Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen! Milton’s Portrayal of Satan and the Serpent in Paradise Lost

IT TOOK A LOT to create the universe.  It took even more, from the looks of Paradise Lost, to explain it.  Milton understood that merely acknowledging that God created all existence was not enough; if it were, people would not question God’s order and Will.  So, to “justify the ways of God to men,” Milton had to formulate logically sound reasons for the current condition of the world, hoping that logic would enable faith.

This paradox led Milton to invent, among other things, a plausible temptation scenario; that is, he had to explain why God allowed Eve to be tempted by the serpent.  The question remains, however, why Milton came up with the specific account he proposes.  Does any canonical text literally connect the Serpent in Eden with Satan?  Does this rendition justify Calvinist ideology?  Or does it represent Milton’s personal theological conclusions?

To answer these questions, let us look first to Paradise Lost itself.  Milton depicted the Temptation by the Serpent and the Fall of Man quite elaborately.  The scene begins near the start of Book IX, when Satan, “who late fled before the threats / Of Gabriel out of Eden,” “fearless returned” (392).  He slips underground via the Tigris, entering the Garden, and then he “sought / Where to lie hid” (393).  Milton then wrote that Satan “found / The serpent subtlest beast of all the field” (393).  Initially overcome with disgust for the snake, Satan eventually steels himself to turn into a “black mist low creeping” and enter the snake “in at his mouth” (396).  Why does Satan need to hide, though?

According to Milton, Adam and Eve knew about Satan before he arrived in the Garden.  God sent Raphael to warn Adam about Satan, “lest wilfully transgressing [Adam] pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned” (317).  So, even though Adam and Eve did not know exactly what Satan looked like, they knew they should avoid him after hearing about his failed rebellion against God (318-33).  Therefore, Satan searched the garden to disguise his “dark intent” (395) where it would not draw attention to itself .  Satan deems the serpent “fittest imp of fraud, in whom to enter” because of the snake’s “wit and native subtlety,” which if “in other beasts observed” would cause an onlooker to sense the  “diabolic pow’r / Active within” (393).  Still, this raises another question: Why did Satan want to ruin Adam and Eve if he hates God?

In Milton’s eyes, Satan abhors Man because God raised Man up from the dust to king of the Earth, just as God raised up Christ from among the angels as superior.  When Raphael recounts the story of the War in Heaven, he suggests that Satan’s reason for rebellion lies in God’s decree, “I have begot whom I declare / My only Son…your head I him appoint. . .to him shall bow / All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord” (326).  Satan questions the justice of him and his fellow angels “eclipsed under the name / Of King anointed” (330).  Satan feels that now God has raised up Man, “whom us the more to spite his Maker raised / From dust” (395).  Satan decides “spite then with spite is best repaid” (395).  Satan failed to overcome God and Christ in the War in Heaven, which landed him in Hell.  Satan acknowledges that he aims, “Since higher I fall short, on him who next / Provokes my envy, this new favorite / Of Heav’n, this man of clay” (395).  Satan has a vendetta against God, not Adam and Eve; he subverts them not out of personal malice (he is struck dumb by their beauty when he firsts sees them), but out of his escalating hatred of God (292).

Entering a snake, however, does not complete the task.  Satan, inside the serpent, waits near the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for Adam and Eve.  Just as Satan wishes he “might find / Eve separate” (402), Eve strolls over near “the enemy of Mankind” (404) by the Tree.  Once he catches her eye, Satan speaks to Eve “with serpent tongue. . .his fraudulent temptation thus begun” (405); just as “in at [the serpent’s] mouth / The Devil entered” (396), so does he project his corruption out of its mouth.

The subsequent facts that Satan successfully tempted Eve, and that, in turn, Adam was “fondly overcome with female charm” (418), complete the Temptation Narrative.  Of course, Milton did not invent this entire story; he read about the basic plot in the Bible.  So, to see what Milton built Paradise Lost on, the best place to look is Milton’s contemporary Bible, the Geneva Bible.

The Geneva Bible’s translation of the Serpent’s Temptation lasts a mere six verses: the “subtle” serpent says to the woman (not yet named Eve), “Yea, hath God in deed said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden[1]?” (Gen. 3:1).  The woman replies that she eats of all the trees in the garden (3:2), except that tree “which is in the middle of the garden, [for] God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (3:3).  The serpent replies to the woman, “Ye shall not die at all, But God doth know, that when ye shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, & ye shall be gods, knowing good and evil” (3:4-5).  Her response to the serpent’s beguiling comprises the rest of the episode:  “So the woman (seeing that the tree was good for meat, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, & a tree to be desired to get knowledge) took of the fruit and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat” (3:6).  Considering strictly these verses, Milton’s supposition that the serpent somehow correlates with Satan appears doctrinally unfounded.

The problem, however, becomes complicated by the glosses.  The Geneva Bible includes footnotes that explain certain crucial words or phrases, allowing readers to better understand the Bible the way Calvinists wanted them to understand it[2].  The annotation on the first mention of the serpent states, “As Satan can change him self into an Angel of light, so did he abuse the wisdom of the serpent to deceive man.”  When the serpent first speaks, the gloss remarks, “God suffered Satan to make the serpent his instrument and to speak in him.”  Considering this information, Milton actually held quite close to his Holy Scripture, albeit an editorialized version.

These glosses, logic would dictate, must have some doctrinal background; the Protestants scrupulously pored over their Bibles, and would certainly question anything that contradicted Biblical fact.  In Milton and the Book of Revelation, Austin C. Dobbins listed specific Biblical books which provided a context for the book of Genesis.  So, while Genesis 3:1-6 describes the serpent’s temptation of man and woman, Dobbins points out that Revelation 12:6-17 provided a context for the Genesis passage (62).  In this passage, “the great dragon, that old serpent, called the devil and Satan” (12:9) stood before a “woman clothed with the sun” (12:1), waiting for her to give birth.  This Biblical text literally confirms that Satan was a serpent.  However, the woman described in the passage, who “fled into wilderness” (12:6), does not seem to be Eve; this woman “brought forth a man child, which should rule all nations with a rod of iron” (12:5).  The gloss for this passage asserts this child “is Jesus Christ the first born among many brethren,” making the woman the Virgin Mary.  Based on this passage and its glosses, the Devil may have been a serpent, but there’s no direct statement that he was the serpent who tempted Eve.

Also, like the glosses, Revelation itself was written long after Genesis, and therefore could offer further information and interpretation of the earlier text without necessarily describing the original meaning of Genesis.  Say someone wrote a story about a child hitting their dog and being punished.  Years later, a young nation attacks a faithful ally and receives an international rebuke.  Next, someone writes a background story for the original tale, describing the child as “born with a crown” or “a sceptered god,” and claiming that the original story applies to the real world drama because a second story added relating information post facto.  The second story could not be credibly cited as proof that the first story in anyway foretold the political events.

Similarly, logic does not support the supposition that the glosses or Revelation accurately describe the events in Genesis (or, for that matter, that Genesis itself, written years after its events, tells the precise truth).  However, Christians accept these Biblical books on the faith that the authors were Divinely inspired; any denial of the books as a breed of truth undermines the entire faith, and therefore lacks argumentative clout here.  To alleviate any tensions based on “fact versus faith,” let us treat Genesis and Revelation as “stories,” allegories or fables with meaning, not strictly literal documentations of history.  This stance would, for example, make the Biblical account of the talking serpent much more believable to the reader; in fables, it is no strange feat for animals to speak, and ultimately the moral overrides any problematic nuances of character.

Accepting these Biblical texts as truthful on some level, we reach our next link in the chain: discerning where Milton separates from the Bible.  I will not examine every place Milton inserts his own words; such an exercise would prove both tedious and relatively useless compared to the effort involved.  Suffice it to say that nearly every shred of dialogue and narration in Paradise Lost comes either partially from the Bible and partially from Milton, or entirely from Milton’s head.  The points of concern here, then, are simply where the ideas in the dialogue and narration clearly diverge from Biblical precedent.

Take, for example, Satan’s efforts to enter the Garden.  Since the book of Genesis does not call the serpent by any other name but “serpent,” there’s no explanation as to how he got there; it is simply assumed that when God created “that which creepeth,” He placed every “beast of the earth” (Gen. 1:24), including serpents, in Eden.

