The Fetish of ObedienceThis is the second of two essays on Professor Stanley Fish's How Milton Works following Subtractional Misrepresentation in this website.
The most sinister statement in Professor Fish's depressing new book is hidden on page 381. Here Fish has been arguing that in spite of the appearance of structure in the plot of Paradise Regained, in reality the events of the poem are random and exhibit no tendency or formal organization whatever. This follows:
There is an even severer judgment to be made:the critics who are busy debating the kinds of schematizations and formal organizations that we should keep in mind when reading Paradise Regained are, in effect, doing the devil's work.
Take heed of that, you structuralists. By seducing your readers with wicked dreams of pattern and form in Paradise Regained, you are stoking the fires of hell for them and yourselves. I had thought that nothing could exceed the madness that I collected in An Anthology of Neo-Christian Orthodoxy in this website, but now I see I was wrong.
The book is riddled with this sort of reader response, which Erving Goffman in his Frame Analysis calls "downkeying," a sudden decrease in the mental distance supposed to exist between a person and a performance. Fish embarks on an explanation that Milton believes thus and so, but soon the language makes clear that Fish himself shares the belief, and then that the reader must share it on pain of doing "devil's work." Every one of Milton's poems, says Fish, calls for an "act of faith"(p.10).
Fish's thesis is simple and reduces Milton's works to a like simplicity. Quite early in life the poet discovered that the only thing in the world that mattered to him was obedience to God, and from then on he treated no other subject in his poetry. His universe was "a homogeneous structure of nested boxes (called aesthetics, politics, philosophy, value, knowledge, virtue) each of which, when opened, reveals the same content: an acknowledgement of, and a determination to serve, a benevolent and all-powerful deity" (p.108)"Food, wine, women, family, country, glory, fame, great literature, civil conversation, social justice" are less important than this obedience (p.9; in passing be it noted that Fish lists these unworthy things in an ordered series from the most fleshly and elementary to the least, while denying that any such series exists in the temptations of Paradise Regained.Hence the divided mind, that perennial theme of western civilization, for Milton does not exist:"there are no moral ambiguities, because there are no equally compelling values. There is only one value--the value of obedience..."(p.53)With tenets like these, Milton was poorly supplied with themes either for poetry or prose;he had "an imperative to be single-minded--to affirm one thing, one truth, one meaning, one God, one obligation" (p.51). His characters resemble himself; Christ in PRis "someone for whom everything is always the same"(p.363). Paradise Lost shuns the following, any of which would detract from its single-mindedness: "Plot, narrative, drama, crisis, movement, change, representation, sign, woman..."(p.493). There cannot be badness in Milton's good characters or goodness in his bad ones, and hence PL I. 529-30, which tells how Satan "gently rais'd"the fainting courage of his followers, needs a whole chapter (XIV) to explain it away; Satan cannot possibly be gentle. A world such as this, with no choices, presupposes a world with no differences and this too Milton accepted without qualification."There is only one; variety is only a surface phenomenon beneath which there is a single unchanging substance...in short, there is nothing that is different"(p.489).
The absoluteness of obedience to God is brought out nowhere so clearly as in Samson Agonistes which provides us with little or no explanation "why two thousand people--many of them, to use the Chorus'[sic]own words, 'not disordinate' or 'dissolute' or 'unjust'(701-703) should die." (But, in passing, let me say that the Chorus does not say this about the Philistines killed in the fall of the temple; see "Misreadings," below.) That is, Samson commits mass-murder on no better grounds than because God commands it, and on the same grounds we should accept it. "Within the situation, it is an expression... of his reading of the divine will; and insofar as it represents his desire to conform to that will, it is a virtuous action. No other standard for evaluating it exists...(p.426; emphasis in the original).The motto Gott mit Unswas embossed on German army belt buckles in World War II so the message of Samson Agonistes appears to be that that army's noble conception of what it was doing is the only available standard of evaluation thereof. William Empson also noticed the transition in SA, that in his previous poems Milton at least thought it possible to do what was right, but in this one he envisions nothing but obedience to his bloodthirsty God.
To sum up all, Milton's poetry is "terribly static" (p. 32).
