Notes on Stanley Fish' Surprised by Sin

June 01, 2026

Overall I find Fish’ interpretation fairly compelling as a case for what Milton was trying to do. I think my main (and probably significant) disagreement with him, however, would be that I think in various (and often central) places, the narrative and characters that Milton has created run away from him, as Empson and Rogers emphasize. Fish downplays this aspect if he even discusses it at all, as it undermines his basic thesis which seems to be that Milton was basically a genius in total control of all the aesthetic an rhetorical effects that his book has to offer. I don’t dispute Milton’s genius, but I think you have to close your eyes to much of the ambiguities in the book to come to such a conclusion; it amounts in places to an explaining away, rather than an explaining.

Two choice quotes from Empson that I think capture an essential aspect of the book that is unrecognizable with Fish’s interprative lense:

“I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like the Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious.”
“the poem is good not in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power.”

I have read some of Fish’s other writing, namely his essays and work on social construction, which I found more engagingly written. This book was quite dry, bordering on dull in parts.

ch 1 Not so much a teaching as an intangling

Milton’s purpose is show us our “miserable and wretched state” and show us path to redemption, the reader is “confronted with evidence of his corruption and becomes aware of his inability to respond adequately to spiritual conceptions and is asked to refine his perceptions so that his understanding will be once more proportionable to truth and object of it” (ix). Milton wants us to experience the fall as Adam did, and with clarity (1).
Fish identifies a strain of “anti Milton scholarship”, including Leavis and Eliot (TS?) as well as “Empson, RJ Zwi Werblowsky, HR Swardson, and John Peter” (2), and says Waldock to be the most forthright statement of this strain. It seems like one thing those critics dislike was the alleged lack of narrative “coherence and psychological plausibility that we have come to expect from the novel”, Fish says he will argue it does possess these, and they “are to be found in the relationship between its effects and the mind of its reader” (2). Fish says his approach has been somewhat anticipated by Summers’ The Muse’s Method and Ferry’s Milton’s Epic Voice, as well as Knight’s article “The Dramatic Center of Paradise Lost” which Fish says accords with his own conclusion. Surprising that this is all in a footnote!
Waldock’s claim is basically that the story/form does not allow Milton to express his intentions through Adam, so he ends up expressing them sometimes through Satan leading “pressure to build up” and an imbalance, and “diquieting” moments. Fish disputes this: “If we ttransfer the emphasis from Milton’s interests to and intentions which are available to us only from a distance, to our respones which are available directly, the disparity between intention and execution becomes a dpisartiry between reader expectation and reading experience; and the resulting ‘presures’ can be seen as part of an intelligible pattern” (3). Fish’s “reader response” theory. Milton “consciously wants to worry the reader” (4), cause him to “doubt the correctness of his responses” (4). “Milton’s programme of reader harassment”! Great long footnote pgs 6-7.
Fish begins by dissecting Waldock’s complaint about how PL’s narrator attempts to clumsily undo the magnificence of Satan’s speech, to correct Satan’s error; in fact, Milton’s “rebuke” is aimed at our own interpretive error in being impressed by Satan’s speech, and reading it superficially. Milton is correcting “the weakness all men evince in the face of eloquence” (9). Satan’s rhetorical gifts lull us into the error of “spiritual inattentiveness” and we “fail to read Satan’s speech with the critical acumen it demands” (14). “The result of such encounters is the adoption of a new way of reading. After I. 125-6 the reader proceeds determined not to be caught out again; but invariably he is. If Satanic pronouncements are now met with a certain caution, if there is a new willingness to search fo rcomplexities and ironies beneath simple surfaces, this mental armouor is never quite strong enough to resist the insidious attack of verbal power; and always the irritatingly omniscient epic voice is there to point out a deception even as it succeeds” (14). The reader comes to understand he is being “controlled and mocked” by the same authority, emphasis on the theme of control (15).
Pages 30-34 roughly deal with Fish’ interpretation of time in PL, and how Milton continually throws obstacles into our efforts to fit things into a neat sequence. “Milton cannot recreate the eternal moment, but by encouraging and then blocking the construction of sequential relationships he can lead the reader to accept the necessity of, an perhaps even apprehend, negatively, a time that is ultimately unavailable to him because of his limitations” (35). Milton “leads us to feel again and again the conflict between the poem’s assumed morality and our responses, and to locate the seat of that conflict in our fallen nature and not ion any failure in composition. In short, the reader’s difficulty is the result of the act that is the poem’s subject” (39). PL is a “good temptation” (40) because it exposes our “secret corruption” (41). The reader is thereby “split” (42). This is “nowhere more central” than in book IX when Adam chooses to obey; as a reader, we go through a process like “Adam is wrong, no, he’s right, but then, of course he is wrong, and so am I” (43). “the reader is continually surprised by sin and in shame, ‘sore displeased with himself’” (44).
“In Milton’s larger scheme the conviction that man can do nothing is accompanied by the convicton that Christ has taken it upon himself to do it all” (45) unclear what he means, “can do nothing” is this a “salvation by faith alone” thing?
As to Waldock’s complaint that M’s “allegations clash with his demonstrations”, Fish suggests that M “invites us to put his epic voice on trial by allowing the reading expierience to contradict it” but whereas Fish charges Waldock with resolving the problem by deciding “for the poem (and for himself)” (not clear what Fish means here), “Milton assumes a predisposition in favour of the epic voice rather than a modern eagerness to put that voice on trial” (47).

