Conclusions

Conclusions: A Literary Genealogy of Rousseau's Confessions



I am not the first author to have adopted the confessional approach, to have revealed life nakedly, or to have used language supposedly unfit for the ears of school girls. Were I a saint recounting his life of sin, perhaps these bald statements relating to my sex habits would be found enlightening... They might even be found instructive.
--Henry Miller



Following his death in 1778, the name Rousseau came to be synonymous with licentious and immoral behavior; as stated in the introduction, this soon became something of a national obsession: those who had known him, as well as those who did not know him, were equally appalled by his reputation. Published posthumously in 1782, the Confessions prompted an extreme public reaction: some people, such as the aristocratic Madame de Boufflers, reacted in horror. Dismissing the Confessions with a moral condemnation, she compared the work to "the memoirs of a farmhand worker or even lower." In addition, the Confessions were castigated by critics who felt that this non-literary work represented "the grazing ground of the ignorant," "the ruination of letters," and "the rabble of literature." However, a few years later an event occurred which would radically affect Rousseau's status, the French Revolution of 1789. Eleven years after Rousseau's death, Marat, Robespierre and the other revolutionaries constructed a mythical figure of the departed Rousseau as a thinker whose moral liberty was an example to others; through their efforts, he was canonized as a thinker who, through his writings, set forth a code of moral correctness.

By employing him as an iconic presence whose example pointed towards the creation of an ideal society, these same individuals elevated the status of Rousseau to a position equivalent to sainthood. Instead of being demonized for his moral deviances, the now mythological figure of Rousseau was imbued with qualities symbolizing the highest moral perfection. Kant proclaimed that Rousseau had "a sensibility of soul of unequalled perfection"; Schiller took him to be "a Christ-like soul for whom the angels of heaven are fit company"; Tolstoy, thought the works of Rousseau could be matched only by the texts of the Christian Gospels, in this way suggesting that Rousseau's work were of divine inspiration. Clearly, by the nineteenth century, the general opinion shifted to an affirmation of his moral uprightness; this shift can be seen in the appellation affixed by Georges Sand, who re-christened the earthly Jean-Jacques as "St. Rousseau."

After he had been acknowledged as a figure of eternal moral value, it became common for pilgrimages to journey to the site of Rousseau's tomb. Many of these pilgrims set out of their journey with the hopes of becoming more moral individuals through their close proximity to his saintly presence; they maintained a strict self-discipline so that they would be able to enter this sanctuary with absolute reverence and purity of heart. Once there they would sing the prayers they had composed, or sonnets they had written comparing Jean-Jacques to Jesus Christ. The tomb of the departed Rousseau became "a temple of religious mourning." Indeed, his attraction was so great that it compelled one individual to commit suicide at his tomb, in the hopes that he would be buried alongside his idol. Clearly, Rousseau had become something akin to a saint, a figure who was sanctified, not in the Church, but in the popular culture of his day. However, although after his death Rousseau came to be viewed with the stately reverence one would give to a religious figure, it should be remembered that earlier he was denounced as a scandalous figure, infamous for his sordid Confessions.

In a similar way, the works of Henry Miller were, at first, the object of great scandal and were prohibited from entering the U.S. However, although he was considered unpublishable in America, in April 1959, Barney Rosset, who had acquired fame as the man who had dared to publish D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), offered to pay Miller $10,000 for his Tropic of Cancer and agreed to pay the cost of all litigation himself if he would give Grove Press permission to publish his works. At fist Miller dismissed Rosset's offer, but after he learned that book-pirates were eager to publish the work themselves, he agreed. Cancer was first published in the United States on June 24, 1961. Reviews were terrific, almost completely positive and, after the first year, 100,000 hardcover copies had been distributed and over a million in paperback. However, the publishing of his work in his native country was not without incident: several booksellers were arrested and sentences to years in prison for selling Miller's pair of Tropics, and Grove Press became the target of several lawsuits; the first year after the publication of Cancer, Grove Press had to fight six legal cases and spend over $100,000 in legal expenses. In March 1963, the trial of the work of Henry Miller had become a national phenomenon; his books became the subject of heated legal dispute in many of the nation's highest courts, as well as the Supreme Court of the United States. The case of the People of the United States v. Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer ended with Judge Samuel B. Epstein's proclamation that, although Miller's work contained "lewd, vile, vulgar and disgusting language," it ought not to be prohibited by law. Even though, in the end, his work was not judged to be obscene, this victory was not without its price, as Miller lost the anonymity he had treasured. However, Martin Jay writes that, much to Miller's chagrin, he quickly became a legendary figure who pornographic works were seen as more valuable than his literary productions: he had become the King of smut.

Though noteworthy for the exceeding honesty with which it depicted the role of sexual desire in a writer's life, in reality, Miller differed drastically from the libidinous desiring-machine that narrates his text; any notion of his being like the sexually insatiable narrator of Capricorn is a pure myth: even in his sex life there was more love, companionship and mutual caring than there ever was sex. In fact, Norman Mailer describes Miller's childhood years as a period spent "hermetically sealed against sexuality," for he came out of an American society that saw sexuality as being intrinsically linked with obscenity. As a result, during his teenage years, he had a habit of being overcome with emotion whenever a woman looked at him tenderly; each time he would feel that this was the woman who would provide him with the love his mother had not given him since childhood. Even when he reached adulthood, his sexual appetite was nothing like the narrator of Capricorn, who desire women simply on the basis of their sexual appeal; he was much more selective than that. Indeed, Jay reveals that Miller was secretly a romantic, saying that he wanted to have "a passionate love-affair." As Miller wrote to his friend Savington Crompton: "I [want] to make a woman happy, enrich her. But I refuse to make an alliance just for the sake of sex. ...I want to give her everything I've got." Instead of a relationship based purely on sex, what he yearned for was a woman who could both represent all of his 'unhappy' sexuality and, simultaneously, would also embody the healthy sexual energy that Miller needs to live.

In recent years Miller's reputation has a suffered a seemingly fatal blow, as feminist writers such as Kate Millet, who declared in Sexual Politics (1970) that Miller's writing was the product of misogynistic thinking, sought to annul any influence his work might have. Seeking to rehabilitate Miller's reputation, Erica Jong re-evaluated Miller's intentions in composing his works; in her opinion, Miller's writing ought to be seen as his attempt to use the body as a way of transcending the body, in this way allowing him to extend the freedom he has found in sexuality to his readers. However, seeing the naivete of his goals, Miller realize that society would prefer to institute a commodified, liberalized version of sexual love rather than achieve the full liberation of sexuality. Disappointed with a world that refused to change, nevertheless, Miller continued to write about sex, not so much to advocate this kind of behavior so much as to simply point out that it exists.

Miller expressed his displeasure to his biographer, Martin Jay, saying that he doubted whether a single man could alter the moralities of his own age; however, in Jay's opinion, Miller's work has been profoundly instrumental in creating profound changes in American society. When such changes were attributed to him, Miller was not pleased. In 1976, when an interviewer praised him for contributing to the sexual revolution, crediting him with changing the moral climate of his time, he reacted by saying, "Sexual revolution? Oh I consider it a misfortune that we entered into such things." He felt that his original intentions for the society of liberated sexuality were nothing like the society that had been constructed in his name. "I don't give a damn for sex and all that business," he muttered, denying any role in the sexual revolution, saying that it was not what he wanted at all. What he wanted was "a revolution in sensibility, an upheaval in consciousness." However, this mythic image of Miller as a sexually omnivorous figure still persists. Even today, his notoriety as an author is derived largely from this aspect of his work, a fact which he abhorred; in his later years, he claimed to dislike vulgarity as much as he despised his reputation as a pornographer.

