Reading for Our Time: “Adam Bede” and “Middlemarch” Revisited
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.50.2.0342
ISSN1528-4212
Autores ResumoJ. Hillis Miller is now a staggering sixty years in the profession. “The single most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century,” according to Edinburgh University Press, and the author of just under thirty books and well over a hundred essays, he is becoming, astonishingly, even more prolific nowadays. In recent years he has published For Derrida (2009), The Medium Is the Maker (2009), The Conflagration of Community (2011) and Reading for Our Time (2012) and is currently working on another book on community as well as publishing a series of influential essays on critical climate change.The latest of his books, Reading for Our Time, consists of a series of reedited, revised and revamped essays from the mid-1970s to 2006; as such the book is a palimpsest of densely stratified situated acts of reading reflecting Miller's abiding interests in Victorian literary realism, continental philosophy, and rhetorical reading. There are only four chapters: “Realism Affirmed and Dismantled in Adam Bede,” “Reading Middlemarch Right for Today,” “Chapter Seventeen of Adam Bede: Truth-Telling Narration,” and “Returning to Middlemarch: Interpretation as Naming and (Mis)Reading,” respectively.The opening chapter examines Adam Bede as a paradigmatic realist novel before engaging in close rhetorical readings which argue that “it would not be extravagant to say that the narrator of Adam Bede performs a rigorous act of deconstructive reading avant la lettre” (25). Chapter 2 argues that the “totalizing” power of Middlemarch, its apparent organic unity—an encompassing ideological reinforcement of logocentrism—is simultaneously undermined by a “parabolic method” that replaces “objectivism with a fully developed perspectivism” (63). Chapter 3, in which Miller's story “pauses a little,” returns us to the famous Chapter 17 of Adam Bede to explain why “realism is catachresis, and can be named only in catachresis” (81). Finally, Chapter 4, the highlight, and by far the longest chapter in the book, resonates and concludes with Paul de Man's pungent sentence: “The (im)possibility of reading should not be taken too lightly” (165). Here Miller's fantastic scopophilic neologism “semioptic” (combining semiotic and optic) points to the way seeing is always interested, always interpretive, motivated and creative (96). It may be, he says, seeing the issue presented in Eliot, “that rhetoric is not so much a progressive mastery of language both for reading and for writing as it is the place where the impossibility of mastery is decisively encountered” (127).Readers will find abundant repetition in this book, partly a result of the patchwork nature of the volume, though also as a result of the focus on repetition in the work's progenitor volume Fiction and Repetition (1982). Phrases and quotations from Eliot rebound and replicate amid disarmingly probative readings eloquently alerting readers to minutiae all too easily glossed over in those novels. The strange thing about those readings is how critically, intelligently, and insightfully fresh they are now. What is most peculiar, to this reviewer at least, is the Eliot I find in those pages is not an Eliot I have ever known. The Eliot in those pages, like Miller's Kafka in The Conflagration of Community, is strangely anachronistic and every bit as devastatingly perceptive as Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida or de Man.Adam Bede and, to a greater extent, Middlemarch are exemplary in illustrating our human tendency to project fictions and to live our lives through those fictions by taking figures of speech literally; for faces are places on which men read strange thoughts, as do Adam Bede of Hetty Sorrel, Lydgate of Rosamond, and Dorothea of Casaubon. That these faces are always read indirectly by some form of figurative linguistic transfer (metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche, catachresis), and acted on as if that reading were an objective fact, is endemic to all of Eliot's characters. The mocking, ironic tendency of Eliot's narrator to point this out (her “clairvoyeurism”), says Miller, shows at once the constructive and destructive (deconstructive) impetus of her work—a doubling repetitious argument and counterargument at the agonistic core of her art.Let's see how this works. Speaking of Dorothea's fall for Casaubon for instance, Eliot says, in a stunning passage cited partly in epigraph by Miller, “Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge” (1). Miller's point is that it is not enough to simply point out that Eliot demystifies the erroneous tropological presuppositions of her characters by showing us that they are assumptions based on self-motivated metaphorical transfers. Believing that another person's conviction can be “vast as a sky,” that someone's nature can be “sweet,” or that the quality of mercy falls from the sky is a confusion based on an unavoidable propensity to call a spade a duck or a hawk a handsaw. It would be more apt to say that in highlighting her characters' tendency to act fatally on the misinterpretation of signs, to be ever entangled in metaphors and graven images, Eliot creates parables of misreading for those with eyes to see them.Knowing (like