problems is Satan, who is, as we all know, in many ways an impressively heroic figure. Saran directly affirms the autonomy that Eve is said to be made to repress in the story she tells of her creation in Book I. This Satanic affirmation, moreover, is also made to depend upon a creation story. In Book I, responding to Abdiel's argument that he owes gratitude to God for his creation, Satan says that he doesn't remember any time when he was not as he is. The notion that God created him is, Satan declares, a "strange point and new" If Milton's purpose in the poem is the affirmation of authority, why has he made the proponent of autonomy and rebellion into such an impressive figure!

The next big problem we run into in Paradise Lost is God in Book 3. Pace Froula, the problem with God is not that he is invisible and inaccessible to rational explanation, but quite the reverse. God is problematic because he is so conspicuous. There he is, talking to us, or at least overheard by us talking to the Son. Not really, of course. The ''there" of my next-to-last sentence is nowhere, "High Thrond above all hight" (3.58). The representation of the debate in Heaven is a sustained metaphor. God really is invisible; even when he shades the full blare of his beams, the brightest Seraphim have to cover their eyes with their wings (angelkind cannot bear too much reality). But the continual assertions that book 3 is only a metaphor do not prevent the metaphor from working. There God is still visible, or at least audible, and what we hear makes him sound at times coldly indifferent to human misery, and at other times petulantly defensive about his own freedom from responsibility for causing such human misery. Once again, if Milton's aim is what Froula takes it to be, then it must look as if the poem is fundamentally botched.

On the other hand, maybe Milton's text is working in more complicated and interesting ways than Froula assumes. In this respect, consider Milton's acknowledgment in Of Education (1644), just after the familiar assertion that the end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright: "But ... our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible as by orderly corrrling over the visible and inferior creature." This acknowledgment seems to me directly relevant to the kinds of problems we face with Satan and God (and almost everywhere else in Paradise Lost), which arise from the discrepancy that exists between the immediate dramatic impression (Satan is heroic; God is nasty) and the assertions that cross these impressions (Satan is vaunting in despair; God's speech generates new joy effulgent amongst the angelic audience). The poem, as A. J. A. Waldock pointed out many years ago.

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shows us something, then tells us something different. These discrepancies are what might be called the non dramatic moments of the poem (as distinct from the dramatic moments in the poem: the Son's offer of himself, Eve's wanting to go off on her own, and so forth), for such gaps in the test require us to enter- decisively into the action.

The history of Paradise Lost criticism is in many ways a catalog of the various interpretive decisions that can be made from within these interstices of Milton's text. We might decide with Waldock that the poem reflects. in ways the author was not full) controlling, Milton's own ambivalence about authority and freedom. We might decide that the authority, as it were, imported into the text from literary convention or orthodox theology must be supreme, in which case the Epic voice or God tells us the truth (C. S. Lewis, Douglas Bush, Helen Gardner, et al.). We might argue with William Empson that every voice is on trial in a civilized narrative, and then decide to go with the evidence of our senses, or with \that the poem proves to be true on our· pulses (William Blake, John Peter, et al.). We might decide that the poem aims at moving us through and from our impressions to some higher and more orthodox kind of authority (Stanley Fish, and many who follow in his wake). And there are other possibilities as well.

The base from which these critics build is a recognition that the tremendous power of the poem lies in its capacity to involve its readers in its material in contradictory ways that demand action and choice. I am trollbled not so much by Froula's apparent obliviousness to all Milton criticism but by her apparent obliviousness to all the qualities in Milton's poem that have engendered the criticism. Froula assumes that Milton's text is univocal, orthodox and conservative. Unlike nearly everyorre else, for whom the central problems of freedom and authority are thrust by the text directly onto the attention of its readers, Froula seems to believe that the problems raised by Milton's poem have to he teased out of the text, despite its overt intentions, by a reader like herself possessed of a privileged ideological or historical perspective. Strange point and new.

