Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse …
It is extraordinary to imagine our first disobedience; so familiar are we in our fallen state with our disobedience it has become second nature. We can’t remember the first time we were disobedient, let alone easily imagine, as Genesis does for us, the very first disobedience ever, the primal scene of disobedience. And it is difficult to understand in our fallen minds quite what obedience meant to Adam and Eve before they had been disobedient. And we presume in our fallen state that they really knew nothing about obedience until they were disobedient, or certainly not enough about it. They might, for example, have thought that obedience was a state of temptation, or permanent anticipation, or essential ignorance. But all such speculation is just that, speculation, because there is no going back to how we used to think, if thinking, indeed, was what Adam and Eve ever did. We need, in other words, to bear in mind Stanley Fish’s salutary injunction in his all too aptly entitled Surprised by Sin: ‘Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are; its method … is to provoke in its readers wayward, fallen responses which are then corrected by one of several authoritative voices (the narrator, God, Raphael, Michael, the Son).’ The first disobedience, though, as Milton tells us at the outset, was one that bore mixed fruits: death, and ‘all our woe’ (which is a lot); and Christ the redeeming son (who is even more). No Fall, no Christ, no Christianity, no Paradise Lost. The fruit of this first disobedience is that we were left always hoping for something better; this first disobedience was inspired by the wrong kind of hope – for forbidden knowledge – but one of the consequences of the wrong kind of hope was that we could then have the right kind of hope once we had seen our error. This is effectively what Michael tells Adam towards the end of the final book of Paradise Lost, as cited by Johnson for his definition of ‘obedience’:
… hee, who comes thy Saviour, shall recure,
Not by destroying Satan, but his works
In thee and in thy Seed: nor can this be,
But by fulfilling that which thou didst want,
Obedience to the Law of God, impos’d
On penaltie of death, and suffering death,
The penaltie to thy transgression due,
And due to theirs which out of thine will grow:
So onely can high Justice rest appaid.
Christ will ‘recure’ them, though there is a strange ambiguity here that suggests that Adam and Eve were originally cured of something, and needed recuring; as though there could have been something wrong with them more original than original sin. Or at least Milton allows us to wonder about this (the Oxford English Dictionary has for ‘recure’ simply ‘to cure’, clearly Milton’s primary sense, but Milton would have known that the Latinate prefix ‘re’ meant ‘again’). If there is an ambiguity here we might just say that Milton wants us to think about what, if anything, Adam and Eve might have been suffering from in the Garden of Eden; as if he couldn’t quite imagine a life without suffering; as though unforbidden pleasures couldn’t be exempt from it. But, anyway, ‘high Justice’ can only be ‘appaid’ (that is, satisfied) by their dire punishment and their renewed (because recovered) aspiration, ‘Obedience to the Law of God.’ Everything going according to plan, the forbidden, transgression, the first disobedience, can lead us back to the unforbidden, our ‘blissful Seat’. Disobedience makes us really appreciate obedience. You have got to be cruel to be kind. So, at least, God seems to think (in fact you’ve only got to be kind to be kind). ‘The reason why the poem is so good,’ the poet-critic William Empson famously remarked in Milton’s God, ‘is that it makes God so bad.’
But for my purposes, in this chapter, I want to suggest that whatever else Milton is doing here he is making us think about what unforbidden pleasures might be like when we attempt to recover them, and especially when we attempt to recover them having tasted the forbidden pleasures they always coexisted with. This is because what I am interested in is the recovery of unforbidden pleasures, or their renewal, following the experience of the forbidden. And, above all, I am interested in the way in which – in Genesis, in Paradise Lost – unforbidden pleasures only really exist, only come to consciousness, as unforbidden after the experience of the forbidden. Clearly only adults, not infants, are capable of unforbidden pleasures in the light of their experience of forbidden pleasures. At its most minimal, Milton shows us in Paradise Lost, you find out something new, something else, after an act of disobedience (you know something new about sovereignty after you cut off a king’s head; and part of what you may then want to know is what, if anything, you want to recover from the time before the fateful, ‘first’ disobedience). Before disobedience, obedience; though it may be unwitting obedience, it may not be experienced as obedience, or obedience may not be experienced as a problem. But after disobedience there can only be faux innocence (the disobedience can only be punished but not undone, which tells us something about the despair inherent in punishment). You only find out what your obedience entails, what it has been costing you, when you are disobedient. It is not that rules are made to be broken, but that you find out what the rules are made of in the breaking of them, as well as what you are made of. Adam and Eve had a better idea of what they were up against – or rather, of what they and their God were like – through the Fall. And that must have been something God wanted. Obedience is the wish not to know something. Obedience is the wish to stop time; obedience stops us growing by making us remember the rules (God is the name no one can afford to forget). And obedience is what is always required.