Eliot, Nietzsche, and Rousseau) that truths are illusions, Miller is claiming—and I've always thought he's right in this—is not enough to avoid making mistakes in reading: “The only alternative to one metaphor is another metaphor. Metaphors may be fatal, but there is no thinking or doing without them” (118). Not exactly a happy outcome for literary criticism, and Miller says as much in an illuminating passage: This small book on Adam Bede and Middlemarch … necessarily mimes in one way, or other, whether I have wished to do so or not, the discomfort of reading. This happens both in the detail of comment on particular passages and in the overall order of my sections. If criticism is a parable of the act of reading, the displeasure of the text is a multiple dissatisfaction…. I can never quite say everything that needs to be said, say it correctly, and have done with Adam Bede and Middlemarch. The prolonged process of palimpsestic revision my manuscript has undergone, so easy now on the computer, is evident of that endless dissatisfaction. (138) If this book is a failure then it is an interesting failure because it asks questions that few critics are asking in our time. Questions like: what can careful rhetorical readings of a long dead nineteenth-century English novelist teach us about our collective predicaments presently in this real world of global climate change, deepening economic recession, growing civil unrest, and accelerated sociopolitical upheavals in the West in general? How is reading a novel going to help us in our time or, better, for our times to come? Who even has time these days to read slowly, carefully, patiently, responsibly Middlemarch's nine hundred pages and more when emails, Facebook, tweets and text messages interrupt thinking in such an unprecedented manner?The phrase “reading for our time,” I take it, implies that reading is something now engaged in as a defense mechanism against the encroachment of teletechnological prostheses, a way of alienating oneself from the world. There is certainly more than a wisp of the admonitory in the title. As such, the book is a stirring panegyric for the benign didactic results of rigorous rhetorical reading, written in the wish that it might help us understand “how ideological lies and folly come to occur and how they might be unmasked” (xii). Miller's hope is that it might transform some of us into “Ariadnes awakening.” But one can be critical of this position and claim, as Paul de Man did, that rhetorical readings more often lead to “a darkness more redoubtable than the error they dispel.”1This potential aporia is a question for The Conflagration of Community and a possible response to Adorno's infamous dictum “Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarish” (“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric”), on which Miller's book turns. If reading the Holocaust through fiction is barbaric, then, as Miller rightly realizes, it may be that “much more suspect … to spend one's time ‘analyzing’ literary works, even those that are part of what is called ‘Holocaust Literature’” (xiii). This is whyHe the book is far from an “impersonal academic analysis.” This is also why, in my opinion, it is exactly the place that readers who think rhetorical readings of literary works have no purchase on reality as testimony, ethical commentary, historical account, or sociopolitic critique, should begin.The book is split into four parts. After a pensive opening chapter on various conceptions of community, in which Jean-Luc Nancy's La communauté désoeuvrée (where the phrase “conflagration of community” appears) is delicately contrasted with Wallace Stevens's idealistic indigenous community in “The Auroras of Autumn,” parts 2, 3, and 4 (“Franz Kafka: Premonitions of Auschwitz”; “Holocaust Novels”; and “Fiction After Auschwitz”) investigate Kafka (extensively), Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List, Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Imre Kertész's Fatelessness (Sorstalanság), and finally Toni Morrison's Beloved.Part 1 demonstrates how Kafka's work both anticipates the Holocaust and subsequently chimes with various literary reactions. This is not a new approach to Kafka by any means. George Steiner in 1963, for instance, saw in Kafka's word “Ungeziefer” in “The Metamorphosis” a tragic stroke of clairvoyance alluding to inhuman Nazi designations for gassed victims, just as “The Penal Settlement” reminded him of the death factories and the innate suicidal tendencies of the Nazi regime itself. Miller reads this story with uncanny similarity through Derrida's autoimmunity (261). Lawrence Langer was also to argue against proliferating readings of Kafka as a Holocaust prophet in a forceful essay in 1986.Though Miller argues convincingly that Kafka “must have had some occult telepathic premonition of what the genocide would be like,” the real power of his readings of Kafka's unfinished novels is the argument that, like Kertész's stunning Fatelessness, those stories resist the interpretive rigors of their critics; they are darkly ironic works that, through various complicated linguistic, rhetorical, and plot stratagems, vacillate between a tentative understanding and an outright confusion (65). There is something, that is, about the language of those works (Kafka's German is “eine peinliche Unzukömmlichkeit” [“an awkward