Subtractional Misrepresentation in Stanley Fish's How Milton Works

This is the first in a series of two essays on Professor Fish's recent book, How Milton Works.The second will concern the entire significance of the book, but this one will focus on a specific structural or stylistic device I shall call subtractional misrepresentation.

Subtractional misrepresentation is related to quotation out of context, but is not the same thing. In quotation out of context whole sentences are omitted, and in consequence the meaning of other sentences is distorted, but in subtractional misrepresentation parts of sentences are omitted and the meaning of individual words changes.

As an example of quotation out of context,consider the Sermon on the Mount; its astounding precepts are often quoted without the opening sentences, "And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying..."(Matt. 5:1-2) These change the meaning of the following precepts, for Jesus, fleeing the madding crowd, indicated that the precepts applied only to a select group, such as the elect, the clergy, or the Essenes.

As an example of subtractional representation, consider the famous phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Millions in this country give the phrase keep and bear a fantastic meaning because of the omission of modifying phrases, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state."

By a miracle of coincidence, Google, the Internet search engine, produces a subtractional misrepresentation about Stanley Fish himself:"Position: Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Criminal..." But at least the computer program has the decency to supply ellipsis dots indicating that a phrase or word such as "Law" has been omitted, thus leaving some doubt that the professor is actually a criminal. Fish himself has fewer scruples, as a majority of eight examples will show.

1. On page four of How Milton Works, Fish argues that the sin containing all other sins is merely to try to live independently of God.Hence, the Devil did not have to foment rebellion and wage war in order to deserve damnation;he was lost "at the moment of disobedience and movement away" (emphasis in the original).

Fish quotes:

"impiously they thought/Thee to diminish, and from thee withdraw."

--pp.2-3, quoting PLVII.611-12.

The full stop(.)is contributed by Fish, not by Milton. An academic convention, the neglect of which here gives rise to the darkest suspicions, requires ellipsis dots (...) after withdraw, to warn the reader that (s)he is getting, not an integral sentence, but only part of one; but such a warning would have spoiled a masterpiece of subtractional misrepresentation. Milton's sentence continues:

...and from thee withdraw
The number of thy worshipers (612-13).

The ingenuity startles;it's an excellent pun. This man wields more intelligence to write a bad book than others do to write a good one.

Fish's version turns withdraw from a transitive into an intransitive verb, and in so doing, changes its meaning from withdraw the numberinto withdraw from thee.That is, Milton says that Satan and Beelzebub,with a whispering campaign and a midnight march and rally, seduced one-third of heaven's angels, but Fish's version says only that Satan moved away from God. Thus Fish's version gives much-needed help to Fish's theory.

2. On p. 102, Fish describes the "wasteful Deep" (VI. 862)that the rebel angels behold with horror before falling into it, and says that "The gap is not the space before them; it is the space within them," a notion consistent with his earler declaration that "the priority of the inside over the outside is thematized obsessively" in Milton (p. 23). Confirming this, he quotes Satan's words: "myself am Hell; / And in the lowest deep a lower deep" (IV, 75-76). (p. 103)

Thus, thanks to the apposition of Hell and deep, both linked by a copula to myselfSatan calls himself two things: Hell, and a deep that is lower than the lowest. This certainly seems to confirm the statement that this abysm is inside the fallen angels--seems to, but does not, for Milton continues:

...a lower deep
Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n(76-78).

In Milton's version, deepis not the noun-complement of am; it is the subject of opens.So Satan does not call himself a deep, nor is this deep inside him, for it threatens to devour him. Fish says that according to Milton, conclusions should generate evidence instead of the other way around, and clearly he is determined to take his master's advice.

3. To expand this idea, "truth and certainty are achieved not by moving from evidence gathered in discrete bits to general conclusions," but by going from conclusions to evidence (p.23). Hence truth must be either innate, or attained instantaneously by a mystical vision.
Fish's quotation from The Reason of Church Governmentcertainly supports this view, for in it Milton says that pamphleteering hinders him from "'beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air'(Reason of Church Government, 821-822), and consequently it is a task he is reluctant to perform"(p.133). The metaphor suggests that truth, a vision, appears out of thin air, either indoors or outdoors.
But Milton continues:

...in the quiet and still air of delightful studies to come into the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk, and there be fain to club quotations with men whose learning and belief lies in marginal stuffings, who when they have like good sumpters laid ye down their horseload of citations and fathers at your door, with a rhapsody of who and who were bishops here or there, ye may take off their packsaddles, their day's work is done, and episcopacy, as they think, stoutly vindicated.

