Against the Grain
Volume 25 | Issue 6 Article 41
2013 Collecting to the Core--Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin Cecile M. Jagodzinski Resources for College Libraries, [email protected]
Anne Doherty CHOICE/ACRL, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons
Recommended Citation Jagodzinski, Cecile M. and Doherty, Anne (2013) "Collecting to the Core--Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin," Against the Grain: Vol. 25: Iss. 6, Article 41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7436
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Collecting to the Core — Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin by Cecile M. Jagodzinski (British Literature Editor, Resources for College Libraries) Column Editor: Anne Doherty (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL)
Column Editor’s Note: The “Collecting speare, of course, but what about John Don- and 1674.2 It was published after the Res- to the Core” column highlights monographic ne, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Johnson, toration of the monarchy in England, fol- works that are essential to the academic li- Jane Austen, the Brontës, the Brownings, lowing years of civil war — years in which brary within a particular discipline, inspired Charles Dickens, and, of more recent vin- Milton stood on the side of the republicans by the Resources for College Libraries bib- tage, James Joyce, Nobel laureate Seamus as a prolific author of pamphlets opposing liography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). Heaney, or winners of the Man Booker Charles I and the royalists. Especially after In each essay, subject specialists introduce award? In order to escape the burden of such the publication of the fourth edition of Para- and explain the classic titles and topics that a choice, I am proposing a single core title, dise Lost, Milton was “known and celebrated continue to remain relevant to the undergrad- along with its associated referents, that has in England as the author of the national uate curriculum and library collection. Dis- had a profound influence onMilton studies: Protestant epic.”3 The poem was regarded ciplinary trends may shift, but some classics Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin: The Reader as a work of supreme sublimity, notable for never go out of style. — AD in Paradise Lost.1 Not only did this critical its aesthetics as well as its Christian mor- work change the way scholars thought about alism. Several positive critical appraisals, eaders, I hope, will pardon the cli- John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost; it commentaries, and explanations of the work ché, but writing on core monographs illustrates the way in which the critical tradi- appeared in the eighteenth century. in British literature, from the Old tion in literature evolves, and, more broadly, The critical winds shifted with the rise of R how scholarship operates as a conversation English period through the twenty-first cen- the Romantic movement in the nineteenth tury, provides one with an embarrassment between and among scholars. century. For William Blake and Percy of riches. Which period best represents the In order to set Fish’s work into its Bysshe Shelley, the poem’s key figure was strength and influence of British literature proper context, a brief history of the criti- not Adam, Eve, or God the Father or the Son, on literature as a whole, or on the literatures cal reception to Paradise Lost is in order. but Satan himself. Shelley, in the preface to of other parts of the globe? Which authors It was first published in 1667, with later his Prometheus Unbound, invokes Milton should one regard as preeminent? Shake- seventeenth-century editions in 1668, 1669, continued on page 70
Against the Grain / December 2013 - January 2014 69 Milton’s poetry doesn’t mean very much.”10 notes that Eve’s “wanton” hair is not to be Collecting to the Core Ricks, who goes on to defend Milton and his taken as an indication of a predilection toward from page 69 poem, classifies the charges against Milton sin; we only read it that way because our fallen as misreadings and faults attributable to the natures cannot rightfully interpret “prelapsari- as “the inheritor of a republican tradition in poem’s stylistics.11 an vocabulary.” Fish also answers those who poetry” whose leaders, a new generation of C. S. Lewis was one of the few critics regard Satan as the hero of the poem; in one poets, sought to overcome tyranny. In A De- who countered the anti-Miltonists in his chapter, he distinguishes between Satan’s fence of Poetry, Shelley regards Satan as “the seminal work A Preface to Paradise Lost.12 “epic heroism” and true Christian heroism. Hero of Paradise Lost” because of the devil’s Immediate responses to Fish’s work were 4 His arguments became “dominant in Milton sheer “energy and magnificence.” The most scholarship” and contributed to a critical mixed. Rosalie Colie, in a review of the book, influential of the Romantics in the history of shift in readings of Milton’s work.13 Lewis says that Fish’s “stylistic, rhetorical, and for- Miltonic criticism, however, was William bases his reading in part on hierarchy and mal analyses of Paradise Lost go a long way Blake. Not only did he illustrate several of the natural superiority of God, as well as the to dissuade us that Milton was “affected by Milton’s works, but he famously remarked in disobedience which causes the Fall, ideas anti-Christian feelings,” as Empson et al. had The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton which surely would have been repugnant claimed. Both the seventeenth-century and “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & 14 the twentieth-century “guilty reader” is drawn 5 to the Romantics to whom Lewis alludes. God and at liberty when of Devils & Hell.” Anticipating Fish, he contrasts the “unfallen into the poem to identify with Adam and Eve, Blake’s estimation is repeated throughout the sexual activity” of the early parts of the poem who are taken unawares by temptation and criticism surrounding Paradise Lost; indeed, with