Froula's misrepresentation of Paradise Lost is nowhere clearer than in her discussion of Milton's own poetic authority. Froula is right to say that Milton's claim to aurhority is based upon a special relation to the Holy Spirit, but this claim to illumination is available to any one of Milton's readers (many of his contemporaries, of course, were making basically the same claim). More important, this claim serves not to mystify but to demystify authority. Once again, it is the aggressive intrusiveness of Milton's claim that ought to be emphasized. Any good rhetoric will urge that the way to establish authority is to do it gently. Here is Edward P.J. Corbett, under the rubric "Ingratiating oneself with the Audience":

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.

With all allowances made for changes in rhetorical conventions from Milton's day to our own, the point remains that Milton's way of establishing his authority is as subtly ingratiating as a panzer division. You don't need to be a feminist to react with instinctive resistance to such an assault. By thrusting his unverifiable claim upon us, Milton requires us to ask, in the words of my students--generally a quiescent bunch through whose minds questions of God and authority and freedom pass without any residual deposit, like evil through the minds of Gods--"Who says?"

Once again, Milton has botched his job if, like Froula, one assumes that his aim was to secure a blind acceptance. But he has succeeded if his job is to involve us--skeptically, perhaps rebelliously, probably angrily, but in any case actively--in a consideration of the real visible and rational bases for belief and trust. Froula, who marches under the banner of visibility, skepticism, and rationality, persists in seeing Milton's poem as the enemy. But Milton's aim, trumpeted at the outset, is to justify the ways of God to man, an aim that puts the poem at the vanguard, three hundred years ago, of the very endeavor Froula supposes herself to be originating.

My point is not that Milton is a feminist avant la lettre, or of Eve's party without knowing it. As Joan Webber points out in "The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost," Milton's poem is situated in history, and it is implausible to suppose Milton capable of thinking up feminist answers to feminist questions, or for that matter of being able to ask such questions." On the other hand, the history in which Milton's text ought to be situated includes regicide, Puritan rebellion, and a widespread distrust of` the desire of institutional authority to impose its version of the truth on the consciousness of' individuals. Milton's poem goes with that flow, by inviting its readers, or indeed sometimes dragging them kicking and screaming, into acknowledging their freedom to choose and responsibility for choice. As this way of putting it implies, Milton's poem is a bullying one, but its aggressive assertion of authority is finally a way of ceding authority to its readers, the authority to use their freedom in ways that cannot be controlled by the text or the particular beliefs that may or may not define and limit it. In this respect. Paradise Lost is certainly of an age, but it is also, I suspect, for all time.

Why does Froula so fundamentally misrepresent Paradise Lost? How can it be that to her eyes this ornery Protestant poem assumes the mystifying

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shape of a sacramental wafer in a priest's hands, The answer, I think, is in the assumptions she brings to the text, which allow her to see what she can see and constrain her from seeing anything else.

Froula assumes that the canon is formed and sustained by a ruling vested interest as a means of preserving its power and that any text which has arrived at and kept a position close to the center of the canon must serve this vested interest. The problem with this view is that it is based upon a reification called "cultural authority" (in Berkely in the 1960s we used to call it "the establishment," or sometimes just "them"). Where exactly are we supposed to locate cultural authority in Milton's time? If Froula can answer that question, she will make much easier the hopelessly complex task of historians of the English seventeenth century. And where is cultural authority in the eighteenth century. Does it matter if the canonization ofParadise Lost was largely the work of Whigs, or are Whig and Tory the same thing! And what of the early nineteenth century, in which the great revolutionary Romantic poets helped to preserve Milton's canonical status, and incidentally provided the operative terms by means of which, to this day, e understand and value his epic? Blake and Shelley and Byron; Metternich and Castlereagh--same thing! Froula says she wants to bring Paradise Lost down from myth and into politics and history, but it's a strange kind of politics and history she grves us. About the best thing that can be said for it is that it is clear and simple, but it's the clarity and simplicity of a comic strip in the funny papers.

Every movement for change has to rewrite history for its own purposes. I am not convinced by Froula's version of the history of canon-formation, but let that pass. What does she see for the future! There are two prospects she holds before us the (further) opening of the canon, and the disappearance of the canon. In the first instance, her analysis seems to me too narrow. In the second, I don't think she knows what she is talking about.