--Frank Allen Pattison et al.,The Works of John Milton, New York: Columbia U.P., 1931, III. 241.

The three words after airshow that in fact, Milton thinks truth comes from study. The rest simply derides Joseph Hall for accumulating evidence of no value. Indeed, this prolonged disparagement of specific evidence that wearies him though others "think"it vindicates their cause, implies that other evidence is better. If all kinds of evidence were equally ineffectual, the passage would be pointless.

4. Although the Lady in Comusexpresses fear of some things in her environment, and rapturous welcome to others (ll.205-209; 213-216), Fish informs us that the latter are inside her, innate ideas that never change. The same is true of Christ, Samson and Abdiel; all the good characters in Milton know a few things (or rather a single thing) that they never learned and will never forget. Hence the lady copes with being lost in a forest at night, and later with being trapped in an enchanter's palace, using qualities that she has used every minute of her life. They cannot be ad hoc. "The external landscape, in all its detail, will be a function of belief"(p. 24).

Fish quotes:

O welcome pure-ey'd Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hov'ring angel girt with golden wings,
And thou unblemish'd form of chastity,
I see ye visibly, and now believe.(ll.213-16) (p.165)

Again, Fish inserts his own full stop where Milton has no punctuation. I shall repeat this no more and the reader may assume it unless I state otherwise.

When Jesus was about to perform a miracle, he often tested the patient for faith or exhorted him to exercise it. To a man who had received a report of his daughter's death, he said, "Be not afraid, only believe" (Mark 5:36). So Milton had an excellent precedent for for using the word believe absolutely with no following prepositional phrase, noun, or noun clause, to mean exercising a generalized faith in God's providence applicable to any and every difficult situation. But he did not follow it this time.

He wrote:

...and now believe
That he, the Supreme Good, t'whom all things ill
Are but the slavish officers of vengeance,
Would send a glist'ring Guardian, if need were
To keep my life and honor unassail'd (217-220).

Hearing a loud noise of music and laughter in the woods, the lady has gone to the place from which it came, hoping to get directions, but fearing the bad manners of her guides, whom she takes for Welsh peasants celebrating Michaelmas Night, as their custom was, with "swill'd insolence"(l.178).Arrived at the spot, she finds only darkness and silence. For a traveller at night to be led astray by a demon in the form of a glimmering light (the "Friar's Lantern" of L'Allegro, l. 104) or counterfeiting a human voice, till the spirit made his victim fall into quicksand, was a stock situation in Renaissance spirit-lore. Ariel does this to Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. Robert Burton states that spirits called ambulones"walk about midnight on great heaths and desert places, which...'draw men out of the way, and lead them all night a by way,or quite bar them out of their way"(Anatomy of Melancholy,I.ii.i.2). The vision of Faith, Hope, and Chastity then inspires the Lady to believe that God would send an airy demon to save her from murder and rape. The "glist'ring Guardian" of l. 219 has been called an angel, but that is unlikely. Protestants took the concept of angels as seriously as Catholics did, and were unlikely to mingle them with Bacchus, Circe, their son, and Sabrina,the creatures of pagan myth suitable to a mask (Apollo,the Lemures, and Osiris in the Nativity Odeform no exception to this statement as they are fallen angels in disguise). That the Attendant Spirit's home is in the elements, beneath the starry heavens ("Before the starry threshold of Jove's court," l. 1) confirms his demonic, rather than angelic or diabolic, nature. (See more at "Airy Demons" in this website.)

In short, the Lady's belief is structured, specific, and very much of the moment. Fish's amputation of the four lines after believe,again, serves his theory.

5. On p. 253, Fish argues that Milton is torn between the desire to decentralize authority and power, and fear of "dissolution of the ego." Fish says Belial poses this question as follows:"'Who would lose,/Though full of pain, this intellectual being,/Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,/To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost?' (PLII, 146-49)."