Ch 2 The Milk of the pure word

“In recent years, several critics hav asserted that the sylistic characteristics of the voice of miton’s God ar eanswerable tothe idea of deity demaneded by the the poem and by seventeeth-century theology” (59), God is said to speak without metaphor, even to be incapable of such speech, heaven speaks in flat statements of fact in stark contrast to the demons (60). Some critics feel that the distinct falls flat in the poem, and this is therefore not just an aesthetic demerit. quote from Kingsley Widmer, “the entire Miltonic view, and thus much of Protestant Christian mytholoyg is involved in the sytlistic antithesis between Heaven and Hell” (61). Fish adduces some evidence in support of this. For a contemporary of Milton’s, the juxtaposition of these two modes would be “emotional, even visceral, as well as intellecutal” (61) given the degree to which, to the “watchful Christian, the rhetorical appeal is something to be feared because it panders to a part of him he knows to be subversive… coversely, bareness and clarity or orgnaization are not only valued, but welcomed, with the kind of physical pleasure men in other ages reserve for beautiful (lyric) poems or beautiful women” (61-2). This strikes me as fairly speculative and dubious, not nearly enough evidence has been given for this claim. OTOH maybe I just don’t know 17th century Puritan poetry well enough, I am tempted to ask, as one asks “did the Greeks believe in their gods”, “did the puritans really like their poetry”?
When God calls Adam an “ingrate” it is “a term not of reproach, but of definition… God is the perfect name-giver whose word is the thing in all its aspects. In the ultimate philosophical sense his words are true. ‘Ingrate’ is not a judgement, but a scientific notation with the emotional value of an X or a Y” (65).
With a quotation from Peters 1960, we ask can theology’s demand for clearness be reconciled with poetry’s demand for a “characterization fo God that will support our love and reverance” (69). “Milton secures a positive response to the figure of God by creating a psychological (emotional) need for the authority he represents” (70) by unsettling us in books 1-2, our own powers are shaking, the apparent authority of the demons is quickly unmasked. God’s “rhetoric” establishes his character as per Aristotle, his language is “conspicuously biblical and assures conviction by virtue of its references to scriptural passages every reader knows… James Sims lists eight biblical sources for lines 85-6 alone… God’s syntax also contributes to the ‘proof’ or demonstration of his character. Satan’s fallacies are wrapped in serpentine trains of false beginnigns, faulty pronoun references, missing verbs and verbal schemes which sacrifice sense to sound” (74); it is a loose style, irresponsibly digressive, moving away steadily from logical coherence… and calling attention finally to the virtuosity of the speaker. In contrast, God practices a Stoic austerity; his syntax is close an sinewy, adering to the ideal of brevity by ‘employing only what is strictly necessary for making the matter clear’” (75). God’s is an “art that conceals art, the rhetoric that denies itself recognition… God is innocent of Milton’s skill; his eloquence is not eloquence at all” (75-6). “For of course the true force of God’s speech as a rhetorical performance stems from its success in satisfying the needs of a specific audience, in ‘putting the audience into a certain frame of mind’… The emotion Milton is reaching for here is relief” (77) that we can rely on the solid ground of God’s wisdom. “Pope is correct when he calls God a ‘School-Divine’” (77). (Aside: but the actual impact of PL seems to have been largely, at least for nearly a century, around the subversive appeal of Satan; if that is true, hasn’t Milton failed, both in his mission at large, and in his effort to produce this response? if so Fish’s theory is wrong, the proof is in the pudding of actual reader response.) “God is not a rhetorician but he has a rhetorician’s success” (80).
“The defence, however, cannot rest without admitting that the difficulties Milton’s God poses for most readers remain” (80), Fish gives the example of Frye finding God’s speech in book 3 “grotesquely bad” no matter how many times he reads it. God’s rebuking/repudiation of Satan, ending in “shall redound” has been so effective, its force is transferred to “shall pervert” (81) which is aimed at Man. Where we the audience were willing, we are now captive (81), and the pace and closeness of the presentation make it hard for us to follow. “God dwells on a point only for the length of time it takes to state it concisely (truly) and that time is insufficient for a merely human mind to assimilate the various parts of a complex argument… The reader is always off balance” (81-2). The two levels of God’s speech, statement of fact and “oration delivered before auditors ‘in a certain frame of mind’” (82) diverge when we the audience become the judged. “At this point modern critics divide into two camps, one holding that ‘God escapes the requirements of decorum personae by not being a person’, the other insisting, with Waldock, that ‘the human impression is what is important’. These views can be reconciled if the unimpeachability of God’s word is distinguished from the manner in which the reader receives it” (83). Fish says these can be resolved if we see that PL is here “reading the reader” the way Scripture, “searches out a man’s corruption and reveals it to him” (84). Milton hurls “the naked word at the reader” (84), he “takes the risk” (85, quote from Waldock) prioritizing salvation over comfort. With ingrate, “the recalcitrance of the sinner, not the vindictiveness of God, is the source of the difficulty” (86). (Aside: seems like the divine equivalent of “stop hitting yourself” as you smack your little brother with his own arms.
iv carnal and spiritual responses. Fish starts this chapter re-emphasizing the difference in style between “God’s abstract discourse” and the “colour and chaotic liveliness” of Satan’s grand style (88). The reader’s response to these two offerings indicates, or as Fish says “determines” (88) his spiritual status. Milton forces us to choose between the two.