Froula suggests that the opening of the canon is a relatively recent phenomenon, but canon opening goes back a long time. When in 1598 Francis Meres constructed a tiresome set of analogies between his contemporaries and the playwrights and poets of classical antiquity, he was in the canon-opening business. When the advocates of American literature in the early nineteenth century went through a similar kind of exercise with their contemporary compatriots and the canonically secure British Poets, they too were in the canon-opening business. By reducing the opening o the canon to the opening of the canorr to women writers,

Froula seems to assume that only women have felt themselves silenced or excluded. The same attitude leads Froula to believe that the successful entry of women writers into the canon means that the opening of the Canon has now been virtually accomplished. A colleague of mine, a Canadianist, told me recently at an M.A. orals that Leonard Cohen was the Canadian Wordsworth. (He is still in the canon-opening business.) I

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laughed when he said this, but I might have laughed at the claims of Meres for Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century Americans for Ralph Waldo Emerson. I inhabit history, and history, as the Marxists keep reminding us, always has the last laugh. The point, in any event, is that history is likely to continue (Reagan and Chernenko and the rest of us permitting) and that if it does, then canon opening will continue as well, though subject no doubt to the kinds of constraints, variables, and inerl:ias so richly circumstantiated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in a recent issue of this journal.(4)

Froula in any case has a higher (or lower) ambition in mind, not just the opening of the canon but its disappearance. Just what does it mean to imagine the disappearance of the canon? On this point, Froula is unhelpfully vague, but probably as a consequence of honest uncertainty.
No one in the midst of a revolution, and Froula seems to think that this is where we are or may be, can be very sure what the slouching beast looks like. In the time of the breaking of nations, all bets are off. Let me, though, risk a descriptive prediction about the canon-less future; and if this implies skepticism about our inhabiting a revolurionary moment, so be it.

The disappearance of the canon is in effect the opening of the canon to infinity. Everything is in, or can be; there is neither center nor margin. In order to get a handle on this amorphous situation, imagine what it would mean to be an editor of a journal. This editor would be getting contributions whose range of reference would reflect the contours of the canon-- that is to say, an infinite range of subjects. Milton; Judith Krantz; the semiotics of Paris Match and Penthouse; Casey Stengel's influence or the oral discourse of Yogi Berra; the ontological status of Jorge Luis Borges' Fictions--all will be all in all. But how, then, will this editor function! How decide what to publish, what to decline? It probably sounds as if I mean to describe a situation in which answers to these questions are hopelessly impossible. Not at all: the answers are immediately accessible. Since this journal's readers, like its contributors, are actually interested in everything, the editor's choices will inevitably have to shift away from the objects of the contributors' studies, the texts that they write about, to the methodological, or theoretical, or simply rhetorical interests of the contributions themselves, there are two points I want to make about this imaginary situation.

The first is that it is not wholly imaginary, but in fact corresponds to what has been happening during the last fifteen years or so--a movement away from an object-oriented kind of interpretive or practical criticism, a movement toward the consideration of methodology and theory. Instead of writing these days about the texts sanctioned by the canon, we write about textuality, or the historically situated quality of texts, or their capacity to represent the power of cultural authority, or their incapacity to achieve closure or coherence, and so forth. This shift, which has coincided with

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the dramatic opening of` the canon, is still far, far away from the opening of the canon to infinity imagined with hope by Froula, or with horror by those who wish to "preserve exemplars." It suggests nonetheless-- and this is the second point I wan to make--what that eschatological situation might be: the imagined disappearance of the canon turns out to be simply a reconstitution of the canon. Critical discourse will no longer be parasitically related to "major literary" text; but with the disappearance of a quasi-sacred "literary" canon, we will note have a new canon, no less sacred, of self-referring theoretical texts. Instead of getting published largely by virtue of what vou write about (this essay is acceptable, because it's on Shakespeare), you will get published now because of the way you write (this essay is acceptable, because it's feminist). I exaggerate, of course. It is not enough merely to be a feminist these days, just as in the old days (which are still alive in these days), writing about Shakespeare could not in itself guarantee publication. But it was and is a help, for there Here and still are and always will be recognizable routes to follow in order to achieve success. In short, Froula's vision of the last things turns out to be merely business as usual, though a business whose profits will be distributed in greater proportions to the kinds of writers who write like Christine Froula.

