Paradise Lost Text and Context: A Review Essay

Abstract

Paradise Lost Text and Context: A Review Essay Philip J. Gallagher University of Texas at El Paso The distinguished classical scholar M. L. West has recently cited an even more distinguished classicist, U. von WilamowitzMoellendorff , to support a common-sense hermeneutic with which I heartily agree: "I believe," West writes, "that the understanding of many works of literature would benefit from trying to see them more from the author's viewpoint and paying greater attention to his train of thought and the problems of construction and expression that he faced. [As Wilamowitz has stated,] 'Behind the works stands the man who created them. The scholar seeks to reach him, to penetrate his soul, and then to present this man in terms of what he was and what he aimed at . . . [,] to understand how this man was formed, and what he intended, thought, achieved.'"1 The review essay that follows proceeds on the assumption that interpretation ought to pursue the goals enumerated by West and Wilamowitz, and myjudgmentofthe three books scrutinized — two of which have won prestigious national awards2 — derives from the degree to which each facilitates the recovery of Milton's poetic intention in Paradise Lost. For my opinion that authorial intention is the criterion of validity in interpretation, I am of course indebted to the work of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. I share Mr. Hirsch's outrage at what he calls "the present decadence in literaryscholarship, with its anti-rationalism, faddism, and extreme relativism."Over against the radical skepticism of the "cognitive atheists,"3 1 believe with Hirsch in the 1.Hesiod Works and Days (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. v-vi. 2.The first book under review, Robert Crosman's Reading Paradise Lost (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), has won the Explicator Award; the second book, Stella Puree Revard's The War in Heaven: Paradise Lost and the Tradition of Satan's Rebellion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), has won the James Holly Hanford Award of the Milton Society ofAmerica; the last book, Francis C. Blessington's Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), has won nothing, though I believe it to be the best study of the three. 3.The Aims ofInterpretation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 13. 218ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW possibility of genuine humanistic knowledge, the acquisition of which — and forgive us for sounding platitudinous — is "governed by the critical testing of hypotheses with reference to evidence and logic" (pp. 151-152). The best evidence at hand is the literary text in the light of its peculiar cultural givens. In this our westwardmoving and declining age of literary criticism, it seems to me that the astonishing proliferation of critical systems has led inexorably to an infinite regress from whatever artifact critics have essayed to annotate; my review therefore tries to measure the success with which the writers under consideration illuminate their text in context. Consistent with this purpose, I intend to emulate the method Milton himself espouses in his posthumous treatise The Christian Doctrine: most theologians "have been wont to fill whole pages with explanations of their own opinions, thrusting into the margin the relevant [biblical] texts in support of their doctrine with a summary reference to the chapter and verse. I have chosen, on the contrary, to fill my pages even to redundance with quotations from Scripture, that so as little space as possible might be left for my own words."4 Like Milton I have tried hard to let the texts of his critics speak for themselves — not futilely, I hope, for in one case at least the medium is decidedly the message. I In the last chapter of Reading Paradise Lost Robert Crosman makes a crucial distinction between interpretation and affect. His proof-text is Book XI of Milton's epic. God has instructed the archangel Michael to narrate to Adam a visionary summary of postlapsarian history, after which Adam and Eve are to beled out of their Garden home into the subjected plain of Eden below. The manner of the fallen couple's extirpation will be contingent, God commands, upon the nature of their emotional response to the various instructions Michael gives them: "If patiently...