J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading: Literature After Deconstruction 9781472542526, 9781441194053, 9781441136398

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For Jenny and Peter

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Preface What does it mean to read well? How can one ever know for sure if a reading of a literary text is accurate or not? And what precisely does “good reading” mean for J. Hillis Miller? If Miller is right, good reading does not occur all that often (Theory Now and Then, 277). Why is that? This book is foremost a response to these questions. My concern, in what follows, is with the manner in which, for Miller, the act of reading is never (or cannot ever be) subsumed under the heading of a singular, univocal or objective theory. If reading, in the enigmatic sense that J. Hillis Miller affords this term, is the ungovernable “event” which always and ever exceeds the government of any institution or overarching rationale, then how can we speak of what happens in that inaugural event with any degree of epistemological certainty? How can we write about it, teach it or pass it on to others? In truth, what happens when reading is taken seriously curiously complicates any theoretical insights, presuppositions or assumptions we may have brought with us to the text. A responsible response to what happens when this event is experienced is what Miller calls in a celebrated formulation “the ethics of reading.” Personally, I am skeptical of all those critical books proclaiming some kind of privileged knowledge of the practice and art of reading. Those works with titles like How to Read and Why, How to Read a Poem, ABC of Reading, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, How to Read Faces: The Ultimate Advantage, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Critical Reading, and so on and so forth. If you really begin to think about the “how” (explicit or implicit) in those titles you might lay awake at night (Speech Acts in Literature, 6).1 The tendency in such works is to provide definitions and describe avenues that the attentive student, given the knowledge received from the textbook, will be better equipped to follow. The presumption: that the one writing the account has achieved some degree of knowledge about what it is to really

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read. This is one reason why my title refers to possibilities of reading, and why I also believe that good reading, perhaps the only kind of reading worthy of the name, comes about as an inaugural event that changes one’s views about what that “how to” in reading actually means. Another reason for this title comes by way of Jacques Derrida’s suggestion in one of his very last public lectures, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” that the experience of the event upsets the distinction between the possible and the impossible. He calls this strange, haunting experience the “im-possible”: “An im-possible that is not merely impossible, that is not merely the opposite of possible, that is also the condition or chance of the possible” (454). A “possibility” refers, somewhat passively, to the idea that something or other may come to upset the present moment, to disturb our sense of time, of self and of our relationship with the world. When Miller speaks of this in Others, he is characteristically speaking of what has haunted and disturbed him in the literary works he has read and reread for well over 50 years as a professor of literature. The others that Miller finds (or is found by) in literature come out of the blue, so to speak, and always befall him in multiple voices, likewise, demanding multiple responses. Those others are what remain in, of and from his writings. Because they cannot be conceptualized or fully accounted for in those texts, they live on as the ghostly semblance of an im-possible ideal reading that never appears in the full plenitude of the representable. A literary work “is worth reading,” he says, “only if it is in some sense inaugural, if it is performative in a certain somewhat anomalous speech act sense, that is, if it brings something wholly other into the world, and if reading it gives the reader access to something he or she can reach in no other way” (Others, 2). Seeing reading as a performative event, an im-possible invention, helps us to shed some light on the way a theoretical understanding can be good for that time and place only, and why the contexts of our readings will always complicate any theory for what happens when we read. My subtitle refers to literature after deconstruction. As if there could be an “after” to deconstruction! Deconstruction never began in the first place. It was always already there, from the beginning—from the beginning of the beginning. “Deconstruction is nothing more or less than good reading as such” (The Ethics of Reading, 10). It is not something we can speak of as a method, a procedure we invented and bring with us to a text, but rather something that happens in our transaction with those words on the pages of the books we read. I follow Nicholas Royle in After Derrida and Afterwords, in suggesting this, and by pointing out what is difficult about the word “after.” “After” can mean “later in time.” It can also mean “in the

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manner of,” as in “after Rembrandt.” In yet another sense, it means “going in search of” (Royle 1995, 2). My subtitle refers to each one of these possibilities, which, as I take it, are by no means contradictory. I also do not distinguish between deconstruction and good reading. It should be explicit from what I will say in the following pages that when I am speaking of good reading I am also speaking of a certain gesture of deconstruction, of an openness to the event and of a hospitality to the other and to what comes. In each chapter I have worked under the assumption that responding responsibly to what Miller does as a literary critic means going back to the works he speaks of before commenting on what he says in his own writings about those works. This means that the following chapters are also situated acts of reading, designed not only as a commentary on what goes on in Miller’s reading, but also as a commentary on what goes on when I read those literary texts for myself. I have tried to respond honestly and responsibly to what I have found peculiar in those texts. I have also tried to show that this peculiarity complicates and disturbs what Miller has to say about them. This has taken me, at times, away from Miller. At other times, I feel, it has brought me closer to what he is saying about those works. My own hypothesis is that there are necessarily moments when one outbalances the other. All this has meant reading specific works by Henry James, Thomas De Quincey, Friedrich Schlegel, W.B. Yeats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Heinrich von Kleist, respectively, as closely and as patiently as possible. Traces of my initial wish to read Miller’s work chronologically remain throughout these pages, though this procedure was abandoned early on, as the opening chapter testifies by focusing on Literature as Conduct (2005). That Miller is without doubt one of the most prolific literary critics working today has also influenced my decision to focus my attention primarily on specific moments in his major books. As I write this, Fordham University Press has this week released For Derrida; several weeks ago the University of Sussex academic press released The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies. I also believe another book, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz, is reaching its final stages. Readers interested in an extensive catalog of Miller’s publications will find Julian Wolfreys’ bibliography of works for The J. Hillis Miller Reader (2005) a testament to the dauntingly vast number of these writings. The strength of Miller’s work is that it is endlessly fascinated and fascinating as a result. I have been drawn to these writings by a shared fascination with what is unaccountable in works of literature I have read,

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studied, and taught over the years. This book was written in the hope that this fascination might proliferate and perhaps even instruct, though one can never know for sure what will happen in the event of it being read. “Reading is an act, a performative use of language. It is a happening that makes something else happen, though never anything that can be named ahead of time, promised or foreseen” (Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, 225). That being so, I have yielded to the possibility that good reading might just happen along the way.

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Acknowledgments Manuel Asensi once said of J. Hillis Miller, “He is one of the most urbane, respectful, and kind persons, I have ever known. He will help you even if you wake him up at three o’clock in the morning.” Though I have not had occasion to call him up at that ungodly hour, I express my gratitude to Hillis Miller for his unflagging good humor, encouragement and timely responses to all of my questions. I also accept full responsibility in my own name for any oversights, injustices or misreadings that may occur in the following pages. Too many people to acknowledge here have also graciously given up their time to help and encourage me during my research. For friendships, insights and teachings I thank only a few: Steve Barfield, John Brannigan, Arthur Broomfield, Carlos Bruen, Ron Callan, Brian Cosgrove, Mark Currie, Sarah Dillon, Gerard Dunne, Brendan Gaffney, Noreen Giffney, Séamus Harte, Martin McQuillan, Jonathan Mitchell, Haaris Naqvi, Tom O’Malley, Michael O’ Rourke, Dermot Philips, Graham Price, Mark Quinn, Constanza del Río Álvaro and Julian Wolfreys. Much of the research for this book was funded by a grant from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I am indebted to them for their support. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as “Just Reading: Hillis Miller’s Kleist” in Textual Practice, vol. 21.4 (2007). Finally, to my wife and son, Jenny and Peter, I give thanks for perseverance, laughter and love.

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Abbreviations of Works by J. Hillis Miller AT BH CD DG DSI ER FR FVF HH IL LC LM MM

O OL PR

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Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) Black Holes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1958) The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963) Dickens’ Symbolic Imagery: A Study of Six Novels, A PhD thesis presented at Harvard University on March 31, 1952 The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1968) Hawthorne and History: Defacing It (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009) Others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002) Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966)

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RN SA T TH TNT TPP VP VS Z

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Reading Narrative (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999) Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995) Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) Theory Now and Then (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) Tropes, Parables, Performatives (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) Victorian Subjects (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) Zero plus One (València: Universitat de València, 2003)

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Chapter 1

Reading as Conduct My mother’s a piano teacher and my father was a conductor. Where did he conduct? On the Baltimore and Ohio. Billy Wilder

1. Direction Before we take issue with J. Hillis Miller’s conduct, let’s start with Henry James, a figure of commanding presence in Miller’s work. According to the Preface to “The Aspern Papers,” Jane Clairmont (the half-sister of Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley’s second wife), a lover of Byron and mother to his child, Allegra, had lived in Florence to a very great age.1 James recalls that had he been aware of her presence in Florence earlier he might have even “seen her in the flesh.” The account he provides of this probability gives rise to a heady excitement from which he was to draw the subject and impetus for this work. The story he recounts here concerns an American scholar who got wind of Miss Clairmont having in her possession certain letters from Shelley. The scholar, an “ardent Shelleyite,” whom James confesses to have known, ingratiates himself with the lady and becomes a tenant in order to gain some proximity to the letters, and, in the event of her death, which was certainly imminent, he hoped to have had priority concerning the legacy. Here we have the germ of James’s story. But another factor intrigues him at this point. Facts, he says, are useful so long as they are not too many or too few. There should be enough to stimulate the imagination to fill in the gaps between them, but not too many as would “crush” the artistic inclination completely. This narrow pass is bounded on either side by those readers either too interested in an historical excavation or those others too interested in taking flight from the basic facts altogether: “The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.” The possibility, indeed the probability, of falling foul of this meandering causeway figures for James an “odd law,” “which somehow always makes the minimum of valid suggestion serve the man of imagination better than the maximum.”

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The terminology of the Preface henceforth begins to make sense as a meditation on the retelling of occurrences in a visitable past. But the historical significance of the event is in a sense being “turned,” as James says, but not too much, an impulse he ascribes pejoratively to the overimaginative artist. Neither are these “bare facts” being simply related through a transparent lens. There is a necessary refraction. And this is James’s point. Not to let the “turn” become too angular and similarly not to attempt to straighten the line, to forge it into a linear retelling of the facts. He wants to be somewhere in the middle. The narrative, as he suggests, is bent in proper proportions (whatever they are) already; “the direction is right.” This “essential charm” provokes the author into “squeezing it hard!,” stretching it a little while maintaining the “essence” or “clear matter” of the story. This double bind is not only a general theoretical principal which James is making as an artist. It is also the principal motivation of the story he recounts and develops as a piece of creative fiction. The story is praxis. It is the kind of “doing” that James describes throughout the Prefaces, that “doing” which does other things in its turn. It is in fact “conduct” in the manifold manners in which Miller has taken it to mean in The Ethics of Reading, Versions of Pygmalion and Literature as Conduct. “Doing,” Miller says of James’s work, “does not stop with the initial act, but goes on doing and causing other things to be done, in an endless chain of consequences” (ER, 102). Whether or not this conduct is an elegant reflection of the theoretical principles set out in the Preface the reader must find out for him or herself in a further act, which is another act of conduct, another doing which does other things in turn. Whether or not Miller’s act of reading James is therefore of a conduct befitting a gentleman, so to speak, only a further act of reading will tell us. But this act, one may be sure, will not stop there. Act begets act in a general conductive economy emanating from the germ described in James’s Preface to all acts of writing, reading, rewriting, and rereading: “Writing, considered as an act, has the inestimable advantage that the traces of it remain” (ER, 108).

2. Speech Acts Perhaps the single greatest statement of this notion of conduct in all of James’s writing, and certainly the one Miller chooses to amplify to the highest pitch in each of the aforementioned texts (and many more besides), comes in the latter pages of the Preface to The Golden Bowl. Here James, in an uncannily prescient expression, sets in motion a way of thinking

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about doing things with words which prophetically envisages J.L. Austin’s celebrated discussions of speech act theory by at least three decades: The whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in their turn, just so our behaviour and its fruits are essentially one and continuous and persistent and unquenchable, so the act has its way of abiding and showing and testifying, and so, among our innumerable acts, are no arbitrary, no senseless separations. The more we are capable of acting the less gropingly we plead such differences; whereby, with any capability, we recognise betimes that to “put” things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them. Our expression of them, and the terms on which we understand that, belong as nearly to our conduct and our life as every other feature of our freedom; these things yield in fact some of its most exquisite material to the religion of doing. More than that, our literary deeds enjoy this marked advantage over many of our acts, that, though they go forth into the world and stray even in the desert, they don’t to the same extent lose themselves; their attachment and reference to us, however strained, needn’t necessarily lapse—while of the tie that binds us to them we may make almost anything we like. . . . We give them up even when we wouldn’t—it is not a question of choice. (James 1947, 347–8)

The wonderfully rich opening lecture of Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, originally given at Harvard in 1955 as one of the William James Lectures—in memory of our subject’s brother no less—echo these lines almost as if they had been uttered by the same person. For Austin the distinction between use and mention is difficult to sustain if we begin to think of words doing things, that is, if we begin to think of words as having what he calls a “performative” capacity to make things happen without our approval or intention. After providing a few examples of how these “performatives” work—examples in the first person present indicative active like “I do” in the wedding ceremony, “I name thee” in launching a ship, “I bet,” and “I bequeath”—Austin relates that these statements differ fundamentally from so-called constative statements, statements of affairs or facts. One is neither right nor wrong in saying “I bet” or “I bequeath” in quite the same way that one is either right or wrong in saying that “it is raining outside” (a classic constative statement). In speaking performatively, one just does what one says. “In these examples,” says Austin, “it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (Austin 1975, 6).2 When I say “I do” at my wedding ceremony, and if I’m not an actor on a stage, my words perform the action. They bring it into existence. This is what Austin would call a “felicitous performative,” a speech act uttered at the right moment in the proper context.

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But what about the actor or, to use another one of his examples, the poet, who utters performatives as an act in the sense of an “infelicitous” performance? What of the writer, like James, who uses words mimetically in that dangerous sense of performance ascribed to them in Plato’s Republic? Both Austin in the early lectures of How to Do Things with Words and James in the Prefaces point to the strange ways in which to say something is in a sense to do it. Austin’s attention to the question of intention is telling on this issue since it questions the nature of performative speech acts in terms of notions of moral conduct. For Austin we must acknowledge that an “inward performance” or “spiritual act” is a prerequisite for any felicitous act of promising, pledging, or bequeathing. We must, that is, ordinarily assume that the person is not lying, for instance when they say “I promise to meet you at my office at eleven o’clock on Tuesday the 5th of May.” Neither must they be joking nor must they be writing a poem, to recall Austin’s famous examples. We must, in other words, lend credence to an intentional act previously performed by the speaker in order to believe that he or she has made a decision on the matter. Being serious is the outward sign of an inward act, an act of proper ethical conduct. The felicity of the speech act is judged, in short, on the moral character of the speaker, an act of belief in intention and moral integrity previously assigned to that speaker. But there is an important twist here for Austin which has caused Miller to consistently evoke a Kantian principle in his musings on the subject. For Kant in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, the whole moral fabric of society finds itself based on a unanimous imperative, the assumption that there must be a respect for the law [Achtung für Gesetz] as such, a respect which precludes a person from making lying promises in order for that society to go on working (LC, 171; ER, 31). Otherwise, the categorical imperative is baseless. I must act “as if” I would want my actions to be a universal legislation; that I would want others to act in the way I do. For Kant this is not a subjective wish so much as a tenet of universal reason, not a particular desire so much as a “direct determination” of a guiding rational principle of the Enlightenment, the pure ground of a civilized society. “The keeping of promises, like not telling lies,” according to Kant, “is the basis of morality” (LC, 75). Austin’s complicating example of the promise or bet as a performative must allow for the possibility that the performative utterance may be felicitously infelicitous, that is, that it can be performative without the intention of the speaker in ways which the speaker has not even envisioned. The context may also not fit the utterance, which would be an example of an “unhappy” performative, for example, betting after the race is over. It may also affect exactly the reverse of what it is intended to do. The problem

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with believing that a bet was made under false pretences is a good example of how betting, whether we do so without meaning to, or without intending to pay up, does not change the fact that we bet. The words “I bet” do not have to be intended with conscious integrity in order for them to work felicitously. The words do that all by themselves. When I say “I promise,” “I bet,” “I do,” I have already in a sense done these things by uttering them. Speaking of the example of how the promise obligates, Austin relates: It is gratifying to observe in this very example how excess of profundity, or rather solemnity, at once paves the way for immodality. For one who says “promising is not merely a matter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act!” is apt to appear as a solid moralist standing out against a generation of superficial theorizers: we see him as he sees himself, surveying the invisible depths of ethical space, with all the distinction of a specialist in the sui generis. Yet he provides Hippolytus [who’s just been quoted saying “my tongue swore to but my heart did not”] with a let out, the bigamist with an excuse for his “I do” and the welsher with his defence for his “I bet”. Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond. (1975, 10)

The difference being described here is that between the intentional subtext of any utterance, which cannot ever be really known, since I can never know what another is thinking, and the felicitousness of the utterance itself within a specific context. Austin’s twist here is to suggest that the solid moralist, believing in the intentional spiritual act behind the utterance is letting the speaker off the hook. The speaker can always say, “oh! I didn’t mean to say that!” or “when I said I bet you five quid the next bus that passes is red, I didn’t really mean it.” The strict moralist would say that in order for the sentence to be felicitous, it must have had a prior spiritual or intentional act guiding its path. Not so, says Austin. Even if I promise in “bad faith,” without the intention to follow through with my oath, I have still promised. There is nothing in the utterance itself that distinguishes it from an infelicitous speech act. The moralist, believing that he is privy to what Austin calls in a fine phrase the “invisible depths of ethical space” is in a weird way being literally unethical. He allows the person of low character go free and lets him or her relinquish their responsibility for having caused something to happen. The paradox is that to say that our word is our bond in a “plain saying” becomes distinctly problematic.3

3. Religion as Doing Literature is awash with examples of why such distinctions simply don’t work. One can think here of Mr. Pickwick’s trial for breach of promise to

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Mrs. Bardell, who hilariously misconstrues his note—“Garraway’s, twelve o’clock. Dear Mrs B. Chops and Tomata Sauce. Yours, Pickwick”—as a marriage proposal, and for which Pickwick is put on trial and ultimately imprisoned (Dickens 1982, 564). Or of Bloom, who upon offering his copy of the Freeman’s Journal to Bantam Lyons in Ulysses, provides a wonderful example of a “false bet.” “You can keep it . . . I was just going to throw it away,” says Bloom, which is interpreted by Lyons as a tip for a horse named “Throwaway” running at Ascot later that day (Joyce 1992, 106). “The words,” Miller says of such instances, “work on their own, mechanically, impersonally, independently of any conscious, willing subjectivity, just as grammar does. A performative exceeds the firm and clear opposition between willed and accidental. It is the product of a machinelike power in the semantic and grammatical aspects of language that cannot be entirely controlled by intention or cognition” (T, 125). James’s “religion of doing” is also a response to this moment of doing that does other things without our quite knowing how they have occurred. His writings are a manner of conduct because they are doings, but these doings are problematic because they inaugurate; they are events about which one can never be sure: “It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word,” and we think here of James writing his works, doing them, “that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that constitutes and that is, primarily its future” (Derrida 1978, 11). Seen from this perspective, “a religion of doing” is a bizarrely oxymoronic phrase. James purports that his writings are conducted in a manner of an ethical obligation to a higher law that cannot be known.4 This “religion” is a respect for a law (that “odd law” we’ve seen in his Preface) that precedes understanding in the way that all writing precedes understanding as it is taking place. Writing promises and it bets, it casts its nets continuously into the depths in the expectation of surprise, just as Simon does in Luke’s Gospel. This thinking leads Miller to ask of “The Aspern Papers”: Is it possible that our station as readers may parallel that of the narrator? We have been taught to read literary works, for example “The Aspern Papers,” in order to understand them. Reading may rather put an unforseen burden of obligation on our shoulders. The story, it may be, demands not that we know but that we do. (LC, 18)

Such is the obligation facing me in each of the following chapters, just as I am obligated to do it here. If Miller and James are right this “religion of doing” binds me to a law of conduct which is a conduct of life. As Miller

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notes in The Ethics of Reading, “Doing is something that binds or ties us , as the etymology of the word ‘religion’ implies . . . Doing, including that form of doing performed with a pen or a typewriter or by oral dictation, involves an ‘I must’ which is born of respect for the law, though what law it is James respects in writing or in re-reading remains to be seen” (104). It is perhaps also no mere coincidence that Austin’s phrase “my word is my bond” is also a religious expression binding us to a law that we cannot know but must take responsibility for. Every day we respond to this law countless times: my word is my bond may also be rephrased as my doing is my religion, or my religion (word) is my religion (bond) without religion (Word).

4. Obligations Reading after Miller obliges me to countersign his work in my own name, to take responsibility for engaging with his writings and for putting them to work in a different context. It also obliges me to go against my instincts to write a book encompassing his thought under a series of easily applicable headings, “Miller the Burkean,” “Miller the Pouletian,” “Miller the Derridean,” and so and so forth. Reading Miller’s responses to literary or philosophical works teaches you to choose, Il faut choisir, (rightly or wrongly, for how can one ever really know?), to respond to the text itself over whatever other demands are being made on you at that time: “A law or a ‘you must’ without duty, in effect, if that is possible” (Derrida 1992a, 156). These acts or events of reading are always a new contract with authors, institutions, even with oneself; they are irresponsibilizations or ways of getting irresponsible with texts. This ties the act of reading to the idea of democracy. It could even be said that the religion of doing things with words is a response to the promise of a democracy to come. For Miller and Derrida, this demand, literature’s secrecy, is unconditional and unequivocal: “Irresponsibility vis-à-vis constituted ideological powers is sometimes the only way to begin to fulfill an infinitely more exigent responsibility toward the democracy to come” (T, 299). My respect for James’s text is the first step toward this irresponsibility. The paradox is then that for Miller the proper conduct of good readers is improper conduct. Responding responsibly to texts means responding to something in the text that goes against our better judgments. It means going against what we think should be happening in favor of what is actually happening in the event of reading. It also means taking responsibility for the words we use which are not our own. But, after what has been said

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above, how is that really possible? “Are we perhaps condemned to speak for ourselves by re-speaking the words of the other, or the words of an interminable string of others,” he asks, “going back to vanish somewhere near the ‘things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world,’ that Jesus claimed to expose (Mt. 13.35)? I shall,” he continues, “therefore cheerfully and somewhat defiantly, responsibly and irresponsibly at once, sign this essay with my own name.”5 Responsibility is inhabited by the irresponsible. Both are inextricably enmeshed, tied, bonded each to each in every religious speech act.

5. The Aspern Touch What is intriguing about “The Aspern Papers” is that it prefigures these questions and impossible possibilities. It is about the acts of reading and writing, acts of responsibility and irresponsibility, the religion of doing and of making our word our bond. It is also about institutions, hospitality, history, biography, topography, spectrality, narrative, and signing one’s name. James has found a way here to bring all of these factors into play and, as Miller notices in his own reading, of “putting the reader on trial” (LC, 14). Our conduct in the act of reading James’s “Papers” shares in the act of reading our narrator performs on the poet Jeffrey Aspern. He is the phantom at the center of what James in referring to The Turn of the Screw calls “an irresponsible little fiction” (1947, 169; 1986, 35). The reader desires to find out as much about Aspern as he or she possibly can. Consequentially the narrator’s obsession quickly becomes the reader’s; and inasmuch as the suspense of the novella revolves around this quest, the reader becomes complicit in the crime he or she will ultimately condemn. This, incidentally, does not change after the story is read for the first time. With each rereading a re-vision occurs, and the hope of finding out begins anew with the phantom presence of Jeffery Aspern mocking all epistemological endeavors toward interpretive closure. To recall one of Miller’s favorite Jamesian expressions, our feet fall unevenly into that “shinning expanse of snow,” the “clear matter” of the story, breaking the surface in ever-new directions (ER, 101–127). Mrs. Prest, the narrator’s confidante and guide, upon helping the narrator find lodgings with the Bordereaus under false pretenses, ironically calls attention to this obsessive endeavor to track Aspern: “‘One would think you expected from it the answer to the riddle of the universe,’ she said.” After which our narrator retorts, “if I had to choose between that precious

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solution and a bundle of Jeffrey Aspern’s letters I know which would appear to me the greater boon” (46). Such a blind pursuit inevitably leads to a variety of complications and minor crimes for which the narrator and reader are equally guilty. One of these crimes is a form of apostrophe or prosopopoeia in which the location of the Bordreau house and the house itself are confused in the mind of the narrator with the character he is seeking out. For him the aspect of the house takes on the aspect of Jeffrey Aspern himself. This may even be one of the insinuations of the name Aspern. The word “aspect” means, according to The Collins Dictionary, “appearance to the eye” or “visual effect”; “a facial expression”; “a distinct feature or element in a problem or situation”; “a position facing a particular direction”; “a view in a certain direction.” The name also suggests “asperity,” meaning roughness of sound, temper or surface; or it could suggest an abbreviated form of “aspersion,” as in casting false rumors about someone or defaming them. A most likely result in this case as the narrator is ultimately led to the Bordereau household on a somewhat salacious rumor he has picked up from his colleague and fellow literary paparazzo John Cumnor. Aspern’s presence is felt from the moment the narrator approaches the house. He can almost touch him in the atmosphere of that place. The narrator believes he can hear a voice that is gone or can touch a hand that is vanished. The genius of the poet is synonymous in the mind of the narrator with the genius loci of that place. Mrs. Prest’s prevailing view of the place (her aspect) is that it is “as negative as a Protestant Sunday” (49). While our narrator, considering his plan of campaign, waxes lyrical saying, “Jeffrey Aspern had never been in it that I knew of, but some note of his voice seemed to abide there by a roundabout implication and a ‘dying fall’” (46). The letters he seeks, therefore, evince a powerful magic allowing him to conjure the ghost of his dead god hanging over the house as a spectral presence-in-absence. The voice and the place have become emblematic and chime harmoniously for him in the walls of the grand old palace. He speaks later on of his adoration for “the spirit of the place,” of its having kept him “perpetual company.” If, for Miller, the “topographical sublime” is figured by a place such as the sea where the mind is allowed free reign without borders, then the Border(eau) household also figures the possibility of a borderless sublime topography where the mind of the reader and narrator can be set free: “The sublimation is achieved by taking away the borders, that is, by choosing a vista, like the seascape at Key West, that is sublime in being virtually limitless and thereby exceeding the human power of comprehending and ordering” (T, 266). Because topography always involves notions of

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limits or borders, the Bordereaus figure the possibility of an imaginative escape from those restrictions. They are the borders shimmering in the light of Aspern’s aspect, semipermeable membranes leading the narrator closer into “a mystic companionship,” or “moral fraternity” with his quarry. They are simultaneously the gatekeepers of his affections and the guardians of his desires. Another crime the reader and narrator commit is the reading I’ve just been exploring. The names here have become inextricably associated with the characteristics of the persons being described. Our unnamed narrator may in fact be unnamed for this very reason; we are not even given his assumed “nom de guerre” (52). The joy of reading this story is due in large part, like the later chapters of The Wings of the Dove, to the wonderfully rich array of exotic Italian terminologies James employs to set the mood of the place. Words like “piano nobile,” “felz,” “padrona,” “scagliona,” “serva,” and “forestieri.” The reader inevitably invests these names with talismanic power; he or she “reads into” them the virtual space of a mythical topos. Thereafter the place has become a complete imaginative cartography, partly discovered, partly found. This is a performative not a constative doing things with words. The place is a virtual invention through the act of reading. Such is also the case with the narrator’s reading of Aspern, whom he has endowed with the characteristics he has chosen to see in his own memory. The play becomes one of subjective interpretation until we reach the apotheosis of this “reading into” at the moment he transfers this idolatrous image of Aspern over to Juliana: “my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for my benefit . . . Her presence seemed somehow to contain and express his own, and I felt nearer to him at that moment of seeing her than I ever had been before or ever have been since” (60). All of this occurs through a veil. She wears a green shade over her face, so that she sees the narrator but he cannot quite see her. When he hears her speak, he hears Jeffrey Aspern. The woman, as it were, becomes the other’s other in a strange cancellation of one other for an other, a reduction of an other to the sameness of one’s own projection of an other other. She is also the embodiment of authorial intention itself, the manifestation of an ideal idea of poetic form without the superimposition of a medium or conductor. There is no conduct here in the mind of the narrator in the myriad senses of that word. Juliana is, for all intents and purposes, Aspern’s poems, his voice, and his corporeality in one. The narrator sees only Aspern through her, seeing beyond the phenomenal into the materiality of poetic expression or aesthetic ontology. In a bizarre reversal the narrator wants to obtain carnal

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knowledge of Aspern through Juliana. “I felt,” he says in a palpable instance of indiscretion, “an irresistible desire to hold in my own hand for a moment the hand Jeffrey Aspern had pressed” (65). The bizarre image is reciprocal in the way that to touch Aspern is to also touch oneself touching in a moment of what Derrida would refer to as “auto-hetero-affection” (Z, 32). The narrator wants to touch himself touching, to be touched by Aspern in an extraordinarily ecstatic onanistic moment of revelation and resurrection. He is touching here without tact. This is also arguably noticed by Juliana who refuses to shake hands with him as a sign of contractual obligation when he rents a room in her house. Juliana says that she belongs to a time when that was not the custom. This can be taken in two ways: either she wants to “snub” him as he thinks she does or she means to delay having to place her trust in him. He then shakes hands with Tina in an ironic parody of the touch he so longs for with Jeffrey Aspern. Tina’s touch is a surrogate touch for Juliana, as Juliana’s touch is a surrogate touch for Aspern. Of course this tactless touching is an unethical act. Our narrator in pursuit of his goal of getting ever closer to his quarry is willing to sacrifice all codes of moral conduct in order to gain his prize, as he repeatedly recounts throughout the story that “there’s no baseness [he] wouldn’t commit for Jeffery Aspern’s sake” (51). The culmination of this Machiavellian thinking is echoed in the diabolical phrase the narrator attributes to Juliana via Tina. Juliana believes “when people want to publish they’re capable of violating a tomb” (136). The episode smacks of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s infamous disinterment of his wife in 1869 in order to repossess the poetic manuscripts he had buried with her. James would surely have been aware of the incident. The narrator’s reaction is defensive but the underlying import is that if pushed his “editor’s nerves” know no borders.

