Therefore, Adam does not create anything new, but rather, God provides the environment and Adam names it according to a meaning that already exists. ‘Though sun,’ said I, ‘fair light/ And thou enlightened Earth so fresh and gay” (VIII 271-74). Adam states, “to speak I tried forthwith spake:/My tongue obeyed and readily could name/ Whate’er I saw. Yet Adam’s bewilderment exists as he notices this attribute to his speech. Adam names according to God’s singular truth. The singular meaning to naming shows Adam’s little power as he obeys the meaning of words through one singular truth. When Adam has not yet fallen, he names the environment that surrounds him according to God’s singular meaning. Therefore, once the characters have fallen, they grasp the notion of multiple truths, and that makes them authoritative figures. Furthermore, the “position of post-structuralism is that meaning is inherently unstable, whereas a structuralist would hold that an explanation/understanding is conceivable and possible” (Cuddon 691). Indeed, this shift allows Milton’s characters to access the knowledge that is forbidden to them. In Paradise Lost, the shift from pre-fall to post-fall indicates a structuralist to a post-structuralist mindset. Post-structuralism pursues further the Saussurean perception that in language there are only differences without positive terms and shows that the signifier and signified are, as it were, not only oppositional but plural, pulling against each other, and, by so doing, creating numerous deferments of meaning (691). Without realizing it, Saussure, in making the distinction, exposed not coherence between signs, but an inherent incoherence. fundamental distinction between signifier and signified is at the heart of the instability. In a sense, it complements structuralism by offering alternative modes of inquiry, explanation, and interpretation” (Cuddon 690-91). Post-structuralism is the “more rigorous working out of possibilities, implications, and shortcomings of structuralism. The theorist Saussure examines speech acts through the theoretical lens of Post-structuralism. Speech acts help define pre-lapsarian language-which has one singular truth-and post-lapsarian language that has multiple interpretations to its meaning. A perlocutionary speech act is also “a feature of rhetorical harangues” (Cuddon 660). A perlocutionary speech act serves to depict meaning in different ways while an illocutionary speech act only has one. It often involves the use of imperatives”. In contrast, a perlocutionary speech act is “an act that is the effect of utterance. For example an order, a promise, the striking of an oath” (Cuddon 412). Through multiple truths, they alter the meaning of words to be better than God’s definition of them.Īn illocutionary speech act is “an act which is carried out by a speaker in the actual utterance of words. When Adam, Eve, and Satan have fallen, they are able to elevate their role as universal truth no longer reigns over them. The characters that have fallen gain more authority as they can use perlocutionary speech acts to their advantage, while the characters that have not fallen struggle through a language where only one universal meaning exists. Eve is portrayed as a woman when she has yet to fall and this denotes her role as inferior to Adam. Satan uses his fallen language to inflict more harm to Eden, hence, Adam and Eve.
Satan allegorizes himself and the archangel as gods due to perlocutionary speech acts due to his fall. Adam names Eden according to the universal meaning and by doing so, he finds solitude. When characters have fallen, they are no longer exposed to God’s universal meaning (also known as his logos) and they differentiate meaning, which are in words. Milton’s Paradise Lost explores language schemes.
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