Did John Milton successfully hack the brains of his readers? Probably not. Milton tried to convince an era infused with an unbounded confidence in the intellectual abilities of Man that his reason was actually limited.
Furthermore, the brains of his general audience, consisting mostly of teenagers and adults, are already molded to a dangerous degree of inflexibility. Granted this knowledge of modern neuroscience, would Milton still have embarked on his near impossible mission? Or, as Fish puts it, “If our hearers are defective, if the age will not be prompted, are we not justified in abandoning them” (204)? He responds: “Milton answers this question by continuing to write Paradise Lost, and thus accepts, heroically, the confines of the human heart as the battlefield on which he is now permitted to raise God’s standard” (ibid). Fish extends the reciprocal side of the heroic challenge to the reader: “Admittedly, the poem is a profoundly disturbing experience which produces something akin to neurosis; the natural inclination to read on vies with a fear of repeating old errors and encountering new frustrations. In this, the poem is a microcosm of the world and the difficulties of reading are equated with the difficulties of the earthly pilgrimage. The reader’s…heroism…is in going on” (207).