Milton, on the other hand, needs to explain how Satan managed to enter the Garden without the Cherubim catching him.  Milton also has to explain that God knew Satan was going to enter the Garden, but that He allowed him to so Man could exercise his free will (317).  The absence of an explanation in Genesis does not contradict Milton’s statements, or necessarily support the idea that any explanation is needed; it logically follows that since God oversaw the whole world and controlled every detail of its creation (Gen 1:1-31), he tacitly condoned (or perhaps even ordered) the serpent’s temptation.

Consequently, Satan infecting the serpent has no mention in Genesis for the same reason.  But the fact remains that Milton attributes Satan’s motivations (and thus the serpent’s) to marring “What he Almighty styled” (394).  This concept, if pronounced in Genesis, would undermine both God’s omnipotence and perfect Goodness, as if he silently permitted the temptation to occur.  Milton exonerates God by giving Him both the awareness of the impending temptation, and also the willful restraint of power in light of what He knows.

By absolving God of indifference, ignorance, and impotence, Milton creates a new problem: Why does God warn Man when He knows Man is going to Fall anyway?  He knows His intervention will prove fruitless.  Would God do something He knows will have no influence?  Is it that important to His conscience to remind Man about his obligations moments before the Fall occurs, the Fall He sees coming?  In the end, what difference lies in God letting the temptation happen, and God wanting it to happen?  Since God knows all, He certainly saw the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden; the fact that Genesis omits His acknowledgment creates a very different perception of God than Milton’s portrayal.  Several times, Milton’s God foresees that Satan will “by some false guile pervert” Man (264).  God acts as if He cannot contain Satan, “whom no bounds / Prescribed, no bars of Hell, nor all the chains / Heaped on him there, nor yet the main abyss / Wide interrupt can hold” (264).  Furthermore, God feels no responsibility for either Satan’s indomitable will or Man’s inherent weakness to “glozing lies” (264); God made Man “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (264).  The fact that His ruler of the Earth fell so quickly, and so far, does not strike God as a design flaw; how could it, if God makes no mistakes?

These questions point back to the original aim of Paradise Lost: to justify God’s ways to men.  Milton wanted to show that Man fell freely, and that God could do nothing to change that.  God saw the Fall coming, but he did not make the Fall happen.  Had God done nothing to warn Adam and Eve, one could argue that God doesn’t have foresight, or that he didn’t care enough to help; Milton insisted that God would have tried to intervene, but He simply cannot violate His promise: Man has Free Will, for good or for ill.  Milton asserted that God’s “foreknowledge had no influence on their fault” (265).

While this stance falls mostly within the boundaries of Biblically prescribed truth, it undermines the crucial Calvinistic tenet of predestination.  Milton’s God says that Mankind cannot “justly accuse / Their Maker, or their making, or their fate, / As if predestination overruled / Their will” (265).  In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin explicitly states

Predestination we call the eternal decree of God, by which He hath determined in Himself what He would have to become of every individual of mankind. For they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others.  (Brians)

Predestination occurred in the seminal Protestant philosophies, most famously in Calvin’s works.  Milton clearly departs from Calvinistic doctrine in his own “De Doctrina Christiana.”  In this pamphlet, Milton supports “infralapsarianism” over Calvin’s “supralapsarianism” (Bryson).  Michael Bryson explains Calvin’s philosophy in this way:

In order to glorify himself by manifesting both his mercy and his justice, God decreed that some rational creatures would be saved and some would be condemned; these creatures, however, did not yet exist as anything other than possibilities in God’s mind. God decreed the creation of these rational creatures, and then decreed permission for their fall. Out of this now-fallen mankind, God ordained the justification of some to be saved, and the reprobation, or damnation, of others to be condemned.

Milton’s beliefs, as expressed in Paradise Lost, do not line up with Calvin’s.  Infralapsarianism supposes that God wished to manifest His goodness in Man, so He blessed him and gave him free will.  The Lord “foresaw in what direction free will would lead mankind, but God did not interfere, and thus permitted the fall” (Bryson).  Once mankind fell, God implemented ” the predestination of some to salvation and others to damnation” (Bryson).  Milton very clearly presents this view with God’s own words in Paradise Lost.  Milton’s God confirms Man’s free will, permitting the Fall because of it.

While the Fall may make some sense now, one still must wonder what Milton, or the Bible, gains by having the Serpent be Satan.  Another way to ask that question is, if the Serpent wasn’t Satan, what was it?  Even though the Bible does not expressly connect Satan and the Serpent, it makes a great deal of sense to make such a connection.  The only solid argument I can make against Satan’s presence in the Garden is the fact that the Hebrew Scriptures did not share the concept of Satan found in Christian texts.  The Israelites believed all Good and all Evil came directly from God; how else could He be omnipotent?  The idea that evil comes from somewhere other than God compromises his control of the universe, and verges on blasphemy.

In the Book of Job, Job’s wife tells him to “blaspheme God” (Job 2:9) for covering him with boils; Job, the model of Jewish faith, replies, “shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive evil?” (2:10).  The Geneva Bible says that God sent Satan to test Job, but the idea of Satan in the Hebrew Scriptures does not coincide with the Christian understanding of Satan.  In Hebrew, “ha-satan” means “The Accuser”; according to NRSV Bible, “the article with the word Satan indicates that an office is involved” (751)–––that is, some angel fulfills this function for God, but the word describes the office, not any of the various angels that could fill it.  For instance, we have a President, but a number of men have filled that office, all of which were called “President.”  Additionally, this Satan is “in the Lord’s imperial service” (751); God Himself sent this Satan to test Job, unlike Milton’s conception of Satan working contrary to God’s Will.  So, even if we assume the Genesis writer meant for Satan to be Serpent, Satan would have tempted Eve under God’s orders.

Calvin rejected this possibility in his Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Calvin claims that God’s “inability to do evil arises from His infinite goodness” (Brians).  Calvin assumed that Satan must be the cause of evil; how does this affirm God’s omnipotence?  It cannot be said that God is both all-powerful and also not the sole cause of evil.  As Regina Schwartz notes, “an omnipotent God has no real enemy, yet the notion of redemption involves the defeat of just such an enemy” (33).  This argument can be diluted by the idea that there is no evil, merely what people construe as evil based on our limited understanding of God’s larger scheme.

Still, if Man is wrong in assuming there is evil, or at least some destructive force, in the world, why do we suffer?  I don’t mean this solely in a karmic, desire vs. selflessness way, but in the simple matter of physical pain.  No amount of belief or logic can anaesthetize my nerves–––it hurts to be burned, to be cut, to be bruised.  Why do I hunger?  Why do I thirst?  Why was I ever given a body that needs things, things that pain me in their absence?  Suffering does hurt; only the most severe dissociation, by way of mental illness or pharmaceuticals, can negate that suffering.

Nothing in the Bible, or in Milton, excuses, for instance, the pain women suffer during childbirth.  All the Bible and Milton say is that “ye will suffer death” for eating the fruit; the added penalties of hard labor, pain in childbirth, enmity between man and snake (or perhaps animals in general)–––all these penalties affect not merely the transgressors, but their heirs to sin, in perpetuity throughout time.  This is, in my limited and mortal estimation, grossly unjust.  And yet, if I have learned no other thing in life, it is that simply because some idea is not appealing, does not make it false.

These types of inequalities that people see in theological texts are precisely what motivated Milton to “justify the ways of God to man.”  No doubt Milton himself questioned the Biblical account of the Temptation and Fall, especially the bareness of the story.  Whereas the Bible shows Eve reacting normally to a talking serpent, Milton provides Eve with a different reaction, as well as an explanation for the snake’s unusual ability to speak.  When Eve expresses her surprise at language of man “pronounced / By tongue of brute” (406), Satan cleverly explains that he “tasted those fair apples” of the Forbidden Tree, so that he gained a “capacious mind” that enabled him to speak (407).  What goes unwritten in the Bible, Milton states explicitly, generating brilliantly logical explanations for Biblically ambiguous moments.

Still, depicting Satan as a great serpent differs, however slightly, from having Satan briefly enter a snake’s body.  Why would Milton depart from the Bible on this particular point, staying close but making a seemingly negligible alteration?

To resolve this quandary, one must eliminate the false premise of Satan’s snake-imbruting as an isolated incident in Paradise Lost, or even the culmination of a series of degradations.  True, Satan does continually fall further and further into disgrace throughout the poem, but his final incarnation does not occur during his triumph over Adam and Eve; to have Satan achieve some victory during his disgrace and escape the confines of the serpent would allow him some pride.