Responding in Miller's name to critics who, like Millet, accuse him of holding to patriarchal beliefs, Jong declares that patriarchy is not something which can be removed from society simply by restructuring the social order; rather, this impulse to dominate is something which resides in the fabric of consciousness, and this accounts for its power as a form of oppression. In light of this statement, one can see that Miller's sexually explicit style of writing is his way of approaching the central core of desire, taking part in the production of desire in order to acquaint oneself with the powers of creation. While some of the passages in Capricorn seem to be obscene or even pornographic, Miller's aim in writing such passages was significantly different. He regarded these passages not as pornography, but as "pieces of symbolic prose, in the metaphysical tradition." As he explained to Erica Jong in 1974: "The real Henry Miller is not a sex addict or an adventurer, you're dealing with a metaphysician...always looking for the secret of life."

However, unlike Miller, Howard Stern proudly wears the title of the King of Smut. He writes that many industry sources had predicted that his book would be an embarrassing failure. Instead, Private Parts was a resounding success, breaking all sales records in Simon and Schuster's seventy year history. Yet even with all its success, he notes that he is still unhappy because of the public's reaction to his book, for Private Parts incited a string of controversies after its national debut. In order to give his paperback readers the opportunity to follow the events which occurred after the hardcover publication (or, as Stern says, "How I'll get you to buy the paperback after you've already bought the hardcover") he includes a chapter of extra material in the paperback version which, by reproducing articles from newspapers and magazines, chronicles the public's reaction to the book.

In the first week after the publication of Private Parts, the publisher had to order an additional 500,000 copies of the book, as it had climbed to number one on many of the nation's bestseller charts. In its second week of publication, there were 850,000 copies of the book in print. The director of merchandising at Barnes and Noble, Inc. declared Stern's book to be the fastest-selling book in the history of their chain. As a bookseller reported in The Cleveland Times, October 20, 1993, the only other time he had seen a book selling as quickly as Private Parts did, it was Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a work which had received much coverage in the press because of its inflammatory reputation. This may be used to bolster the argument that Stern, like Rousseau and Miller, is seen as forging a new morality through the transvaluation of all moral values. Most of the early reviews of the book were favorable, for example, The Entertainment Weekly called Stern "the most brilliant--and misunderstood--comic artist in America." Many reviewers compared Stern to Lenny Bruce, whose How to Talk Dirty and Influence People is considered to be a masterpiece of comic autobiography.

However, more negative reviews started appearing after the book had already become a success. A reprint of an editorial from the United Methodist Relay contains one such negative commentary; the writers of this piece call for bookstores to cease promoting the book, displaying it in store windows, and to discontinue selling it. In sum, they attempted to see this book banned, even though, as they unapologetically admit, they have not read it. Sharing similar feelings as this newspaper's editorial board, one distributor, the Caldor's chain of department stores, decided that Stern's book did not conform to its mainstream image, removed it from its stock and adjusted its bookshelves so that Private Parts was no longer featured in its display of New York Times bestsellers. More controversy followed when Private Parts was removed from public libraries in Texas for similar reasons. Curiously, Stern's book was deemed too obscene to be held in the collection, while other books, such as Alice Walker's Warrior Marks, a work which dealt with female genital mutilation, and sexual manuals such as How to Make Love to a Man were readily available. Evidently, some types of sexuality are permitted, while other forms, such as those expressed in Stern's book, are not. It is interesting to note that many of the terms in which Stern's book was censured were very similar to the way the leading French intellectuals condemned Rousseau's autobiography in the 18th century.

At this point the censorial emphasis shifted from constricting the availability of Stern's book to the outright banning of Stern's physical presence. After he appeared on the Phil Donahue talk-show to promote his book, some stations refused to air the program, deeming its content to be inappropriate. Lastly, Stern met with some resistance when he was refused permission to appear at a book signing in West Hollywood, California, unless he agreed to pay $43,000. ($25,000 against the damage the crowd could potentially cause and $18,000 to pay the police needed to control the event.) Apparently the town, hearing of how Stern drew over 10,000 people to a book signing in New York City, had some misgiving about the possibility of a similar occurrence in California. Stern, of course, refused to offer payment, and expressed his anger at what he saw as yet another example of censorship in America.



In attempting to present a conclusion, one realizes the a mere list of the ways in which these three texts operate within structures which bear correspondence with one another is not enough. Ideally, one would prefer to have demonstrated, not only a relationship of contingency between these authors, but a relation which reveals a deeper congruence between them. As it may be seen, from Rousseau, to Miller, to Stern, one sees the shifting of various pieces and their solidification into a pattern, as the central themes of Rousseau's Confessions finds a new literary basis in Howard Stern's Private Parts, vis-a-vis Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, a bridge of narcissism between Rousseau's obsession and Stern's repression.

Reading these three autobiographies, one sees an evolution in the concept of meaning: starting from Rousseau, who vouches that his feelings are all-important for the truth of his life; to Miller, who locates the foundation of truth in contradictions; to Stern, who views truth through the ironic eye of the satirist. This evolution begins with the entrance of Rousseau onto the literary stage, bringing the anti-social personality into the public eye and, as a result, prompting the aristocracy to fall into decline. This event laid the historical foundation for a new culture, a new system of morality to accompany this transition period. For the reader who passes from Rousseau to Stern, the formation of an ironic American culture where self-deprecation becomes the only way one can present oneself, seems to be the inevitable outgrowth of valorizing a text such as the Confessions. Their particularized conceptions of the truth does not mean that these writers have resigned themselves to the belief that any attempt to communicate the facts must be seen as a subjective analysis; they suggest that the facts of reality are merely a weaving of fictions which have been legitimized by society.

Having established this trinity of names, the figure of Rousseau becomes a single player in a historical movement, which culminates in the development of post-modern society of late capitalist Americas, a land where Rousseau's revolutionary notions, freedom of religion and the liberal codes of sexuality are no longer revolutionary, but are the standards of the status quo. In the contemporary period the names of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry Miller and Howard Stern become a series of links in a chain, a concatenation of three literary presences, as traces of each figure may be found in the others; not only does Stern obtain his person from Rousseau and Miller, but it may be seen that Rousseau is the first modern celebrity, the Howard Stern of the 18th century. Not only does Rousseau's Confessions make the literary productions of Miller and Stern possible, but the works of Miller and Stern allow us to read Rousseau with a view towards the future of literature. Indeed, the same thought-process may be found to occur in each author: as a result of positioning themselves as figures who are isolated from the rest of society, as individuals who, through the fullness of their being, have ascended above the affairs of this world, they prevent their being judged according to the same standards as others; these three moral prophets, in trying to escape the injunctions of moral society, find the freedom to create their own moral systems and their individual sets of ethical values.



One of the main ways in which these writers portray a new concept of morality is in their view of sex. Their works indicate the road to the liberation of the self in that they each speak of the benefits to be gained by exploring human sexuality, deviant sexual psychology, and the sublimation of being made possible in the world of sex. Just as Rousseau presents the reader with new possibilities of human existence, so do Miller and Stern bequeath additional possibilities through their works. One might suppose that by falling in love with these possibilities, society may someday enshrine Henry Miller or Howard Stern, just as the fathers of the French Revolution enshrined Rousseau's historical personage. These authors are to be seen as three moral myth shatterers, enacting through their work a transvaluation of all moral values, as their autobiographies run counter to the moral code that is ordained by modern society in its regulation of the individual's sexual-behavioral development. Rousseau, who shows that the immediate gratification of one's desires in childhood may lead to the deformation of one's adult genital desires; Miller, who uses sex as a metaphor for his approach to the spiritual center of humanity; and Stern, who focuses on his fear that he is sexually aberrent, that he deviates from the norm, as a way of showing that there is no standard to measure one's self by. The works of these three authors clear the way for a new type of thinking about sexuality, a state where sex is not a forbidden, 'dirty' aspect of human consciousness.