Milton, Johnson wrote in his Life of Milton (1779),
hated monarchs in the state and prelates in the church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority.
Yet Milton, who in Johnson’s words, ‘hated all whom he was required to obey’, wrote a poem about how and why we are all required to obey. And he drew a remarkable distinction from Johnson: Milton, ‘felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority’. It would be truer to say that Milton felt repugnance to certain forms of authority, but it would be infinitely less interesting. It is more interesting to wonder what a repugnance to authority might involve; and how it could come about that a repugnance to authority could be more important than a love of liberty – could, indeed, displace it so that one’s hatred of authority could lead one to forget one’s love of liberty; as if one could be bewitched by that hatred, and could forget the point of it. The forbidden always incites our hatred, and can seduce us into forgetting about our love of liberty. We take liberties in an attempt to recover our love of freedom. Only in our unforbidden pleasures do we love our liberty without needing a repugnance to authority. Believing in the forbidden is believing in the authorities. In our unforbidden pleasures we get a glimpse of what a life without obedience would be like. A life in which pleasure and terror were no longer inextricable.
VI
When the psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear describes, in his essay ‘The Call of Another’s Words’, people for whom it ‘is not a concern that they fall short of a now impossible ideal; it is a concern that there is no longer an ideal to fall short of’, he is talking of the fear of there being nothing or no one worth obeying. So we must talk then both of the fear of disobedience, and the fear of having nothing or no one to obey; and of what requires our obedience as opposed to our engagement; of what, in Rowan Williams’s terms, invites us to argue, and what forces us to submit. There are certain arguments we can’t afford not to have. And other arguments we need not have at all.
We don’t, for example, tend to describe all r
ule-bound behaviour as obedience. We don’t think of ourselves as being obedient to the rules of a game, say, but of the rules making the game possible. We may think of schools, or religious orders, or prisons, or even families as requiring obedience, but not skating rinks, or supermarkets, or poetry readings. Obedience becomes an issue, or the issue, when something about following a rule – something about the rule itself, or something about how the rule has to be followed – is troubling. Obedience is invoked when dissent is predicted, when the authorities themselves – the rule-setters – already know there is a problem: they have made a rule that people are going to be tempted to break. So those who demand obedience have already imagined for themselves why it may not be forthcoming. They have imagined, that is to say, the very real pleasures of breaking the rule. They are taking a kind of risk that might involve, for example, some conscious or unconscious complicity with those who refuse to abide by their rules. Officially they know where they stand; unofficially they are double agents. They know that one thing they are doing with their rule is tantalizing those who must abide by it.
If, in Rowan Williams’s words quoted earlier, the good is something we argue about, the good cannot be something that requires our obedience. It requires, rather, our arguing (‘the idea,’ William Empson writes in Milton’s God, against Milton’s God and his many devotees, ‘that there actually couldn’t be a moral debate in a literary work amounts to a collapse of the Western mind’). Obedience wants to put a stop to the argument, to pre-empt the debate. Freud, with his ‘method’ of free association, wants to take the debate for granted, as it were. Freud says: the argument is always already going on (in oneself, and between oneself and various other people, both real and imaginary); the question is whether we can create the conditions in which we want to hear it, and hear about it; whether we can make a compelling case for the argument, rather than for its suppression. His conditions are the psychoanalytic setting, with its two explicit demands: say whatever comes into your head; and pay for the treatment. ‘The fundamental technical rule of this procedure of “free association”,’ Freud writes in his ‘Two Encyclopaedia Articles’ of 1923, means that:
The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other hand not to hold back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these last-mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.
The preconditions for doing psychoanalysis – for taking up what Jacques Lacan rightly calls the ‘psychoanalytic opportunity’ – are the following of this rule, as far as is possible. Unlike the confessional, in which the person always already knows what he must disclose, the analytic patient cannot know beforehand what he has to say. Unlike a man on trial, the analytic patient has only, as it were, a superficial sense of what he is and isn’t guilty of. The analyst aims for a recure, to use Milton’s word; the analyst aims to cure the patient, as the psychoanalyst Masud Khan put it, of his already established self-cure, because the patient is deemed to be suffering now from the self-cure of his organized symptoms. He has come to conclusions about himself that are inconclusive.
