Milan Kundera, The Unbearbale Lightness of Being
The Abrahamic religions are based on the myth of man’s fall from God’s realm. This quintessentially narcissistic, overtly patriarchal interpretation of man and the reason for his existence on earth still goes unchallenged and is believed by millions of ‘believers’ across the planet. Milton’s Paradise Lost is a literary version of this biblical story. The crucial aspect of the text is the conflict between God/Satan and the fall of man due to Original Sin {Disobeying God or the CENTER (Derrida) or the super-structure of Power (Foucault}. Derrida’s fierce criticism in the form of Déconstruction of such Logocentricism (God as the CENTER, binary oppositions-- good angel/bad angel Satan, Adam/Eve) gives the text a complete new perspective. Derrida’s “there is nothing but the text” is perfectly applicable to Paradise Lost. Since the religious implications of Paradise Lost and the Miltonic motives are based on Western humanistic ideas, a deconstructive reading of the text will prove the relativity of the traditional Semitic religious canon and the holy books illustrating Jean-Françoise Lyotard’s notion of ‘incredulity towards the metanarratives’. Freud, a key figure in the Western thought was also largely opposed to the Abrahamic religions, calling them a psychological disease. Despite such claims these Semitic ‘metanarratives’ are tending the hearts of millions of believers across the world.
Deconstructing Milton’s seminal text gives a very good idea of how overpowering religiosity has not only overshadowed the mythical quality of the conception of Original sin, the fall and the hardships faced by our first parents but also has been the center of violent debates and conflicts through ages. Deconstructive reading uncovers the unconscious rather than the conscious dimension of the text, all those things which its overt textuality glosses over or fails to recognize. Derrida’s own conception of deconstructive reading: “must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses…[It] attempts to make the not-seen accessible to sight” which has the same purport as Barbara Johnson’s notion of Deconstruction being closer to the word analysis rather than not synonymous with ‘destruction’ in The Critical Difference(1980) is perfectly applicable to Paradise Lost. J. A. Cuddon, in his Dictionary of Literary Terms asserts that in deconstruction—“a text can be read as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying…it may be read as carrying a plurality of significance or as saying many different things which are fundamentally at variance with, contradictory to and subversive of what may be seen by criticism as a single ‘stable’ meaning”. Paradise Lost in this regard opens up a new dimension of textual analysis, also subverts the traditional religious belief inherent in the plot of the text establishing it as an elaborate mythology of staggering anthropological significance.
Mythologizing of Paradise Lost makes the text essentially humane and elevates it to the position of Iliad, Odyssey, even links it to the Eastern myths of Ramayana and Mahabharata and the sacred texts and belief system of different indigenous communities. It brings the supposed superiority of the Semitic monotheistic religions (Islam. Judaism, Christianity) down to earth, placing them in the same alters as the pagan religions of the past, Hinduism, Buddhism and other belief systems and metaphysical quests. Also it sheds some light on the clash among these Semitic religion despite the staggering commonality of ideas and rituals. Paradise Lost also speaks the voice of Foucault, proving that the superiority claimed by each of the Abrahamic religious traditions are nothing but constructs of the subtlest priests and religious scholars, erected to dominate, control and manifest Power through founding different parochial customs (Prayers, pilgrimage, sacrifice) that become Kantian categorical imperatives for its’ believers.
Freud, Milton and the monotheistic Semitic religions
Freud throughout his life grappled with the religion of Judaism. In Civilization and its Discontents (1930) he writes, “My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I learnt the art of reading) had as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interests”. Discontent in Civilization begins with an examination of the idea that religion is based on an “oceanic feeling of connectedness.” He suggests that the narcissism that underlies this feeling is originally independent from religion, but gets retroactively utilized and interpreted by religious belief. Freud begins to examine the so-called religious experience more closely and finds that it may have traits similar to an obsessive neurosis, but in its essential features it is more akin to a psychotic structure. Another procedure operates more energetically and more thoroughly. It regards reality as the sole enemy and as the source of all suffering, with which it is impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is to be in any way happy. The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one‘s own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happi¬ness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion. It is asserted, how¬ever, that each one of us behaves in some respect like a paranoiac, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbear¬able to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass¬-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognize it as such.”
The frightening perspective that Freud opens within the above train of thought, is the generalization of psychotic structures: He discovers them underneath what we would call normal behavior and thinking, and as being far more pervasive than commonly thought. We create a delusional view of reality by introducing a wish into the real, and the mechanism of this alteration of reality remains unconscious. Thus he concludes religion to be a compulsive neurosis.