These three writers believe that this idyllic desire to create a standardized world is much more harmful than the acceptance of one's physical desire, in this way legitimizing all forms of human existence; in their view, all desire is to be seen as normal. For Rousseau, Miller and Stern, sex is immanent and form-less in nature; however, they differ in the way they react to their sexual desires. By trying to position himself outside of society and failing in his attempt to do so, Rousseau fashions a moral code around himself, incorporating a most particular form of sexual ethics: this code will prevent him from enjoying any sexual or sexual pleasure, but will spare him none of the more humiliating sexual experiences of life. Miller, too, has a code of sexual ethics but, while a casual reading of his work would lead one to suspect that his code allows him to enjoy sexual pleasures to their fullest, in all of his descriptions of sexual acts there is curious omission--that of the pleasure he derives from sex. When one reads his descriptions of his sexual experiences, one gets the feeling that he is not even present; the bodily experience which Miller relates seems intangible, distant, removed. This is not at all surprising, considering that Miller is not concerned with the self in a romantic way, in a Rousseauistic way, or any other idealistic way; rather, he is concerned with investigating the metaphysics of sex, not the pure flesh, but what lies concealed behind it. Contrary to what many people believe, Stern, too, plays by rules prescribed according to his own code of moral correctness.

The work of these three individuals witnesses the evolution in our understanding of the sexual-morality of the child, which Deleuze says, "has not to do with the sexual nature of desiring-machines, but with the family nature of this sexuality." Stern takes up the same problem of sexuality which was discovered through an analysis of Rousseau's autobiography, and re-focuses it onto the tensions which arise in reconciling the morality of infantile sexuality, a sexuality which is traditionally thought of as being of a univocal order, with the polymorphous, multiplicity of moralities that coexist in the expression of adult genital sexuality; this can be seen in Stern's emphasis on the social presence of marginalized types of sexuality. The inclusion of Stern roots this essay in the present, lending a historical continuity which, simultaneously, permits us to grasp the inherent problematization of sexual ethics which occurs in the transition to a sexually liberated state and what is, ultimately, the irreconcilability of flesh with power.

Each of these three authors stands as both saint and sinner in that they point the way to the transcendent experience of the individual. My suggestion that one ought to view these writers as saint implies that these three men have been able to achieve sainthood through an act of confession, revealing how each of them has lived the life of a great sinner. These three authors see clearly what it is that society needs: they realize that society has no use for saints who regard God as the one indispensable thing needed to complete the world; rather, society needs individuals such as Rousseau and Henry Miller who, wholly absorbed by the pursuit of their own goals, are able to turn a blind eye to every other desire but their own. Nor does society need individuals who enclose themselves within the space of the self; rather, society needs people like Rousseau and Howard Stern who are able to stand away from it in order to see it for what it is, to comment on it and so allow others to see as they have seen. As the work of these three authors show, the individual does not need to be further alienated from society by his inability to grasp a privileged intellectual discouse; instead, humanity needs those kinds of saints who provide us with the moral possibilities which allow one to experience the happiness of being alive, saints who permit us to say 'Yes!' to the joy of existence.

On Franz Kafka

The Judgment of the Father:
Franz Kafka and the Formation of the Ego


The special nature of my inspiration in which I, the most fortunate and unfortunate of men, now go to sleep at 2 a.m. [perhaps, if only I can bear the thought of it, it will remain, for it is loftier than all before], is such that I can do everything, and not only what is directed to by a special piece of work. When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, "He looked out the window," it already has perfection.


This passage from the diaries of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) gives a concise summation of his adult life, a life consisting of nights spent in his bedroom, isolated from the world, yearning for ecstasy. As this essay will make clear, Kafka's predicament resulted from the fundamentally paralytic state of his being, a paralysis stemming from being caught in a series of contradictions. Firstly, his all-consuming paralysis may be seen as having emerged from two contradictory impulses, impulses which directed his psychic development and which captured him in a double bind. He was imprisoned, not only by the enormity of his desire to write, he was also imprisoned by his inability to write as he desired. Consequently, this predicament reduced his literary activities to a permanently spasmodic process. Caught in the anxious tension of these two impulses, it is no wonder that he became obsessive about writing. For Franz Kafka, each line must be inscribed with complete authenticity, and this authenticity may only be derived from its form, its textual perfection. Also, it is here, during these same late hours, that he came face to face with the impossibility of his goals: he wanted to submerge himself into the form of the text, converting his imperfect being into a more perfect textual being. Blanchot identifies this attempt to change being as indicative of Kafka's despair, for it is in the process of writing that one realizes the sheer hopelessness of one's life.

According to Blanchot, in trying to inscribe the circumstances of his life onto paper, in trying to reproduce his being in text, Kafka realized that he had cause to despair. Accordingly, he composed his diaries in full knowledge that he is alone in the world; no-one, not even his closest relatives, will be able to understand his pain of share in his sorrow. For several years, he continues on in this state of paralysis, tormented by his literary desires and haunted by the prospect of assembling a work which would accurately depict the savagery he experienced at the deepest core of his being, the violent powers he was conscious of from an early age. Simultaneously desiring and fearing these moments of ecstasy where he was able to abandon the self, Kafka was unable to act on these primitive forces. Instead, he chose to repress them, hoping that he would eventually tame them through his literary representations. In this respect his short stories can be read as his attempts to achieve a textual mastery over his emotions. However, although he desired to become a writer, he consistently prevented himself from realizing these dreams. Seeing how he was reluctant to embrace his life in a textual form, one may surmise that he was frightened by the prospect of becoming this alter-ego which was available to him through literature.

Reading over his diaries, it is apparent that Kafka was never able to grant himself the legitimacy he needed in order to write in good faith, for he never felt confident enough in his abilities to label himself as a writer, at least not until he had produced a work of substance, a work whose richness was commensurate with the plenitude of his desires. The despondency he felt comes through when he describes his view of life: he feels he inhabits a life of weakness and gloom, a sickness which has encircled all of existence, both within the body and without, into the external world. Finally, his thoughts drift towards an event which would definitively mark the limits of his existence--suicide. However, Blanchot cautions us from taking him at face-value, for the crisis of Franz Kafka is, undoubtedly, an internal one, a psychological affair which could never be alleviated by re-arranging the circumstances of his material or social existence. Blanchot tells us that, in this respect, he cannot be helped, for "there are no favorable circumstances." Kafka found himself in the process of steady regression, progressively requiring less and less time in the world, while needing more and more time to devote to his literary activities.

The shrinking of Kafka's world may be schematized in the following way: after being born and raised within the structure of the bourgeois family, upon reaching maturity, he came to concentrate all his affectations on a single person, his fiancee, Felice Bauer. Eventually, his desire for this woman sublimated into a desire whose impossibility effectively guaranteed his solitude, as he became fixated on his essentially unshareable spiritual beliefs. As it can be seen, Kafka's professional desires, the desire to lead the life of a writer, contrasted radically with his personal spiritual beliefs, the fundamentally religious law which commanded him to abandon all these goals and, instead, to go into the world, to earn a living, to support a family, to produce children, to become a member of the community. One can imagine the immense guilt he experienced, as the social world around him demanded something which was, again, in direct contradiction to his being. As a result of these contradictions, Kafka found himself condemned to live life as a bachelor, imprisoned in the space of the self without any companions of his own. Closing himself off from the fulfillment of his sexual desires, he came to position writing as the one activity which could affirm his existence.

Using writing as a means of self-psychoanalysis, Kafka sought to ensure the continuance of his infantile relationship with the world. He did not want to leave his childhood behind until he had discovered the reasons why he was so unhappy. This could most accurately be described as an attempt to preserve a pre-narcissistic relation to the world, that relationship he had come to know in his youth. Seeking to alleviate his pain through his form of the 'talking cure', Kafka hoped that, through writing, he could again make himself psychologically healthy. In this way Kafka continued on in his mode of preservation through abstinence, perpetually seeking to compose that one perfect, transcendent text which would bring him under the sign of the writer. However, when one realizes that this notion of 'the writer' is an essentially mythological sign, it is not surprising that these illusory goals should have tormented him so throughout his life. For this reason Kafka's writing can be seen as his attempt to achieve salvation through textual production.