6. Reading as Necrophilia There is no doubt that the violation of a tomb is a potent image, perhaps even the most potent and scandalous expression in the story. Reading “The Aspern Papers” is like violating a tomb in the sense that our own curiosities are analogous to the curiosities of our narrator. We want to read the missing papers as much as the narrator and it is the hope of doing so that creates and fosters our desires. It is also another crime for which we are being put on trial. Juliana later makes an essential point separating the two distinct types of reader the text is liable to produce. She says, “The truth is God’s, it isn’t man’s: we had better leave it alone. Who can judge of it?—who can

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say?” And the opposite view: “We’re terribly in the dark, I know . . . but if we give up trying what becomes of the fine things? What becomes of the work I just mentioned, that of the great philosophers and poets? It’s all vain words if there’s nothing to measure it by” (106). These two ways of viewing the situation are irreconcilable. On Juliana’s view there is no rationale by which we can measure the worth of the works. In a Platonic sense there are only interpretations of an ideal model known only to God, a transcendental signifier at the outermost limit of a logocentric epistemological desire. All subsequent readings are pale simulacra of this mystical Ding-an-sich. Her impression is a variation on that infamous Heideggerian remark, “only God can save us.” His judgment is the final watermark by which we measure our word and our worth. The word, in short, is measured against the Word. Our word is our bond to God and his Law. This is her religion of the word, her tie that binds. On the narrator’s reading the word has meaning in and of itself. We can have knowledge of the work, especially, in his view, if we have access to his most personal letters. Like some phenomenological cartography of the imaginative integrity of the poet’s mind, these items are the Rosetta Stone of his entire Cogito, the missing piece that will allow the critic to throb in unison with the poet’s innermost psyche. Once we have access to them everything will fall into place and we will be able to see through the work’s artifice into the dead poet. Reading the letters will raise the dead. But aren’t these mysteries the real mysteries we are seeking in the story too? Reading the story should make this apparent. What exactly is it we wish to know? And how far are we willing to go to find out? In this way, the story is about possibilities of reading. It is a presentation of various acts of reading through the words and by no means unbiased gaze of an unnameable narrator. The choice the reader confronts is like the choice Juliana’s words engender: either you conform to the notion that there is something behind Aspern’s life that will allow you to gain access to the reason behind our narrator’s pursuit, or you agree with Juliana that this will make no difference. A further irony, however, encompasses this reasoning like an enigma wrapped in an enigma. Just when we have begun to think that we can know what lies behind James’s own irresponsible little fiction a further encryption becomes insistent. The fact is that we have no access to Aspern’s works throughout the story. The narrator only refers to them indirectly even when, in a rare moment of honest divulgence, he announces to Tina early on that he is fond of the poet’s work. We are only left with the name. Conversely, we seem to have everything but a name for our narrator. This in itself is not exactly atypical in first-person narratives, though in a story

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about a literary historian’s search for biographical clues it is certainly a little odd. For when he confesses to Tina that he has been using an assumed name all along and presents her with his “real” name—and when this is not given—the irony becomes pungent: “Then your real name—what is it?” Tina asks. “She repeated it over twice when I had told her, accompanying it with the exclamation, ‘Gracious, gracious!’ Then she added: I like your own best” (120). Why is this? Why is the reader given Aspern’s name and not the narrator’s?

7. Cryptonymy One possible way of approaching these questions is through what Derrida, following Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, calls a “cryptonimic analysis” or “cryptonymy.” The questions pertaining to the concept of a crypt, if concept is the appropriate word in this instance (nonconcept would perhaps be better), are uncontrollably diffuse and varied. In posing the question “what is a crypt?” in “Fors,” the strange preface to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, Derrida repeatedly opens up this word to various readings. For him the word signifies something unapproachable, an atopos about which it is impossible to say for sure that it is either there or not there, inside or outside in any cartography. A crypt is never present as such: “No crypt presents itself. The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and to hide: something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds” (Derrida 1986, xiv). The play here is on borders, thresholds, prefaces, introductions, insides/outsides, etc., as it is throughout Derrida’s preface, which, as Miller points out, “is a commentary on a commentary on a commentary on a commentary . . . each one trying to outdo the previous one in breaking into the hidden crypt in the Wolfman’s unconscious” (T, 305). In which case each commentary can be seen to invent its own topography. With each of these topographies goes toponymy, the naming and renaming of places. Each place is displaced in a peculiar way by the act of naming it. Indeed, much of the linguistic performance of “Fors” is brought about by the slippage in the word lieux as place, ground and displacement, as in the Anglicized French idiom in lieu of [au lieu de]—the phrase carries with(in) itself the ideas of placing and displacing simultaneously. Naming or providing figures for places, topoi, is a way of doing things with words that has a performative effect in creating and recreating those very borders, just as the proper name shimmers under the unrealized inventive scrutiny of the narrator and reader.

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Much of what Miller has to say of Derrida’s topographies turns on the problematic of deciding between the constative and/or performative force of the language of “Fors.” Is the preface referential or exemplary, he asks? Does it perform the argument it creates by encrypting a reading of the Wolfman in a further figurative displacement or does it seek to open up the problematics of the Wolfman’s crypt itself by mapping its borders? One cannot decide this tout court. Is Derrida’s essay literature or not? No amount of argumentation will allow for a definitive answer. To say “‘Fors’ is graffiti defacing a tomb,” as Miller does in this essay, is to recall the aforementioned cryptic phrase in “The Aspern Papers” and to simultaneously pose the question of whether or not writing on “The Aspern Papers” is an act of improper conduct defacing a tomb. In plumbing its depths for its hidden secrets, or indeed in writing on it as Derrida writes on the “Wolfman,” we change the face of the story in a re-vision of the matter of the tale. This revision is a violation in the same way that overstepping one’s tracks slightly is a violation of the integrity of the original step. The failure, however, of the unnameable narrator of “The Aspern Papers” to take this into account is the crux of his inability to see the consequences of his own actions, linguistically and otherwise. It may also be the reason why the name is given without being given. Defacing a tomb in this instance is like an act of countersigning in one’s own name the name of the text itself. The narrator, that is, wishes to expropriate Aspern’s name in place of his own name, wanting in fact to become Aspern by displacing his name in lieu of his own. Taking place here has the significance of a topo-bio-graphical cuckolding. Moreover the tomb referred to in the story has quite a diverse significance if we have paid attention to the references to haunting that rhythmically punctuates the text from the outset. The narrator unconsciously describes the house itself as a tomb. “Looking over the top of my book” (a superb figurative allusion to what he does as a literary biographer) he notes: “In these windows no sign of life ever appeared . . . Their motionless shutters became as expressive as eyes consciously closed, and I took comfort in the probability that, though invisible themselves, they kept me in view between the lashes” (74). As we see here there are two figures controlling the scene. The narrator, unconcerned with the text in front of him—which may very well be Aspern’s work—is focusing his attention beyond the text. This is in large part the overriding warning the story seeks to portray: “Stray too far away from reading the works,” it seems to say “and you may be unconsciously guilty of the most heinous crimes against your subject.” The second figure is the counterpart and disfiguration of the first. The shadows (themselves liminal figures) are reading between the blinds, circumspectly

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surveying the gaze of the narrator, haunting him through the imaginary eyes of the windows of the house. The anthropomorphizing of the house is a further figure looming large over both parties and controlling the scene itself. In various ways the Havisham-like absent presence of Juliana, echoing of course Aspern’s genius (spirit), is a monstrous expression of the ghostly. Taken literarily or figuratively Tina’s “We’ve no life” insinuates an undecidable margin between the living and the dead and a disturbance of the boundaries between tropological and referential dimensions. The narrator at one point even asks Tina “Should you mind telling me how you exist without air, without exercise, without any sort of human contact?” (81).

8. Distant Voices These allusions do not stop there; they seep through the very language of the narrative itself with a kind of bizarre telepathic insistence. The narrator, expressing further his blindness to the various semipermeable thresholds encrypting and decrypting the atopos of the cryptic narrative, believes that he can properly distinguish between the linguistic traits of the Bordereaus. In doing so he touches upon the ghostly telepathic structural peculiarities of James’s text: “I guessed that her aunt had instructed her to adopt this tone, and I may as well say now that I came afterwards to distinguish perfectly (as I believed) between the speeches she made on her own responsibility and those the old woman imposed upon her” (67). There is an odd reversal at work here all too easily passed over. Though the narrator “believes” Aspern speaks through Juliana, Juliana also speaks through Tina. Furthermore the narrator believes he can distinguish between these other voices, like any literary critic distinguishing between voices. All criticism in a manner of speaking is precisely this: the distinction between voice and the “belief,” for what more can it be, that the voices one hears are distinguishable, separable, singular. The so-called crypt effect or the permeability of borders and the placeless place of the spectral scene of the narrative is carried across as a reminder of the force of the nonsaturable context(s) of linguistic expression. Not only is the house a flickering threshold between the living and the dead, but is also the language the narrator seems to think he can identify, codify, and contextualize. In other words, our narrator believes that he can trace the significance of the words Tina is using back to their source in Juliana and discover their hidden agenda by presupposing the intentions of an original absent interlocutor.

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Much the same thing is going on with his reading of Aspern. In such instances the narrator gives away a rather crude and unreflective confidence in his abilities as a telepathic narrator. An attentive reading will therefore find some trace of unreliability in what the narrator says early on in the tale. It will also heighten the awareness of the reader to the demand being placed on him or her to distinguish between what the narrator is saying and seeing and what he is saying and seeing through Jeffrey Aspern. Part of the reader’s wrongdoing is in the way in which he or she believes, like the narrator, that the past is visitable through language, an ideological illusion in the de Manian sense (O, 241–242). But what kind of “responsibility” is being alluded to here? The narrator is under the impression that the responsibility for saying the words that Tina says lies with Juliana. Like Austin’s philosopher of the sui generis, brilliantly surveying the unfathomable depths of ethical space, he believes that he can choose not to hold Tina responsible for what she is saying. Her word is no longer her bond; she is therefore morally exempt from what she is doing with her words. The reader is consequently forced to make a similar decision. Are we to hold the narrator responsible for “invoking” the spirit of Aspern through his own words? Are we to hold him responsible for acting on that prompting from another source? Or do we rather say that it was really Aspern, like Vereker in “The Figure in the Carpet,” who was to blame all along? “I had invoked him,” he says, “and he had come; he hovered before me half the time and it was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth to assure me he regarded the affair as his own no less than as mine and that we should see it fraternally and fondly to a conclusion” (73). Speaking the words of another in citation is problematic as an aporia between use and mention, as Derrida and Miller repeatedly point out. It is also a form of bearing witness to the other, a leap requiring an act of faith by the addressee. For instance if I say “I love you,” “you” have no way of knowing what I mean by that statement. In other words, you will have no way of knowing whether such an utterance is a statement of fact or a performative gesture: “the fact that you have no way to find out or to be certain one way or the other about my state of mind, though nothing could be more important, both makes ‘Je t’aime’ possible and at the same time always undermines it with the possibility that I may be lying, or citing someone else. Its possibility depends on its impossibility” (SA, 136). Likewise, Tina’s words are impure in a similar way because they are iterable. Her remarks, even though the narrator believes them to be explicit paraphrases or citations from Juliana, only work in the context by being both citations and inaugural speech acts simultaneously,

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acts for which the narrator cannot be sure from whom they are issuing or what the intention is behind them. In bypassing the undecidable nature of these statements the narrator rather reflects his own shortcomings as a critic and highlights his presuppositions. This can be sensed in his reading of the intentions behind one of Aspern’s poems: “There was a profession in the poem—I hope not just for the phrase—that he had come back for her sake” (74). Quite simply, he can never know whether or not it was “just for the phrase.” By a further projection then this means that his presuppositions regarding Tina’s responsibility will rely heavily on his “hope” that they are words perversely put in her mouth by Juliana. What then is the task of the critic if it can never be decided? In an interview with Gary Olson in 1994 Miller made an important statement about the attempts critics have often made to discern, in another Jamesian phrase, “the general intention” of his work. I quote this commentary in extenso because of the importance of the statement for what will be happening throughout this book: Sometimes in reviews people have cited things I have said that were intended as ironic or as the miming of somebody else’s position as though they were my opinions. Sometimes this is done disingenuously. You take a passage out of context. Miller says this and you quote it. However, if you look back at the context, Miller wasn’t really saying this at all; he was saying something like, “People say” or “This is a position”—and that ought to be clear. On the one hand, you point out that this sentence does appear in that essay or in that book; on the other hand, I thought I was making it clear that I was simply saying what my author said: it was Thomas Hardy who was saying this or George Eliot or somebody else, not me. So, I have two exhortations for my readers. First, try to notice whether I might conceivably not be speaking for myself but doing what any literary critic has to do: trying to speak for the author that I’m discussing or even for some imagined position which I’m then going to differ from. The other exhortation would be to stress again the fact that for me, and I think for my colleagues like Derrida, those theoretical formulations that can be detached and are not ironical, that are straight, nevertheless have their meaning only in the context of a reading. The relationship between theory and reading is the really fundamental one, not the detachable theory that you can make into a system. The theoretical statement should always be put back in the context of the reading which—the relationship is a very complicated and uneasy one—both facilitated the theoretical formulation but at the same time isn’t quite congruent with it; they’re not quite symmetrical, and it’s that asymmetry between reading and theory that seems to me fundamental to the nature and function of literary theory. Theory is never fully sponsored or generated or supported or confirmed by the reading; far from it: the reading always does something to the theoretical

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formulation and at the same time generates new theoretical formulations which have to be modified then in their turn. So a theory is never something that’s fixed once and for all, and the thing that alters it is more reading. I think that’s often forgotten, perhaps inevitably, in the attempt to reduce my work or somebody else’s work to a handy set of theoretical formulations. That’s certainly true with Derrida. People will say that Derrida talks about “the free play of language in the void” or something, and you go back and find he’s really talking about Levi-Strauss in that passage and the formulation is only made possible by the reading of the particular author. I think it’s often forgotten in what you might call pedagogical accounts of Derrida, accounts used in teaching him, that almost all his work is the reading of some text or other. That’s certainly true of my own work.6

If this is indeed the case, as I am arguing throughout this book, then there is a problem with responsibility and irresponsibility that cannot, indeed must not, be lost sight of. Reading “The Aspern Papers” I am claiming here is a good way to begin to read Miller responsibly while at the same time sharing the idea with James in the Prefaces that reading is inherently irresponsible. Rereading is always necessarily re-vision; revision is always necessarily a call for rereading. This tautology announces itself as the double bind of criticism. In what context? That’s the whole question. The only way to read Miller—by his own account—is to read the works he is reading first. This is a tall order, to say the very least, since it would require a lengthy rereading of the entire oeuvres of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and that’s just to begin with. Besides these one would have to pay some attention to de Man, Derrida, Blanchot, Burke, and Poulet. But a further paradox meets the reader at this point. What is the crime we are accusing the narrator of in “The Aspern Papers” if it isn’t this very crime of trying to read around his subject in order to catch “the faint wandering notes of a hidden music?” (James 1986, 376). Looking over his book at the spectral windows of the haunted palazzo, and imagining his glittering prize, our narrator is guilty of putting words in his subject’s mouth. “The Aspern Papers” is a good way of seeing this to be the tragedy and comedy of criticism.

9. Literature’s Secret There is something else worth exploring at this point and it is the subject of secrecy itself. This secret, if there is one, is the evasive center of Derrida’s

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reading of the crypt and is also the black hole to which Miller’s readings of James are ultimately drawn. One might even say that Miller’s oeuvre is also a passion or taste for the secret, as Derrida has pointed out in an essay on Miller’s reading of Gerald Manley Hopkins.7 The nonconception of a democracy to come in Miller’s work founds itself on the groundless ground of irony. All storytelling is pervaded by the possibility that the utterance can be taken as ironically charged, that is, that any utterance in any language whatsoever is founded on the possibility that it can be taken as literature (RN, 177). Austin’s theoretical failure is that he cannot allow for this parasitical drift in the distinction between constative and performative speech acts. His examples though tell the real story. They are strange, somewhat elliptical, fragments complicating each attempt he makes to distinguish rigid demarcations between clarity and murkiness. The “odd law” that James has spoken of is once more an expression of this confusing undecidability in reading and writing. We may want to get to the facts of the story but there is no way of returning to that past in order to judge the story of those facts against the real events giving rise to that narration. The creative response to the facts is the im-possibility of touching on the almost visitable and almost palpable secrecy of the event itself. The metaphor of the violation of a tomb in “The Aspern Papers” is a simultaneously appropriate and inappropriate image for the narrator’s insistence that he will be able to contextualize the work of Aspern by learning about the facts of his life. The tomb, we remember, both places and displaces. There is some secret [Il y a du secret] he seems to be saying with greater persistence as the narrative develops, and where it is seems to be getting further away from him as he gets closer to the Bordereaus. The culmination is of course the proposal Tina makes him of marriage which would put him too close to the family for him to be the “publishing scoundrel” Juliana says he is immediately prior to her death (125). By getting closer he gets further away, going inside the tomb he is paradoxically being sent back outside. In a concomitant manner in getting closer to the end of this opening chapter I am also getting further away from something I want desperately to say about this necessary destinerrance in reading Miller’s work. I want, like the narrator of “The Aspern Papers” merely to bring the movement of his work to light, to show what it is about the acts of reading Miller performs that engages his readers so consistently. One word for this sense is otherness, the “others” on whose behalf his work consistently speaks; another word for this is “catachresis” (the perverse trope); another term would be a “black hole”; yet another would be the “secret” that impassions him. There is a secret which is paradoxically open to anyone who reads his

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texts, an open secret which is available to anyone to see. And yet this open secret is renewed each time a different text is approached and read in the peculiarly concentrated, productive and elusive way Miller’s readings have of multiplying the center or centers of the works he examines. Tom Cohen calls this the “McGuffin effect”: “Miller comes like your uncle with a suitcase—yet what’s in it? It is like the famous contraption that Hitchcock calls a McGuffin, it covers a black hole of logic, and it is for you. . . . You have been pushed into a black hole. Miller thinks it’s good for you, even if—per definition—you can’t get out (a black hole absorbs constellations, light, space-times)” (Cohen 2005, 87). These black holes in James’s story are legion. But I have chosen two here to conclude with. First, the tomb is a secret that is open because it is there. It also hides something that is not there, as we’ve seen, out in the open. It hides that something out in the open and incites us to violate a tomb in order to find out what it is. In this sense we are touching on something impalpable but which nonetheless causes us to respond to a deeply innate desire for closure, the hermeneutic need for ultimate meaning. Such a desire is like trying to hold something too delicate to be handled, for instance a fluttering butterfly. But we can also be too careful. As Geoffrey Bennington astutely points out in a wonderful passage in which he muses on an ethics of reading and of every text’s appeal to a reading yet to come: “An absolutely respectful relation to a text would forbid one from even touching it” (Bennington 2000, 36). Another kind of irresponsibility. Reading, whichever way you look at it, is an imposition, a moment of disrespect, like violating a tomb. Tombs impassion by calling from the other side of reason. A responsible response means responding otherwise. But, in a further twist, how can we be wise to this other if the other is precisely that which challenges knowing? This is the question I maintain which is at the root of my reading of Miller and James. Each one hides something which is simultaneously staring us in the face, so to speak. Like Juliana’s veiled head, we can see it but not through it. When Miller says that reading James may be “an unforeseen burden of obligation” demanding “not that we know but that we do” he is characteristically not only speaking about James but about acts of reading in general. All acts of reading are a manner of doing without knowing in the ways in which (or by which) reading can be seen as a mode of conduct. Reading is doing. It is an act or series of acts causing something else, something other, to happen in turn. Reading in the Emersonian sense that James echoes in his work, and Miller in his, and I in my own way in mine is a species of self-reliance for which we must ultimately be separately held to account. Each act is a response to some secret that is there in the work, some tomb

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or other that can be sensed in a singular way each time. Reading-doing is a way of responding to a demand made by the text to explore this uncharted territory and to create in an inventive way the new topography awaiting our explorations in the hope, chance or mischance that some others will somehow arrive. This is done by actively following the scent or developing the germ of the impression made on us by the initial stimulating event, of noticing something previously unsensed or possibly unsensible, even nonsensical in each work. This scent or sense of some secret is inextricable from what is known as the literary: There is in literature, in the exemplary secret of literature, a chance of saying everything without touching upon the secret. When all hypotheses are permitted, groundless and ad infinitum, about the meaning of a text, or the final intentions of an author whose person is no more represented than nonrepresented by a character or by a narrator, by a poetic or fictional sentence, when these are detached from their presumed source and thus remain locked away [au secret], when there is no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret beneath the surface of a textual manifestation (and it is this situation which I would call text or trace), when it is the call [appel] of this secret, however, which points back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself which keeps our passion aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us. (Derrida 1992b, 24)8

Reading “The Aspern Papers” is perhaps a way toward understanding the appeal this call has on readers of literature; it is also an allegory of the way this call can be misrepresented by hastily rushing to some form of unequivocal meaning. By opening up to a kind of reading that takes the possibility of the impenetrable secrecy and strangeness of literature, a kind of alloreading perhaps, “The Aspern Papers” paradoxically (in the root sense of that word as “against teaching”) presents the limitations of a reasonable hermeneutics. Its call calls this process into question. If the secret of “The Aspern Papers” cannot be revealed as such, even if the papers were read by the narrator— not least because the narrator is guilty of not really reading the work on its own merits—then neither can the readers of this story in the same way penetrate through to the secret tomb at the center of the text without violating the matter of the tale. In this way the tale is an allegorical or emblematic expression of the unreadability of secrecy; it places reading and interpretation against one another (O, 147). The meaning of Aspern’s story is in fact staring the narrator in the face as he reads his work. The secret is there on the surface because there is no way of going behind the words to find out the true story behind them. There is the secret. Just as the secret for the reader is also in the words on the page not behind them: “There is nothing transcending the text, since

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with texts all is on the surface. Their mystery is in the open. The unknown is rather that which the particular text cannot say, what is implicit in the words but must not be made explicit, the unsayable whose status facilitates the text, makes it possible to go on producing itself. The unsaid is in a peculiar sense the characteristic signature of the text” (TNT, 139). No matter how much information we are given by James in the Preface to the story the “clear matter” of the tale is all on the surface of the work we find in front of us. There is no secret behind the tale that can be exposed therefore without going beyond it and therefore ignoring it. Moreover, as James’s story (un)cannily exemplifies, there is no means either of not going beyond the story. That “odd law” simultaneously figures our inability to stay in the same place, to remain safely either within the confines of a constative rendering or a performative positing. Constantly lifting our eyes over the edges of the book we are forever caught between the facts and the matter.

10. What’s in a Name? The second black hole or secret of the text I choose to highlight here from the many inconsistencies and aporias in the text is the problematic of naming in the story. One of the curious calls or appeals [appel] made on the reader is the need of rendering the appellation, as we’ve seen, as a kind of magical indicator of personality. For example, the proper name, as Tristram Shandy’s father believes in Laurence Sterne’s great novel, leaves an indelible mark on its bearer. It is a pointer to some characteristic or abiding trait of personality: “His opinion, in this matter, was, That [sic] there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impress’d upon our characters and conduct” (Sterne 1997, 43). By inadvertently mis-christening the child “Tristram” the priest has committed a heinous crime; he has given a name that will have detrimental consequences for Tristram and his family. He has also unwittingly unleashed a critique against Tristram’s father’s ideological presuppositions—presumably the father will have to rethink his position on naming. These names are promises in the sense that language promises to give a properly descriptive mark to a real referent out there in the world. They are marks that seek to be both proper and improper, signifying singularity and plurality, sameness and otherness at once. In calling somebody by their first name in everyday speech I both refer to a unique and singular individual and a tradition, for example, Matthew or Mark which have strong biblical overtones and reflect that person’s presumably

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Christian heritage. Or if I write a letter and begin it with “Dear John,” I ordinarily imply that I am directing a message to a person named “John” and simultaneously refer to a very specific species of letter about which one would presumably already know the content. In the latter example, both the Christian tradition and the tradition of gentle amorous jilting are simultaneously implied before the name is properly applied. In other words, the name is inhabited by the possibility that it can, indeed must, refer to something else, and that it can be translated, twisted and made to signify beyond itself. Our conduct as readers and our conduct as individuals are tied to our relationship with the proper name. In “The Aspern Papers” there is a constant play on this destinerrant possibility, the possibility that the name will be set adrift in an odd way creating a doubling possibility in the logocentric placing of the proper name and the deconstruction of that possibility. When our unnamed narrator first enters the Bordereau household he tells Tina (originally called “Tita” in the early published version of the story!), in a performative speech act which ripples throughout the story, a lie about his name: “You know me as much as I know you; or rather much more, because you know my name” (57); and later the narrator is dismayed by not receiving a receipt for his rent from Juliana because “she would not give me even a morsel of paper with her name on it” (72). Two problems converge with these examples: (1) the implication that to know someone’s name is to know something about them is so ingrained in the Western logocentric tradition surrounding so much novelistic discourse that the reader is co-implicated in the accusation that he or she is being taken in by the narrator’s lies. Tina can see nothing through the name she is given by the narrator apart from her own projections. Likewise the reader can see nothing beyond the character if he or she is taken in too easily by a belief that the name can be properly translated into the intention of the author. The story, that is, both invites us to see or read into the name while it simultaneously critiques the notion that names have any intrinsic meaning whatsoever. By relating the proper name above to the act of casting aspersions, I am casting aspersions; (2) The unnamed narrator’s lust for the signature of Juliana incisively questions the custom of autography in a manner which should give even the most naïve idolatarian pause: “There hovered about her name,” he says, “a perfume of impenitent passion,” from which he surmises, “that she had not been exactly as the respectable young person in general” (77). The tendency here as it becomes clearer later on in the story is for the narrator to confuse his desires for Jeffrey Aspern (the poet not the poetry) with the Bordereaus. This becomes most salient at the moments when

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Aspern’s name is mentioned in the text. Most particularly perhaps when the narrator first mentions it to Tina: “I watched her well as I pronounced that name, but I saw nothing wonderful. Why should I indeed? Wasn’t Jeffrey Aspern the property of the human race?” (87). His desire is to see his desire reflected back at him Narcissus-like with the mention of the most powerful magic word he possess: “Aspern.” The problem is that neither Tina, Juliana, nor the reader will ever be able to penetrate into the significance of that name for him. His secret passion will remain a secret passion, as all reading is a secret passion, individual and private. One might even go so far as to say that the title of James’s story is the announcement of the im-possibility of ever knowing what the word “Aspern” means; the pronouncement of an impenetrable secret. The story is in one sense a series of conjectures about the possibility of ever deciding what it is that the name signifies. The proper name impassions us to give it meaning through acts of reading. We are to decide what the Aspern papers are by bearing witness to a story told by a narrator who refuses to give his name. This is a matter of a leap of faith in some other, like the narrator’s faith in Aspern; it is a mode of hospitality to some other whom we cannot possibly ever really know. There is no possibility, in the narrator’s own words, of ever knowing anything about him if we do not know his name. In this sense he is irresponsible, perhaps beyond good and evil. If we cannot give him a name then he is as much of an enigma as Aspern. “One often thinks that responsibility consists of acting and signing in one’s name,” says Derrida; “A responsible reflection on responsibility is interested in advance in whatever happens to the name in the event of pseudonymity, metonymy, homonymy, in the matter of what constitutes a real name” (Derrida 1996, 58).

11. Acting Up I stop at this point before I become guilty of projecting my own limitless interpretations into the void, of naming the secret, but, as ever with James and Miller, without feeling that I have followed the scent far enough. That is, I finish by reiterating a point I made at the beginning concerning acts of reading after Henry James and J. Hillis Miller. When James recounts in his Preface that the conduct of life consists of things done which do other things in their turn he is speaking, like Austin, of that peculiar power performative speech acts have of creating unpredictable events; the responsibilities one has to those effects are therefore in a perverse sense also unforeseeable. The “religion of doing,” “putting” things as a “doing” things

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with words, is therefore a dangerous enterprise. To say, after Austin, that my word is my bond is to place oneself squarely before the law, a law which will always remain shrouded in secrecy, hidden from view, entombed, enghosted, but present-in-its-absence nonetheless. James’s odd law of interpretation is another way, I claim, of stating the law Miller calls the ethics of reading. This law is a law based on rhetorical modes of reading as well as a respect for the singularity and secrecy of literature. Acts of reading are events for which we must take responsibility. They are also the chance we have of mapping out new topographies, of finding new voices, of engaging with others. The exemplary secret of literature cannot be told; it can only be shown to work in further acts of reading. In doing so I take responsibility under my name for what happens under the names of others, particularly Miller’s. I claim that I can only do so by reading his work through those others in an attempt to show how the secrets present themselves without presenting themselves. These acts of reading are possible ways of exposing his writings and casting aspersions; they are ways of changing the context of his criticisms by creating further contexts in which we can catch a glimmer of the performative power of the event of criticism. I too have a taste for secrecy. I too hear some appeal in each act of reading I perform. In trying to respond responsibly to this name and its secrets, in trying to trace its contours, and by reducing its other voices to an assimilable, workable sameness, I am guilty of an irresponsibility for which I take full responsibility. But I also claim that in doing so my writings find new grounds, encounter new territories, make new land. I promise to act up with Miller. That’s a bet, a gambit, a mortgage. My word is my bond, my religion of doing, and my deepest mode of misconduct. It is a declaration of independence.