In Moses and monotheism (1937) accuses Moses of stealing from Pharaoh Akhenaten the unitary concept of god. He claims that religion is not an illusion, but rather an imaginative way of relating to and adapting our environment. Freud states his position clearly in the book: “How enviable, to those of us who are poor in faith, do those enquirers seem who are convinced of the existence of a Supreme Being! To that great Spirit the world offers no problems, for he himself created all its institutions! How comprehensive, how exhaustive and how definitive are the doctrines of believers compared with the laborious, paltry and fragmentary attempts at explanation which are the most we are able to achieve! The divine Spirit, which is itself the ideal of ethical perfection, has planted in men the knowledge of that ideal and, at the same time, the urge to assimilate their own nature to it. They perceive directly what is higher and nobler and what lower and more base. Their affective life is regulated in accordance with their distance from the ideal at any moment. When they approach to it – at their perihelion, as it were – they are brought high satisfaction; when – at their aphelion - they have become remote from it, the punishment is severe unpleasure. All of this is laid down so simply and unshakably. We can only regret that certain experiences in life and observations in the world make it impossible for us to accept the premises of the existence of such a Supreme Being. As though the world had not riddles enough, we are set the new problem of understanding how these other people have been able to acquire their belief in the Divine Being and whence that belief obtained its immense power, which overwhelms reason and science.”
Religion now becomes the ‘return of the repressed’…”hat children have experienced at the age of two and have not understood need never be remembered by them except in dreams; they may only come to know of it through psychoanalytic treatment. But at some later time it will break into their life with obsessional impulses, it will govern their actions, it will decide their sympathies and antipathies and will quite often determine their choice of a love-object., for which is so frequently impossible to find a rational basis. All the phenomena of the formation of the symptoms may justly be described as the ‘return of the repressed’”.
Derrida takes Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to task since it is a part of the humanist tradition in his lecture “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” (1986). Derrida did put Freud’s account (his science, his speculation, his commentary, etc,) into the perspective of its own performance, its own playing and acting out. He denies the historicist cognitive Freudian method as simply an attempt to explain the ‘real’.
Whatever may be the post-structuralist view of Freud, his contributions to de-mythologize the dominant religions did play a vital part in the secularization of modern Europe as did Marx and Darwin.
Satan: Is he the hero?
William Blake, the poet-prophet of Romanticism stated that Milton was “of the Devil’s party” without knowing it”. Satan essential human qualities of intelligence, energy, courage, jealousy and the ability of suffer makes him a sympathetic character in Paradise Lost. His individuality is a refreshing aberration in a text bogged down otherwise in overbearing religiosity. He controls the events unfolding much more than does God himself. His bold declaration of non-servium dazzles the otherwise insipid Paradise Lost.
After the banishment from the Edenic power-structure Satan is burdened with an ‘inward grief’ that eventually leads to his resolution to inflict further pain to God’s realm. He comes to earth and is overwhelmed with the beauty on earth—
“Terrestrial heaven, danced round by other heavens
That shine, yet bear their bright officious lamps
Light above light, for thee alone, as seems,
In thee concent’ring all their precious beams
Of sacred influence”.
Satan acknowledges God’s being the structural ‘centre’ of all and is distraught in his reversed state. Previously he was the most respected of the angels. But now he is whittled down to a mere bully boy. His bold decision not to bow to Adam though disbanded him has ushered a new dawn. God, the all-seeing, omnipresent, omnipotent Power, the designer of the Universe has been violated. Satan has incurred his wrath, a negative quality. The rebellious spirit procrastinates regarding his decision but there is no going back for him. God, the center in structural terms has been violated, tickled. He feels subconscious elation though the ‘surface meaning’ of the Miltonic text is hardly designed to show that. It shows his guilt, remorse and more importantly attempts to prove him an Evil (He is associated with the Seven Deadly Sins as was shown in the Morality Plays). Milton makes a big mistake at that.
Satan next goes on to achieve another feat. He challenges God’s idea that his creations Adam & Eve will not violate him. This concept is of greater contradiction. At one hand, our first parents had free-will and on the other, they were not supposed to split away from God’s careful eyes. So when Eve is tempted to the Tree of Knowledge, God is apparently vanished from the scene though the whole incident is taking place in his sublime architecture the Garden of Eden.
Just when Eve devours the fruit of the tree the ‘center’ declares a complete absence. Thus the oppositional conflict (Adam & Eve vs Satan) takes a new turn. Satan begins to threaten God’s position as the CENTER, scatters or “disseminates” the meaning or the significance of God. He threatens to become the CENTER, if not wholly in Book 9 of Paradise Lost where the fall occurs. The binary oppositions (Adam & Eve/Satan, Seven deadly sins/God’s order, Life/Death, Eden/Fall) which till now existed also come on the verge of dissolving. And it comes full circle when Adam also acts his part in the fiesta. After her fall Eve becomes concerned with the idea of Adam marrying ‘another Eve’. That must be prevented at any cost, if she is to die, Adam must die with her:
“So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.”
