The Lists of Paradise Regained: An Economy of the Full and the Empty

This article works from Madeleine Jeay’s Le Commerce des Mots (2006), Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists (2009), and Bernard Sève’s Philosophie des Listes (2010) to understand the abundance of lists in John Milton’s Paradise Regained. The lists in Paradise Regained emerge from the following conditions: the fantasy of chaos remaining an unfulfilled horizon, the complicated coherence among things escaping the worst disorder, and the tortuous cohesive power of analogy barely unifying a worldview by holding the chaos of reality at bay. In sum, the lists in the short epic would mark, as a manifestation, the trace, like the shadow, of the intractable fallen world within the very act of worldliness (much like the creation of an alternative Christian ethos), always leaving a space of nothingness necessarily paradoxical and in some ways astonishingly so.