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How Milton Works

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Stanley Fish takes an extremely hard line in this at-least-twenty-years-in-the-making study. Besides the terrific close readings, what's most amazing here is Fish's suggestion that Milton (as either the most or at least the second-most important writer in the English language) might actually have known what he was doing. The fact that this is today a radical stance is a comment on the bizarre orthodoxy of current critical thinking. One of the most hillarious set pieces of this book is a too-true list of "What Liberals Believe," after which Fish points out that Milton believes exactly none of these things. By the end of the book I was ready -- despite being a committed atheist -- to join the Creator's angelic hordes in a rousing chorus of "Amen!"

Divine doctrine can teach a group of people they belong together, but when nationalities attempt to use an official national religion to inspire loyalty, people with a genuine attachment to religion are apt to fall for hidden beliefs and coded politics as William Shakespeare's The Tempest found itself in a political climate in which "a dramatist who wrote the way Shakespeare did was likely to get beaten up" (Clare Asquith, Shadowplay, p. 264). Stanley Fish manages to make liberals the opposite of the holy doctrines of Milton for being free in their own way:

so that it makes perfect sense
to say, as Satan does,
I know what the good is -
I just choose another path (p. 55)

Liberals believe that communication
and persuasion take place
(or should take place)
in the context of that rationality
and that it is possible to bring anyone -
except perhaps, the mentally impaired -
to a clear understanding, so long as he
or she is willing to set aside or bracket
all biases and preconceptions. (pp. 56-57).

Milton believes none of these things.
He believes that all the evidence is in
and that it points to a single conclusion -
we must discern the will of God and do it -
that should form the basis of our thought
and action in any and all situations. (p. 57).

I have tried to take a liberal view to rock and roll as a reality-based culture in the midst of commercial exploitation, but religion might have played some part of Mark David Chapman singing "Imagine John Lennon is dead" during a prayer group meeting of the Chapel Woods Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia. John Lennon was not entirely unwelcome in New York City: he was merely shot down in the street. What makes modern regimentation of the American totalitarian nobodies coincide with the ideas of Stanley Fish in How Milton Works in seeing love of self in the temptations rejected by Christ:

after seeing Christ reject
wealth, honor, arms,
art, kingdom, empire, glory,
fame, the active life,
and the life of contemplation (p. 307)

The CIA prevented Americans from gaining personal recognition of Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko in February, 1964, by locking him up to dry him out and treat him like the target of a counterintelligence operation because a previous Soviet defector, Anatoli Mikhailovich Golitsyn, had said that anybody who comes after me is a fake. Trying to make everything that happens a big secret while Golitsyn maintains his special adviser status to explain to the CIA whatever the KGB was up to. Fish has a big analysis of some lines:

But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so (p. 318)

"Not yet" is what the poem
has been saying all along,
and here it says it openly,
leaving everyone -
poet, readers, characters -
in the position in which
they have been so often placed
by the verse, waiting for
something to happen. (p. 318).

Satan has so much in common with counterintelligence operations:

The first epithet the Son applies
to Satan suggests that the fiend's
substance is largely verbal:
"composed of lies" (p. 339).

Lying, the Son continues, is
"thy sustenance, thy food"
a food Satan offers to "the Nations"
in the form of verbal "Delusions" (p. 339).

The outline of Fish's acerbic standing often eclipses his critical innovations (nearly 35 years ago now) in the invention of reader-response theory in his reputation setting initial study of Milton in Surprised by Sin. Now he returns to study of Milton in this magisterial book. Fish is popularly known for inadvertently setting off the most embarrassing scandal in the science wars when Alan Sokal's hoaxing contribution to Fish's journal, Social Text was denounced by Sokal as a paradoy of postmodernist cant. Fish's own pathetic comeback dampened the brief hegemony of postmodernist political trends. Fish is also a controversial legal theorist (The Trouble with Principle) and a glib combatant in the culture wars (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too), but it is as a reader of John Milton that he first made his most enduring mark, with 1967's Surprised by Sin.In the wake of the Sokal disaster, Fish has left the demoralized English department of Duke University for the University of Illinois, Chicago where he has returned his attentions to his once-revolutionary reader-response criticism in this surprisingly jargon free study, How Milton Works. This book concentrates on the whole range of Milton's oeuvre in prose and poetry. Fish asserts that the core of Milton's significance is richly theologically, in that "there is only one choice to be or not to be allied with divinity." In various chapters Fish reworks the rich mythic structure of Paradise Lost to show how the Fall that separated Satan from Heaven parallels Adam and Eve loss Eden. So the meaning of human existence is the attempt to find restoration in the Divine image. This is perhaps ironically the single foundation of meaningful action, politics, individuality, and poetry, including Milton's own. It is obvious that not all readers of Milton will so easily agree with Fish's premises or conclusions but it is likely to quicken Milton study as his earlier study did. Also his painstaking close readings and carefully wrought arguments, enough so that perhaps many will be encouraged to return and read anew this most British of our poets. The rich architecture of Milton's epics, it abstract phrasing and taut moral reach and ambivalence that is at once immobile in its traditionalism and radical in it modernism makes Fish's readings and argument another milestone in Milton studies.

Fish's approach to texts, including statutes and the US Constitution (he is perhaps better known for jurisprudence than for lit crit) moves the text off the page, and into the class -- the interpretive community. But this is always a tricky move, and the way Fish executes it leaves us with no glue to prevent the fissioning of "interpretive community" into factions of one, just so many obstreperous individuals with nothing more to say to each other, because each has his own (mutually contradictory) inward disposition, a self-reinforcing dogmatism in the light of which all evidence is interpreted.

This is not law nor is it literature. This is the chaos of competing autisms.

The way out of this chaos would take us through history. It would involve the realization that history is not simply a collection of texts. The execution of King Charles I was not a sentence in a book, "King Charles was beheaded today," but was a real fleshy neck on a real block, as an axe swung through its downward arc. As a literary theorist, literary critic, and legal theorist, Fish has consistently dismissed the importance of such physical extra-textual events. It is no wonder that the texts become insubstantial if the world in which they are written is rendered insubstantial, too, so all we have is a group of graduate students sitting around in our own day gabbing about their own gabbling.