When my organism realized that writing was the richest direction of my being, everything pointed itself that way, and all other capacities, those which had as objects the pleasures of sex, drink, food, philosophical meditation and especially music, were abandoned. I've thinned out in all those directions. This was necessary because my strength, even when gathered together and devoted to one aim, was so small that it could only half reach the goal of writing.



His love-life, too, was filled with unhappiness and doubt. Although he was engaged to be married on several occasions, each time, when the wedding day grew near, he suddenly changed his mind, breaking off the engagement. The reason why he preferred to remain a bachelor, the reason why he was unable to maintain his commitment to a woman, may be found in his "Letter to His Father" (1919), where Kafka reveals that "the moment I make up my mind to marry I can no longer sleep, my head burns day and night, life can no longer be called life, I stagger about in despair." Each time he decided to marry, Kafka found his mental condition to be endangered, as he was again caught between two desires, the desire to realize his spiritual aims and the desire to write; yet Kafka knew that the realization of either of these desires would not make him sound again, for each of these two choices promises a further retreat into the self, away from the reality of his existence. Regardless of the choices available to him, what Kafka most desired was to degenerate into the bliss of madness; Kafka decided that, rather than put himself at risk by encountering the Real, he would choose to find sanctuary in the Imaginary world of art and literature, for it is only in art that one can gain access to that which is linked 'outside' the world.

Having painted this picture of Kafka's mental condition, let us now turn to an examination of the psychological causes that were responsible for creating this situation. What was the cause for Kafka's lack of confidence in himself, as a son, and as an artist? We may find our answers in a letter to his fiancee, where Kafka explains the psychological turmoil he experienced in his father's house.


But I stem from my parents, I am linked to them just as to my sisters by blood. In everyday life, and because I devote myself to my own goals, I don't feel it, but fundamentally this bond has more value for me than I know. Sometimes, too, I pursue it with my hatred: the sight of the conjugal bed, of the rumpled sheets, the night clothes carefully spread out, makes me want to vomit; it pulls all my insides out. It's as if I were not definitively born, as if I were always coming into the world out of that obscure life in that obscure room; it's as if I had to search there for confirmation of myself, and as if I were, at least to a certain extent, indissolubly linked to these repulsive things. This still impedes my feet which want to run; my feet are still stuck in the formless original soup.



In this passage, we see at once the origin of Kafka's psychological impasse, his lack of independence. It is this situation which was responsible for the erosion of his confidence and his retreat into infantilism. In addition, because this dependence was appalling to him, it made all prospects of family life equally unbearable; any prospects of starting a family of his own became, to his mind, a grim reminder of the struggle within his own family, of his father's subjugation to his mother. Again, this is a bind made up of two contradictory impulses in that, simultaneously, he finds himself drawn to and repelled by this idea of family life. While he would like to be set free from his family, he would also like to commit himself to it irrevocably by starting his own, for that is obedience to the law. Yet his observance of this spiritual truth is also problematic, in that this truth is also the truth of his father, making that which he is most attracted to also that which he is most compelled to resist. This next passage is drawn from a document where Kafka attempts to present the reasons why he becomes entangled in this psychological dilemma:



You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason I am afraid of you, and partly because of an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more detail than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I know try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.



With this passage, Kafka begins his "Letter to His Father" (1919), a fifty-page correspondence whose overriding theme, according to Erich Heller, is "the fearful disproportion between guilt and punishment"; Heller finds this theme to recur throughout Kafka's work. Describing his relationship with his father, Kafka reveals the circumstances which were responsible for his psychological and emotional development. He tries to help his father understand the reasons why he appeared to be so ungrateful for his life of middle-class prosperity, why he abandoned the family business and retreated into a world of books, and why he became so estranged from the rest of the family. Recounting his family history, he reveals a fact which had tremendous effects on his childhood. Franz Kafka was not the first child to be born to his parents: earlier, Herman and Julie Kafka had two other children, who would have been Kafka's older brothers, had they not died in infancy. A few years later, a new child was born, whom they named Franz. Just how deeply Kafka's mother had been hurt by the deaths of her children may be inferred that she was so eager to spoil her new child: "Mother was illimitably good to me," Kafka writes. For whatever reasons, most probably ones deriving from his own family history, Kafka's father did not engage in his son's life the way his mother did. As this critic finds no direct evidence which shows that he was unaffected by the deaths of his children, one might suppose that he simply preferred to take a more matter-of-fact attitude towards the birth of his new son.

Kafka write that, as a child, he was filled with love and admiration for his father; he felt proud of the strength his father displayed, in his body, his mind, and in the way he stated his convictions; to him these things were "dazzling." Yet despite all of this admiration, the relationship between father and son became difficult and tense. Although Kafka's father should not be seen as being wholly at fault, he may be criticized for his poor communication skills; it was only on rare occasions that there was a conversation between father and son. Most of the time, the conversations they did have consisted of little more than short, deprecatory sentences in which the father belittled his son and all that which the younger Kafka felt to be important. To illustrate this point, Kafka gives a number of examples of such comments from his father, such as "Is that all you're worked up about?" or "Such worries I'd like to have!" or "The things some people have time to think about!" or "Where is that going to get you?" Reflecting on this method of communication, Kafka remarks that is father acted as if he had no conception of the role he played in directing the psychic development of his child. He then says that most of which his father handed down to him was in the form of rules for good behavior at the dinner table. The irony inherent in this statement is very appropriate for Kafka's discussion of his father, for his father was a man who brought up his children in an ironic manner, addressing them in such a way that he always retained his status of superiority over his children. One might suppose that one of the contributing factors to Kafka's damaged personality was his deep disappointment with this relationship.

The case of Franz Kafka indicates the potential results of having a father whose prime function in child-rearing is to intrude on the child from time to time, making various 'belittling' comments. In this case, the implementation of this method of child-care resulted in the formation of a subject who constantly felt as if he were being judged by his father's troublesome physical presence. This had significant effects on his physiological development, as Kafka's eating habits became extremely poor for most of his early life. Kafka records how he viewed himself in comparison with his father: "There was I, skinny, weakly, slight, you strong, tall, broad." In such a poor physical condition he grew up, a timid and intimidated child. Upon arriving at 'manhood', by this point Kafka's guilty conscience had developed to such an extent that all of his relationships with the outside world became colored by this flawed relationship with his father: "I felt a miserable specimen...not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were to me the measure of all things."

As a result of his poor relationship with his father, Kafka eventually became completely unable to communicate with his father at all, as he could neither think nor speak in his presence. Although his father never harmed him physically, he did abuse him psychologically by threatening him with the prospect of becoming a failure at whatever he put his hand to; this, too, would do great damage, for "my veneration of your opinion was so great that the failure became inevitable." These prospects of failure gradually loomed larger as he grew older and, ultimately, his problematic relationship with his father led to the complete and total erosion of his confidence. Even after reaching adulthood, he was still unsure about his own body. "What I needed was a little encouragement," he declares, but unfortunately, such encouragement was not forthcoming. As the years passed, he came to be immersed in weakness and hypochondria; he became a prisoner in his own home, often running from his father to find sanctuary in his bedroom. Seeing how, from the time of his early childhood into his adult life, Kafka sought to annul his presence in his own home, one is not surprised to learn that he came to see himself as an exile from the reality.

His mother's over-protective style of child-rearing prevented her son, not only from engaging with the outside world, but with the world of his father. Kafka notes that he came to see his mother's boundless love as way of preventing his father from establishing a significant presence in his life. This may be seen in the passage where he says that, although his mother did so many good things for him, these same things only served to create more and more distance between the two men. These conditions led to the development of an overwhelming guilt-complex, in that he came to see all those good things his mother did for him in relation to his father's non-involvement. The shame he felt for living in a way that was unlike the way his father lived was greatly intensified by his father's reproachful statements: his father caused him to feel guilty for living in warmth and abundance, lacking nothing, thanks to his hard work. Kafka felt extremely guilty for living a life among the middle-class which was nothing like his father's life, who had lived in a financially impoverished state. As the above shows, this disparity between the social stations of father and son led to the distortion of Kafka's image of himself, to his self-castigation in a variety of pernicious terms.