Satan fell from Heaven to Hell–––a devastating fall by any estimation, but drawn into sharper comparisons by the fact that Satan was Lucifer, the bearer of light, the brightest of all the angels.  When he is cast into Hell, he loses some of his divine glow, but he remains an impressive figure; he could hardly rally Pandemonium if he instantly became the most wretched demon for his most blasphemous acts.  Milton slowly degrades Satan throughout the poem, and his stint inside the serpent is only one of the later steps on the way down to his inglorious nadir.

For instance, shortly after Satan lands in Hell, he addresses Beelzebub with shock: “If thou beest he; but Oh how fallen!” (208).  Satan recognizes his comrade, but immediately notices his less splendorous appearance.  This compels Satan to look at himself, and conclude he too is “changed in outward luster” (208).  Milton uses a dazzling epic simile to describe Satan’s fading brilliance; he

Stood like a tower; his form had not yet lost

All her original brightness, nor appeared

Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess

Of glory obscured: as when the sun new-risen

Looks through the horizontal misty air

Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon

In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds.  (224)

So, like the normally blinding sun can be gazed at through a mist, the luster of Satan now appears more bearable to witness than his former awe-inspiring glory.

In addition to figurative descriptions of Satan’s waning intensity, Milton also relates Satan with some unflattering creatures as the poem progresses.  Satan dwindles from a Leviathan (211) to a large mythological vulture (272), to a wolf (286), to a cormorant (287), and even a lion and a tiger (293); he appears “squat like a toad” when he corrupts Eve’s dream (304).  When Satan enters Eden to undo mankind, he arrives merely as a mist, hardly an impressive entrance for one so previously powerful.  His “foul descent” into the serpent actually appalls him; his awareness of his own repugnant “ambition and revenge,” and his subsequent dismissal of that disgust for the sake of his vengeance (395), reveal Satan’s continuing fall post bellum.  At first, all this shape-changing strikes one as impressive; did Milton mean for Satan to maintain such a useful and deceptive power?

During the mid-17^th century, the idea of “The Great Chain of Being” was addressed in the philosophies of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes (Suber).  Essentially, the Great Chain of Being proposes that all things, except the absolute bottom of the chain, possess some amount of perfection; God made them, so there must be something perfect, or true, in them (Suber).  The theory models all of existence as a hierarchy, with God at the top, and descending down the list are the decreasing levels of perfection (Suber), from angels to man to horse to slug.  Satan’s systematic degradation throughout Paradise Lost works logically within this paradigm; his devolution from angel to snake requires the erosion of layers of perfection, until he eventually embodies God’s exact polar opposite, utter imperfection.

So, enter the brutal irony of Milton: Satan, recently extracted from the “bestial slime” (395) of the snake, returns to Hell to gloat about his victory against God’s crowning creation.  He tells all of Pandemonium about his trickery and the consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and waits to glory in the rousing cheers of his fellow outcasts (435-6).  Instead, he hears a “dismal universal hiss” (436); he wonders about the insulting reaction, but only briefly––––Satan looks down to find himself transforming into a “Huge Python” (437), the king snake amongst a new wretched nation of slithering demons.  Satan finally becomes the Serpent, against his will, a mockery of his deception of Eve.  Satan is ultimately debased: he is the trapped forever as a giant serpent in the pits of Hell.  In the end, Milton does agree with Biblical precedent, he simply provided an elaborate back-story to explain Lucifer’s serpentine form.

In fact, Satan’s “inserpenting” possesses such literary force, as metaphor, as irony, as a grand unifying theme, that it sounds fictional.  The highest of angels falls to the depths of Hell, and furthermore, he contacts the highest on Earth only as the lowest of creatures.  Even if the Bible never remotely claimed that Satan spoke through the Serpent, Milton’s assertion that he did deserves credit based solely on its literary brilliance.  It makes perfect sense within Paradise Lost: Satan demonstrates both the personality and motivation requisite for wanting to tempt Man; he has the powers to do so; God knows about it and permits it; and human history itself, with all its avoidable sin and death, seems logically confirmed by the Fall.  Milton does have to create situations and dialogue to express ideas the Bible only implies, but he doesn’t truly stray that far from the text with his ideas.

Yet, one still may wonder why Milton would include the fall of Satan with the Fall of Man.  Was it simply necessary background to set up the Temptation and Fall?  Or is there secondary motivation?  The Bible tells the stories of each Fall at opposite ends of the book; did Milton put them together just to make the poem more interesting?

In one sense, the involvement of Satan’s story with the Fall of Man provides further support for Milton’s justification of God’s ways to man.  Though it may seem harsh that Adam and Eve, and all mankind thereafter, fell because of disobedience, the apparent inequity of our shared fate is mitigated by the comparison to Satan’s fall.  Our Temptation Narrative shows not the control God has over us–––“he made us do it!”––––but rather his generosity; Satan’s fall contrasts with our fall by showing what happens when those who are not free disobey God.  Our free will is a gift, and God’s intractability regarding that gift displays his kindness, not his stubbornness; his love, not his contempt.

So much can be said about the conditions of the Original Sin, questions that have always been asked, and they cannot be resolved due to the simple fact that faith resists strict rationalization; people believe the overall meaning of a faith, and if that overall meaning (or interpretation of the meaning) satisfies, the minutiae of word choice–––especially in translations–––and situational particulars do not provide adequate dissuasion from that faith.  Yes, it goes against the grain of every empirical mind, but our minds are not strictly data-driven; we are moved by what we feel overall about an idea, an event, a person: how many people give up a friend because of one mistake?  And giving up your entire, established understanding of essential reality is no small task; furthermore, it is not the aim of this paper to evoke such a revolution.

Milton did not wish to set Christianity in stone either.  He felt that scriptures could be corrupted, and the true guide for one’s faith came from within, from the scripture of the Holy Spirit in one’s soul (Walker 204).  The entire force of this, or any theological argument, rests on one’s belief in the premises, on one’s “inner scriptures” agreeing with expressed ideas.  To paraphrase Lincoln, whether this notion, or any notion, can long endure, rests not on the actuality of the serpent being Satan, but people accepting as truth that something at least symbolically like it occurred.  Milton did embellish the Biblical account of the Temptation, but the spirit of the work stays true to the spirit of the Bible.

Works Cited

Brians, Paul.  “John Calvin: Free Will and Predestination from Institutes of the Christian Religion (1537).”  Reading About the World.  18 Dec 1998.  http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader /world_civ_reader_2/calvin.html.  (May 5, 2002).

Bryson, Michael.  “De Doctrina Christiana.”  Milton Web.  http://www.brysons.net/miltonweb/index.html.  (May 5, 2002).

Dobbins, Austin C.  Milton and the Book of Revelation: The Heavenly Cycle.  Tusacaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1975.

Fresch, Cheryl H.  “‘Cain rose up against Abel’: murder, mystery, and paradise lost.”  Christianity and Literature 51.2 (2002): 191-209.

The Geneva Bible, a facsimile of the 1560 edition.  Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969.

Milton, John.  The Poems of John Milton.  James Holly Hanford, ed.  New York: Ronald, 1953.

Rogers, John.  “Milton and the Mysterious Terms of History.”  ELH 57.2 (1990): 281-305.

Schwartz, Regina M.  Remembering and Repeating:  Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost.  New York:  Cambridge U P, 1988.

Suber, Peter.  “The Great Chain of Being.”  The Great Chain of Being.  1997.  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/re/chain.htm.  (Nov. 4, 2002).

Walker, William.  “Milton’s dualistic theory of religious toleration in A Treatise of Power, Of Christian Doctrine, and Paradise Lost.”  Modern Philology 99.2 (2001): 201-31.

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[1]           For the sake of easier reading, I have modernized the spelling of the 1560 version of the Geneva Bible.  Most of the alterations involved the usual interchanging of “u” and “v”, replacing “ƒ” with “s”, eliminating the obsolete terminal “e”, and the like.  Certain linguistic conventions, such as the use of “hath” and “doth”, were kept to preserve some of the traditionally Biblical style.

[2]           The Geneva Bible, the preferred Bible of the Puritans and therefore Milton, was translated into English from the original Hebrew and Greek Biblical texts; it was the first English version of the Bible to do so.  The glosses were written by such Early Protestants as John Knox, Miles Coverdale, William Whittingham, and even John Calvin himself.  Based on this last fact, I think it fair to assume a Calvinist slant to the text.

