![]() Johnson’s conscious omission of question marks seems to suggest that man is equipped to answer his own questions. In great contrast to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Radi os contains no question marks. If these lines were paraphrased they would read as follows: “Who, from the terror of this//(elevated or sublime) sky//which is inseparable from joy//answered ” However, this paraphrase falls short. One instance in which man’s inherent act of questioning arises in the statement, “Who, from the terror of this//empyreal//Irreconcilable/of joy//answered” (lines 48-52). In short, God needs man and man needs God there is no question without answer. To paraphrase the words of Althusser, the great Subject, with a capital S, needs the subject. Though God, as a noun, may be omitted, man’s quest for answers and dialogue with a higher power will always persist. Johnson’s implied relationship between man and God, that man is the source of questioning and God (or the universe) holds the answers, is one of symbiosis. In affect, these erasures place man in control of his own existence. Furthermore, in the deletion of God, Satan, and Jesus, the intermediary, Johnson also erases man’s fall from grace and his punishment: death. As a result, Johnson’s text asserts that even in the deletion of God, Jesus, and Satan, man is inherently bound to seek answers for those unanswerable questions. Yet, despite Johnson’s erasure of these metaphysical nouns, Radi os creates a landscape in which man and the eternal continue to coalesce. ![]() However, Johnson’s decision to erase key figures such as God, Christ, and Satan from Milton’s original framework rewrites Paradise Lost as a humanitarian text. Ronald Johnson’s Radi os, at its most intrinsic level, is an erasure of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
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