Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation.

John P. Rumrich. Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv + 186 pp. $44.95. ISBN: 0-521-55173-0.

Milton Unbound proposes nothing less than a transformation of the critical paradigm that has dominated Milton studies for the last thirty years. What is this paradigm? As readers of John Rumrich's 1990 Hanford prize essay will recollect, it is an entity he calls the "invented Milton," the legacy of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin. There, he contends, Milton acquired what has become his essential critical character as the "punitive persona" who "already knows the truth of things, humiliates and berates his charges for their errors, and with obnoxious superiority requires conformity to traditional beliefs" (21). This vision of the harsh pedant pervades Marxist, deconstructionist, and New Historicist readings alike, all echoing a Milton who, "having established fallen engagement, dominates it" (7). In assaulting this "badly skewed version of Milton" (xi) Rumrich casts temperance aside. He cannot "imagine a methodology less appropriate to an epic so morally daring and exuberant as Paradise Lost than reader-response theory joined in lockstep with a quasi-determinist, catechetical didacticism" (21). The "invented Milton," he claims, has been a "pedagogical disaster" (3) more likely to leave students "bored and repelled" than properly "inspired and awestruck" (19). While every reader has felt the weight of the "invented Milton," must a critical artifact, now much mutated or effectively ignored (as Rumrich concedes), be so aggressively supplanted?

The answer lies in the Mikon Rumrich wishes to put in its place, for the "unbound" Milton is, as we might expect, its precise alter ego: "fundamental to my larger argument is the claim that Milton was a poet of indeterminacy who found ways to incorporate the uncertain and the evolving into his most highly realized works of literary art" (24). Where Fish's Milton is a tedious didact "repeatedly provoking and then squelching readers' evil responses" (28), Rumrich's Milton celebrates the "chaotic potency" (28) of psychic and spiritual life. Freeing Milton, in turn, frees his readers, once the "ordinary educated and Christian audience" (28) posited by C.S. Lewis and reaffirmed by Fish, but here the diverse contemporaries of a radically individual poet who "begins with shared beliefs, only to use them as a basis to subvert others" (36). As Rumrich challenges the fiction of a Protestant common reader, he assails those critics who use the dubious notion of a mainstream Protestantism to recast Milton as "the voice of the emergent bourgeoisie" (35). "Milton unbound" is Milton purged - restored to a state before the fall of theory initiated by the proto-Rezeptionsasthetik of Fish. Yet not wholly purged, for Rumrich uses psychoanalytic theory to explore Miltonic indeterminacy in the second half of the book.

His consideration of the poetry thus begins with a revision of William Kerrigan's reading of Comus as a site of Oedipal struggle. For Rumrich, it is the mother, rather than father, who dominates a masque that reflects Milton's pre-Oedipal "wish to renounce compromising involvement with identity-threatening maternal powers" (93). If such Freudianism seems anachronistic and speculative - "it may have been the . . . mother, more than her husband, whose fondest dream was for her precious first son to join the church" (86) - it also marks a crucial reorientation. Placing Sara Milton at the heart of Milton Unbound undermines the patriarchal poet and deconstructs the Hobson's choice of a misogynist or feminist Milton in favor of a maternal Milton who throughout his career copes with the "generative force of maternal nature" (94).

In elaborating this argument, Rumrich compares Miltonic constructions of gender to cultural ideas of generation and, in his most brilliant reading, reconstrues chaos as the principle of a fruitful indeterminacy that illuminates the "instability and excess . . . incoherence and undecidability" of Paradise Lost (118). Yet this revision of Milton is not without irony. As Rumrich appeals to "feminine" principles of nature, wildness, and generation to subvert a masculinist Milton - redefining chaos itself as the "feminine otherness" (145) of God - one cultural stereotype is undone by reaffirming another. He constructs his maternal Milton in the cause of liberating the poet from interpretive impasse, but the difficulties of typifying gender continue to enclose Milton's writing.

Milton Unbound constitutes a striking performance, an impassioned attack on what it depicts as a fundamentally misguided Milton industry that evolves into a quest, grounded in psychoanalysis, to undo the patriarchal Milton. Yet its very abrasiveness and what may seem to many an unsympathetic method yield something rich and strange. The attempt to restore to Milton a sense of indeterminacy, to apprehend what Rumrich calls his "poetics of becoming" (24), offers a seductive transformation of a monolithic figure. It is the distinction of this book to seize on what is often missed: the precariousness of Milton's art.

SAMUEL GLENWONG Simon Fraser University