What she is determined to forestall is the possibility of his living on without her. Her real motives have been turned inside out, and as she goes off to meet Adam it is as if a new character had suddenly entered the poem.
Adam is confronted with tricky arguments just as Eve was previously by Satan. The Tree of Knowledge she declares excitedly is not deadly at all. Its fruit has made her divine. For the first time in the poem their conversations have been conflated, devoid of naïveté. Adam, then, eats the apple not out of pride or ambition but, as the argument states, out of love. Thus, Milton insists that Adam is ‘in the transgression’ precisely because he is ‘not deceived’ as he sinned with eyes open. His wife was ‘by some fair appearing good surprised’ as he had warned her of the impending dangers. He willingly chooses what he already knows to be evil. Her failure as Milton showed is primarily intellectual and his moral. After Adams’ transgression they become aware of their sexuality and wallow in sex.—
“So said he, and forbore not glance or toy
Of amorous intent, well understood
Of Eve, whose eyes darted contagious fire.
Her hands he seized, and to a shady bank
Thick overhead, with verdant roof embowered
He led her, nothing loath; flowers were the couch,
Pansies, and violets, and asphodel,
And hyacinth, Earth’s freshest, softest lap.
There they their fill of love and love’s disport
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the seal,
The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep
Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play”.
Freud would see it as a triumph of the Libido, the flaming of Eros while Satan rejoiced in his success in violating God’s precious creations. Textually, the CENTER is ‘decentred’ and ‘free play’ becomes a reality. The binary oppositions collapses as momentarily it seems both Adam & Eve/Satan are on the same plain, rejoicing in the guilty pleasures of violating the all-good, benevolent, omnipotent CENTER.
Milton’s Satan shows tremendous dexterity while tempting Eve to the tree of knowledge. He assumes the form of a serpent, immediately fascinating Eve to the utmost (Serpentine figures have sexual overtones). He speaks to Eve arguing that his ability to talk is a blessing of the Tree of Knowledge. It gives Eve apparent proof of the tree’s potency, it suggests the possibility of undergoing ‘proportional ascent’ herself, and it allows him to prepare the ground for his second deceptive trick; man’s alleged state of deprivation. Satan squabbles as if Adam & Eve are ‘low and ignorant’ and thus the apple becomes the ‘cure’. This idea of elevating to a superior state is ‘knowledge’ based and it would mean the accessibility to ‘power’ as defined by Foucault. Milton makes Satan approach in the most delicate fashion regarding the temptation of man. In other words, the possibility of possessing knowledge entails the possibility of ‘decentering’, disseminating or scattering of ‘knowledge’ which up until now is a copyright of God, the CENTER. Satan is also a victim to ‘return of the repressed’ in Paradise Lost, thus, unable to perceive how grand a task he has performed through revolting. He has created instability, questioned the order and as Milton’s creation has unsettled the entire history of Western thought that has closer ties to Semitic religious belief system based on hierarchial oppositions: good vs evil, mind vs matter, man vs woman, speech vs writing; in other words LOGOCENTRICISM. This makes him a hero in the post-modern sense.
Deconstructing the consequence of the fall
The fall of Adam & Eve is a tragedy as Milton intended it to be. But deconstruction calls into question Milton’s delineation of the conflict between fate and free-will. This tussle between fate/free-will is a significant in the Western thought pregnant with endless dichotomies and polarities. Adam alludes to this classical idea in Paradise Lost—
“But god left free the will; for what obeys
Reason is free; and reason he made right
But bid her well beware; and still erect
Lest by some fair appearing good surprised,
She dictate false, and misinform the will
To do what God expressly hath forbid”.
This argument arises when Eve mentions they should work separately. This shows the ‘latent’ independence of spirit within Eve. She has been subordinated by Adam (created from his ribs) as Milton intended a CENTER that has marginalized her to the ‘periphery’. As the fate/freewill opposition collapses at the moment of the fall Eve is elevated from the margins. This event necessarily entails the functioning of différance and deference within the text.
Milton’s Puritan ethics convinced him to illustrate Sophoclean motives of terror and pity through the text. Religion works through this method. It provokes terror and pity and catharsis through various accounts of biblical prophets and God’s wrath upon the non-believers and pagan of the past. But the most potent of them is the concept of Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve. They were thrown out of Eden, incurred hardship on earth and have given rise to these hordes of mortal men and women burdened with a propensity to sin and who will only be redeemed in the afterlife if they have lived a life according to the scriptures. Milton’s intention in Paradise Lost is nothing but establishing similar religious sentiments within the perimeter of conventional Western literary architecture.