To articulate how aghast I am at this auto da fe of Milton's work would exceed the duties of a critic. But I can briefly recollect another century when a famous Miltonist, E.M.W. Tillyard, said that if Milton had been Adam, he would have eaten the forbidden fruit and then written a pamphlet to justify the act. Fish, indeed, seems to have written his book solely in order to annihilate Tillyard's position, though I think the reverse were better done. Let us consider these ideas, that Milton cared only for obedience to God and that Satan could not possibly have any virtues.
1. In fact, Milton lived through, and expressed in his poetry, the tumults of a mind deeply divided against itself, and in an extreme moment was as ready to defy God as was his own Satan. I refer to the moment when he found himself married to a woman he loathed.
Whether God wanted Milton to marry or not, the poet behaved as if his wedding to Mary Powell during a trip to Buckinghamshire in 1642 had resulted from divine inspiration. In college his conspicuous celibacy had caused him to be generally disliked. Edward Philips's narrative of Milton's marriage stresses its contrast with his previous behavior:
About Whitsuntide it was, or a little after, that he took a journey into the country; no body about him certainly knowing the reason, or that it was any more than a journey of recreation; after a month's stay, home he returns a married man, that went out a bachelor...(The Life of Milton,in Merritt Hughes, ed.;John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, Odyssey Press, Indianapolis, n.d.,p. 1031).
Nor was Milton a man to treat offhandedly a dubious oath in the Anglican church in which he paid his vows to God and Mary. Though desirous of being an Anglican priest, he had foregone this vocation because it would require him to swear "with a conscience that would retch" that he believed in the divine institution of the order of bishops (The Works of John Milton[New York:Columbia U.P., 1931], Vol. III, part i, p. 242.Hereafter CE.) Hence we must conclude that in June, 1642,Milton believed that God willed him to live with Mary Powell, for better or for worse, till death parted them.
A passage of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, whose density and concentration remind one of Chekhov, informs us of the sequel;
...if he be such as hath spent his youth unblamably, and layd up his chiefest earthly comforts in the enjoyment of a contented marriage, nor did neglect that furderance which was to be obtain'd therein by constant prayers, when he shall find himself bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or, as it oft happens, to an image of earth and fleam, with whom he lookt to be the copartner of a sweet and gladsome society and sees withall that his bondage is now inevitable,he will be ready to dispair in vertue, and mutin against divine providence... therfore charity ought to venture much, and use bold physick,lest an over-tost faith endanger to shipwreck (CE, III. 399-400;emphasis added).
Let me draw the reader's attention to the implications of the italicized words. Milton knew well that the Presbyterians might not accept his scriptural gloss that the New Testament command (Mark 10:9; "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder")is ad hocto the practices of some hypocritical pharisees and does not repeal the Old Testament law of divorce. Indeed, they rejected the argument in toto and branded Milton a heretic, whereupon he soothingly replied that they were "Owls and Cuckoos, Asses, Apes, and Dogs" (Sonnet XII). Here Milton forestalls attack with an argument of Realpolitik: the Presbyterian church is losing thousands of members who annually become atheists, warlocks or magicians; hence the Westminster Assembly should stretch any permissiveness they have to the utmost ("use bold physick") to keep these men in the fold. At this critical moment, God's will becomes secondary. The legislators must meet the mutineers halfway.
In Tetrachordonthis demotion of God's will (here called his law)becomes more explicit still:
...Christ having cancell'd the handwriting of ordinances which was against us... and interpreted the fulfilling of all through charity, hath in that respect set us over law, in the free custody of his love, and left us victorious under the guidance of his living Spirit, not under the dead letter; to follow that which most edifies, most aids and furthers a religious life,makes us holiest and likest to his immortal image, not that which makes us most conformable and captive to Civill and subordinate precepts; whereof the strictest observance may oftimes prove the destruction not only of many innocent persons and families, but of whole Nations. Although indeed no ordinance human or from heav'ncan bind against the good of man; so that to keep them strictly against that end is all one with to break them (CE,IV, 74-75; emphasis added).
