Is Satan Gay?

Dame Elenor Hull's musings about performance have inspired me to post on an idea I've been mulling over about reading Paradise Lost. The question of Satan's sexuality is a way to get at a bigger question about performative reading and interpretation of Paradise Lost.

The lines in question appear in Book 5, after the Father has exalted the Son. Satan is not happy:

Soon as midnight brought on the duskie houre
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolv'd
With all his Legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshipt, unobey'd the Throne supream
Contemptuous, and his next subordinate
Awak'ning, thus to him in secret spake.
Sleepst thou, Companion dear, what sleep can close
Thy eye-lids? and remembrest what Decree
Of yesterday, so late hath past the lips
Of Heav'ns Almightie. Thou to me thy thoughts
Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart;
Both waking we were one; how then can now
Thy sleep dissent?

[Courtesy of the Milton Reading Room]

I know I am not the first person to raise questions about Satan's sexuality. Ask whether Satan is teh ghey among Miltonists, and discussion will likely go into angelic ontology and other Greek words ending in “-gy” or "-cy" (In defense of the “gay” anachronism, see magistra on “gay” for medival sexuality here.) Shakespeareans would be much more comfortable allowing several possible answers, and might offer performative consistency rather than some form of authorial intention (so-called or not) as the key criterion for legitimate interpretation. Not “what does this mean?” but “what works in performance while remaining consistent with the rest of the text?”

Shakespeareans, for obvious reasons, are much more willing to bring performative questions to the fore in their readings than Miltonists. Harry Berger, for instance, often brings up performative questions in the process of brilliantly illuminating Shakespeare. But as an epic, Paradise Lost ought to be heard, and I wonder how useful questions of performance are, especially in a teaching context.

The question of Satan's sexuality, then, might not be whether Satan and Beelzebub are lovers, but rather the question of how the modern day rhapsode might deliver these lines. If you will allow me to indulge my inner A.C. Bradley for a moment, here are two possibilities for the rhapsode “visualizing” in order to find the character's “motivation”:

1. Beelzebub, an aristocratic angel, sleeps alone in his mansion. Satan barges in, throws open the doors to Beelzebub's chamber: [A bit angry, and a bit incredulously]: "Sleepest thou?! . . ."



2. Beelzebub and Satan, lovers, lie in bed together. Satan is restless, can't sleep. He gently strokes Beelzebub in the bed they share: [softly, trying to wake without startling]: “Sleepest thou, . . .”

I find the second more compelling than the first, because in the first version the “companion dear” would have to be delivered with a bit of a sneer, and as the line continues, it becomes harder and harder to rein this back in to express a real mutuality, which Satan seems to want to play on. (Of course, this is his first seduction, and the question of how much Beelzebub is manipulated/duped by Satan into rebelling is interesting.) In the immediate context, I find the first second more consistent with the lines and easier to deliver. It's consistent with much else in the epic (Raphael's embarrassed description of the angelic hibbity-dibbity in Book 8, for instance, though many Miltonists would insist that his language of substantial interpenetration isn't really sexual). But to fully check its consistency one would have to check the language Satan and Beelzebub use for each other throughout (“compeer” and such). Still, the question would not be what did Milton mean, but what works in a performative reading of the epic.

There are dangers in treating Milton this way, surely, not the least of which is that most students will only get one crack at Milton and could come away thinking that the epic is X or Y, rather than can be read X-ly or Y-ly.

Semi-Defense of My “Non-Tech” Colleagues

There's a not so hidden annoyance on the part of scholars engaged with digital media at the backwardness of many academic humanists. It's a sentiment that sometimes appears on the techrhet listserv, and some recent posts (and threads) by both Timothy Burke and Geeky Mom dance around this annoyance.

In large measure I agree that humanists can and should learn more about and use developing communication technologies. But I do think we need some perspective on the uses of old-fashioned-ness, especially with respect to humanism.

Adopting new communication technologies inevitably entails loss. I wish we had managed to preserve more of the culture of oral disputation from medieval universities (minus the silly cantankerousness it often encouraged.) Those who look backwards and criticize, from Socrates to Sven Birkerts, provide an important function. They help us to recognize what we are losing and ask what and how some of that might be preserved. I don't think it's generally recognized how much even current educational practice reveals our affinities with Socrates' criticism of writing in the Phaedrus. We still, as part of our educational process, get people together in face to face meetings and talk, often about pieces of writing. (I might want to argue that what we do when talking about texts is just a kind of technical training, showing people to use the technology of writing, but that's a subject for another day.)

In the process of adopting new technologies, how much room is there for human agency? I think, for instance, about Howard Reingold's fairly well-known article on the Amish from Wired. Here is a community where people think carefully about the effects introducing new technologies will have on their social life and make decisions about what to use. Too often we treat newer technologies and the worlds they call into being as inevitable. What decisions can we make, as individuals or as groups, and what are the consequences of those decisions? How can we ask these questions without seeming simplistically pro or con? In some ways, the recalcitrant and the blithely ignorant have the most to teach us as we continue to consider how to integrate these technologies into teaching.

Let me try to put this another way. All current academic humanists are remarkably sophisticated users of a technology: print. Indeed, writing itself is a technology. The techne of writing requires not only learning to encode and decode the alphabet. Even more, it involves learning to put a dialectic (people talking with/against each other) into a "monolectic" medium, and then somehow to reawaken its dialectic origins, even in the mind as reading. Writing and reading in general are much more deeply rhetorical technologies than is usually recognized, even among those who understand literacy's fundamental rhetorical structure.

