In 1641-1642, a Prebyterian parliament abolished King Charles’ I incredibly stringent censorship decree. This move could be read in the spirit of humanism and “public dissemination of culture” were it not for the nearly immediate institution of similar censorship rules by Parliament in 1643. Parliament almost immediately put their own imprimatur on the process by creating “licensers” who had to the ability to decide what should or should not be published. Milton’s Areopagitica is a response to the 1643 decree, which Milton sees as a regression to monarchal tyranny. However, in 1651, Milton began working as a licenser for the English Parliament. This narrative exhibits strong parallels with the commodification and development of Big Criticism that Kindley describes. Given the fact that Milton eventually works for the very processes he denounces, how are we to view his appeals for a more lenient licensing process? What does it mean to think about Areopagitica as participating in what Kindley calls “the consolidation of the status quo”—or at the very least, participating in a broader political and social context (82)?
Like the authors and editors of the little criticism magazines, Milton is concerned with the improvement of literature. He argues that censorship actually stifles the growth of learning and of good writing, so that new ideas cannot be tested and “serious and elaborate writings…must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser” (359). For Milton, proliferation is the way to circulate good ideas, not confinement to certain elite journals determined by an already-extant literary community (the end result of funding critical work). However, who is to determine what makes “good” literature or a good argument? Wise and learned men, argues Milton—describing a feedback loop similar to the one described by Kindley, where the Rockefeller Foundation appoints R.P. Blackmur to designate who is worthy of funds, and Blackmur “opened up the question to the literary community” of the most prominent critics, many of which were already affiliated with little magazines (76).
The essential situations are similar: threatened by severe decline, new market, or the growth of “mass culture”[1] Milton and the little magazines respond by justifying their existence: Milton by appealing to a national responsibility to be an example of learning and truth, and the little magazines by funding criticism to ensure the perpetuation of “good standards.” The fact that Milton later became a licenser does not necessarily nullify his previous argument, but demonstrates the economic conditions that surrounded the process of publication—after all, authors need to eat, and Milton had refused on several occasions to register his work with the Stationers Company. Additionally, this move bears many similarities to that made by the little critical magazines in the 30s and 40s—Milton’s joining the ranks of licensers can be seen as an effort to preserve the standards of good literature while working within the context. In Areopagitica, he recommends not a complete freedom of the press, but a return to an earlier, less stringent order from 1642 that would require “the printer’s and the author’s name, or at least the printer’s, to be registered” (379).
At the close of his essay, Kindley arrives at the conclusion that philanthropic funding of literary criticism and the subsequent development of Big Criticism/Theory is neither good nor bad, but a product of “both of a very particular historical moment and very specific anxieties about the future of American literary culture on the part of an insecure intellectual elite” (95). In similar ways, Milton’s Areopagitica and his subsequent turn to licensing must be understood outside of such good/bad classifications, and considered in terms of a network of historical, economic, and political factors.. Like the little magazines, Milton and his treatise represent anxieties about the future of learning and the fate of publication in early modern England, and his work should not be deemed either a “selling out” or a subversion—it may in fact be both, or neither.
[1] In Milton’s context, this can refer to the explosive growth of small presses and published works: “the number of annual printed items increased in the early 1640s from the hundreds to the thousands” (333).
1 comment:
Hi Samantha!
Big Censorship...love the term.
Your discussion of how Milton eventually ended up working for the very process he wrote against is really illuminating and definitely reminds me of Raley's dicussion of datavaillence when she questions the extent to which we should immerse ourselves in a system in order to gain an "agential" position within it. But I like that you place this dialectic not in terms of good or bad, rather in historical moments hampered by the present economic, political, and social situation. Smart! And you tie your argument about Milton very neatly back to Kindley.
I also like your point that authors need to eat. It's sort of like, yeah, we can do "art for art's sake" but we can't only do "art for art's sake" because otherwise, we'll starve. I remember when reading Kindley that I was struck by how similar his discussion of modern day philanthropy is to the Early Modern patronage system. Patronage, like philanthropy, had the ability to determine what the artist produced and there were those attached to "true art" who felt uneasy about it. But obviously, their stomachs outweighed their sense of misapprehension as ours did and they reconciled themselves to their place within the system to create something that was perhaps greater than the system.
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