This time a question mark creates the spurious sense of completion, along with the usual intrusive full stop following the parenthetic documentation.

To be swallow'd up and lost by an undefined agent, in an undefined manner, is an apt metaphor for losing one's ego to decentralized authority and power. If the sentence ended where Fish says it does, it would be a valuable bit of evidence (which, notwithstanding Milton's disdain, Fish seems to accumulate when he can) in favor of fear of "dissolution of the ego."

But it does not end there; the sentence continues:

...swallow'd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?(150-51)

The wide womb of uncreated Night, also known as Chaos,is the interval between Heaven and Hell through which the rebel angels have recently fallen. If they mount an attack on Heaven's ramparts, as Moloch has just exhorted them to do, and lose, as Belial thinks they surely would, and are blasted to atoms, as Moloch wishes should victory prove unobtainable (but not annihilated, for in Milton's universe not even God can uncreate completely what has been created), then these atoms will sink into Chaos and welter there forever, incapable of moving themselves or perceiving anything. Hence Belial fears physical death and nothing so mental as "dissolution of the ego"; it is obliteration by omnipotent power he fears and not "decentralized authority."

6. Fish now tries to prove that the Christ of Paradise Regainedis determined "to do nothing at all,"and for this purpose quotes the poem as follows (p.329):

My time I told thee...
...is not yet come.

Milton wrote:

My time I told thee (and that time for thee
Were better farthest off) is not yet come;
When that time comes think not to find me slack
On my part aught endeavoring...(III.396-99)

At this very minute, Christ does a decisive act: he threatens Satan. Fish, perceiving that this fact weakens his case, removes it, leaving the incision sutured with six ellipsis dots; then he deletes Christ's threat to be very active indeed at some future date.

The same page features the following subtractional misrepresentation making the same point:

I shall first
Be tried in humble state...
Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting(III. 188-89, 192).

This makes it seem Jesus' choice that he shall be humble, and that he likes suffering, abstaining and expecting. But Milton, explaining that God the Father intended to make Jesus suffer before letting him be King of Israel, wrote:

What if he hath decreed that I shall first
Be tried in humble state, and things adverse,
By tribulations, injuries, insults,
Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence,
Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting
Without distrust or doubt, that he may know
What I can suffer, how obey? Who best
Can suffer, best can do; best reign, who first
Well hath obeyed; just trial ere I merit
My exaltation without change or end (III.188-197).

The words I shall,with connotations of personal choice, making it seem that Jesus prefers the humble state, actually mean submission to another's choice, with a note of weariness added, when prefaced thus: What if he hath decreed that I shall. Jesus' submission is against the grain,for he suffers only that he may do (line 195); he plans to merit his exaltation(lines 196-97). Yet by hacking this speech down to twelve words, Fish makes it support his contention that Jesus is determined to do nothing at all.

7. On pp. 338-9 Fish argues that Christ favors a plain or even ugly literary style, contrasting with Satan's luxuriant one, and quotes Christ's denunciation of Greek poetry:

Remove their swelling Epithets thick laid
As varnish on a harlot's cheek, the rest,
Thin sown with aught of profit or delight,
Will be found unworthy.(PRIV, 343-346)

As the phrase "profit or delight" refers to the Horatian test of all poetry, the dulce et utile, and the word unworthy is unqualified, this would appear to be a simple, comprehensive, and absolute condemnation of all Greek poetry.

But Milton wrote:

...they loudest sing
The vices of their deities, and their own
In fable, hymn, or song, so personating
Their gods ridiculous, and themselves past shame.
Remove their swelling epithets, thick-laid
As varnish on a harlot's cheek, the rest,
Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight
Will far be found unworthy to compare
With Sion's songs, to all true tastes excelling,
Where God is praised aright, and Godlike men,
The Holiest of Holies and his saints...(PRIV,339-349)

In the first place, Fish has omitted the word farfrom line 346, making Christ's literary style more like what Fish's theory needs it to be, i.e., simpler. Secondly, his alchemy has produced an absolute, unworthy, out of a relative, unworthy to compare.Thirdly, the three lines he omits after unworthycontain four swelling epithets, true tastes, excelling, Godlike, and Holiest of Holies, so that this passage fails to demonstrate that Christ's literary style is plainer than Satan's. But worst of all, by changing unworthy to compare from a relative into an absolute, he breaks the grammatical and logical link between the Greek-poetry lines (339-345) and the Hebrew-poetry lines (346ff). The issue is not style, but content: a case of the gods versus God. The epithets swell only by being applied to the wrong subjects, deities with vices. The varnish merely needs another cheek. As C.S. Lewis pointed out long ago, the Book of Psalms and Pindar's odes resemble each other in literary style.John Ruskin, in his essay "Of the Pathetic Fallacy" in Modern Painters ,made a point very similar to what Milton's Christ says: that the pathetic fallacy is fine if you are talking about God, but pathetic in the common sense of the word if you have a lesser subject. So Christ does not defend a simple literary style; he attacks idolatry.

8. In the same vein, Fish attacks Satan for verbosity on p. 341, quoting Christ's refusal of a career in diplomacy and statecraft:

...it is, he complains, "But tedious waste of time to sit and hear/So many hollow compliments and lies,/Outlandish flatteries...talk"(123-125, emphasis added).

Milton wrote:

...embassies thou show'st
From nations far and nigh; what honor that,
But tedious waste of time to sit and hear
So many hollow compliments and lies,
Outlandish flatteries? then proceed'st to talk
Of the emperor...(PRIV, 121-126)

Fish did more than add emphasis. By stripping the word talkof the three words before it, he changed it from a verb into a noun and made it part of a rhetorical scheme. That is, Milton constructed an isocolon or parallelism of objects of the verb hearin order to stress the theme of verbosity:compliments, lies, flatteries. The word talk, once it has been subjected to a most impressive subtractional misrepresentation, becomes the fourth noun of the series, the climax of a more ambitious isocolon. A book about 18th-century adaptations of Shakespeare bears the titleShakespeare Improved. Maybe we should call this book Milton Improved.

#

Besides subtractional misrepresentations I found many quotations out of context, and very misleading ones, e.g., verses isolated in such manner as to imply that the diabolical council in PRwas but slightly affected by Satan's defeat,thus confirming the rule that nothing happens in the poem.(PR, 577-80;HMW,p.388).

But, much more interesting than those, I found evidence that Fish habitually tests sentences to see if they contain a part that negates the whole,and then if the part supports his theories, he quotes that, but if the whole does, he quotes that, letting Milton have the last word after all. Here is his version of some lines in Paradise Regained:

the angels...sing "Victory and triumph to the Son of God/Now ent'ring his great duel" (I.173-74). But then the qualification follows immediately--"his great duel, not of arms,/But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles"(174-75).

Again,in Samson Agonistes:

"If I obey them,/ I do it freely"(1372-1373), he declares, but then immediately, as if recoiling from the very word 'freely,'he proceeds to construct a new prison,this time calling it God: 'I do it freely; venturing to displease/ God for the fear of Man, and Man prefer,/ Set God behind:which in his jealousy/ Shall never, unrepented, find forgiveness" (1373-1376)."(p. 462)

In baseball, to bat from both sides of the plate is praise;in literary criticism, maybe not. Here Fish shows his awareness of what would happen to duelandfreely if the following words were suppressed. This argues that he knew what he was doing to withdrawin example 1, deepin 2,airin 3, believein 4,swallow'din 5, not and shallin 6, unworthy in 7, and talk in 8.

To enjoy a Miltonic sentence in prose or verse, which pleases precisely because it does not read from left to right, but a word on the right changes the meaning of a word on the left (as wisdom does duelin the example above) is one thing. But to build an interpretation, sometimes on such sentences in their entirety, sometimes on the dependent fragment, is indefensible, although, if the idea catches on, sure to be a favorite with the nation's undergraduate and graduate students. Think of the term papers, master's theses, and doctoral dissertations they will write:

A Metaphysical Conceit: Impregnation by a Meteorite

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child.

Shelley's Faint and Dubious Hope
If winter comes, can spring?

Longfellow's Poetry of Darkness

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight.

But the worst thing about these subtractional misrepresentations is the appalling concept of Milton and his work that they support. I will attempt to deal with this in the Second Part.