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Editor's Note

The following is an address delivered at a session at the MLA convention in Toronto in 1997 devoted to changes in critical perspectives on Milton's work since the publication of Professor Rajan's landmark Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth-Century Reader, in 1962. Professor Rajan was invited to speak by the session chair, Albert Labriola.

Milton Encompassed

Balachandra Rajan

I suppose my qualification as a respondent is that I have been in the Milton business for fifty years and have lived through some of the coalescences that Professor Labriola has outlined. I cannot say that I have single-handedly engineered these coalescences and I also cannot point with confidence to any collectivity that may have engineered them. There is a lesson to be learned from this inability and perhaps the lesson can be more sharply defined by glancing at a critical moment in the scholarship of another period.

In 1971 M. H. Abrams published Natural Super naturalism, the distinguished climax of a long com mitment to the exploration of Romantic poetics. In the same year Paul de Man published Blindness and Insight. These two works marked a watershed so decisive that it was almost a razor's edge. The sharp revisionary turn marked by the watershed led to remarkably productive decade which domesticated French theory on this continent by giving it both a literary site and a New England habitation.

In Milton scholarship the post-structuralist infiltration lasted for much less than a decade. It was mild as well as brief. It left behind a book by Rapaport*, an essay or two by Goldberg, and a slim volume by Catherine Belsey with gentle post-structuralist accents. The new historicism which followed was restricted [End Page 86] in its newness. It was prepared to treat literary sites as conflicted rather than consensual, and it made its salutations to the interdisciplinary by contextualizing literary works in relation to the political and religious thinking of their day. It had been engaged in this practice for thirty years before awakening to its avant-garde possibilities. Milton scholarship did not proceed beyond this cautious contextualization which was scarcely avoidable, given the nature of Milton's work. In particular, it shied away from the idea of cultural poetics and even today the prospect of imperialism as a cultural genre--a natural development of cultural poetics--treated as a reckless generalization, unscholarly rather than premature.

Milton scholarship is the work of the Milton community rather than of individuals or of groups. Its guild character safeguards the quality of its work-manship; but it also makes it assimilative rather than methodologically adventurous. It seeks to re-orient itself rather than to move itself to another location. The fixed foot of the compass stabilizes the world of Milton scholarship while the errant foot takes what is possible into that world's circumference.

If we proceed with a conceit which is Donne's as much as Milton's we can translate the fixed foot as the authorial presence and the just circumference as drawn and redrawn by the politics of reading. The politics of reading are prominent in Elizabeth Sauer's paper and the post-colonial reader takes the her-meneutic spiral to a point in alignment with that seventeenth-century reader whom I tentatively in-vented fifty years ago. Both readers of course have to be emblems of reading communities characterized by moderate varieties and brotherly or sisterly dissimili-tudes, but communities nevertheless, drawn together in dialogue rather than segregated by their differences. The post-colonial community in particular will be im-poverished if its brotherly dissimilitudes do not embrace readers from the West as well as from the East.

We do not simply apply the politics of reading to Milton. Milton teaches us those politics because of the issue-laden nature of his work and because a poem such as Paradise Lost is read internally in many dif ferent ways which interrogate and yet articulate the poem. Within the poem the politics of reading are dynamic. Outside the poem they are dynamic *too with the just circumference continually redrawn by the fresh intervention that the poem makes and by the changing nature of a response which has itself partly constructed the intervention.

The politics of reading question boundaries. They enlarge the just circumference by drawing attention to its injustices, by problematizing the once transparent work, so that its world can contain more without ceasing to be a world. As Sharon Achinstein indicates, the politics of reading may have had their beginnings in the interregnum proliferation of tract literature. The seventeenth century was fiercely concerned and one might even say dominated by the problem of how to interpret sacred texts, but as the art (or imperatives) of reading evolves, ways of reading the Bible elide themselves into ways of construing the canon.

The feminist interrogation of the unjust circum-ference was strongly begun by Christine Froula and carried further by scholars such as Mary Nyquist. It gained its initial momentum by perceiving a Milton adversarial to its politics. Since then it has been productively complicated in ways that invite us into Paradise Lost more fully, but which also make it difficult to align the poem along a single straight-forward patriarchal axis.

The post-colonial questioning of boundaries goes beyond the feminist interrogation in arguing that there can be no just circumference, that the outside must always be reached for by the inside if it is not to become the prisoner of its mystique. Exploring Milton's place in the imperial continuity gives this proposition historical depth by examining seventeenth-century uncertainties as to where the just circumference might be and on what principles the compass is to draw it. This rapidly emerging trend in Milton scholarship has gathered strength from complementary studies by David Quint and Martin Evans, one concerned with filiation and the other with affiliation, to use a distinction made by Edward Said. Both coordinates invite considerably more explo-ration if the terrain between them is to be adequately mapped. Sites other than the New World and works other than Paradise Lost have to be taken into account in determining the contours of this terrain. And though Milton scholarship is methodologically cautious, it may be less than wise in declining any [End Page 87] engagement with the conventions of thought of post-colonial scholars.

