Skepticism and poetry in Milton's infernal conclave.(Critical Essay)

In the preface to the second edition of Surprised by Sin (1997), Stanley Fish claims that his book's success during the previous thirty years is a result of its ability to reconcile the arguments of the two major competing strains in Milton criticism, the Christian and Romantic camps. "By shifting the field where coherence was to be found from the words on the page to the experience they provoked," Fish asserts, "I was able to reconcile the two camps under the aegis of a single thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are; its method ... is to provoke in its readers wayward, fallen responses which are then corrected by one of several authoritative voices (the narrator, God, Raphael, Michael, the Son). In this way, I argued, the reader is brought to a better understanding of his sinful nature and is encouraged to participate in his own reformation." (1) To the extent that Fish's method and interpretation has become hegemonic in Milton studies in the thirty years since the original publication of the book, his claim of having reconciled the two camps is perhaps justified, but, of course, this does not mean that he has actually succeeded in solving "the Milton problem," as it has long been called. Indeed, as the equivocation in the first sentence of this passage would indicate, there is always a kind of duplicity in Fish's approach that makes it unclear what his claims actually are. The information before the semicolon suggests that all interpretation is unavoidably subjective and that the best one can do is analyze how the various subjectivities come into play, but the information after the semicolon suggests that there is an authoritative interpretation--and that it was written by C. S. Lewis.

If Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are, the fact of the matter is that some of those readers continue to hold to at least a version of the Romantic interpretation. For these readers, the "authoritative voices" imparting correction are simply not persuasive and hence not authoritative. Fish is certainly not able to prove that the "authoritative voices" are authoritative because the process of conferring literary authority depends on the actual responses of individual readers. He is only able to assert that they are authoritative because the tradition regards them as such. The whole argument thus rests on a tautology. The reason for the success of Fish's book, in other words, has nothing to do with any reconciliation between the two camps--for this could only result from an interpretation that actually resolves the Milton problem--but rather with the fact that, firmly ensconced in the "Christian" camp, Fish has discovered an ingenious method of defusing the Romantic perspective without merely circumventing it or denying its force. He argues that the force of the Romantic perspective stems from our fallenness and that Milton constructs the figure of Satan in such a way as to make us identify with him but only so as to enable us eventually to recognize our own sinfulness. The argument is not vulnerable to empirical refutation any more than it is empirically demonstrable. The fact that the argument is tautological (we are moved by Satan's sinful speeches because we ourselves are sinful), or that Fish's "reader's response theory" is a Rube Goldberg device that makes it seem as if what unfolds in the reader's mind is predicated on something other than what unfolds in the text, has been no impediment to its becoming hegemonic, at least not for an American academic community that seems willing to sacrifice Milton's poetry for any theory that offers the hope of a univocal solution to the impasse.

The Romantic perspective, baldly stated as it had initially been by William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, was of course untenable as a full-scale interpretation of the poem for its own reasons. First and most obviously, it contradicted Milton's Christianity, not only his theological writings but also his professed aims in the poem itself and not only his professed aims but also what one might call the larger trajectory of the poem. Second, even if there is a heroic dimension to Milton's representation of Satan and the devils, the Romantic reading conveniently forgot that this is largely confined to the first two books. Finally, the Romantics, caught up in their own antinomian struggles, were unwilling to attend to Milton's depiction of the angel Abdiel, who, though a minor figure in terms of the space allotted to him, serves as a faithful counterexample to Satan's heroism and seems to be the character with whom Milton most fully identifies in the epic: "So spake the Seraph Abdiel faithful found, / Among the faithless, faithful only hee." (2)

The impasse that Fish's book purports to resolve remains, and, quite clearly, will continue to remain, so long as we insist on a univocal solution to the problem. It is an oversimplification to say, with T. S. Eliot, that "[t]o extract everything possible from Paradise Lost, it would seem necessary to read it in two different ways, first solely for the sound, and second for the sense," but there is certainly tension between the poem's professed doctrine and its poetry. (3) When Shelley says in A Defence of Poetry that "[n]othing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost," he is expressing only one aspect of this tension that every reader of the poem must feel. (4)

Whatever we make of Milton's relationship to Christianity (and, of course, there is a good deal that can be made of it), Paradise Lost is a Christian poem to the core. If, however, we seek to deny that there is something authentically heroic and magnificent in books 1 and 2--if not in the devils themselves, then at least in Milton's language--we do so only by reducing the poetry to rhetoric. Fish is not alone in having to resort to this expedient. Indeed, he is preceded by Milton himself, who, like Dante in the Divina Commedia, is sometimes embarrassed, or even frightened, by what he has wrought. In the Ulysses canto of the Inferno, Dante gives voice to the anxiety of the Christian poet when he says (in Allen Mandelbaum's translation), "and more than usual, I curb my talent, / that it not run where virtue does not guide." (5) The one thing the poet is not able to do, however, is to curb his talent. (6) Whatever Dante may have intended, the Ulysses he created is as eloquent a spokesman for an incipient humanism as any we have in literature. (7) In the case of Paradise Lost, we are left with a similar set of unresolved and unreconcilable dualities, and it may even be that without those dualities this gigantic work of art could never have been written. If such is indeed the case, then instead of attempting to resolve the contradictions, we should attempt to understand them: why they arise, what role they play, and (despite the inconveniences they pose) what they enable in the poem.

The conclave in Hell, in which the devils debate the course of action they will pursue, presents itself as a purely rhetorical situation, and thus offers an excellent opportunity for examining the relationship between rhetoric and poetry that unfolds in the opening books of the epic. The devils are rhetoricians, and there is a long tradition, going back at least to Plato, in which rhetoric has been associated with sophistry. In Platonic accounts, the sophist, unconcerned with truth, will try to make the worse appear the better argument and will emphasize style over substance. It is clear from the picture we are given of Belial (who may be said to stand in for all of the devils in this respect) that Milton--or his narrator--is drawing on this Platonic tradition and the conventions associated with it:

 
   On th' other side up rose 
   Belial, in act more graceful and humane [than Moloch]; 
   A fairer person lost not Heav'n; he seem'd 
   For dignity compos'd and high exploit: 
   But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue 
   Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear 
   The better reason, to perplex and dash 
   Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low; 
   To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds 
   Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd ...