[Milton-L] Satan in Paradise Regained

[Carrol Cox]

James Rovira wrote:
> 
> Jonathan: It's probably been too long since I've read PR, and perhaps
> I missed something in PL, but where is it said by God that the earth
> belongs to Satan? 

Just to add a bit of variety to this discussion --

PR is the best written poem in the language; there is simply no otgher
poem that quite so powerfully carries one on from one line to the next,
from one clause to the next. The sheer way each word compels the next
word makes it an endless delight.

It is a pity, then, that even more than is the case with PL, the
criticism of it tends to be one endless theological debate. The poem
_can_ be read as a secular poem, and an extraordinatily powerful one.
(This is independent of whatever Milton might say about how the reader
should read it.)

As a secular poem, that mass of criticism in the '60s and '70s which
babbled on about the Son finding his identity suddenly takes on interest
independently of the theology. If the Son has not found his identity,
then he is that "abstract - isolated -- human individual" that KM sees
Feuerbach as positing; he finds himself exhibiting the "dotlike"
existence of the mere free worker in bourgeois socieity. (Someplace in
the _Grundrisse_). He is archetypal for Margaret Thatcher's claim that
society does not exist, only individuals and families.

In that case Satan is the external, meaningless reality within which,
against which, this autonomous individual (to be autonomous is to be
lacking in one's humanity) must somehow find him/herself as human.

I assume, of course, that this individual is an illusion of commodity
fetishism: that in fact wherever we find ourselves, we are always
already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations. Milton's poem's
greatness is that he exhibits so powerfully what it would be like to be
this non-existent individual who is posited in all modern ideology,

Carrol.