How Milton Works (review)

194 Reviews the less knowledgeable - in sections like 'Performance Chaucer'. Altogether an entertaining, well-written book, with something for everybody. Raluca Radulescu Centrefor Medieval and Renaissance Studies Trinity College Dublin Fish, Stanley, How Milton Works, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2001; cloth; pp. 616; R R P US$35.00; ISBN 0674004655. In this large volume, Stanley Fish explores a single thesis: 'Milton works f the inside out' (p. 23). The whole body of Milton's verse and prose is, according to Fish, characterised by the priority of the internal over the external. Epistemologically, this means that knowledge is not acquired by a movement from empirical data to the mind, but vice versa: the mind uses certain nonverifiable , axiomatic assumptions to interpret the external world. Thus one's beliefs cannot be proved or disproved by external events or phenomena, but rather the external world serves only to confirm what the mind already knows. Moreover, Fish posits that Milton must also work from the inside out for the reader. Political, theological and philosophical questions should be abstracted from Milton's language, rather than being brought to the text from without. This intemal-to-extemal thesis is most convincingly presented in the analyses of the shorter poems, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (Chapter 9), Comus (Chapters 3 and 4) and Paradise Regained (Chapters 10 and 11). The Nativity Ode portrays the 'dramatically undramatic' form of Miltonic action, wherein the righteous character simply possesses a certain state of mind, and consistently maintains it in the face of external evil. Similarly, the chastity of the Lady in Comus is dramatically static, incapable of being moved by the external influence of Comus. The only real movement is in the reader's or spectator's developing understanding of good and evil. Thus the same lack of action which some have criticised in the masque is for Fish its fundamental dramatic merit. Paradise Regained likewise portrays the internal, entirely stable (and therefore passive) goodness of Christ against Satan's temptations of action and movement. Fish compares the verse's style to this theme of interior stasis: Christ's rather colourless language, as opposed to Satan's luxuriant rhetoric, is"the verbal equivalent of standing and waiting, of doing nothing' (p. 339). Moreover, the reader's response of increasing approval of passivity and Reviews 195 disapproval of assertive action is itself 'a subplot in the poem's action' (p. 337). Thus in the three poems the reader is moved towards virtue by the interior stasis ofMilton's heroic characters. The simple idea that virtue is equated in these works with a static condition of mind, rather than any external action, has much to commend it. Indeed, it seems that the whole argument ofHow Milton Works is essentially a development ofFish's perceptive reading of Comus and Paradise Regained. It is unfortunate then that the same interpretative thesis yields considerable distortion when applied to other works and to Milton's oeuvre as a whole. The analysis of Samson Agonistes (Chapters 12 and 13), for example, is both eccentric and strained. The argument in Chapter 7 that Lycidas is concerned with the immolation of the individual will is unconvincing, although Fish is surely right when he observes that Milton's 'fierce egoism is but one-half of his story' (p. 280). Fish's argument is weakest when the discussion turns to Milton's prose. Chapter 5, on the Areopagitica, and Chapter 6, on the early prose, are characterised by both convoluted and reductive interpretative strategies, and the strange admixture ofpost-structuralist approaches prevents these chapters from achieving any real coherence of argument. Nevertheless, even in the discussion ofMilton's prose there are moments of brilliance, as is the case in Fish's acute analysis ofthe sentence on true and false eloquence in Milton's Apology against a Pamphlet (pp. 115-20). The book's most serious flaw, as also its greatest merit, arises from the nature of the thesis itself. To identify any single interpretative key to the entire Milton oeuvre is, even if not wholly convincing, a formidable achievement. Yet the simplicity of Fish's interpretative key invests the entire book with a repetitiousness that is hard...