Stanley Fish. How Milton Works. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. vii + 616 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-00465-8.

David Loewenstein. Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiii + 413 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-77032-3.

Reviewed by Blair Hoxby (Department of English, Yale University)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2002)

How Should We Read Milton?

How Should We Read Milton?

The appearance of these two studies by distinguished Miltonists, one resolutely anti-historicist, the other scrupulous in his attention to questions of historical context, invites us to consider the power and limitations of close reading and contextual interpretation alike.

Stanley Fish may be the most famous living Miltonist. His reputation is based both on his early theoretical writings, which advance a model of interpretation based on the reader's response to a text through time, and on his influential Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (1967), which puts Fish's theory into practice in series of brilliant readings of Paradise Lost. These instantiate Fish's three-part thesis: (1) that the poem's center of reference is the reader, (2) that Milton's purpose is to teach the reader his position and responsibilities as a fallen man, and (3) that Milton's method is to entangle the reader and, by leading him into interpretive temptations, to guide him through the experience of the Fall again and again. Thus difficult lines like these "His spear, to equal which the tallest pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast / Of some great admiral, were but a wand" (PL 1.292-94) are not simply to be sorted out and filed away in their final, properly interpreted, form. The meaning of these lines resides in our experience of them, as we entertain the idea that Satan's spear is the size of a mast, only to reject it in favor of the conclusion that it stands in relation to a mast as a mast does to a wand. Fish's book has been so influential in part, I think, because it makes the case that seemingly recherché topics that could interest only literary critics--like syntax and verse form--matter to, indeed dramatize, the "big themes" that interest common readers of Paradise Lost.

Fish has continued to publish actively on Milton since the appearance of Surprised by Sin. The fruit of his labors is now gathered in How Milton Works, a book that aspires to the coherence of a monograph by assembling ten discrete essays that were previously published from 1969 to 1995, filling in the gaps with three new chapters, and framing the whole with a couple of new introductory chapters and an epilogue.

The thesis of this book is as simple as that of Surprised by Sin. Milton, and Milton's poetry, longs to return to what was lost by the Fall, a "perfect dependence of union with the center of all being" (p. 3). For Milton, there can be only one imperative: do God's will. But because the path of obedience is strictly interior and susceptible to no external tests, it is "fraught with the danger that it may be the path of self-aggrandizement" (p. 6). As Fish describes them, Milton's prose tracts and poems are "always engaged in an act of containment," often of self-denial, as "centrifugal forces" Satan, Comus, Adam and Eve, even Milton struggle to "nominate their own values," write their own literature, and thus become rival deities (pp. 8-9). Milton longs to join his voice to the universal choir's, yet he also fears the extinction of personality attendant on that consummation: promise and threat, joy and anxiety are indissoluble. Yet to read Milton's poetry as polysemous, conflicted, or tragic is to mistake the letter for the spirit: the spirit asks us to affirm against the letter, and thus against everything we admire in Milton's verse, in favor of single principle that cannot be gainsaid, that God is God.

According to Fish, Milton thinks that "what you believe, is what you see, is what you are, is what you do" (p. 36). That makes Milton opposed to everything liberals believe. Fish's Milton denies that the knower may be separated from the facts of history, justice, or science; that there are meaningful choices; that procedures, whether logical, political, judicial, or scientific serve any purpose; and that communication and persuasion are possible. It would be awfully difficult for Fish to prove this case by adducing the evidence of Milton's writings since Milton is so often on the record saying things to the contrary, especially in his prose tracts. That doesn't really matter, however, because it is our starting position that determines what we see, what we are, what we do. Some readers may be saved and see things as Fish does; others may be damned. But nothing Fish can say on the matter will make the least difference. His book is as useless as Milton's poems, an irony of which Fish (and, he claims, Milton) is not unaware. Then why write? Because those "filled with the love of truth" have no choice but to "testify" (p. 126).

Fortunately, even readers who cannot agree with Fish's larger argument will find plenty to interest them in this book, which contains, among other good things, a fine new reading of the allusions in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (better known as "Comus") to the stories of Echo and Narcissus and of Aeneas's encounter with Venus; a still-important discussion of the divorce tracts; a splendid new explication of the invocation to Book 7 of Paradise Lost; and, most impressive of all, his classic and provocative readings of Samson Agonistes_, which argue that we are at our strongest as interpreters when the play opens but find ourselves systematically robbed of interpretive resources by its end.

Many theologians and historians are likely to be dismayed by Fish's sublime indifference to fine points of doctrine and to all other considerations of historical context though even that, claims Fish, is how Milton would have it, because the great moments in Milton's poetry ultimately "resist historicization" and "remain excessive" (p. 569), unsusceptible to historical analysis because such analysis fails to read from the inside out. What Fish seems to overlook is that even thougbh some residuum of Milton's poetry defies historicization that does not mean that all of it does and that we can only define that residuum after we have undertaken a careful historicist reading. Even readers who are less historically inclined are likely to wish that Fish had turned his articles into a more shapely monograph by, for example, writing a single coherent reading of Samson Agonistes rather than printing two discrete but overlapping essays as separate chapters. But the volume is still a handy compilation of Fish's important articles. It demonstrates all the considerable virtues of what Harold Bloom would call antithetic criticism, or creative misreading.