Because the welfare of a nation depended on that of the household of its monarch, it was traditional to grant at his desire an annulment with permission to remarry. Thus Henry VIII's petition to Pope Clement VII was not outrageous but was of a kind that had been granted by many popes. Martin Luther, going farther than Henry desired the pope to do, arranged for Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, to marry Margaret von der Saal bigamously while validly married to Christina of Saxony, without even the excuse that Christina was infertile. So popes and protestant leaders as well would defy God's will (law) to save a nation. If so, asks Milton, why not extend this indulgence to measures designed to save families and individuals? To obey a command of God in such manner as to harm these individuals, families and nations is the same thing as breaking it. Christ has set us over law.
Man's right, asserted by Milton, to nullify any ordinance of heaventhat was against his good,should be considered in the light of God'sright, asserted by William Twisse, to do evil to man-- apparently, fromthe wording of Twisse's document, all the evil he wants. (See "JohnMilton: Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians..." in this website.) Twisse headedthe Westminster Assembly which must decide whether there would or wouldnot be divorce in the Puritan commonwealth so Milton simultaneously facedan evil God and a hanging judge.
"Mutin against divine providence!" "No ordinance human or from heav'n!" These are the expressions of a man, the ignorance of whose pious admirers has filled his poetry with a fetish of obedience to God.
Do all the annals of Christianity show a professing Christian in such a state of defiance against God as these pamphlets do? Certainly the norm is more submissive. John Henry Newman wrote that the Catholic Church holds
that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes,than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth... or steal one poor farthing without excuse (Lectures on Anglican Difficulties(1852),Lecture 8).
Father Jeffcott, the fin de siecle Irish Jesuit immortalized as Father Arnall in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,adorned one of his retreat sermons with a similar notion:
...Father Jeffcott told us that if all the natural catastrophes and all the wars and all the ills and evils of mankind could be avoided by deliberately committing one venial sin, it would be far, far better not to commit that sin. With a start of anger that deafened me awhile to the rest of his sermon, I thought,"A lie! A thumping falsehood!" and later, when my anger ebbed, "Do the sufferings of men not matter?"(--Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper,New York: Viking Press, 1958,p. 82)
Need I point out that Milton's response to God's omnipotent will was closer to Stanislaus Joyce's response than to that of Newman or Jeffcott?
2. Fish states sweepingly--not that he ever talks any other way--that "an agent who has broken with God... cannot be gentle (or courageous, or compassionate, or trustworthy, or anything else, for that matter)"(p.460).In so doing he erases one of the most remarkable differences between Dante and Milton. Dante's devils hate one another as much as they do God and the damned. In the Inferno, Canto XXII, a mass of devils torture sinners by driving them into a lake of boiling pitch, but at the same time attack each other with rude commands, threats, and abuse.
"...see that you get your claws into his back so you can skin and flay him!"(ll. 40-41) "Stay back there while I've got a grip!"(l.60) "We've stood enough!"(l.70) "Get back from there, you filthy bird!" (l.96)"...he sneered, 'Listen to that...'"(l. 107;tr. James Finn Cotter.)
But Milton, a humanistic scholar, wanted to create an epic more truly classical in form and content, and so depicted devils with many good qualities, many traces of their heavenly past. As in tragedy, so in epic, everyone must be in the right; there could be no Iliad if either the Greeks or the Trojans lacked all virtue. Satan still shines:
...his form had yet not lostAll her Original brightness, nor appear'd
Less than Arch-Angel ruin'd, and th'excess
Of glory obscur'd: As when the Sun new ris'n
Looks through the Horizontal Misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs (PL I, 591-99).
The sight of Eve fills him with such admiration that he forgets what he is doing and for a brief period is stupidly good (PL IX, 457-66).
His army preserves unity, discipline, and high morale under the worst possible conditions for these qualities, namely, total defeat:
...Anon they moveIn perfect Phalanxto the Dorianmood
Of Flutes and soft Recorders; such as rais'd
To highth of noblest temper Heroes old
Arming to Battle, and instead of rage
Deliberate valor Breath'd, firm and unmov'd
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat,
Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage
With solemn touches, troubl'd thoughts, and chase
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain
From mortal or immortal minds (PLI. 549-559;emphasis added).
Angels, humans and devils alike respond to music.
Even more strikingly we learn that devils, though always worse than angels, are sometimes better than men.
