Fish 2001

"In short, the argument against licensing, which has always been read as an argument for books, is really an argument that renders books beside the point: books are no more going to save you than they are going to corrupt you; by denying their potency in one direction, Milton necessary denies their potency in the other and undercuts the extravagant claims he himself makes in the passage with which we began. Whatever books are, they cannot be what he says they are in those ringing sentences -- the preservers of truth, the life-blood of a master spirit, the image of God." (195)

"The image here is one that will loom larger and larger: it is of a truth that is always running ahead of any attempt to apprehend it, a truth that repeatedly slips away from one's grasp, spills out of one's formulations, and escapes the nets that for a moment promise to catch it. Here that net is the tract itself, which is at this moment disqualifying itself as a vehicle of the truth it wants to convey; but at the same time and by the very same process, it is playing its part in the fashioning of another vehicle, one more able to bear the inscription of the Holy Ghost's pen. That vehicle is the heart of the reader, who is the direct beneficiary of the Areopagitica's failure, or, to be more precise,of Milton's strategy. That strategy is one we have been tracking from the beginning of this chapter: it involves encouraging the reader to a premature act of concluding or understanding, which is then undone or upset by the introduction of a new and complicating perspective. As we have seen, this happens not once but repeatedly, as the reader is first allowed to assume that the point at issue is the purity or impurity to be found in books, and then is told that the content of books (or any other object) is a thing indifferent relative to the purity or impurity already in persons, and finally (or is it finally?) is reminded that all persons are congenitally impure ("we bring impurity much rather") and that therefore the problem must be entirely rethought. The result is, of course, disorienting, but it is also salutary, for in the process of being disoriented the reader is provoked to just the kind of labor and exercise that is necessary to the constitution of his or her own virtue." (204)