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Chapter 2

Fugal Reading No one, however special his point of vantage, can get past all those doorkeepers into the shrine of the single sense. . . . The pleasures of interpretation are henceforth linked to loss and disappointment, so that most of us will find the task too hard, or simply repugnant; and then, abandoning meaning, we slip back into the old comfortable fictions of transparency, the single sense, the truth. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy

1. A-Theory of Reading In this chapter, we move from the moral valence of “conduct” to the musical connotations of that term by way of what Manuel Asensi, in the only sustained study of Miller’s work calls his “rhapsodic” mode of criticism.1 Suppose I take the phrase “Miller’s conduct” and see it as a kind of linguistic form of cheironomy (conducting with hand-signals, gestures). Suppose I interpret that phrase as an idiomatic stylistic craft alerting me to a singular mode of expression particular to just that person. Suppose then I also say that I can distinguish between a sentence written by Miller and a sentence written by, say, Slavoj Žižek or Maurice Blanchot. What am I alluding to? What does this tell you about their writings? In speaking of conduct in this latter sense as a musical or stylistic term, are we moving away from ethical questions or are we merely translating (another form of conduct) our questions into another ethical arena with a new set of rules and regulations? Are we moving from an objective focal point to a subjective discussion of impression and preference? What happens when we do that? To speak of the critic as a conductor with a unique idiom is to think of the critic as a translator, a carrier, or a messenger, like the god Hermes who in the classical import of his name is both messenger and interpreter. Conductors are both mediums and magicians. They pitch their own image onto something that is not wholly theirs, bending and obscuring it in the process; they exist in an in-between space of creation and translation, making and relaying, placing and displacing, discovering and creating, at the same time. Their “Illustrations are always falsifying abstractions from the ungraspable idea they never adequately bring into the open” (IL, 150). In short, they are both parasites and hosts; and we remember “There is no parasite without a host,” and that “The critic’s attempt to untwist the elements in the texts he interprets only twists them up again in another

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place and leaves always a remnant of opacity, or an added opacity, as yet unravelled” (TNT, 145; 166). If I hold that “criticism or the teaching of a given text is always the displaced expression of what happens when the work is read,” I must also realize that the act of reading is always a matter of interminable peripatetic translation and therefore never quite adequate to a hermeneutic interpretation basing itself on some presupposed outside (VP, 24). However much I attempt to impose a theoretical structure on the meaning of the text, the work of interpretation will never in truth be finished. “The specificity and strangeness of literature, the capacity of each work to surprise the reader, if he can remain prepared to be surprised, means that literature continually exceeds any formulas or any theory with which the critic is prepared to encompass it” (FR, 5). The event of this surprise, its aleatory arrival, is always inaugural even when I am attempting to be as faithful to the text as possible, or, better still, especially when I am trying to be faithful to the experience of reading. Each experience of this is unique even though I may be reading a text I feel I am familiar with and have read many times. Theory and reading are, as Miller often puts it, uneven or irregular; there is always a remainder, something left unsaid. “Though there is no theory without reading, theory and reading are asymmetrical” (T, 323).

2. Translations In Topographies, the most consistently inquisitive of Miller’s works on the question of translations and border crossings, Miller concludes by saying that his own early presuppositions were enactments of theoretical motifs in ways in which the progenitors of those presuppositions could never have foreseen: A work is, in a sense, “translated,” that is, displaced, transported, carried across, even when it is read in its original language by someone who belongs to another country and another culture or to another discipline. In my own case, what I made, when I first read it, of Georges Poulet’s work and, later on, of Jacques Derrida’s work was no doubt something that would have seemed more than a little strange to them, even though I could read them in French. Though I read them in their original language, I nevertheless “translated” Poulet and Derrida into my own idiom. In doing so I made them useful for my own work in English literature within my own particular American university context. (T, 317)

The ways in which the words of previous critics or authors are reworked and changed by the new contexts of their deployment in other cultures or

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distilled through the words of other writers is a complex theoretical question, as Miller suggests in the closing sections of this book. “To translate theory,” as he puts it, “ is to traduce it, to betray it,” which is perhaps another way of saying in Paul de Man’s terms that the resistance to theory is theory’s resistance to itself (T, 319). In translating theory from one place to another I am in a sense rejecting the readings or misreadings that brought that theory into being in the first place. I am transferring what was originally a response to a certain collocation of words at a particular moment in time to another place and another moment, forgetting along the way the singularity of the reading that brought about the theoretical formulation. But in another sense this transposition, in its disarticulation, discloses what was transitory about that formulation in the first place. It opens that theory up through example, showing it to be less structurally sound as a generalization about literary events than may have been previously assumed. Let me give an example. The best place to talk about the cultural specifics of translation that I know of is Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen has just explained to a Jesuit priest that the word “tundish” in Lower Drumcondra (a Dublin suburb), “where they speak the best English,” is used for the funnel with which he is oiling his lamp. He then maintains that the word “detain” has its own tradition in Hiberno-English that the priest may not be aware of: One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you. — Not in the least, said the dean politely. — No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean . . . — Yes, yes: I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: detain. (1994, 192)

The significance of Stephen’s examination of the word “detain” lies in the manner in which both men decipher its meaning. When Stephen says that the word is used differently in the marketplace, he ostensibly means that the priest’s attention to its meaning is overshadowed by the culture he himself comes from and the academic tradition he ascribes to that word. When Stephen attempts to trace the connotations of that word in its more usual Dublin context (the marketplace), as he himself knows it, the priest, interjecting, expresses a rather haughty distain and a desire to move to a different subject as quickly as possible. Stephen obliges but the reader is left in a state of distress for two reasons: first, Stephen has failed to offer

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an account of what he sees in that word, leaving the reader in the same oblivious state as the priest; second, the priest has exhibited a tendency to bypass the desire for reading the range of meanings in the words he uses. We are left feeling that the aesthetic theories Stephen has been expounding up to this point are reductive, lifeless, and one-sided by association. The apotheosis of the scene is rendered in Stephen’s inner consciousness in the following manner: “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted his words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (194). My greatest temptation here is to move from the specificity of this example to the generality of translation. I want to move from the unique instance of my reading of Stephen’s predicament to a general apodictic equation that will be true of all translations. But I am aware also that this translation will not stop there, that one translation begets another, and so on and so forth. To say that translation is an infinite task does not excuse me from the necessity to translate. I do it all the time. I am doing it now and must keep on doing it. And this does not either take away from the fact that translation is in a certain sense impossible, as we have seen with Stephen, and as Paul de Man wittily points out in his translation of the title of Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” [The Task of the Translator]. “If you enter the Tour de France,” he says, “and you give up, that is Aufgabe—‘er hat aufgegeben,’ he doesn’t continue in the race any more. It is in that sense also the defeat, the giving up, of the translator. The translator has to give up in relation to the task of refinding what was there in the original” (de Man 1986, 80). As a reader of Joyce I feel a certain closeness to his linguistic, cultural, and national position, since I was born in Dublin and have lived there on and off for most of my life. I feel like I can hold his wheel, as they say at bike races, that he can’t drop me. But the example I’ve given here is also an allegory of the way that the translation, even for someone familiar with the idiom, is an impossibility, that it cannot be exhausted: “The word finis can never be written to the work of interpretation” (LM, xx). The word “detain” likewise is not explained in Portrait. It is left to the reader to “refind” the implications of that word and its place in Stephen’s argument. “Detain” therefore becomes a figure, a catachrestic and allegorical figure, for the task of the critic as a translator gazing into a black hole. Read into it what you will; it maintains its secrets, if there they be, and conducts us into the labyrinth of something wholly other: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’intrate. Readers beware.

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3. Translating Theory I return to my original question: what happens when I translate another’s idiom into my own? My hypothesis is that the stylistic characteristics of the reading I am investigating will inevitably change the style I take to be my own however much I try to resist it. It will infect it, live on or off of it. Like a contagious virus, or pathogenic invader, it will affect my thinking as I go, life-giving and death-giving at once. To say that I can identify a line of criticism by one critic or another is to have already been affected (infected) by that criticism: “The thread is the labyrinth and at the same time it is the repetition of the labyrinth” (AT, 19). The translation of the critical model, denaturing it along the way, always already changes not only the criticism but also the critic. The act of reading calls some other into being from the margins as that act reenacts the event of some initial discovery. Let me detain you with another example of what I mean. This time from Miller’s earliest recontextualization of Georges Poulet in his first book Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels: This study presupposes that each sentence or paragraph of a novel, whether it is presented from the point of view of the narrator or of some imagined character, defines a certain relationship between a mind and its objects. . . . For all the works of a single writer form a unity, a unity in which a thousand paths radiate from the same center. At the heart of a writer’s successive works, revealed in glimpses through each event and image, is an impalpable organizing form, constantly presiding over the choice of words. This form, if we can discover it, will be a better clue than any biographical data to the writer’s intimate relation to the material world, to other human beings, and to himself. For a novel is not simply an external structure of meaning, an objective narrative which we can understand from the outside. It is also the expression of the unique personality and vital spirit of its author. It is the embodiment in words of a certain very special way of experiencing the world. (CD, ix)

The most important thing to remember here is that when statements like this appear in Miller’s early work as a translation of a Pouletian model of so-called consciousness criticism, they are always attended by a statement that the consciousness of the author is “an embodiment in words.” As Sarah Lawall has pointed out in her remarkable study Critics of Consciousness, Miller’s work has always combined an American brand of formalism with the existentialist motifs of his Continental counterparts: “Miller does not lean so far as Poulet in the direction of supra-verbal analysis, but looks to the text for the technical effects of this motivating experience” (1968, 197). The style itself, in other words, reveals a conflict between language and

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mind that cannot be stilled. It reflects the idiom of the subject of analysis through the stylistic lens of the Pouletian model. The question is, how much does the style change or embody the meaning? This conflict has been present from the very beginning in Miller’s work and betrays a fascination with textual analysis that has never been subsumed by theoretical allegiances. “Literary works in the conventional sense,” he will later say, “have always more interested me than theoretical works as mediations in various ways, different in each case, offering a glimpse of the wholly other” (O, 3). Though this first book was dedicated to Poulet and exudes, as the preface makes clear, a profound debt to the Pouletian mode, where “a thousand paths radiate from the same center,” it shows a consistently rigorous attention to the language of the text. This is due in no small part to the earlier existence of this work as Miller’s doctoral thesis on symbolic action, where metaphorical structures in Dickens are traced through the language of the text and Kenneth Burke’s writings. The emphasis here is, as the epigraph to his doctoral study informs, that a command of metaphor is the mark of genius (DSI, i). On closer inspection it is, and has always been, the language of the text that fascinates Miller. And “You don’t need Derrida if you have read Burke,” says Miller (TNT, 193). Here’s a point worth remembering: the so-called linguistic turn in Miller’s criticism never happened. There is certainly a shift, but no break: “The shift back from ‘consciousness’ to ‘language’ as the category to be investigated allows in principle a closer look at what is actually there on the page and at the transaction between reader and word from which meaning emerges . . . The thing all readers share is those words on the page” (FR, 20). This shift to language does not exclude the referent from investigative analysis; it simply puts the referent in question. It also allows the critic to focus on the singular event of reading without constant reference to a methodology. When Miller espouses “reading,” in the strong sense of that term, he is responding to what he has always been referring to in his readings: the strangeness of the text, its otherness.

4. Literature’s Others In a 1994 roundtable debate, alongside Jacques Derrida, Wolfgang Iser, Bill Readings, and Murray Krieger, Miller discussed his essay “Humanistic Discourse and the Others.” He explained that notions of otherness are too often oversimplified by an attempt to view the other’s difference in relation to its dissimilarity from the same. The argument is that his own version of otherness is of an “alterity that cannot be logically understood by being

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turned to some version of the same. That is to say, it’s not a same other.”2 In a telling digression, he suggests that his early works took a rather naïve approach to these notions of otherness: If I can be autobiographical for a moment . . . those were the concepts that governed my two books after the Dickens book, those two books on nineteenth and twentieth century literature [sic], The Disappearance of God and Poets of Reality. These were entirely controlled by the notion of either transcendence or [immanence]. In the Victorian period was The Disappearance of God (God wasn’t exactly dis-believed in, it’s just that God wasn’t here), and in the twentieth century there was a diffuse [immanence]. I now find those notions very problematic, including the zeitgeist notion that I had then. It’s the part of my work that most embarrasses me.

To give Miller his due however, to do justice to what he has always said of the strangeness of literature, that “literary study hides the peculiarity of literary language by accounting for it, naturalizing it, neutralizing it, turning it into the familiar,” is to realize that his response to those “others” or “each hetero-otherness” in the texts he encounters is just that: an encounter with something else (OL, 33). Such encounters leave traces of those others behind. At their best Miller’s readings are always attempting to do justice to a half-glimpsed, half-felt, half-understood event of language. They are always trying to make you aware that literary works cannot be domesticated. In “Justices,” the playfully provocative essay where the “J” of J. Hillis Miller stands for justice, Derrida recounts that Miller’s earliest fascinated speculations on doing justice in The Disappearance of God were “deconstruction avant la lettre.” “I no longer remember who it was,” Derrida says, “who dared to say that deconstruction is justice [it was Derrida himself!]. Contrary to the persistent rumor, Miller did not convert, one fine day, to deconstruction. The latter is already at work beginning with his first book. One has just to read. One recognizes the taste of it in what he says about the singularity of taste, the limits of language, logos, thus logocentricism, and especially about what exceeds and divides presence” (Derrida 2005, 244). It is important to remember that whenever questions of justice arise in these works, responsibility to otherness is haunting those questions.

5. Reading De Quincey Reading Thomas De Quincey’s work is no easy task. His world is a shadowy and spectral universe, where life bleeds into death and death is

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always returning and bleeding back into life. This often leaves the reader transfixed in ways which are not unlike the impressionistic dreamscapes conjured by the opium haze of the writer’s imagination. Miller’s point of departure in reading Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is to regard the loss of De Quincey’s beloved sister, Elizabeth, on June 2, 1792 as the pivotal moment when De Quincey realizes that “conscious life begins at the moment when life is finished” (DG, 17). Her death has the following implications for him: (1) there is no longer the immanence of the divine presence in the world; (2) De Quincey becomes conscious of the vast unfathomable debts of time and space; and (3) he realizes that the self is other. The awareness of the latter will have drastic consequences, for “as soon as De Quincey is aware of himself as a separate being his life is already finished. The door back into the paradise of childhood has been locked and he is ‘shut out forever’: He is outside, a solitary point of consciousness surrounded by infinite reaches of time and space” (DG, 23). He is henceforth left to wander alone in the world, becoming what he calls a “Pariah”: “a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets.”3 An existence without center, be that center God, Truth, or a belief in a unified self, presupposes an existence without teleological goals. The immediacy of the lived-world has retreated to the extent that the subject is forced to look within himself for an adequate understanding of his own existence. The problem of course arises from coming to know that the self is as divided and infinite as the objective world. If the universe without the immanence of the divine presence seems beyond the realms of wisdom, then the internal universe of the subject, equally devoid of a guiding hand or prime mover, remains divided within itself and infinite. On Miller’s account, all of this amounts to the same problem one experiences when reading De Quincey’s writings themselves. Their style reveals their substance, as they become translations of an untranslatable void. At times these writings are wholly illogical and transitory and yet they continue to circle ominously around a tentative point all the same. De Quincey’s writings characteristically begin with a tangible subject and then leak into some unforeseen and distant arena; they wander about casting vague lights on distant and tenuous themes; yet they paradoxically seem for all their slippages and digressions part of an aspiring pattern getting further and further away as the writing continues: “For De Quincey there is no subject with just limits, a finite goal which may be seen from the beginning, and pursued through a logical train of thought. The realm of his essays is like London a space of infinite wandering. Just as it is impossible to say of the astronomical space whether we ‘look down, or look up,’ into it, so there is a consistent ambiguity in De Quincey’s descriptions of his

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mental space” (DG, 29). These stylistic characteristics are seen as an attempt to make the space of writing fill up the void of time. De Quincey’s wonderful penchant for writing footnotes to footnotes and his equal propensity to bizarre flights of fancy bring to mind the images of the thyrsus and caduceus in Miller’s reading. These ancient Greek symbols are often depicted as shafts entwined with ivy leaves or two snakes forming a double helix around a central staff. Though the caduceus forms an eloquent self-expression of De Quincey’s style in Suspiria de Profundis, and the thyrsus a fitting image for Baudelaire’s reading of De Quincey in Les paradis artificial, what becomes interesting about Miller’s reading is that each symbolic register is not quite right. In trying to describe the style of De Quincey’s arguments, Miller is noticeably drawing toward the conclusion that these spatial metaphors inhibit the temporal mood of this dissolute stylistic wandering. What actually happens is that Miller’s journey from one register to the next becomes a disastrous catalog of failures to describe the central motifs behind De Quincey’s work. Miller is in a very real sense mimicking the style and tone of his subject, translating it, moving at a dizzying speed from one image to the next. Until he hits upon the right one, the image of the mountain lake or “tarn”: “A perfect image for De Quincey’s writings” (DG, 41). Miller sees the tarn as an appropriate way of envisaging the process by which De Quincey’s thoughts simply fill up and spill over into alternative spaces. But, alas, this image is too rooted in a foundational logic because the subjective universe of the poet is devoid of a grounding, centering God. For De Quincey, as Miller comes to see it, the universe is fluid and volatile yet suspended by the antagonism of opposites. It is at this point in Miller’s reading that the notion of concordia discors (harmonious discord) becomes evident. In this principle of cosmological counterbalance, as Earl Wasserman puts it via Heraclitus in his superbly rich readings of Augustan and Romantic poetry, “the doctrine explained the design of the cosmos: ‘Existing things are brought into harmony by the clash of opposing currents . . . All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream’” (Wasserman 1968, 54). Likewise for Miller De Quincey’s view of a universe that is devoid of the immanent presence of a prime mover becomes a vast emptiness where things are held together in a similar harmonious collision or “pregnant tension”: The motif of opposites in tense equilibrium is more than merely a psychological or epistemological principle for De Quincey. Space and time stretch interminably in all directions, with no strong magnetic field to orient things and hold them in position. If this is the case, a man, a system of thought, or a nation must hold itself up in the void by “a steady, rope-dancer’s

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equilibrium of posture”. . . Only in this way can an area in the infinite space be filled up with an harmonious system which will possess internal principles of self-perpetuation. . . . De Quincey believes that there is a built-in law of compensation in man, in nature, and in history whereby any one power tends to call up its opposite and keep things in balanced motion. (DG, 44)

Here we encounter a universe hewn from the remnants of contrariety. The antagonism of opposites opens up a space wherein the author attempts to close the gap between the opposing forces. This attempt to find the harmonious middle ground is achieved through the opium dream of pure presence in time and space; but as a world formed from the anodyne affects of a narcotic, the capricious space-time of such a world is necessarily transitory. The dream is an illusion.

6. Metareading? If Miller’s readings show that De Quincey “always fails, not because he has an unfortunate habit of wandering, but because, however straight he goes, he can never exhaust the infinite which lurks in the finite,” then he is also alluding to the quintessential impossibility of the unilinear or univocal act of reading itself (DG, 56). Manuel Asensi rightly points to this problem of reading Miller reading: What exactly does Miller do in this essay or in the rest of The Disappearance of God? We hazard the following hypothesis: by having set forth in the preface the problem of identification and by having explored the problem by way of an example, namely De Quincey’s textuality, Miller literally and allegorically (as does De Quincey) develops the metatheoretical problem of reading. Probably Miller’s interest (his “subject matter,” as I have said at the beginning) lies not so much in De Quincey, Browning, Brontë, and the disappearance of God as in what those authors and that subject matter represent. This is the enigma of reading as enigma or, what is the same, the enigma of literature as an alterity absolutely other. (1999, 90)

In following this question throughout his book, Asensi sees two key problems informing Miller’s work in The Disappearance of God. First, there is the problem of the interpretation of the subjectivity or consciousness of the author as it is expressed through the text. Second, there is the problem of the interpretation of a text that is devoid of any center—the loss of God, as we have seen, has annulled any teleological progress toward a unified or finite metaphysical truth. Simply put, what Asensi is describing right the way through his analysis of Miller’s reading of De Quincey is the failure

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of the critic to perform a criticism of consciousness (a la Poulet’s mode of phenomenological interpretation), as the consciousness that is being described does not cohere with any models of the formal expression of experience. For the awareness of the loss of God as a harmonizing or unifying presence is not consistent with a mode of criticism that attempts to find that harmony in a consciousness experiencing such a loss. “De Quincey’s best stylistic effects,” says Miller, “are achieved by a series of sentences, each one of which is ornate and complex, full of clauses in apposition which repeat one another with slight variation. The sentence is a kind of fugue, and the endless echoes among the clauses make it a little infinity in itself” (DG, 48). Can we then use this image as yet another figure for what is going on in Miller’s failed reading? Can we use this fugue writing as a way into what happens when Miller reads De Quincey? I hazard a yes here, since, as we can see, the fugue is a figure of disfigurement, a way for us to catch a glimpse of why metatheories of reading are forever caught up in their own impossibility. To put this in Paul de Man’s elegantly concise formulation: “What I mean is upset by the way in which I mean” (de Man 1986, 87).

7. Spacecritics In an early review of The Disappearance of God de Man has pointed to exactly this danger of reading any phenomenological critic deriving their influences directly from Poulet’s work: “One can copy Curtius, or Spitzer, or even Bachelard, but to copy Poulet is to betray him. Miller never does” (1964, 643). De Man’s point is incisive and should have been remembered by critics of the school, since on his account, correct in my view, following Poulet could only really be done at the expense of actually reading him. Just as we might say following Derrida, de Man or Miller is equally a betrayal. The evidence of Poulet in Miller’s work can be seen in the way Miller condenses the entire works of De Quincey into one essay by using references to the complete edition. It can also be seen in Miller’s encyclopedic concern with the idiosyncratic imaginative scope of De Quincey’s writings. After that, however, the resemblance stops and the act of reading becomes the major concern. Miller reads De Quincey, not through Poulet, but through De Quincey. It is through De Quincey, we can say, that Poulet is undone. The closer Miller gets to De Quincey the further away from Poulet are the results of his reading. As de Man and Frank Lentricchia (in After the New Criticism) are correct in assuming, Miller’s thesis in both the Disappearance of God and

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Poets of Reality prioritizes a spatialized or synchronic awareness of temporality over a historicism that “is bound to appear as the very chaos which the esthetic consciousness is obliged to put into shape” (de Man 1964, 647). But the concern with the present over the past in Miller’s De Quincey is a necessary kind of nostalgia for that moment before the consciousness of a being-toward-death, which is paradoxically a consciousness of life. If consciousness begins at the moment when his sister dies, then it follows that the author would wish to return to that originary moment before the chain of time and loss is set in motion—De Quincey continually returns to this point in the Confessions and Suspiria, as the “terrific grief which I passed through [and that] drove a shaft for me into the worlds of death and darkness which never again closed” (1990, 93). Such an illusory longing results from the extraordinarily impossible wish to attain an immediate commerce between man and God, life and death, and self and other—the very theme of the Disappearance. If Miller is indeed privileging the space of criticism over its regard for the historical, in an attempt to close down his analysis of the imaginative lived-world (lebenswelt) of the author (what de Man sees as Miller’s attempt to find the mental space of the author), then it becomes difficult to reconcile his readings of “iteration” (repetition of difference), “palimpsest” (disremembering), and the “Piranesi effect” (psychical trauma) without cause for a redefinition of the approach; or, more radically, it forces us to realize that Miller couldn’t have picked a better example than De Quincey to attack the very phenomenological mode of criticism he is espousing. Like J.L. Austin’s examples in How to Do Things with Words, Miller chooses examples that put the greatest pressure on the theories he is propounding (SA, 43).

8. Trace I have said reading De Quincey is difficult because his writings are places where life bleeds into death and death is always returning and bleeding back into life. This is nowhere more apparent than in his discussions of palimpsests. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been washed clean of its original inscriptions and used again. That the traces of previous texts always remain hidden beneath the new ones allows De Quincey to make the following startling analogy in the Confessions: Of this at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may, and will interpose a veil

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between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever . . . (69)

“We move by forgetting,” says Leo Bersani, “and no human faculty is more alien to psychoanalysis than that of forgetting” (Bersani 1998, 21). De Quincey’s commentary may therefore look like a defense of the classic Freudian psychoanalytic model par excellence, a defense of depth psychology as the possibility of reliving the past in the present moment. Such would be the case if we were to assume that De Quincey’s fantasies in writing where sublimated attempts to relive the memories of his life before the death of his beloved sister. But yet again De Quincey’s style of writing continuously shatters this model. How so? In a recent account of how the palimpsest becomes an apt figure for a constant breakdown, Sarah Dillon has argued that it cannot exist as a unified image because it is actually a figure for relentless displacement.4 It recognizes the provisionality of place as an “involuted” (De Quincey’s word for perplexing combinations of images in the mind) amalgam of interwoven traces and entanglements non-present to itself. The palimpsest is an open secret conjuring up the ghost of an impossible translation. It is a place-no-place where alien texts haunt other alien texts, interring and resurrecting one another in an interminable fort/da movement of textual conduction and reduction, analogy and ana-analogy. To write about palimpsests, she argues, is always another act of palimpsesting: “any new text about the palimpsest erases, superimposes itself upon, and yet is still haunted by, other texts in the palimpsest’s history” (Dillon 2007, 9). By repeating De Quincey in such a way, Miller translates, traduces and betrays him. But Miller is also repeating a certain confusion in De Quincey which is quintessential to his style, that is, the manifest impossibility of identifying with another consciousness through language. Repetition, as both De Quincey and Miller indicate, is always repetition with a difference. Writing on the palimpsest is haunted by the multiple texts such writing resurrects and translates.

