There’s a recent series of author biographies by Wiley called ‘The Life of the Author‘. They’ve got eight volumes out so far, with another on F. Scott Fitzgerald coming in December this year, and lately I’ve been reading their volume on Milton. The Life of the Author: John Milton (2021), by Richard Bradford, is split into two parts: first a straightforward biography of the man, and then a whistle-stop tour through three hundred and fifty years of literary criticism around the central text in his oeuvre, Paradise Lost. We get C.S. Lewis on Milton, William Empson on Milton, T.S. Eliot, and then all the various literary theories – feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, so on – collectively known as the isms, even though they don’t all have ism in the name.

Bradford also touches on a movement that we might refer to as ‘post-theory’, which is maybe less a formal movement and more a sense of exhaustion. It grows partly out of this feeling within literary studies that the theoretical approaches, while valuable, have in some places grown to take on more of a life than the texts themselves. The fear is that all these theorists go around treating every book as proof of their pet theory. To the Marxist, every book is proof of Marx’s theory of history. To the feminist, every book is made up of progressive feminism or regressive patriarchy. The fear, among the fearful, is that none of these theoretical approaches really end up dealing with the book at all. They’re seen as political approaches, using the text as a staging ground (as an excuse) to talk about their pet theory. And intuitively that fear makes sense, right – like, oh, a Marxist reading of Paradise Lost? I wonder what conclusion the Marxists will draw. Could it be that Paradise Lost will prove, once again, that Marx was right? We’ve talked previously about this issue with regard to a funny post from Babylon Bee – Jesus Was A Socialist Deconstructionist Feminist, Claims Socialist Deconstructionist Feminist Scholar – essentially riffing on the same point. What you put into a text is often what you get out of it. If you’re going in with this loaded perspective, you’re probably going to come to certain conclusions, and it’s worth wondering what’s lost in the text along the way.

And there’s a lot feeding into these arguments. It’s not all just about the philosophy of reading – partly it’s a generational thing, with older, mostly white, mostly male critics set against younger, more diverse demographics. Some of the hostility to theory does boil down to misogyny, or other entrenched, regressive forces, and in some places I do actually think the older critics have a point. It’s reasonable to wonder whether theoretical frameworks applied en masse might start producing indistinguishable results. If you have to read five hundred Marxist interpretations covering all the books in the literary canon, you can imagine it might be the same story over and over again, the individual, unique nature of any given book made subservient to the grinding engine of theory. There’s a risk there, for sure, but I think also sort of a caricature. In practice it’s simply not the case. Theorists aren’t all busy running roughshod over their texts: in fact, when I took classes on postcolonialism, I remember my lecturer pulling me up and saying hey, you’ve explained the theory, but you haven’t talked at all about the book. She was actually quite good at redirecting that sort of behaviour. It was always – well, how does the book engage with that theory? How does the novel explore that concept? I hear the concern of the older critics, but I also don’t think their fears are grounded in the facts of how literary theory is taught in practice.

In any case, this era of post-theory seems almost like a sort of truce. The phrasing of the term seems to imply that we’ve got over theory and gone back to the proper business of reading the text, which isn’t quite the case – I think it’s more accurate to say we’re past the stage of people getting mad about theory. Theoretical approaches have naturalised, and the whole stoush is being set aside – nobody’s really getting mad any more about feminist readings of literature. It’s sort of passé. We haven’t abandoned the insights of our theoretical frameworks, but we aren’t going back to some presumed neutral or objective style of reading, either. Like Adam and Eve, we’re living after the Fall. I think also a lot of the powerful concepts from the age of theory have become part of our everyday thinking. We don’t necessarily need all of this complicated intellectual infrastructure, because a lot of the thought is communicated intuitively on the level of culture. For instance, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic explores Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. In their classic section on Jane Eyre, they explore how Rochester has locked his insane wife in his attic. We can go through all the specifics of the argument, but it essentially boils down to Gilbert and Gubar pointing at the madwoman in the attic and going – hey, is that weird? If you’re not familiar, Rochester wants to marry Jane Eyre, but he can’t, because he has a wife (Bertha Rochester), who he locked in the attic when she went mad. Rochester wants to be with Jane, but he can’t, because of his awkward marital commitments. Thankfully, at the end of Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester burns down the family home and dies, resolving her narrative function as an obstacle to Rochester and Jane getting married. Charlotte Bronte resolves the book’s central conflict by murdering Bertha offscreen so that her heroine can have a fantasy wedding. Is that weird? We don’t even really have to make the argument – just intuitively, we can see how Bertha Rochester is treated cruelly as a character. The romance of Jane and Rochester is built on disregard for Bertha’s illness. It’s built on a lack of empathy, on imprisonment and death as natural outcomes for the mentally ill. What’s interesting here is that we can sense the problem even before it’s articulated. The argument almost comes after the fact, after the identification. We can just outline the situation, point at it, and go – hey, that feels weird. If post-theory means anything, in other words, I wonder how much it gestures towards a change in social values. If we’re able to pick this stuff up essentially just on vibes, maybe post-theory means that we’re so acculturated to these points of view that their conclusions seem natural.

