Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, Second Edition with a New Preface

Critics, including Shelley, have argued over "Paradise Lost" for over 300 years. Stanley Fish has answered the crucial question once and for all: "What was Milton doing?" In a critical masterpiece, Fish has opened for all of us the pedagogic purpose of this monumental work. With a pattern of "mistake, correction, instruction," Fish has broken the code; showing at once that we are still "fallen" and susceptible to the rhetoric of Satan and his minions, and in what ways we, as "fallen man" continue to respond to the persuasion of the serpent in the Garden. It's hard to see what more can be written about "Paradise Lost" after this landmark exigesis. Read it and see how easily we can be seduced - and today's political discourse continues the tradition.

According to Fish, "Paradise Lost" operates according to a mechanism of rhetorical indirection that works on all rhetorical levels, from depiction of character to deployment of tropes. Milton wants to show us how our fallen state corrupts and distorts our responses to poetry and instruction; the poem is constructed as a series of interlocking traps for the reader, who is lured into reacting in tempting but "wrong" ways to tropes ("with serpent error wandering") and characters (the apparently admirable Satan and his cohorts, the apparently tyrannical and odious God). The chapter on the poetics of prelapsarian Eden ("In Wandering Mazes Lost," I think it's called) is a masterpiece. Fish backs this all up with plenty of solid research into the theological doctrines Milton was known to endorse or was likely to have been familiar with. This approach to Milton was regarded as radical when the book first came out, rather oddly, since Milton's tactics of indirection had already been noted by several critics, though not foregrounded as here. What's new is the thoroughness and clarity of the treatment, and Fish's sheer intelligence as a reader. This is criticism at its best: lucid, engaging, responsible, illuminating.