David Loewenstein's Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries is likely to be more warmly received by historians. It is divided into two parts, the first of which is largely devoted to the trenchant criticisms that radical Puritans like the Leveller John Lilburne, the Digger Gerard Winstanley, the Ranter Abiezer Cope, the prophetess Anna Trapnel, and the Quaker George Fox mounted against the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In a book that is as interested in prose style as political argument, it may seem surprising that Loewenstein chooses to focus on Lilburne rather than the more engaging stylists Richard Overton or William Walwyn. He offers an interesting analysis, however, of the ways in which Lilburne turns himself into his own best pamphlet by making his personal ordeals an image of the sufferings of the nation. Winstanley is at his most interesting when he reads the story of Jacob and Esau as a contest between an oppressed younger brother and the lord he eventually overthrows; when he puts the vision of Daniel to his own uses to condemn, among other things, "the thieving Art of buying and selling" (quoted, p. 74); and when he recounts the story of Jonah and the gourd (Jonah 4:5-11) as a warning to Cromwell to give the people their true freedoms. Coppe follows the road of excess to the palace of wisdom. Trapnel specializes in "untutored" i.e. lame--verses uttered while she is in a prophetic trance. However earnestly Loewenstein may press his claims for the imaginative and rhetorical vigor of these writers, it comes as something of a relief to get to Andrew Marvell's poetry in Chapter Five, where Loewenstein offers a brilliant reading of the way The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector appropriates the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Protectorate's opponents. This may be the finest chapter in a book that has many high-points; it shows that historical contextualization need not be a substitute for, but may be a compliment of, extended close readings.

In the second part of the book, Loewenstein offers readings of Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Loewenstein demonstrates the extent to which royalists like Griffith Williams and radicals like Milton shared a vocabulary of monstrous rebellion which they chose to apply to different sorts of revolt. The struggle for control of words like "rebellion" and "reformation" in the pamphlet literature of the Civil Wars--in Eikonoklastes, Loewenstein argues, Milton had the affrontery to call Charles I a true "devil of rebellion in disguise" (p. 191)--energizes Paradise Lost's portrayal of a protean Satan, who at various times seems to resemble Charles I, Cromwell, the seditious Presbyterian party, and even the treacherous Irish rebels. Loewenstein insists that Paradise Lost cannot be read as a political allegory but instead draws on Civil War polemics to tell a story that teaches readers how to make sense of devious political rhetoric and conduct.

What has puzzled Miltonists more in recent years than Paradise Lost is what to make of the volume of 1671, which prints Paradise Regained with Samson Agonistes. If Samson had been printed first in the volume, critics might be readier to assent to Joseph Wittreich's plea that we recognize Samson as a negative example whose failings are made manifest by the fulfillment of the law, Jesus.[1] At stake is nothing less than Milton's attitude toward politics, and especially toward violent revolution, at the end of his life. Loewenstein diminishes the apparent differences between the two texts by pointing out that both stress the virtue of waiting patiently upon God and that both have almost apocalyptic conclusions. To be sure, Samson slays the flower of Philistia's nobility, but Jesus will also "to pieces dash / All Monarchies besides throughout the world" (4.149-50), a final conquest that is foreshadowed by the fall of Satan from the Pinnacle of the Temple. As Loewenstein sees it, the decisive actions of Samson and the patience of Jesus both prompted by inward persuasive motions are two sides of the same radical religious culture of Restoration England, which Milton deliberately juxtaposes in the same volume. That such a plan of publication might seem reasonable to a radical Puritan is suggested by a statement of George Wither: "Know...that the LORD of Hosts..is General of a two-fold Militia...; the one Natural, the other Spiritual.... The first he employeth in shedding the blood of malicious opposers...and the other, (if need be) he engageth in sufferings" (quoted p. 293; italics omitted).

This book makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of radical Puritanism. First, it reclaims some figures like Lilburne, Marvell, and Milton from the clutches of secularism. If the recent histories of classical republicanism produced by J.G.A. Pocock, Blair Worden, David Norbrook, and others have proven that Milton knew his Livy, his Lucan, and his Machiavelli, Loewenstein reminds us that even a figure like Lilburne, who would seem to be the most secular of all Loewenstein's subjects, read and cites not only Magna Carta, Coke's Institutes, the Long Parliament's Book of Declarations, and the histories of John Speed and Samuel Daniel, but the apocalyptic books of the Bible, Fox's Book of Martyrs, Luther, Calvin, Beza, Perkins, and other Protestant authorities. Indeed, one could assemble a fascinating list of the passages from scripture that radical Puritans applied to their contemporary circumstances, for Loewenstein notes biblical citations and allusions with diligence. His book also goes some way toward providing a critical vocabulary that can adequately describe and value the peculiar prose styles of radical, and particularly apocalyptic, Puritanism. I must admit, however, that while I fully concur that writers like Coppe deserve to be studied because they constitute one small part of a history of interiority, and because they were a force to be reckoned with by major writers like Marvell and politicians like Cromwell, Representing Revolution did not really convince me of two things that Loewenstein wants us to believe: that all the writers in this study, and not just Lilburne, Marvell, and Milton, were perceptive (as opposed to vocal) critics of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and that their prose and verse possesses the qualities of strongly complex imaginative literature.

Note

[1]. Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting "Samson Agonistes" (Princeton, 1986).

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Citation: Blair Hoxby. Review of Fish, Stanley, How Milton Works and Loewenstein, David, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. January, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5806

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