P A R A D I S E L O S T V i l i : A D A M , H A M L E T A N D T H E A N X I E T Y O F N A R R A T I V E JU D IT H S C H E R E R H E R Z Concordia University A striking feature of the narrative structure of Paradise Lost is its postponing of the fatal act. Within that structure, Book vm marks a boundary; it repre sents the poet’s last manoeuvre to forestall the Fall, to keep the Edenic moment eternally present by “talk where God or angel guest / With man, as with his friend, familiar used / To sit indulgent” (rx. 1-3). But what happens during the “venial discourse” of Book vm confirms the “thick shade” of its last line more effectively even than the circling Satanic presence at its periphery. The resources of narrative used to keep the Fall at bay disclose an anxiety about the enterprise itself that is more than a function of the scriptural materials; that is, it is more than an unwillingness on the poet’s part to release our “grand parents” into the flux and darkness of human history. The narrative voice does not so much acknowledge this anxiety directly (although it is audible in the first forty-seven lines of Book ix) as displace it onto Adam, whose delaying of the angel’s departure with his own account of origins repeats the process of deferral at work throughout the poem.1 Book vm is doubly the book of Adam’s creation. It offers that creation as Adam’s own narrative and at the same time creates an Adam different from his first iconic representation in Book iv. A useful access to the Adam of Book vm can be found in the transition from the previous book, a movement over the space between God’s creation of the universe and Adam’s creation of his own consciousness. This movement has its structural parallel in the transition from Book xi to Book xn. In each case the material that was added to mark the boundary between books signals a crucial change in the unfolding of the narrative. With each intervention, narrative is suspended and silence takes its place. However, in Book x i i , Adam does not break that silence; by then the docile pupil, he does not “interpose.” When the Archangel “with transition sweet new speech resumes” (5), it is in a new discursive mode that has moved from primary to secondary representation (from a direct depiction of “obj'ects divine” to a relation of what is to come), from vision to “due audience,” from pictura to poesis. It is a shift, moreover, that gives the narrator even greater authority as he prompts an almost synesthetic response from Adam by causing E n g l is h Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , x iv , 3, September 1988 the visual scene to be aurally apprehended and then instantly submitted to a purely speculative end. Adam plays his part here with no resistance; as Mi chael prompts he responds, gradually closing the space between his dereliction and God’s intentions towards him. We can read the silence at the start of the book as emblematic of that lack of resistance, a signal of Adam’s acquiescence in God’s design. But Book vm is still before the Fall, and the silence there has both a different function and a different effect. It marks a shift in the narrative from a representation of creation as God’s work to a representation of creation as human memory, a shift from transparent to occluded narration. And it signals a shift in speakers as well, bringing forward a speaker whose relation to his materials is complicated both by his participation in his own narrative and by his essential ignorance of its final shape. At the start of Book vm, Raphael’s account of creation and the angel choir hymning God sound in Adam’s ears alone. But moments after Adam breaks that silence and...