My point is not to object to Froula's attempt to influence the profession in such a way as to acquire more of its privileges and powers. Her desire to get more of the action is based upon rights equal to the rights of the rest of us. It might even be argued that she has, like Orwell's pigs, a more equal right to the action, in view of the fact that women have only recently found their way into academia ("affirmative action," or mtfrapmgr as it's called where I live). But what I don't think Froula has the right to do is to represent her desire for increased power within the academic world in terms of some vague, otherworldly eschatology and thereby to mystify her endeavor by relating it to an indefinite, indefinable, and thereby inaccessible spirituality.

Such mystification is central to Froula's rhetoric from the very beginning of' her essay. In the title. Froula declares sisterhood with Eve, a share in the secondary status imposed upon her first mother. In the quotation at the head of her essay. Frouia declares sisterhood with the nameless women in the biblical text, enjoined to learn in silence and sill, mission. And finally, in the first words of her essay proper, Froula declares sisterhood with Woolf'. looking at the priestly academic world of Cambridge from her position of exclusion on the outside. All of this seems to me rather strange. There is neither silence nor submissiveness in Froula's eloquent and powerful essay, and for an associate professor at Yale to claim exclusion fronl academia is a bit like the Marxist with two Volvos in the driveway who claims to be "bringing down the system from within." Froula herself' acknowledges that women have gained entry into the academic world, to the point, indeed, of "critical mass." What, then,

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is the purpose of these invocations to the stunted, repressed, and maddened women of history?
Let me try to answer the question by means not of feminist discourse but of a discourse closer to my own experience: that of Jews. Some of my fellow Jews, from Menachem Begin down to my cousin Irwin from Westchester, like nothing better, when threatened or at other crucial points in a discussion, to remind their interlocutors of "the six million.' It always works; if it doesn't win the argument, it ends it. I have seen Gentiles who did not, to my knowledge, have an anti-Semitic drop of blood in their body, rendered silent and submissive by "Remember the six million." What, after all, from this corner into which they have been pushed--where if they are not part of the solution, they are now declared to be part of the problem--could they possibly say? (The phrase can work on Jews as well, though it is more likely to provoke rage as well as guilt; think of Judge Wapter in Philip Roth's Ghost Writer.) "Remember the six million" is a way both of immobilizing the audience and of conferring mystical authority upon the speaker who, even if he or she never got closer to the holocaust than a duplex in New Rochelle, nonetheless now speaks with an irresistible because inexplicable power. "Remember Virginia Woolf," which has become almost an obligatory ritual gesture in feminist rhetoric, is the equivalent of "Remember the six million." Its usual effect, whether or not this is the intended purpose, is to paralyze potential opposition into a guilty silence. Similarly, the usual effect, whether or not this is the intended purpose, of "Remember Virginia WooIf" is to mystify the authority of the speaker, on the basis of a special relation to the history of her gender to which only she and others who share her opinion have access.

His attempt to mystify anthority by locating it in an invisible realm outs de rational nderstanding is what Froula accuses Milton of doing. But as I have said, her understanding of Paradise Lost is a projection of her own methods. She is wrong about Milton. But her ways of being wrong about Paradise Lost tell us what it is she brings to Milton's text. New feminist is but old priest writ large.

Notes:

I..John Milton, "Of Education" (1644). Complete Poems and Major Prose. ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianpolis, 1957). p. 631.
2. Edward P. J Corbett. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York, 1965), pp. 282-83.

3. See Joan Webber. The Politics ot Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost." Milton Studies 14 (1980): 3-24.
4. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith. 'Contingencies of Value,' Critical lnquiry, 10 (Sept. 1983): 1-35.