that Milton thread: book review

[pynchonoid]

Neil Forsyth. The Satanic Epic. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003. x + 382 pp. Index. $65.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-691-09996-0; $22.95 (paper), ISBN
0-691-11339-4.

Reviewed by Joad Raymond, School of English and
American Studies, University of East Anglia.
Published by H-Albion (March, 2004)

[...]Forsyth's argument has much in common with that
put forward in William Empson's Milton's God (1961):
Milton wrote a Satanic epic within his more orthodox
one, the epic in which a heroic Satan takes arms
against a God who is unreasonable, unattractive,
unsympathetic, and ethically compromised. Milton
criticism for decades has been inventing ways of
disguising, denying, defying, or sterilizing this,
trying to make the heterodox poet orthodox. So we have
Stanley Fish's brilliant and massively influential
account (in Surprised by Sin, 1967, revised 1997) of
how to read the poem, an interpretation that
attributes heterodox readings (Satan is heroic) to the
method of an ultimately orthodox poem (God is good)
that elicits sympathy for the devil in order to
correct and ultimately teach the reader the process of
virtuous interpretation and decision making. This is
wrong, says Forsyth. Milton knows he's unorthodox:
listen to his narrator, whose voice is far distant
from the objective commentator of classical epic who
vocalizes his own poetic authority. Milton constructs
a narrator who feels sympathy for the devil, while
knowing he has to distance himself from Satan. Hence
he gets involved, gets upset, unconsciously confuses
pronouns, posits resemblances between Satan and the
Son; and hence the epic similes that so often clash
with or rub against their narrative context. Milton is
not the narrator, Forsyth argues, and the distance he
creates enables him to put into the epic a pro-Satan
reading.

The pre-Christian materials of the earlier The Old
Enemy suggest that there is a long history of
ambivalence about Satan before Augustine pins him like
a display butterfly. Milton's sensitivity to the
development of ancient religions, to Gnosticism,
Manichaeism, and other "heresies," perhaps to the
Watcher Angel story as elaborated in the Book of
Enoch, and to classical representations of villainy is
always in evidence when he reads scripture. Finding
this residual ambivalence inscribed in the history of
Satan, Milton offers us an alternative version. He
begins (as does the myth) with the heroic version of
Satan in books 1 and 2: we see him first as a
character, before he turns into the combat myth's
personification of evil. Milton wants us to run with
this Satan for a while, and to see his point of view,
as the poet cannot be certain that Satan is completely
and simply bad. So a Satanic version of events is
wrapped up in a more orthodox one--this doubleness,
multiple-referentiality, and ambiguity being
characteristic of Paradise Lost--and this is Satan's
and Milton's challenge to Christian orthodoxy.

Forsyth, like Empson, who mistook Milton for a
Calvinist, believes the problem of the poem originates
in the problem of Milton's God, and in how a decent
and sane person deals with the existence of evil in a
universe governed by a deity who is omnipotent,
omniscient, and good. Intellectually Milton tackles it
through an account of freedom, but one that
occasionally gets entangled in a residual Calvinism.
The Son is necessary to man's salvation, but it's hard
to get away from the fact that God will know what will
follow from Satan's action, and that he is therefore
in some way responsible for it. Satan and the Son
spring from the same apple: one as persecutor, the
other as redeemer, roles which are interdependent.
Time and again we find a doubling between the Son and
the fallen angel. No Satan no Son. Yet Satan is the
unknowing fall guy, while the Son only rises.

[...] Satan is doubled, self-divided. We identify with
Satan because he has a split self. According to
Forsyth, Sin--born from Satan's head, resulting in
narcissism and auto-eroticism--is the discovery of
interiority. Satan is a projection of "our modern and
divided selves" (p. 152). In this argument Forsyth
dispenses with old-fashioned soteriology and theology
in favor of modern identity-politics and reminders of
our bourgeois condition (and of the bourgeois nature
of the epic to which we relate). This is a recension
of a very familiar modernization thesis. Instead of
finding our own sinfulness in our identification with
Satan, we find our divided selves. Welcome to
modernity. [...]

<http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=144531082971481>




	
		
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