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”

Knowing I was going to a Tom Stoppard play, I wasn’t expecting to leave without a number of great quotes or moments swarming about my mind.  I definitely enjoyed the many humorous themes in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” such as minor characters focusing their intelligence on minor issues like the probability of coin-flipping without fully grasping the larger, connected concept of fate that loomed all around them.  My greatest interest, though, came from a very serious issue in the play, and reality, dealing quite poignantly with the reality of plays regarding death.  When Guildenstern speaks about the lack of value in acting out death, I was never more aware of the frailty of fiction as an emotionally engaging technique.

The scene where the acting troupe shows off their ability to convincingly fake deaths beautifully articulated the difference between acting and real life.  Guildenstern argues with the leader of the acting troupe, saying fake deaths don’t really lead people to confront their own mortality, because they know actors are just acting, and if they pretend to die, they will soon get up and probably die again, without permanence.  Guildenstern then seems to take a sword from the leader and appears to run him through.  The actor hunches over and collapses to the floor, with Guildenstern eulogizing, “If this is our destiny, then that was his, and if there are no explanations for us, let there be none for him.”  The viewer feels like Guildenstern has proven his argument about the ineffective pointlessness of fake death by showing us the disturbing meaninglessness of real death; a moment later, the fallen actor rises, and we feel foolish for thinking the murder was real.  Obviously we were watching a play: Guildenstern didn’t have anything in his hand, and even the lack of a prop did not stop us from accepting the murder as theatrically real.

Their interest in death enables Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take on a humanness, allowing us to empathize with their fate, which really differs little from our own.  We, too, will die, and just as all the deaths around us, real and pretend, continue, our mortality will not concern us as it should, or be treated as anything more than an idea shortly after we face it.  Rosencrantz thoughtfully pondered, “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death?  There must have been one.  A moment.  In childhood.  When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever.  It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory.  And yet, I can’t remember it.”  As many times as death steps into our world, exchanging glances or messages with us, we will still march about importantly, blowing off this acquaintance as a minor character in our lives.

Ambiguous Johnny

            I suppose every rapist has a story.  However, the idea that I would care to hear it, let alone empathize, is an entirely different matter.  In Mike Leigh’s film Naked, Johnny (David Thewlis) somehow manages to draw sympathy from viewers even after his rampant victimizing; viewers end up unsure whether their pity or their disgust was the greater emotional response.  This attraction/repulsion struggle makes any definite opinions difficult to decide.  Mike Leigh and David Thewlis work together to create a paradoxically complex character, both through Thewlis’ dogged questioning, his troubles finding a place to stay, and a disarming sense of humor, and through Leigh’s continued focus on Johnny, refusing to write him off or reach any conclusions about him throughout the film.

            Johnny is, above all else, lonely.  He forever seeks out companionship, and finds it always among the equally isolated.  Everyone he meets is pathetic, and so by comparison Johnny seems a more dynamic person.  Johnny meets Brian, a night watchman who “guards space”; Johnny observes Brian at work and concedes he has “the most tedious” job in England.   Johnny dominates people intellectually, forever asking philosophical questions, of which he expects in return not answers but a blankness he can face with a deprecating grin.  When he meets Archie, a twitching, shouting Scotsman, Johnny mocks his tic and sarcastically addresses him as “bodhidharma”.  His scorn reflects our scorn; all his derisive comments gain our support, because we, unlike most of his acquaintances, are smart enough to understand his wit.  By affiliating always with lost, desperate, and weak individuals, Johnny takes on an ambiguous nature:  we know how he treats people wrongly, but our judgmental side can’t stand people who don’t respect themselves; we consider a woman monumentally stupid if she claims she loves a man who beats her.  Pushing Sophie around isn’t so bad, we reason, because she is a prostitute, and she is so drugged out all the time she probably doesn’t feel the abuse.  When people walk around so afraid to be bullied, we subconsciously feel like pushing them around, like they’re asking for it.

Of course, there are times when Johnny downright pisses the viewer off.  His truculent interrogation of the poster-hanging guy reaches an irritating pitch.  Johnny receives not one, but two beatings after this, and many viewers feel that he finally gets what’s been coming to him for so long.  But Leigh still follows him, and we have to watch Johnny suffer.  When Sebastian snaps at Johnny, we side with Johnny, because, even though we dislike both characters, Johnny has received some retribution.  We’ve come to like Louise and Sophie, especially since they’ve been terrorized by Sebastian, and their support of Johnny reflects our desire to be altruistic and defend the downtrodden victim, especially after accruing so much vicarious guilt for silently endorsing a number of past victimizations.

Since Johnny is so unpredictable, the viewer can never really be satisfied with one idea of him.  We accept him as a sort of picaresque character going from encounter to encounter, where this basic Johnny character puts a new spin on himself each time we meet him again.  This allows the viewer to forget Johnny’s past cruelty and accept his suffering as legitimate and worthy of our pity; it also shows how forgiving we are in the face of charisma.  Even Johnny’s harshest crimes lose some of their reprehensibility in comparison to Sebastian, making Johnny the lesser of two evils.  Johnny has rough, animal sex with Sophie, but she at least wants to be with him; Sebastian forces himself on her, raping her.  Surprisingly, Johnny’s rape in the beginning doesn’t bother the viewer as much as it should, largely because we have no real sympathy for the woman, and we manage to forget about the incident once the movie gets going.

Leigh’s ability to maintain Johnny’s ambiguity relies on comparison to both victims and victimizers; in an environment of relatively awful people, Johnny shines a little brighter than he would alone.  We end up identifying with him at some points, because he talk so much, he eventually has to say something we would agree with.  He makes observations about the very same problems we have –– “I’ve got an infinite number of places to go, the problem is somewhere to stay.”   His lifestyle embodies a willingness to be someone we, quite honestly, do not have the courage to be.  Johnny alienates himself from society, because of his very strong personality and his refusal to be complacent.  Johnny enjoys his own presence so much that we begin to share his enthusiasm.

With Johnny, Leigh gains the ability to comment on many different situations with a character whose viewpoint can be manipulated to be valued in one instance and opposed in the next.  By letting us understand Johnny a little it, Leigh leads us to ask ourselves “How far are we from the real Johnnies in the world”, and “Could I become one myself?”  Ultimately, Leigh faces Johnny’s heartlessness and his wretchedness with equal candor; he shows us how ugly we can be sometimes, considering how we treat each other, and how helpless we can be when we must rely on others to survive.

The Persistence of the Culture Industry Into the Twenty-First Century

In their vehement social critique “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Horkheimer and Adorno observe that businesses perpetually reupholster their products to appear new, so the consumer masses will continue to buy the same rehashed products.  By buying the same content in a different package, consumers endorse the culture industry’s essential product, and fund the relatively inexpensive subsequent reissues.  The criticism of this modern assembly line culture has borne increasing relevance since its inception, especially regarding the perpetuation of the industrial ideology by advertisement and entertainment.  Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno complained about connoisseurs arbitrarily commending one cookie-cutter product over another and talkies of sustained kartharsis sans tragedy, we now endure product placement in films, unwelcome pop-ups online, and conspicuous brand names on an athlete’s clothing.  The culture industry has conflated entertainment and advertisement, forcing consumerist thoughts even into our leisure, our amusement.

The advertising machine abhors a vacuum: it sees everything as billboard, ad space, commercial.  To look is to look upon calculation.  Our eyes are guided to the logo, the trademark, the signature form.  The ubiquity of advertisement assures the consumer that the product will be wherever needed, so the repetition of the ad creates the need and then instantly gratifies it.

We have had our patience bred out of us by instant gratification–––the time to even make our rote decisions has been truncated by the saturation of our senses with rampant accessibility.  Our wills are being slowly eroded down to reflex.  The industry discovers what works and endlessly repeats it; Freud has become the father of manipulation.  Our teeming suggested needs compel us to consume as much as possible in the shortest amount of time: Fast food, satellite TV, strip malls, computers that download songs to iPods, DVD players in our minivans.  And of course the greatest triumph of instant gratification: the Internet.

With the apotheosis of the Internet, the technological Gesamtkunstwerk par excellence, the culture industry not only bombards the consumer with the hyper-produced word, image, and music of advertisements found on TV, but feeds off the input of the consumer.  It provides the illusion of submission to the consumer’s wishes.  What can I teach you?  What gift can I find for you?  What services do you need sent to your home?  The breadwinner consumer goes to the consumptive industry to gain sustenance (150).