Let’s try with a couple examples. In his section on feminist readings of Milton, Richard Bradford accuses one feminist, Christine Froula, of being obsessed with a “patriarchal conspiracy”. Is that weird? Bradford attacks Froula for her essay ‘When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy’, published in Critical Inquiry 10.2, in 1983. Examining a passage from Book Four of Paradise Lost, Froula argues that Eve’s instruction by the invisible voice of God bears parallel to the induction of women into patriarchal authority. “The nativities of Adam and Eve in Milton’s poem bear out the archetypal associations of maleness with invisibility and of femaleness with visibility that some theorists argue is given in male and female relations to childbirth”. Froula identifies this division in Freud, who writes “maternity is proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise”. You always know the mother, in other words, because you can see the pregnancy, but you don’t really truly know who the father is – because you didn’t see them having sex. You have to believe who you’re told is the father. Motherhood is visible, fatherhood is invisible. It’s very Freudian. The shift from visible to invisible is then read as a shift from the sensory to the spiritual, from the lower female form to the higher masculine. When Eve is instructed by the invisible God, Froula reads it as part of a long tradition of patriarchal writing, perpetuated and upheld by the patriarchal literary canon. Bradford replies to her close reading with this:

“She [Froula] is either genuinely ignorant of the broader context of the passage or so intent on exposing Milton as part of a patriarchal conspiracy as to deliberately omit any reference to the complex interplay between this poem, the lady in Comus, and Shakespeare’s presentation of Portia in Measure for Measure, which shows that both writers were willing to raise radical questions regarding gender roles.”

Bradford here is dodging the point. He argues that Milton raised some radical questions about gender roles, to which we might reply: so what? Being progressive in the 1600s doesn’t mean all your views will age well into the modern day. You can raise radical questions about gender (or at least questions that might be considered radical in the 1600s) and still uphold patriarchal ideals. Bradford makes this defence himself later in his book:

“True, in a practical sense she [Eve] plays a secondary role to Adam’s. He is the one who engages directly with Raphael, for example. But Milton’s treatment of her in this way can hardly be regarded as unusual evidence of patriarchal authority. He can neither be expected to rewrite Genesis completely, nor to personally reschedule the seventeenth-century notion of a woman’s social role.”

He’s sort of giving away the game. His argument here is that yes, there are a series of markers of Eve’s subservience throughout the text, but Milton couldn’t have done anything else. He’s as progressive as it’s possible to be for the time – which is a roundabout way of admitting Froula’s point. Froula critiques Paradise Lost as a text in support of patriarchy. Bradford’s defence is that it’s progressive for the time, and that Froula doesn’t credit Milton enough for that progressiveness – which is less a rebuttal and more an accompaniment. Milton can be both progressive for his time and still uphold patriarchal values. Even so, Bradford feels entitled to roast Froula for attacking, in his words, a patriarchal conspiracy.

There’s more to say about Froula – we can’t get right into it now, but Paradise Lost is essentially a slippery text to invoke in a discussion about authority and power, specifically because it sets out to disrupt those ideas. To raise just one instance, which we touched on last week (P is for Paradise, Pilgrims), Milton was a religious non-conformist. He disobeyed the institutional church, with its rules and structures supposedly ordained by God. He publicly supported the execution of King Charles I – he’s heard of the divine right of kings, and he doesn’t give a shit. In a book where Satan rebels against God and is cast out of Heaven, Milton’s biography would seem to incline him more towards the revolutionary than to the divinely ordained power. It’s difficult to pair his personal history of political and religious rebellion with a full-throated endorsement of God’s authority. That problem threads its way through all aspects of Paradise Lost, including the gender dynamics. In keeping with the Biblical text, God creates Eve out of Adam’s rib, making her second and subservient. That is, unquestionably, a patriarchal idea. But does Milton endorse it? Does he agree with God, or does he cast himself as Satan, a political revolutionary who’s here to burn the whole thing down? The answer is probably closer to the first option than the second – no serious critic believes Milton was an anti-Christian Satanist, or even a freewheeling 1980s feminist – but the point is that Paradise Lost is slippery. It has a complicated relationship with authority. Satan is the coolest character in the whole thing, and God honestly seems boring and shit. Holding up Paradise Lost as the paradigmatic example of patriarchal authority seems like maybe overstating the point, giving too much credence to ideas of authority that the book itself works to unsettle.

