Interesting enough, in fact, that I started thinking about the kind of engagement that Ackroyd must have with Milton's writings--with Milton himself--and wondering how it might be similar to and different from my own. To be more frank: I started thinking about the deficiencies in my kind of practice as a professional (chortle) reader. Perhaps my thoughts have been influenced in part by Derrida's Archive Fever, which I've also been reading lately (very slowly, even though it's a thin book). That book, more than any other, has shown why and to what end the language of specters and haunting (which I've tended to find trite and unnecessary) persist. I think I've hit a point in my dissertation-turning-into-manuscript where I feel like I want to have a monologue with Milton, like Yerushalmi's with Freud.
I suspect that I should, just as a heuristic exercise, try something like what Ackroyd has done. But I'm not sure, at this juncture in literary studies, at this juncture in my own intellectual development, how to conduct that particular seance.
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i'm looking fwd to a fuller report from you. i've had that book on my shelves since it came out, and keep managing not to pick it up, not even to crack the cover.
My current impression, being less than half-way through the book: its narrative structure is smartly conceived in a number of ways, but the content--and the character of Milton--is getting flat and tedious. He's cranky and sanctimonious, fine, but he's also constantly spouting lines of his own verse, and that joke gets old. Most of the wit or full subjectivity has been displaced onto Goosequill, the irreverent narrator.
For what its worth, it sounds sort of like Ackroyd's book on Shakespeare, where we managed to get from lines of text to what young Will did in the fields and forests around Stratford. . .
My word today is spine.
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