As promised, a post featuring not one but a series of half-baked ideas.

I'm intrigued by literary passages that have created a legacy of misreadings--misreadings so pervasive that they seem to be foundational rather than incidental. One of my favorite examples is a famous crux in Antigone:

The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born: but, father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother's life could ever bloom for me again.

My knowledge of the body of discourse surrounding Antigone is rather slim, but as far as I can tell, everybody from Hegel to Kelly Oliver to, more recently, Joan Copjec willfully misreads what Antigone is saying, turning her declaration into some sort of generalizable statement about the sibling relationship as opposed to a parent-child relationship. Take, for example, Copjec's remarks in Imagine There's No Woman:

Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him. His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety [sic] . . . . Lacan summarizes her stance this way: "Antigone invokes no other right than that one ['this brother is something unique'], a right that emerges in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is ['my brother is my brother'] . . . ."

This all sounds nice and good, but doesn't such a reading ignore the simplicity of what Antigone says? Brothers are not necessarily unique or irreplaceable--it's just that, in her case, her parents happen to be dead. Declarations about the universality of Antigone's claim need to take into account the obvious fact that her situation is marked by a rather banal contingency: perhaps if her parents had been alive, she merely would've asked them to reproduce again rather than burying her brother. The question of what it means that her parents happen to have been Oedipus and Jocasta--as well as the more general question of what the relationship between contingency and universality means in this case--I'll leave to those who are better qualified.

* * *

I wonder if Eve's narration of her first experience at the reflecting pool (what, according to William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, "may be the most reflective, even philosophical account of courtship in all of Renaissance literature") includes another such moment that has produced a rich legacy of misreading:

As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam appeared
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair creature is thyself,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming.

The problematic moment here is the line, "What there thou seest fair creature is thyself." At a conference I recently attended, a Miltonist responded to a talk about queer studies and Narcissus by inquiring about this line. He suggested, sensibly, that there's something peculiarly incorrect about the disembodied voice's lesson: after all, what Eve sees is her reflection, not herself.

What I want to think through here is the possibility of taking the voice's lesson seriously--to say, as literally as possible, that what Eve sees in that pool is her very self. Shouldn't it be quite easy to say that this passage labors to transform Eve into a visual Echo rather than Narcissus, thereby enabling Adam to take his rightful role as the reflected rather than reflection? In this case, the lesson is quite apt: what Eve should learn is that she is a second-order reflection (what she sees in that pool is the essence of herself), and she needs to turn to her original source, Adam, where "no shadow stays / Thy coming."

But I wonder if reading the passage in this way causes a surprising amount of friction, rubbing the wrong way against a pattern of thinking about Narcissus that is for us still inextricably dominated by psychoanalytic thought. I suppose a quick-and-dirty (or, perhaps, half-assed) reading of Eve's mirror stage would run as follows: the Eve-infant, not being yet in the symbolic order, has no clear boundaries between self and other. The disembodied voice effects the necessary misrecognition that is needed to give Eve a clear sense of herself as a discrete ego as well as her need to enter the symbolic order. And part of the force of Milton's bourgeois version of the Narcissus story is how deftly he combines the story of entry into language with that of entry into marriage. Once the Eve-infant has been compelled to grow out of her primary narcissism, her only choice lies in reverting back to narcissism or in going along with the wholesome bond of marriage.

The gravitational tug of this account feels awfully strong, but I think this reading suits, say, Ovid's version of the Narcissus story far better than Milton's. In Ovid, the poetic speaker berates and mocks Narcissus for loving his shadow, in which nothing of himself truly inheres; Narcissus chooses to love his own reflection anyways. I wonder if Mary Nyquist turns Milton's Eve too much into Ovid's Narcissus when she remarks--in an essay that ranks as among the handful of texts that have really taught me how to read Milton--that Eve’s “desire for an other self . . . is clearly and unambiguously constituted by illusion, both in the sense of specular illusion and in the sense of error." In a state of complete innocence, isn't it at least possible that Eve simply cannot fall into intellectual or moral error? What Eve attempts to explain here is her prelinguistic experience, when she has not yet experienced the split between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. With eloquent concision, Eve's account reveals this split to be a temporal one. Before language, Eve can experience complete, seamless spontaneity: “I started back, / It started back”; “I soon returned, / Pleased it returned as soon.” Yet these line breaks emphasize how Eve’s narration undermines itself. Once stuck in language (which is also to be stuck in marriage), the image that is Eve’s self is doomed to be belated, its action delayed. As the voice rightly posits, Eve will be caught between the past-tense "came" and the present-tense "goes."

But before language--which is to say, before any concrete sense of herself versus another--how could Eve be incorrect? Before language--which is to say, before any temporal divide comes between herself and her image (or, should we say, learning the lesson of the disembodied voice, between herself and herself)--how could Eve possibly fall prey to an illusion? In the untimebound perfection before language, there may be absolutely no difference between loving another and loving yourself.

This might be the true shock of Milton's version of Narcissus. By virtue of not having a clear sense of self, pre-linguistic, premarital Eve might be more capable of loving another than she will ever be afterwards. This is not, then, the story of narcissism thwarted, but the story of narcissism instilled (and then only partly deflected). Once the voice teaches Eve that what she sees is herself, she will never have access to the undifferentiated perfection of loving another without even realizing that the other is the self--the golden rule embodied as it never could be again. For after this scene, Eve will be split twice, once by the order of language, and again by the economy of marriage, which will cast her in the role of second-order reflection. The point of Milton's story is not that the Eve-infant needs to learn a discrete sense of self and then to turn away from her innate narcissism in order to love another; rather, the realization that she has a discrete self shatters the Eve-infant's ability to love perfectly. Instead of loving another who is herself (the condition of which love qua love being her not having a sense of self), Eve will be forced to know herself through the order of language and to love another in the economy of marriage. As she rightly intuits, these are rather poor consolation prizes; as she is forced to learn, she has no other recourse.

"In me is no delay," Eve declares optimistically at the end of the epic, but her first waking experience suggests otherwise. Or, at least, it suggests that the place where no shadow stays her coming cannot be her union with Adam, but with unmediated access to God--but that's a matter for another entry.

Another way to explain the deftness of the reflecting-pool scene: neither Eve nor the disembodied voice are incorrect even though both seem wrong, and the reader is left to split the difference. Like Eve, the reader is stuck in language, and should simply side with the voice; yet the scene is powerful enough to give us a sense of what might have been on the other side.