O shame to men! Devil with Devil damn'dFirm concord holds, men only disagree
Of Creatures rational, though under hope
Of heavenly Grace; and God proclaiming peace,
Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
Wasting the Earth, each other to destroy...(PL I.496-502)
As"creatures rational" includes unfallen and fallen angels, Milton seems to have forgotten the three-day war, so big that it dwarfs all human wars combined in one, that his enjoyers of firm concord have recently survived. There must be some narrower focus than, on the one hand, the series of all human wars and, on the other, the behavior of "creatures rational."It is this: two rebellions against usurping monarchs; (1)Satan's rebellion against God and (2)the Scottish and English Puritans' rebellion against Charles I. In Christian theology and PL, the aftermath of (1) was that the rebels, though defeated, stuck together. In history and Milton's Sonnet XVI ("Cromwell, our chief of men") the aftermath of (2)was that the rebels, though victorious, flew at each others' throats in the Second Civil War, 1648-1651, in which the Scottish Presbyterians were crushed by Cromwell's Independents in the battles of Dunbar and Worcester. This war was such a near thing, and the consequences for Milton would have been so bad had the Presbyterians won, that his sonnet hails Cromwell's victory with Blutlust("Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued...resounds thy praises loud"). But sadder thoughts must have prevailed as soon as the danger was past. The malicious power-struggle of the Second Civil War, dividing two armies who theoretically were both "under hope of heavenly grace," revealed the Puritan revolution as the shoddy thing a revolution usually is,causing anguish in sincere Puritans. When Cromwell wrote to the National Assembly of the Calvinist Kirk of Scotland, begging them at the last minute to cancel the Second Civil War, he still thought they were his brothers: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, to think it possible you may be mistaken." Sir Thomas Fairfax, "whose name in arms through Europe rings,"could not endure the treachery of attacking his former comrades-in-arms; he declared that the Solemn League and Covenant still bound him to them, resigned his command, and returned to civilian life. Satan's legions showed more honor fighting against God than the Puritans did fighting for him; Milton could not help noticing this. Professor Fish's unsupported assertion that Satan cannot possibly have any virtue thus contradicts both the text of PL and the facts of the case as perceived by Milton.
This seems to me an adequate account of the most egregious errors of the book, the notions that Milton had a monomania for obedience to God and that Satan could not have any positive qualities. Other matters remain, some of content, others of style, which I shall treat in this order: selection of sources, misreadings, Freudianism, jargon, vernacular, self-correction, and usage errors.
Selection of sources
The improbable and depressing notion that Milton's only idea was obedience to God, that for Christ everything is always the same, that we must accept mass-murder if God says we should, that during Christ's temptation nothing happens and no one thinks it does--all of these ideas are drawn from a selection of Milton's works, omitting some of his greatest. Fish mentions not one of Milton's sonnets. Clearly they are relevant; in a counter-argument as brief as this I have already quoted two of them. Besides, Sonnets VII, XIX, and XXII appear to be among the most important statements Milton ever made about obedience to God.
Poems never mentioned in How Milton Worksinclude:
At a Vacation Exercise
On the Death of a Fair Infant
In Adventum Veris
On May Morning
The Passion
On Shakespeare
On the University Carrierand its sequel
An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester
L'Allegro
Arcades
On Time
Upon the Circumcision
Epitaphium Damonis
In On May Morning there is eroticism; in In Adventum Veris hectic eroticism; in The Passion a confession that the sacrificial torture and death of his savior left Milton cold (with a "well-instructed" and "order'd" [ll. 48-49] grief that, even such as it was, soon gave out, though the nymphs with flower-inwoven tresses in the Nativity Odehad not left him cold). In L'Allegro there is a decision to live for mirth and in Epitaphium Damonis,bisexuality. Through all these poems runs a streak of humanism and even paganism. Stanley Fish seems to have gone to the same school with Barbara Lewalski. Both set out to prove things ( the religious poets of 17th-Century England were Protestants; Milton cared for nothing but obedience to God) and accomplish the task by ignoring the poems that fail to support the preconceived conclusion.
