Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Edited by Michael   Lieb and Albert C.   Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewMilton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.Stephen M. FallonStephen M. FallonUniversity of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author University of Notre DamePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBy any measure this is a valuable book, with excellent essays by many of the leaders of the American Milton establishment. Nevertheless, it shows the strains of the festschrift genre. One can start with the titles, sub and main. The wide variety of scholarly and critical approaches represented by the essays, some of which are only tangentially related to Stanley Fish's work, cast some doubt on the title's claim that we are living in the “Age of Fish.” Michael Lieb and the late and deeply lamented Albert Labriola divide the essays between the subtitle's three imperfectly parallel groups, “Authorship,” “Text,” and “Terrorism.” The first two are literary critical categories and the third is a theme. It is no reflection on the essays or on the editors' success in gathering an impressive lineup of scholars to say that the result is more a collection of impressive parts than a coherent whole.The three essays gathered under the rubric of “Authorship and Authority” have little in common. Marshall Grossman's essay, “The Onomastic Destiny of Stanley Fish,” is, characteristically, both fertile and demanding. Barbara Lewalski offers the kind of confident, authoritative, and well-crafted summary of “Milton's Idea of Authorship” that one would expect from the author of an excellent recent biography of Milton, to say nothing of her distinguished books and articles of Milton criticism.1 Lewalski's Milton is busy redefining authorship and an author's relation to patrons and readers. The finest essay in the opening section is Annabel Patterson's contribution, “Milton's Negativity.” The negativity is in the first instance syntactic. Patterson traces Milton's predilection for double and triple negatives not only to the influence of Latin but also to some of his deepest preoccupations, and especially to the vocational anxiety, the defensiveness of one long choosing and beginning late.The four essays in “Text and Context” constitute the book's strongest group. Labriola returns to some of the preoccupations of his seminal 1981 essay on the kenotic Christology of Paradise Lost.2 He discovers an intriguing analogue for the Son's descent in Paradise Lost in the apocryphal Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, a work composed and redacted across several centuries surrounding the birth of Christ. Milton's Son, according to Labriola, follows the same parabola as the Son in the text, as redacted in the early Christian period, from incarnation as an angel through incarnation as human to re-ascent to Heaven as both divine and human. While Labriola sees his argument as a useful intervention in the old debate about Arianism and subordinationism in Milton, those who think that debate long settled in favor of an Arian Milton will still find the essay valuable. Stella Revard's finely nuanced essay on the chariot of paternal deity in Milton and Henry More engages those interested in source studies, theological contexts, and shifting political currents in the 1660s. The two products of Christ's College—one royalist, one antiroyalist, but both millenarians—use the chariot in surprisingly similar but instructively different ways to encode political dissent during the Restoration. Joan Bennett finds an analogue for Milton's hermeneutical practice in the parliamentarian Lucy Hutchinson's biblical epic Order and Disorder, and she argues that both writers foreshadow feminist liberation theology. Bennett's test case is the apparently patriarchal but, in her reading, actually liberating episode of the judgment of Adam in Paradise Lost (10.145–56). Whatever one thinks about the dangers of anachronism courted here, the essay is rich and illuminating. In the section's final essay, Joseph Wittreich reprises his revisionist reading of Samson Agonistes as a warning against the religious appropriation of violence. The most intriguing new material is on the direct influence of Samson Agonistes on nineteenth-century biblical criticism.Wittreich's essay gestures forward to the final section, “The Terrorist Plot,” in which three essays take up the gauntlet thrown by John Carey in a September 2002 Times Literary Supplement essay that dubbed Samson Agonistes as interpreted by Fish “a work in praise of terrorism.”3 David Loewenstein argues for the poem's participation in a seventeenth-century “culture of religious terror” and for its distance from twenty-first-century terrorism (203). He emphasizes differences between al Qaeda and Samson: bin Laden targeted the World Trade Center while Samson reluctantly accepts the summons to the Temple of Dagon only after an initial adamant refusal; suicide bombers welcomed death as part of the ritual while one can argue that Samson does not intend to kill himself. Ultimately, Loewenstein argues that the mysteriousness of the divine will in the play and the authenticity of the “rousing motions” distinguish Samson from Islamic terrorists (219). The terms and the force of this argument might be questioned. At the same time, Loewenstein finds a significant new context for the Samson Agonistes in sectarian, and particularly Quaker, writings on divine wrath and vengeance on persecutors.If Loewenstein defends Milton against the charge of terrorism, Lieb in his ingenious contribution defends Fish, throwing himself on Carey's sword. It is Lieb, who has written often about the odium Dei and “God's living dread” and who sees a regenerate Samson as the representative of God's purgative violence, who should be accused of encouraging terrorists rather than Fish.Fish himself, as he often does in person, gets the final word in the book. Fish reiterates his argument that there is no other criterion for evaluating Samson's action than that it conforms to Samson's understanding of (an ultimately