원근법으로 본 밀턴의 『실낙원』--입체적 내러티브에 나타난 작가의 주관과 권위

Abstract

This study finds a three-dimensional narrative structure in Milton's Paradise Lost by looking at it from a perspective - an aspect of visual perception of space and objects as used in painting. In this Biblical story, which describes the Fall of man in a fundamental and symbolic way, we find various techniques of perspective used and practiced by the poet. In this study, Milton's poetic work is analyzed from a linear and non-linear or relief perspective, aerial and irregular perspective or anamorphosis. Seen from a perspective, Paradise Lost looks like a grand poetic architecture in which the author brings home the magnitude of its scale by juxtaposing God's infinite power and goodness with the infernal viciousness of the origin of evil in its essence. God's Empyrean is compared to the bottomless perdition; and in between lies man who is both spiritual and physical, thus, though fallen, capable of choosing right, that leads him to salvation. This triangular relationship is seen from a linear perspective. And Satan's identity is visualized as a distorted image found in an anamorphosis of the 17th-century painting, whose bizarre effects not only hide its real quality, but produce its various shapes in the whole picture of Paradise Lost. This study then links Milton's use of perspective to the disruption of human episteme that occurs in the early modern period, a phenomenon that changes the whole system of knowledge in the Renaissance and especially in the 17th century. This paradigm shift brings into literature an author's subjective view that observes the object with his own inner vision. A changing process is clearly revealed in that Milton sees time and space from the narrator's subjective perspective, away from the one-dimensional or flat point of view in the medieval and early Renaissance period. Milton's epic, therefore, is a culmination of human knowledge of the period, departing from the past and pointing to a new phase of life to come.