9. Fugues But what is it about the fugue that takes such a hold of De Quincey in his writings, especially the “Dream-Fugue” section of The English Mail-Coach? And how does it haunt Miller’s reading as I say it does? “Toccatas and Fugues: Bach’s compositions,” says Julia Kristeva, “evoke to my ears the

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meaning of an acknowledged and harrowing otherness that I should like to be contemporary, because it has been brought up, relieved, disseminated, inscribed in an original play being developed, without goal, without boundary, without end. An otherness barely touched upon and that already moves away” (2002, 266). The fugue, I claim, is what happens to Miller’s translation of De Quincey. It haunts it and creates its meaning. Fugue is yet another name for his interminable palimpsestuous writing-event, taking as he does the entire 14-volume Masson edition of De Quincey’s works in a mind-boggling academic feat, weaving and unweaving point and counterpoint together and stitching bits from each volume into one single chapter.5 But it is also a pervasive digressive movement always already at work in De Quincey’s writings and therefore an uncanny guest in Miller’s rereadings of his work. Fugue is a powerful figure for the impossibility Miller has to close down and catch De Quincey at what he’s doing. Now that is Aufgabe! It is the otherness that moves away from Miller, that which he can barely touch. In music theory a fugue is a highly complex form, one for which critics have yet to come to a common definition. What most can agree on is that the fugue is a species of counterpoint (contrappunto) in which a number of voices—usually three—react with one another in a composition. Generally, each voice is at a separate tonic level and initially remains distinguishable from the other voices in the piece. At the outset, the first voice states the “subject” and is given time to express this in its entirety. The second voice reacts to the subject in contrapuntal style through the “answer.” This counter-subject is then followed closely and overlapped by a second counter-subject as the third voice enters in—the second counter-subject usually repeats the original subject. The overall impetus of the fugue is achieved through repetition and imitation. As the etymology of the word suggests (from Latin Fuga meaning flight), the fugue is a kind of chase or hunt. The imitative measure of the fugue, expressed in a series of “episodes” (where the subject appears metonymically in each voice) and expositions (where the subject is stated and restated), essentially operates on a series of dialectical tensions between degrees of thematic expansion and modification. In the freer forms of fugal expression, exemplified by Bach’s major works, a chain of devices such as augmentation, diminution, inversion, and stretto, embellishes the formal structure to the extent that it becomes radically fractured. Through experimentation with pace, tone, reversal of subject, and overlapping, Bach’s works succeed in complicating the more traditional form of the fugue beyond recognition. In saying this, it is useful to remember that the stretto (from the Italian for “squeezing together”) or the overlapping of the voices in the fugue creates a delirium

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that compounds the formal eloquence of the structure with an uneasy confusion. At this stage the composition moves through a kind of formal overload, where the initial threads of individual and mutually exclusive components are lost in an interminable disseminative play. In the final moments of his reading of De Quincey Miller turns to the “Dream-Fugue” section of The English Mail-Coach in order to discuss what most critics see as the apotheosis of De Quincey’s stylistic achievements.6 De Quincey’s outrageous term for the rhythm of the writing style here is Tumultuosissimamente [most tumultuously], indicating on a thematic level how the disjointed and dreamy images of the piece seem to clash against one another and deflect the reader’s attention into an ever increasing spiral of digression and confusion. It is also of course a musical direction for how the piece should be read—with what speed the reader is advised to pursue the words along the page. The “Dream-Fugue” is the finest testament to the virtuoso flair and iridescent chaos of De Quincey’s writings, exhibiting also the remarkable gifts he had for throwing bizarrely incongruous images into cacophonies of pandemonium. In each of its five sections a different rhythm is suggested, leading the reader to vary the pace at abrupt intervals, a disjointed devise that controls the mood of the entire dream sequence. The short prelude opens as an introduction to the theme as a repetition and reminder of the earlier subject of The Vision of Sudden Death—the story of De Quincey’s disastrous coach trip to Manchester in which he nearly lost his life because his driver fell asleep at the reins. After which dream visions of the unknown lady from the coach scene accompanying the narrator on an ocean voyage enter in. The mood, at first blissful and carefree, is quickly overtaken by shadows of an ominous storm which hurls the narrator’s vessel in the path of another, repeating the scene of the two coaches in the earlier essay. Everything here becomes a rhythmical impression: “There she stood with hair dishevelled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling—rising, sinking, fluttering, trembling, praying—there for leagues I saw her as she stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, amidst the fiery crests of the pursuing waves and the raving of the storm; until at last, upon a sound from afar of malicious laughter and mockery, all was hidden for ever in driving showers; and afterwards, but when I know not, and how I know not” (226–227). What happens here is a series of rhythmical and tonal repetitions wherein De Quincey pursues the subject of his dream visions in a musical fashion, emphasizing the fugal form of pursuit and flight, chance, discovery, embellishment, and a dazzling arrangement of emotive figures. As the piece progresses the vision becomes more abstract and the images are

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repeated and seem to infuse into intractable strange allusive impressions, until we realize that “His subject is not a group of words, but rather a group of ideas: speed, urgency, and a girl in danger of sudden death” (Brown 1938, 345). But the performance of the piece, its overall structure aspiring to the fugal squeezing together of disparate elements in the stretto moment, once again throws us back upon the language of the piece as the supreme performative act. The words are doing what they are saying; they are rising, sinking, fluttering, trembling, and praying. “The mistake of most people,” we have been told in the Confessions, “is to suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with music, and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not so: it is by the re-action of the mind upon the notices of the ear, (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed: and therefore it is that people of equally good ear differ so much in this point from one another” (45). In these final fugal instances De Quincey infuses these sentiments into a stunning architectonics of incredible power. Sense and matter become locked into one another, involuted. Yet they are constantly at play, constantly escaping, so that the senses and the matter, the cognitive and the sensual, are at once felt to be the same and other. When Miller actively translates this movement into his essay, it becomes yet another translation of the play that already exists in De Quincey’s prose. He carries it over. This moment is remarkable because it makes his own writing share in a perpetually digressive reconfiguration of the impossibility of a final clarity, a critical allegory of the ceaseless wandering of De Quincey’s own Pariah. It also reflects the kind of criticism Miller is doing. In using the complete works of De Quincey and splicing quotations together from early and late works—even into fragments in the same sentence—Miller reenacts, stretto-like, the fugal patterns of De Quincey’s own poetic prose. We are at once expanding to an overall pattern and then rather abruptly plummeting into a discussion of a single phrase—the movements being centrifugal and centripetal at varying degrees, enframed by an initial and final reference to the greatest event of De Quincey’s life: the death of his sister. In a more recent reading of Thomas Hardy’s “The Pedigree,” Miller focuses on a strange archaic word in this poem: “fugelman”: A fugleman, according to the NED [New English Dictionary], is a “soldier especially expert and well drilled, formerly placed in front of a regiment or company as an example or model to others in their exercises.” The word comes from the German Flugelmann, from Flugel, “wing,” plus Mann, “man.” To fugle is “to do the duty of a fugleman; to act as a guide or director; to make signals,” or, figuratively, “to give an example of (something) to

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someone.” To fugle is also slang for “to cheat, trick.” The example given by the NED has a sexual implication. To fugle is to mislead, to seduce: “Who fugell’d the Parson’s fine Maid?” (1729). A fugleman is not an originator. He is himself a well-drilled copy who stands at the wing and who passes on to others a pattern, perhaps a deceitful pattern, by the wing-like beating of his arms and legs, making signals. . . . Whatever I do my fuglemen have already been there first. I can never be more than a follower, the momentary last of the line, never be an initiator, a first. The concept of “archetype,” as “The Pedigree” shows Hardy knew, is inherently contradictory. Any type (from the Greek tupos, “informing matrix”), is already divided within itself. It is multiple, and it is an iteration. It is already secondary to any arché or origin. (TPP, 253)

If Miller and Hardy are right, all readers are fuglemen. Never original initiators, only ever commentators and poor translators of an ever elusive and shifting ideal. Even my punning insistence here on the somewhat false homonymic etymological linkage between “fugal” and “fugle” is a symptom of this possibility. But the possibility is both exciting and necessary in every reading, that is, the possibility that the translation will take flight as both words signifies, that it will initiate something other, something at least that has not been noticed before. This is the impossible possibility of all translations. It is also something that always feels somehow like a cheat, like something has been tricked into being just by being repeated. The word “detain,” we remember, was something different on the priest’s lips, just as it is on mine. When I repeat it, as the fugleman repeats his drill, I am conducting something always already translated and bringing it back to life in the process. I therefore answer my hypothesis. What happens when I translate someone else’s idiom into my own? I not only change it, I also change my own idiom. But in doing this I change the ideal itself, the presupposition of an origin. This is what happens to Miller when he reads De Quincey through Poulet and to me when I read Miller through De Quincey, and to you, dear reader, whatever else happens, when you read me through all of the above. The result is always a kind of fugle.

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Chapter 3

Double Reading Thus we perceive that it can be just as ironic to pretend to know when one knows that one does not know as to pretend not to know when one knows that one knows. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony You will never understand—so we can stop right here, and all go home. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony”

1. Equivocations One thing that should be noted about De Quincey, which I have neglected to pursue in my last chapter, is his uncommon degree of humor and comic subtlety in even the direst circumstances. He even apologizes for it at one superbly witty instance: “I have a very reprehensible way of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery: and, unless when I am checked by some more powerful feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in these annals of suffering or enjoyment. The reader must allow a little to my infirm nature in this respect: and with a few indulgences of that sort, I shall endeavour to be as grave, if not drowsy, as fits a theme like opium, so anti-mercurial as it really is, and so drowsy as it is falsely reputed” (De Quincey 1990, 39). Just what is De Quincey asking of his readers in these few sentences? A certain latitude in humor or a dispensation for being “drowsy?” The comedy of course is that he is asking for both at the same time. He is effectively apologizing in advance for what will be untimely amusing instances punctuating the gravest circumstances, instances he fears may offend his readers’ delicate tastes. He is also punning wonderfully on the word “drowsy” as an effect of opium and as a possible side effect of his prose. His equivocations at this point interestingly display a sense of humor that is pervasive throughout the Confessions and that the drowsy reader will all too easily pass over if he or she succumbs to the anodyne effects of his more academic explanations. In saying that opium is at once a drowsy subject and not a drowsy effect, De Quincey is trying to do two things at once that are completely contradictory. “I’m going to tell you a dull story,” he says, “about an exciting experience.” “Forgive me for that.” “Oh! and also for the times when I make jokes about the experience.” At such

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instances the reader becomes aware that De Quincey is trying to have his cake and eat it too. Something exceedingly odd happens, though, when the reader of the Confessions considers these sentiments. They change the overall effect of the reading experience fundamentally. Not only do we come to see the narrator as more cunning and inventive but we also realize that the story itself becomes ironically doubled. The contradictions in the tenor of the argument become explicit forcing us to read and reread the narrative ironically. Specifically, a dynamic is formed between the actual moral reprehensibility we may attend to the practice of opium eating and the amusing events that come to pass as the narrator succumbs to its effects. When the narrative voice becomes doubled in such a way events can be reread with an eye to the disparity between a weighty earnestness and a darkly absurd jocularity. Consider for instance the description De Quincey gives of his acquaintance with Ann, the woefully unfortunate girl and faithful companion to our insolvent narrator: This person was a young woman, and one of that unhappy class who subsist upon the wages of prostitution. I feel no shame, nor have any reason to feel it, in avowing, that I was on familiar and friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate condition. The reader needs neither smile at this avowal, nor frown. For, not to remind my classical readers of the old Latin proverb— “Sine Cerre,” etc., [et Libero friget Venus—“without bread and wine love freezes”] it may well be supposed that in the existing state of my purse, my connexion with such women could not have been an impure one. (20)

The reading falls rather too heavily on the word “could” in the last sentence, and the reader cannot help but feel that De Quincey’s use of an old Latin proverb is also being used as an unsubtle nudge in the direction of the educated friends he has known and is addressing here. One gets the impression that there is more to De Quincey’s supplication than might be taken at first glance. His hospitality to the Malay arriving unexpectedly at his house is another instance of a dark humor that seems to be pervasive throughout the entire narrative. On this occasion our hapless narrator provides his visitor with enough opium “to kill three dragoons and their horses,” watches him gobble it down, and says afterwards, “but what could be done? I could not think of violating the laws of hospitality by having him seized and drenched with an emetic.” We are told that no news of any bodies having being found along the road has ever reached our

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narrator’s ears, so that we are to conclude that finally he “must have done him the service [he] designed” (57). I have said that the dark humor seems to be pervasive because it is the problem with the figure I am addressing that one can never be quite sure. There are no linguistic markers or traits, as there are with other figures like metaphor, simile, or synecdoche, which call attention to the process by being detectable and taxonomical tropes—“like,” “as,” and so on (O, 231). Irony, unlike these, does not afford us the luxury of saying “there it is,” “right there.” We can only ever give examples of it in the hope that it will be detected. “For whoever hasn’t got it,” says Friedrich Schlegel, “it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed” [Wer sie nicht hat, dem bleibt sie auch nach dem offensten Geständnis ein Rätsel] (Schlegel 1964, 536).1 To say that a narrative is doubled is to understand that it can be read two ways at once that are equally valid and that it can only be seen to be working by taking a leap between these two points. The result is an uneasiness that remains uneasy, since one reading cancels out and displaces another making each one singularly incompatible. “The ironist cuts up into little bits beyond hope of reassembling the coherence of the narrative or line of argument he presents” (FR, 105). Irony irritates, as Milan Kundera has it, because we can never be sure of it. We can never be sure whether De Quincey is being serious or not, whether or not he is harboring a wry smile as he calls for his readers to be sympathetic to his infirmities. Just as we can never be sure whether or not to admire Michael Henchard for his latter-day rectitude or loathe him for it, or know how to react to Rochester’s burdensome advances on Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous heroine Jane Eyre. “The more attentively we read a novel, the more impossible the answer, because the novel is, by definition, the ironic art: its ‘truth’ is concealed, undeclared, undeclarable” (Kundera 1986, 134).

2. De Man’s Irony When we feel like defining irony we are in most danger of becoming its victims. We are in danger of sounding like Blackadder’s hapless Baldrick, whose response to the question “Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?” is “Yeah, it’s like goldy and bronzey, only it’s made of iron.” This is why irony carries with it such a stigma of shame in society for those who simply don’t get it. They end up sounding hypernaïve or hopelessly innocent. I say “they” here, but one can never be quite sure within which

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category to place oneself. Here’s how de Man put it in a late interview with Robert Moynihan: For me, irony is not something one can historically locate, because what’s involved in irony is precisely the impossibility of a system of linear and coherent narrative. . . . Irony comes into being precisely when self-consciousness loses its control over itself. For me, at least, the way I think of it now, irony is not a figure of self-consciousness. It’s a break, an interruption, a disruption. It is a moment of loss of control, and not just for the author but for the reader as well. . . . I’m not at all comfortable with those various distinctions— dramatic irony, narrative irony. Irony, of all tropes, if it is a trope, is the most difficult, the most all-encompassing, and the hardest to pin down. (1986, 138–139)

Whenever Miller speaks of irony, de Man is always in one way or another present in what he says. And much of what de Man has to say about irony in the remainder of this remarkable interview is a repetition of what is laid out here concerning the impossibility of ever being sure that this tropeno-trope is identifiable as such. For de Man, to call irony a trope is an error since “irony is a disruption of a continued field of tropological meaning.” It is “the lack of control of meaning,” what Schlegel calls Unverständlichkeit [ununderstandability].2 Therefore, as he notes, people who try to write about irony consistently fail to acknowledge the fact that in trying to delimit its boundaries they become its victims. The most ironic moment is when the critic, according to de Man, tries to put a stop to the madness and is drawn to a conclusion, a Verständnis. The ununderstandibility of this trope-no-trope is the impossibility of controlling its movement, of stemming the tide of ironic allusions and closing its multiple meanings down. The problem with speaking about irony, like speaking of the palimpsest, is that one is inevitably drawn into its movement. And though you might suspect this, you never may know it. “One feature of irony is the way it is catching, so that it is extremely difficult if not impossible to talk about irony without being ironic” (O, 230). There is therefore no outside to irony, no solid ground from which to peer down at it. Hence, de Man’s astonishing concluding comment in Allegories of Reading: “Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding. As such, far from closing off the tropological system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration” (de Man 1979, 301). Such statements are why Miller in reading de Man has referred to him as allergenic: “De Man’s work as allergen is something alien, something other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that otherness” (O, 220). That de Man often makes the most controversial statements

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imaginable is one way to construe what Miller means when he says de Man often makes his readers break out in a rash. A statement like “History is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality, but it is the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition” should give any reader pause (de Man 1996, 133). How on earth is history not a temporal notion? “There’s an allergenic statement for you!” says Miller (O, 241). But one has to regard the performative valence in what de Man says. For irony is always closely linked with the performative power of language in de Man’s readings: the way that language has a mechanical power to radically alter received opinions, to go on operating in the absence of any speaker, to have a mechanical force without intentional impetus, and to radically transform and even make history. Another way to describe this is to say after de Man and Miller that language has a material force, a power to change things in the world, to make things happen. That performative statements are unknowable, that they suspend cognition, strangely allows us to glimpse how ironic utterances can have purchase on the real world by generating those events that make up the materiality of history. This is presumably why de Man insists that temporality and history are at odds when it comes to the material power of language. To conceive of history as a coherent linear narrative is somewhat incompatible with the conception of language as excessive, incoherent, as, in a word, event. When de Man speaks of irony it is intrinsically linked with the unintelligibility of what is, for Miller, known as otherness. In that sense, de Man’s thinking on irony often takes on a note totally at odds with the more common conception of irony as a form of play. “Irony is not comedy, and theory of irony is not a theory of comedy.” It is “disruption, disillusion,” the madness of words (1996, 182). Before returning to these ideas in de Man, allow me to trace a little further how the madness of words infects what Miller has to say of irony in Victorian fiction at a moment when many critics of his work have argued that he has reached the point of transition from phenomenological criticism to deconstruction.

3. Forms of Victorian Fiction In a new preface to The Form of Victorian Fiction, published 11 years after the first edition appeared in 1968, Miller offered a critique of the theory he earlier held regarding temporality, intersubjectivity, and realism in the Victorian novel—the three main discursive categories of this short volume. But what we witness in this preface is not a disquisition on the importance

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of post-structuralist readings as a way out of the impasse of all naively phenomenological sympathies. Nor do we witness a deferent bow in de Man and Derrida’s direction at the expense of Miller’s old compatriots in the Geneva School. “Even the most linguistically oriented criticism of fiction,” says Miller, “must still talk of the characters, the narrator and so on, just as the most radical of ‘critics of consciousness,’ Georges Poulet for example, must occasionally run head on into the fact that literature is not made of minds but of words” (FVF 1979, viii). The course charted here then, between the Scylla of language and the Charybdis of consciousness, is not a direct contradictory rebuttal of his earlier phenomenological readings or an untimely meditation on the failure of his critical project up until the late 1960s. It is in fact an attempt to account for what he finds problematic about earlier readings as well as a productive rereading of what remains important in those pages. The concept Miller uses for the double bind of language and consciousness in The Form of Victorian Fiction is inner form, which is explained in the original preface as follows: A novel, it is true, is as much as any other work of literature the expression of the way a single consciousness, that of its author, has appropriated his world. One aim of the criticism of fiction is identification of the unique flavour of that consciousness in any given case. In a novel, however, the expression of this special quality, the peculiar Dickensian, Trollopian, or Meredithian note, is mediated, indirect. It is to be approached only by way of the interaction of the imaginary minds of the narrator and his characters as they are related within the horizon opened by time in the novel. My goal in this book has been to suggest ways for reaching the former by interpretation of its incarnation in the latter. (FVF, ix)

This “inner form” can be viewed as a juxtaposition of the phenomenological attention to the intrinsic consciousness of novelistic discourse and the close reader’s attention to the manifestation of that consciousness in the formal architecture of the work. There is a play here too and it is the idea of “inner” as an existential tag. This becomes in Miller’s reading, via Paul de Man’s critique of Lukács, the notion of experience as a temporal or “polyrhythmic” phenomenon—a term signifying the way in which each character in a novel has his or her own peculiar temporality.3 “Time,” for Miller, “is the fundamental dimension of fictional form” because it complicates the notion of closure in the novel, the idea that the novel can draw a circle around life, close off experience through a spatialization of structure, and contain in miniature a world within a world. “Any attempt,” as Miller puts it, “to account for the relation of form to meaning in the Victorian novel will constantly encounter three questions

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crucial to the interpretation of fiction” (FVF, 29). These are, as I’ve mentioned, intersubjectivity (a consciousness of the consciousness of others), time (polyrhythmic), and realism (which is seen as a mise en abyme). The problem, however, is that the experience of reading fiction precludes us from separating these questions out into mutually exclusive or selfsustaining modalities. Though the fundamental experiential dimension of fiction may be temporal, it is given only in terms relative to the other dimensions adding up to that experience. For instance, nothing would seem more counterintuitive than thinking about a novel wholly in terms of (1) an unmediated expression of an omniscient mind; (2) a linguistically overdetermined accumulation of signs referring only allegorically to the ultimate failure of representation; or (3) as an overarching spatial design containing within its frame a fixed pattern wherein we might find the same characters or images unchanged each time we open the same novel. It would in fact be more truthful to the experience of reading to say that each of these elements is a factor that plays a part in the experience without being a specific, determinable entity. This is what Miller means by referring to the temporality of the novel as an “open form.” In what is perhaps the single most important statement in The Form of Victorian Fiction Miller says, “The juxtaposition in indirect discourse of two minds, that of the narrator and that of the character, is, one might say, irony writ large” (FVF, 3). One reason why this is so important is that such a view precludes any theoretical investment from ever setting down a solid foundation. It is also important because, coming in the first few pages of the book, it puts everything that will follow under a spell. Effectively, the sentence haunts the entire work. Its spectral presence hangs over everything that is subsequently said about self and other, intersubjectivity and consciousness. Once we have noticed that indirect discourse—where author, narrator, character, and of course critic too, telepathically leap in and out of identities, voices, times, minds, other people, other languages— we can never be sure where to situate a criticism, upon whom, that is, to concentrate. Indirect discourse dislocates souls (TPP, 171–180). It is another way to experience the uncanny manner in which we are addressed by literature, caught up in it, divided by it, becoming others to ourselves. Writing about literature is yet another form of indirect discourse, an ironic miming of it. Writing about it dislocates, dissembles, disassembles. “Deconstructive reading is comic miming,” says Miller, “It takes nothing away from the text and adds nothing to it, except irony, as in the insolence of a student who repeats back to the teacher exactly what that teacher has said, and as in the ironic insolence of my mediumistic citations of Derrida’s ‘Telepathy’ ” (MM, 71). Quoting this is of course yet another instance of

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this dislocation and indirection, and of the irony involved in doing so. In work after work Miller will return to questions of irony and otherness, their relations to one another, and why the critic is constantly unable to understand them from whatever position. “Wherever I turn, on whatever point on the line of narrative theory I stand,” Miller says in Reading Narrative, “I continually encounter the monster, irony, ruination of my search for a solid ground on the basis of which, theory becoming application, I could read with a secure mastery one novel or another” (RN, 178). Here I’ll make another large claim: Miller’s acknowledgment of the pervasive irony inherent in the relationship between characters, narrators and novelists in The Form of Victorian Fiction precludes his strategic analyses of the form of Victorian fiction from ever amounting to anything more schematic than a paralysis, something commentators of this difficult volume have failed to perceive or account for.4 This paralysis is reached somewhere between the logical and the rhetorical, somewhere between the scheme and its dissipation into darkness, at a point where logical enquiry into the very structure of the narrative pattern divides into two mutually exclusive yet legitimate renderings—a logology and a polylogology. This is, as my title suggests, the double bind that only ever suggests itself indirectly; it is also the parabasis that bursts the bubble we create when we identify with the world beyond the words on the page.

4. Permanent Parabasis A parabasis is a doubling of the narrative line. It means digression, a going aside, or a stepping forward. In ancient Greek [para¢basiV] it refers to the way in which the chorus comes forward on stage to address the audience, breaking what actors often refer to as the “fourth wall” (OED). “Reader, I married him,” being one example, though of course such examples abound in literature. “What had passed between Eleanor Harding and Mary Bold need not be told,” says Trollope in a superbly witty instance in The Warden, “It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines, or how would three volumes or twenty suffice!”5 Suppose I say that double reading is a “permanent parabasis,” a phrase Schlegel uses to describe irony in a famous philosophical fragment. What would that mean? In one way that sentence repeats an idea, redoubling it, not only by repeating its sense, but also in a way ironically undoing that sense by multiplying it by two—a double double—double reading as parabasis. In another way, the notion of a “permanent parabasis” is wholly illogical,

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sheer nonsense. There simply can’t be a permanent doubling or suspension of the narrative line. It would be like talking about an endless epiphany. Double reading as permanent doubling? My sentence, I aver, enacts what is difficult about the notion of a double reading. Once that doubling begins, or is noticed to have already begun, there is no going back. Once the line is seen to have multiplied, the reader is always already in trouble. “Irony, as a pervasive disruption of intelligibility in an entire discourse, is like performative speech acts in being alien to cognition” (Z, 88–89). Take this example from Eliot’s Silas Marner. Silas has just been robbed and our ever-intrusive and somewhat sanctimonious narrator takes the opportunity to prognosticate on the change of heart the villagers feel toward him: I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes [sic] without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. (Eliot 1984, 68)

This is Eliot’s way of suggesting that the goodwill Mr. Macey expresses to Silas in the kind words he offers him backfires, making Silas even more depressed. Macey says something encouraging and it has the opposite effect. In this sense the conversation becomes ironic because we encounter Macey’s words from an opposite point of view. Another way to see this statement though is as an allegorical commentary on the author’s own function as a purveyor of words, “a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.” Two forms of doubling are going on. One is the ironic suspension of the episode and the other is the ironic suspension of the narrative line itself. Speech acts are not like puddings or potatoes. We can’t present them as gifts in quite the same way as we can other things because language has a way of changing its form, becoming “adulterated” even before it passes our lips. There would be much to say here concerning the economy of the gift and the economy of language, but I wish only to make the point here that when Eliot hints at the ironical force governing the narrative something happens. Our attention is drawn to the way in which the language of the text is operating to undermine our interpretation. The logos is therefore doubled all along the line, just as it is when De Quincey’s comments become doubled by references to Ann’s profession. We experience this doubling as a parabasis, a doubling which unbalances us, paralyzing us, stopping us from going in the direction we were going by throwing our sense of direction off, putting it in doubt.

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But how can a line be permanently suspended? In order for there to be a suspension there must be some ground or line from which that suspension comes. There must be something in order for that thing to be doubled. But with the trope I’m concerned with, and we remember it is not simply a trope, the logical equation disappears and we are left with something ununderstandable, something turning at the rate of a whirling dervish. As Miller says in his reading of Thackeray in Fiction and Repetition, “Irony is a permanent parabasis. This means it suspends the line all along the line. Irony is the one figure of speech which cannot be figured spatially or as any sort of geometrical line. Nor is it locally identifiable as a turn of language or ‘figure of speech.’ Irony may pervade a whole discourse, as it does in the case of Henry Esmond, exactly identifiable nowhere, but present everywhere as a persistent double meaning blurring the line of sense from one end to the other of the text” (FR, 105). What irony and otherness have in common, if that is the correct way to put it, is that they are nonsensical, illogical, unknowable; and they can only ever be noticed indirectly.

5. Irony as Others In de Man “absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a nonconsciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself” (de Man 1983, 216). Nonetheless, though definitions are tempting, a temptation that evidently holds de Man enthralled here as elsewhere—for any sentence that holds that “irony is” uses a definitional language—it ought to be resisted as much as possible (resistance on the level of reification at least).6 Though de Man knows that “definitional language seems to be in trouble when irony is involved,” the effect of his musings on the subject forms an inevitable shift into the definitional mode (de Man 1996, 165). Of course, we can never know if de Man is being ironic when he says, “I will attempt a definition.” But we can never know that he is not being ironic either. And that’s the point. This is one way into the problem then of a double bind de Man sees operating at the conceptual, nonconceptual level, something Miller will also identify in “the non-systematic system of Schlegel’s thought” (O, 14). Miller’s account of de Man’s reading of the situation I’ve been referring to in “The Concept of Irony” sees that this definition is a kind of inescapable contradiction. Though de Man stresses the madness of irony (its “unrelieved vertige”) in his reading of Schlegel’s “Über die Unverständlichkeit,” he proceeds by offering several different definitions. Although he is certainly subject to the same propositional language (perhaps especially

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so when he says “irony cannot be understood”), Miller stresses this unknowableness in terms of otherness and the performative language that attempts to confront this darkness. Through Schlegel this becomes the necessity of an indirect or allegorical language for discussing the chaos that irony catachrestically names—what he will refer to in “Rede über die Mythologie (Talk of Mythology)” as the new mythology. “Catachresis,” about which I’ll have more to say in the next chapter, “is the violent, forced, or abusive use of a word to name something that has no literal name” (LM, 418). Examples would be the “face” of a mountain or the “hands” of a clock. What Schlegel’s new mythology calls into being is a language of the unspeakable, a performative language reinventing the allusive chaos which is the abyssal or kho¯ral ground of things—the abgründlich Grund (LM, 423–433). This new mythology bespeaks the myth of permanent becoming. “For this is the beginning of all poetry, to cancel the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination, into the aboriginal chaos of human nature” (Schlegel 1968, 86). On Schlegel’s view poetical power is magical; it is the power that words have to catapult us into an aboriginal chaos. Because poetic language is alien to knowledge it confronts something other, something beyond language; it does this by giving us access to that which can only be glimpsed indirectly in beautiful confusion, in chaos. Another way of seeing this necessary doubleness, the stretching of the word in order to incorporate something other, is in Miller’s reading of de Man’s wittily allusive reading of the term “unrelieved” as an expression of this permanent madness within “The Concept of Irony.” The pun on the word “unrelieved” recalls Hegel’s infamously complex register Aufhebung and Derrida’s playful translation of this untranslatable word in Margins of Philosophy as la relève. In de Man’s reading of Schlegel it recalls the chaos at the origin and the end, the “relief” which is the original, inimitable chaos of translation, of sublation, of differentiation. For Miller we cannot perceive this nonconcept, this chaos in Schlegel, without perceiving a black hole at the centerless center of things. And on this point he espouses de Man’s reference to “the free play of the signifier” as the undoing of Hegelian dialectical reason. Yet, and this is the critical point, he suggests a mode of thinking which opens up to a “magical,” nonrational performance of language that is not seen as such a free play or madness but as an opening toward some other beyond it. This is the infinitesimally small crack separating Miller’s reading of Schlegel from de Man’s. The difference though is only in degree. “Paul de Man,” says Miller, “does not seem to have much patience with portentous terms like ‘the

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other’ or ‘others.’ His radical concept of irony, however, presupposes the encounter with otherness within language that generates a permanent suspension of meaning” (BH, 161). Miller’s reading envisions the radical nature of something beyond language while de Man’s reading stresses that radical nature at the level of language, its materiality. “As opposed to Paul de Man,” says Miller, “who stresses the madness of ironic language in Schlegel, I want to argue that Schlegel’s difference from Hegel arises from a different intuition about what is beyond language, Schlegel’s chaos as against Hegel’s Idea. Everything follows, I claim, from that difference. Every feature of Schlegel’s nonsystematic system makes sense (a strange kind of nonsensical sense) when everything he says is seen as swirling around those ‘wholly others’ he calls chaos” (O, 30). The “Shein,” as Schlegel refers to it, is a ghostly semblance of knowledge within chaos, a glimpse for Miller provided by catachresis, by performative speech acts. This is an opening up to otherness through language that allows something “wholly other” to suggest itself without us ever knowing from whence it came. It is precisely that indirect view—that trace of the other at large within the chaos—that only ever suggests its presence within the absence at the very center of madness. It is also the movement of this “wholly other” that Miller continually traces in his readings of the poets and novelists.