unpleasantness”]) that deeply troubles its readers.One of the truly remarkable features of Miller's work is his commitment to the vernacular. He reads Kafka's German exceedingly well, Nancy's French, and in an “apparently trivial” micrological reading, even Kertész's Hungarian—Miller, by the way, doesn't speak Hungarian, but that doesn't stop him writing about it. In the “double-thick fog of translation” he traces the Hungarian word “természetesen” (“naturally”) so that by the end of his several pages of stunningly intricate analyses the word seems indispensible for any careful reading of the novel.The chapter on Imre Kertész (himself an Auschwitz survivor) is for me the crowning achievement of the book. Although Fatelessness was first published in Hungary in 1975 and translated into English in 1992, it did not become widely known until after Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002. Miller's triumph is to make that work of paramount importance today by revealing how its brilliant narrative devices—ironic understatement, the uncanny subjective doubling of the narrator's voice with the protagonist's, the vivid portrayals of life in the camps and the “Muselmann”—afford its readers a view of the “conflagration” few other novels do. The crux of this reading is “Miller's law”: “If Holocaust novels get more complex, more ‘interest bearing,’ narratologically and rhetorically, the closer the author was to direct experience of the camps, at the same time the rendering of the conflagration of community becomes more pronounced. Those novelists further away are most likely to want somehow to affirm that community survived the conflagration of the crematoria” (223). This is a hypothesis, claims Miller, which can only be tested by reading more novels about the Shoah.A powerful strategy in The Conflagration of Community is to point out that “testimony is a performative enunciation, not a constative one” (201). Writers like Imre Kertész, Tadeusz Borowski, or Piotr Rawicz whose writings ironize life in the camps through sterile understatement, shocking indifference, or mordant farce employ a kind of verfremdungseffekt that, paradoxically, highlights the performative force of their works. In an odd way, we come to see that such writing can lay claim to an account every bit as vivid and responsible as the most accurate and direct historical treatment. The flipside to this argument is Jean Améry's belief, echoing Adorno's, that “no bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice” and Inga Clendinnen's compelling argument in Reading the Holocaust that “the fictional world contains a curious absence,” an absence which, as a historian, she is more than dubious about.2 There is a point, then, where one must choose. Il faut choisir. One must choose between, on the one hand, believing fictional works can grant preeminent access into the catastrophic crucible of Nazi brutality and, on the other hand, believing there is an exigent human moral responsibility to keep all fictional accounts subordinate to factual objectivity.Whichever choice is made the work of memory goes on, infiltrating and changing the present moment, our time. Such is Miller's argument in the final chapter on Toni Morrison's influential novel Beloved, where Morrison's coinage “rememory” becomes a touchstone for rethinking the consequences of American slavery and the burning issues in the United States today: health care reform, global warming, the legacy of the Bush years, the so-called war on terror, the effects of latter-day concentration camps such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and so on. Denver in Beloved makes the point that “nothing ever dies,” that memories are transferable from time to time and place to place. What happens once in a strange way keeps happening over and over again, just as the impression of American slavery can be felt in all forms of racism today or as the 116 Karl Höcker photos of Auschwitz encroach on us now. These are powerful testimonies to the importance of reading traces of our past into our present moment. They are also powerful indications of why Miller's book is itself a crucial addition to testimony after Auschwitz. Far from being a secondary or tertiary response, the book recreates in its own inimical miming the horrors of our histories and our responsibility to confront those histories with dignity and insight, lest we forget.The third and final book in my review of Miller's latest trilogy, The Medium Is the Maker, bears little resemblance to The Conflagration of Community or Reading for Our Time. From its Wallace and Gromit cover illustration to its wildly comical readings of Browning, Freud and Derrida, The Medium Is the Maker is certainly Miller's funniest work. At less than a hundred pages, it reads like an extended essay split into three short subsections: “The Boomerang Effect,” concerning the extraordinarily bizarre manner in which “telepathy produces, right now, what it predicts”; “Mr. Sludge, C'est Moi,” a riotously funny reading of Robert Browning's scatological poem “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’”; and “Derrida as Medium,” which focuses on the impressive and difficult rhetoric of Derrida's essay “Telepathy.”The most attractive quality of this slim volume is how it seamlessly interweaves Freud's never-delivered “fake” telepathy lectures—“Dreams and