Further Thoughts on Satan's Journey Through Chaos I

Abstract

Several years ago, I attempted to determine imagistically the scatological dimension of Satan's journey through Chaos in Book II of Paradise Lost.1 That journey, I maintained in The Dialectics of Creation, involves, among other things, an ironic debasement of the Arch‐Deceiver in scatological terms.2 Entering Chaos’“Furnace mouth,” which belches forth its innards (II. 888‐89), Satan becomes part of the “crude consistence” (II. 941) that characterizes Chaos’“intestine broils” (II. 1001).3 As such, he participates in a process of intestinal decomposition that finally expels him as “waste” through the opening of what Milton variously calls the “bare outside of this World” (III. 74) and the “backside of the World” (III. 494). There, he is buffeted as the “sport of Winds” (III. 393) in a place “since calld/The Paradise of Fools” (III. 495‐96). In that way, his journey nicely illustrates Raphael's adage that excess “soon turns / Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind” (VII. 129‐30). Assuming the imagistic validity of this scatological point of view, I would now like to explore some of its biographical and historical implications.