Kafka's image of his father was similarly distorted as well. When he was a child, he lived in constant fear of his father and the terrible authority he represented, the commanding way he wielded his power, cleaving the younger Kafka's world into three parts. These divisions demarcate three separate spaces: one being the lonely and isolated space of the self, where a childlike Franz Kafka hid from his father; a second space, where his father propounded a merciless judgment, subjecting his son to a continual repentance; and a third space, wherein the rest of humanity existed, that portion of the world which Kafka envied, seeing it as being liberated from the power of the father. For many years, Kafka remained frozen in this space of the self, living his life in a state of perpetual disgrace. He includes in his letter a point which indicates that he has noticed a change in his father's behavior: although he now appears to be "a kindly and softhearted person," the original impression his father made refuses to be altered. Remembering an incident from childhood which left him with an indelible image of his father, Kafka tells of a time when he was calling out for a drink of water when, suddenly, his father appeared like a massive silent monster. Instead of getting him the water, his father tried to teach him a lesson about poverty by taking him to the veranda and, for a brief moment, locking him outdoors. Years later, even as he composes his letter, the now mature Kafka is unable to relinquish the terror he felt at the time:



Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fantasy that this huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come for almost no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that meant I was a mere nothing to him.



Kafka spent much of his life in flight from the awesome and terrifying figure of his father, attempting first to escape his father through Judaism. While he has not successful in his first attempt, when Kafka discovered literature, he discovered a space where he could take refuge from his father's presence, as his father, perhaps because of his boorishness, did not intrude on his son's writing. However, although Kafka was able to find some brief solace when he was writing, nevertheless, he remained tied to his father, for the prime subject of his writing was this same defective relationship. Summarizing his attempts to write when he had yet to liberate himself from his family, Kafka categorizes these pages as "an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from [my father]." This psychic inability to confront his father had significant effects on his ability to write, for he was never able to bring the texts he worked on to completion.



June 21, 1913. The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free it without being torn to pieces? And a thousand time rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or to bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.

January 16, 1922. This past week I suffered something very like a breakdown; the only one to match it was on that night two years ago; apart from that I have never experienced its like. Everything seemed over with, even today there is no great improvement to be noticed.

June 12, 1923. More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits--this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture--becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons.



As these selections from his diaries show, Kafka was a man who suffered deeply at the central core of his being. In fact, he suffered to such an extent that it caused him to lose his ability to perceive the world through the senses. His inability to view his situation accurately prevented him from experiencing the joy of being alive, the health, the prosperity, the certainty of his future. In a real sense, the erosion of Kafka's confidence may be seen as a disease of the spirit as, for many years, Kafka existed in a state where he was unable to make the connection that his life and all of the proprioceptive sense-data which he received from the outside world did, in fact, belong to him. In the case of Franz Kafka, an individual who was unable to locate himself in the world, this phenomenon could be called a 'disembodiment'. Perhaps the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have chose to study this case, the case of the disembodied Franz Kafka, as proof of the necessity for both parents to play an active role in the formation of the child's ego, raising them up to the 'mirror' of the external world, to the ideal-ego that is glimpsed in the image.

Reading Mikkel Borch-Jacobson's essay on Lacan's mirror-stage, one sees the extent to which this concept represents a break with classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which saw the child's world of primary narcissism, the infantile world of immediate gratification, as concluding with the introduction of the child's awareness of itself as an image. In The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud schematized the formation of the ego through a series of connections and withdrawals, either with various objects or with the progenitor in the individual's history, the original father-figure. Lacan represents a new development in psychoanalytic theory, for he saw Freud's theory of primary narcissism as too ambiguous to be retained. In opposition to Freud, who saw the state of primary narcissism as coming to an end with the introduction of the specular image, in the Lacanian theory of ego-formation, it is the double which comes first. Inverting the Freudian theory which saw the primal ego-split as having been initiated by the birth of the image, Lacan felt that the image of the self precedes the formation of the ego; the ego is the image of an image, in that it is positioned outside itself from the very start. It is only later, after this moment in the child's development, that the self is ecstatically relocated into the image which has been prepared prior to the child's experience in the self.

According to Lacan's theory, beginning at about six months, the infant first becomes cognizant of its own body as an image, as a separate being, and as an other. Lacan calls this moment in the child's psychic development the mirror-stage, for this process takes place as if the child were gazing at itself in a mirror. This stage is constituted in the moment when the child comes to identify his own image, differentiating it from all of those images it received from those other objects that enters its field of vision. It is at this point that the child forms what Lacan terms the Ideal-I, an immature form of the I which has yet to be identified with the image of the other, and which has yet to have its consciousness infiltrated by language. With his concept of the mirror-stage, Lacan provides an understanding of how the self is organized on the basis of an ideal ego through the unification of signifier and signified. From a Saussurean viewpoint, the mirror stage contains the principle ingredients for the composition of the sign: the first time the infant, Franz Kafka, a material form, as a signified, conceptualized himself as an image, as a signifier, marks the beginning of the process which laid the foundation-structure for his ego.

Perhaps as a result of his difficult relationship with his father, not only did Kafka come to idealize this image of the self, he also became a neurotic, consumed in his attempts to actualize this ideal ego, this fabrication. As one might expect, this had tremendous consequences on his ability to relate to the world, for his life came to be dominated by the quest for this unattainable goal. Successfully completed, the mirror-stage is a time when the child finds a wholeness and unity in its being, a completeness which springs from its immediate cognizance of itself as both material presence and absent image; the child who recognizes himself in the mirror experiences a reaction of pure exultation. However, in the case of Kafka, his inability to successfully complete the mirror-stage led to an inappropriate identification of the self with its ideal image in such a way that it caused this child, who would eventually compose "The Metamophosis", to become hypersensitive to his father's (lack of) judgment. If Lacan's thesis is accepted, then a number of answers to the many questions we have raised about Kafka's life become available.

A critic could draw a number of interesting relations between Lacan's theory and Kafka's situation. For instance, one might suppose that Kafka felt as if he were in the presence of something most unheimlich whenever his father stood before him, as this image of the father embodied "an ego standing outside itself in order to view itself, a figure estranged and alienated from reality." In addition, one might suppose that Kafka experienced a reaction similar to what Lacan called meconnaissance, confusing the ideal image he experienced at the beginning of his proprioceptive development with the reality of his Being. As one may have guessed, the towering, authoritarian image of the father which Kafka was deluded into believing is a feature of the imago, was a simulation of Kafka's desire to establish a reconnection between image and reality. Nor is it unreasonable to suppose that the reason why Kafka hesitated from categorizing himself as a writer may also be attributed to this unfortunate moment in his childhood, for this obstacle may have called his attention back to his inability to master this stage of psychic development. Lastly, as Lacan states, the fact that the image in the mirror shapes the ontological structure of the human world may be responsible for the strength of Kafka's spiritual ideals, which themselves grew out of this meconnaissance. Eventually, this led to Kafka's retreat from the world, pulling in all of his proprioceptive mechanisms for gathering information about himself and about the world; truly, Kafka had become a sheltered individual.

Prevented from gaining access to the world by a mother who hermetically sealed him from every form of social reality, and shamed into isolation by a father who idea of child-care consisted of irony and ignorance, Kafka was forced to organize his ego on the basis of what he saw before him, in the world which was his mirror. Knowing that the infant's gaze is established on the basis of what it sees, one realizes that, because his father remained distant and cold, it was inevitable that Kafka formed a weak ego-structure, and was unable to establish himself in the world, as his psychical development ended at some point prior to its fullest maturation. Furthermore, these initial difficulties led to the development of a series of obstructions, all of which served to block Kafka's journey to a healthy psychological development: his inability to experience the unity of the ego led to an inability to engage with the imaginary self, leading to his fundamental inability to elevate the ego up to a height from which it could look down upon him in his magnificent completeness, a deficiency which led to the creation of his neurotic character. As Borch-Jacobson explains, although it is only a simulation, the erection of the ego is an all-important event, for it eventually will come to manifest a solid presence in the individual's life--"triumphant, unshakable, eternal, fixed."

