“Silence and Sufferance”: The Tacit Milton

Abstract

Noam Reisner recognizes that 'the claim to novelty in Milton studies is a notoriously difficult one' (10), and so it now seems natural for Miltonists to follow Pierre Macherey's suggestion that 'what is most important in the work is what it does not say'. 1 Scholars in the field are shifting their focus from what Milton did say, to what he did not say, and how he did not say it. While this may appear to be an unnecessarily dense or even absurd line of inquiry, it nevertheless proves remarkably rewarding. Of the three works discussed in this review, only one, Noam Reisner's Milton and the Ineffable, is explicitly concerned with the question of silence. However, Milton and Monotheism by Abraham Stoll also reveals a surprising engagement with silence through its exploration of the paradox of deistic revelation. In the Oxford Handbook of Milton, a number of essays in the collection explore both Milton's use of voices and the gaps and silences in his corpus, to great effect.Reisner's thesis is that Milton 'only ever wants to be seen to say the unsayable without actually saying it' (7), and this rather opaque statement initially leaves the reader a little uncertain of the accessibility of the rest of the book. Such fears are soon allayed, however, by an illuminating discussion of the evolution of the concept of ineffability in western thought. While such overviews often divide intellectual history into neat epochs, Reisner is careful to emphasize the fundamental sense of continuity. One notable exception is the treatment of the Reformation as a watershed moment in the history of ineffability. The resurgence of biblical translation and exegesis in this period transformed the ineffable from its original ontological status into a semantic phenomenon, as the impossibility of translational parity highlighted the inherent insufficiency of language.With the theoretical framework of his thesis firmly established, Reisner then delves into Milton's works. While his investigation of the earlier poems is largely conventional, he strikingly suggests that Comus is not merely afraid of the Lady's unassailable virtue. Comus is actually anxious regarding the presence of the ineffable within the Lady, as her virtue is irreducible to words and impervious to verbal seduction.Strangely, Reisner passes over the prose tracts of the 1650s without comment. The Defences were written to disabuse Europe of Salmasius' misrepresentation of the English, and so the tracts are fundamentally concerned with what had not been said.