6. Telepathy I have said that the single most important point in The Form of Victorian Fiction was the initial realization that the juxtaposition in indirect discourse of two minds is irony writ large. I have also suggested that since Miller is attentive to this in the narratives he reads critical commentary that fails to engage with this question also fails to acknowledge how Miller’s readings are constantly turning, constantly at odds with themselves, doubling their own logos in the event of noticing this doubling in all narratives. One hypothetical term Miller gives for this form of pervasive doubling in narrative is “radical polylogism,” which “may happen as an effect of the human imaginative power to be, or to think of itself as being, someone other than itself and to speak for that other. ‘Radical polylogism’ would mean the presence of an indefinite number of incompatible logoi in a text” (RN, 121). Examples of doublings in the narrative line, doublings of a central logos, include prefaces, footnotes, epigraphs, and all the marginalia that exist alongside the main narration. Stories within the main story, such as the digressions we’ve seen in De Quincey, are also examples of this

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polylogism. And of course the superimposition of mind over mind or voice over voice in indirect discourse figures another form of the multiplication of a central narrative logos. Each one of these goes to make up another complicating parabasis in reading narratives. All narratives share in this problematic relationship between the central logos and the permanent parabasis of that logos. And like the impossible task of speaking of irony objectively without becoming its victim, all discussions of the dialogical in narratives become victims of that too. “Even the attempt to master dialogical doubling through theoretical reasoning seems to become dialogical, that is, no longer, strictly speaking, reasonable, just as rational discourse about irony seems infallibly to become itself ironical” (RN, 122). What this pervasive parasitical dialogism in the act of reading suggests is that logical narrative taxonomy runs into problems when it tries to account for the strange, uncanny nature of indirect discourse. Canny critics, as Miller has called them, such as Gérard Genette, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan or even the subtler Mikhail Bakhtin, become uncanny critics, however much they try to remain canny, when they confront such issues in their analyses. They become guests in the house of uncanny fictions in attempting to provide a scientific rationale for the alogical in the multiplying logoi of stories.7 In other words, and it is always a question of other words, when trying to account for issues such as point of view, omniscience or narrative levels (Genette’s famous categories are deigetic, intra-deigetic, autodeigetic, heterodeigetic, homodeigetic) their competence as objectively scientific structural narratologists begins to inadvertently express the impossibility of accounting for narratives in such terms. That moment when normative thinking about identity in narrative becomes uncanny, so to speak, is precisely what Derrida has elsewhere referred to as the (non)truth of literature. In his reading of Baudelaire’s narrative poem, “Counterfeit Money,” in which we are never able to decide whether the money given to the beggar by the narrator’s friend is counterfeit or not, Derrida says: [T]here is no sense in wondering what actually happened, what was the true intention of the narrator’s friend and the meaning “behind” his utterances. No more, incidentally, than behind the utterances of the narrator. As these fictional characters have no consistency, no depth beyond their literary phenomenon, the absolute inviolability of the secret they carry depends first of all on the essential superficiality of their phenomenality, on the too-obvious of that which they present to view. This inviolability depends on nothing other than the altogether bare device of being-two-to-speak [l’etre-deux-àparler] and it is the possibility of non-truth in which every possible truth is held or is made. It thus says the (non-)truth of literature, let us say the secret

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of literature: what literary fiction tells us about the secret, of the (non-)truth of the secret, but also a secret whose possibility assures the possibility of literature. (Quoted in Royle 2003, 266)

“Being-two-to-speak” [l’etre-deux-à-parler] is another way to express this uncanny being-beside-oneself that is the defining trait of fiction, the possibility of experiencing the otherness of the other that only ever expresses itself in multiple voices. It is the division of the logos, the multiplying of the self in the identification of (one)self with others. There is something here, as Nicholas Royle points out, which figures a tremendous humility before the text, a radical kind of impassive passivity before the secret of literature. Indeed, the possibility of multivoicedness, of ventriloquism, of polyphony or heteroglossia, is also the impossibility of ever defining the secret or (non-)truth which is all “too-obvious” here. If there is a secret here, it is paradoxically open for all to see, not behind the text but on its surface, where the bare device of being-two-to-speak is the very condition of literature itself. In reading Baudelaire’s prose poem Derrida is not prescribing a new taxonomy, a new narratological device which might allow us to categorize and define what is happening in Baudelaire’s poem. Nor is he giving us reason to suspect that we may be able to apply his reading technique to another narrative. He is, rather, pointing to something strange about the condition by which we enter into literature by becoming multiplications of ourselves, divisions, fragments, remnants of a disinherited consciousness. What Royle calls the telepathic structure of Derrida’s reading is merely the shift we experience when reading literature to a being-two-tosee, or a being-two-to-feel, or a being-two-to-think; in short, the initiatory doubling of consciousness in the act of reading. This doubling, then, is what remains . . . strange. What is unaccountable or unforeseeable in all acts of reading, nontaxonomical, nonlimitable, nonrepeatable as such. The being-two-to-speak of indirect discourse occurs at the interface between all epistemologically fuelled definitions and “terminologisations” and the strange encounters between self and other that call for or even demand a unique and responsibly singular response each time.8 Hence Miller’s own neologism “ananarratology”: “Narratology—the word means the knowledge or science of narrative. This present book [he is speaking of Reading Narrative], in its demonstration that this knowledge is not possible, might be called a work of ananarratology” (RN, 49). If Miller is right, and there can be no such thing as a science of narrative, then the repetition of what someone else hears, feels, thinks, or says in the third person past tense, “that Möbius strip form of language called indirect discourse,” would require a doubling ironic commentary (AT, 26). Not

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even that, it would necessitate it. A properly responsible response would have to be itself a dialogical and ironic response to the multivocal atmosphere of plurisignificance and polylogism that inhabits any novel. It would therefore trace as far and as rigorously as possible the hermeneutic impulse of critical analysis in order to show how far that kind of criticism can go before it runs into something that is truly strange or baffling, something which can’t be explained or doesn’t quite fit. It would, in other words, stop short of interpreting. This would be the moment of paralysis I have mentioned already: “If irony is the basic trope of narrative, as it is, then all narrative is suspended at every moment over its own impossibility . . . If irony is the impossibility of narrative, it also signals the impossibility of criticism in the sense of a demonstrable hermeneutic decoding of meaning” (RN, 157).

7. Amazing Let me give you an example of what he means. I take a passage from What Maisie Knew almost at random: He was smoking a cigarette and he stood before the fire and looked at the meagre appointments of the room in a way that made her rather ashamed of them. Then before (on the subject of Mrs Beale) he let her “draw” him—that was another of his words; it was astonishing how many she gathered in— he remarked that really mamma kept them rather low on the question of decorations. Mrs Wix had put up a Japanese fan and two rather grim texts; she had wished they were gayer, but they were all she happened to have. Without Sir Claude’s photograph, however, the place would have been, as he said, as dull as a cold dinner. He had said as well that there were all sorts of things they ought to have; yet governess and pupil, it had to be admitted, were still divided between discussing the places were any sort of thing would look best if any sort of thing should ever come and acknowledging that mutability in the child’s career which was naturally unfavourable to accumulation. She stayed long enough only to miss things, not half long enough to deserve them. The way Sir Claude looked about the schoolroom had made her feel with humility as if it were not very different from the shabby attic in which she had visited Susan Ash. (James 1985, 82)

In this scene Sir Claude, Maisie’s stepfather, pops in to see her in her dingy schoolroom. Mrs. Wix, her governess, who also shares Maisie’s infatuation with Sir Claude, has left her alone for a short while. Sir Claude will take this moment to speak somewhat confidentially with Maisie about Mrs. Beale, Maisie’s biological father’s recent wife, and the object of Sir Claude’s burgeoning amorous affections. Quite a muddle! as Mrs. Wix will say.

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As the title suggests, much of the ironic import of the novel lies in the discrepancies between what the narrator says, sees, thinks, and knows and what Maisie, a young girl of no more than 12 or 13 can gather from her juvenile experiences of the adulterous affairs of her elders. Maisie’s unique gift as a character in James’s fiction is that she sees things from the innocent perspective of a child. Her own language has a freshness and naivety that sheds light on the events around her in an uncommonly intuitive manner: “Truly, I reflect,” says James in the Preface to the New York Edition, “if the theme had had no other beauty it would still have had this rare and distinguished one of expressing the variety of the child’s values. She is not only the extraordinary ‘ironic centre’ I have already noted; she has the wonderful importance of shedding light far beyond the reach of her comprehension. . . . I lose myself, truly, in appreciation of my theme on noting what she does by her ‘freshness’ for appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough” (James 1947, 147). Much of the excitement and intrigue of the narrative is due to the problems Maisie has in articulating her thoughts. She hovers at times at key moments in the narrative unable to consummate her ideas with her underdeveloped vocabulary. Speaking of Sir Claude’s appeals to her confidence, the narrator informs us, “Maisie stared with a thrill at the dramatic element in this. ‘And she couldn’t come here without mamma’s—?’ She was unable to articulate the word for what mamma would do” (87). A similar point is made in the example I’ve chosen above: “he let her ‘draw’ him—that was another of his words; it was astonishing how many she gathered in.” Maisie, like an open vessel, draws in Sir Claude’s words, movements, expressions, and mannerisms and interprets them, we feel, in her own childish manner, finding something interesting in everything he does and says. The main figure in the passage comes in the opening sentence. Sir Claude is smoking beside the fire. The word “draw” in the next sentence mimics and suggests this motion, doubling the importance of it as an encompassing figure for what is happening. But if we were to take it seriously as a word demanding our attention our interpretation would stop dead in its tracks, which, by the way, is only one of the 38 root meanings of that word listed in my Collins Dictionary. Our attention to it is given by James’s quotation marks around the word and the way in which Maisie is astonished by its suggestiveness. We are therefore led to ask exactly what it means in this context. Some of its various meanings include: vb. “to smoke”; “to bend a bow in archery”; “to pull out,” as in “the act of drawing a revolver in order to shoot” U.S. (OED); “to strain”; “to draught”; “to sketch”; “to make, formulate or derive”; “to take or derive from a source”; “to choose at random”; “to stretch or bend”; “to disembowel”; Bridge “to keep

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leading a suit in order to force out”; Billiards “to cause (the cue ball) to spin back after a direct impact with another ball”; Bowls “to deliver the ball in such a way that it approaches the jack”; “a contest or a game ending in a tie”; Cricket “a leg stroke in which the batsman deflects the ball so that it passes between the wicket and his legs” (OED), and so on. The critic can’t be sure where exactly to draw the line with this word. Even the last line is a suggestive metonymic repetition of the figure in Maisie’s former guardian Susan Ash. Of course, the other suggestion we feel in reading this section is not that Maisie is astonished by Sir Claude’s linguistic dexterity but by his masculine presence and virility. Since she is so young and “innocent” (we really never know how innocent) however, the reader feels that such an interpretation is on shaky ground from the outset. Moreover, as their conversation continues, the excitement Maisie feels seems deflected by a clandestine confidence in Sir Claude’s relationship with Mrs. Beale. In gathering or drawing in Sir Claude’s words, Maisie also exhibits a profound suggestibility. This suggestibility, when it is noticed, is a good way of understanding how the passage shifts from one consciousness to another in a subtle and easily overlooked manner: “Without Sir Claude’s photograph, however, the place would have been, as he said, as dull as a cold dinner.” Is this Maisie’s indirect repetition of what Sir Claude says or the narrator’s? That question cannot be answered for sure. We can assume that Claude is not referring to himself in the third person, or that Maisie had likewise absorbed Sir Claude’s metaphorical prowess, but we are also aware of the discrepancies between a preadolescent child’s linguistic capacity and the narrator’s. This is not easily forgotten. But in another way it is only by allowing ourselves to pass over the gaps between the two consciousnesses that we can carry on reading the narrative. On Miller’s reading “Maisie’s name, like that of Shakespeare’s Miranda, tells us her nature. The pun on ‘amazed’ primarily defines her as a wondering spectator, though there may be a secondary suggestion that she is lost in the maze of all the strange signs from the adult world she has to learn and read” (VP, 53). The important point to remember is that she does “read” the signs, but we are never sure how she is reading the signs. This is, in part, James’s stroke of genius. The child, as “ironic centre” repeats Sir Claude’s words, doubling them and suspending them in such a way that the reader is always left in doubt as to how exactly she has drawn them in or for what purpose. We don’t know, in other words, whether Maisie is passively “drawing” in Sir Claude’s words or actively interpreting them as the game of adult sexual intrigue pervades her own youthful sensibilities. Likewise, the reader is left pondering how much he or she is being taken in

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by what is ostensibly a simple conversation about the dreary schoolroom. Once the allusions are set in motion the interpreter is never sure where exactly to stop interpreting. The passage is anacoluthonic in the sense that there is a muddling of voices throughout, which is indeed characteristic of many of James’s intricate and wandering sentences. Take again what Sir Claude is indirectly saying: “Without Sir Claude’s photograph, however, the place would have been, as he said, as dull as a cold dinner. He had said as well that there were all sorts of things they ought to have; yet governess and pupil, it had to be admitted, were still divided between discussing the places were any sort of thing would look best if any sort of thing should ever come and acknowledging that mutability in the child’s career which was naturally unfavorable to accumulation.” Who says “it had to be admitted” here? To whom does it refer? To Sir Claude or Maisie? There is a break at this point between what Sir Claude is suggesting ought to be done to decorate the place and what Maisie and Mrs. Wix feel ought to be done with the place. Then there is another shift into an abstract and convoluted syntax— “were still divided between the best places were any sort of thing would look best if any sort of thing should ever come”—which is suggestive of the child’s language in describing what should be done to the room. Then there is yet another shift into a distant abstraction where Maisie becomes “the child.” To follow the changes though is quite dizzying and we realize that there are three voices overlapping and suggesting one another in ironic juxtapositions, Maisie, the narrator, and Sir Claude. Each voice is vibrating throughout the intricately orchestrated and repetitious syntax of the passage to the extent that we are never sure who is really speaking, who is feeling, who is seeing. Once the “ironic centre” of the narrative is taken seriously, logical interpretations begin to run aground. The being-twoto-speak of any section of indirect discourse in a novel will also run into similarly interminable, impossible questions.

8. Good Reading is Sensitivity to Irony In a recent essay on Derrida and literature, Miller becomes conscious of the problems involved when criticism tries to take account of a reader attuned to the singularity and uniqueness of reading events. Says Miller nearing the end of the piece: Here I am then, nearly at the end of my time or space or allotted number of words, still before the door, ante portam, of what I promised to do, that is account for the way Derrida actually does literary criticism, performs acts of

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literature in that particular sense. To do so in detail would be an interminable job, since each such essay is in some degree unique, idiomatic. Each employs its own special strategies of reading appropriate to what is idiomatic about the work in question. That is one reason it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn from Derrida’s work how to do literary criticism, unless what you learn is that you are always alone before the work, on your own in reading it, forced to invent your own way to allow it to come through in your writing. If the wholly other does not come except in multiple voices, each work is a unique and irreplaceable opening that allows the others to come or rather to come in their not coming. (Miller 2001, 74)

I claim here in bringing my discussion of double reading in Miller prematurely to its conclusion that the same questions can be asked of Miller’s entire work. What can we say of it but that it is unique or idiomatic? That it reads each work in terms of a singular event? If so, doesn’t this mean that critical analyses that speak of so-called turns miss the point of this kind of reading altogether? That they don’t “read” it? No accounting for this singularity will ever be able to provide a holistic methodological overview for his works. It will never in short be justified. And not because there are no traces of theoretical traits or leanings, patterns and gestures, but because those traits are always being tested in acts of reading. It cannot be said too often: theory and reading are asymmetrical. Reading undoes theory. It changes it. That is what happens when real reading begins. Theory is never going to put, or will never put, an end to reading, which is perhaps its covert goal. If irony, the pervasive trope-no-trope of narrative fiction, is what makes this happen each time we read then the task of the critic is interminable. Miller’s work therefore calls for a micrological approach, a double or doubling reading, a criticism that must be patient, slow, lento, subtle: “When I picture to myself a perfect reader, says Nietzsche, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer” (OL, 122). Such a criticism would need to resist the temptation to encompass and pass over what remains obscure, what haunts it, in other words, its others. Schlegel asks, “What Gods will rescue us from all these ironies?” [Welcher Götter werden uns von allen diesen Ironien erretten Könen?] (Schlegel 1984, 37)9. That irony is by no means a local trope, that it may be present everywhere and nowhere for certain, means that one is often faced with the alarming realization that a response to irony in reading is necessarily endless. A sensitivity to irony, Miller often argues, is what separates the sheep from the goats. It is the thing that is most important in a reader, yet the one thing that is most difficult to teach or to learn (VP, 229).

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That irony has to do with multiple voices, with the incoming of the other, with alterity, chance, the event, leads me to believe that it is bound to the spirit of a democracy to come that Miller in one way or another has always expressed in his readings (RN, 230). It also leads me to believe that the most exigent obligation readers have, whatever else may come, is to what happens when those multiple voices impinge upon and destabilize normative modes of thinking. Irony forces one to think otherwise. It forces one to invent and reinvent oneself as the encounter with all those others takes place. I turn now in my next chapter to what an obligation to good reading means in a university setting.

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Chapter 4

Protocols of Reading I am a monster of fidelity, the most perverse infidel. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card So it is that education perverts the mind. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Education”

1. What is Education? There’s a startling scene in Muriel Spark’s seminal novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which we find a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, the eponymous Brodie, expounding arrogantly on the role of the pedagogue. The scene is comical and frightening at once because it testifies to the most egregious abuses in teaching. But as it does this in such a persuasive manner it becomes doubly terrifying: The word “education” comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix in meaning in and the stem trudo, I trust. Miss Mackay’s method is to thrust a lot of information into the pupil’s head; mine is a leading out of knowledge, and that is true education as is proved by the root meaning. (Spark 1962, 45)

The irony here is that she is “leading” in the sense that a prosecuting attorney might influence the answers he is given from a witness by the power of astute rhetorical suggestion. She is also leading in the sense that the duco here refers us to her own political affiliations with the Italian leader Mussolini (Il Duce) and to the aggressive manner in which she will indoctrinate her students to believe in the fascist cause. The etymological survey of the word education, then, has “led” us to an equally worrying understanding of the disastrously immoral regimes “education” can be—and often has been—made to serve. The academic freedom she announces as a direct turning or inversion of the tradition of education she sees exemplified by the methods employed by Miss Mackay is an indirect affirmation of her own position as a defender of a very particular alternative political faith. A worrying prospect indeed!

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Her position as we can also see is an appeal, as all prophets of the correct path inform us, to truth, veritas, lux, reason, the way toward the great teleological educational Aufklärung. Like Plato’s Meno, Brodie’s pedagogical model is an appeal to anamnesis, the remembrance of an innate intellectual capacity (eidos), not the intrusive inculcation of a foreign object but the bringing to light of an instinctive knowledge. Nevertheless, what the etymologies explain, in a post-Heideggerian fashion, is that the word is invested with meaning, that etymologies are read, interpreted, that they are never stable rationalizeable literal descriptors. Brodie reads the significance of “education” just as we read its significance in our own incomplete translations of its various meanings. And what seems to be the most democratically open gesture to the experience of reading quickly becomes its opposite, a tyrannical reinstitutionalization of a momentarily insightful event of reading. Brodie, in short, opens something up only to close it down by reinscribing it with her own law, the law that says, “I lead, you follow.” How then to keep open the promise of another path? In The University in Ruins Bill Readings broaches this question in a way that will haunt Miller’s later thinking on the subject (BH, 57). On Readings’s account, there must be a level of openness to some event of otherness, what he refers to via Kant as Achtung, which is both a respect and a demand made by something unknown. The word contains both meanings simultaneously and is therefore a good way of expressing how the other demands our respect and attention each time we encounter it: There is some other in the classroom, and it has many names: culture, thought, desire, energy, tradition, the event, the immemorial, the sublime. The educational institution seeks to process it, to dampen the shock it gives the system. Qua institution, education seeks to channel and circulate this otherness so that some form of profit can be made from it. Yet shock arises, since it is the minimal condition of pedagogy, and it opens a series of incalculable differences, the exploration of which is the business of pedagogy. Education, as e ducere, a drawing out, is not a maieutic revelation of the student to him- or herself, a process of clearly remembering what the student in fact already knew. Rather, education is this drawing out of the otherness of thought that undoes the pretension to self-presence that always demands further study. And it works over both the students and teachers, although in a dissymmetrical fashion. (Readings 1996, 162–163)

In the previous chapter I have already inadvertently engaged with the questions Readings and Spark are staging. What is the difference between a “drawing out” and a “leading out” in the two translations above? What

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does it mean to say that “drawing out” exposes one to this otherness of thought? Or that one is educated by being “drawn out” by this other thought or thinking? Is it possible to say that James has already noticed what Readings is talking about here in What Maisie Knew? I think so. And I also think that he has questioned the difference between the two examples by subtly drawing our attention to that “drawing” in the schoolroom scene. The point for James is that the process of drawing in education is also an unknowable event. It is something that happens in a bizarrely unaccountable moment. The passage I took from What Maisie Knew, as I’ve argued, is suggestive in a nascent or synecdochical form of what is going on in the entire novel. We don’t know what Maisie knew or what the drawing out of thought meant to either Maisie or Sir Claude or the narrator. We are only aware of an ironic discrepancy between several competing voices. And therefore we become aware that language has something to do with this drawing out. Something in the machine-like workings of language makes us see connections between the drawing out of cigarette smoke, the fire, the voices, Maisie’s consciousness, Sir Claude’s consciousness, and the reader’s consciousness. Something is at work that we are trying to overhear in our own readings, something which we are, if we are open to it, not trying to inhibit but let speak or come. This is also Readings’s point when he says that “Doing justice to Thought, listening to our interlocutors, means trying to hear that which cannot be said but that which tries to make itself heard” (1996, 165). For Readings, then, and as I will show for Miller too, this event of overhearing what cannot be said is a way of noticing the limits of the university and the problems of the process of a methodological or even protocological form of reading. If the university historically espouses the rational, logical, repeatable, interpretable, or programmatic result, as both Readings and Miller argue in various ways, then it fails to do justice to an otherness of thinking which is fundamental to the teaching and reading of literary works. “The modern Western university has defined itself as the place,” Miller tells us, “where the principle of reason reigns” (IL, 18). What Heidegger interestingly refers to as “the ear of our thinking” is perhaps a useful expression for the way the kind of unknowability repressed by logic is experienced in reading and how it can be respected. “Thinking,” he says, “begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought” (Heidegger 1977, 112). In what follows, I will try to show how Miller’s work responds to the demand made on him by Yeats and how my own responses to that work complicate this procedure.

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2. What’s Perverse About Good Reading? Let me provide you with another quotation, this time from Barbara Johnson, which picks up on this theme and will therefore help me introduce my own reading of the situation in Miller’s work before I return to these questions in more depth. Here’s Johnson attempting to determine what passes for teaching literature in the university—what it ought to be and how it should be performed: Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not to guess what the author was thinking; how to take in evidence from a page, not to seek a reality to substitute for it. This is the only teaching that can properly be called literary; anything else is history of ideas, biography, psychology, ethics, or bad philosophy. Anything else does not measure up to the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language. (1985, 140)

Rigorous perversity is a wonderful oxymoron. The first term denotes firmness, rigidity, harshness, inflexibility, austerity, stringency, toughness; while the second term indicates a contradictory dynamism, rebelliousness, deviancy, or aberrancy. The contradiction between both terms turns the charge of the final sentence into an Austinian “happy performative,” doing what it says. Placing the word “perversity” alongside its own antonym is in a very real sense to perform what the latter word suggests. In yoking these words together in a violent kind of oxymoronic conceit, Johnson sparks off a powerful seduction for the reader to investigate the strangeness of the pairing. The seduction of literary language, Johnson’s example suggests, is charged by the use of language in oddly contradictory ways; ways which the teaching of close reading can productively tease out and examine each time a particular text is read or reread. Johnson’s usage of the word “perversity” importantly picks up on a benign energy not commonly associated with this word. This is helpful in explaining the bewitching twists and turns in literary language that keep readers in thrall to a linguistic performativity which always already exceeds its ostensible constative force. It points to the way that literature often surprises us, throws us off track, or carries us away from where we thought we were going. One of Derrida’s characters in the “Envois” to The Post Card humorously refers to the errant possibilities of any utterance as a “perverformative” condition (Derrida 1987, 136). Destinerrance, a closely related term in Derrida’s work, and one that Miller has seen as especially “a feature of performative utterances or of the performative dimension of

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any utterance,” suggests that language is destined to err, wander and to interrupt or be interrupted along the way to its destination, wherever that may be (Miller 2006a, 895). Another way of viewing perversity of course, and the more common usage at that, sees in it a malignancy or abomination, something deplorable and irresponsible. This idea engenders a turning away from a correct path, a countermovement against a normative imperative, be it ethical, political, juridical, or whatever. It is in this latter sense that Robert Scholes picks up its meaning. Commenting on The Ethics of Reading in a review article in 1989 and again in his Protocols of Reading in the same year, Scholes repeatedly employs this register as the overriding element in Miller’s ethic: Not to put to fine a point on it, I think this is a perverse notion of what reading is. It is perverse because in it Miller takes the inevitable centrifugal activity of reading and treats it as if it were a sin, instead of seeing the unfinished, expanding nature of reading as a blessing for both the reader and the text. It is perverse, also, because he treats the centripetal activity of interpretation as a superhuman task that humans are nonetheless compelled to perform. And it is especially perverse because he takes the ethical activity of criticism and reduces it to the hermeneutic issue of interpretation, which he then calls “the ethics of reading.” In this manner, he avoids the ethicalpolitical realm entirely, as if reading had nothing to do with choices and actions involving other human beings. (1989a, 226) [emphasis added]

The odd thing about Scholes’s argument is that it’s right. I completely agree with him when he speaks of Miller’s “perverse” readings. They are a perverse notion of what reading is. “Reading,” says Miller, “should be guided by the expectation of surprise, that is, the presupposition that what you actually find when you read a given work is likely to be fundamentally different from what you expected or what previous readers have led you to expect” (VP, 33). Now there’s a perverse expression if ever there was one. How can reading be “guided by an expectation of surprise?” Statements like this drive Miller’s critics mad. “Logic,” says Scholes, “is not Miller’s strong point” (Scholes 1989a, 153). Neither, he continues, is ethics. For him Miller’s readings suggest that there is no right reading and we are all therefore doomed to play a merry (or not so merry) dance of interpretation and be condemned to damnation for the effort. But Scholes is wrong in this. Miller has often spoken of the right reading and has believed in it from the beginning, as I shall show. In what follows, my focus is drawn primarily to the most perverse and unsettling register in the Millerian lexicon, namely, catachresis. “Catachresis,” as we’ve seen, “is the violent, forced, or abusive use of

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a word to name something that has no literal name” (LM, 419). Words like the “leg” of a chair or the “eye” of a storm are examples. Catachreses are therefore “placeholders for missing literal words” (T, 28). How this trope works in Miller’s analyses, I contend, like the other tropes and non-tropes I’ve investigated so far, can only be seen through a reading of a primary text which Miller reads, not via a reading in “the rarified atmosphere of pure theory” or in argumentum ad hominem (FR, 21).

3. The “Right Way” to Read Yeats Miller’s reading of Yeats’ “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” in The Linguistic Moment, and his subsequent discussion of this reading in an interview collected in Theory Now and Then, announces something that any criticism of his work must take into account. Says Miller, in the most unequivocal manner imaginable, a manner which is so striking that it seems uncharacteristically prohibitive: “I would say that my reading of Yeats’ poem is right, that all right-thinking people will come, given enough time, to my reading” (TNT, 196). He also says this as an opening generalization in The Linguistic Moment: “I believe all right-thinking readers will come to agree with what I say if they go on thinking about my poems long enough” (LM, xx). And again, “The right reading of ‘The Last of the Valerii’,” he says, “depends on the right reading of this passage” (VP, 232). “Some readings,” he holds, “are certainly wrong” (TH, ix; FR, 51). In fact, Miller says this kind of thing quite a lot. What can this mean for deconstruction, for good reading? And what can it mean for readers of Yeats? Everything hangs on how we come to answer these questions in our response to Miller’s assertions. It follows therefore that in everything I have to say about Miller’s reading there will be one prominent question: what does it mean to read rightly? Can there be such a thing as the correct reading? If so, what might that be? How would we know it? And most importantly, how could we show or teach it to others? It will also follow, of course, that in my own reading of Yeats I will be equally obliged to say, “Yes, I believe this to be the right reading.” I will have to take responsibility for that personally. After all, pervert or not, “I am, in the end, responsible for what I make of a text” (BH, 137). In a poem which is about perversity in several of it chief senses as profanity, sexual deviancy, irrationalism, and inhumanity, Miller’s reading emphasizes the asymmetrical relationship between the bizarre figures Yeats employs as analogies. These analogous terms, Miller argues, are in fact undermining the notion of analogy itself in the poem. The odd relationship

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between these figures therefore becomes what he calls an “ana-analogy”: analogous terms which seem to be referring to a central logos but in fact are referring to some unknown X. This X [das rätselhafte X] is Nietzsche’s figure for an unnameable placeless place or unfigurable figure in his famous philological treatise “On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense” (LM, 330). What this X is can only be seen as a consequence of the persistent failure of these analogies to settle into a cohesive design or overarching metaphorical significance. This perverse instant when language turns back on itself he calls the “linguistic moment”: “What I am calling the linguistic moment is the moment when a poem, or indeed any text, turns back on itself and puts its own medium in question, so that there is a momentum in the poem toward interrogating signs as such” (LM, 339). To see how this linguistic moment occurs in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” only a close reading of the poem can show.

4. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” Yeats’s poem might best be explained as a sustained elaboration on the line from the opening sequence “man is in love and loves what vanishes, what more is there to say?”1 Each one of its stanzas turns around this idea in diverse and somewhat disquieting ways, while the speaker tries in vain to salvage something from the “the circle of the moon / That pitches common things about.” Like Phidias’ “famous ivories” plundered from the Acropolis, a bigot (the implication here is surely the still controversial topic of the Elgin marbles) can always be found, like those fumblers in the greasy till, to “traffic in the grasshoppers and bees.” That is, there is always in Yeats’s bleak understanding of history someone willing to destroy great art for financial gain, as was the case with “the proud stones of Greece” mentioned elsewhere in The Tower (415). This pecuniary theme is of course pervasive throughout Yeats’s poems, finding its fullest expression in “September 1913” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”: “that raving slut / Who keeps the till” (630). Whatever is mortal born or begotten of the mind or hand lingers a while and hastens on toward death in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” since time will allow no work to stand in isolation. To say then that the poem is an elaboration on the idea that man is in love with what vanishes is to predict in some way the ephemeral nightmarish vision of the final stanza and infer what David Young has referred to as the poem’s “requiem for progress” (Young 1987, 46). The themes of which—reason, war, intellect, politics, naturalism, and supernaturalism—converge to create a seeming

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counterpart to what was already announced as having been annihilated in the opening sequence: each image is a perversion of those “ingenious lovely things” of the opening lines. I therefore focus on the final stanza here: Violence upon the roads: violence of horses; Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane, But wearied running round and round in their courses All break and vanish, and evil gathers head: Herodias’ daughters have returned again, A sudden blast of dusty wind and after Thunder of feet, tumult of images, Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind; And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries, According to the wind, for all are blind. But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon There lurches past, his great eyes without thought Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks, That insolent fiend Robert Artisson To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks. (433)

The first 12 lines form one prolonged wandering sentence which meanders and meditates uneasily on the question of the vanishing presence of the apocalyptic riders, of the speaker’s dissipating awareness of a natural world about him and the encroachment of an evil not entirely present in the sensible world at large. The abrupt fragmented interruption of the following and final sentence—“But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon / There lurches past . . .”—functions initially as a tripartite staccato introduction to what can most easily be described as the poem’s real logos, its center, the eye of the storm. Though it is really a false calm within a chaos at the core of which lurches the incubus Robert Artison, a daemon neither wholly natural nor supernatural. Like the “rough beast” that “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born” in “The Second Coming,” Artison occupies a space between worlds, a logos-non-logos, neither flesh nor spirit, a shifting groundless vertigo (402). The Sidhe (Herodias’ daughters) are earlier spectral models of this unseen force in Yeats’s first volumes, but are never experienced with such foreboding doom as the winds are at this moment. “His great eyes without thought” indicates the movement of this crucible, the eye of the storm moving similarly without purpose or direction. Here the awkwardly stuttering “shadow of stupid straw-pale locks” complements the equally artless lilting prosody of the “love-lorn lady Kyteler” and strikingly contrasts the cacophonic finale: “bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.”

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This final line is one of those great enigmas Paul de Man mentions in his discussion of the symbol and emblem in Yeats’s poetry. The reader is faced with a choice: take the images as natural symbols which speak of mimetic referents or see them as emblematic or “esoteric puzzles accessible only to the initiates as a reward of an act of faith” (de Man 1984, 204). Either we see the peacock and cock as the profane trappings of the witch—sacrificial symbols of bodily lust—or we puzzle over their esoteric values by evoking a systematic and pedantic classification of intra-referential significance, liminal figures of prophetic power and supernatural significance conjuring a meaning by a traditional not a natural right. What happens then is a choice we make between the natural symbol, the “body” of the dancer or the “divinity” of the dance in that famous de Manian reading of “Among School Children” (de Man 1979, 11). The distinction is symptomatic of the earlier work where sexual imagery is ostensibly contrasted with divine transcendence. However, in the later work de Man rightly says we can speak of a failure of the emblem where the poet experiences “a failure to overcome the inimical power of nature itself” (1984, 229). In this instance, as in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” we experience a “violence upon the roads” and “the beast-torn wreck” of Robert son of Art (237). The natural is not something that can be overcome by the emblem or the divine voice of poetry, “No longer does [the emblem] function as the self reflecting, narcissistic mirror of the earlier poetry, but it acts as the brutal strength of the matter, a bestial violence which can only find expression in images of blood and torment” (229). Here then is an extraordinary example of this bestial violence in both thematic import and stylistic resonance: “Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks” literally performs a violence at its own linguistic level. Miller, as I’ve mentioned, refers to such a violently dissonant and arhythmical juxtaposition of terms as the “linguistic moment”: “It is the moment when language itself is foregrounded and becomes problematic” (LM, 41). Notice for instance the word “peacock,” a recurring image in Yeats’s later work, as in “Juno’s peacock,” another emblem of prophetic register. And also then how this word is violently deformed in a puzzling chiasmatic rendering: “red combs of her cocks.” An archaic term for a dandy or fop—implied by the word “peacock” and those “red combs of her cox”—is “coxcomb,” a recurring refrain in the closely associated thematic echoes of “Crazy Jane and the Bishop” and the other poems in that series, as well as the penultimate lyric of “A Man Young and Old”: “Were I but there and none to hear / I’d have the peacock cry, / For that is natural to a man / That lives in memory” (458–459).

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We might also note that the word cock appears in the OED as a Middle English “perversion of the word God;” whereas to “cox” means to fool, most likely a root form of “coax.” The implication, via this peculiar homonymic displacement, is that the twisted words somehow reflect what cannot be spoken of directly; that the linguistic perversion of the perverse theme is somehow more justifiable than any attempted literal rendering. This cock, as in the “cocks of Hades” in the “Byzantium” poem from the later volume The Winding Stair, also poses the enigmatic question: “Miracle, bird, or golden handiwork . . . common bird or petal?” How are we to think of the bird, as a natural symbol or an emblem? Can we really decide what “it” is? The answer to the enigma is surely in the negative. The space or rather nonspace (“the labyrinth of the wind”) that the poem is evoking is neither a literal rendering of an actual space, nor a rendering of an actual event, despite the vast critical heritage that says it is.2 Rather, what is being suggested in the confusion is that the poet cannot speak directly of the violence he is trying to depict: that the violence within the poem is really the only violence that can be directly experienced. The poem indirectly performs what it refers to by disfiguring its own figurations and by realizing that each figuring is inadequate. But that this playful or even violent rendering of the word “peacock” alongside the image of Lady Kyteler offering her fowl to a lusty and evil spirit is immersed in the bizarre natural-supernatural nonspace of the poem is without question: “And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter / All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries.” Any attempt to frame its asymmetrical patterns or shape its meaning will therefore be a gross abuse, a real perversion in the negative sense. The punning insistence of the “fowl” storm of the final lines obscurely makes this point.

5. What is “It?” The perverse performance of the final stanza can be best explained by saying that what Yeats is attempting is being attempted at the level of catachresis. It is an experiment in what Miller in Black Holes and Others refers to as “catachrestic performatives.” To see this is to share in the reading Miller has earlier given to this poem in The Linguistic Moment by suggesting that there is no original language for the “it” or X or black hole that the poem is constantly circumventing. Here Miller suggests: “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is a poem that systematically dismantles itself as system. It lacks the closed order of “organic unity.” It keeps stopping and starting again and cannot be rationally integrated by interpretation.

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Also, it is about the ruination of system and order. It is about the way the “foul storm” cannot be barred out because it always gets incorporated into any system of art, of love, of politics, law, or philosophy and makes that system self-destruct, as “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” continually destroys itself. (LM, 347) [emphasis added]

Like Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” a work with which “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” shares overriding similarities, the howling storm, like a Fuselian nightmare, perverts all order and unity in the poem. This causes Miller to realize that “That the critic’s language may be defined as the continuous translation of what cannot be by any means ever given, by poet or critic, in the original language” (LM, 343). Though to say that the poem is about some thing—structure, the law, system, philosophy—is surely a kind of analogical positing or translation, is it not? Yes and no in this case (another failure in logic there!) since to “bar the foul storm out” or to bar the system out seems both to become aware of the otherness of some other and to attempt to assert a kind of intrinsic difference. In coming closer to a nonconcept of the wholly other we could imply that the poem is about nothing in particular. But it is of course about something. It is about love, politics, philosophy, war, law and so on. Even at the most linguistic moments reference to an event is never barred out, however much it is suspended, suspected, or kept secret. The attempt is quintessentially not to name that “it,” wholly other, or mysterious X of the poem, to inhibit its coming with a proper name. This is the ethic to which Miller’s reading conforms. Indeed it must conform to it. It is bound to it by the Achtung! Ein andere of the poem (Readings 1996, 162). It is, like the poem’s own frustrated endeavor, an attempt not to reduce the difference to something assimilable, to some status of the selfsame in a violent act of stilling the unstillable, “like some crazy hand touching a daughter.” This theme begins to unravel in Miller’s reading of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” and is therefore a nascent example of further readings in Black Holes and Others. In the latter work Yeats appears again as an example, while the germ of Topographies is also being formed in this reading, making the essay an important locus for even further analysis. “‘The Cold Heaven’ violently empties itself out,” says Miller in another reading of Yeats, “It wastes itself, spends itself, cancels itself out . . . in the impossibility of deciding whether natural image or supernatural emblem takes precedence as the literal referent for which the other is the figure. This self-cancelling leaves the reader empty-handed, riddled with light, driven out of all sense and reason by an effort of reading” (O, 181). The “it” that is not named in Miller’s interpretation of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is always already the perverse otherness, as I am

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calling it, that has caused others to see in his work a radically subversive procedure. I claim that this version of the perverse can be of both a benign and a rigorous nature, since its dynamism is the very seductiveness of literature, and its refusal to systematize is the hospitable counterpart to a methodology that would refine the differences between various “others” into an assimilable commodity. Otherness is what cannot be assimilated. The perverse is always already an uncanny part of the system as we can see here and has been exhaustively argued in “The Critic as Host,” to take only one example. “If there’s no possibility of being perverted,” says Derrida, “if the good is not pervertible, then it’s not good” (Derrida 2007, 459). This is the condition of any promise, the ever-present chance that it will not be kept. Perversion is therefore not subversion. It does not simply undermine in a counteractive or countervailing sense. Perversion is neither an inversion at the level of polarity, neither is it a subversion at the level of reduction or ruination. Perversion is without center, without logos and without cessation—it turns “through” something as the etymology of the verb implies and as Miller points out: Words in “para” form one branch of the tangled labyrinth of words using some form of the Indo-European root per. This root is the “base of prepositions and preverbs with the basic meaning of ‘forward,’ ‘through,’ and a wide range of extended senses such as ‘in front of,’ ‘before,’ ‘early,’ ‘first,’ ‘chief,’ ‘toward,’ ‘against,’ ‘near,’ ‘at,’ ‘around’.” (TNT, 144)

Its twists and turns are never simply a point of process toward a teleology or eschatology. It is therefore not dialectical. It is also always already within the boundaries of language as well as without, folded in, enfolded, invaginated. “That all laws are perverse is no doubt something that will always have kept J. Hillis Miller going,” according to Derrida in another late essay (Derrida 2005, 246). Of course, this can be read, perhaps perversely, by saying that it means that such laws are dynamic, protean, permeable and subtle in the same ways that the languages upon which they are based are likewise fluxional and changing, and that the purpose of any irreducibly performative language such as poetry is to highlight this activity. Though seeing this, like seeing responsibility as a freedom greater than the freedom one has when there are necessary protocols, rules that can be a calculation in any decision, opens up a more immediate responsibility in criticism. Do I name this enigma? Or do I let it stand? How can I respond to the text’s singularity and perverse otherness in a responsible manner?

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6. The Crisis in Criticism According to the arguments Robert Scholes makes in Protocols of Reading and again in The Rise and Fall of English, critics like Miller who stop short of providing these answers “have become reluctant to make truth claims about the matters [they] teach” (Scholes 1998, 39). They have avoided taking responsibility for their interpretations by steering clear of the “embarrassing T-word.” Moreover, they avoid what it is professors in English Departments are supposed to do, that is “profess.” Tell the truth about things as they are, and in doing so teach students to become better readers by finding out what it is that they are supposed to find when they read literary texts. Such critics are “hypocritics” in Scholes’ wonderful neologism (Scholes 1998, 81). They are critics who speak falsely because they have lost faith in themselves and what they teach. Two quotations from Derrida’s vast corpus make up what is essentially the argumentative basis of Scholes’ two books and the grist for his contention that Miller and others have misread Derrida. The first is from Positions: “Reading is transformational. . . . But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me” (Derrida 1981, 63). The second is from Derrida’s much cited address to the Columbia Graduate School, “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties”: “But we feel bad about ourselves,” he says in relation to a perceived crisis in the humanities, “who would dare to say otherwise? And those who feel good about themselves are perhaps hiding something, from others or from themselves” (Derrida 1992c, 7). For Scholes the present crisis in the humanities is due to the fact that we have not found either protocols of reading or developed a sufficient faith in new humanities. We have neither found a justified consensus for teaching the humanities to others in a modern university setting nor have we developed a methodology that will allow us to pass on our values to others. “We need reasons for believing in our beliefs. We need protocols of reading and teaching” (Scholes 1998, 54). The most persuasive argument for this kind of respectful teaching comes at a moment when Scholes offers his own protocols for teaching and reading. Here is Scholes’ imperative based on his reading of Derrida: The one thing a curriculum in English must do, whatever else it accomplishes on the way, is to lead students to a position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumers and their own eloquence as producers

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of texts. This also means, of course, that, along the way, we must be assigning the right texts and responding to the work of our students with an informed and rigorous sense of the rhetorical skills that they need to develop. (Scholes 1998, 66)

I don’t think many of us would disagree with the tenor of Scholes’s argument. Teaching rhetoric and creating avenues for students to gain confidence in the basic skills of reading and writing about literature is exactly what should be happening in any English Department worthy of the name. Nevertheless, when we come to view these statements in light of my earlier discussions of the differences between Muriel Spark’s frightening novel and Bill Readings’ appeals to an otherness of thought the cracks begin to appear. Scholes’s rhetoric is in fact worryingly close to Jean Brodie’s. “Leading” students toward the right texts and teaching them the values of their immediate predecessors is not to my mind what Derrida would have envisioned in the wake of his arguments concerning a university without condition (“a place of unconditional resistance”), nor is it what Bill Readings argues for in The University in Ruins in terms of a community of dissensus. And it is certainly not what Miller means by a responsible response to demands made on him by the always-excessive event of reading. Teaching, as Miller has often argued, is haunted by the possibility that one may have chosen the “wrong” texts, whatever they may be. Or at least it should be. One can never gauge how a particular student is going to react to a text (HH, 164). It may have the most detrimental effects on that student’s life. This is the paradox of the professor. Perhaps some truths are better left unsaid, but those truths cannot be known directly or before acts of teaching and reading begin. Though knowing this does not change the possibilities of teaching the “wrong” books, it certainly suspends the possibility to say that what is being presented in a classroom environment is the right book or books. What Scholes is missing in the quotation he responds to in Protocols of Reading is the latter part of the section taken from Positions: “Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me.” This statement is not a simple constative statement. It is also a performative declaration suggesting that the search for protocols of reading is ongoing. That reading is a process. Not a goal. Scholes has misread Derrida in this sense because Derrida’s suggestion is a kind of vocative. It is a calling for something to come, a dream or a promise, “the dream of a new institution to be precise, of an institution without precedent, without pre-institution” (Derrida 1992d, 73). “My law,” says Derrida in this interview with Derek Attridge,

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“is the text of the other, its singularity, its idiom, its appeal which precedes me. But I can only respond to it in an irresponsible way” (66). Thus, each countersignature is caught in an interchange between being responsible and being irresponsible. One must in fact be irresponsible by responding as far as possible to the demands made by “the text of the other” that always inevitably change at the moment of countersigning. There is no way of ever knowing that one has responded adequately to Derrida’s law. “A book itself,” Miller will say, “does not explicitly confirm or disallow any of the ways we may read it. It passively abides our readings and misreadings, though it would not be wise to count too confidently on the passivity of the texts we read, since they may have unforeseen power over us. No measure exists to distinguish correct from incorrect readings, even though a given text strongly calls us or demands of us that we read” (O, 71). How then can Miller say that he has hit upon the “right” reading of Yeats? And how can I, in countersigning Miller, claim to have hit upon the correct reading of either Miller or Yeats or both? It would seem from what both Derrida and Miller are saying at this point that I can’t do that. And that this is a direct contradiction of what has just been said concerning right reading. This is not really a simple contradiction, though, if we take the time to think about it. Every critical reading, however covertly, states that it is the correct reading: “All literary criticism tends to be the presentation of what claims to be the definitive rational explanation of the text in question” (FR, 50). I am claiming in what I have been doing throughout this book that my readings are right. That I have hit upon the correct interpretation each time I’ve read Miller reading a text. I have been claiming each time that other critics have missed this in their interpretations and I have therefore been hypothesizing new ways of seeing Miller’s works along the way. My claims have also come on the backs of the readings I have performed of primary texts. This, I’ve been arguing, is the only way to see if Miller’s readings are indeed right or wrong, whether or not he has responded adequately to what I believe are the demands being made by those texts. The most interesting thing about reading Yeat’s poem is that it is the best place in my opinion to see why critical reading cannot be taught by protocol or learnt by rote. If Miller is right in saying that the poem is a series of catachrestic performatives, signs which are neither literal nor figurative displacing one another and pointing indirectly to the impossibility of naming the place-no-place (the ex-centric center of the poem), then a criticism which would want to refute this would have to suggest that this is not the case. Such a criticism would need to prove that those last enigmatic lines of the poem can be revealed, brought to light, uncovered. Their secret would need to be shared.

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At that precise moment the critic stands alone. No amount of “leading” can bring him or her to a correct calculation. Only a leap of faith can provide an answer. That leap is always taken, if it is a leap and not a calculation, individually, without a safety net or protocol. It will be a decision or series of decisions haunted by the ghost of the undecidable. After studying what Frank Kermode, Denis Donoghue, C.K. Stead, Harold Bloom, A. Norman Jeffares, and J. Hillis Miller say about “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” a reader is actually in no better position than they were when they started. The best claim that can be made is that each one of these critics sheds light on something that may not have been noticed before, or that they have been able to bring us closer to an understanding of why a complete understanding is impossible. “My argument,” Miller says in a similar instance of what can be legitimately called unreadability, “is that the best readings will be the ones which best account for the heterogeneity of the text, its presentation of a definite group of possible meanings which are systematically interconnected, determined by the text, but logically incompatible. The clear and rational expression of such a system of meanings is difficult, perhaps impossible. The fault of premature closure is intrinsic to criticism” (FR, 51).

7. Protocols for Catachreses A protocol would like to make a decision of closure for you. That would be a calculable process whereby the critic could say with equanimity that the answer to the X of Yeats is Y. But the encounter with Yeats’s poem, like any poem, is an encounter, a struggle, with something that requires an answer but that doesn’t provide a unilateral direction for comment. We are afforded neither the correct nor the incorrect path with Yeats. What happens when it is read? What is it about? What is its subject? What can be accounted for in terms of a closed economy of response? The task of answering these questions takes place as an urgent demand when the poem is read. This urgency is a key to an understanding of what Miller’s work has elsewhere referred to as the ungovernable within the university. The university, he says, “is the place where what counts is the ungoverned, the ungovernable. The ungovernable does not occur that often. Most of what goes on in the university is all too easily governed. In fact it is self-governing, as when we say a machine has a ‘governor’ that keeps it from running too fast. It turns around at a moderate speed and keeps repeating the same. Nevertheless, the university ought to have as its primary goal working to establish conditions propitious to the creation of the ungovernable”

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(BH, 181). A study of the performative power of catachresis in the poems and novels being read in tertiary institutions, how those books exceed expectation, protocols of reading, is one way of seeing how this ungovernable can come about. Catachresis is a dissonant trope, a trope for which protocols become troubled. The word points to our inability to find a name for what happens in the ungovernable event of reading. “All the common names for the Internet and its programs are catachreses”: “the web,” “the net,” “the information superhighway,” “the galaxy,” “cyberspace” are all examples of an inexorable human need for providing a logical or rational account of the new or the different (BH, 117). These words are what Miller has called catachreses for chaos, revitalized registers for an otherness at the limits of our knowledge. Terminologies employed to discuss narrative, such as “line” or “character,” are also catachrestic, since they are importations of words from another realm to cover over a semantic gap. Indeed, “The terminology of narrative,” says Miller, “is universally catachresis. Each is a trope breaking down the reassuring distinction between figure and ground, base of so much theoretical seeing” (AT, 24). To speak of the university as the place were these catachrestic performatives are encountered, is to speak of a place where language is continuously reinvented, twisted, perverted. Transparently or not, in the singularity and event of reading, even when that reading believes it is following a protocol, what happens has the power to change the university fundamentally. Derrida has also pointed to this in his distinction between metaphor as “proper” analogy and catachresis as “abuse”: The term metaphor generally implies a relation to an original “property” of meaning, a “proper” sense to which it indirectly or equivocally refers, whereas catachresis is a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no anterior or proper norm. The founding concepts of metaphysics—logos, eidos, theoria, etc.—are instances of catachresis rather than metaphors, as I attempted to demonstrate in “White Mythology” (Marges de la philosophie [Margins of Philosophy]). In a work such as Glas, or other recent ones like it, I am trying to produce new forms of catachresis, another kind of writing, a violent writing which stakes out the faults (failles) and deviations of language, so that the text produces a language of its own, in itself, which, while continuing to work through tradition, emerges at a given moment as a monster, a monstrous mutation without tradition or normative precedent. (Derrida 2004, 153–154)

The monstrous power of catachrestic performatives on Miller’s account also calls for a new humanities which will always be a humanities to come, a monstrosity that questions at every turn the sovereignty of the

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university over the power of the reader. Thus “Only teaching or writing that is performatively effective will make anything happen institutionally and politically, as opposed to inadvertently supporting the status quo” (BH, 177). When Derrida speaks in Positions of “protocols of reading,” he is speaking, as I’ve suggested, in a performative or vocative manner, calling out into the empty space of some future anterior. The point is that his hesitation bespeaks something of the same rationale as the “messianicity without messianism” in Spectres of Marx, of the à-venir, of a passion for the impossible. A governing theoretical insistence for consensus in the university setting will always seek to justify itself through an Arnoldian nostalgia for “Culture,” which is not surprising (RN, 230). My point, again, is that Scholes, in calling Miller’s readings perverse, actually gets it right. Miller is a perverse reader. He’s the most perverse critic of them all, a monster of fidelity, in love with the impossible coming of others. The demands Miller’s works make on his readers are the demands he makes of himself, a responsibility to the text being read, of saying what happens there (the encounter, the turning, what arrives), while also always already (and this is the supplementary logic Scholes misses in his analysis) describing the possibilities of seeing those examples undone by further acts of “good reading.” The OED refers to catachresis as “a perversion of metaphor” as indeed Quintilian, Cicero, Puttenham, each in their way, have also inferred.3 The one that takes a proper name like line or cock and transfers it abusively to a place not its own. Jennifer Williams has noticed, in a superb essay comparing Miller’s ethics of reading with Augustinian ethics, “For Augustine caritas involves a focus on the end of the journey—on home—while eros [which is Miller’s muse] involves a ‘perverse enjoyment’ of the rest of the world” (Williams 2005, 66). We might come to see then that while Miller’s journeys through literary texts provide many paths, none of them lead us home—they are all uncanny, unheimlich. Catachresis is pervasive in literature and therefore also in criticism, it inhabits the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language. What Miller simply refers to as “good reading,” rhetorical reading, is a way to see this happening. But one must be open to it to notice it before it disappears, in the blink of an eye. There is, then, no prefigured teleoeschatology in Miller’s readings, no protocols stipulating a kind of pre-programed response or horizon of expectation; rather, what we find is an infinite responsibility to an other calling, an other heading which literature (like democracy) envisages always as a possibility, an eternal return of difference structured in a différantial alogicality, not a protocol of

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absolute responsibility to an ideal sovereignty but a futurity based on a simple, trembling perhaps. I believe that Miller is right in this and that all right-thinking people, given enough time, will be drawn to a similar monstrous conclusion. But they will only see it when they read the strange texts Miller reads for themselves. That is as far as he can take you. It’s as far as any criticism can go. For when it stops short of giving proper names for what Wallace Stevens calls the “dominant X,” which it is the motive of metaphor to domesticate, it has gone as far as it can logically go.4 After that a new kind of writing and a new kind of reading is required. Good reading is in love with these performative new starts, with beginning again, with the hope of the new, with welcoming the future, the unforeseeable and the unpredictable. All new reading and writing, in its infinite hospitality and openness to the future arrival of the ungovernable, begins with a kiss, another X. “Each kiss, I suspect, is sui generis” (LC, 82). Each one right for that time and moment only. XXX.

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Chapter 5

Reading Parable Den Gott verhüllt seine Schönheit: so verbirgst du deine Sterne. Du redest nicht: so kündest du mir deine Weisheit.1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra What can this work be? Sure, you will say, it must be an allegory; or (as the writer calls it) a religious PARABLE, showing the dreadful danger of selfrighteousness? I cannot tell. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

1. Spectres of Marks “There has never been a scholar,” says Derrida at the beginning of Spectres of Marx, “who really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality” (Derrida 2006, 12). Miller is one of these scholars. “I do not, myself, believe in ghosts,” he claims (LC, 299). And neither does he believe that he is being called by that “still small voice” that others have claimed they can hear when they are reading and writing about literature. He is no Elijah, no prophet. But this does not mean that he doesn’t deal with them. Miller’s work is chock-full of ghosts. It’s the ghostliest body of work I know. In fact, it’s a kind of ghost writing. In saying this, I am reminded of a short essay by Derek Attridge which speaks of such a thing called “ghost writing.” In this paper Attridge makes reference to a response Miller gave to a question put to him by Philip Lewis at the “Deconstruction Is/In America” conference in New York in October 1993. “Where does this responsibility [in acts of reading] come from? [Lewis] wanted to know. Who lays it upon me? Who calls me to be responsible? And to whom, for whom, before whom am I responsible?” (Attridge 1996, 223). Miller’s reply, we are told, was evasive. It spoke of a Protestant heritage and fidelity to an original text without being able to give a straight answer. Derrida’s answer, for Attridge, is that “responsibility comes from a ghost, or the ghost; the revenant which is also an arrivant” (224). It calls us because that “peculiar institution we know as ‘literature’ is haunted by many ghosts, which appear to the living to remind them of their responsibility, to test them, to demand justice” (224). A demand for

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justice in literature for Attridge’s Derrida arises from the fact that “the ghost is literature.” Not only has literature always been haunted by ghosts. Its very condition is ghostly; its ontology is a hauntology. All of our obligations to literature are haunted by our obligations to the dead that live on/ in literature, like the ghosts in Kafka’s Letters to Milena drinking up kisses and dislocating souls (TPP, 171–180). If Attridge is right in what he says next, and “the ghost is prosopopoeia and apostrophe in their most violent form,” then Miller’s work is exemplary in having been the single most responsive critical account of how this works in literature (224). “All prosopopoeias are visits to the underworld,” he has consistently said. “They depend, in a shadowy way, on the assumption that the absent, the inanimate, and the dead are waiting somewhere to be brought back to life by the words of the poet or orator . . . Without prosopopoeia no poetry, no narrative, no literature” (T, 72). Prosopopoeia is the inaugural trope of literature. It is the word we use to describe this virtual spectrality, what we do when we ascribe a voice, a face, or a name to what is absent. It is what happens when we read, what arrives, what comes, to what we are responsible and that which demands justice. A manipulation of this trope is the key to all good, responsible, responsive reading. It is the one thing we can say is indispensable. All readers are necromancers. Reading is the art and practice of a dark magic called necromancy, and, dare I say it, Miller is an arch-virtual-necrophiliac. His questions have always dealt with something we might call virtu(e) ality, an ethical response to an act of spectralization. Reading in other words. “Reading is one major form of responsibility the living have to the dead” (T, 75). One problem with this is that this responsibility is not a choice, in the sense that we can choose how or when to respond to this demand. Something happens. And we remember that deconstruction, if there is such a thing, is just what happens. Something happens again. But never in quite the same way. Spookily. This is where the ethics of reading starts for Miller. “The ethics of reading begins with the reader’s response to a parallel demand that each text be read, and even read again and again” (VP, 18). The demand issues from all those books sitting together on the bookshelves of our homes and libraries. Each work cries out to be read, seeking a reader to bring it to life again. To make it live again. This is the responsibility we have to ghosts. Miller is in love with the fortuitous arrival of the ghosts of literature. Miller is in love with how this happens, and in searching for this how he allows it happen again. He lets these others come. Again. Viens, oui, oui. Lazare, veni foras.

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2. The Visor Effect It is Hamlet’s father’s ghost that Derrida speaks of at the beginning of Spectres of Marx. “‘Stay! Speak, speak. I charge thee, speak’ is what Horatio says to the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”2 But one cannot force a ghost to speak. Neither does one know whether or not it is even dead or alive. Belonging to a different ontology, “this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge” (Derrida 2006, 5). When one speaks of ghosts one doesn’t speak knowledgeably of a thing or no-thing but of an absence, a space of the unnameable. “Here is—or rather there is, over there, an unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing ‘this thing,’ but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde], comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy . . . The Thing is still invisible, it is nothing visible” (5). The ghost of Hamlet’s father is no thing visible. It can see us but we cannot see it. The ghost remains. Or rather the ghost is what remains invisible. The “Thing” as Derrida refers to it is both thing and no thing. We cannot see it, but “The Thing meanwhile [“meanwhile” in a disjointed time—ED] looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this,” posits Derrida, “the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us” (6). The visor effect is “presupposed by everything” he says in Spectres and about spectres in general. It is the lynchpin of what he will say throughout the book and beyond the book. The visor effect is therefore central to an understanding of this hauntology. Though “understanding” is not quite the right word. The armor of the ghost “lets one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level of the head and beneath the visor, it permits the so-called father to see and to speak . . . The helmet, did not merely offer protection: it topped off the coat of arms and indicated the chief’s authority, like the blazon of his nobility” (7). This is a crucial point for what will follow here. Not only does this armor hide what is visible beneath the visor, what borders seeing and not seeing, it is also a mark of authority. The visor is a display of authority by being a boundary line for what we can and cannot see—a kind of spectral allowance. It is a ghostly demarcation, to recall Wallace Stevens’ phrase, between what is brought to light and what is kept secret.3 Indeed, the visor effect is the space of secrecy itself. And “one always inherits from a secret—which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’ ” (Derrida 2006, 18). Reading the face will therefore

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always already have been a question of secrecy and of the impossibility of reading. If “there is no face-to-face exchange of looks between God and myself, between the other and myself,” my responsibility in positing or projecting that face is groundless and secret. The veil is “of the order of the visible in-visible,” as is the face which keeps its secrets (Derrida 1996, 90–91). “The law of personification is that for a sharp reader it uncovers as it covers over. Prosopopoeia effaces, defaces, and disfigures even as it confers, ascribes, or prescribes a face and a figure” (VP, 227). Though, and here is the irony that runs alongside the law, the only way to see how that law works is through another act of prosopopoeia. Prosopopoeia begets prosopopoeia, so that the reader must read in order to see how the reading works.

