Fishing for Milton's Meaning
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Fishing for Milton's Meaning By Phoebe Pettingell Back in 1978 Stanley Fish wrote an intriguing little book, The Living Temple: GeorgeHerbert and Catechizing, which confronted a...
...In the end, the sympathetic reader will have trouble resisting the compelling personalities of both the 17th-century Puritan and the 21 st-century postmodernist...
...Yet there can be no doubt that the critic feels a deep affinity for his subject...
...How Milton Worh provides a compelling exposition...
...one must come to any situation calling for a decision (about what to think or what to say or what to do) with an open mind, a mind prepared to jettison its most cherished convictions should the evidence tell against them...
...On Poetry Fishing for Milton's Meaning By Phoebe Pettingell Back in 1978 Stanley Fish wrote an intriguing little book, The Living Temple: GeorgeHerbert and Catechizing, which confronted a question that had long perplexed scholars and critics: Since Herbert possessed a serene faith according to his contemporaries, why is so much spiritual anguish expressed in some of the saintly clergyman's poems...
...Therefore, no matter how hard others may try to find or be one, there cannot be a rival deity...
...Liberals believe that facts (of history, justice, science) are independent of the knower, and that it is the knower's obligation to approach the task of knowing with as few preconceptions as possible so that the understanding he finally achieves is impersonal rather than a reflection of his antecedently held views and preferences...
...At the same time, the heavenly forces invariably rein in the rebelliousness...
...In a passionate, critical riff, he looses arrows of scorn on one of the chief idolatries, in his view, of our own era: liberalism...
...But, Fish insists, both contentions happen to be true...
...On the other, he is constantly tempted "to be first, preeminent, outstanding, independent, new, separate...
...In Milton's prose tracts, as in his poetry, this duality highlights the human predicament: We want to believe that somehow, somewhere, the universe holds a plan that, if grasped, would make the meaning of life clear...
...When Adam tries to exculpate himself for eating the forbidden fruit by speaking of his devotion to Eve, the Son simply replies, "Was she thy God...
...Religious conservatives and moralists approve his attempts to "justify God's ways to man," while from yet another perspective Romantics have lauded his portrayal of Satan as one of the greatest tragic heroes of all time...
...Many liberals, though, have seen him as a champion of free speech, notably in the tract Areopagitica...
...Still, the world teems with distractions that can easily lure you into attractive delusions and ultimately result in your destruction...
...Here Fish's prose takes on some of the sonorous tones and baroque enumerations of his subject...
...Liberals believe that if we are sufficiently careful in our gathering of evidence (careful, that is, to keep ourselves and our desires out of the process) the truth will finally emerge in a form everyone (whose mind is open) will acknowledge...
...These conflicting impulses play out everywhere in the poems...
...In fact, in this account Milton seems more powerful and relevant a writer than ever...
...Eliot hated his politics and theology so much, he could not approve of the verse...
...Its length notwithstanding, it is worth quoting in full for its own brand of polemic poetry: "Liberals believe that knowledge of an object (be it a piece of data, a person, a concept) is one thing and evaluation of it is another, so that it makes perfect sense to say, as Satan does, I know what good is—I just choose another path (as if knowledge and inclination could be severed from each other and opposed...
...How Milton Works might have been titled How Fish Operates...
...He wants at once to celebrate humility and to be celebrated as the celebrator of humility...
...But, as Fish delights in stressing over and over again, we have our own gods and theologies, and our particular beliefs might well sound uncouth and even ridiculous to another culture...
...Simultaneously we are aware that most of what we apprehend is the product of what we have learned or experienced, the particular set of circumstances in which we find ourselves, the limitations of our culture and what we have studied...
...Fish has a different take...
...According to Fish, much of the drama of the poet's works arises from a conflict between two viewpoints: "one that regards every situation as a space of new possibilities and new meanings, the other that regards every situation as a space to be filled with certainties already known and inscribed with the single meaning everything always displays...
...God is omnipotent...
