The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation
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First of all congratulations on your book, What in Me Is Dark – it is extraordinary and when I was thinking about questions for this interview I began to feel quite daunted which made me wonder if you had that feeling when you began the project, because it is so enormous in scope.
Yeah, I definitely did. I remember describing what I was planning to do to someone I was dating when I first started writing the book and she said it sounded ‘quite ambitious’. Ambitious is a good word for it, and it felt really important to do something that was ambitious, because Paradise Lost is nothing if not ambitious. In various ways I wanted what I did to be a kind of attempt to imitate some parts of the poem. That’s why there are twelve chapters, but I also wanted to try and tell a story that was itself epic, or as epic as possible. When I felt too daunted by it, I reminded myself that my job was simply to explain twelve different allusions to Paradise Lost, and that made it feel much more grounded in something that I could do. And so hopefully it didn’t end up being too wildly overambitious.
In your chapter on George Eliot and her relationship to Paradise Lost you write about Casaubon who was famously writing a kind of Jungian key to all mythologies, a book that was impossible and could never be completed. He’s a figure of much sympathy, but also of ridicule. Did you feel like that?
Well, I think I always felt confident that I was going to finish it. There were definitely moments where I was worried that no one would want to publish it, or that it would be published by someone who didn’t have a reputation that was sufficient to get the readers that I wanted for it, but I was never worried that I wouldn’t finish it, and I think that faith is really important for writers. Obviously, you go through periods of severe uncertainty. There was a moment when one of my friends asked me if I was ‘still working on Milton’ and there were times when people suggested that I might do something else. But I knew from the start that, since there hadn’t been a book about Paradise Lost for the general reader, there needed to be one, and that it was just a matter of finding the right person to convince, and eventually I managed to do that.
You couldn’t get away with not quoting Johnson when he says of Paradise Lost that ‘no one ever wished it longer’. Your book is very disciplined, what were the various processes of editing it like? Was it painful?
I wanted no one to say of my book that they wished it had been shorter. It’s almost the thing that I’m proudest of, that it’s two hundred and twelve pages long. That sense of proportion is important. Johnson didn’t say Paradise Lost was too long, so in that sense it could even be a double handed compliment, that it’s actually the perfect length. I guess it was a process of just killing off all of the darlings, one after the other. When you get to the point where you’re confident enough about what you want to say, you don’t need to ornament your writing with things that aren’t relevant to it. It was a process that required so many readers and so much advice. There was also this meme circulating about a year ago, while I was really in the thick of writing – it was a meme about someone’s desire to write a hundred page long blended memoir slash literary criticism, and it was ridiculing this impulse. I definitely had that inclination myself at some point, but the existence of this meme helped me to resist the impulse to make my book insubstantial and too autobiographical. I wanted to push back against that. Two hundred and twelve pages feels long enough that the reader is not short changed.
I felt quite depressed after I’d finished a day of reading Jordan Peterson.
You make the various readers of Paradise Lost so loveable – even Jordan Peterson became someone I could almost understand, if not agree with. Did this project of being so sympathetic and empathetic to the readers you encountered make you feel like George Eliot? Did you have favourite readers?
I do think that George Eliot is the high benchmark for writing characters, and as you say about Casaubon, he’s the perfect example of a character who in any other book would get no sympathy. In Middlemarch he gets a huge amount of sympathy. And I think that’s the task of writing not only fiction, but non-fiction. I loved writing about C. L. R. James because he is such an enabling thinker. It’s all about movement. There’s something about the dialectical tradition, which is all about not remaining stuck in contraries or conflicts, but always trying to find a way to overcome those conflicts. I felt energised when I finished writing about him, which I didn’t feel when I finished writing about Malcolm X, even though he’s my favourite reader of Paradise Lost, and the reader who I think is the most important in the book.
I certainly didn’t feel that when I was writing about Jordan Peterson, who is so angry. There were days and days where I felt quite depressed after I’d finished a day of reading Jordan Peterson or writing about him, because his work wants to make you feel angry. The reviews have been divided about whether Jordan Peterson should have been in there or not, but I really wanted to include him to challenge people. There are left wing people who would never even read Hannah Arendt, let alone Jordan Peterson. I think it’s really important to read people that you disagree with, and important for us to challenge ourselves. It was difficult for me to know whether I should be sympathetic to him, and I’m glad that you think that it was both sympathetic and that it was sympathetic enough. I did want to do justice to what makes his work so appealing to so many millions of people, but I also didn’t want to leave a reader unclear about what I want them to think about him, which is that he’s despicable.
You layer a chronological close reading of Paradise Lost with a discussion of its appearance at revolutionary moments. Talk me through the way you decided on structure.