mysterious) divine will. That is not Fish's criterion, writes Fish, but Milton's, embodied throughout his works; Carey's mistake is to confuse Fish and Milton. To ask for a different criterion is to pursue politics or moral philosophy or psychology rather than literary criticism, and doing literary criticism is, Fish asserts tirelessly, the literary critic's job. Fish's essay, as one would expect, is well crafted and provocative.With the parts in view, a few words on the whole. The essays, many of them excellent, vary widely in attention to Fish's legacy. This may be a missed opportunity. The opening sections on “Author” and “Text” evoke a puzzle in Fish's work that a volume such as this might have addressed more directly: the champion of reader-response criticism and interpretive communities is one of the most relentlessly author-centered critics out there. Lieb does address the question, making sense of the puzzle by disassembling it and arranging it diachronically: the “harassed reader” of Surprised by Sin is replaced by the aspirant to the “angelic choir” in How Milton Works (229).4 But aren't they really versions of the same thing? The reader is harassed, if she is, into the choir. What Lieb sees as development from one to the other in Fish may be an unresolved tension in Fish's career, vividly highlighted in the distance between the claim that interpretive communities validate readings and Fish's insistence on the unchanging validity of a good interpretation based on the author's intention. Milton scholars are in an ideal position to observe the gulf between Fish the Miltonist and Fish the theorist.Desire for an engagement with this tension in the first two sections may be my negligible preference. Unease with the third section might be more general. As a lover of Milton's poetry and as one who lost a brother in the World Trade Center, I am keenly interested in the challenge posed by John Carey. The essays suggest that there is more hard thinking to be done. Loewenstein places great stock in the differences between the particular texture of twenty-first-century terrorist acts and the climactic act of Milton's Samson, and it goes without saying that Samson is not identical to Osama bin Laden. Samson, as Loewenstein demonstrates, may be more impulsive and his thinking may echo more closely (and not surprisingly) the thinking of early modern radical religious antinomianism than it does that of today's radical Islamic fundamentalism. But the crucial question concerns the invocation of divine warrant to justify violence. At the moment between the pillars, Samson decides to kill indiscriminately.Although never one to pull punches or play it safe, Fish flinches at the last minute in his own discussion of terrorism. His Samson, like Loewenstein's, is an antinomian rather than a terrorist. If the “violat[ing] of civil law in the name of a higher commitment” makes Samson and Milton terrorists, Fish argues, then the same principle makes Abraham, Jael, and Martin Luther King Jr. terrorists (262). The appearance of King here vividly illustrates the flaw in the argument: Fish's observation that the antinomian King was not a terrorist does not prove that antinomians cannot be terrorists. In his next step, Fish suggests that, if threatening the lives of noncombatants makes one a terrorist, then the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima makes the United States a terrorist state. While Fish seems to assume that this position is absurd (comparing it to Education Secretary Rod Paige's calling members of the National Education Association terrorists), his comparison once again calls his point into question. Finally, he restricts the term “terrorist” to those who kill and maim for no higher purpose, but only for the joy of destroying—the serial killer and demented despots. By this definition, Fish concludes, the one left on the hook is not Milton but Satan, the “arch-terrorist” (264). Fish is too smart to credit any of this pyrotechnic conclusion to his essay. One suspects that he deploys it in part to set up an ambiguous parting concession to Carey, giving the last word, in an involuted inversion of a new historicist essay, to a Milton-reading terrorist, Mir Aimal Kasi, executed in Virginia two months after the Times Literary Supplement piece that set his essay in motion.Lieb, who sees Samson as the vehicle of God's holy dread, is the only one to accept the implications of his own argument. Lieb's Samson is “empowered” by God “to be triumphantly destructive in God's cause” (238). He exhibits “precisely the kind of outlook that underlies what might be called ‘the terrorist frame of mind.’ As we have come to know it, terrorism manifests itself in the unpredictable yet horrific behavior of those bent on jihad. Thus perpetrated in the name of God, terrorism assumes the aura of ‘religious' or ‘holy’ enactment of self-sacrifice (literally) to a divine cause” (298–99). The logic of all three essays in the final section points toward the possibility that Samson Agonistes may be a work in praise of terrorism, but only Lieb does not flinch. Notes 1See, e.g., Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (London: Blackwell, 2002), “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton University Press, 1985), Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of “Paradise Regained” (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1966), “Why Milton Matters,” Milton Studies 44 (2005): 13–21, and “Milton and De Doctrina Christiana : Evidences of Authorship,” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 203–28.2Albert C. Labriola, “‘Thy Humiliation Shall Exalt’: The Christology of Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 15 (1981): 29–42.3John Carey, “A Work in Praise of Terrorism,” Times Literary Supplement, September 6, 2002, 15–16.4Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (New York: St. Martin's, 1967), and How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 107, Number 3February 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/650715 Views: 213Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.