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Just reading: Hillis Miller's Kleist

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360701642375

1470-1308

Éamonn Dunne,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See especially Hillis Miller's concluding remarks in Hawthorne and History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 2. This is something Miller's reading also dramatizes through reading, but I will argue that this is not something wholly peculiar to the act of reading Miller sees in opposition to the events described in the text, and that Kleist is aware of this from the beginning – from the title. 3. Nicolo approaches Piachi, we are told, with his cap in his hand. The phrase ‘cap in hand’ [‘mit der Mütze in der Hand’] means both to be humble, deferential or servile – a likely result on this occasion, since Nicolo has been the catalyst of the demise of his saviour's son – and it also means to be actively searching for something, as in begging with a cap in one's hand. The juxtaposition of the passive and active senses of this phrase interestingly complicates both Nicolo's and Piachi's subsequent acts. It suggests a mode of reading which is both a passive apologetic expression and an active beseeching. Deference and entreaty, then, play out this paradoxical juxtaposition linguistically and thematically, I am arguing, throughout the story. All quotations of ‘The Foundling’ are taken from the Penguin Classics edition of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquis of O and Other Stories, trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 270–286. For the German text, see Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Vol. 2 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1952), pp. 213–230; for the online text see the Kleist archive on www.kleist.org/text/derfindling.pdf. 4. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, ‘Ethics’ in Critical Terms in Literary Study, 2nd edition, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 399. Harpham is most interesting on this point of desire and force in any ethical moment of decision: ‘All ethical systems can be shown by determined critics to be driven by a machinery of interest, and those who wish to transform culture, society, and politics often approach their project as Held does, through a critique of ethics, a project whose motto is: “where monolithic necessity was, there shall freedom be”'. I think it important to note at this point that this is not what I take Miller to mean by freedom in interpretation. Harpham's formulation, weather for rhetorical effect or not, reduces the responsibility to an unwieldy binary. The phrase 'machinery of interest’ carries within it important notions of desire and force in criticism that I take Miller's work here to be consistently challenging. 5. What is interesting about Kleist's stories as a critique of Kant's philosophy – especially the (in)famous ‘second analogy’ – for Miller is the central topic in Kleist's work, i.e. what Miller calls the human tendency to project personal agency and concatenation on a random series of events. Such events are narrativized and personified in an act of reading that cannot avoid these logical or personal projections. In Kant, however much this latter process is obscured or veiled, it is nonetheless at work to undermine the objectivity claimed for causal events in the ‘second analogy’. The following question sounds alarm bells for Miller's critics: ‘But in what sense, exactly, is perception according to causality a fundamentally linguistic event?’ Of course, a full exposition of these points in relation to Miller and his critics would require detailed readings of Kant and Miller which I cannot attempt here. Readers interested in taking up these points should begin with both The Ethics of Reading and Versions of Pygmalion and the sections in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals dealing with the ‘second analogy’ and the ‘categorical imperative’. For a critique of Miller's Kant see Christopher Norris' The Truth About Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 182–256 and H. P. Rickman's Philosophy in Literature (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson, 1996), pp. 81–89. 6. Hillis Miller has also made this point in The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia, 1987), p. 4. ‘The ethical moment in the act of reading, then, if there is one, faces in two directions’. He means by this that it is a response to something or someone and also an individual moral imperative to respond to the particular event of reading. 7. Paul de Man's translation of Hölderlin's phrase ‘What is true is what is bound to take place’ [Es ereignet sich aber das Wahre] provides Miller with this example of the act of reading as both an inaugural event and a necessity. This is a key topic in his ethics of reading. Every act occurs as an event that causes something else to happen in its turn. This is something that happens for Miller and de Man regardless of theory. It is outside the Law and before it. This point is also metaphorically alluded to in the final passages of Miller's reading of Kleist's ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ in Chapter 3 of Topographies (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), pp 80–104. Here Kohlhaas has his head separated from his body symbolically indicating the disparity between knowing and doing. For more on this asymmetrical relationship between reading and theory see also Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) p. 21 and Paul de Man's