...Though Fish has relentlessly attacked liberalism throughout his career, his choice of such subjects as Herbert and Milton—considered by many to be the supreme poets of faith in the English language—indicates that his allies are not those who say mockingly, with Pontius Pilate, "What is truth...
...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...
...Liberals believe that the most important of these procedures is the machinery of rationality, of those laws of logic attached to no agenda or vision, but sufficiently general in their scope as to provide a normal perspective from the vantage point of which any agenda or vision can be assessed and, if necessary, corrected...
...In recent years, feminists have decried Milton's misogyny...
...Early in the book, Fish tips his hand to show us the heart of his own fascination with Milton's uncompromising ideas...
...Why should we care...
...Indeed, innumerable readers have wondered why the whole story could not be as gripping as Satan's plot against the divine or Adam's disobedience...
...This rebuttal to critics who claim Milton sided with Satan also sets up Fish's response to a related issue: Why Paradise Lost so often seems static...
...At first, that sounds like the assertion of many a Greek tragic chorus that the gods' ways are inscrutable, and we simply have to put up with them...
...Was this done merely for dramatic effect, or did it perhaps reflect doubts from an earlier period in his life...
...You don't accept Him because it answers a psychological need, or because it helps you live a more orderly life, or makes for a more humane society...
...Fish is attracted to Milton because he is both a monist who believes in one true thing, and a radical antinomian who acknowledges that we can only know what we are given to understand...
...Now, in a much weightier book entitled How Milton Works (Harvard, 632 pp., $35.00), Fish scrutinizes the Puritan bard's often epic works...
...Instead, he has often gravitated to people who devoted themselves to the service of revealed religion...
...Departing from the various historical and psychological responses of previous critics, Fish proposed that the poet was indulging in the kind of Socratic questioning that impels readers to make their own cognitive journey, culminating at the poet's chosen destination...
...Is that a paradox too...
...And because liberals believe in all of the above, they believe in the efficacy of procedures— scientific, parliamentary, judicial—designed to protect us from the overhasty judgments we make when we allow our commitments and allegiances to blind us...
...Only those characters who have strayed indulge in them...
...Thus, despite his unshakable belief that God is Truth and reality is objective, he also holds that human comprehension is so badly flawed that, in Fish's words, "the real is known only perspectivally, according to the various lights of individual knowers...
...Milton's "progressive" ideas on divorce and government also prompt them to hail him as a humanist and free spirit...
...Consider the philosophy of the following chorus in Samson: All is best, though we oft doubt, What th 'unsearchable dispose of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close...
...His Milton fully realizes and exploits the tension between opposing instincts, seeing it as part of the temptations humans face in a fallen world...
...Liberals believe that evidence lies about the world waiting to be gathered and then arranged in patterns it itself suggests...
...Twentieth-century readers and critics tended either to love or loathe his solemn, elaborate cadences and heavily Latinate vocabulary...
...Nonetheless, numerous scholars argue that, despite himself, Milton is unconsciously on Satan's side—that the Devil becomes the poet's alter ego, full of a passion and appeal absent in the portrayal of his archrival, the Son...
...Most valuably, Fish proved once again that one need not share a writer's philosophy or religious belief to fully appreciate his work...
...Or does it imply that the wily Fish is no enemy of an ultimate reality, but only doubts our ability to perceive it by ourselves...
...More significantly, he demonstrated that studying the text's form can yield more profitable interpretations than speculation based on the author's life or other extraneous material...
...For this adamant Puritan thinker, belief in God is not something natural to us...
...In Milton's universe, Fish explains, "the usual sources of interest in life and in narrative—the clash of competing but legitimate values, the attempt to discern intelligibility and design amid the apparently random details of experience, the struggle to achieve self-authenticity as one acts on life's many stages, the suspense of waiting to see how things turn out, the excitement of not knowing what comes next, the conception and execution (or failure) of long-term projects— are available to the agent only when he or she has wandered away from, lost sight of, ceased to be filled with" the knowledge that one is living out the condition of God's will...
...No one who reads this slim volume will ever think of Herbert in quite the same way afterward...
...Many people have attacked postmodernism on the grounds that it makes all things relative, denying any objective truth...
