Stanley Fish is famous for taking seemingly gratuitously extreme, provocative positions for the sake of aggravating his readers, many of whom wrongly associate him with a bland, outmoded flavor of so-called postmodern "thought." (That’s a topic for another day’s post.) His occasional columns in the New York Times typically generate polar responses in the comments when, for example, he writes in favor of an absolute prohibition against teachers revealing their political preferences in class. His latest column has largely avoided the intense disagreement, despite the fact that he casts the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates as, respectively, Jesus and Satan.
Jesus and Satan, that is, as depicted in the poetry of John Milton. Obama’s campaign style has been passive and calm, while "[t]he McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge…"
What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What dost thou in this world?”
This post has apparently garnered more than the usual proportion of favorable responses. Leave it to Fish to render Milton pertinent to a 2008 US presidential election, and to do it without forcing an analogy. He locates the wisdom of the poetry and brings it to bear on the current scene. I appreciate his attention to words: each party affords "discipline and care" different shades of meaning. (Nobody, on the other hand, disputes the significance of "a boatload of money.") The Jesus/Satan business is all Milton’s doing, of course, characters in a literary work, types in a cosmology, perhaps. Fish just happens to know more about the underlying work—not to mention its enduring vitality—than anybody else on the planet.
Accidental Blogger 
5 responses to “Post-Restoration Poetry and Campaign 2008 (Dean)”
I’m a little unclear on how he’s not “forcing an analogy.” He’s explaining the presidential race by saying that the candidates are acting like Milton’s characters! To the extent he’s commenting on anything beyond the poem–and it sure seemed to me that he was attempting to comment on politics–how can this not be a little forced?
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A fair question, Joe, and I’m betting my response won’t do it justice. But here goes. Fish most directly addresses the matter here:
We are not in the realm of analogy, then, but in the realm of rhetorical strategies shared by the two pairs of adversaries. Granted, Fish weakly states that the strategies “match up,” but I think it might be more appropriate to suggest that they are nearly identical. In fact, it’s surprising to me that Fish didn’t resort to the usual brand of tempered hyperbole he deploys when he composes these columns.
I’m at a loss at the moment to cite an instance of what I would consider a forced analogy, something not unlike a roman à clef or allegory for which the pleasure of reading arises primarily out of solving a puzzle, rather than carefully attending to the composite literary text. Fish has carefully read both Milton (duh) and the salient political drama of the day. He has found in the former a surprising relevance for the latter.
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Okay, here’s a forced analogy.
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With the NY Timesexample, I can see the ‘forced’ element, but is it really an analogy? This seems more like a peek into the actual telenovela that the McCain-Palin campaign has devolved into.
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No, you’re correct, Sujatha. I haven’t really nailed analogy, which would seem to entail more than a simple comparison, although OED allows for increasingly vague senses of the word. The typical form of an analogy is A:B::X:Y, i.e., the relation of A to B is the same as that of X to Y. But analogy can also be just a systematic remarking of similarity, and it becomes forced when the drawing of comparisons overwhelms any argument they might serve. Take, for instance, this story. It is a belabored series of comparisons, counterparts, coincidences, weak similarities, “situations [that] are almost identical,” and “inexact parallel[s].”
Now, you could argue that just as Fish elaborated his column upon a nifty identification of current real world actors with Milton’s characters, so has the NYT writer built his column from an even larger pool of evidences of similarity. The problem, of course, is that Fish wasn’t merely pointing out that Milton had somehow “foreshadowed reality,” which is a trivial observation. (Everything is like everything else, so of course fictional works are like the real world.) Fish is highlighting the importance of “rhetorical strategies” to the candidates’ contrivances to fashion themselves—for reception by the public and by each other—and the equally important poetic work accomplished by Milton, whose topic was an archetypal struggle.
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