Man's Fallen Condition in Milton's Satan Figure: A Working Thesis

I just wanted to take a minute to post my working thesis for Paradise Lost and some recent reading from Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin. I've posted my thesis previously as part of my first paper, and I've tackled Fish's work a couple of times already, but in any case, I want to spend more of my time tonight reading/researching rather than blogging, so this will likely be quick.

Working Thesis: In Paradise Lost, although Milton draws upon strong religious and archetypal currents in crafting his Satan figure, truly understanding his character (and thus, the epic as a whole) requires that the reader dissociate Satan's character from that of the Biblical adversary. Rather, Satan should be interpreted as a representation of the fallen condition of mankind and thus as a lens for better understanding the nature and degree of human fallenness.

The Reader, by Edouard Manet
Wikimedia Commons

Today in Surprised by Sin, I finished off a big section on the reader's involvement in his own edification. Fish asserts that through Paradise Lost, the reader "becomes the detachedly involved observer of his own mental processes" and thus becomes an investigation of sin and fallenness within the reader himself (54). Fish suggests that Milton basically forces the reader to find the conflicts of Paradise Lost within himself and within his own psyche, and understanding the work requires that the reader acknowledge that the poem is essentially concerned with his salvation specifically. Fish notes, "The value of the experience depends on the reader's willingness to participate in it fully while at the same time standing apart from it" (43). He must see himself within the poem and yet see the poem as an independent entity. This is, in some ways, similar to my view that the reader must see himself in the Satan character (or vice versa) while still preserving the distance necessary to place him as a set character within a largely fixed narrative of the Edenic encounter.

Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on my working thesis. Where are some areas where it's lacking, and does this contribute meaningfully to a study of Paradise Lost?

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Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 1967. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1997. Print.

Surprised by Fish

The Titans in Hell, by Gustave Doré
Public Domain

A while back, I wrote a quick post addressing some of Stanley Fish's broader claims in Surprised by Sin, quite possibly the most influential secondary resource for Milton's Paradise Lost. I've had a little bit of time to actually get into the text of late, so I have new discoveries and new contentions with some of the claims therein.

Overall, Fish makes some really intriguing points and corrects (perhaps too giddily) a number of flaws in theories then prevailing among Miltonic scholars. As a whole, though, I still wonder if Fish misinterprets the Satan character, despite his clear focus on his necessity in helping the reader to understand his own condition. I've been working to prove basically that same point but from the perspective that Milton's Satan figure should be interpreted not as the Biblical adversary but as one of many varying degrees of human depravity or fallenness. Fish certainly makes a number of claims that support this, but I feel like despite his insistence that Milton's objective is to "educate the reader to an awareness of his own condition," he is still fails to comprehend the Arch-fiend's existence as a degenerate condition of humanity.

Prewriting for Man of Sin: Milton's Satan Figure as a Reflection of Fallen Man

Satan in Eden (1866), by  Gustave Doré

These are just some thoughts that have been going through my head as I've been trying to put together my formal argument for a paper that I'm writing on Milton's Satan figure as a lens for understanding man's fallen condition.

Thesis: In Paradise Lost, although Milton draws upon strong religious and archetypal currents in crafting his Satan figure around the image of the Biblical adversary, Satan's condition should be interpreted rather as a depraved state of mankind comparable to (though by no means equivalent to) that of Adam and Eve following their fall from Eden. The archfiend's condition, then, becomes a lens for understanding the human emotions of pride, grief/loss, and doubt.

Commence Thought Vomit
The Fall should be understood not as an individual choice nor a bipartite decision but rather as the combined efforts of Adam, Eve, and Satan, each in a position of inferiority to God--> semi-Marxist.