...T.S...
...it is, rather, the Enlightenment conviction that by using our intellect we can be as gods, omnipotent in our objectivity...
...He is the poet of submission and corporate identity and he is also the poet who would write something the world will not willingly let die...
...Milton believes none of these things...
...The creator of Paradise Lost has provoked the strongest reactions of any poet of his time...
...one that looks to the world and to the unfolding of events for guidance, the other that looks with a guidance already in place, and sees in every event an opportunity to reaffirm its imperative...
...Unless Milton happens to be a special passion of ours, it seems like pretty arcane stuff for the 21 st century, when many people reject the idea of a deity, or at least one so uncompromising...
...Centrifugal forces—named, variously, Satan, Comus, Chaos, Chance, the Prelates, the Confuter, Belial, Mammon, Moloch, Beelzebub, Sin, Death, Dalilah, Adam, Eve, and, sometimes, Milton—are struggling to get out, to set up their own shop, to nominate their own values, to establish their own empire, to write their own literature, to draft their own laws, to go their own way, to have their own circuitous paths...
...in] a voice so distinctive that no one could mistake it and everyone tries (and fails) to imitate it...
...As a result, the usual devices that drive literature: action, speech, plot, even understanding and intelligibility, become enticements to error in Milton's paradigm...
...You believe in God because he created you to do so...
...Fish concedes that "from the human vantage point, problems abound, and the pain of experiencing them is very real...
...This catches us in another of the poet's paradoxes: At one and the same time, humans can know that God is always with them and nevertheless feel that because of their ignorance of his ways they are in some sense on their own...
...Although many today are adherents of situational ethics, Milton unquestionably was not...
...Liberals believe that when the truth to be determined is the meaning (political, moral, legal) of an action, the previous history of the actor—whether he has in the past been a good or bad man—is largely irrelevant and that we should look only to the shape of the present circumstances when assessing him...
...We all want to understand human suffering, for sooner or later each of us must encounter it ourselves...
...If, like Milton, we happen to be writers, we may wish merely to be vessels conveying some ultimate reality that will clarify the meaning of life to others, while, in contradiction, we also seek personal immortality through our work, hoping our particular voice will stand out in the clamor of all the other writers who ever lived, so that our individuality—our uniqueness, even—may be acclaimed by posterity...
...Of course, that may seem cold comfort when we are caught up in the turmoil...
...Fish glosses this: "Disobedience to God is not wrong when the countervailing value is base (sell me your soul and I'll give you riches) and kind of okay when the countervailing value is a higher one (she's my wife, and I love her, and I have to be there for her...
...The best authors speak to us in a language that transcends our personal ideas to present paradigms that arouse our empathy and enlighten us...
...This book is a salutary reminder that it is possible to believe in an independent reality, yet also hold that our knowledge of it must be imperfect...
...As Fish observes, "Milton criticism sometimes offers us the choice between an absolutist poet with a focused vision and a single overriding message, and a more tentative, provisional poet alert to the ambiguities and dilemmas of the moral life...
...The tension between these poles is not our usual concept of literary movement, yet Fish's readings of Milton make it come alive—even for those who have always yawned at the poet's epic works...
...After all, we too find ourselves caught up in the dramas of our conflicting beliefs...
...His real foe is certainly not the assertions of religions...
...However, as Fish points out, Milton is promising more: The divine will may be hidden from us for a time, yet "like any good storyteller, God doesn't give his point away at the beginning but withholds it, calculating the moment at which its revelation will produce the maximum impact...
...On the one hand, Milton adheres to the idea that God demands absolute obedience and that dutiful followers form a universal chorus without individuality...
...Once we know this, the moments of confusion can be borne because of our assurance that ultimately the truth will be made radiantly clear...
...What about the rest of his abstruse theology...
...Oft he seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns And to his faithful Champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously...
...In the process, Fish displayed a deep understanding of Herbert's temperament and of the metaphysical systems prevalent in 17thcentury thought...
...disobedience to God is just plain wrong, and any value that seems to urge it is, at least in this moment of choice, base...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