The argument that there can be no just circumference questions the legitimacy of containment. It is doubtful if we can take the politics of reading Milton this far when not simply the divine creation, but its answering echo in the scribe's poetics, depend on containment passionately sought, on limitedness as a principle of order which must somehow be reconciled with inclusiveness. But to take the politics of reading any distance is to discover a Milton who is neither imperialist, nor anti-imperialist, nor an intermediate, ambivalent figure stumbling falteringly along an over-determined road. Milton works within a discourse of conflicting parameters, a discourse that is theolog-ically secessionist yet secularly imperial, that must walk a tightrope between dissent and obedience frayed slowly by its own internal stresses. He brings to this conflict his familiar will to coherence. Some of us have become Miltonists because we share some of that will with him. The will falls short of assimilating every-thing it encounters. We are educated not only by what it does but by what it cannot do or cannot see as needing to be done.

We have looked at the roaming foot of the compass as it maps the receding and dissolving line which the politics of reading call on it to trace. It is time to turn now to the fixed foot of the authorial presence. It seems profoundly unnecessary to say that Milton scholarship is Milton-centered but when a scholarly effort amounting almost to an industry is dedicated decade after decade to a single author, it must be influenced in its character by that dedication. The single author moreover is anything but self-effacing. Romantic writers were correct in noting Milton's refusal to disappear into his work and in contrasting that refusal with Shakespeare's invisibility.

Over-determination tends to substitute the conflicted site for the uncertain author. Milton, far from being in hiding, is obstinately active on the site. It is hard to conceal him in a fold in language. In fact he folded language with such vigor that English poetry according to T. S. Eliot took two and half centuries to recover from the trauma of the fold. The Babylonish dialect Milton created ought to be less harsh and barbarous in a multivocal world than it was in the sensitive ears of Dr. Johnson. But it also entrenches in the language itself, the Roman strain within English imperial discourse. Milton specializes in these bi-valencies. He is a principal voice in the articulation of imperial discourse and also a principal voice in its dismantling. His work straddles the apparently unnegotiable watershed between resolute dissent and the totalizing will. The spectacular surrender in Book 3 of Paradise Lost of the entire divine poem to the hazards of agency surely says something about an author determined to do battle with himself.

The Miltonic self is indeed embattled and the De Doctrina controversy, which Professor Rumrich has looked at as an important coalescence in Milton scholarship, is a contemporary recognition of this embattlement. Behind the conjecture that Milton may not have written the De Doctrina and the indeterminacy about Milton's share in its authorship arrived at by a team of researchers whose meticulous work is nevertheless legitimately questioned by Rumrich, lies the recognition that the De Doctrina is an identity sign of major importance. It points to a Milton who was a militant non-conformist, a lively member of a robust fringe group, central to the character of English thought, the sponsor of a concatenation of heresies which made him a member of a church of one, unless of course the real author of the De Doctrina is admitted to that lonely Everest. On the other hand, we have in Paradise Lost a poet of the mainstream who has been read increasingly as con-stituting the nature of the mainstream. The tension, subversive or creative, between the establishment icon and the defiant dissenter is not unknown to previous readers of Milton. The Romantics made it internal to Paradise Lost. Because of the radically different agendas it supports, the contrast continues to agitate Milton criticism.

Hunter's way out of the paradoxical relationship between the two Miltons is to suggest that the author of the De Doctrina may not have been Milton. This is an evolution from Sewell's view, now apparently obsolete, that the treatise and the epic were written at different times rather than by different persons. Others before Hunter, most notably Maurice Kelley, have treated the differences between the treatise and Paradise Lost as differences of presentation, modal rather than substantial, so that in effect, the treatise [End Page 88] writes the poem. Despite my well-known addiction to poetry, I do not propose to reverse this proposition by arguing that the poem writes the treatise. I wish to argue instead that the two are constitutive of each other.

The natural consequence of this proposition is that the choice we are called upon to make is not between one Milton and another. Both Miltons are necessary and have to be placed in contestation in the agon of his identity. As we study this agon we find ourselves brought back to that other major trend in Milton scholarship which Professors Labriola and Sauer have illuminated. Far from being autonomous, the two coalescences we have examined today are linked, as the self and the world are linked, and as the two legs of the compass are joined. The agon of self is not the sealed repository of a struggle limited to the imagination, that can issue only in an aesthetic catharsis. It is both nourished by, and in its turn sustains, the disseminations of that founding paradox on which imperial discourse is engineered and by which it is inevitably fragmented. Dissent and obedience, the interrogating passion and the totalizing will are constituents not only of the Miltonic identity, but of that crisis in early modern England's self-formation in which that identity finds it roots.

If the circumference of Milton scholarship is able to take in nearly all that our current preoccupations call for, it is because so much of the circumference is already at the center. That fact sustains the integrity of Milton scholarship, preventing the politics of reading from sliding into wilfulness, or from finding a Milton antipathetic to those politics. There is almost always a connection and often a critique enabling us to learn from and not simply make the connection.

I cannot let this occasion pass without expressing my gratitude to the Milton community in which I have participated for fifty years. Working in this community has been for me a steady source of intel-lectual happiness. I have had my disagreements with its members but the disagreements have never been less than courteous. Spenser put justice and courtesy together in the last two complete books of The Faerie Queene. The Milton community has shown me the purpose of this conjunction.

University of Western Ontario