On the existence of external objects

Wittgenstein #14

In Oliver Sacks' book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, there is a chapter devoted to Dr. Sacks' work with Virginia, a patient who suffered from a rare disease that caused her to experience a gradual loss of sense-perception, beginning with the legs and, over a period of time, extending to the whole body. As the disease progressed over the next few months, Virginia was in such a state that Dr. Sacks could show Virginia her own hand and she would be unable to make the connection that it belonged to her. Would either Moore or Wittgenstein use this case of the 'disembodied woman' in support of their view of Moore's proof of an external world?

As I read G.E. Moore's essay, I see a break with the Kantian theory of knowledge: according to Moore, Kant's notion of the empirically external is identical with the phrase "to be met with in space". However, Moore states that in making the proposition 'there are external objects', it does not follow that there are things to be met with in space, for these are two different conceptions. Here Moore is attempting to refute Kant in a 'common-sensical' way. In place of this notion, Moore states that we are entitled to the claim that there exist at least two objects outside us. Both Moore and Kant agree that there can be only one proof for this claim, a proof which Moore claims he can produce in any given number of situations. To prove his claim, Moore simply holds up his hands, indicating the one and then the other, fully confident that "it is impossible to give a more rigorous proof of anything whatever."

However, in his work On Certainty, Wittgenstein pokes fun at this method of proving the existence of external objects. W sees Moore as a confused muddle; he does not believe Moore's proof of external objects is something he is entitled to so easily. The reason why W is skeptical of Moore's claim to have proved the existence of external objects is evident when W states: a) "It is so" cannot be inferred from the utterance of another, yet it is true that b) one can infer "It is so" from one's own statement. When Moore shows his hands, saying, "Here are two hands", what are we to infer from this display? Of course, we can say that he knows those are his hands. What we cannot do, however, is to say that someone knows with absolute certainty, simply on the basis of their saying that they know. But what is the source of Moore's confusion? In my opinion, the reason for this confusion is that Moore is caught between two philosophical language-games: that is, the language game in which he is a subject, receiving sense-date in his internal world, and the language-game in which his hands are an object of the external world. When I read On Certainty, it seems to me that W wants to show how the language-game Moore is working in is insufficient to offer the proofs he is trying to make.

In Wittgenstein's view, for a proposition to be an 'empirical' proposition, it must be the case that its contrary is also a sensible statement. That is, it is necessary that this proposition can be regarded as either true or false. However, there are occasions when the contrary of a proposition, rather than being false, is unintelligible. Thus, W calls Moore's statement that "there are my two hands" a logically invalid assertion because, in order to refute Moore's curious propositions one would be forced to make statements of an unintelligible nature. Here we can see clearly what W means when he says that if we were to encounter a person who took a position opposing Moore's proof, saying "These are not my two own hands", we ought to regard this person as demented.

But why "demented" ? What do we mean when we say that a mental disturbance has manifested itself in one's thinking? Put simply, a mental disturbance in our thinking occurs when we believe a proposition which runs counter to 'all that we hold to be true'. For this kind of disturbance to be utterable, it must be the case that the person to whom the message is addressed must also possess a similarly 'mentally-disturbed' thinking-structure as the utterer.

Now to return to our first example: if, after being shown her own hand, Virginia responds to the doctor, "That is not my hand", what, then, would Moore/Wittgenstein say? Certainly, this would be an example of the contrary position of Moore's proof of an external world. Is this, then, an unintelligible statement simple because it opposes Moore's self-evident proof? If it is, should we then consider this woman to be suffering from dementia? I imagine that both W and Moore would say that, in this case, because of the nature of the disease, they do not intend their propositions to hold. Probably, they would dismiss this case as an anomaly. While our hero, Wittgenstein, proved to be faulty in this situation, we can forgive him for this, as he was unfamiliar with the type of nerve degeneration which caused Virginia to become so dissociated from her own body that she was unable to recognize her own hands held before her face.

12.04.1994

On John Milton

John Milton and the Law of Genres:
Paradise Lost as a Pluralistic Text


In this essay I will discuss how the style employed by John Milton (1608-1674) in composing his greatest work, Paradise Lost (1667), was significantly affected, and almost predetermined, by the social changed that were occurring in seventeenth century England. Written in a time of emerging pluralism, the cosmopolitan structure of this work was influenced by the sweeping demographic and societal changes of the time. As we shall see, this monumental epic incorporates what may be called a pluralistic form of textuality, for Paradise Lost, in defiance of the law that prohibits the mixing of genre-forms, exhibits an unparalleled freedom of creativity. In reaction to these changes, Milton swings from one genre-form to another, something that, at the time, was a radical approach to literary composition. This essay will look at Milton's prose works, showing how his desire to affirm the public's right-of-access to a greater degree of discursive forms can be traced back to works as early as The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty (1642) and Areopagitica (1644), two tracts that pre-date the English revolution. In these works, too, Milton advocates the spirit of freedom in a pluralistic society. However, before we begin discussing these works, either prose or poetry, we must first investigate the English history that was the background of Milton's literary performance.

As Christopher Hill has written, the period of English history in which John Milton came of age was a time of flux and possibility. In particular, the period encompassing the early years of the seventeenth century to the year 1640, the period that Hill brackets off as the time of Milton's 'apprenticeship', was a troubling period of mounting tension for the English. During this period, the composition of English society was altering on many levels--economically, ideologically, sociologically and demographically. One might even say that England was experiencing its own multicultural crisis. Hill suggests that one of the main causes behind this age of anxiety can be found in the shifts in alignment regarding religious faith, as the consensus that had established a privileged position for the prescribed national faith, Protestantism, began to fragment. To discern the reason why this was such a traumatic state of affairs, one must delve back further into English history in an attempt to discover how this religious and cultural consensus came to be.

Even the most casual student of history remembers that Protestantism, England's national religious faith, was born when Henry VIII, in his desire to wrest authority from the Roman papacy, created the Church of England. Over the course of time, an equivalency between England and Protestantism was formed in the national consciousness, as the English people gradually came to see themselves as a nation chosen by God to receive the Protestant faith. Unsurprisingly, this sacrilization of the origin was especially active in times of warfare. For example, when the English forces went to war against Spain, the war was often conceived in terms of a religious struggle between Protestants and Catholics. This belief served as a sediment, solidifying the association between England and Protestantism until these two separate things, country and religion, came to be seen as indivisible. To help instill opposition to the enemy, the monarchy continually stressed the relationship between nationalism and Protestantism as one whose originary nature was essential to the life of the people. These false beliefs were passed down through English history and into the Elizabethan era, at the end of which Milton was born.

With the ending of the Elizabethan era, the pressures of change that had hitherto been abated began to mount, eventually falling with great impact, irrevocably altering the country by dissolving the consensus that had held England together under Elizabeth. Many people reacted to the enormous wave of change by interpreting it as a test of their faith, as a crisis in spirituality. However, Hill believes that Milton saw these changes as indicative of a more neutral process, seeing this dilemma as the product of many cultural and ideological uncertainties. The first successor to Elizabeth was James VI who, although he was Scottish, was crowned in 1603, five years before John Milton was born. James continued a political policy similar to that of the Elizabethan era and, as a result, both Puritan and non-Puritan Protestants alike were united by their mutual adherence to Calvinistic theology. It was under the rule of Charles that this consensus began to break down with full vigor.