Ch3 Man’s polluting Sin

What are we to make of the initial impression of Eve, as it evokes traditional images of the wanton/seductive/sinful woman? Critics like Stein, Ricks and Ferry argue the use of wanton and error here is meant precisely to signify the absence of moral sin or error (93), but Fish wonders whether they are not “confusing their own subtlety with Milton’s and creating a response no reader could be expected to deliver” (93). “The answer can be more firmly grounded in contemporary attitudes toewards language as they are related to the traditional nostalgia for the linguistic purity of Paradise. An examination of the verbal texture of the poem against the background of the concerted effort during the century to evolve a truly scientific system of denotation reveals a pattern in the apeparance of words like ‘error’ and shows them to be an important part of the interior drama Milton creates in the reader’s mind” (94).
Much discussion of the debased and limited language of the fallen angels. “The reader comes to know the limitations of the Hellish metnalitiy by remarking how the fallen angels misuse or under-use words of whose larger significant he is aware. The result is a gain in confidence as well as in his knowledge; in the early stages of the peom the distinction between the Satanic an mortal perspectives is sometiems blurred, but when the ‘fall’ is taken to have no meanign beyond the obviously physical, and ‘loss’ is a political concept, and light the province of the interior decorator, the reader is entitled to congratulate himself on his superior understanding. In Paradise Lost however such gains are only temproary and when Adam and Eve are introduced in Book IV, MIlton teaches us a new humlity through a habit of mind he has himself encouraged” (100). A&E are presented as strange to us, the reader. Discussion of Eve’s hair, the wantonness, disheveledness: her “‘sweet disorder’, her ‘wantonness’ is innocent precisely because it is not ‘too precise in every part’” (102) which would be vanity. “In short the reader will declare Even innocent of a sensuality whose only existence is in his mind” (102). “Satan’s demoralization of language is no more reprehensible and revealing than the over-moralization which makes it necessary for the reader to exclude meaning that properly are not there” (103). The reader sees A&E doing/saying things we might identify with sinful or fallen, but “almost immediately, however, something in the text reminds him of the distance separating the first man from all others (save one) and he is asked to make a mental adjustment—not them, but me—which becomes the felt measurement of that distance, and thus the reality of the innocence, int hhe poem. (Again the sequence: mistake—correction—instruction.)” (104).
ii language in paradise. discussion of the idea, tempting throughout history, that if we could only get the right names of things, we could have true knowledge of nature. ref to Adam’s naming of the animals. “Behind these statements is the assumption that linguistic reform is the key to all the problems of that beset fallen man” (118). The risks of linguistic artifacts like redundancy, equivocals, and metaphor (121-2), that if we could eliminate these via a rational scientific method. “By regarding the laws of method as absolute and God-given, Sprat and Wilkins adn their fellolw sin the Royal Society manage first to isolate a variable—the defect of the species—and finally to eliminate it as a serious obstacle to clear and distinct knowledge” (123), rehabilitating the senses. The process has implications for our image of individuality that Fish developers: “the philosophy that yields the mathematical plainness of Sprat and Wilkins implicitly denies or skirts the concept of indivdiuality. In Croll’s terms, the scientific style is oratorical… because it concerns itself with the ‘general and communal ideas’ and does not recognize the thinking mind as an active part of the cognitive process. The universal applicability of method makes all mind one mind, a common and