Of course it advertises overtly and subliminally on every page: it is replete with blind links, unstoppable pop-ups, spam–––so much so that companies have designed software to stop these things (much like the mobster offering “protection” to the small business owner).

So leisure becomes entertainment becomes advertisement becomes consumption.  The question arises, though, of how the culture industry perpetuates the image of satisfaction through consumption when dissatisfaction grows persistently more evident the more one is driven to consume?  Children develop increasing impatience with toys as they grow older.  This is natural: it takes less time to grow tired of the repeated stimulus–––one must up the dose or frequency for the same high.  The culture industry has capitalized on this accumulating tolerance, so the natural response to stimuli integrates seamlessly into the ever-feeding, ever-moving culture machine.

Horkheimer and Adorno assert that the interchangeable, mass-produced commodities the industry offers the consumer have value only in their utility and/or the amount of money pumped into them.  In order to perpetuate consumption, the industry must make its product intensely superficially appealing, yet empty enough to be discarded for the next flashy package.  The industry markets superficial variety with homogeneous filler.  It expects consumers to model themselves on this schematic: change your appearance, your apparatus, your accessories, but the content remains the same.

The most logical escape from this cycle would be the aesthetic experience, as it transports the participant beyond the superficial and inspires individual thought and awareness, rather than encouraging mental passivity.  However, the culture industry has degraded art.  Horkheimer and Adorno contribute the devaluation of the work of art to the idea of a “sale” in a capitalist market.  The less one has to pay to acquire what was once valuable, the more people have it, and the less they concede that it retains value.  Just the opposite effort by the modern market keeps consumers interested in consumption–––by equating expensive products with the most pleasure.

Pleasure goes best with entertainment, and so the culture industry remains in the entertainment business.   Amusement is sought as escape from mechanized work, to recuperate to do more work; however, amusement requires no thought––to sustain pleasure, there must be no effort (137).  But we are not merely shown the token well-to-do man or woman relaxing in their luxury vehicle or lounging beside their state-of-the-art electronic equipment; these universal symbols lack much relatability.  The advertiser employs the movie star or musician from humble beginnings to hawk its wares to the same lower class from which the star emerged.  So deeply has this practice penetrated the lower classes, rising music stars mimic their inspiration.  They not only willfully promote the same brand names they were taught to desire (and could not afford at the time they recorded the song extolling the appeal of Rolex or Versace)–––not only that, they even promote it in their music, as an aspiration for the same youth they once were, back when they could barely eat, let alone purchase designer leather jackets.

To exacerbate this abuse, the illusion of the sale has replaced the sale.  Now when these high-priced “desirables” are marked as “reduced priced,” the consumer believes he is getting a deal, and buys what he cannot afford (courtesy of the credit card companies).  The credit card companies emerged when the culture industry desired even more money than the solvent income of the masses.  With credit, the industry not only takes the money you have, but the money you will have, someday, or rather will use to pay off credit card bills.  With the help of credit, the ostensibly unattainable comes nearly within reach, such that the conspicuously produced becomes conspicuously consumed.

In Our Kind, cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris posits that the cycle of conspicuous production–––where “quality” is determined by how much cash is dumped into a project–––and the rise of conspicuous consumption brought about the birth of the Yuppie (Harris, 370).  The mantra, the single-minded goal, of the young urban profession is to consume the most valuables, then discard them when they lose their appeal and acquire more valuables; as Horkheimer and Adorno warn, nothing is actually permanently “of worth” (150), and the next obscure expensive commodity becomes valuable.  There is nothing inherently superior, aesthetically, in a Versace dress over a Dolce & Gabbana, or for that matter a J C Penney’s dress.  The Yuppie’s desire to consume en masse comes from above: you may only be admitted to the upper class if you buy preciosities, which the upper class conveniently own.  Consumers make the rich richer by trying to be like them, and make themselves poorer.  They are taught to resent their poverty–––how can anyone be poor in the land of plenty?  And especially how can I be poor when I work so hard?  I need to show that I work hard by frittering away my money on excesses, thus showing how much disposable income I have.  People try to look as “comfortable” as their seemingly better-off neighbors, who are themselves trying to out-consume to someone else.

With this level of internal regulation, the culture industry has grown certain of it unrivaled power–––so certain of its monopoly, so satisfied with its unassailability, that it permits attacks against itself, as it knows the consumer is helpless.  Entertainment invites the mockery of its transparency, only to revel in our continued financial support after the revelation.  By showing the consumer its abuses, it pretends to take him into its confidence.  “Here’s what I’m really up to…but you’re so smart you saw that already, didn’t you?  Ok, well, here’s something much more authentic for your discriminating eye…”  Even the potentially perceptive consumer therefore becomes duped through his or her own intellectual vanity.  The American culture has given in so fully to the industry, has become so dependent on consuming, that it cannot sustain its needs on its own, and requires the industry to maintain function.  Who could bear to subsist after being so acculturated?

Any reversion, on a significant scale, back to self-sufficiency and self-awareness, requires an almost clinical reformatting of lower brain functions at the degree of brainwashing.  We live in an age where movies incorporate advertisements in the film proper.  Even the performance, the entertainment, the space of imagination has been invaded by product placement, so that any emotions roused by drama become intimately linked with the products consumed to evoke those emotions observed on screen.  We need to learn to feel again, feel our emotions, and forget the histrionics of fake culture.  While it seems impossible to counter the considerable arsenal of advertisement and entertainment, consider simply the presence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique, and the liberation of at least a few minds evidenced by that work’s production.  It can be done, that much we see, but what matters most is that it must be done, if any relic of humanity should exist in the progressively more technology-framed future.

Work Cited

Harris, Marvin.  Our Kind.  New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1990.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno.  “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”  Dialectic of Enlightenment.  John Cumming, trans.  New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1972.

“Which America Is Ours” and Teaching Politically

            In Michael Hames-Garcia’s essay, “Which America Is Ours?”, he argues that ethnic American literature should be taught politically, not just aesthetically.  By “teaching politically” Hames-Garcia means teaching texts within their historical context, and in relation to the political and social environment today.  A key aspect of this context is conflict, which is central to ethnic American literature and any discussions about that literature.  However, this focus on conflict and politics does not mean Hames-Garcia wants teachers to slant the reading of text toward or away from the prevailing political agenda of the day (leaving out certain passages or avoid certain issues to skew a text or render it “politically correct”).  He wants the conflict to highlight the struggle of the author’s ethnic group as a minority in an oppressive society, and believes the only way to honestly discuss that core dynamic is to address it, inviting conflict into the student’s discussions so that various sides are heard and the issues are shown in their true roundness and complexity.

            I strongly agree with Hames-Garcia’s argument, and intend to teach ethnic American literature to my future students politically.  In fact, I couldn’t imagine teaching A Raisin in the Sun without addressing its historical context and bringing up the conflicts Hansberry mentions in the play.  Without knowing the actual housing struggles African Americans faced after WWII, the Younger’s story can seem like a sad but isolated anecdote.  Without understanding the attitudes of White Americans and property values based on a neighborhood’s racial make-up, characters like Carl Linder seems like a fictional trope rather than a realistic archetype.  In short, without the conflict the play lacks teeth, and as an aesthetic achievement may have some shine, but would feel unpalatably watered down.  In my future classroom, I would have to talk about “blockbusting” and the realities of race-based mortgage lending.  I would have my students grapple with Carl Linder’s position and the Youngers’ position, playing Devil’s Advocate to get them working around all sides of the issue.

A novel like No-No Boy ties so intimately into its history and the experiences of Japanese Americans during the early 20^th century that it only makes sense in a political light.  What would be the point of focusing on its aesthetics alone?  It is not meant to be a “universal story,” adaptable to all times; No-No Boy, like much ethnic American literature, insists on its exclusion from the universal, on its author’s marginalized perspective in the oppressive majority-dominated society during a given era.  Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, while written by a Jewish American author, tells a much more “timeless” story, where the main character faces many of the successes and difficulties anyone could face in America during any time.  Ichiro’s central conflict, based on a unique decision, only makes sense in its context: only a young Japanese American man during WWII would have to make the choice he made, and endure the many consequences of that choice in the society of post-WWII America.  If I were to teach this novel, I would have my students discuss – debate, even – the interment of Japanese Americans and the decision Ichiro was forced to make.  If they were in his position, how would they react?  How Okada crafted his narrative is interesting, but the meat of the novel is its political commentary, its undeniable conflicts.

