From this descent / Celestial Virtues rising, will appear / More glorious . . . than from no fall. (ii. 14-16)1These are Satan’s words to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost. Satan claims that their fall from Heaven will seem like a “fortunate fall,” in that their new rise to power will actually be “more glorious” than if they had stayed in Heaven all the while. Can we, as fallen humans, possibly make Satan’s words our own, even if it is not our own work but God’s that causes our “rising”; or, if we do claim a “fortunate fall,” have we been beguiled by Satan to rejoice in our fallen state? While it is common among beguiled critics to claim that Paradise Lost presents the Fall as fortunate, in fact the Fall is much less fortunate than these critics presume.
Millicent Bell is among the beguiled, but he starts off with a vital point that is too easily forgotten. What does the narrative make explicit about the Fall? “The bare story makes no mystery of it. It was infinite disaster.”2 From the beginning of the epic we learn that the Fall “Brought death into the world, and all our woe” (i. 3). It “brought into this world a world of woe,/Sin and her shadow Death, and misery/Death’s harbinger” (ix. 11-13). We learn that Eve, after leaving Adam to go her own way in Eden (just before the Fall) “never from that hour in Paradise/Found’st either sweet repast, or sound repose” (ix. 406-07). Eve’s Fall is a great calamity for the world (ix. 782-84); so is Adam’s, completing the original sin (ix. 1003). The couple’s early reactions to their sin include disgust, shame, lust, and scorn for the earth (ix. 1010 ff.). The woe of Satan, too, is “perpetual” (ii. 861) and “eternal” (iv…
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…s that Paradise is where she and Adam are together, so that an Eden without Adam would be no Paradise at all (xii. 615-17).
15. Bell (878-79) asserts that Milton could not have understood Raphael’s words about education and spiritual uplift without tying them to the harshness of error and suffering; though I disagree, Bell’s general point stands: as a fallen human the life of righteous suffering is the only good one that Milton could have had true sympathy for. On the other hand, in the context of the epic, Frank Kermode and Barbara Lewalski recognize that in Paradise Lost we yet know nothing of this inner paradise with which to compare it to Eden (we have only Michael’s word): “The paradise of Milton’s poem is the lost, the only true paradise, we confuse ourselves . . . if we believe otherwise” (Kermode, “Adam Unparadised,” Elledge 603-04; cf. Lewalski 270).
Essay on Character Movement in James Joyce’s Dubliners
Character Movement in Dubliners
In a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, concerning his collection of stories called Dubliners, James Joyce wrote:
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the resentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard (Peake 2).
Joyce’s passion for Dublin presents itself in the copious detail he uses in Dubliners. No street name, tower, pub, or church is left unspecified. Joyce often boasted to his brother Stanislaus that if Dublin were to disappear off the face of the earth, it would not be difficult to reconstruct it, simply based on Joyce’s work (Walzl 169). Though all but three of the Dubliners stories were written while Joyce was in self-imposed exile form Ireland, he describes strolls his characters took throughout Dublin, carefully noting every turn of every street corner. The movements Joyce notes are not arbitrary, but symbolic. Joyce intended for his audience to give special attention to the direction of the characters’ movements. In most of the stories, the East symbolizes willful exile and escape. Movements westward indicate acceptance of corruption and eternal paralysis. In Dubliners, Joyce uses symbolic physical movement to trace the different stages of paralysis in his characters.
In the three childhood stories, “Sist…
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…ements of his book” (60). The movements of Joyce’s characters in his work Dubliners offer a telling picture of where Joyce predicted the city of Dublin was headed.
Works Cited
Bidwell, Bruce and Linda Heffer. The Joycean Way: A Topographic Guide to Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Johns Hopkins: Baltimore, 1981.
Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. University of California: Berkeley, 1982.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Penguin Books: New York, 1975.
Peake, C.H. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford University: Stanford, 1977.
Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce. Noonday Press: New York, 1959.
Walzl, Florence L. “Dubliners.” A Companion Study to James Joyce. Ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens. Greenwood Press: London, 1984.