The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 24. De Man uses Hölderlin's phrase to explain this phenomenon in his preface to Carol Jacobs' The Dissimulating Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. xi. I have also tried to develop this notion of ‘finding’ more fully in the direction of Miller's de Manian ethic in my reading of the detective fiction of Paul Auster in ‘Finding what you want in Paul Auster's “City of Glass”', On The Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, ed. Silvia Martínez Falquina and Bárbara Arizti Martín, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholar's Press, 2007. Here I tackle the question of causality and discovery in the genre of detective fiction, what Brian McHale has referred to as the 'epistemological genre par excellence’. If what is true is what is bound to take place, I argue, against several prominent positions, that this implies that not only can you not find what you want in Auster, you ‘must’ paradoxically be held responsible for a finding you have no possible control over. Auster's story uncannily highlights this process of what I refer to as the ‘irresponsible necessity’ at the heart of the detective's decision. 8. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 139. 9. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading, p. 47. 10. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 217. 11. de Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 24. 12. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 11. 13. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991), p. 0. 14. Hillis Miller, The Conduct of Literature: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 49. 15. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Presidential address 1986: The triumph of theory, the resistance to reading, and the question of the material base’, in Theory Now and Then (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 315. For criticisms of Miller's approach to reading, and for Miller's reply to his critics, see PMLA, Vol. 103, No. 1 (Jan 1988), pp. 57–60 and PMLA, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Oct 1988), pp. 819–821. 16. Robert Scholes, Protocols of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 151. 17. Scholes makes these points in order to suggest that Miller's ‘perverse’ reading does not distinguish between determinism, the categorical imperative, and a freewheeling anarchy. For Scholes the paradoxical relationship Miller sees operating between freedom and responsibility is an obscurantist trickery that refuses point blank to be concerned with practical moral issues. In fact, Scholes views Miller's ‘cleverness’ as a way of prognosticating about his own ‘right’ readings in some implacable time out of time, while every other reading is doomed to be wrong. Scholes' vitriolic reading of Miller's ethic exemplifies the high stakes and very real effects these kind of ethical questions have outside of what Miller refers to as ‘situated acts of reading’. See Scholes op. cit., pp. 150–151 and Miller's Versions of Pygmalion, p. 22. 18. This is what Miller means by saying that ‘The ethics of reading is the power of the words of the text over the mind and words of the reader. This is an irresistible coercion which shapes what the reader or teacher says about the text, even when what he says is most reductive or evasive’. From ‘The ethics of reading: vast gaps and parting hours’ in Victorian Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 255. 19. Vincent B. Leitch, ‘Deconstruction and ethics’ in Comparative Literature, 44(2) (1992), pp. 200–206. 20. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Le Parjure”, Perhaps: storytelling and lying (“abrupt breaches of syntax”)’ in Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 199. 21. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 242. 22. Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the law’ in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 206, 212. 23. Cf. Nicholas Royle on the ‘Telepathy effect’ in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 256–276. Critics need more than ‘enervative taxonimizing’ such as omniscient narrator, focalizer and point of view in order to try to account for what happens in the always already uncanny event of reading. Arguing against the inevitable reductive consequences of such traditional notions of narrative inquiry, Royle emphasizes the importance of thinking in terms of a so-called telepathy effect. This effect, a Derridean concept, ‘remains a cryptic and uncanny term, always already other and “more than itself”, figuring a crisis in intelligibility and sensibility, an irreducibly interruptive moment in reading’ (p. 271). Speaking of Midnight's Children, he argues: ‘Telepathy, for Saleem, comes down to a sort of minimal (but therefore also maximal) egoism – “the children of midnight” … transmitting simply “I” … “I.” “I.” “And I”. The “And” is crucial here, the last of these unconscious beacons, signalling not only “I”, but the inevitable grafting of an “and” that accompanies any and every “I”: identity is never absolutely pure or singular; it is always iterable, anded about’. Royle emphasizes that such questions of identity throw traditional rhetorical or narratological epistemic terminology into radical doubt. For Royle, the uncanny nature of narrative, and specifically its relation to a metanarrative theory of identity politics, is always underscored by its inability to be terminologized, reified, or categorized under any pseudo-Judeo-Christian-transcendental-logocentricism, as the term ‘omniscient narrator’ would covertly imply. Such terminologization implicitly rejects the conditions of impossibility which allow literature to exist at all; that is, the ‘secrecy’ of literature for which Derridean analysis has consistently reserved the concepts of provisionality and iterability, consistently ‘finds’ its place in the conjunctive/disjunctive logic of the ‘and’. This telepathy effect, then, can be figured as a relation to the ethical of the deconstructive or uncanny enterprise, drawing into and prising open the event of prosopopoeia and the positing of the name. 24. J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), p. 156. 