It was always clear to me that I wanted to write twelve chapters, and that each chapter would have a different reader and tell a different part of the poem’s story. One of the challenges is that you need to know a lot about the story in order to understand it, and I didn’t want this to be a book only for people who had already read Paradise Lost. Part of the original impulse was to bring it to as many other readers as possible. So I figured out that I had to be telling the story, but also telling the reader something about the quality of the poetry. I was told very early on by people in publishing that there is no market for literary criticism – none. So I realised, as I worked on it, that the parts about the poem had to be short enough not to lose the reader, and that the stories of the readers that I focus on would be the main motivation for the reader. However, the parts that are about the poem itself were some of the most enjoyable things to write about. I do think that there’s something very special about Paradise Lost that I actually haven’t found to that extent with any other literary text – it’s so fun to paraphrase and the culture of paraphrase is not very present anymore. It used to be a big thing in the medieval period where people would paraphrase the Bible, or paraphrase the Aeneid in prose. It was fun to get to do that.
So there’s no market for literary criticism, and yet you make excellent use of close reading and practical criticism. You were able to identify when people were misquoting Paradise Lost deliberately or not. Tell me a little bit about readers who misquote Paradise Lost, like Jordan Peterson, for example.
I try not to be judgmental about people’s misreadings. Or rather, I’m approaching it with an interest in how people are using it, and that entirely brackets off the question of whether people are reading it correctly or not. But with Jordan Peterson I did allow myself to judge the misreading, not on the basis that there’s anything wrong with misreading a poem – people like Harold Bloom insist on the importance of misreading for any original writer. I think that with Jordan Peterson the problem is that his misreading seems to reflect one of the most damaging parts of his work which is that it encourages young white men to feel resentful of the society that they live in, in the same way that Jordan Peterson accidentally takes Satan at his own word. So I did allow myself to be judgmental there, but elsewhere I was simply interested in the process by which a text becomes fragmentary or deformed or mutated, and that’s one of the principles of its ongoing fertility.
Teaching in prison was definitely one of the ways that I discovered the value of teaching literature after having lost it.
You write that ‘for a long time I was afraid of Paradise Lost’. Tell me about your first encounters with it and what changed.
My first encounter with the poem was as an undergraduate in my second year at university. I’d sort of lost my sense of direction, and I wasn’t a very good student. I had to write an essay about Paradise Lost, and therefore I had to read the poem. I left it far too late, and I read the whole poem in a single day, but I didn’t really read it at all, because you can’t consume a poem like this in that stretch of time. So I was left with this vague impression that the ending was the best thing that I’d ever read, but I didn’t understand hardly anything about it, and I wrote a relatively mediocre paper about it, but something about it did leave a kind of residue in me and, through a series of good and bad decisions, I ended up doing a PhD in Renaissance literature. I was still interested in Milton, but I had a kind of avoidant relationship to him. Once I got to Princeton, where I did my PhD, I was surrounded by people who seemed to have such a strong command of Milton and what he was saying, the critical literature and the classical sources. Once again there was a period of time, which I mention briefly in the book, where I lost my sense of direction and, maybe more importantly, my appetite for reading. Milton, because he’s such an intimidating, authoritative, erudite figure was almost like the symbol of that thing that I was avoiding. I didn’t think that there was anything that I could add to the conversation.
Teaching in prison was definitely one of the ways that I discovered the value of teaching literature after having lost it. It was only after the end of my PhD, when I was unemployed and when no one was expecting anything from me, that I decided that I did have something to say about Paradise Lost after all. I think the germ of that was when I realised that what Malcolm X made of Paradise Lost was really interesting, and that none of these scholars who produce reams of writing about Paradise Lost seemed to care about what Malcolm X had said. That seemed very strange to me, but it was also the foundation of the book.
How did you first come across Malcolm X’s relationship to Paradise Lost?
Well I finished my PhD in the first month the lockdown, and I had one short-term job lined up which evaporated quite quickly. So I was unemployed, without any real prospects ahead of me, and I decided to teach an online poetry seminar. I guess it was a time when people were starting to do book groups. I thought about how much my students at Princeton had enjoyed Paradise Lost, and how surprised I’d been by it, so I decided to teach a seminar on Paradise Lost, and enough people were interested that I ended up teaching five different groups, five days of the week for three months. So Milton became my job for three months, and it was obviously a really weird time and difficult in some respects, but that was a wonderful way of making money – talking to people about Paradise Lost every day of the week. The poem suffused my whole world at that point. It was then that I realised that one of the ways that I could convince people who weren’t academics to care about Paradise Lost, was by saying, ‘Oh, by the way, Malcolm X read this, and this is what he made of it’. It was really a kind of pedagogic strategy that led me to think, well, actually, this is one of the reasons why you should care about Paradise Lost, because Malcolm X did. So I kind of worked my way back from that.
I found out about Malcolm X’s reading of Paradise Lost in quite a strange way. When I was at Princeton I was in a Spinoza reading group, where every week we would talk about a tiny chunk of Spinoza’s Ethics. Lots of philosophers and historians of philosophy would turn up and spend two or three hours poring over a single paragraph, which was sometimes a bit too much for me because I couldn’t always go there with them. Once we were talking about Spinoza, and there was a noise outside of the philosophy building, and it was a Black Lives Matter protest. We ended the session and wandered out, and some of the participants joined the protest. I remember one of the philosophers telling me that Malcolm X had loved Spinoza. I read his autobiography because I was really curious about this fact. When he was in prison, he was teaching himself everything about the world and consuming Western history and philosophy, and before he reads Paradise Lost, he reads Spinoza. Malcolm X is an incredibly original reader, and he wants to turn a lot of his reading upside down because he’s figuring out that the world he’s been educated into is not as it seemed, and that historians have whitened everything. So he wants to reverse that process of whitening, and often that involves coming up with quite surprising interpretations. So he’s really interested in Spinoza, because he thinks that he’s a black Jew. When he comes to Paradise Lost, he comes up with his own very original interpretation of it.