passive machine harnessed and directed by a power independent of it… In this way the human factor is phased out and the epistemological gap between concepts in the mind and their objective existence in nature is bridged” (125). Fish suggests that despite Milton’s sympathies with his contemporaries’ distrust of rhetoric, he did not share their optimism regarding the progress of knowledge because of its “latent impiety” (127). The “‘immediate intuitive perception of logical relations’ is the hallmark of prelapsarian thought processes, as is the possession of oa perfect language. Any claims to the contrary… he would regard as a huge and dangerous self-deception, dangerous because it indicates a deficiency in humility” (127-8). It is beyond our power to entirely limit metaphor and ambiguity (128). Fish’s argument here seems to be that the “programme that offers salvation in the guise of linguistic reform” is undermined whenever a reader “reads into the word more than is literally there” (128); I find the argument sort of confusing, surely someone supporting such a program could merely reply that Milton is using the wrong words.
iii in wand’ring mazes lost. discussion of the various neutral and eventually moral meanings this word takes on. we are surprised by the description of the rivers of paradise as “wandr’ing” and rolling “with mazy error” (135). “By confronting the reader with a vocabulary bearing the taint of sin in a situation that could not possibly harbour it, Milton leaves him no choice but to acknowledge himself as the source, and to lament” (136). In the temptation, we get two kinds wandering, Satan’s is evil and Eve’s is not, and this “distinction… is a difficult one… but it must be made (the possibility of not making it constitutes a temptation)” (139). Afterwards, Adam “has slipped into the fallen habit of imputing evil to things and actions rather than persions” (140) and Even challenges his abuse of the term “wandering”.
iv the guilty reader and the innocence of nature. A&E know neither good nor evil in their original state, they inhabit his “plenitude” (145) and their “prayer is various, that is non-patterned” but after the fall the “easy and various expressions of praise will be replaced by the rigidity of ritual” (145). “If the reader has been properly attentive in the early parts of the poem, his own perceptions will come back to haunt him here in book VII” (150), e.g. the image of Satan-Leviathan we got from Book I is irrelevant to the “deliciously genial and natural” image of the elephant in book VII. When it comes to the fall and God’s punishment, “God does not execute his decree with pleasure, yet he must allow the forces let loose by m an’s error to run their course or deny man the dignity imputed to him by the original contract” (152). This treatment of nature, and the serpent in particular, may be called unfair (153). Fish’s argument seems to be that it is not exactly God’s treatment, but rather a natural consequence. “The serpent, and later all of nature, are subject to a kind fo infernal transubstantiation. They are literally consumed by evil, and although incorruptible in their essence… they are impure in their present position, and are adjudged so… It is of course unjust or unfair if one considers the culpability of the serpent, but that injustice is not God’s who merely establishes the laws of his universe and leaves their maintenance to his appointed agents, who are assigned spheres of responsibility… Since these spheres of responsibility are interdependent, a disruption of the order at any one point will affect areas beyond it; in short, the innocent will suffer” (154). (Aside: this plausibly reconstructs Milton’s point, but is a weak defense. God could of course have designed things otherwise. God designed a world in which the innocent will suffer.) “Satan’s single action—the exploitation of the serpent—is a model for what man does every day of his sinful life. He makes things the vehicle of his evil and then puts them away (judges them accursed) as if they were guilty” (156).