the fallen sexuality of the later sections Satan. Colie recognizes that Milton’s rhe- the character of Satan becomes the central fig- and argues that a “heroic” Satan is attractive torical strategies are meant to convey proper ure in what came to be known as “the Milton because an evil character is incomparably Christian doctrine.19 Barbara Lewalski, controversy,” and Satan presents Fish with easier to draw than a good one.15 It is easy to meanwhile, criticizes the reader-response the opportunity to make some of his strongest draw on the “bad passions” within ourselves; approach to the text: “Fish’s theologically arguments in Surprised by Sin. it is more difficult to imagine the best in grounded insistence upon the defects of the By the early twentieth century, the image ourselves “prolonged and more consistently ‘fallen’ readers deprives them of any basis for of Milton as a republican combatting tyranny embodied in action.”16 criticizing the poem: everything in the poem was replaced by a consideration of Milton the In Surprised by Sin, Fish responds to must be assumed to succeed entirely … for epic poet. The Latinate (and often obscure) Milton’s critics with an ingenious argument: whatever difficulties fallen readers encounter style of Paradise Lost was criticized by the must result from their own defects rather than that we find Satan and his rhetoric so attractive 20 modernists, including T. S. Eliot, William and God so forbidding because we, as readers, their author’s.” Lewalski’s general opinion Empson, Ezra Pound, and F. R. Leavis. To are fallen. Like Adam and Eve, we fall into of the book, however, is positive: she appreci- them, Milton’s God was a cruel tyrant who the trap of Satan’s magnificent speeches and ates Fish’s engagement with the epic similes simply gave long and boring speeches. In a (anti)heroic gestures precisely because we and style of the poem. John Peter Rumrich 1936 essay, Eliot opines that Paradise Lost have inherited the faults of our first parents. was one of Fish’s detractors, insisting that “is not serious poetry, not poetry fully occu- his work relies primarily on rhetoric, just as In the preface to the book, Fish summarizes 21 pied about its business, but rather a solemn his purpose: Satan does in the poem. But even Rum- game.”6 Noted (and formidable) critic F. R. rich, in a later article (within a footnote), My subject is Milton’s reader, and my Leavis does not mince words in his commen- admits to the legacy of Surprised by Sin and thesis, simply, that the uniqueness of taries on Milton and the pro-Milton camp. In “the extent to which even now our Milton is the poem’s theme — man’s first disobe- 22 an essay entitled “Mr Eliot and Milton,” Lea- Fish’s Milton.” dience and the fruit thereof — results vis remarks on “Milton’s failure to realize his in the reader’s being simultaneously a A second, thirtieth-anniversary edition of undertaking — to conceive it dramatically as 23 participant in the action and a critic of Surprised by Sin was published in 1997. In a whole … He remains in the poem too much his own performance.17 a Times Literary Supplement review of the John Milton, declaiming, insisting, arguing, second edition, Cedric C. Brown pronounces suffering, and protesting.”7 In Milton’s God, Fish intends to explore two patterns: the “Those of us who have taught Milton have William Empson centers on the figure of reader’s humiliation and his education. always known that Fish radically overstated God the Father. Quite radically, he admits This intentional focus on the reader is what the case when he claimed that Milton actually that “I think the traditional God of Christi- differentiates Fish’s approach from that of coerced the reader in Paradise Lost to fall anity very wicked, and have done so since Milton’s other defenders, especially Lewis. with Adam and Eve.” In fact, he calls Fish’s I was at school, where nearly all my little It also makes use of the modern literary the- argument “bullying,” and praises other critics playmates thought the same.”8 Satan, on the ory of reader-response criticism, a method to who challenge Fish, including Rumrich’s other hand, makes us “feel the agony of his which Fish would remain committed, later Milton Unbound.24-25 Fish, however, makes ruined greatness;” in other words, Satan, as producing the influential workIs There a Text no apologies for his early work and makes in all tragedies, is the hero with a tragic flaw.9 in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive no changes to the original text. Instead, in 18 Confronting “The Milton Controversy” in Communities. a lengthy preface to the anniversary edition, Milton’s Grand Style, Christopher Ricks Fish makes three points in the book: that he responds to his critics: “You will probably summarizes the anti-Miltonists’ views: “The the central figure of the poem is the reader; have noticed that in the course of defending basic point of the an- that Milton’s purpose is to educate the reader Surprised by Sin, I have repeated the gesture ti-Miltonists, then, on his position as fallen; and that Milton’s that most infuriated some of its readers. I is simply that method is an inventive one: he wishes to have turned objectors into devils and replied re-create the drama of the Fall. Fish em- to their points by hitting them over the head phasizes that the reader admires Satan even with mine.”26 Neither should academic though his rhetoric (that which tempted the librarians offer any apologies for retaining Romantics) is false, despite its virtuosity; the Fish’s seminal book in their collections, reader is “surprised by sin,” just as Adam and since it represents a pivotal argument in the Eve were. This interest in the language of the centuries-long discussion of Milton the poet, poem underpins Fish’s argument; the reader as well as an important exemplar of reader-re- is fooled by language because he knows only sponse criticism and the evolving critical fallen language. In an extended explication of approaches to literary works. a passage describing Eve before the Fall, Fish endnotes on page 71
70 Against the Grain / December 2013 - January 2014