Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism (review)

This collection features (plus brief preface by Lieb and Labriola and introductory essay by Lana Cable) three essays on "Authorship and Authority," four on "Text and Context," and three on "The Terrorist Plot."

In "The Onomastic Destiny of Stanley Fish," Marshall Grossman imitates Fish by connecting the "trans-mat mishap" of The Fly (37–38) to Morris's troilism being Zapped and "Fish" being "groped and tickled" (37) by John Bunyan while arguing that "Fish leaves his mark on the text . . . and the text leaves its mark on Fish" (38). Barbara Lewalski, in "Milton's Idea of Authorship," argues that "no English writer before Milton fashioned himself quite so self-consciously as an author" (53) and illustrates how "the core of that self-presentation is Milton's idea of authorship . . . as a vocation" (54), independent of patronage or state control. Annabel Patterson ("Milton's Negativity") shows that "Milton tends to put his positives . . . in negative form" and that this negativity "whether of syntax or vocabulary . . . is not just a question of linguistic habit, but reflects the poet's deep psychological impulses and . . . his world view" (81). My favorite example is "not unseen."

Albert Labriola, in "The Son as an Angel in Paradise Lost," analyzes the Son's creation in Paradise Lost by examining his three literal begettings: as divine (before the poem's timeframe), as angelic (Christ's only form in the poem), and as human (prophesied in book 12). Labriola parallels these states with those of Isaiah in his Martyrdom and Ascension to illustrate the perfectibility of angelic and human nature. Stella Revard, in "Milton and Henry More: The Chariot of Paternal Deity in Paradise Lost, Book 6," sees Milton and More "using the Kabbalah to interpret Ezekiel's vision both as a political as well as the theological statement for the post-Restoration world of the 1660s" (121). She finds More and Milton oddfellows in millenarianism and that Milton "employ[ed] the cherubic chariot as the engine to defeat a corrupt kingship" (137). Joan Bennett's "Mary Astell, Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, and Feminist Liberation Theology" displaces modern feminist theory with a "liberation theology" that emphasizes "creative actualization" (154) to reread Astell, Hutchinson, and Milton. Joseph Wittreich, in "'The Ramifications of Those Ramifications': Compounding Contexts for Samson Agonistes," examines Samson's influence on writers and critics, most interestingly (for me) Mary Shelley, Malcolm X, and Ralph Ellison. Oddly, in Wittreich's Book of Judges 16:28, Samson prays to avenge "the loss of one of his eyes" (173).

"The Terrorist Plot" essays respond to Gilbert Achcar's The Clash of Barbarians: September 11 and the Making of the New World Order and John Carey's "A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes (TLS, 6 September 2002, 15–16). David Loewenstein, in "Samson Agonistes and the Culture of Religious Terror," resists Carey's characterization of Samson as suicide bomber by pointing to the different "cultural, political, and religious contexts" (208), though he admits that Milton approved of terror against the Irish. Michael Lieb's "Returning the Gorgon Medusa's Gaze: Terror and Annihilation in Milton" argues that Fish does not read Samson's final act as "regenerationist" but one that "eludes any possibility of interpretation" (231): thus, we have "interpretive anarchy" (232), not terrorism. Stanley Fish's "'There Is Nothing He Cannot Ask': Milton, Liberalism, and Terrorism" rebuts Carey's charges that Fish's reading is "a license for any fanatic to commit atrocity" (246) by noting the ambiguities (particularly that of intent) in the play.

This volume lets ten fine Miltonists do what they do best: however, the collection (except for the essays by Grossman and Fish) focuses more on "an entire range of issues" (ix) and less on analyzing Fish's connections to those issues. Even so, this collection perfectly answers the...