Ch 4 Standing Only: Christian Heroism

Each individual sin is at the same time all sins. “In Milton’s monistic universe, where ‘all thigns are of God’ (de deo) a sin against he source is a sin against all” (159) and the root commandment is “obey God”. Whereas in Eden they had to obey but one prohibition, after the full they have innumerable laws to keep, they encounter the “impossibility of fulfilling” (160) the law. The task M sets to the reader of the poem is described in the Aeriopagitica, namely the the “piecing together of the shattered image of truth” (160), the degree to which the reader will be capable of this depends on how he has faces the lesson of the fall. Fish is “proposing a direct relationship between the (potential) effect the poem has on the reader and his ability to read it; a curiously circular relationship whose explanation lies in the uniqueness of the poem’s subject-matter. In other words, Paradise Lost is a primer designed to teach the reader how to interpret it, and especially to interpret it at the point where the characters perform the action which made its writing and reading necessary” (161-2). There is of course a risk that the reader will fail in this task, and come away worse off than before.
i baptiz’d or infidel. distinction between classic and christian epic heroism, Milton subverts the “ideal of martial valour” (162). pretty amazing analysis of the simile comparing Satan’s army to the human heroes and pygmies, showing how the suggested structure differs from the actual structure, causing multiple misreadings. these passages and those that follow aim to undercut the heroism of hell, and indeed “all heroism, hellish or otherwise” (173), presumably Fish means specifically military heroism, since he says a few pages later, “Whatever heroism and virtue are, they do not reside where men have been accustomed to look for them” (176). The “final collapse” of the poetry of heroic physical action finally collapses in book IV, “Deeds of eternal fame / Were done, but infinite”—if all deeds are infinite, then how to single any out for telling (177)? Fish quotes summers: “In these lines we can recognize the destruction of the old heroic tradition” (177).
ii servant of god, well done. the disappointment the reader may feel at the inconclusive war should be tempered by the reader having learned his lesson about the (lack of) importance of physical action (181). It is Abdiel who represents Christian heroism; his faithfulness is “obscured by teh superficial political motives and military tactics” (182) but is so obscured because “one can respond to his gesture without being fully aware of the ideal embodied in it… he is too easy to admire” (182) though his heroism is chipped away at in various ways, e.g. he is not equal to Satan. After it all, “What remains, then, of the angel’s heroism? All of it, if we recall Raphael’s encomium, ‘His Loyalty he kept’, which perhaps is only now properly understood by the reader” (188). Abdiel avoids the temptations/pride of the “desire to serve” (188). His acceptance of his uselessness is impressive precisely because it is unconscious” (189). Abdiel ultimately remains only to annoy the enemy. But the “distance between Abdiel as irritant amidst a host of irritants exists only in our eyes, as a consequence of a false conception of heroism” (189).
iii other warfares and other heroes. “The reader’s sphere of action is the poem… Submitting to the style of the poem is an act of self-humiliation. Like all heroic acts it is a decision to subordinate the self to a higher ideal, one by-product of which is the discover of the true self. The imperative is ‘read!’ and by not giving up, by not closing the book, one learns how to read, and by extension how to live, and becomes finally the Christian hero who is, after all, the only fit reader. In the end, the eduction of Milton’s reader, the identification of his hero, and the description of his style, that is, of its effects, are one” (207).