While Froula maybe picks a poor case study for her argument, Bradford talks past her in his defence of Milton. At issue here is his specific reference to patriarchal conspiracy. As a phrase, it’s meant to degrade and discredit Froula, and feminists more broadly. It suggests that the feminists are conspiracy theorists, that they’re making up ghosts to be mad about. Patriarchy isn’t treated as a real and legitimate problem – it’s a conspiracy, a delusion. Calling it a conspiracy also seems to imply the existence of conspirators, as if all men have banded together in some conscious and deliberate plot to oppress women. Bradford’s trying to make the idea seem ridiculous – exposing Milton as part of a patriarchal conspiracy, he says. It’s worth noting that systems of oppression don’t actually require committee meetings. It is very obvious that women have been systematically disadvantaged in innumerable ways across our history and into the modern day. They do a greater share of household chores, they’re paid worse, there are fewer of them at the highest levels of government and business – are we really doing this? Do I really have to explain? There was no meeting where all the men sat down and decided how things were going to be. It’s cultural. It’s mediated socially, interpersonally, through our cultural forms and institutions, including through the texts that are held up as exemplars of literary excellence, such as Paradise Lost. And I can explain all of this overtly, but what’s interesting (I think) is the way in which the mere phrase ‘patriarchal conspiracy’ immediately sets off a red flag.

Let’s try another example. In his review of Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand, C.K. Stead opens by imagining the history of New Zealand without Maori. Is that weird?

“If it were possible to subtract the Maori element from New Zealand history then the story would be remarkable only in an entirely unremarkable way, offering yet another illustration of the human capacity for hard work, optimism, endurance, adaptability and (on the whole) triumph against odds.”

As reprinted in his collection of essays Book Self, the review takes up maybe six or seven pages. The first half is taken up with discussing New Zealand in terms of Pakeha relations with the UK. In the second half, Maori are allowed to emerge, and we hear about the history of Maori-Pakeha relations. On the whole, the review doesn’t contain any howlers. It’s never shocking, but it is always slightly off-colour. It feels like it was written by one of those old white men who never quite internalized biculturalism – exactly the sort of person who would open a review of New Zealand history by imagining a world without Maori. You could maybe propose a similar piece that examines Maori and Pakeha as two separate strands, slowly integrating two halves into one whole – that structure might illustrate through its form something of the story of New Zealand. But that’s not this review. This review deals first with New Zealand and Britain, and then with New Zealand and Maori. The central figures are the colonials, looking back towards home and then towards their new compatriots. Pakeha sit at the center, and Maori are encountered as strangers or foreigners, as new characters introduced into the colonial story, as ‘them over there’ rather than as ‘we who were already here’. I don’t even really understand what I’m supposed to take away from that opening sentence – without Maori, the New Zealand story would be unremarkably remarkable, only (only?) a story of hard work, optimism, endurance, adaptability, and triumph. That sounds like a rave review of white people; I wonder what’s left for Maori.

These examples in themselves are fairly unremarkable. One’s patronising to women and the other is a Eurocentric view on colonial history. We could drum up any number of examples of these sorts of things. What’s interesting, to me, is how quickly we clock it. A brief description sets off warning signs. We might not immediately be able to articulate the problem – we might have to think about it, might have to read more closely, more deeply across the text as a whole, but we know something’s wrong. We know we’ve heard something weird. Obviously this skill isn’t shared universally by everyone. Bradford and Stead don’t seem to have it, although who knows – maybe both of them would immediately clock the problem with the other. In any case, these ways of thinking have become more common. They have sunk into our collective psyche. We don’t necessarily need all the intellectual scaffolding and framework to spot the issue – even merely by talking to these types of people, you can often pick up the bad vibes well ahead of any overt comments. If post-theory means anything, maybe it’s something to do with vibes. It’s that radar, that awareness. It’s still something that’s taught, still something that we learn and share overtly, but it’s also something – je ne sais quoi – something in the air, something in the water. We’ve learned how to spot bad vibes. Maybe that’s what post-theory means.