Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions ed. by Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (review)

126 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 to the plays themselves, it works against the development of a cohesive, flowing argument. Nevertheless, the suggestions Goldberg makes about Webster's attitudes and the reasons for them provide us with a new perspective from which to view his complex plays. (LESLIE THOMSON) Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, editors. Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions Methuen 1987. xviii, 362. us $66.50 Re-membering Milton comes armed with instruments from Marx, Weber, Althusser, and Foucault to analyse Miltonic economy, production and authority; from Freud, lung, and Lacan to track subtextual sexuality; from Saussure, Barthes, and Derrida to illuminate signs and signification. There are voices here from both sides of the Atlantic and of the gender divide, and Carolivia Herron's fine essay on Milton and Afro-American literature shows how the white 'British Homer' can touch the marginalized consciousness in a sad and sometimes bitter variety of ways. It was time for Milton to join the ranks of the canonized who have recently been submitted to such contemporary critical scrutiny. Some of these essayists, however, proclaim an amateurism about which there is a shadow of the epideictic. The Milton Academy is dismissed in the preface for its 'theoretical innocence' and there is another flicker of smugness when the editors conclude with the hope that their enterprise will 'foster the conditions needed for a more engaged, as well as more theoretically and historically informed, critical literature on Milton.' There is a danger that too much self-congratulation will produce not a fresh de-institutionalized view but the manifesto ofa little Senate attentive to its own applause. And at times this tight little meta-Academy circling in on itself offers to implode. The dialectic becomes the privileged discourse of a coterie and its accessibility is problematic. Theoretically innocent members of the Academy may be surprised to find sex transpiring at every Miltonic pore, flickering and flashing in unsuspected places. When the Attendant Spirit in The Maske is 'representative of the Phallus itself' and when Milton descends into Blake's phallus, one finds oneself inclined to re-member the very title. The problem is that the argument in parts of the essays by Halpern, Loeffelholz, Kendrick, and Guillory is based on models of the mind which are unconvincing to many readers. The effect is not so much one of freshness. It is more like overhearing a group of learned Schoolmen speculating about epicycles and eccentricities in the Ptolemaic universe just as Copernicus was going to press. Occasionally, there is a trace of wilfulness and strain in the recourse to intellectual platforms as Kendrick switches ideological rafts or in Halpern 's biographical reading of the 'Nativity Ode.' He works from the HUMANITIES 127 Lacanian model of the infant anticipating in a mirror image the maturation of its power. The story of Christ's kenosis is supposedly Milton's story. But the kenosis parallel does not work. The proud young poet can only treasure a latency. Unlike God, he is subject to a Keatsian terror that he may cease to be while yet unfulfilled. There can be no dehiscence for the apprentice. Overhead, the intellectual aerobatics is fascinating, sometimes in lazy elegance, sometimes in frenzy. Kenneth Gross's notes on Satan are of the first kind. Retracing that old flight path through Blake, Shelley, and Empson, he unloads contemporary liberal indignation on the unfortunate C.S. Lewis. Of the more frenzied kind is Mary Loeffelholz's effort as she skilfully interweaves fictions and myths of maternity with a social view of patriarchal Jacobean society and a poetics of authorial Oedipal jealousies. Kendrick, Guillory, and Jarvis are impressive in this kind, with their free-falling abstractions. However, the reservations made above do not apply to a group of excellent essays, which includes Mary Nyquist's energetic analysis of Milton's 'deeply masculinist' view of sexual hierarchy. Pro-feminist defenders of the poet will have to answer her. Perhaps her scornful tone, though, could have been tempered by contact with Eleanor Cook's melic, elegant, and subtle feminist inquiry into insidious aspects of gendermarking in aesthetics and biblical hermeneutics. Richard Bradford establishes a perspective (post-Ricks and with...