[Milton-L] 'Myth' of "Unfallen" language

[Erick Ramalho]

  By and large, prelapsarian language entails an ideal and unequivocal association between word (language) and thing. If Adam names an animal with a certain noun, this noun applies to the animal as if name and thing were one, which would make of a lion the word that describes it. After the fall, word and thing are apart in the shards of a shattered representation of reality, and by saying 'lion' one puts forth a representational process in which everyone of us mentally pictures a particular lion which is of course never to be the same. Thus, the impossibility of representation leads things named and their names apart. A poet, in his turn, would always be looking for the right word to describe best a particularly thing, for which he/she could use more than one language, the word of course being far from one. An interesting aspect of that is to be found in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in which critics have found a tendency to unite word and action in the violence that
 becomes literal (by saying ‘stop her mouth’, for instance, one character would severe another character’s tongue rather than just gagging him/her). This extreme attempt is identified as the desire of unattainable unity between language and things by Terry Eagleton, a. H. Tricomi and others. As particularly for Milton, in PL God’s language is full of Latin words and syntactic elements indicative of an artistic means of presenting partial prelapsarian aspects now lost, since Latin would lead to some sort of linguistic ‘before’. On the other hand, Satan is able to manipulate words and meanings precisely because, unlike Adamic language, postlapsarian communication allows for double meanings by the detachment between words and the things they name.
   
  Erick Ramalho 
   
  Centre for Shakespearean Studies (Brazil)
   

       
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