The fall humanizes Adam & Eve as they have shed their Edenic skin on earth living like ordinary mortals. Adam accuses Eve of corrupting him just as any other man would while quarreling with his wife/friend. Eve’s subversive position at this moment in the text undergoes virulent criticism from the feminist. It was natural for Milton to show such patriarchal fervor as he was simply imitating the story of fall written in the Genesis. Examples of Adam’s irritations are many in Paradise Lost. He calls Eve a serpent and laments ‘without feminine’ such terrible consequences wouldn’t have occurred but forgets his own contribution in the fall. Eve pleads fervently and Adam forgives her. They learn to compromise and attain some form of Hegelian dialectic by synthesizing Adam’s uxoriousness and hot-temper with Eve’s free-spirited bend of mind. Thus the oppositional existence (man/woman) is crushed to the post-structuralist situation of a=~b. Moreover the structural existence of the text (God as the CENTER, Adam & Eve and Satan as binary oppositions) faces extinction with a new deconstructive existence with the difference between God and Satan coming to a non-existence, both becoming competitors of each other in luring mankind to their own realm as the Torah, Bible and Koran supposes. This is essentially a paradox/contradiction within the sacred texts since there must be a prevailing binary opposition, God/Satan, good/evil etc. Similarly Milton’s text destabilizes the oppositional qualities its author wanted to illustrate that gave rise to moments within the text when the adequacy of language itself as a medium of communication is called into question. Milton followed the tradition Western rule of privileging speech & presence over writing & absence. Thus Adam’s adumburation sticking to fate dominates Eve’s ‘latent’ free-will.
Just as Derrida finds both speech and writing are beginninglessly structured by difference and deference, a deconstructive reading of Paradise Lost entails similar results. Hence the dichotomy between fate/freewill ‘overlaps’ and swirls in the abyss of nothingness.
Freud and C S Jung calls religion a creation of the unconscious, and a creation of the deepest fears within human psyche which is often erased by the humanizing aspects of religion (again defined within the binary codes, good/bad, holy/evil, perennial/transitory, death/life) argued by religious scholars and propagandists and the Faith (again faith is privileged over no faith) of millions. Derrida in his commentary on Freud’s ‘mystery writing-pad’ shows that différance is present even in the structures of the unconscious ("Freud and the Scene of Writing,").In this regard the religious overtures of Paradise Lost creates textual disunity by giving rise to ‘aporia’. The textual deconstruction gives rise to an essential ‘instability’ that takes the debate of creation and fall further forward giving rise to a virtual motion within the grammatical disunities and discursive diatribes of the text. As a consequence, the dominance of “the metaphysics of presence” or speech-thought (the logos) is disrupted. Paradise Lost becomes a text hardly imploring the need to construct the ‘real’ since the ‘violent hierarchies’ (God/Satan, Eden/earth, Adam/Eve, man/woman) has been deconstructed.
CONCLUSION
The conflicts between differing religions and metaphysical beliefs have tormented the world since human histories have been written. More recently the clashes between Zionist Israel and their Semitic Palestinian cousins, the grotesque rise of Islamism overdriven to take Muslims to medieval times and racism/ xenophobia has its roots in religion. The 21st century also grapples with the possibility of a religious war though waged in oblique ways through rhetoric, media, academic practices and through aphorisms such as ‘the clash of civilizations’. Derrida argues in an interview after the September 11 incident that Europe has long come out of the darker days of religious clashes. In other words, Europe have wholeheartedly embraced the Enlightenment ethics (‘cogito, ergo sum’). Such argument takes back Derrida to structuralism or in a stage where he contradicts himself (Arguing Islamic fundamentalism necessarily representing the Other could thrust the whole Islamic world back to darkness). In fact, his arguments have a true basis since holding on to the ‘fundamentals’ of religion means going back to the CENTER. Derrida points out to the LOGOCENTRICISM at work within the Islamic thought process. However, Paradise Lost deconstructed shows us how such propensities are destroyed by the postmodern post-structuralist theories. Derrida points out Europe no longer is afraid of the ‘opium of the people’ as Marx put it, that is, it has become Secular. But one problem, Derrida fails to answer regarding the brutal European colonization which started since the 15th century and perhaps going on still now (more subtly). His Déconstruction though has the power to de-mythologize Paradise Lost, a text reminding the world of Europe’s muddled, violent, sectarian and narcissistic Christian times.
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