5 The Interpretive Choice

i vain speculations. The “dazzling simplicity” of the meaning of the fall, for Lewis (i.e. it’s disobedience, stupid) is paralleled for Fish by the dazzling simplicity of the prohibition of A&E, yet another way in which our experience as readers parallels theirs. “The opportunities to yield to such sophistications are provided by God an MIlton, respectively, who wish to try the faith and integrity of their charges” (209). Fish lists various forms of the “anti-Milton” (209) criticism that all amount essentially to “God, not Adam and Eve, is guilty of the Fall” (210). Fish contends, as he has throughout the book, that Milton has left language that apparently absolves A&E of guilt for the fall in to test and tempt us. “As before, the subversive response (interpretation) is first encouraged and then discredited, leaving the reader to come to terms with the appeal it has for him” (214). This is Milton’s “good temptation” (216) technique. The “interpretive choice… is always made consciously and wilfully, and is ultimately a choice between the word of God and the structures reared (self-defensively) by the reader’s reason” (216).
ii the choices. one such choice comes early with the allusion to Narcissus: will we see this as a foreboding of vanity, or innocently (217)? (Fish is obviously for the latter, so to Rogers.) Similar analysis is given to Eve’s dream. But the dream “is meant to show what Adam and Eve are capable of doing, rather than what they must inevitably do” (226). If we “read properly and refuse to rest in superficial resemblances, the Fall is continually thrown into brilliant relief as an incomprehensible phenomenon; otherwise we comprehend it, and by comprehending, deny it” (228).
iii the consequences.

6 What Cause?: Faith and Reason

i carnal reason. reason can be a false guide, a “portal of temptation” (244), the same way rhetoric can, it is acceptable only so long as it “coincides with the word of God” (242). The prohibition against eating the apple must be unreasonable, otherwise it would be too easy to abide by and therefore not a test of obedience. “The more unreasonable seems the command, the more obvious it should be that its rationale lies in its source” (243). “The freedom of the fall… is a a point of doctrine, and the reader must resist the temptation to submit it to the scrutiny of reason” (244). We are inevitably lead to such questions as “why did God create man to fall?” and “is God unjust”, which are “unanswerable except by blasphemies” (245) and so we must “give them over” (245) and “accept on faith what we are unable to understand” making a “leap of faith” (245). Fish’s argument here rests on quotations from Milton’s contemporaries, which is a bit surprising/weak, imo.
ii eve: ‘with reason to her seeming’. Satan’s “entire argument” is contained in the two phrases “look on me” and “do not believe”, i.e. substitute what you seem to see for your faith (249). Satan “initiates Eve into the mysteries of empirical science” with words like “discern” and “trace” (250), which Fish suggests Milton does to dramatize “for the seventeenth-century projectors the traditional warning against intellectual pride” (251). When Eve later speaks to Adam, her “speech is a tissue of Satanic echoes” of words like cause, trace, effect, etc.
iii the reader: what cause? The reader recreates Eve’s error if he attempts to trace the causes/reasons for her fall, similarly losing himself in reason. “His responsibility parallels hers: she must remember that the reasonableness of eating does not alter the status of the divine prohibition; he must remember that she is required to perform an act of the will, signifying faith, not understanding” (254). This is a difficult task for the reader, given the degree to which his reason has been legitimately called upon already in the poem (255). The fall cannot be explained or understood; if it could, it would no longer have been free, but “the result of some analysable ‘process’ which attracts to itself a part of the guilt” (257). This hearkens back to Milton’s promise to “justify the ways of God to man”; but Fish cites I. A. Cormican to the effect that such justification is not intended in a logical/rational since but rather the sense from the New Testament indicating a “divine understanding, a supernal illumination” (257-8). (Aside: it is a curious view of free will that Fish is proposing here, or attributing to Milton, that a reason to do something is contradictory to or undermining of free will, rather than a necessary constituent of it.) Milton dangles these carrots of explanation in front of us (259).
iv adam: what seem’d remedyless. seeming remedyless, but being remediable by act of faith. we must go beyond what is given to our appearance. The poem asks us to “put off the old Adam and put on the New” (271). Our interpretation of Adam is the “terminal point” in the poem’s eduction, deciding whether Adam is right or wrong compasses the “full range of contraries whose differentiation has been [Milton’s] concern in the body of the poem—true and false heroism, true love and love of self, freedom and licence… In short if the reader has applied himself assiduously to the lessons the poem woudl teach him, ans so effected the purging of his intellectual ray, the superficial appea of Adam’s gesture will be neutralized by his understanding of what it means—a transgression of the whole law and therefore of those obligations in whos name the sin is committed… Not that the poem is finally ambiguous, at least as a moral statement; rather, its readers are abmiguous, and their ambiguities (crookednesses) are reflected in the interpretations they arrive at. There is, however, only one true interpretation of Paradise Lost and it is reward of those readers who have entered into the spirit of Milton’s ‘good temptation’ and so ‘become wiser by experience’” (272).
v dext’rously thou aim’st:

