***** NYT December 28, 2002
Is Reading Milton Unsafe at Any Speed?
By D. D. GUTTENPLAN
LONDON - In his lifetime the poet and pamphleteer John Milton was called many things: divinely inspired, blasphemous, a Puritan, a libertine, a flatterer, a propagandist and a revolutionary.
Over the centuries since his death, in 1674, the poet who sought, in "Paradise Lost," to "justifie the wayes of God to men" has been recruited to causes ranging from atheism to orthodoxy. The author of "Areopagetica" has also been praised as a defender of free speech and damned as a male chauvinist who oppressed his wives and exploited his daughters. As T. S. Eliot observed, "Of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry."
Since September, however, the pages of a venerable British literary journal have rung with a new charge: that Milton's verse play "Samson Agonistes" is "an incitement to terrorism" and that its hero, the blind Israelite champion, who pulled down the pillars of the Philistines' temple, killing himself along with thousands of citizens, "is, in effect, a suicide bomber."
Was Milton a terrorist sympathizer? John Carey of Oxford University, co-editor of an edition of Milton's poetry, seems to think so. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London on the anniversary of Sept. 11, Professor Carey said that in the weeks following the atrocity he had been haunted by the similarities between the biblical Samson and the hijackers. "Like them Samson sacrifices himself to achieve his ends," he wrote. "Like them he destroys many innocent victims, whose lives, hopes and loves are all unknown to him personally." Professor Carey wondered whether "Samson Agonistes," with Milton's sympathetic portrayal of his hero, should not be "withdrawn from schools and colleges and, indeed, banned more generally."
The remarks set off a controversy that is still raging in the letters pages of the journal.
But while Professor Carey sets out the case for interpreting "Samson Agonistes" as "a work in praise of terrorism" at some length, his real target is not so much Milton but another critic - Stanley Fish, one of America's premier postmodernists, who is appearing on a panel titled "Why Milton Matters" on Dec. 28 at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York. In Mr. Carey's view, Mr. Fish, who is currently dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is "strongly opposed to any adverse criticism of Samson's terrorist attack."
Professor Carey is particularly exercised by Professor Fish's claim, in his recent book, "How Milton Works," that "in the end the only value we can put on Samson's action is the value he gives it in context."
Samson's destruction of the Philistine "Lords, Ladies, Captains," whom Milton describes as "Their choice nobility and flower," is an expression, Professor Fish says, of Milton's "reading of the divine will, and insofar as it represents his desire to conform to that will, it is a virtuous action. No other standard for evaluating it exists."
In the end it is not Milton, but Mr. Fish's interpretation of Milton, that Mr. Carey calls "monstrous - a license for any fanatic to commit atrocity."...
[M]any critics have joined the fray. The novelist and critic John Bayley wrote in to say that literature frees the past into a realm "where there is no political correctness and we can be on the side of whom we please - Carthaginians, Confederates, Philistines." Hyam Maccoby, of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Unversity of Leeds, wrote that "John Carey's reading of the Samson story, as it is told in the Book of Judges, leaves much to be desired." When Samson brought down the temple on his Philistine tormentors, Professor Maccoby wrote, "he was far from being a `terrorist' in the modern sense." To which Professor Carey replied, "I am not sure what the modern sense is, but the mass murder of civilians in a politico-racist cause certainly looks like terrorism."
But it is Professor Fish who is at the heart of the dispute. He has been drawing fire for his views on Milton since 1967, when he published "Surprised by Sin," an interpretation of "Paradise Lost" that put the emphasis not on the poet's intended meaning but on the way readers responded to his poem. So it is perhaps paradoxical that Professor Fish now finds himself under attack precisely for his account, in "How Milton Works," of the poet's intentions. In his reading, the whole of Milton's work - epic poetry, religious tracts, radical pamphlets on the side of Parliament in the English civil war - puts one cause above all others: obedience to God. "I have no doubt," he writes, "that many of my fellow Miltonists will resist" his interpretation "because it flies in the face of what they believe as good post-Enlightenment liberals." Liberals, he says, believe in objectivity, disinterested consideration of evidence, procedural safeguards for justice and above all in the primacy of rationality. "Milton," he argues, "believes none of those things."
Professor Fish says he responds to reviews only to correct factual errors, and won't be writing to the T.L.S. He has nothing but praise, though, for Professor Carey's edition of Milton. "I would agree with Carey that the Milton I describe could be thought of as a dangerous person," he said in an interview. "It depends on what you want from poets. If you want to find political values or eternal sentiments you can agree with, Milton is a problem." Which isn't to say Professor Fish has any sympathy for calls to ban the poetry - or for the argument, implicit in Professor Carey's attack, that postmodernists like him have no basis from which to condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center.
"What I do deny is the possibility of independent, neutral reasons," he continued. "I also think it is a mistake to say that men like bin Laden have no morals. He clearly has moral and ethical views that for many reasons we are entitled to reject and despise. The fact that our reasons cannot be given a pedigree that takes them out of the world doesn't make them any less compelling."
[The full article is available at <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/arts/28TANK.html>.] ***** -- Yoshie
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