Striking an alliance with the Armenians, a religious group who wanted to re-define the doctrine of the Church of England, Charles exacerbated the political and social tensions he had inherited along with his kingdom. The Armenians believes in universal salvation of mankind, something that stood in marked contrast to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. A second action Charles took was his appointment of William Laud as bishop of London in 1628, and later as archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. The leader of the anti-Puritan party, Laud took over as bishop in a city that was of strong Puritan character. Initiating his anti-Puritan policies, Laud oversaw the advance of Armenians to influential positions in the church and subtly promoted Armenian theology. Naturally, the Armenians responded by supporting Charles in his causes against Puritanism and Parliament. We now have a good idea of the many tensions that caused England to become a divided society, and we can see how these battle-lines that were drawn between the monarchy and the people led to a civil war, which occurred despite Milton's cries for greater freedom to be given to the people. When the New Model Army, a Parliamentarian army of 22,000 men commanded by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, defeated Royalist forces in 1648, King Charles was executed and Cromwell assumed the position of authority, now becoming England's Lord Protector.

Cromwell, too, saw the Reformation as a religious struggle over the souls of the English people. He made this known in his famous pronouncement, "The reformation of England shall be more glorious than of any nation in the world, being carried on by the spirit of the Lord." He selected John Owen, an independent clergyman, to guide the religious settlement under Cromwell's commonwealth. This settlement in England under the Puritan commonwealth may be most appropriately described as pluralistic ; for the various parish churches in the community were led by a variety of denominators including Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents and others. As stated previously, we have begun with an extended look at the historical background of the seventeenth century, for these events had a profound impact on the form of John Milton's canonical masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Of course, this is not the only significant work of Milton's that reveals the extent to which the surrounding social body was important to his work. Milton's entire literary output, both prose and poetry, addressed itself to the changes the English people were exposed to through the shifting relationships and structural transformations in the society at large. His conscious acknowledgment of the significance of these changes within the space of his work is so unmistakable that one might even say that these changes constitute the source from which his work derives its historic impact and emotive force. As we shall see, Milton's prose essays, written before the English civil war, also support the growth of this pluralistic community.

Much like Oliver Cromwell, Milton saw the Reformation as evidence of God's blessing on the English people, a gift that they deserved due to their indomitable Christian fortitude. In The Reason of Church Government (1642), Milton composed an anti-Episcopal tract argued against the Church powers whom, he felt, were an obstruction to the liberty of England. Again, it was the monarchy that was to blame: in giving the Church the power to dismiss Parliamentary actions, the monarchy effectively prohibited the right of the people to establish their own power in the form of a legislative body. While Milton was against hierarchies in general, he was especially agitated by what he saw as Church interference in the public domain, and he expressed the view the restoration of secular stability was the top priority for the English people. This is not to say that Milton was anti-religious for, as we know from reading Paradise Lost, Milton was a man of profound religious spirit. He was against axiomatic cultural precepts--religious, political or ideological--and persisted in the belief that there was no one ecclesiastical polity that was divinely authorized, neither the Presbyterians nor the Puritans. On the contrary, he felt that a pluralistic religious culture was the only redemptive possibility for the country, and that the stability of religious interests was of prime importance for a culture. In his desire to see England develop a public policy that would advance the causes of the Reformation, Milton wavered in his opinions, at first welcoming the progress made by the Presbyterians, then growing angry when he saw signs that they had founded a stable religion of their own.

In Reason of Church Government Milton set forth the Utopian view that, if the bishops were removed from their positions of authority, the state would return to its original state of equilibrium, and this would allow for a more intimate dialogue to form between the King and Parliament. While these historical details are all of great interest, our prime interest in this document is that it also provides a glimpse into Milton's poetics, revealing his complex approach to the Renaissance genre-system.

Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem to profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home in the spacious circuits of her musing hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer and those two of Virgil are diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art and use judgment, is no transgression but an enriching of art... If to the instinct of nature and the emboldening of art aught may be trusted, and that there be nothing adverse in our own climate or the fate of this age, it haply would be no rashness, from an equal diligence and inclination, to present the like offer in our own ancient stories: or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides resign, shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation. The Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral drama in the Song of Solomon.... And the Apocalypse of St. John is the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy... And if occasion shall lead to imitate those magnificent odes and hymns wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy... But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be made easily appear over all the kinds of lyric poetry to be incomparable.

For Milton, the law that proscribed the artist's restriction to a single genre was a purely formal constraint. In opposition to this law, Milton invoked the artist's privilege to create as he sees fit, developing his inspiration from a combination of different sources without having to fear that he has somehow corrupted the essential being of his work through this mixture. As the de facto prohibition against plurality was an institutional norm both in literature and in the society of Milton's day, a passage such as this one must have been seen as the height of radicalism. Here Milton suggests that the poet should compose with all of his freedoms intact, retaining the ability to develop his work from a variety of literary sources. This includes a great variety of world literature, as Milton enumerates a number of literary achievements throughout history, including various poets of antiquity, both Greek and Roman. In addition, this passage includes Milton's appreciation of the Bible as a literary text, seeing the Song of Solomon and the Book of Job as literary works comparable with those of ancient civilizations. Most importantly, this passage contains Milton's critique of the rules set forth in Aristotle's Poetics regarding the formal features of literary representation. In Milton's view, the creation of a work that fails to observe the rules set forth by Aristotle is not an act of literary terrorism, something to be prevented at all costs but, rather, should be seen as a further contribution adding to the range of artistic achievements. In this way, Milton positions his own formalistic experiments in Paradise Lost as an elevation of the work of art--but we shall come to this work later.

We will now turn to a second prose essay, Areopagitica, a work whose genesis Milton summarized in his Second Defense of the People of England (1654), saying:

I wrote my Areopagitica in order to deliver the press from the restraints in which it was encumbered; that the power of determining what was true and what was false, what ought to be published and what ought to be suppressed, might no longer be entrusted to a few illiterate and illiberal individuals, who refuse their sanction to any work which contained views or sentiments at all above the level of vulgar superstition.

This statement is quite true, for Areopagitica (1644) was a tract in defense of the liberty of the press. It was written in response to the Parliamentary order to return to the code of governmental censorship that had long kept the English people from exercising their liberty to choose. As Milton said:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seed which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to be cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps that is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.

As this passage shows, Areopagitica was a statement on the indivisibility of good and evil, and also on the positive value of human errors. Milton re-emphasized this point, saying: "Many there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing..." In this quotation, as well as in the passage above, Milton speaks of the necessity that man should be permitted to exercise his capacity to choose. In order that these categories of good and evil should be values correctly, people must attain knowledge from both in order to legitimize their goodness. For Milton, life consists in having navigated between good and evil and, after one has been acquainted with both, true knowledge consists in possessing the moral compass that allows one to tell the difference. To make this choice in one's own name, not in the name of another, is the only way that an authentic choice can be made. As can be seen from this passage, Milton equates our essential humanity with this capacity of reason, to choose between good and evil.

This being an imperfect world, we must have knowledge to choose between right and wrong and, in order to ensure the autonomy of individual liberty, this knowledge has to be acquired experientally. Through his advocacy of complete and total access to one's personal decision-making process, Milton wanted to create a society that did not enforce the imposition of normalizing restrictive clauses that served as the adjudicators of moralistic standards of social goodness. Specifically, he wanted people to be able to test their experiences against their own moral standards, with the goal of arriving at ideas they could then export into the framework of civil society or into the consciousness of literary works.