Similarly, Zoot Suit is deeply political – how else could you teach it?  As an absurd comedy?  A universal tale of youth culture being “misunderstood” by older generations?  Certainly that link can be made, but the play itself has so little meaning out of context.  This isn’t some fantastical story about a made-up subculture and some exaggerated legal fall-out – Chicano zoot suiters were exactly real, and the media-fueled legal circus honestly took place.  In America.

Valdez based Hank’s fictional court case on the real Sleepy Lagoon trial almost word for word, character for character, injustice for injustice.  The appeal process Hank and the 38^th Street Gang endure involved nearly as much struggle as Henry Leyvas’ actual appeal.  The only thing that seems fictional after their legal ordeal is that the appeal is successful, even in America The Just.

This need to treat ethnic literature so politically is perhaps unique to America, or unique in its degree, because of the professed nature of American society, the foundational values and beliefs of this country (as established by the White majority).  On paper, the US is ardently pro-freedom, pro-independence, pro-equality.  However, the realities of the immigrant experience, the hardships suffered by minorities – and not just in some remote past, but even in the second half of the 20^th century, after two World Wars made us prosperous and unified our nation against the oppressive regimes of our enemies – those hardships stick out more prominently, contradict our social mores so thoroughly, and are that much more galling in their breadth and depth and excess, than they would be in any other nation.  We are a land of immigrants – immigrants run this country, immigrants decimated the natives of this land, and immigrants have oppressed immigrants since the day the Pilgrims landed.

The variety of ethnic groups in America gives this nation more potential than any other to benefit from the talents and wisdom of the world’s many cultures.  Thus far, we’ve fallen very short of realizing that potential; the marginalization and oppression of minorities, throughout time, across the land, without ever truly a break, has and continues to weaken the positive impact ethnic minorities can make.  Therefore, ethnic American literature needs to be addressed in its context, complete with the unavoidable conflict that informs it.  The sooner we can all discuss the ugly truths that spurred minority authors to write, the sooner the true America we live in will resemble the still-fictional America our founders envisioned.

American Identity and Military Service

           A recurring theme in various ethnic groups’ experiences in America is the achievement of American identity through military service.  For immigrants and citizens, fighting for the country has been the litmus test for loyalty and belonging.  However, this decision comes with a cost: relinquishing any previous national identities.  For many ethnic minorities, the desire to belong in America and the need to identify with their homelands creates an unwinnable internal war.

            For example, Hank Reyes in Zoot Suit faces immediate resistance from El Pachuco, the macho ideal that embodies his ethnic heritage, when he reveals his ambitions to join the Army.  “Forget the war overseas, carnal.  Your war is on the homefront.” (Valdez 30).  Hank doesn’t say he wants to join the military to seem more American; his closest justification is when he talks to Della about maybe “not coming back” after he joins the Navy:

              Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this feeling like there’s a big party going on                     someplace, and I’m invited, but I don’t know how to get there.  And I want to                 get there so bad, I’ll even risk my life to make it.  Sounds crazy, huh?  (55)

For Hank, military service is a ticket to something better, a pass to the better life he knows exists, but has yet to actually experience.  At the end of the play, the multiple endings suggest that military service would fully redeem Hank in a way that even his acquittal could not: in one scenario, Hank fights in Korea, dies, and posthumously earns the Congressional Medal of Honor (94).  The catch is that even when military service brings him some acceptance, it’s only after he loses his life.

            The stakes grow higher when military service demands that immigrants or children of immigrants fight against the nations they came from, such as in No-No Boy.  Even though Ichiro never lived in Japan, his mother impressed upon him a faithfulness to her native land that he carried unwittingly into adulthood.  When the US government interned him and his family, along with all Japanese Americans during WWII, Ichiro had to choose the lesser of two evils: join the army and fight Japan, or refuse enlistment and brand himself “un-American.”  Ichiro’s refusal to join the military, and the socially understood implications of that decision, forms the core of No-No Boy’s conflict.  After spending two years in prison for his refusal, Ichiro returns home to a proud mother; her reaction clearly shows that military service equals American, and refusal equals Japanese.[1]  His peers, especially the Japanese American men who didn’t refuse, realize this fully as well.  Returning veteran Eto spit on Ichiro as soon as he discovered he was a “no-no boy” (Okada 4); his brother Taro felt so much pressure from his peers because of Ichiro’s refusal that he organized a group beating of him (78) and then ran off to join the army himself to salvage his threatened status as an American (81).  Society at large, even other marginalized minorities, took their shots at Ichiro, the new lowest of the low; African Americans mocked him with chants of “Jap-boy, To-ki-yo” (5) and Chinese Americans like Bull, who never had to make the impossible choice Ichiro faced, took shots at him at the Club Oriental as soon he sat down at the bar (74).  Even Ichiro sold himself short, assuming no one would hire him because he’d been in prison the previous two years rather than the “more socially acceptable” internment camp.

            Not that everyone who fought in WWII resented Ichiro’s decision.  Ichiro’s friend, Kenji, fought in the Air Force, and lost part of his leg in combat.  While Ichiro envied Kenji’s situation, even with the leg injury, Kenji said both of their decisions were better and worse than the other (73); each choice had its merits, each choice was a loss.

            Like Kenji, Tayo in Ceremony endures the gamut of consequences for his military service.  When he reminisced with his friends about the war, Tayo said that all the Indians in Vietnam liked that “they had the uniform and they didn’t look different no more.  They got respect” (Silko 41).  The respect was short-lived; he felt the same old ostracism he felt before the war when he interacted with Whites after the war.  Tayo shouted

First time you walked down the street in Gallup or Albuquerque, you knew.  Don’t lie.  You knew right away.  The war was over, the uniform was gone.  All of a sudden that man at the store waits on you last. … [T]he white lady at the bus depot, she’s real careful now not to touch your hand when she counts out your change” (42).

Worse yet, he felt further isolated because he had rejected his already tenuous Pueblo identity by putting on the uniform in the first place.  As a “half-breed,” Tayo was often marginalized by his peers and even his Auntie.  He was teased for his “Mexican eyes” and always wished he “had dark eyes like other people” (103).  The horrors he endures and carries with him after war reveal the cost of the “better” choice: pursuing an American identity via military service requires killing, figuratively and literally, other nationalities, as well as damaging his own identity.  Tayo seeks cleansing from Ku’oosh after fighting in “the white people’s war,” even though he says

           I never killed any enemy.  I never even touched them….Maybe you could help                me anyway.  Do something for me, the way you did for the others who came                  back.  Because what if I didn’t know I killed one? (36)

Tayo may not fully fit into Pueblo society, but he’s Pueblo in his heart, and his sickness there requires a Pueblo cure.

            Tayo witnessed Harley’s horrific torture at Emo’s hand – witnessed the continuing cycle of violence engendered by the war.  The brutality made Tayo feel like “his own sanity would be destroyed if he did not stop them and all the suffering and dying they caused” (252).  Tayo’s Pueblo identity could not bear the destructive nature of “real” Americans; only by reclaiming his native spirit could he salvage his identity and heal his war-torn soul.

            The price of military service in exchange for an American identity takes a deep and often unending toll.  Fighting for America forces many minorities to abandon their native identity, or choose one half of themselves at the expense of the other.  They might even have to fight against their homelands, or violate their inborn values of loyalty to family or unwillingness to kill.  Even the best case scenario – becoming an American war hero – seems possible only through death in combat, posthumous and not truly inherited by the living.  The choice to fight versus the refusal to fight proves to be no choice at all: either path leads to a lifetime of suffering, and the fleeting benefits of service live and die in the uniform.

Works Cited

Kingston, M. H. The Woman Warrior.  New York: Random House, Inc., 1989.

Okada, J. No-No Boy.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

Silko, L. M. Ceremony.  New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

Valdez, L. Zoot Suit and Other Plays.  Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992.

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[1] Ironically, Maxine Hong Kingston mentions in Woman Warrior that her brother was a family hero for fighting for the US in Vietnam, welcomed back “with chicken and pigs” and lauded in a way Maxine never was (47).