Misreadings
In
SA, line 1470, Fish takes
the restto mean the rest of the Philistine lords, whereas it means the rest of Samson's sentence (p.423). At lines 701-03, Fish takes the people who are
not disordinate or
dissoluteor
unjust to be the Philistines killed in the collapse of Dagon's temple whereas they are the national leaders, including Samson,
solemnly elected (l.678) to save their nations, who nevertheless fall on evil days before dying (p.424).
Freudianism
A critic of the 1920's, who may have been John Livingston Lowes, reviewed a debate lively at the time he published,concerning the stately pleasure dome in line 2 of Coleridge's
Kubla Khan: granted that it must see some sort of phallic symbol, was it a penis or a vagina?It might be either, concluded Lowes, depending on how close to it the viewer was standing.
That should have been the end of literary critics' application of the methods of psychoanalysis to literature, especially in view of the condemnation by Freud himself of all such analysis by persons not possessing an M.D. degree with membership in the international psychoanalytic movement. However, the New Critics rescued Freudianism for literary purposes. Freedom having been proclaimed to critics to forget the heap of lore accumulated by source-hunters, biographers, and chroniclers of historical schools and trends, and to canvass the text for meanings of unprecedented mystery and subtlety never before found, the Freudians and Marxists entered the house of New Criticism like the suitors entering Odysseus's palace, and with a similar exploitive intent, to promote their views, and found, the first; vaginas and penes, incest and repression, sodomy and castration, the second; class war and proletarian revolution, bourgeois exploiters and surplus value, struggles to control the means of production, in every text they tormented.The aim of New Criticism being to stay inside the text and not reduce its meaning to those of prior texts, the Freudians and Marxists, by reading from inside an intricate maze of such prior texts, stultified the New Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism, which is but New Criticism burning with a whiter flame, ought to resent both. But Fish offers Freudianism in How Milton Works, calling it post-Freudianism and, with his famous shoulder-clasping we,employed on another occasion to make us all Christians(Item 7 in An Anthology of Neo-Christian Orthodoxyin this website), enlists us readers in it:
As post-Freudians we may be properly skeptical...(p.236)
He simultaneously quotes, and declares his and our independence from, Jacques Lacan:
We need no Lacan to tell us that that to be deprived of mastery by the presentation of a lack... is to be castrated (p.472).
At last we learn that Milton could, after all, write about something besides obedience to God. He could write about castration. Six images in Lycidas represent castration, including the two-handed engine, the sanguine flower inscribed with woe, and the blind mouths (p.75). Perhaps to explain the notorious badness of the invention-of-the-cannon passage in PL, Fish finds it to be a tour of the genito-urinary tract: the "materials dark and crude" are semen (VI. 478), "dilated" (VI. 486) means either swelling of the seminal vesicle or erection of the penis; "devilish glut"means ejaculated semen (VI. 589). The fact that the cannon point upwards, but "with hideous orifice" gape "wide" (VI. 577) is "as obvious a threat of castration as one could wish or fear" (pp. 95-96). In other passages, the "boastful argument" inscribed on the shields of Satan's army is that Satan has a bigger penis than God's (p.100). The fall of the rebel angels is "a large bowel movement" (p.103). Comus has an Oedipus complex and can't get over his infantile passion for his mother Circe.The Lady, making a healthy adjustment, has "internalized the authority" of her father, the Lord President of Wales (p. 172).The poet's fear that Urania will not lead him safely back to earth amounts to "a fear of the female that is unmistakably a form of castration anxiety" (PL VII, 12-20; p.288).To be phallic, an entity need not have dimensions or shape: "the voice also is a phallus" (p.297).
Jargon
All the above may be ignored as fashionable piffle, and we may plausibly surmise that Fish inserted it to play to a gallery. So too with the following philosophical, psychological and anthropological jargon:
"The distinction between knowledge and belief is given for a post-Cartesian world in which the inner world of subjectivity (now first invented) has been severed from, and put in an ever-problematic relation to, external reality"(pp.41-42).The line "Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore" is "An internalizing counter-usurpation of totemic power"(p.84).
"Haemony is...the true source, the origin, the beginning--and as such it is precisely 'unsightly,' not seen, because it is within its unbounded boundaries that acts of perception and intellection occur. The cause and substance of everything visible, it is itself hidden, not because it is nowhere but because it is everywhere" (p.163).
