Some
more Milton criticism…
I have tried to show that in his
treatment of the Fall Milton meant to condemn the mental levity of Man, who is
prone to forget the importance of his every action. His condemnation is the more weighty because of the solemnity with which by the art
of his construction he invests the struggle. He clears the stage, gives us all
heaven for audience, and the wretched human actors have hardly begun to grasp
the fateful significance of their parts. Feebly they commit what they imagine
is a trifling error, for which they are punished with a doom out of all
apparent proportion to their crime. To their crime, yes; but not to the mental
triviality that accompanied it: by their miserable inadequacy before the issues
of life mankind have deserved their fate. Milton's treatment of the Fall yields the obvious meaning that it is the first
business of man to understand the issues of life, and to be aware of the
importance of every trivial act. This he believed, because not only his own
nature but the trend of Puritan thought fostered this awareness. The present life, and the right use of every moment of it, were Milton's
principal concern. Now, a belief that every moment is critical, that every
action is irrevocable and determining, must heighten the pressure at which life
is lived. Life will have nothing of routine in it, but will consist of one gala
performance, never to be repeated.
from
E.M.W. Tillyard, Milton
(1967)
I would like to suggest something
about Paradise Lost that is not new except for the literalness with
which the point will be made: (I) the poem's centre of reference is its reader
who is also its subject; (2) Milton's purpose is to educate the reader to an
awareness of his position and 'responsibilities as a fallen man, and to a sense
of the distance which separates him from the innocence once his; (3) Milton's
method is to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the poem's
scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and
with Adam's troubled clarity, that is to say, 'not deceived'.
*** ***
The 'definiteness' of a genre
classification leads the reader to expect a series of formal stimuli--martial
encounters, complex similes, an epic voice--to which his response is more or
less automatic; the hardness of the Christian myth predetermines his
sympathies; the union of the two allows the assumption of a comfortable reading
experience in which conveniently labelled protagonists act out rather simple
roles in a succession of familiar situations. The reader is prepared to hiss
the devil off the stage and applaud the pronouncements of a partisan and
somewhat human deity . . . . But of course this is not the case; no sensitive
reading of Paradise Lost tallies with these expectations, and it is my
contention that Milton ostentatiously calls them up in order to provide his
reader with the shock of their disappointment. This is not to say merely that
Milton communicates a part of his meaning by a calculated departure from convention;
every poet does that; but that Milton consciously wants to worry his reader, to
force him to doubt the correctness of his responses, and to bring him to the
realization that his inability to read the poem with any confidence in his own
perception is its focus.
*** ***
… this
first epic interjection [“Vaunting aloud, but rackt
with deep despair,” I.126] introduces a pattern that is operative throughout.
In Books I and II these 'correctives' are particularly numerous and, if the
word can be used here, tactless. Waldock falsifies
his experience of the poem, I think, when he characterizes Milton's
countermands as gentle; we are not warned ('Do not be carried away by this
fellow'), but accused, taunted by an imperious voice which says with no consideration
of our feelings, 'I know that you have been carried away by what you
have just heard; you should not have been; you have made a mistake, just as I
knew you would'; and we resent this rebuke, not, as Waldock
suggests, because our aesthetic sense balks at a clumsy attempt to neutralize
an unintentional effect, but because a failing has been exposed in a context
that forces us to acknowledge it. We are angry at the epic voice, not for
fudging, but for being right, for insisting that we become our own critics.
There is little in the human situation more humiliating, in both senses of the
word, than the public acceptance of a deserved rebuke.
From Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise
Lost, 2nd ed. (1998)