The Many Languages of Oscar Wao

           Throughout The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz changes narrators, time periods, languages, dialects and jargons, often fluidly and without warning.  Taken individually, code-switching, mixing popular culture and intellectual jargon, or blending elements of fantasy with reality do not challenge modern literature; Latino/a writers have long used Spanish and English in the same texts, critics like Chuck Klosterman and Roger Ebert have analyzed TV and film with academic rigor, and magical realists routinely conflate the supernatural with the everyday.  The striking quality of Diaz’s language is how he merges this range of discourses in one narrative, creating a unique voice and forcing the reader to adapt to ever-shifting linguistic ground.  In Oscar Wao, Diaz’s language supersedes literary purpose and performs a political function, providing not only the complex framework of the narrative, but making pointed commentary on the novel’s historical and ethnic content.

            Consider first the most expected (if not the most comprehensible) language-blending in Oscar Wao, Diaz’s code-switching.  Code-switching, here used to describe the toggling between English and Spanish in the same sentences, technically describes a “worldwide phenomenon”; there are thirty times more languages than there are countries, and so the boundaries of speech invariably intersect around the globe (D’Amore 86).  Often, Diaz’s code-switching reflects the typical language pattern of native Spanish speakers talking in English, where Spanish “interjects” into an English sentence (87) when emotions flare – like when Beli confronts the Gangster’s wife and barks, “Còmeme el culo, you ugly disgusting vieja,” (Diaz 141) – or when a Spanish phrase comes more naturally or says something more precisely – terms like “ciguapa,” “chacabanas,” “chabine,” and “cibaena[1]” (151).  In terms of expressing identity, code-switching allows speakers (or writers) to indicate their social ties to more than one community (89).  For Diaz, ascription to Dominican Spanish, street English, fantasy (“Genre”) jargon, and academic discourse simultaneously expresses a discrete voice, as well as the aggregate voices that constitute the singular language of America.

Superficially, Diaz’s (and Oscar’s) obsession with Genre seems to undermine any effort to connect with real American culture; mainstream readers may get many of the TV and comic book references, but the sci-fi and role-playing allusions frequently confuse the reader and only seem to emphasize Oscar’s “otakuness”[2] (Diaz 21).  In an effort to explain the pervasiveness of fantasy references in Oscar Wao, Diaz elaborates on the parallels between Oscar’s life in the Dominican Republic and then in New Jersey in one of his many unconventional footnotes[3].  In moving from Santo Domingo to Paterson, from the Third to the First World, Oscar (and one can assume Diaz) could relate to the experiences of fantasy literature, where heroes often face strange new worlds unlike anything they’d encountered before.  “You want to know what being an X-Man feels like?” Diaz asks the reader, “Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary US ghetto” (22).  So when Diaz calls Trujillo “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid,” he isn’t trying to make the dictator more relatable or realistic to American readers, but more unfamiliar, more inhuman[4].  The rub, then, is that Trujillo was real, and his behavior bore an uncanny resemblance to these fictional despots, from the commanding of soulless henchmen like Belaguer (90) to the complete erasure of individuals like Abelard Cabral (246) to the isolation of the entire nation behind a forcefield-like “Platano Curtain” (224).  Unlike most authors who make pop culture references, Diaz doesn’t incorporate sci-fi elements to make Dominican history more comprehensible to the average American, but to highlight how Americans “who missed [their] mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (2) understand the DR and its past about as well as they grasp the nuances of Star Trek.

From the beginning of Oscar Wao, Diaz establishes the historical and supernatural elements of Dominican culture with a crash course in Trujillo and fuku; we see right away how much truth and fantasy blend together in Oscar’s community.  Early on, Oscar fits perfectly into his family’s expectations of Dominican-ness: outgoing and flirtatious with girls, the typical little macho.  Still, the aspects of his personality that made him an outsider began to show even at seven; he tried to impress two girls, Maritza and Olga, by acting like his favorite superhero, Shazam, and when Maritza broke his heart, Oscar sulked at home in front of Herculoids and Space Ghost cartoons (14).  Oscar’s retreats into the imaginary worlds of cartoons, comics, and role-playing games grew more frequent as he passed through adolescence, seemingly his only comfort after failing to measure up to the standards of manliness so fiercely thrust upon Dominican boys.  The curse dooming Oscar to his outcast fate, his dose of fuku, affected not only him, but those around him as well.  Olga, the girl he dumped in retaliation for Maritza rejecting him, ended up “huge and scary, a troll gene in her somewhere,” (17) much like Oscar “grew fatter and fatter” (16).  Meanwhile, Maritza, “the hypotenuse of our love triangle,” became “the flyest guapa in Paterson” faster than you could say “Oh Mighty Isis” (17).  Even in that brief passage, the patois of intellectuals, street slang, and comic book allusions run together indiscriminately, a linguistic mixture of various social strata, spanning cultures but loyal to no single one.  Inevitably, the reader feels left out or confused at certain points, either by the Spanish, the ghetto slang, or the fanboy references; Diaz uses all this code-switching to make sure no one is completely comfortable reading Oscar’s story, that everyone eventually feels like a pariguayo (20).

Diaz attempts to unravel the roots of Oscar’s obsession with books and comics, attributing some of his attraction to nerd-lit to the sci-fi nature of Dominican stories (replete with ghosts and curses and “el Cuco”) and the dramatic shift from life on a Third World island to a First World nation, from want to plenty, from failing to be Dominican to failing to be American (22).  To find a sense of power and belonging somewhere, Oscar sank deep into his imagination, envisioning himself as a heroic savior, wealthy from writing like Stephen King, or mighty like a “platano Doc Savage,” saving the girls he admired from afar from the apocalyptic future he dreamed up (27).  Through language, Oscar hopes to recast himself as someone heroic, in a future no longer beholden to the oppressive realities of the present.

Eventually, Oscar comes close to a relationship with a girl, one who actually reciprocates his interest.  Ana shares Oscar’s tastes in movies and reading, so they’re able to talk about the same things.  However, Oscar speaks in such a formal fashion (“I think she’s orchidaceous,” he tells his sister, Lola (35)), whereas Ana speaks coarsely and directly to the point – when Oscar mentions his crush on Maritza, Ana blurts out, “I know that cuero!  Oh my God, Oscar, I think even my stepfather slept with her!” (40).  Even though they can talk about anything, they don’t really share language.

Later, when Diaz switches to Lola’s point of view, he drops most of the sci-fi references, but continues to uses street Spanish and English frequently.  When Nena Inca recounts Beli’s youth before Oscar and Lola, the voice and language shift again, using more contemporary allusions and Dominican phrases to fit the setting.  Still, whenever Diaz interjects as Diaz (or “The Watcher” as he calls himself), anything goes.

When Diaz recounts Trujillo’s assassination, all his linguistic registers chime in.  He begins with formal prose (“The black Chevy flashes its light innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacarias, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down”), switches to street slang once the shooting starts (Antonio de la Maza’s gun “goes boo-ya!”), brings in Spanish terms and expressions (after Trujillo is shot by de la Maza “escopeta” he shouts, “Cono, mi hirieron!”), mentions several pop culture figures (fictional drug lord Tony Montana and action director John Woo) and describes Trujillo’s fatal injuries in Dungeons and Dragons terms (“suffering from four hundred hit points of damage”) (155).  Diaz even brings in words he invented, calling Trujillo “a consummate culocrat to the end” (154).  Diaz deliberately uses language to create a certain voice in each section, but why such often inscrutable language?

Naturally, language differences are a major issue for anyone moving from one culture to another.  Still, Diaz doesn’t settle for the typical code-switching of a Hispanophone living in urban America; he provides a precise view of a very particular, perhaps completely one-of-a-kind, individual.  The Paterson patois, the DR phrases, and the litany of real and fictitious characters paints a specific era, and seems destined to grow less approachable over time.  As counterintuitive as this may seem for an author to do, this may enhance Diaz’s intended goal: portraying Oscar’s impenetrable isolation.  Oscar is a man from an island who is an island, distanced from his peers and surroundings by his own choice as much as theirs.  Lola tries to convince him to back off Ana once he finds out she has a boyfriend, but he doesn’t listen (Diaz 43); Yunior later attempts to improve Oscar chances with the ladies by telling him to “stop hollering at strange girls on the street, and don’t bring up the Beyonder more than necessary” (174).  Yunior eventually gives up when he realizes “trying to talk sense to Oscar about girls was like trying to throw rocks at Unus the Untouchable” (174).  We hear about Oscar through references he would grasp, but we never hear from Oscar regarding his perspective.  For all Diaz’s nods towards Oscar’s many dialects, his depiction of Oscar holds a certain distance.