Why do I find the above meaningless? Because my "shallow perception in effect creates the obstacles to clear seeing." I "look around with carnal and empirical eyes and see only forms unanimated by any spirit"(p.164).
The dancing in Comusis an "antiphenomenal phenomenology...entirely internal to its own performance" (p.177).
Samson's chief objection to Dalila is "her presentation of herself as a site occupied by the desires and inscriptions of others(p.466; emphasis in the original).
Writing like this is uncharacteristic of Stanley Fish who is, as I have elsewhere remarked (critique of Surprised by Sin,this website), to be admired for his refusal to hide his meaning or lack of it behind jargon. As in the Freudian sentences, I daresay he is conceding something to the needs of a faction of his readers.
Vernacular
And by the same token, this inaccessible style will offend many readers. For them, Fish has incongruously and deplorably salted his erudite text with vernacular expressions, in their effect comparable to appearing on a lecture platform wearing a one-size-fits-all baseball cap with the visor turned back over the neck.
"... Lycidas' new job as genius of the shore"(p. 84)."...Satan is trying to bootstrap himself back up to deity..."(pp. 98-99)
"Says Who?"(chapter heading, p. 103).
"...it takes one to know one..."(This high-school expression of the 1950's,concerning homosexuals, is cited to prove that only good people can love Milton's poetry as they ought, p. 139.)
"But this may seem a long way around the barn"(p.203).
"...someone up there likes me..."(title of the memoirs of Rocky Graziano, a prizefighter; later of a pop song and a film starring Paul Newman,1956; p. 294).
"Of course [Milton] does not explicitly push Urania away, out of his bed" (from a catch-phrase, "I wouldn't kick her out of bed," said by a teenaged male of a girl of average good looks, p.295).
"... there is a light show in heaven..."(p.302)
Satan's wounds heal "like a self-sealing automobile tire" (p.308).
"... more reasons than Samson can shake a stick at"(p.433)
"... it is a 'common female fault' to spill one's insides" (p. 468).
Now let them say Stanley Fish doesn't have his feet on the ground.
Self-Correction
Fish offers a word, only to demur to his own choice as either short of or beyond his real meaning, or deceptive in its seeming simplicity.
...spirit (a word precisely intended)...(p.191)
...superficially (another word precisely intended)...(p.192)
...we can achieve (precisely the wrong word)... (p.214)
...go to such lengths (a phrase intended literally)...(p.217)
...as far as he can see (a colloquialism I want to take very seriously)...(p.28)
...one's identity (exactly the wrong word)...(p.253)
...that happy (?) consummation...(p. 293)
...he succeeds (exactly the wrong word)... (p.353)
...the act (if that is the word)...(p.353)
...the structure (if that is the word)...(p.365)
...she reminds (a nice word)...(p.25)
...something identified (a word literally intended)... (p.436)
...anyone who (and I mean this literally) sets his or her mind to it...(p.484)
...someone who conceives of himself (another phrase that should be taken literally)...(p. 496)
...his own self-conception (a phrase literally intended)...(p.540)
...he recovers himself (a phrase I intend precisely)...(p.549)
...politics that seeks its end (in both senses) in itself...(p. 571)
By a trick of intentional and unintentional significance, a person who uses the word franklyin half his sentences (as in "Frankly, I hate French criticism") ends by making his hearers feel that the other half are insincere. The very need to distinguish certain sentences as frank leads to suspicions that the others are not. Here we find Fish endorsing twelve of the words he puts into How Milton Worksas literal, precise, nice, or seriously meant, though other writers trust their words to recommend themselves. Inevitably, I suspect metaphor, imprecision and frivolity in the rest of the book. My suspicion is exacerbated when he stigmatizes five words in his final draft as as suboptimal, and three of these as the worst possible choices (take that, and that).Probably his anxiety about being rightly interpreted is caused by the justified fear that many of his readers will apply Reader-Response criticism to the present text and shred it.
Usage Errors
free reign (p.314)status of he who reads it (pp. 368-69)
berefting (p.393)
to distinguished himself (p. 465)
but still more hands Aid us (cf. PLIX.207-8;p. 530)