Darkness Visible logo
Cropped snake
Cropped snake

Avoiding Traps

How Milton's language challenges the fallen reader

Edenic Language vs the Fallen Language of the Reader

In defending the Latinate language used by Milton, Christopher Ricks argues for the ability of the original (often Latinate) senses of words to take us 'back to a time when there were no infected words because there were no infected actions' (scroll down for Works Cited). That is, to a time before language along with mankind, was corrupted in the Fall. But it is worth bearing in mind that words have no real etymology in Eden. From our fallen perspective, we can only approximate this kind of linguistic purity as we attempt to put ourselves back in the shoes of Adam and Eve (not that they wore shoes until they were fallen, of course).

While you're probably familiar with the idea of puns, it is in Paradise Lost that the so-called 'anti-pun' comes into play. This term, coined by Ricks in The Force of Poetry, describes a pun which denies rather than incorporates multiple meanings: 'whereas in a pun there are two senses which either get along or quarrel, in an anti-pun there is only one sense admitted but there is another sense denied admission'. The problem in Paradise Lost is that if we include the fallen meaning in Edenic puns we inadvertently corrupt the pure prelapsarian meaning. This problem has been formulated into an idea of 'reader response' by Stanley Fish in his work, Surprised by Sin.

The Fish Trap

FishStanley Fish argues that the reader's experience of this poem can be formulated into a well-trodden path of interpretation. He sees the purpose of this poem as educating the reader into an awareness of his own fallen position and the distance which separates the reader from original Edenic innocence. The process of reading this poem, then, is one of repeatedly falling into Milton's ready-made traps, being brought up short, our understanding being corrected, until we finally emerge a fitter, healthier reader, with retrained perspective perception. Milton in this manner trains his reader to become his 'fit audience' (7.31). Because we are fallen, we wrongly construe Milton's words based on our own infected understanding. For example, look up the word 'wanton' in two of the places it occurs in Paradise Lost: 4.629, 9.1015. Although the word is the same, the senses in which it is used are crucially different.


 

Fallen Language and beyond: Babel to Pentecost

Just as man fell, so language too came plummeting down around man's ears and, just as man rose again, so language too was put back on its feet, with more than a little help from God. On the day of Pentecost, God sent the Holy Spirit to purify and redeem language from its fallen post-Babelic state of 'jangling noise' and 'hideous gabble' (12.55, 56); the Spirit descended as 'tongues like of fire' (Acts 2:3) and mankind was once more able to understand each other and spread God's word. In the final pages of Robert L. Entzminger's outstanding book on Milton's language, he concludes that the felix culpa (or fortunate fall, an idea that celebrates the fall as the occasioning of Christ's sacrifice) is a concept which extends to language. That is to say, the fall is actually a blessing in disguise as it enabled the existence of multiple languages and sanctioned each language's own complexities and ambiguities - the very features of language which are most prominently at play in poetry. Raphael and Milton narrate 'what surmounts the reach | Of human sense' and they do so 'By likening spiritual to corporeal forms' (5.571, 573), making the 'unspeakable' (5.156) writeable through poetic means, which have been sanctified by God in order to allow man to come closer to comprehending the divine ineffable.

Works Cited

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1975) (quotation from p. 8)

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary (1755) (London, 2002). Johnson quotes Milton over three hundred times in this dictionary, more times even than he references the Bible.

Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton (London, 1963; 1779) (p. 72)

T.S. Eliot, ‘Milton I’ (1936), in Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (London, 1953)

F.R. Leavis, ‘Milton’s Verse’, in Revaluation (London, 1936) (p. 52)

Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford, 1963) (p. 110)

Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1984) (p. 266)

Contributing authors