The combination of Reason of Church Government and Areopagitica constitute Milton's contribution to the debate on the question that, in some ways, had instigated the English Civil War. That is, to what extent does the government, or the Church, have the right to insist on the people's strict adherence to the law, whether this law be a divine monarchical law, such as was Charles' law, or a societal law, an example of which manifested itself in the civil uprising of the 1640s. A third set of laws, a form that Milton attempted to supersede, were the laws of literature, a code that prescribed the classical unities of time, place and action. As we can see from our analysis of these two works, here Milton argues that any governmental suppression of the social will to enact its own developmental process invariably has deleterious effects for the greater society at large. Rather than extend these repressive measures, Milton advocates the growth of a civil society where citizens possess the liberty to realize their own desires, extending personal knowledge as they choose to, and thus opening up possibilities for transformation on both the social and individual levels. In writing these two tracts, Milton expressed his belief that man's liberty to make choices, even ones that might be considered to be the wrong choices by some, must always be preserved; the freedom to make decisions is more than something merely commensurate with God's will--it is the manifestation of God's will, our desire to attain happiness. Holding this pre-utilitarian philosophy, Milton advocated the principle that people allow themselves the opportunity for intellectual growth and spiritual development through unhindered freedom of inquiry. Implicit in his argument is the suggestion that any systematization or codification of the rules governing artistic productions, such as Aristotle's Poetics, is valuable insofar that it does not detract from the human will to create.

In "The Genres of Paradise Lost" Barbara Kiefer Lewalski speaks about the Renaissance as a time of "heightened genre-consciousness in literary theory and poetic practice" and names Milton as "the most genre-conscious of all English poets." She sees Paradise Lost as containing a multitude of literary forms, all of which contribute to the weight of its cultural and historical distinction as one of the great masterpieces of English literature. Specifically, Lewalski finds textual evidence for each of the following types of dramatic categories; the form of the morality-play is suggested in the scenes where God speaks with the Son among the heavenly spheres:

To whom the great Creator thus repli'd,

O Son, in whom my Soul hath chief delight,

Son of my bosom, Son who art alone

My word, my wisdom, and effectual might,

All hast thou spok'n as my thought are, all

As my Eternal purpose hath decreed,

Man shall not quit be lost, but sav'd who will,

Yet not of will in him, but grace in me

Freely voutsaf't; once more I will renew

His lapsed powers, though forfeith and enthrall'd

By sin to foul exorbitant desires;

Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand

On even ground against his mortal foe,

By my upheld, that he may know how frail

His fall'n condition is, and to me owe

All his deliv'rance, and to none but me.

...

Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace,

And shall grace not find means, that finds her way,

The speediest of thy winged messengers,

To visit all thy creatures, and to all

Comes unprevented, unimplor'd, unsought?

Happy for man, so coming; he her aid

Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost;

Atonement for himself or offering meet,

Indebted or undone, hath none to bring:

Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life,

I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;

This epic also incorporates a domestic farce in the scenes where Death delivers an address to his distant father, Satan:

Art thou that Traitor Angel, art thou hee,

Who first broke peace in Heav'n and Faith, till them

Unbrok'n, and in proud rebellion Arms

Drew after him the third part of Heav'n's Sons

Conjur'd against the Highest, for which both Thou
And they outcast from God, and here condemn'd

To waste Eternal days in woe and pain?

And reck'n'st thou thyself with Spirits of Heav'n.

Hell-doom'd, and breath'st defiance here and scorn,

Where I reign King, and to enlarge thee more,

Thy King and Lord? Back to thy punishment,

False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings,

Lest with a whip of Scorpions I pursue

Thy ling'ring, or with one stroke of this Dart

Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before.

Domestic tragedy becomes the central genre-form in the scene where Adam blames Eve for having succumbed to temptation:

O Heav'n! In evil strait this day I stand

Before my judge, either to undergo

Myself the total Crime, or to accuse

My other self, the partner of my life,

Whose failing, while her Faith to me remains,

I should conceal, and not expose to blame

By my complaints; but strict necessity

Subdues me, and calamatious constraint,

Lest on my head both sin and punishment,

However insupportable, be all

Devolv'd, though should I hold my peace, yet thou

Wouldst easily detect what I conceal.

This Woman whom thou mad'st to be my help

And gav'st my as thy perfect gift, so good,

So fit, so acceptable, so Divine,

That from her hand I could expect no ill,

And what she did, whatever in itself,

Her doing seem'd to justify the deed,

She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

The final book takes the form of a tragic masque, as the miseries of humankind are described by the angel, Michael, who speaks of the power Death exerts over the world:

But first the lawless Tyrant, who denies

To know thir God, or message to regard,

Must be compell'd by Signs and Judgments dire;

To blood unshed the river must be turn'd

Frogs, Lice and Flies must all his Palace fill

With loath'd intrusion, and fill all the land;

His Castle must of Rot and Murrain die,

Botches and blains must all his flesh imboss,

And all his people; Thunder mixt with Hail,

Hail mixt with fire must rend th' Egyptian Sky

And wheel on th' Earth, devouring where it rolls,

What it devours not, Herb, or Fruit, or Grain,

A darksome Cloud of Locusts swarming down

Must eat, and on the ground leave nothing green:

Darkness must overshadow all his bounds,

Palpable darkness, and blot out three days;

Last with one midnight stroke all the first-born

Of Egypt must lie dead.

As Lewalski points out, the reason why Milton included such variety of dramatic forms into this epic poem has to do with the nature of the epic itself. Historically, the epic has been seen as the form that serves as the nexus of all meaning, the site where all writing takes place, the locus from which all knowledge derives its origin. Lewalski speaks of the classical form of the epic, a heterogeneous composition whose pluralistic textual form allows it to address many subjects, including "philosophy, mathematics, history, geography, military art, religion, hymnic praise, rhetoric and all literary forms." With this conception of the epic in mind, Milton designed Paradise Lost to contain a similarly diverse number of genre-forms, including "law, history, prophecy, heroic poetry, psalm, allegory, proverb, hymn, sermon, epistle, tragedy, tragicomedy and more."

Like many people living during the Renaissance, Milton saw history as a cyclical process. This view carried over into his view of himself as a preeminent English poet, a social role that was his life's enduring engagement. Seeing his function as the poet of England being bound up with the fate of his country, Milton set out to compose Paradise Lost, consciously attempting to write a work that would, in time, become one of the nation's literary treasures. In this way he sought to win God's favor for the country through his great deed as the individual who can shape history through his art. As Michael Fixler has noted, in Milton's mind, his ultimate goals for this work were bound up with the goals of the Reformation and, over the course of time, he began to see his own struggles, both personal and political, as being caught up in this circular scheme. Having this kind of psychological framework, it is not surprisingly that Milton came to write a religious epic for his country, a work that blended the country's past with its future through the familiar story of the Biblical account of the Fall. Composed at a time when it had already become apparent that the Reformation was unable to change life as he had hoped, Milton took the goals for revolutionary change he had deferred, and transposed them into the creation of this work. In effect, writing Paradise Lost was Milton's way of completing the work of the Reformation on his own. Like the writing of his tracts, it was his way of taking an active role in history rather than suffering through the long process of historical change. Now having demonstrated the plurality of Paradise Lost, we are able to see of these historical, cultural and psychobiographical influences played a role in shaping this text which, as we have shown, is pluralistic in terms of its formal composition.

In light of these distinguishing facts, when reading the passage from Reason of Church Government once more, one suspects that Milton was even then thinking of a way that he could incorporate the entire genre-system into a single work of art. This critic sees Milton's method of incorporating this variety of literary forms and genres into a single work as a way of enhancing his own poetic vision, since each of these literary forms provides an additional dimension to his poetics, enabling him to advance his reader's own poetic understanding of the world through his exposure to a pluralistic literary universe. Milton's reconfiguration of the literary text may be seen as a response to the alterations in the composition of the English populace and their relationship with the divinity in that, by transgressing the law that forbade the use of multiple genres, Milton created a work that was able to suggest the plenitude of life that occupies the highest order of being; that is, through his representation of God and the angels in a literary form, Milton brings the divine in closer contact with reality, a contact that made real through the mixtures of genres and forms. As can be seen from the section on the historical background of seventeenth century England, this plurality of form grew in response to a culture that needed to recognize the diversity of its composition in order to affirm its continued solidarity as a European power. Finally, we are able to see that the recognition of this plurality, both in works such as Paradise Lost and in the surrounding social body of seventeenth-century England, is of profound significance when interpreting Milton's art.