3. Reading the “The Minister’s Black Veil” In a moment of supreme clarity in an otherwise dark and shadowy universe, King Duncan forecasts his own demise at the hands of Macbeth by saying that he has misjudged him: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face” (1.4.11–12).4 But his realization is impossible. We must as an irreducible necessity in life, so innate that it is difficult to imagine how it occurs, read men’s minds in their faces, even though we may know this to be impossible. The first error of reading, we can say, is the error of prosopopoeia. Reading the mind’s construction in the face is the reader’s responsibility par excellence and simultaneously an egregious irresponsibility. And yet nothing is more fundamental to our existence as humans than those prosopopoeic projections that stretch out from our imaginations into the ethereal non-world of le tout autre. Knowing this, as Duncan does, is by no means an overcoming of the necessity, erroneousness, or futility of the operation. It is merely a realization of an excessive responsibility in the face of an excessive alterity. Such is the overriding image we glean from “The Minister’s Black Veil,” if we can say with any degree of accuracy that there is an image to be had. In a plot that seems rudimentary and uncomplicated, a local Reverend, Mr. Hooper, arrives one sunny Sabbath morning to perform his weekly sermon. His parishioners play games and admire one another’s shinning Sunday garb and fresh complexions. The minister paces meditatively toward the church, as he has always done, in his “starched collar” and with “due clerical neatness.”5 On this occasion, however, “There was but one thing remarkable in his appearance. Swathed about his forehead, and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by his breath, Mr. Hooper had on a black veil” (186).

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Everything henceforth changes, though everything is the same, save for the black veil. In a strange and somewhat unsettling shift of point of view, the subject of the story suddenly becomes the subject of the characters in the story too. The veil sets off a rapidly oscillating motion between what the characters are doing and saying around our oddly bedecked Reverend and what the Reverend is doing and saying with his veil. In the blink of an eye the story becomes a reading of the reading of the veil and this Reverend becomes a revenant, a spectre. Somewhat predictably, perhaps even for Puritan New Englanders, the congregation become enraged by the minister’s action. They tend to see this veil as an affront to their pious sensibilities. In more extreme cases, they see it as something deplorable: “He has changed himself into something awful,” remarks an old lady, “only by hiding his face” (186). Others believe he has gone mad. Several people subsequently leave the “meeting-house” as a consequence of such a belief. While still others see it as an untimely joke and laugh vigorously and delightedly sotto voce. These responses catalog a spectrum of reactions to something that cannot really be given one appropriate response: a spectral-spectrum result. Nobody knows how to respond to it or how to read it. No answers are offered by the story or by the narrator. We are, like the citizens of Milford, simply left clueless. When Hooper finally addresses his audience ex cathedra he is, unlike the Catholic priests of the time, “face to face with his congregation, except for the black veil” of course, an adornment which throws “obscurity between him and the holy page, as he read[s] the Scriptures” (187). This reading without reading, or a reading as if through a glass, darkly—the veil separating the face and eyes from the page and the face and the eyes from the faces beyond—suggests a number of things. First, our omniscient narrator is no longer omniscient, since he does not see through the veil to the meaning of the reading. Second, the minister is also blind to the reading he is performing. Third, the congregation are doubly removed from the obscure hermeneutics of the minister. And, finally, the real outsideroutsiders, the readers of the story, become triply removed from the events taking place on the pulpit. There is also, as we’ve seen, the shift from the minister’s reading to the reading of the minister: “There was nothing terrible in what Mr. Hooper said; at least, no violence; and yet, with every tremor of his melancholy voice, the hearers quaked” (188).

4. Is the Black Veil a Parable? Why does Hawthorne subtitle his story “A Parable?” One possible answer is the obvious parallel between Hooper’s veil and the one worn by Moses

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in Exodus. In the second book of the Pentateuch, Moses returns from Mount Sinai with the Sacred Covenant (the Ten Commandments) dictated to him by God: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel” (Exod. 34.27).6 Moses, as faithful amanuensis to God, inscribes the letter of the divine Law and returns, after 40 days and 40 nights, to his people the children of Israel. But Moses does not encounter his people face-to-face when he comes away from his meetings with God. He wears a veil because his face is still shinning with the Lord’s radiance: “But when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the vail off, until he came out” (34.33). Why does Moses hide this divine glow from the people? Why does he only speak with God face-to-face and not his followers? In a brilliant reading, Edgar Dryden has argued that this scene should be taken alongside St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians as an exemplary case of the interrelationship between the literal and the figurative in biblical parables (Dryden 1977, 148). Hiding the celestial light of God behind a veil is for St. Paul an unforgivable act of apostasy. Moses hides the very glory of God from his people, so that “even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart” (2 Cor. 3.15). For St. Paul Mosaic Law also becomes a dead letter if it is not internalized in the new covenant of the Lord as a spiritual awakening. In a remarkable and at times slightly rancorous reading of the story of Moses, Paul speaks of the danger of the letter as a death knell to spiritual freedom. He speaks of a “new covenant” inscribed in the hearts of men, “not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3.6). The importance of Paul’s epistles to the Corinthians is that we encounter an oblique interpretation and discussion of this scene on Sinai and a critique of the symbolic importance of the veil in Exodus. St. Paul tells the story Moses tells otherwise by reinterpreting it. Readers of Hawthorne’s tale are called on to do the same in their interpretations of the Minister’s veil. Readers fall on either side of Moses or St. Paul. An interpretation exposes a leap of faith in the reader. “To what extent,” Dryden asks, “can the subtitle be seen as an interpretive clue to the reader that will allow him or her to place the text within a contextual order by establishing a set of generic expectations?” (1977, 133). This is perhaps the most important question we can ask of the story. But it is also one we cannot really answer. If “The Minister’s Black Veil” is taken to be an extended form of a biblical parable, where the minister becomes a reimagining of Moses, then the story is not really about Mr. Hooper’s predicament. If “The Minister’s Black Veil” is not a religious parable, then

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the story becomes an historical account of a bizarre local scene in New England, not stricto sensu a parable at all. We must choose between the two, but in choosing we also deny the parable its status as parable. Let me explain this a little further by explaining what it is about parables that deny generic status. A parable is a short realistic story that is really a story about something else, something that can only be said indirectly. Etymogically “parable” means “thrown beside,” in the Greek and Hebrew equivalent it means “riddle.” The German word for parable is Gleichnis, “likeness.” “The paradox of parable,” says Miller, “is that it is a likeness that rests on a manifest unlikeness between what is given and what cannot by any means be given directly” (TPP, 136). Parables, according to Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy, separate outsiders from insiders, those who can read them from those who can’t. Jesus puts it to his disciples (insiders) like this: “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables . . . seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand” (Mk 4.11–12). What parables do is conceal as well as reveal a riddle. They tell of the advent of the excessive, of the incalculable and unknowable. They are cryptographic thematizations of the role of storytelling itself—refigured, rewritten, reimagined in all stories, inside and outside of whatever generic models or affiliations we seek to find them. We may even say that the parable is the genre-non-genre that enables and disables criticism. One could hardly do better than to subtitle one’s own story “A Parable,” since doing so would result in a generic mise en abyme, as James Hogg knew only too well. The parable, in short, raises the question of belonging to its highest pitch. The significance of the term parable is that it serves to efface its belonging rather than being the “clue to” or “the way in” as Dryden suggests.

5. Miller’s Parable of Paradox The truth about “The Minister’s Black Veil” is that there is no mention of Moses in the story and the critic is led to read into it the significance of its biblical correspondence by a process of what Kermode elsewhere calls “divination,” inspired, creative and informed interpretation (Kermode 1989, 152). The leap is not wholly unjustifiable. There are many more markers here than I have pointed out that would lead us to read it in this way. The problem, however, is that the one thing that can be said about the story is that it opens onto a question of reading, which, if taken to its logical limit, will question any interpretive code we attempt to apply.

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“The reading of the story culminates in the double proposition that the story is the unveiling of the possibility of the impossibility of unveiling,” says Miller (HH, 51). As a result it must also follow that “any judgement passed upon the moral character of the [minister] must therefore be somewhat gratuitous” (Stein 1955, 386). Of course critics have tended to take the wearing of the veil as cause for admonishing Father Hooper and for reading into his character the subject of his initial sermon’s secret sins. Surely putting a black cloth over your face is a little odd. But for no reason! Now that’s just absurd. One of the most famous criticisms is Edgar Allan Poe’s confident assertion that the reason for the veil is a secret sexual indiscretion: “The Minister’s Black Veil” is a masterly composition of which the sole defect is that to the rabble its exquisite skill will be caviare. The obvious meaning of this tale will be found to smother its insinuated one. The moral put into the mouth of the dying minister will be supposed to convey the true import of the narrative; and that a crime of dark dye (having reference to the “young lady”) has been committed, is a point which only minds congenial with that of the author will perceive. (Quoted in Kaul 1966, 92)

Who would want to be one of the rabble content with the “obvious meaning?” And who would ever admit to not knowing the “insinuated” meaning? And yet doesn’t the madness of the act, like the parables of Jesus, betoken a kind of alogics foreign to this two-tiered stratification subscribed to by Poe? “The paradox of Jesus’ parables,” Miller will say time and again in various works, “is that they are addressed to ears that will not understand them. If you can understand them you do not need them. If you need them you will not understand them” (T, 187).7 Such is the defining trait of the parable. Poe reads this story like one of his detective fictions, saying that “Hawthorne’s insinuations make it abundantly clear where to look for a sin: in the sexual sphere” (Kaul 1966, 92). In this Poe becomes like Matthew in the Bible, the insider hearing, seeing and understanding the Omniscient’s Word and defending it against the wilful obscurity and wrathfulness attributed to it by Mark. There is an odd aspect of release in the exuberant penetration of this interpretation. Indeed, one of the extraordinary features of Hawthorne’s tale is that it keeps generating such insider readings. But Poe’s criticism can only be speculation since there is nothing concrete in the text to back up the argument. Perhaps, muses Miller, Poe’s own personal preference is that “Hooper likes them dead” (HH, 85). That being so, God only knows why William Empson and Denis Donoghue, two remarkably subtle readers, conclude that the story can only be about “an addiction to masturbation?” (Donoghue 2005, 111).8

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If, as outsiders, we take “The Veil” as prima facie a question about reading faces, we also run into problems. We see or do not see that the text questions the faces we project onto the text. Miller sees this story “as a simultaneous unmasking of the trope of prosopopoeia and recognition of its ineluctable reaffirmation in the very terms used to unmask it, for example in the word ‘unmask’” (HH, 51). The minister’s veil interrupts the process of interpretation just as the textual veil we are only becoming aware of interrupts that process of reading also by showing itself as an allegory of reading. The materiality of the text itself becomes like the veil the minister is wearing to ward off our piercing gaze, a gaze which is reflected back to us in the act of reading. For Barbara Johnson, critics of “The Veil,” like the congregation, “are blind to the possibility that nothing is being concealed—or that concealment is what is being revealed.” Therefore the story dramatizes the “inescability of allegorical structures in the conduct of ‘real’ life.” Her question emphasizes Miller’s paradox: “is the act of reading always, in a sense, an act of resistance to the letter?” (Johnson 1985, 148). Only a reading will tell, but by that time it will be too late. In order to unmask we must first project a mask.

6. Death is a Linguistic Predicament? Quite infamously for Paul de Man in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, “Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament” (de Man 1984, 81). Another wonderfully allergenic statement there! What on earth does that mean? What it does not mean is that death is in and of itself a linguistic event. De Man certainly does not insanely deny the very real event of dying. How could he? Neither of course does Miller, who in the final pages of Hawthorne and History builds upon this phrase as an insistence to rethink the relationship of the trope of prosopopoeia with death and history. The point for de Man is that, like autobiography, narrating a person’s life after death is a task that tells us something about the way language works as “privation.” If we think of autobiography as a task that attempts to give a “face” to someone, then we can also see how it defaces in the way that storytelling is always a positional or perspectival exercise. This positionality or perspectivism, if we think of it linguistically, can also be described as a problem with figuration (“literally” face-giving). Autobiography is an exemplary generic expression of the impossible possibility of prosopopoeia. Prosopopoeias are projections, like any other tropes, that disfigure or deface their subject matters, and in doing so tell us of the impossibility of proffering a face that can never escape further disfigurement. They also tell

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us of the necessity of the act of projection, a speech act which performatively ascribes a name to something other, something which human knowledge has no other way of describing. This means that all speech acts that have death as their subject matter are by definition catachreses, since they attempt to cast insight into that unilluminable darkness of the absolutely unknowable. They are therefore all performances of the unknowable, passionate pleas (and a plea is a performative speech act) for an answer to a question that can never be answered. “‘Death’ is a catachresis for what can never be named properly” (VP, 172). When one of Hooper’s congregation proclaims to her husband that it is strange that such “a simple black veil” should become such a “terrible thing” on their minister’s face, her husband gives the following startling reply: “Something must surely be amiss with Mr Hooper’s intellects,” observed her husband, the physician of the village. “But the strangest part of the affair is the effect of this vagary, even on a sober-minded man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our parson’s face, throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghost-like from head to foot. Do you not feel it so?” “Truly I do,” replied the lady; “and I would not be alone with him for the world. I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself!”. (189)

The fact of the matter is that the minister is afraid to be alone with himself. Or, rather, the minister is afraid to be alone with himself when he can see his own reflection given back to himself in the mirror. When he is redoubled, given back like the ghost which returns as a hollowed out reflection of the self, a self that once was it-self, he becomes petrified. Such is the case when he is celebrating the wedding mass and catches a fleeting glimpse of his own image in a mirror, drops his chalice, and runs out of the church: “catching a glimpse of his figure in the looking-glass . . . His frame shuddered—his lips grew white—he spilt the untasted wine on the carpet—and rushed forth into the darkness” (Hawthorne 1987, 191). The minister has not only become ghostly to his worshippers, some of whom travel great distances for the spectacle (the spectre-spectacle), he has become ghostly to himself in an uncannily self-sub-dividing manner. He is ghostly in such a way that he is become “two-to-speak,” as Derrida would have it. He is both narrator of and actor in his own tale. What this amounts to is a question mark that the reader is left to figure out for him- or herself. This “vagary” is an indecisiveness that the people of Milford are unable or unwilling to accept, forgetting, as Barbara Johnson says, that it is the normal state of affairs.

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For Miller, “When he puts on the black veil the Reverend Hooper is as if he were already dead” (HH, 93). This would mean that “The Veil” is a ghost story that is simultaneously not a ghost story, like James’s The Turn of the Screw. It would also lend credence to the way that “The Veil” is not finished as such. The last lines tell us that this “preternatural horror” goes on, underground, when the minister is interred with his veil unremoved. Death, the assurance the citizens of Milford have sought as consolation for the unease at which they gazed on the ghostly figure of their living minister, is no longer the comfortable terminal they wished for. Perhaps, all ghost stories go on in precisely the same way. A ghost, by definition, cannot be killed. The desire to do so is the desire to stem the tide of the irrational, just, we might say, as the reaction to his own image in the mirror is a residual manifestation of the desire for a detached self-awareness that cancels out the phantom other. This desire is an ideology that cancels itself out at the moment of death. When the minister dies we think that we can see through the mask to the being that was but is no longer and no more. Reading the story amounts to the same desire, as it is an act of reading that seeks to unveil in an apocalyptic moment of theoretical seeing (we remember that the word “theory” means “to see through”). However, Miller’s paradox (like de Man’s) is that this seeing in reading is a confusion of a linguistic with a material reality. The nonphenomenal materiality of the text causes the reading “I” to be displaced as a linguistic subject in the act of reading: “The ‘I’ becomes a linguistic function in a process that occurs of its own accord and is authorized by no independent witnessing ‘I’. It is not an ‘I’ who speaks or writes, in any of these effectively working historical actions. It is an impersonal possibility of thinking, speaking, writing, there already within language, that takes possession of the ‘I’ to think itself, speak itself, or write itself and thereby enters history. When it enters history it makes things happen as they happen” (HH, 126). This all sounds like a radical linguisticism to me. Who, for instance, would think of a subject as a linguistic function? And who could say that the language of the text speaks “me?” “As a reader of [Emmanuel] Levinas,” says Denis Donoghue contra Miller and de Man, “I would feel squeamish about thinking of other people—even imagined people—as fictive or notional: it’s a habit I wouldn’t like to take up” (Donoghue 1998, 108). Quite so. But it is not Miller’s point to say that language speaks and that there is nothing beyond that. Or that real people are just fictional or notional constructs. He is not anthropomorphizing language in that way. Rather his point is, via de Man, that there is no theoretical standpoint outside of our readings to say that we don’t read

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into people’s faces the constructs of our own minds and that we are not controlled in this by the vocabularies we use to describe this experience. There is no Olympian height outside of the text to say that a theory can show you that language can be used precisely for such and such a purpose. Neither is he capable of claiming that he can read anything he likes into the text. The problem is one of demand and event. It is a problem with what language does in the event of reading and the reactions we have to language’s power to make things happen which we cannot foresee. The phrase de Man uses in Allegories of Reading as a parody of a Heideggerian concept, which Miller takes up in various works of his own, Die Sprache verspricht (sich), “means both ‘Language promises’ and ‘Language makes a slip of the tongue” (Miller 2002, 17). Language rather than being a dead poem concealing the distant din of some primordial “Saying” echoing through eons of human history, operates by promising and denying its promise: “Language promises, but what it promises is itself. This promise it can never keep” (ER, 35). Thus, acts of reading and writing do two things that cannot ever be fully reconciled. On the one hand, they disarticulate the independent witnessing “I” by reducing “it” to a linguistic function in that moment of reading which cannot be entered into freely. It happens as an event, just like the reading of the minister’s veil happened as an event for the people of Milford. Reading like life goes on, and as Wallace Stevens eloquently puts it, the “squirming facts exceed the squamous mind” (Stevens 1990, 215). On the other hand, seeing this linguistic moment as a confusion between “symbol and type” and an external reality, a confusion between a prosopopoeic projection and a material base can never release us from the fact that the error will and has always already occurred. The latter is a responsibility, Miller says, that we bear alone. Each of the characters in Hawthorne’s story perform their own act of reading as I do mine and Miller his. All of these readings in whatever degree provide history with its material base, an enigma that can never be fully brought into the light by an overarching theoretical awareness. Like the parables these narratives forbid and demand interpretation simultaneously.

7. A Passion for the Secret Let me make a promise to tell you a secret. But haven’t I already done so? Hawthorne’s text promises in the same way. It promises a revelation that never comes, like a story without an ending. It promises without keeping its promise. In both of these senses it is apocalyptic (an un-veiling). Just as

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Miller’s key phrase, maybe the most important phrase of the book, “the face de-faces . . . it,” simulates that mode of speaking which gives and takes away simultaneously. To say “the face de-faces” is to contradict oneself and create a vicious paradox in the same breath. The face is precisely that which is seen, naked and bare, like Moses’ face when confronting the Lord. But it is also something that hides. The face is what is apparent to us in the most naked way and yet it is the thing we cannot know. We read the impossibility of reading in the face of things. For an example I return to Macbeth, because it is perhaps an even more extensive disquisition on this so-called visor effect than the play we began with. It is also Levinas’s favorite play, a play full of faces, ghosts and disjointed times, contretemps, “the future in an instant.”9 “You’re face, my thane,” says Lady Macbeth, “is a book where men may read strange matters. To beguile the time, look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t” (1.5.61–65). A little later Macbeth will draw on the same metaphor: “Away, and mock the time with fairest show. False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (1.7.81–82). Each time the emphasis is placed on the reading of the face there exists a reference to time. To “beguile the time” is a reference to the way Macbeth is being urged by his wife to act as a gracious host while plotting to murder his guest, the king, whereas to “look like the time” is a repetition of that sentiment. But of course this is doublespeak, an equivocation. Like those “imperfect speakers,” the Weird Sisters, Lady Macbeth says two things simultaneously. Be unlike the time and be like the time. How can one be either? The equivocation is crucial, as it is throughout the play. In fact, “All may be said to equivocate, and on their equivocal variety we impose our limited interpretations” (Kermode 2000, 216). We read, that is, by imposing the interpretation, by placing one reading above another, by cancelling out or overlooking the impossibility of reading the face. In doing this we performatively breathe life into the play as does Macbeth into the witches: Macbeth: How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags, What is’t you do? All the Witches: A deed without a name. Macbeth: I conjure you by that which you profess, Howe’er you come to know it, answer me. . . . Even till destruction sicken, answer me To what I ask you. First Witch: Speak. Second Witch: Demand. Third Witch: We’ll answer. (4.1.63–77)

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Macbeth “conjures” these witches and demands of them that they profess their secrets, that they tell him the truth. The “speak,” “demand,” “we’ll answer” therefore sounds ironic. They are repeating back to him the imperatives he delivers to them. “Stay! Speak, speak, I charge thee, speak” is what to all intents and purposes Macbeth is saying: “answer me to what I ask you.” Then follow the famous prophecies told indirectly, like the parables, by the three apparitions. But Macbeth hasn’t ears to hear them: “Had I three ears I’d hear thee,” he says in an oddly comical prosthetic metaphor. And in a further extension of this sentiment, he calls for “But one word more,” so that he will be able to make sense of the prophecies. Like the literary critic, Macbeth is searching for the assurance that he has got it right. But it never comes. And he is never able to read the apparitions correctly. The secret hags maintain their secrets, as do the apparitions. The “frame of things disjoint, both worlds suffer” [aus den Fugen]. Once recognized, this disjointing becomes pervasive: “life,” says Macbeth, “is like a walking shadow.” By beguiling time and looking like the time, defacing their faces, both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth enter into a kind of madness, or, rather, they begin to understand a certain fallaciousness in all acts of prosopopoeic projection. They begin to understand the impossibility of reading the face. The “visor effect” causes both to enter into a world of ghosts, beginning with Lady Macbeth’s own conjuring call: Lady Macbeth: Come on, gentle my lord, Sleek o’er your rugged looks, be bright and jovial Among your guests tonight. Macbeth: So shall I, love, And so I pray be you. Let your remembrance Apply to Banquo. Present him eminence Both with eye and tongue; unsafe the while that we Must lave our honours in these flattering streams And make our faces visors to our hearts, Disguising what they are. (3.4.28–35)

Macbeth has by this time ordered Banquo’s assassination and will see his ghost appear at the banquet table. Lady Macbeth’s reaction to her husband’s shock will be to ask: “Why do you make such faces?” That phrase can be read in at least two different ways: “why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?” Or, “why do you conjure up these ghosts?” The visor is, as we can see, used here figuratively. It is not a real visor but a ghostly one. Their faces protect their hearts by obscuring their guilt and culpability. They hide their true intentions and desires beneath the visors of their own faces, projecting other faces. But in doing so they also ironically become

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aware of the impossibility of reading the faces and desires of others. They realize that faces are places where men may read strange thoughts because upon each and every single face is a black veil or visor, literally. The distinction between the literal and the figurative becomes breached any time we discuss the face in this way. Therefore, we might come to see that Macbeth is a play concerned with what it means to read faces, our own and others’. A play, in other words, turning around the inaugural trope of reading: prosopopoeia. “Do you ever try to read your own face?” says Bram Stoker’s Lucy in a letter to Mina, “I do, and can tell you it is not a bad study, and gives you more trouble than you can well fancy if you have ever tried it” (Stoker 1994, 72). Doubtlessly, an appropriate warning for anyone interested in following these questions up in literary texts. In what has become one of the major touchstones for readers of Derrida’s concerns with literature, “Passions: An Oblique Offering,” Derrida poses the question of the secret as a literary phenomenon. He refers to this secrecy as something “heterogeneous to the hidden,” something that “remains inviolable even when one thinks one has revealed it.” This secret is not something hidden in literature that we can unearth or dig up. “It simply exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling, dissimulation/revelation, night/day, forgetting/anamnesis, earth/heaven, etc.” (Derrida 1992b, 21). Thinking of literature in this way leaves us where we began. It doesn’t bring us any closer to being able to say “ah ha! This is what it’s all about.” What happens is something else entirely. “Literature,” says Miller “keeps its secret. A work of literature is all on the surface, all there in the words on the page, imprinted on a surface that cannot be gone behind. This means that there are certain secrets or enigmas in a work of literature that cannot by any means be penetrated, though answers to the questions they pose may be essential to a reading of the work” (O, 152). What are the “secret sins” Hawthorne’s works so consistently pursue? What is beneath the veil (the visor) in “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Macbeth? The need to provide answers for these questions is one of the peculiar demands each of these works places squarely on its readers’ shoulders. Each one asks this question in terms of how we manipulate the trope of prosopopoeia. In this we can say that these works are specifically about that procedure of telling secrets, of uncovering the intentions and desires beneath the visor. They are works which exemplify the critical impulse in their characters to perform on another level what the reader is supposed to be doing while reading the story. But the gap between what we know is going on in the story and what we can sense is going on there is an uncrossable chasm, something other to knowledge, but also something that calls for expression. This call is something that impassions in all senses of that

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word. I cite the following passage again because so much depends on our ability to understand why this is the case: There is in literature, in the exemplary secret of literature, a chance of saying everything without touching upon the secret. When all hypotheses are permitted, groundless and ad infinitum, about the meaning of a text, or the final intentions of an author whose person is no more represented than nonrepresented by a character or a narrator, by a poetic or a fictional sentence, when these are detached from their presumed source and thus remain locked away [au secret], when there is no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret beneath the surface of the textual manifestation (and it is this situation that I call text or trace), when it is the call [appel] of this secret, however, which points back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself which keeps our passion aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us. Even if there is none, even if it does not exist, hidden behind anything whatever. Even if the secret is no secret, even if it has never been a secret, a single secret. Not one. (Derrida 1992b, 24)

Commenting on this remarkable passage, “Derrida’s most concentrated and most eloquent expression of the connection he sees between the secret and acts of literature,” Miller makes the point that for Derrida the “exemplary status of literature” is that one is able to say anything about it and not be held responsible (Miller 2001, 72). Not because there is no demand being made on the reader by the work. But because there is no way in principle of ever knowing that one has finally got it right. There’s no “access to the secret originary ground” that might verify any one of our hypotheses. “The reader cannot make decisions about some secret hidden beneath the surface of a text because, if that secret is really secret (if there is such a thing as a secret, which remains a secret), it is in principle absolutely impossible to uncover this secret” (Miller 2001, 73). There is no way of knowing what the secret is behind “The Minister’s Black Veil” or behind the visions in Macbeth or Hamlet, if indeed there is one. We simply cannot gain access to what is missing from the text. “Hamlet,” says John Caputo with characteristic wit, “is all we have. There is no Hamlet outside the text, no mind of Hamlet outside Hamlet, to whom we may have recourse. And even if we could, per impossibile, exhume and resuscitate Shakespeare, like Lazarus, or track down the ‘historical Hamlet,’ if there was one—or the historical Jesus, or the twelve, or his later bio-hagio-graphers who called him by the name Lord—they could not give us the secret, not in principle” (Caputo 1997, 109). To conclude, I return to the original question put to Miller by Philip Lewis. Where does this responsibility in acts of reading come from? Who lays it upon me? Who calls me to be responsible? And to whom, for whom,

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before whom am I responsible? Not easy questions. But I claim after reading Miller reading Hawthorne and others I can come closer to an answer. Each act of reading places on its reader a singular and secret demand. That demand cannot be named, or, rather, can only be named indirectly, in parables. I can tell you what happens only by way of another narration, only by way of another saying. There is no straight answer to the demand reading places on me when I read, no way of clearly expressing just what it is I am responding to when I read. That remains secret. The secret which impassions keeps its secret. That is what happens in the singular event of reading. It is my responsibility because it is my reading. No one else can claim responsibility for a reading I have performed, or what has happened as a result. What caused the Reverend Hooper to don the black veil? What makes Macbeth kill Banquo, Duncan and so many others? Each time I read these works I come up with a different response, my interpretations multiply. I never read the same story twice. There is the secret. And it is the secret which impassions me to read them again. My hypothesis then is that when Miller responds to the demands that these works make on him, each response is a unique and singular response. That response is different not only from the responses others have to these works but also different for him each time he decides to read the same work again. This is reason enough for me to refrain from any notions of an implicit Millerian matrix in what I read, or from positing some theoretical schema underlying the oeuvre, or from drawing some connection between the biological person called J. Hillis Miller and the works I read signed J. Hillis Miller. There are secrets in these works that Miller couldn’t possibly answer for either. All he can do is tell stories about what happens when he reads, as only I can do in each act of reading, writing, or rereading. Miller’s way of putting this is to say “the basis of ethical decision and act, including the act of writing or reading, is the ultimate secret, the most secret secret. This secret cannot be revealed. It is not the object of a possible clear knowledge. Nevertheless, it is a secret I can share, though it remains secret. This secret can only be passed on to me as an obscure but commanding force that comes from something absolutely other. If it cannot be named, it can be made into a story and so transferred to me when I read it. That reading imparts another strong demand for response and taking of responsibility” (O, 166). The only way to see if Miller is being responsible to the absolutely other in the works he reads is by way of a further act of reading, another search for those elusive others. The call of the wholly other impassions Miller’s readings each time, because the other is what remains mysterious, ghostly, and secret in each text. These wholly others haunt Miller’s work and call out to be brought to life in each act of reading

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and writing. And let’s face it, since it’s always a question of facing up to a responsibility, it’s what impassions us also when we engage in acts of good reading, when we stop short of forced explanations, when we let these others come. A parabolic reading will not name these others in quite the same way that a critical archaeology will attempt to expose the clear matter of the tale to the noonday sun. “Parables do not simply name the ‘something’ they point to by indirection or merely give the reader knowledge of it. They use words to try to make something happen in relation to the ‘other’ that resonates in the work” (TPP, ix). That is the power of the parable. It is a performative doing, an act that is not reducible to cognition, something which exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling, reason/unreason and so on. Parables performatively make something happen, but just what that something is will require another doing and yet another in an interminable chain of performatives. This is part of the conduct of life. I turn now to show how this kind of reading can be justified.