Occultism,” “Psycho-analysis and Telepathy,” “Dreams and Telepathy,” and “The Occult Significance of Dreams”—with discussions of recent teletechnological advancements in communications: email, internet, fax, iPhones, and so forth. Uncanny, says Miller, how “our everyday telepathy,” our pervasive teletechnological advancements in communications, is now taken for granted (9). Telepathy, feeling at a distance, in Freud and Derrida is intrinsic to an awareness of death, of ghosts, phantoms, disembodied voices in the ether. In one moving moment, Miller tells us that he has two recordings of Derrida (a copy of a reading of “Circonfession” and an interview given at Loughborough University) that he refuses to listen to because it would prove to him that Derrida is really dead; yet in another moving moment in Dragan Kujundžić's new film The First Sail Miller is shown watching Derrida on film and smiling.The Medium Is the Maker's outlandish comedic polyvocality shares a common ancestry with Derrida's “Envois” to The Post Card and “Telepathy,” but it is also important to think about For Derrida and The Medium Is the Maker as two parts of the same project. Though I cannot expand on this here, For Derrida is so-called because in one sense it ventriloquizes Derrida, speaks for him. Speaking for/through the dead is what we generally associate with the word “medium.” Miller is doing just that in both books. He is speaking through Derrida and as Derrida. In The Medium Is the Maker the extraordinarily bizarre nature of this process is foregrounded: “Derrida raises Freud from the dead, just as Freud spoke, mediumistically and telepathically, for the quasi-patients who wrote him letters about their telepathic experiences, just as Browning was the medium through which (or through whom) Sludge spoke, and just as I speak here for Derrida and for all those others who speak through him” (43). Speaking for someone in one's own idiom changes what that person says, remakes it, ironizes it, as an insolent student repeats what the teacher says back in another voice. “Deconstructive reading,” says Miller, “is comic miming” (71). The medium is the maker, not, as Marshall McLuhan famously put it, the message. The medium changes that, displaces it, however minutely. It makes it spooky.Anyone who has ever read Derrida's “Envois” and “Telepathy” can attest to the outlandishly weird and whimsical syntax of those fragmentary epistles, postcards, letters, and aphorisms. In both cases the reader encounters a series of voices, from Derrida to a lover addressing his beloved to Freud to Derrida and back again. The reader is often left wondering just who is speaking at any given time, is it Derrida (one of the many)? or Freud? or Derrida as Freud? And so on—“so fort, so da,” says Miller!Much of the fun in reading “Envois” and “Telepathy” stems from the fact that in miming Freud on telepathy Derrida is performatively re-creating telepathy effects and drawing readers closer to the so-called postal principle. As Derrida famously has it in response to Lacan, “It is because there would be telepathy that a postcard can always not arrive at its destination…. [E]verything I said about the postcarded structure of the mark (interference, parasiting, divisibility, iterability, /and so on/) is found in the network. This goes for any tele-system—whatever its content, form, or medium.”3Miller's own medium is the maker here also because a ghost haunting the machine of the performative infects, changes, reworks, and reforms what is said in and through it. Since understanding “Telepathy” means understanding the rhetoric of “Telepathy,” its form and procedures, this means readers have also to go back to Freud in those fake lectures on telepathy, lectures that were never given because, presumably, Ernest Jones was terrified that they would make psychoanalysis less of an objective science. It also means that readers have to go back to Derrida to figure out just where Miller is miming him. Quite a tangle! And just in case readers are wondering if anybody actually believes in telepathy, Miller, miming Freud, miming Derrida, ends hilariously with “I know nothing about it” (75).I concluded my opening section on Reading for Our time with reference to the “endless dissatisfaction” of the text. Though Miller says it there, this is a false note. Nothing, in my reading of Miller could be further from the truth of his readings. It is not therefore fortuitous that Reading for Our Time, like Joyce's Ulysses, culminates with the word “yes.” Nor is it by chance that in those final pages Miller repeatedly refers to Dorothea Casaubon's love for Will Ladislaw by way of Nietzsche's “ungeheure unbegrentzte Ja” (“the uncanny, unbounded yes”) and the monstrously oscillating relationship between sober Apollo, wild Dionysus, and impulsive Ariadne. Reading for Our Time is consistently at odds with a darkness it fails to dispel. Yes. But it is a work of hope, a hope that readers to come might figure out how to become better demystifiers, better readers of signs. I claim reading these books is a good start toward good reading. Reading Miller reading will help you figure that out for yourself. But why add a parentheses to de Man's sentence “the (im)possibility of reading should not be taken too lightly”? Is it because Miller has more hope than de Man?
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