Not only does this blending of argots define Diaz’s voice and provide much of the unique energy of the novel, but it also serves to define and isolate Oscar, a Dominican relocated to New Jersey and belonging neither place, nor seemingly anywhere.  The narrator changes between English and Spanish, formal and informal registers, and weaves historical and fantastical references throughout the story, often without explanation or translation; the language of the book reflects the character of Oscar, who ascribes to many groups, but fits in to none.  He is, to paraphrase Derek Walcott, either no one, or a nation.

Another striking characteristic of this mash-up of codes is the democracy of its presentation: no quotes, no italics, nothing that makes one language or genre privileged or marginalized.  English flows right into Spanish, which runs into nerd-speak.  The footnotes meld academic reality and sci-fi references freely.  Diaz’s choice to incorporate the variety of vernaculars he grew up with into Oscar Wao reflects his belief that every American, immigrant or otherwise, has multiple linguistic levels, from how they talk with their families, to how they talk with friends, to how the talk at school (“Junot Diaz” NPR).  By melding all his idioms into one story, Diaz emphasized his assertion that “a basic part of communication [is] unintelligibility,” and he sought to remind mainstream readers that “if you’re an immigrant, you’re so used to not being able to understand large chunks of any conversation, large chunks of the linguistic, cultural codes” (“Junot Diaz” NPR).  Diaz deliberately employed an array of languages in Oscar Wao to disorient and confuse the reader, or at the very least make readers conscious of how much they skip over phrases they don’t understand or rely on context in communication.  However, he didn’t aim to simply frustrate readers; Diaz wanted to incite readers’ awareness of what they don’t comprehend, and compel them to seek out more information or “start a conversation” (“Junot Diaz” NPR) about the immigrant experience, or life under Trujillo, or the ongoing effects of diaspora.

If Diaz stopped innovating there, and followed standard formatting for his Spanish phrases and dialogue, he would still have made an impact, but perhaps a less forceful or consistent one.  The fact that Diaz also leaves his Spanish phrases romanized rather italicized and doesn’t use quotes for dialogue pushes his political and personal message in an unprecedented way.  In mainstream American writing, non-English expressions appear in italics, as if to say to the reader “This is not English, don’t expect to understand it.”  This differentiation marginalizes non-English languages, and gives English primacy in communication.  In Evelyn Ming-Nien Ch’ien’s Weird English, Diaz explained the political motivation for this stylistic decision:

Spanish is not a minority language.  Not in this hemisphere, not in the United States, not in the world inside my head.  So why treat it like one?  Why ‘other’ it?  Why de-normalize it?  By keeping the Spanish as normative in a predominantly English text, I wanted to remind readers of the fluidity of languages, the mutability of languages.  And to mark how steadily English is transforming Spanish and Spanish is transforming English. (204)

By democratizing languages, Diaz conveys a truly American view of discourse, one where everyone’s thoughts and expressions are legitimate and equally worthy of consideration.  More specifically, he asserts that Spanish belongs in American writing at the same level as English (204), and the voices and experiences of Hispanic people deserve the “understood” tone that English implicitly carries in the US (as evidenced by expression such as “I said it in plain English!” and “That’s all Greek to me.”).  In other words, dominant-culture writers present language in a way that puts the burden of understanding on the reader; American authors writing in English[5] do not generally clarify their references, translate their idioms, or put their culturally defining ideas in quotes.  If the ethnic American reader does not grasp what this writer has written, the reader must make the effort to decode or research what the author implied.

In essence, Diaz consciously uses his language to bring awareness to the Dominican experience, to legitimize Spanish/fantasy/street discourse, and to reveal the similarities between science fiction and reality.  The central purpose of Diaz’s literary act, however, spans all these intentions, or rather unites them in a singular role.  If Oscar’s story is a story of fuku, Diaz considers his book a sort of zafa (7), a counterspell against the supernatural curse that has haunted Dominicans since Columbus “discovered” Hispanola and once seemed like force behind the Trujillato.  His language choices function both politically and supernaturally, binding the past with the present, and forcing readers to grapple with the involvement of the American government with Dominican oppression, with the unbelievable lengths the powerful really go to when they want to maintain control.  Such as dictating which language has the final say in a society (if any words, in certain cases, are permitted at all).

Which invites mention of Diaz’s counterpoint to his excessive languages: the times when he uses no words at all.  Most of the time, Diaz uses a variety of languages to reach those cracks and corners any single language fails to cover, to provide texture where English (or Spanish or realism) falls flat.  When no language suffices, Diaz invokes the dash – when the Mongoose speaks Oscar out of his coma (301), when Yunior contemplates the words that could have saved his relationship with Lola (323), or if he “had been ––––” (329).  Perhaps most tellingly, Oscar’s death ends with a dash, when he answers “what fuego means in English” with “fire” (322).  Through the act of translation, Oscar is undone.

Diaz’s panoply of language communicates as much as it confounds, alternating between discourses and dialects relentlessly.  Yet even this confusion makes a point: being a Dominican in America is steeped in confusion, in lack of clear communication.  The average American understands as much about Dominican (or any other nation’s) culture as it does about the nerd subcultures within its borders.  The history of both the Dominican Republic and the United States runs deeper than a dozen languages could convey, but so often goes unspoken of.  By telling Oscar’s story so multilingually, Diaz reveals how DR and US history weave together in a unified tangle, and invites the reader to put the effort into unraveling it.

Work Cited

Ch’ien, Evelyn Ming-Nien.  Weird English.  Boston: Harvard UP, 2005.

D’amore, Anna Maria. Translating Contemporary Mexican Texts: Fidelity to Alterity. New             York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009.

Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.

Eng, Lawrence.  “The Politics of Otaku.” CJAS.org. July 5, 2009. Web. Dec. 12, 2010.  <             http://www.cjas.org/~leng/otaku-p.htm&gt;

“Junot Diaz Discusses his ‘Wondrous’ Debut Novel.” NPR.  May 2, 2008. Web. Dec. 11, 2010.                 <http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=90111248&gt;

“The Annotated Oscar Wao.” Annotated-Oscar-Wao.com.  Web. Dec. 13, 2010.

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[1] “Ciguapas” are mythical Dominican monsters in the form of dark-skinned women with feet facing backward.  “Chacabanas” are the dressy shirts Dominican men wear.  “Chabines” are Afro-Caribbean women of mixed race with light, freckled skin, crinkly fairish hair, and sometimes green eyes.  “Cibaenas” are people from Cibao, a term that indicates socio-economic and cultural qualities comprehensible only to true Dominicans (“Annotated Oscar Wao”).  For all his verbal bombast, Diaz has a great economy with words!

[2] “Otaku” literally means “homebody” in Japanese, but today carries the added pejorative connotation of a shut-in who loves Japanese culture (manga, anime, J-horror, etc.) but doesn’t belong to it (Eng “The Politics of Otaku”).  Diaz’s use of the term provides yet another linguistic layer to the text, and deftly reinforces his implicit argument that other languages can often express ideas more clearly (or succinctly) than English, so why not err on the side of conciseness?

[3] In yet another subversive stroke, Diaz uses footnotes oftentimes tell the bigger story, making the primary narrative seem marginal.

[4] Sauron, of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, brutally ruled the dark lands of Mordor and its monstrous inhabitants, commanding them to take over the surrounding countries of the Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits by seizing the powerful Ring controlled by Frodo Baggins.  Arawn is the god of death in Welsh mythology, and appears as evil sorcerer in charge of an undead army in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series.  Darkseid serves as one of the New Gods in the DC Universe, and possesses superhuman strength, speed, intelligence and powers (the most intimidating of which is his Omega Effect, which Diaz mentions early in the book).  I would cite these explanations, but I too am so well versed in nerd culture that I actually knew this stuff already.

[5] I would like to note that I struggled to define “normal” American writers – “English writers” didn’t work because American authors aren’t usually from England, they just use that language (much like “Spanish writers” in this hemisphere rarely come from Spain).  The need for an elaborately specific title for “the norm” makes me long for the precision of Spanish (or the disregard for delicacy the Amish have when they call all non-Amish “English.”  I’m German-Irish, damn it!)