Most of the blogs I read are imbued with print literacy. The best pieces are really essays, not all that different from what Montaigne and Bacon wrote. They are based in the same process of somehow mashing dialectic into the monolectic medium. And, I also hope that humanists continue to train readers who will be able, and even want, to read such things as essayistic blog posts and other "long-form" pieces. Burke, in this thread, alludes to a presentation from Kathleen Fitzpatrick that asked questions about “how to do 'long-form' scholarly work in digital environments that isn’t just an attempt to translate the book or codex into those environments, but is net-native in some respect .” Such activity requires readers who would still want (and be able) to read long form works as a basic condition. But that's an assumption. I'd guess that not many people today could follow a 14th-century disputation, because we don't have the same kind of knowledge about oral arguments and Aristotleian logic that was de rigueur for the university educated then. “Long-form” literacy could very well be lost as communication media develop in the direction of presenting everything short-form. I take this as part of what Burke means when he calls “complete hooey” much of the talk of current students being digital natives. They aren't long-form digital natives.

All this said, I agree that academic humanists often miss the boat right now. And because campus humanists often remain embedded in print culture as we move into the digital future, we don't exercise enough power, on campuses, over the direction IT takes. We ought to be leaders in this regard. But I think a large part of what we have to offer is specifically thinking about ways to use these newer technologies of the word to preserve the goal of promoting just the kind of understanding that Socrates lamented would be lost with writing.

On the difficulty of seeing things differently: Note on Rereading Ong

I've have, yet again, been rereading Ong's lecture “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” in preparation for teaching it tomorrow. I like Ong, and despite understanding and accepting many criticisms of the Great Leap theory from New Literacy theorists (never got into Derrida enough to assimilate him effectively), there's still something about the basic ideas that I find compelling. But that's not what this post is about.

I just had a moment when I finally “got” the idea that writing is a technology just like the printing press or computers. It's not that I didn't get this on some level before, but I had always felt it as somehow different, that writing was somehow more fundamental and that as a technology it was different in kind from these others. In other words, it seemed an equivocation to call writing and the printing press technologies; the definition of “technology” seemed somehow to change when addressing one or the other. And to point out that they were each technologies because each one relied on tools seemed somehow to mistake accident for substance (as so many definitional arguments do.)

But I just had a moment where this idea I've been mulling over for years really did sink in. Maybe I'm just dense. But it's helpful, as a teacher, to recognize how hard it can be to think differently, how difficult it can be to assimilate a new perspective, and why it's valuable to do that work.

Why I Teach: I Love Knowledge

I'm going to pile on the "why I teach" meme, comfortable that no one will tag me seeing as how I've just started here.

This started with Dr. Crazy's excellent reaction to the MLA "Why Teach Literature" panel. It's been buoyed by reaction to Stanley Fish's two columns on the delicious uselessness of literary study. And there's also the desire, spurred by Free Exchange, for professors to explain our real motivations for teaching in the face of the Horowitzian accusations of indoctrination. (And note the spring offensive of the Academic Bill of Rights supporters, just in case you thought they had finally gone away.)

I won't repeat what others have have already said more eloquently than can I. But I'll add two things.

I.

First, the Chaucer's clerk reason: I teach because I love knowledge. I've never gotten over the pure wonderfulness of learning new things and sharing what I know with others. The problem with Fish's view is that he highlights only one kind of knowledge: the recognition of aesthetic craft. That's fine, but there's more to know, and drawing strict disciplinary boundaries around knowledge doesn't work. It doesn't work for reading literature, and is especially deforming when engaging with ideas generally, something that humanists just do, whatever our primary expertise. Yes, the pure desire to know exists beyond questions of utility, but that does not preclude the idea that knowing "in a general way" leads to a host of pragmatic ends (many of which the blogs I've linked to explain in some detail.) And I would say that this thirst for knowledge is also why research and teaching, for me and many others, really do go hand-in-hand.

I think the reason most academics are willing to do what we do for a fraction of what we'd earn for similarly demanding work is that we really do find discovery and sharing knowledge rewarding. I don't think that is so odd -- witness the number of people who still say that when they retire they would like to get a part-time teaching gig.

II.

The second important thing about teaching is that I recognize I have a limited role, albeit an important one. I won't change the world: my students will.

Most humanists I've spoken with share this point of view, which is why the idea of "indoctrination" is so far from the mark. Now, to be clear, we all have areas of expertise. Some of them are clearly useful. When questions of policy arise involving those areas of expertise, decision-makers should genuinely listen to what we have to say. (Not blindly follow, but genuinely listen. The ability to know the difference, and know how to listen, comes in part from a good liberal arts education.)

That said, I don't take it as my job to dictate what students should do with the knowledge, and more important ability to learn, that my teaching provides.

Exordium

I have finally decided to cultivate my fallow patch of the blogger fields.

What's this blog about? Most academic humanists are familiar with those occasional flashes of insight. The ones where we say, “That would make a great article!” I have collected all the flashes of insight I've had over the past year. Rereading them, I see none would make great articles. Plus, I only have two. After that, I'll have to think of something more to say about rhetoric, technology, things early modern and, of course, do some higher ed navel gazing.