The difference between consenting to free associate and obeying God’s laws is that through free association the patient can discover what has been forbidden him, and so what he has forbidden himself, because he has repressed this knowledge; and what all this might have cost him in terms of inhibition, and in terms of uncompleted actions (as well as the actions of speaking and thinking and feeling and desiring). Then, perhaps, the patient can make some choices; choices about which rules he believes are worth following, and which rules he has merely been following, consciously or unconsciously, for fear of punishment (the aim of the analysis, the analyst Roger Money-Kyrle once remarked, is to prove the irrelevance of the inhibition). The devout believer in God’s laws, on the other hand, always already knows what is forbidden her, and has no choice in the matter (she has her reasons ready to hand: she remembers them). For the so-called analytic patient, the good is to be argued about; for the believer, the good has already been decided. The psychoanalytic patient is, in other words, Kant’s self-legislating individual: not a law unto himself, but a person who can argue, with himself and with other people, about what the laws should be, about which rules are of value, and why. He is a person who can give and hear reasons.
All you must do, Freud says, is notice the disagreeable, the nonsensical, the unimportant and the irrelevant, and voice it, to a psychoanalyst, who can respond and not respond in a certain way (and, by implication, then you can recover an appetite to speak with greater freedom to other people, and to yourself – as if to say: we should be more attentive to the affinities between people who have little in common; which would include the affinities we have with our selves). The criteria for censorship could not be more ordinary – no qualifications are required to discern them, no learning, no mysterious talents; and what you can discover is what Freud calls ‘the forgotten material’, the unconscious after-effects of your conscious and unconscious obedience. The analytic patient discovers he is the casualty of forgotten obediences. Some, at least, of his forbidden pleasures will be revealed as unforbidden pleasures after all. Other of the forbidden pleasures can be redescribed (debated, argued about). And some of the forbidden pleasures will remain forbidden because they are the preconditions for our preferred story about ourselves. But most importantly, the unforbidden will have recovered its allure. And some versions of the forbidden will be reopened.
We inhibit ourselves through self-criticism, through obedience to our own largely unconscious rules. We are forbidden, and we forbid ourselves, a certain freedom of thought and feeling and desire and speech. And then we turn this ferocious, unrelenting self-criticism into an unforbidden pleasure. It is, as Milton makes clear, second nature for us to be obedient. But we should notice that it is, of course, by definition, unforbidden to obey the forbidders. There are, in other words, unforbidden pleasures of which we should be duly suspicious. And other, infinitely more various, unforbidden pleasures that we might enjoy, once the forbidders become people we can argue with. We can begin to enjoy our unforbidden pleasures and our forbidden pleasures anew only when we can dispel the curse of our obscene, inordinate self-criticism. We need to be able to argue with, and let others argue with, whatever is most forbidding about ourselves. What begins as obedience ends as self-criticism.
Against Self-Criticism
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
I
Jacques Lacan famously remarked that there must surely be something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself, because actually people hate themselves. Indeed, it seemed rather as if, given the way people treat each other, they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves. That is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard. ‘After all,’ Lacan wrote in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ‘the people who followed Christ were not so brilliant.’ Lacan, at this moment in his talk, is of course implicitly comparing Freud with Christ, many of whose followers in Lacan’s view had betrayed Freud’s vision. And that meant, simply, that they had read him in the wrong way. There had been a failure of literary criticism – literary criticism being notably a phrase, and a practice, that has had rather more staying power than the idea of literary appreciation (literary appreciation, with its Paterian associations, has a whiff of the effete, whereas criticism always implies something more determinedly robust and intelligent). In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which
celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the repertoire; and in which we praise whatever we can.
Lacan’s comparison, which he immediately qualifies – ‘Freud was not Christ, but he was perhaps something like Viridiana’ (the eponymous character in Luis Buñuel’s film, who is a corrupted nun) – is itself a suggestive interpretation of at least this one element in Christianity. Lacan could be understood to be saying here that, from a Freudian point of view, Christ’s story about love was a cover story: a repression of, and a self-cure for, ambivalence. In Freud’s vision of things we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate, we love; wherever we love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can also frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us. We criticize when we are frustrated – or when we are trying to describe our frustration, however obliquely – and praise when we are more satisfied, and vice versa. Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings. ‘Ambivalence has to be distinguished from having mixed feelings about someone,’ Charles Rycroft writes, in his appropriately entitled A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (as though an ‘Uncritical’ dictionary would be somehow simple-minded):
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 6