Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority by Stephen M. Fallon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 505 that is not entirely without ambiguity especially when one is dealing with phrases like "way oflife" Many would argue that, rather than the reasoned argument of theology ,Merton's depiction of the experience of the spiritual life is his essential subject matter and his forte as a writer. If one were talking about Merton as a Romantic, for example, one would be led to see Merton as a practitioner of Romanticism rather than an analyst of it. In a sense with Merton we are dealing with the primary materials of the religious life rather than with the rational analysis of them, which would seem to be the province of theology. Certainly, one recognizes in Pramuk himself someone who takes a carefully reasoned, analytical, and systematic approach to his subject. Merton, on the other hand, typically writes intuitively, spontaneously, and imaginatively. Thus, Pramuk's claim that Merton is a theologian and in particular a Christologist seems somewhat at variance with Merton's methods as a writer. This is not to dispute that there is theological ore to be mined in Merton writings. One feels here that Pramuk is provoked by the reputation that Merton has among many academics as one who writes evocativelyabout the spiritual lifethough not as a theologian thus seemingly placing him lower in the intellectual pecking order than would otherwise be the case. Many readers, on the other hand, academics and others, will argue that Merton's writings because of their originality, vividness, and subtlety about the experience of the spiritual life occupy a space of their own, one that many would regard as at least as Significantas the writings of a multitude oftheologians. Nevertheless, on the whole readers must be grateful to Christopher Pramuk for providing the study of Merton with fresh contexts and lenses through which to see his writings anew. Ross Labrie University ofBritish Columbia, emeritus Miltotis Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority. ByStephen M. Fallon. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. ISBN 13:978-0-8014-4516-3; 10: 0-8014-4516-7. Pp. xxi + 274. Stephen Fallon's book is the mature product of well over a decade of study, reflection, and engagement with other Miltonists on the endlessly fascinating topic of Milton's self-image. It belongs to the genre of psychological biography, not literary criticism strictly speaking, though the interpretation of texts does enter in as Fallon draws on nearly the full range of Milton's literary work for clues in his investigation , as well as making good use of the insights of other scholars before him. In these works he find Milton's presence-pace Roland Barthes-through various forms and degrees of deliberate self-representation (though sometimes veiled): in his own voice in the prose, as speaker and narrator in the poems, and in "characters who uncannily represent him" (ix). He finds Milton's presence also in "uninten- 506 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE tional" self-revelation (2), arising from "unresolved tensions in the author" that "disrupt the surface" of the text in a "return of the repressed;' in ways discernible by the acute reader who may notice various kinds of departure from normal grammar and acceptable argument. Such disruptions, Fallon says (following Paul de Man), exhibit a "structural intentionality" (12),one that goes beyond what the author consciously intended. Fallon traces Milton's self-representations across three stages of his life:the period up to his early thirties, when Milton was finding his vocation as a poet and a growing confidence in the exercise of his gifts; second, a period when Milton felt obliged to defer his poetic ambitions and at the same time felt his early selfimage threatened by several failures-in his marriage, his public reception, and his eyesight; and the final stage, when his major poems were published. On this framework Fallon describes a "trajectory" from early, "relatively naive" claims to authority based on superior qualities, both intellectual and moral, "through the unsettling of this idealized self-construction, to the more conflicted and chastened self-representations of the mature Milton" (xii). But the complexity appears early: barely out of college,Milton exhibits "pugnacity and defensive anxiety, ... syntactic tortuousness;' and "a concern with ... belatedness...