WHO'D READ HIM IF HE WERE "SAFE"?:

Is Reading Milton Unsafe at Any Speed? (D. D. GUTTENPLAN, December 28, 2002, NY Times)

Was [John] Milton a terrorist sympathizer? John Carey of Oxford University, co-editor of an edition of Milton's poetry, seems to think so. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London on the anniversary of Sept. 11, Professor Carey said that in the weeks following the atrocity he had been haunted by the similarities between the biblical Samson and the hijackers. "Like them Samson sacrifices himself to achieve his ends," he wrote. "Like them he destroys many innocent victims, whose lives, hopes and loves are all unknown to him personally." Professor Carey wondered whether "Samson Agonistes," with Milton's sympathetic portrayal of his hero, should not be "withdrawn from schools and colleges and, indeed, banned more generally."

The remarks set off a controversy that is still raging in the letters pages of the journal.

But while Professor Carey sets out the case for interpreting "Samson Agonistes" as "a work in praise of terrorism" at some length, his real target is not so much Milton but another critic - Stanley Fish, one of America's premier postmodernists, who is appearing on a panel titled "Why Milton Matters" on Dec. 28 at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York. In Mr. Carey's view, Mr. Fish, who is currently dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is "strongly opposed to any adverse criticism of Samson's terrorist attack."

Professor Carey is particularly exercised by Professor Fish's claim, in his recent book, "How Milton Works," that "in the end the only value we can put on Samson's action is the value he gives it in context."

Samson's destruction of the Philistine "Lords, Ladies, Captains," whom Milton describes as "Their choice nobility and flower," is an expression, Professor Fish says, of Milton's "reading of the divine will, and insofar as it represents his desire to conform to that will, it is a virtuous action. No other standard for evaluating it exists."

In the end it is not Milton, but Mr. Fish's interpretation of Milton, that Mr. Carey calls "monstrous - a license for any fanatic to commit atrocity." [...]

[I]t is Professor Fish who is at the heart of the dispute. He has been drawing fire for his views on Milton since 1967, when he published "Surprised by Sin," an interpretation of "Paradise Lost" that put the emphasis not on the poet's intended meaning but on the way readers responded to his poem. So it is perhaps paradoxical that Professor Fish now finds himself under attack precisely for his account, in "How Milton Works," of the poet's intentions. In his reading, the whole of Milton's work - epic poetry, religious tracts, radical pamphlets on the side of Parliament in the English civil war - puts one cause above all others: obedience to God. "I have no doubt," he writes, "that many of my fellow Miltonists will resist" his interpretation "because it flies in the face of what they believe as good post-Enlightenment liberals." Liberals, he says, believe in objectivity, disinterested consideration of
evidence, procedural safeguards for justice and above all in the primacy of rationality. "Milton," he argues, "believes none of those things."

Professor Carey seems like a nitwit. Substitute a Jewish bomber pilot for Samson and Nazi Germany for the Philistines, and suppose the pilot crashed his plane into a packed rally being addressed by Hitler: who in their right mind would argue that such a terrorist attack was not justified? It is not the death of innocents that makes terrorism wrong but the purposes for which terrorists act. Only the modern intellectual's complete inability to differentiate between right and wrong--to say that we are right and they are wrong--creates Mr. Carey's kind of confusion. Milton knew who was right. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 1, 2003 11:35 AM