Milton on Monday...

I am making it well into Book 6, and still pondering the character of Satan, and the discussion previously about whether he is the hero of Milton's work. Carolyn suggested I look up Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost which turns out not to be a preface, but a series of lectures in their own book, which I must now see if I can track down through he library system. However, thanks to my friend Kevin, I now at least have a few quotes from Lewis' book, and share them below ( thanks, Kevin and Colleen!)

For it is a very old critical discovery that the imitation in art of unpleasing objects may be a pleasing imitation. In the same way, the proposition that Milton's Satan is a magnificent character may bear two senses. It may mean that Milton's presentation of him is a magnificent poetical achievement which engages the attention and excites the admiration of the reader. On the other hand, it may mean that the real being (if any) whom Milton is depicting [...] is or ought to be an object of admiration and sympathy, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the poet or his readers or both. The first, so far as I know has never till modern times been denied; the second, never affirmed before the times of Blake and Shelley--for when Dryden said that Satan was Milton's "hero" he meant something quite different. It is, in my opinion, wholly erroneous.

It remains, of course, true that Satan is the best drawn of Milton's characters. The reason is not hard to find. Of the major characters whom Milton attempted he is incomparably the easiest to draw. Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. [...] To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp [...] But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. [...] We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves. [...] Heaven understands Hell and Hell does not understand Heaven, and all of us, in our measure, share the Satanic, or at least the Napoleonic, blindness. [...] Hence all that is said about Milton's "sympathy" with Satan, his expression in Satan of his own pride, malice, folly, misery, and lust, is true in a sense, but not in a sense peculiar to Milton. The Satan in Milton enables him to draw the character well just as the Satan in us enables us to receive it.

To admire Satan, then, is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible. [...] Satan wants to go on being Satan. That is the real meaning of his choice "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." Some, to the very end, will think this a fine thing to say; others will think that it fails to be roaring farce only because it spells agony.

~C. S. Lewis, introduction to Paradise Lost

My thoughts, being only in the angelic battle and not yet finished with the poem, are that Satan is well drawn. We definitely feel sorry for him in his arrogance and his determination to fight and ruin even when he can't win. As an angel created by God he is admirable in many ways, but he is a grasper, always envious, always hating. We feel sympathy for him, perhaps because we are similar. We can definitely relate to him, as could Milton, and hence, he is a fully- and well-drawn character. He is "tragic" in the sense that he cannot escape his doom, and that elicits our sympathy. However, that does not make him the hero. Contrast him with the pre-fall humans and the distant Godhead, and Satan stands out in brilliant relief. But how can a man paint perfection? Much easier to paint sin, which we can comprehend. So, perhaps part of this problems lies in the task Milton set for himself to imagine the details we can't know nor really imagine.

I wonder if this view of Satan as the hero who "sticks it to the man" (or God, in this case) isn't really a reading from our context, rather than Milton's. As Lewis said, this idea doesn't show up until "after Shelley and Blake". Is it our modern notion of the autonomous individual as noble in the casting off of all restraint at all cost what makes people look at Satan as the hero here? I think that is reading too much modern context into the text, and ignoring the authorial intent as well as context. But I am likely in over my head here, and will be content to keep listening to see how Milton's story plays out, and try to locate more of Lewis for guidance...