25. For one astonishing literary example of this schizoid or uncanny sensation, operating at both the linguistic and thematic levels, see Siegfried Sassoon's ‘In me, past, present, future meet’. There is much to be said of Sassoon's use of grammar and punctuation in this poem, much to be said also of his use of capitalization and the allusive tensions created between dissonant temporalities and egological conflict. 26. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquis of O and Other Stories, p. 274. 27. ‘Niemand außer Piachi kannte die Ursache dieser sonderbaren und häufigen Erschütterungen, denn niemals, solange sie lebte, war ein Wort, jene Begebenheit betreffend, über ihre Lippen gekommen’, p. 218. In my own more literal translation this reads: ‘Nobody, outside of Piachi, knew the cause of these strange and frequent fits, for never, so long as she lived, did one word concerning the incident pass over her lips’. The important point to remember here is that the overall tenor of the story encourages us to believe that we can know which way the wind blows on Elvira's madness. The linguistic reality of the text itself is, however, at odds with its suggestive power. 28. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 241. 29. For an interesting and informative discussion of silence and confidence in Kleist see Hélène Cixous' Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kleist, Lispectar, and Tsvetayeva, trans. Verena Andermatt Conley (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 30. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 61, for commentary on the term ‘irresponsibilization’ as a contradiction between the general and the absolute. These ideas are also clearly discussed in his evocative ‘A “madness” must watch over thinking’ in Points … Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 339–364: ‘What I have just suggested about responsibility signals instead in the direction of a law, of an imperative injunction to which one must finally respond without norm, without a presently presentable normativity or normality, without anything that would finally be the object of knowledge, belonging to an order of being or value’. Derrida and Miller share this view that the imperative is non-knowable and therefore cannot ever be normative. This is something expressed most succinctly in Miller's reading of What Maisie Knew (Chapter 2 of Versions of Pygmalion) with the line ‘something still deeper than a moral sense’. For Miller this is something which throws all Kantian-Platonic formulations of ideal laws into radical doubt. 31. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 140. 32. Ibid., p. 139. 33. Jacques Derrida, ‘Psyche: inventions of the other’ in Reading de Man Reading, ed. L. Waters and W. Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 43. See also Heidegger's discussion of one of Nietzsche's final ‘epistles of delusion’ [Wahnzettel] in What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 52–53, where the interplay between the acts of finding and losing creates a similar dynamic between invention (inventio) and discovery (dispositio) in the classical senses of these terms. Heidegger's notion, following Nietzsche's, of an active forgetting in order to re-find, is particularly interesting since we might argue here that Derrida's language smacks of a concomitant Heideggerian/Nietzschean heritage. Here is a type of Auseinandersetzung where the other (andere) is paradoxically re-found through its forgetting: ‘But to encounter Nietzsche's thinking at all, we must first find it [müssen wir erst es finden]. Only when we have succeeded in finding it may we try to lose again what that thinking has thought [Erst wenn das Finden geglückt ist, dürfen wir versuchen, das Gedachte dieses Denkens wieder zu verlieren] … Nietzsche knew of these relations of discovery, finding, and losing [Nietzsche hat von diesen Verhältnissen des Entdenkens, Findens und Verlierens gewußt]’. The late note Heidegger discusses here, from Nietzsche to his friend Georg Brandes (4 January 1889) reads: ‘After you had discovered me, it was no trick to find me: the difficulty now is to lose me … [Nachdem Du mich entdenckt hast, war es kein Kunststück, mich zu finden: die Schwierigkeit ist jetzt die, mich zu verlieren…]’. For Heidegger's German text, see Was Heisst Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1971), pp. 22–23. A fuller account of the term ‘finding’ would therefore also need to reconfigure a relationship between discovery and loss. 34. For why this is not properly a performative speech act for de Man, Derrida, Austin or Miller see Miller's brilliant analysis of this episode in Genesis in Topographies, pp. 156–160. 35. J. Hillis Miller, Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 272. 36. Carol Jacobs, ‘Review of Versions of Pygmalion by J. Hillis Miller’ in Modern Philology, 90(1) (August 1992), pp. 149–155 (p. 150). 37. Michel de Montaigne, Essays (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 130.