I have an old paperback edition of Paradise Lost sitting around, and I pick it up and read a page or two from time to time. Milton is one of the few acknowledged great English poets I've never taken a shine to. Nothing about Satan's grandeur appeals to me. If all the powers and potentates of Heaven and Hell have to do is make speeches of elaborate self-justification, then I'd rather poke along here in the middle kingdom and watch a beetle negotiate a tuft of grass. Who cares about all their bombast and swagger?
And then there are the weird discontinuities. The world-building, as kids like to say these days, is comically inconsistent and contrived. Having Death and Sin walk around with the same ontological status as Lucifer and Jesus, not to mention as the Creator himself? How is that supposed to work? The world dangling on a string? The invocation of a Greek muse on a Hebrew stage? And if Milton really thinks that this God is the creator of the world, and of himself, how dare he stuff His mouth with his own words? I mean that literally: you would think that even the most naive and unreflective of Christians would recognize that they're not up to writing a script for God.
Yet Milton is neither naive nor blasphemous in intent, and he's no teenager. He's a man who's taken enormous real risks and played a key part in the great events of his time. His learning is (a little too obviously) immense. What is he playing at?
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I'm uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We're making them up. They're for visiting, not for living in.
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Meditating on that, I realize that I'm engaged in the same thing as my children. I'm holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He's writing a poem, and he's drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he's not that arrogant. He's a man writing a poem, that's all. He's not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he's unsophisticated, It's that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.
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I have Milton's Sonnet 19 by heart, so it's not true that he's never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I'm old enough in reading to know that its not Milton's deficiency but mine that I'm dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I'll leave the door ajar. You never know.
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