You make an extraordinary and very well argued link between Paradise Lost, the 13th Amendment and the current economics of mass incarceration in America. Would you summarise this and the process of how you came to pull those threads together?
It’s an argument that involves a number of leaps, but I think the leaps are justified. Milton was very important for the founding fathers, and it’s widely known and understood that they were influenced by him. They saw him as a predecessor for the American Revolution. He was someone who defended Republican democracy in his own lifetime. The founding fathers were seeking to revive those Republican principles, not only from ancient Greek and Roman writers, but also from modern Republican writers like Milton. There’s a suggestion that Milton even influences the Declaration of Independence. The phrase, ‘we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal’, closely echoes some of Milton’s political thoughts.
Just as poems have afterlives, laws obviously have very important afterlives.
What hasn’t been so often explored is Milton’s influence on the Founding Fathers’ thinking about punishment and unfreedom. While I explore Jefferson’s relationship to Milton in the first chapter, I also note towards the end of the book that Jefferson was the architect of a set of laws called the Northwest Ordinance, which were laws that were to be used in the new states that were being created as America spread West in the 1780s. One of the laws that he drafted enshrined the existence of penal slavery in law. Jefferson, to some extent, was an abolitionist, even though he was also a slave owner. He didn’t want slavery to exist in these new states, and so he said slavery should only exist in prisons. Fast forward fifty years to the end of the American Civil War, and the 13th Amendment, as you’ve said, gets drafted in to enshrine the abolition of slavery. It contains this important exception, that slavery is abolished except for those people who have been found guilty of a crime. Just as poems have afterlives, laws obviously have very important afterlives; the afterlife of a law is its life. A century after the thirteenth Amendment was passed it came to be the case that millions of black people ended up doing slave labour, or something that was very, very close to slave labour. I think the rate of payment for prison labour can be as little as sixteen cents per hour. So it’s not always slavery in the formal sense, but we could say it’s slavery in an effective and material sense. I think it’s the case that Milton and the Puritans were a huge presence in the founding of America, and that Christian imaginary is still very powerful today in terms of designating people guilty of crimes as being demonised. Sometimes you demonise people because you want them to work for you for free.
Who is demonised is a central question in the book. As I started each new chapter I wondered whether the reader would interpret their situation from Satan’s point of view or from God’s. Do you divide it as starkly as that?
One of the things I wanted to do in my book was to insist that the most common way of understanding Paradise Lost, which is William Blake’s suggestion that Milton sympathised with Satan without knowing it, is not the only reading. It’s not the only modern reading, it’s not the only radical reading. I don’t think Blake is right. What’s interesting is the interpretive variety. That was the main point of the book, that you didn’t have to sympathise with Satan in order to read Paradise Lost radically. Malcolm X doesn’t sympathise with Satan. One of the weird things is that Harold Bloom, who is not only an important Milton scholar, but also produced an edition of Malcolm X’s autobiography, just completely misses the fact that Malcolm X doesn’t sympathise with Satan. I think there is a persistent urge to identify Malcolm X with Satan and there is no other way of putting it – it is a racist impulse. That’s why it felt all the more important to actually listen to what Malcolm X was saying. We can explain it if we treat him like an intellectual, and if we treat his writing with the dignity that Milton’s own work is treated. We have to understand what he was actually saying, rather than make these quite extraordinary projections that not only Harold Bloom, but a number of other Milton scholars have perpetuated.
You’ve talked so much about the immense historical impact of this book, but so much of your insistence throughout is on its language. Lines from Paradise Lost do live with me. For example, if my hair isn’t behaving I think of ‘wanton tresses’. You have really lived in parallel with Paradise Lost, and I wondered which phrases echo around for you?
Like you I think that these luminous fragments from Paradise Lost and from other poems are why I love living with poetry. I’m not very good at learning poems, and I don’t like reciting them, and I hate having poetry recited to me most of the time. But I love it when my friends tell me something about the etymology of a particular word in their mother tongue, or someone mentions a phrase from a poem. So that is very much my experience of Paradise Lost. I love phrases like ‘Without thorn the rose’. That’s a very simple example of Milton’s inversions, the grammatical inversions that he’s famous for, which are very easily parodied. By the Victorian period too many people are copying Milton, and it becomes a kind of poetic parody to invert a normal sentence in a Miltonic way. But ‘without thorn the rose’ is such a beautiful example of something that sounds minimally, plainly poetic.
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Orlando Reade is a writer from London. He studied English at Cambridge and Princeton, where he received his PhD in 2020. He has written about culture and politics for publications including Frieze, the Guardian, and the White Review, where he served as a contributing editor. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University London.
Marina Scholtz is a writer and bookseller who lives in London. She can be found making TikToks on out of print books @oopsarchive.
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