Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics by Elizabeth Sauer (review)

206 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 allegorizations of a perceived providential pattern in contemporaneous events and a sacralization of the favourite's role as faithful servant to the crown and the state. A conclusion rounds out the book's argument with a comparison between Calderon's political views and the 'realist' position adopted by the dramatist's near-contemporary, Gracian. If this book has a.flaw, it is the occasional lack of sufficient analysis of possible relalionsbetweenCalderon's politicalviews and contemporaneous events. For example, how can we explain the change from the apotheosis of the Count-Duke Olivares in El nuevo palacio del Retiro to the apparent (albeit veiled) critique of Olivares as favourite in La cisma de Inglaterra? What circumstances could have changed Calder6n's view? This (minor) shortcoming aside, the book's finely argued analyses will doubtless garner deserved critical attention. In addition, the text has been attractively designed, and it possesses a useful bibliography and highly usable index. The well-translated quotations will facilitate the accessibility to those not conversant with Spanish. (BARBARA E. KURTZ) Elizabeth Sauer. Barbarous Dissonance and Images ofVoice in Milton's Epics McGill-Queen's University Press. X, 214. $49.95 Elizabeth Sauer has written a fascinating and important study of-Milton's epics. She explores their various narrative voices within the texts but also in their wider historical milieu. The discussion is often difficult and elusive and obviously much indebted to contemporary modes of critical discourse. Sauerclearlyacknowledges this truth, whichshe has illustrated throughout the book, in her concluding remarks that this 'multivocal, transhistorical approach to Milton's texts is undeniably and self-consciously the product of a late twentieth-century perspective.' 'Textuality' exists in a 'circuit of conversation' that connects and equates 'canonical and non-canonical literarytexts with the texts and voices ofcontemporaryculture and politics, as well as with a range of discursive fields whose boundaries are constantly redrawn.' Thus Sauer describes Renaissance traditions and conte?Cts in order to show how those voices may be negotiated in their time as well as defined (and 'recuperated') in our own world. Milton's representation of Nimrod in book 12 of Paradise Lost reveals 'barbarous dissonance' in which the poet develops a politicized reading of the story of Babel through whichhe shows the failure of tyranny, false authority , and kingship. Herein lies a history of polity and of the evolution of language. Subsequently, Sauer examines the variety of means by which Milton tries to account for the difficulty ofcommunicationinourpostlapsarian existence. Shefurthermore studies the narrative strategies ofSatanand HUMANITIES 207 the poet-narrator's relationship to him and to the other 'interpretive voices' of the epic; and finally Sauer identifies the interconnected discourses of creation - by Sin, Evel and Adam - through Michael's intervention. The final, climactic chapter on 'The Voices of Nebuchadnezzar in Paradise Regained' well defines the dominant argument of the book ~d offers some of its most original insights. Sauer offers what she describes as 'a multivocal and historically engaged text· that interrogates dominant ideologies of political authority through its resistance to the single "negating" monarchical voice.' She sees the final scene of Milton's 'brief epic' as a tower of Babel scene where different voices contend and struggle for identity. In a way that is generally characteristic of this book, Sauer presents a number of seventeenth-century (and earlier) instances that help to contextualize the situation. Here she believes that the Son is portrayed as a notable political and moral leader, and so she invokes William Walwyn's Vanitie of the Present Churches, possibly a model for Milton's views about verbal contests. Satan is trying to urge the Son to act as a king who will in his reign bring the world's history to an end. Satan is seen, Sauer says, as a Master ofRevels, 'the censor and monarchist, who attempts to provoke the Son to assert his godhead and fulfil the prophecy of hisimminent reign and the end of worldly history.... The Son's struggle ... is to refuse to adopt the negating, characteristically monarchical voice and instead to develop an alternative mode of expression and voice of authority.' While I do not agree that Satan's temptations differ very little...