BrothersJudd Blog: WHAT? HE MEANT IT? (via <a href="http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/">Paul Cella</a>):

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January 2, 2003

WHAT? HE MEANT IT? (via Paul Cella):

Stanley Fish's Milton: a review of How Milton Works By Stanley Fish (Edward T. Oakes, First Things)

Some liberals, however blinkered their own views, cannot help but recognize Milton's Puritanism or his debt to medieval angelology. Yet because they remain attached to his antiroyalist politics and appreciate his polemic against prior restraint and government licensing of the printing presses, they posit a nonexistent conflict between the poet's republican politics and his "repressive" theology. A critic by the name of Herman Rapaport, for example, holds that Milton was "committed to the republicanism of Rome and to ideals of freedom and liberty . . . but [his] mind also harbored a darker fascination with a dictatorial takeover, with what amounts to another absolutism much bleaker and more calculating than the foppery of Charles I." Freedom of the press, yes; Cromwell and Puritanism, no.
But this dichotomy, too, is wrong, utterly wrong. As Fish rightly sees, "There are not two landscapes but only one in Milton's poetry, and not two values but only one in his thought." C. S. Lewis would agree; as he put it in his Preface to Paradise Lost, trying to disentangle Milton's poetry from his theology is like asking us to study Hamlet after the revenge code has been removed. The Romantic misunderstanding of Milton begins and ends here, by dispensing with or ignoring Milton's God. Indeed, for Fish, the Romantic interpretation depends on removing God from Milton's thought:
"It is only if the first principle of Milton's thought--that God is God and not one of a number of contending forces--is denied or forgotten that his poetry can be seen as conflicted or tragic or inconclusive or polysemous or paradoxical, words that name literary qualities most of us have been taught to admire. They are not, I will argue, qualities Milton admires; and while their absence in his work might properly be a reason for declining to read it, it should not be a reason for rewriting it in the name of values he everywhere rejects when they are offered as alternatives to the single but complex life--faith, obedience, chastity of mind and deed--he everywhere celebrates."
But what makes Fish's book unique in this regard is not just the way he clearly wants to distance himself from the main implications of his own reader-response criticism: that the reader decides the meaning of a text, even to the point that the text quite disappears (the title of one of Fish's later books in fact plaintively asked, Is There a Text in This Class?). Not only is there a text in his class (and a canonical one to boot), but, even more startlingly, any advocacy of ungoverned, free-for-all interpretation using the excuse of reader-response criticism now comes with Satanic pedigree:
"It is the gap between representation and the reality represented that provides space [for] equivocation, doubleness, and insincerity. . . . Words [after Satan's Fall] display the false freedom of irresponsibility--the freedom that comes with not being tethered to anything but the emptiness within, a freedom that is initially exhilarating because within its license you can go on forever just making it up, pretending, counterfeiting. But that is all you can do; and the more frantically you do it, the more fictions you proliferate, the greater the distance between you and what is real and true."
If St. Augustine were to come back from the grave and survey the world of literary criticism today, he could not have done better than Fish does here. Augustine's treatises on lying often strike modern readers as too absurdly demanding and unrealistic. But these objections do not take sufficient account of Augustine's view, shared by Milton, that the dynamics of defiant rebellion undergird and motivate the free play of plural meanings in a monist world. Nor is it enough for the critic to appeal to words that are undoubtedly ambiguous and then leave it up to the reader to decide which meaning to adopt. As we have seen, words often are ambiguous; and readers will at that juncture have to decide which meaning to adopt, a decision that will affect the "feel" and interpretation of the rest of the poem. But that still does not gainsay Milton's and Fish's wider point that Satan is always,
in Milton's phrase, "scoffing in ambiguous words." All of Satan's speeches to his minions in Book I or to Eve in Book IX draw on the resources of equivocation. Without polysemy, Satan could get nowhere.
"Scoffing in ambiguous words"--saying one thing and meaning another or several others--is at once an ability the devils have and a mode of performance to which they are doomed. The consequence of unmooring oneself from deity is that one loses the point of reference in relation to which entities can be stably defined.

All I'd ever heard of Stanley Fish was that he was a leading post-modernist and that he was one of the editors duped in the hilarious Sokal Affair. But the more you read about him the more interesting he sounds. He's apparently even a character in both the novels of David Lodge and Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews.

MORE
[John Milton 1608-74]
John Milton: The Milton-L Home Page
-John Milton (1608-1674) (Luminarium)
John Milton (kirjasto)
-John Milton (1608-1674) (Johnson's Lives of the Poets)
-BIO: John Milton, poet (James Kiefer's Christian Biographies)
-E-TEXTS: The John Milton Reading Room (Dartmouth)
-E-TEXT: Areopagitica
-E-TEXT: Life of Milton By Samuel Johnson

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 2, 2003 7:46 PM

Comments

As a Milton scholar, Stanley Fish is brilliant. He's really quite first-rate, and engages the text well. His "seduced by sin" thesis, postulating that Milton made Satan seem sympathetic initially intentionally in order to draw in the reader, and symbolically cause the reader to recreate the Fall in himself, was revolutionary. I don't give it justice, but it was a stunning advance from the Romanticist pro-Satan camp versus those who merely tried to deny the attractiveness of Satan in the early going.

OTOH, his non-Milton work is a mix between honest yet infuriating or horrifying.

Posted by: John Thacker at January 3, 2003 10:09 AM

Cool! I bought the book yesterday. (Hence, the links research)

Posted by: oj at January 3, 2003 10:17 AM

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