Milton's Polyglottal Irony of Eating Death . . .
The Confusion of Tongues (1865)
(Image from Wikipedia)
The lines of Milton's Paradise Lost that speak of Eve's Fall offer an ironic contrast between the semantic content and the grammatical analysis:
Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,As previously noted, the use of the participle "eating" mimics the use in Greek of the nominative participle after verbs of knowing. The irony here is that Eve does not know that she is eating death . . . or that death is eating her.
And knew not eating Death: (PL 9.791-2)
We see in process a fall of language here as Eve eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, a confusion of tongues prefiguring the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, a confusion suggested by Milton in mixing Greek with English.
The lines thus threaten to break down into two separate languages, and the knowing reader must consciously analyze in both Greek and English to hold Milton's synthesis together. Eve's disobedient act is already causing trouble for her descendents, for knowledge comes dear, as we must work to know both Greek and English if we want to understand Milton's words.
Eve for the time being remains unknowing despite the verb of knowing required by Greek grammar to explain in English her complex action in eating deadly knowledge, an ironic ignorance emphasized by Milton polyglot lines.
Today's babbling 'Babel' of voices is brought to you by Gypsy Scholar . . .
Labels: Death, English, Eve, Fall, Greek, Gustave Doré, John Milton, Paradise Lost
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 5:50 AM
12 comments
12 Comments:
Eve's disobedient act is already causing trouble for her descendents, for knowledge comes dear, as we must work to know both Greek and English if we want to understand Milton's words
This is genius, Jeffery!
Well, Adam's act too is at work here... since we must toil in order to earn our living, either as writers (Milton) or as people purchasing books.
In fact. Would Literature exist without sin?
Maybe, only gardening handbooks would have been published... surely, not a poem having to "justify the ways of God to men".
"What would the world be without Captain Hook?" ---Dustin Hoffman in Steven Spielberg's Hook
Every great literary effort needs a 'Hook'!
Jeffery Hodges
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... every great writer is a hooker...
:-P
Thank God, I'm not a great writer!
Jeffery Hodges
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". . . Maybe, only gardening handbooks would have been published... surely, not a poem having to "justify the ways of God to men".
Ah, so why then is it necessary to send angels down to Paradise to provide Adam with various cosmic explanations--and bogus explanations at that?
Were the explanations "bogus" . . . or was Milton just hedging his bets?
Jeffery Hodges
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Bogus, definitely. I think that's Milton's point.
A door into this perhaps is considering the bogus cosmological explanations as a parallel to the bogus explanations offered by the Church, and the matter of Galileo's persecution. Ergo, the authority of the angels, the explanations they present--be they cosmological or descriptions of wars in heaven--are subject to skeptical review, as is any orthodox understanding of the figures--God, Son, Adam, Eve, and so on--that variously configure in Milton's transformative meditation.
A.D. Nuttall has a gloss on the cosmological explanation in his book on Gnosticism in Marlowe, Milton and Blake.
I am motivated now to refresh my reading of the passage....
Jeffery:
Your very interesting blog represents a real distraction when I have student papers to correct, and everything else! The way it encourages procrastination is almost diabolical! ;-)
Ah, so why then is it necessary to send angels down to Paradise to provide Adam with various cosmic explanations
To explain (a very boring job, my dear Professors) is not the same thing as to JUSTIFY (a thrilling acrobatic exercise)
Carter, I'm still not convinced that Milton considered the various cosmologies bogus. There remained problems with each of the various cosmologies extant in the 17th century, and a Newton was required to make sense of them and demonstrate the correct one. Milton may genuinely have been undecided.
Meanwhile, I continue my diabolical blogging . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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demonstrate the correct one
"demonstrate"?? "correct"??
who? what? where? when? why? (I am a journalist too, and this proves it)
Well, if I'm forced to state with precision, I'd say that Newton offered a synthesis of various facts and parts of models in his Principia Mathematica that made the most sense of them and worked for a few centuries . . . until relativity theory and quantum mechanics came along to disrupt things.
Jeffery Hodges
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