Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics

Ron Cooley is an associate professor of English at the University of
Saskatchewan.

With Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics,
Elizabeth Sauer has made an important contribution to Milton studies.
For more than a decade scholars of English renaissance literature
(especially drama) have made extensive use of M.M. Bakhtin’s analyses
of dialogism and the carnivalesque to explore the social and ideological
situation of canonical texts. Miltonists, however, have been
surprisingly slow to assimilate this illuminating theoretical framework.
Professor Sauer’s book is the first to do so in a thoughtful and
sustained way. Deeply informed by traditional studies of narrative voice
as well as contemporary critical theory, Sauer’s study explores both
the politically liberating dimension of Milton’s epic multivocity, and
the ways in which that liberating potential is constrained. Her Milton
is concerned both with “recuperating the dissonance that registers in
his major epic” by treating the confusion of tongues as a
“linguistic felix culpa,” and with establishing a “gendered
hierarchy of discouse” to impose order on that dissonance.

The weaknesses of the book are in most cases directly connected to its
strengths. Structured around a theme more than a thesis, and ranging
widely in its theoretical engagements (with deconstructive, historicist,
feminist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic criticism), the book reads
like a group of closely linked essays. Each develops a persuasive and
illuminating argument on its own terms, but many readers will wish for a
stronger sense of cumulative development from one chapter to the next.
Sauer could also afford to be bolder in some of her challenges to
orthodox misconceptions. In the presence of names like Derrida and
Foucault she adopts a decep-tively submissive stance, correcting without
seeming to take issue. Indeed this might even be said about her use of
Bakhtin, since Milton’s epics are, for her, exemplary instances of
what Bakhtin defines as “novelistic” discourse, a mode of discourse
he sets in opposition to supposedly univocal epic narration. Still,
these are the faults of a judicious scholar, more concerned to inform
and persuade than to score points. As a work that builds incrementally
but significantly on an extensive body of scholarship, this book is a
necessary addition to any representative Milton collection.