Ch 7: So God with Man Unites

i not so much an intangling as a teaching:
ii altered style: Fish mentions that some recent critics have undertaken a “rehabilitation” of Books XI and XII to counter CS Lewis’ “criticism that the historical survey is an ‘untransmuted lump of futurity’” (300), noting however that Lewis’ complaint about the curiously bad writing still has it adherents (301). But for Fish, “The force generated by the ‘altered style’ of Books XI and XII will vary in proportion to the effort the reader has expended in reaching them. If they fail now, it is because he has failed before” (303). Fish seems to be arguing that the straightforwardness of these books is a sort of denouement to the complexity and difficulty of the earlier books, that its impact “is tremendous, and it is so because the styule as style makes so few demands” (306). All possible competing “points of view” are “absorbed into the relenteless drone” (307). “the reader who is able to greet the ‘bodiless’ style of Xi and XII as Adam does, with joy, attests to Milton’s success” (307). (Aside: is Fish an atheist able to experience this joy? Presumably not, for essential and obvious reasons. If the Christian Lewis could not, whence Fish’s certainty in this reading?) Fish’s argument in this section is unconvincing.
III till time stand fixt: Milton’s similes, unlike those of other poets which “join two universes of discourse in such a way as to imply and confirm their more usual separation… [instead suggest] that only in their one-dimensional plane are things displayed as they really are with a clarity their natural settings only obscure. His analogies are expressions of cosmological unity articualted… within the system of correspondences we know as typology” (311). The Christian, through his faith, is able to immediately see the unity in diversity (312). “Because each simile finds a kind of form within a system and not in its own internal coherence (although many of them have that too), they reach out to one another and join finally in an endless chain of interchangeable significances: Leviuathan to Pharaoh to River Dragon to Serpent to to Giant to Locusts to bees to pygmies and cranes to imbodied force to edge to fallen leaves to barbarian hrodes and pagan Gods on the one side; Moses, David, Orpheus, Josiah, etc. on the other” (313). Book 12 presents not a linear progression, rather each “image or figure or single action [is] referred upwards to the significance it shadows… pushing upward toward the myth everything belongs to (thus the proliferation in these books of ascension imagery). [This upward force] predominates, forcing the structural members into the background… and imposing a static pattern on the fluidity of the reading experience. Time is consumed, but motion is frozen… On a larger scal this applies to the sweep of the narrative as a whole. It is sometimes objected that Milton’s presentation of history is poorly articulated, with weak transitions and a pronounced lack of proportion. The description is accurate, but the intention is, I think, “ (315).