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Chapter 6

Just Reading Deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of droit (authority, legitimacy, and so on). It is possible as an experience of the impossible, there where, even if it does not exist (or does not yet exist, or never does exist), there is justice. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law”

1. Justices What is justice? What does it mean to do justice in our readings? Can one ever be a just reader? These are questions Miller asks of his own reading of Heinrich von Kleist in Versions of Pygmalion. A staccato relay of false starts and recurring questions emphasizes his apprehension at the task of providing an answer: “Should I teach Kleist? To whom or to what am I responsible when I ask this question or decide it in one way or the other?” “Should Kleist have read Kant?”—an act which may have caused his suicide. “How can a reader do justice to Kleist’s ‘Der Findling’ [The Foundling]?” How can we read it justly or just read it?” (VP, 96–97). Can anyone really ever know these things? If each text, as I’ve been arguing, makes a singular demand on me for justice then no appeal to a method of reading, a law that stands outside the act and event of reading, will help me to decide. I must do this alone. Speech acts, we recall, are “historical happenings.” They are happenings about which we can never be fully sure, even though we must be willing to accept responsibility for them (HH, 127–128). Reading works of literature and writing books about them are ways of making this apparent, if not fully clear. I cannot take responsibility for unforeseeable or unintended effects my words will have on others. But, in an odd way, I must take responsibility for my words, for what they do. I must say, “Yes, I did it, and I accept the results.” These anxious questions therefore must remain anxious if they are to remain true to the event and unpredictability of reading, writing, and teaching. They must also prefigure in an impossible paradox an absolute responsibility to something other, some “dangerous perhaps” in Nietzsche’s famous phrase. “‘Perhaps,’ Derrida will say, “one must always say perhaps for justice” (Derrida 1992f, 27). The theme that concerns me in “The Foundling” [Der Findling] has to do with the problem, as Kleist’s title suggests, of finding something or

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someone and/or finding something or someone out. The emphasis, as I will argue, is quite different in each case, as there is a discrepancy between an active searching and a passive happenstance each time—though the real question always balances precariously on the edge of a reasonable assertion as to where this emphasis lies, as we will see. Much of what I read in Kleist’s short story revolves around this idea of what might also be described as a volitional act and an unforeseeable occurrence; something that raises the subjects of theory and practice, cause and effect, discovery and invention; all of which, needless to say, are central to the works of both Miller and Kleist.

2. The Dangers of Reading “The Foundling” “The Foundling” is a frightening story about a benign and rich Roman merchant adopting a child who will eventually grow up to destroy him.1 In a few terse pages, Kleist relates how the young ward sexually molests his stepmother, scares her to death, dispossesses his stepfather of his fortune, legally evicts him from his own home, incites him to a most heinous act of murder, and finally robs him of any peace in the afterlife. The instance of discovering that child has, in other words, the most dramatic, unjust, and unforeseeable effects. As in Kleist’s other short stories, there are so many instances of finding things by chance or by active inquiry along the way that readers often find themselves in disbelief at the sheer coincidence of the major events of the story. These improbable discoveries make the uncanny catalysts of the narrative’s fragmentary and bizarre progressions. The obvious example is Piachi happening upon the orphan Nicolo, the foundling of the title, outside Ragusa. There is also the subsequent act of Nicolo refinding Piachi after his son, Paolo, has died from the plague. We have Nicolo discovering his stepmother, Elvira, worshipping a hidden portrait of a Genoese knight. The eavesdropping Nicolo then overhears his stepmother crying out the name “Colino,” which we will discover is her secret love and that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Nicolo. Elvira finds Nicolo in his room with Xaviera Tartini’s chambermaid immediately after the death of his wife, and so on and so forth. The examples abound throughout the story and each is an important episode in its own right. One particularly unusual episode in which we find the problem of finding, learning, or discovering dramatized in the action of the story comes when Nicolo finds six ivory letters, which happened to be left on the table in the dining room. It so happened, as Kleist’s fantastical occurrences are so often introduced, that “These six letters had now been lying in the dining-room

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for several days, and Nicolo, as he sat gloomily brooding at the table with his head propped in his arm, picked them up and toyed with them; and as he did so he discovered—purely by chance, for he had never in his life been so astonished—the combination of the letters that spelt the name ‘Colino’” (281). The irony here is that the protagonist, much like the reader, is learning to reread the signs in whichever way he sees fit. In other words, the happenstance of finding the letters vicariously allows Nicolo to reinvent his experience of Elvira’s longing by placing her in the role of the disingenuous seductress. He reads into the letters the key to the riddle of the portrait. For him, the portrait is his likeness and the anagrammatical twist is Elvira’s way of veiling the truth, of keeping the secret from him. Nicolo scatters the ivories and finds the reality he is seeking. Through a throw of the ivory letters “N. I. C. O. L. O” becomes “C. O. L. I. N. O.” “Ivories” is an antiquated term for dice. And this allusive import has almost certainly not been lost on Kleist, as the entire passage revolves around the piecemeal reading of signs, and the chance of finding the meanings you are searching for in those readings. Whether those readings are numerical or lexical symbols, Kleist is suggesting, is relative, since the acts that follow such readings are always based on interpretive habit and latent desire, what Geoffrey Galt Harpham has succinctly called a “machinery of interest” (1995, 399). Nicolo’s misreading is implicitly alluded to in the rhetorical strategies Kleist employs to structure the scene. It is the repetition of the verb “to lie” or “be lying on” (a play between the near homonyms “liegen” and “lügen” in German) that announces the discrepancies between the evident sense of the passages describing the event of these findings and the manner in which they are represented. For example, the narrator speaks of the letters quite literally “lying in the dining-room” and repeats this by telling us of Elvira’s reaction to the name “lying there plainly visible” [“der offen da lag”]. The adjective “offen” in German means to be honest or obvious in its appearance. It can also mean to be open, as in open to interpretation. This odd locution creates a strange paradox that contradicts the conspicuous honesty or “plainly visible” import of an initial reading that seeks to add up the different episodes in order to accumulate a comprehensive view of the overall narrative. To put this another way, the letters are both there in situ for whomsoever to see the plain sense of them and also not there, save for those readers for whom the plain sense of things is an implicit secret, an act or invention. The narrative therefore turns on truth and lie; it turns on the possibility of seeing things as they are behind the phenomenal and of the phenomenal as a lie about the truth of things. There is certainly more than a smack of a

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Kantian critique about this!2 Finding out is as unpredictable, uncontrollable or unjustifiable as finding a sense of the truth itself in appearances or reason, neither of which is really plainly visible at all. Not only is Nicolo seeing what he wants to see in (into) the letters but his reading is also having a very noticeable effect on Elvira. Here is a salient example of the influence of one person’s reading on another, of a reading doing something, an unsettling suggestion that the reader of Kleist’s stories, like readers in any context whatsoever, pass over to their eternal detriment. Reading is a dangerous thing, as we come to see. The results of which cannot be known in advance, as much as the event of finding the reading that causes other things to happen in turn cannot be proleptically determined beforehand. This is what all of Kleist’s stories tell us in various and manifold ways. The most unjustifiable things just happen. “You can never be sure,” says Miller, “what is going to happen when someone in a particular situation reads a particular book. . . . A book is a dangerous object, and perhaps all books should have warning labels” (VP, 21). That the most deplorable and morally dubious things can occur, even when the most apparently (plainly visible) morally benign works are read, means that one can never predict with infallible regularity just what will happen before a given reading takes place. The truth of reading, then, is that it just happens. In a strange way, that is its justice. But we cannot ever really say that justice in reading just is, that it happens here and now. “Justice is not a matter of is or of presence or of the present.”3 It is a matter of the future, of what might come. Perhaps. All ethical responses in reading are responses to what happens, to foundlings, as Kleist tells us. Those foundlings of our own readings, what we find therein, are not foreseeable and never fully justifiable by appeals to the text. They come along by chance or by accident. Reading “Der Findling,” as I shall show, makes this apparent.

3. Misreading Nicolo’s reading of the ivory letters, then, brings us to an ethical moment of reading dramatized both thematically throughout the story and rhetorically in the means by which that content is unveiled. This means that the interpretive imperative facing the reader goes in two directions at once (ER, 4). This is the necessity of seeing the events of the text through the language in which the events are being described and a necessity also to attend to that language in and of itself, to what it’s doing. What the reader inevitably does, like Nicolo, is shape those words and letters on the page into his or her own “Colino.” We read Kleist’s “improbable veracities”

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and repeat the crimes by helplessly performing the same reading as the characters, the ethical moment has therefore already taken place within the epistemological dimension. In order to understand the story the reader must piece together random happenings so that they become a cogent sequence of events. Kleist’s story, however, is a warning against this inevitably motivated procedure. It tells us that in reading this way we are lying to ourselves in order to cover a gap in nonknowledge. Miller sees this as the inevitability of misreading: “We cannot avoid imposing some set of connections, like a phantasmal spiderweb, over events that just happen as they happen. The events within Kleist’s stories and the event of reading them are exemplary of this necessity” (VP, 139). Accordingly, the event of reading Kleist, for Miller at least, is always in error. More precisely, it is the necessity of an error. It makes lying a universal principle, as Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” has it and as both The Ethics of Reading and Versions of Pygmalion consistently remind us. Following the linguistic imperative, the epistemology of tropes Paul de Man propounds in Allegories of Reading, Miller has noted that the allegorical charge of this scene is one such significant moment within which we can read the impossibility of reading Reading, of seeing the one reading that releases us from our responsibility to keep on reading. If, for example, we read Nicolo’s interpretation of the letters as a misreading brought on by a desire to see what he wants in the text, then our reading is also being jeopardized allegorically by the implicit warning not to put too much stock in resemblance or contingency because they might just be what we were looking for in the first place. However, if we read Nicolo’s reading as a warning about the dangers of prosopopoeiac misreading in general, projecting an identity on the absent or the dead, then our own reading inevitably commits the same error—we are implicated in the crime it condemns. In yet another formulation of this predicament we could say that reading “Der Findling” in an Aristotelian/New Critical manner is a futile exercise because the story is really about the impossibility of finding organic unity or causal sequence in narrative; and yet reading it in the opposite light, by sharing in its madness, is equally flawed because as soon as we try to do so we realize the necessity of the error and the impossibility of doing otherwise—to read in this latter manner would be an impossible madness. Whichever way we read, we seem to be in error. The ethical dilemma hovers between these two possibilities: The failure to read, the reader will remember, takes the form of a further, secondary or tertiary, narrative superimposed on the first deconstructive narrative. This supplementary narrative shows indirectly, in the form of a story, someone committing again the “same” linguistic error that the

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deconstructive narrative has lucidly identified and denounced. Only someone who can read, that is, who can interpret the allegory, which seems to say one thing but in fact says something else, will be able to see what is really being narrated is the failure to read. But that act of reading will no doubt commit another version of the same error of the failure to read, and then again, in a perpetual fugacity of final clarity. (ER, 47)

Once we have identified what the text is trying to say but fails to say, its own deconstructive reading, Miller is saying here, once that suggestion has been unveiled, the error is already compounded by the initial error of the secondary reading, its narrative reformation: this is the error of the reading that says because it is not this one way of reading, it must be this other one, its failure to read its own impossibility. A negative knowledge of reading such as the secondary deconstructive one, however, as this passage implies, constructs a narrative in order to highlight the impossibility of reading Reading and in doing so repeats the error by inventing another narrative. This is the dangerous lure for the “deconstructive” critic who might at first take this seeing as the possibility of a meta-reading. According to de Man, we should be wary of this impulse: “Deconstructions of figural texts,” he says, “engender lucid narratives which produce in their turn and as it were within their own texture, a darkness more redoubtable than the error they dispel” (de Man 1979, 217).

4. The Return to Philology What does all of this doubt and error, de Man’s formulation and Miller’s reading of it in Kleist, really tell us of this necessity to lie in our active narrative reformations? Where is the ethic, the value, the law that says this must happen in Miller’s rereading of de Man and in my reading of Kleist’s “Der Findling?” If “ethicity,” as de Man refers to it, is the necessity of seeing judgments as never verifiably true, then how can a system of values, an ethics, be based on a law which relies on the necessity of judgment in order to ward off freewheeling relativism? The answer to all of these abstractions really boils down to the respect for the text in the act of reading—to the ability to see storytelling as a tropologically aberrant system that cannot ever provide us with the key to an understanding of a moral law as such, but nonetheless creates that law in the moment of reading (ER, 45). Hence the return to philology advocated by both Miller and de Man: Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who

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think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden. (de Man 1986, 24)

This is a particularly unsettling proposition, in the sense in which Miller’s reading appropriates this rationale as an ethic, since it means that we are always condemned to a misreading of the law of the text, and yet we are to be held responsible for the inevitable result of that misreading. We are foredoomed always—like Pygmalion to fall in love with Galatea’s effigy, or like Elvira to fall in love with Colino’s portrait, or like Piachi and Elvira with Nicolo as a reimagining of their dead son Paolo—to repeat the initial misreading of our fantasies. “To treat something dead as if it were alive,” Miller says, “is an error of reading. It is also an ethical error that can be exposed by another act of reading” (VP, 11). Yet the return to philology, in all its sceptical grandeur, is the only, though by no means wholly objective or extrinsic, way to see how this misreading occurs. Let me say a little more of this return to philology at this point, since it occupies such a crucial place in Miller’s ethics of reading. In his essay on philology in The Resistance to Theory, de Man relates how at Harvard in the 1950s Reuben Brower’s undergraduate course on “The Interpretation of Literature,” HUM 6, introduced students to “the way meaning is conveyed rather than on the meaning itself” (23). Following precepts advanced by I.A. Richards in his influential Practical Criticism, students were asked simply to write about the works they were given without external reference. They were not to say anything that could not be justified by reference to the texts they were given to read. What happened, says de Man, was extraordinary. Those students were transformed by the experience; so much so that the essays they produced at the end of the course bore little resemblance to their earlier essays. What students lost in generality, de Man claims, they gained in precision and attention to detail. What he calls “mere reading” is therefore an ironic reference to rigorous textual analysis, close reading, a practice he sees as theoretical through and through. Mere reading is “deeply subversive” because by responding to the law of the text readers cannot help breaking with presupposition, prejudice, and stale perception. The “turn to theory occurred,” he announces, “as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces” (24). In Schlegel’s terms, “To read means to satisfy the philological drive, to make a literary impression on oneself. To read out of impulse for pure philosophy or poetry, unaided by philology,

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is probably impossible” (Schlegel 1991, 80). De Man’s promotion of a rigorous attention to the structures of language is therefore proffered, like Schlegel’s, in such a way that it becomes radically opposed (foreign, allergic) to institutionalization, while simultaneously forming its basis. In his most recent discussion of what he calls “Brower’s Law,” Miller highlights the impossibility of responding responsibly to this injunction: “The difficulty for a written reading that follows what might be called Brower’s Law is that it is impossible in reasonable compass to cite all the relevant evidence. Nevertheless, it all counts” (LC, 49). The problems are in the details we choose to emphasize our “close readings.” The gap between the general and the particular, the singular and the universal, will never be satisfied by a single interpretive leap of whatever guise, or under whatever authority making its claim on the event of interpretation. Each performative act of reading faces the singularity of its moment and its choice without the possibility of some universal Law reassuring us of the propriety of our actions. If this were not the case, we could speak unabashedly of the one right [juste] reading. But the impossibility of the Law is strangely enough the opportunity we have as readers to rewrite that Law at the limits of our interpretations. What Miller’s reading of “Brower’s Law” suggests is that while we can never be fully responsive to it, or responsible for it, we must nonetheless never cease trying to be. The “aporia of reading” in On Literature is one aspect of this dilemma: “You must become as a child if you are to read literature rightly. . . . One must read rapidly, allegro, in a dance of the eyes across the page. . . . Good reading, however, also demands slow reading, not just the dancing allegro” (OL, 120–122). Good reading means attending rigorously to a given text by going slowly. It means attending to what the language is doing as well as to what it is saying. That is what Miller’s expression the “ethics of reading” confronts: “If that phrase means anything,” he says, “it must have something to do with respecting any text discussed, with accepting an obligation to read—to read carefully, patiently, scrupulously, under the elementary assumption that the text being read may say something different from what one wants or expects it to say or from what received opinion says it says” (TNT, 315).4 A just reading, in light of this philological imperative, and as I’ve inferred above, could never refer to justice in the present tense. It could never say with equanimity: “This is a just reading.” A return to philology, like a promise, casts our responsibilities into an always-deferred and indeterminable future. The entire ethical-political force of Miller’s writings on prosopopoeia, anacoluthon, catachresis, parasites, and reading in the strong sense, depends on the ability to see the necessity, always and ever, of a double gesture,

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a response and a responsibility to an event of finding that is at once a passive and an active component of the reading process: By “the ethics of reading,” the reader will remember, I mean that aspect of the act of reading in which there is a response to the text that is both necessitated, in the sense that it is a response to an irresistible demand, and free, in the sense that I must take responsibility for my response and for the further effects, “interpersonal,” institutional, social, political, or historical, of my act of reading, for example as that act takes the form of teaching or of published commentary on a given text. What happens when I read must happen, but I must acknowledge it as my act of reading, though just what the “I” is or becomes in this transaction is another question. (ER, 43)

The truly unsettling aspect of reading Kleist’s story, and of speaking about what happens there, is that it points to the impossibility of reading it without falling into the trap Kleist’s characters fall into themselves. For Miller all of the cases of mistaken identity are part of what must happen in our reading: Elvira mistaking Nicolo for Colino; Nicolo seeing the coincidence of the letters as a sign of Elvira’s love for him; Elvira and Antonio Piachi seeing the foundling as their son; the child, Clara, seeing the portrait of Colino as a portrait of Nicolo, all point to the mistake we must make when we read. We cannot see past the sheer coincidence: “But of course it is just a coincidence” (VP, 138). Miller’s account of Kleist’s story allegorizes the way in which readings are always just or unjust in relation to a necessary epistemological response. When that response happens the ethical has always already occurred. “As soon as we learn to read, we cannot not read whatever is presented to us to read, but for Kleist all reading is an unjustified imposition, not a triumphant seeing of what is really there” (VP, 139). We must lie to ourselves to make sense of Kleist’s story.

5. “I” Take Responsibility in Reading What becomes of the “I” in the act of reading is, as Miller says, another ethical question. It is a question because the reading “I” is changed in the transaction. How this happens can be explained by referring to what happens when Stephen Daedalus ponders his conscience (“agenbite of inwit”) in Ulysses: “Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound” (Joyce 1992, 242). Here is a problem we might readily apply to the reader of Kleist’s stories and to Miller’s reading of Kant’s categorical imperative in The Ethics of Reading, Versions of Pygmalion, and Literature as Conduct.

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In this passage Stephen is contemplating a debt he owes George Russell, who writes under the pseudonym “AE.” Joyce’s joke of course is “A.E.I.O.U.” His question, suggested to him by a conversation in the National Library, is whether identity is a perdurable monad or a Heraclitian flux. How can we think of an “I” over time? Stephen asks himself. And what does responsibility mean if that “I” changes? Does the aleatory aspect of time exonerate me from my debt? The classic example of a felicitous performative utterance for J.L. Austin, we recall, is an expression in the first person present tense: “I promise,” “I assert,” “I deny.” These utterances are thought of in terms of a unified ego speaking in the present tense, expressing itself with deliberate intention, with full consciousness of what it is doing with words. Austin believes that the whole moral fabric of a civil society depends on being able to hold people accountable for what they say. “We must have some justified way to hold people to their promises, to put people in jail for perjury, for breach of promise, or for bigamy, or for welshing on a bet, and so on” (SA, 58). Kant in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is doing something similar when he speaks of the categorical imperative depending on the way that I ought never to act except in such a way that I would want my actions to become a universal law. For both Austin and Kant ethics depends on not making lying promises, an example Kant uses in the Groundwork (LC, 171; ER, 30–33). I must be held responsible before the law for what I say and do with words, even if what I thought I was doing was for the good. I said it and that’s that. I’m responsible. Joyce employs a wonderfully ambiguous paragrammatical formulation to complicate how we can think of a promise made in this way. Stephen says “I, I and I. I.” The formulation is a question of prosopopoeia, suggesting, allegorically, the reader’s role in this process of positing an identity that remains constant through time. The comma in the first series indicates concatenation, sequence, or progression. The period or full stop in the second series indicates difference, uniqueness, separation. This strange formulation relays the reader to the idea of a groundless responsibility to a law that cannot be known, and to a moment that must be reconstructed retroactively. The reconstruction of this moment is Stephen’s responsibility. Joyce is jokingly telling us that he must put II and II together in order to come up with his debt to himself and to A.E, a recreation of the initial performative speech act—the promise—which carries over to the time of responsible recollection and the moment of affirmative action in order to be legitimized. “The narrative ‘I’ [always] frightens the Law,” by being “at once allegorical and tautological,” says Derrida (Derrida 1992e, 206; 212).

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An I is never fully present to itself. It is always already divided: “I, I, and I. I.”5 The narrative “I” is iterable, different in different contexts, changing through time, disseminated, divided, and dispersed. The I that makes the promise is not the same I that recounts. “As a result, consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and intention unequivocally identifiable by the hearers, or promisees, are effects of iterability, rather than the other way around. As Austin well recognized, and as Derrida also knows, the whole juridico-political system depends on believing the opposite, on having the opposite fully institionalized and operative” (SA, 84). The I frightens the law because it is not the same I, nonetheless I must be held responsible for it and for what it has promised. To answer Miller’s question, “In what sense does the question of causality always involve the question of justice?” we could say that justice always involves a reimagining of the I in a series of other “I”s (VP, 129). Obligation intrinsically involves the reconstruction of a causal chain of events, which as Joyce shows is an implicit narrative. Whose “I” do we hold accountable for Elvira’s collapse and death in “Der Findling?” Is it Nicolo, Colino, or Elvira herself? After Nicolo becomes Colino, whose “I” are we following through the text? Has Nicolo become Paolo, the ghost of their dead son, for Elvira and Antonio Piachi? The rhetorical figure Miller uses to discuss moments in narrative when there are such logical failures of following is anacoluthon. The anacoluthon is an abrupt breach in the line, as when in Proust’s recherche Albertine shifts pronouns intermittently in mid-sentence (RN, 149; OL, 65). This points to a grammatical contradiction breaking through the sequentiality of the narrative line and alerts us to the way the story is probably a lie. It makes the line a lie, a non sequitur. “So inveterate is the penchant of the mind toward making a story, a narrative line that hangs together and makes a single sense, that it will make coherence out of the most incoherent of data” (RN, 153). Things become distinctly problematic when in “Der Findling” the narrative “he” starts referring to several people at once. This is what Miller has referred to, in his most important formulation of this condition, as the alogical: The condition of our sanity is our ability to tell lies to ourselves, to create splendid fictions of narrative coherence out of data that are not connected story lines [Notice Miller’s play here on storylines!], but dispersed and heterogeneous fragments. . . . The alogical is a precarious unity supported by no base in the logos in either of its chief senses, neither by reason, nor by a mind that remains continuous with itself over time. The alogical, however, always contains within itself the traces of its miscellaneous origin, for example in one form or another of anacoluthon. These traces are, one might say,

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a train of gunpowder that may cause the sequence to blow up if a single spark is applied. This liability shows that the sequence is no coherent line, but a series of juxtaposed points glued together by the power of a lie. (RN, 156)

Our innate penchant for making storylines out of segments of incoherent data is necessary for us to remain responsible citizens for Austin and Kant. Nevertheless, as Kleist and Joyce tell us, it is only through the power of a lie, a lying promise, that the promise can be felicitously performed. All promises are lying promises because they point to a future anterior about which it is impossible to know anything for certain. Our obligations to what we have said and done in the past are held together through the power of our memories. Our memories are subject to the mind’s reluctance, perhaps inability, to regard what is “lying there plainly visible”: “faced with the choice of disbelieving one of two senses, his eyes or his ears, [Nicolo] naturally inclined to evidence that was more flattering to his desires” (280).

6. Justice as Irresponse to Law In the particularly Kafkaesque moment of the finale of “Der Findling” Piachi is led out to the gallows and expected to be penitent for the priest, who can then absolve him from his sins. He has been found guilty of murdering Nicolo. But he refuses absolution, claiming that he wishes to follow Nicolo into hell to continue his vengeance on him there. The Pope is requested to make a decision. This request is a double bind, Kleist tells us, because Papal law states that an execution cannot be carried out on the remorseless. While the State can condemn a man to death, only God can condemn him to hell. Nonetheless, the law that demands the evil be punished for their crimes against both God and the State necessitates the choice. The Pope will eventually sanction the execution, but we are left feeling that that decision is peculiarly unjustified, a gross inconsistency with Christian dogma. Thus, what Derrida refers to as an “experience of the impossible.” The experience of having to choose between antinomies, according to Derrida in “Force of Law” and elsewhere, refers us to an aporia (a dead end or “no-through” road) which emphasizes an unfathomable tension between a moral law and an ethical moment. This is the moment in which adhering to a general moral law means deviating from our responsibility of seeing that moment as also an excessive encounter with alterity,

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singularity or otherness. “This,” in Derrida’s words, “is ethics as ‘irresponsibilization,’ as an insoluble and paradoxical contradiction between responsibility in general and absolute responsibility.”6 For Derrida absolute responsibility is not a responsibility as such. It is not something we can ever really think of. We cannot, therefore, even refer to it as a concept. Absolute responsibility, like the responsibility Abraham has to his God on Mount Moriah when he holds his knife up over his son, Isaac, remains silent, in the internal, unknowable, unimaginable recesses of the heart. I say “his God” here because his responsibility is singularly responsive to what is wholly other. Abraham’s responsibility, his me voici (here I am) to God, remains with him alone, an absolute and unrepresentable bond to some other. Abraham’s responsibility is therefore not a general responsibility. It is in fact irresponsible to a moral law in general. Absolute responsibility is always irresponsible to general moral law. Justice irritates the law. J.L. Austin says something very peculiar that makes what Derrida is saying here about responsibility even more difficult to accept. For Austin the judge’s decision makes the law: “As official acts, a judge’s ruling makes the law; a jury’s finding makes a felon” (Austin 1975, 154; SA, 57). It is the function of the law to remain general and transparent, out in the open for all of us to see. We therefore normally think of the lawyer “applying” the law through rote and protocol. Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, is often depicted in statues adorning law courts blindfolded, representing the way justice and the law are blind, impartial, and evenhanded, that courts mete out justice objectively. What Austin says, on the contrary, suggests that courts are places where laws are invented and discharged in such a way that those laws are altered, modified, or transformed by performative speech acts. The law is blind in more ways than one. If performative speech acts are radically at odds with cognition, as Miller, Derrida and de Man, each in their own way, hypothesize, then when the judge makes the judgment he fundamentally rewrites the law. In another essay on Kleist and the question of justice in Topographies, Miller asserts that the story of Michael Kohlhass exemplifies a contradiction in acts of lawmaking. In order for a verdict to work it must appeal to precedent, to established and institutionalized laws. It must also be legitimated and enforced by an authority that is agreed upon and socially endorsed. The story of Michael Kohlhass is a story about laying down new laws, about Michael’s Rechtgefühl or sense of justice. That sense of justice is “more than a little ominous,” Miller tells us. “It does not name a willingness to obey external law but a scrupulous inner measuring scale by which Kohlhass evaluates on his own the justice or injustice of what someone

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does” (T, 87). The paradox is that in order to be effective in changing the law, it must become apart of the law, “authorized from the past and institutionalized for the future, it is no longer novel, unheard-of, original, heterogeneous to what already has been legislated” (T, 97). “Michael Kohlhass,” like “Der Findling,” tells us in an allegorical fashion that doing justice in reading means being caught between a general responsibility and an absolute irresponsibility to the law of the text. This is precisely what Miller is alluding to when he says: Those who perform such acts [of reading and doing] must take responsibility for these effects, though they are the result of a series of misreadings for which those who do them are not, in one sense of the word, responsible, since they could not do otherwise. But ignorance of the law is no excuse, nor is the knowledge that we cannot help breaking the law. Nor can we be exculpated by saying “I did not mean to do it,” though Kleist’s stories show us that the results of prosopopoetic misreading can be, literally, lethal. We did it, and must take responsibility for our deed. (VP, 140)

This paradoxical formulation is a responsibility for one’s actions even though those actions are the result of a blindness, a naivety, or a failure to read all the signs before making a choice and acting on it—a failure of course which is necessitated by the event of misreading itself. And this misreading is unavoidable since we cannot not read whatever is presented to us to read. We cannot help but create a narrative out of the pieces that we have, the pieces that are necessary for a verdict to be reached—always across a gap of nonknowledge. It is not fortuitous that a judge’s decision in a courtroom is often, vicariously or otherwise, referred to as a finding.

7. Finding • Out “The fault of premature closure,” says Miller, “is intrinsic to criticism” (FR, 51). Criticism yearns for the univocal explanation, the ur-narrative, to be the last in a series of repetitions. But to be fair to Miller before closing, to do him justice and respond responsibly, I must be honest and admit an unwillingness to follow him. “It is the reading, not the finding, that does the damage” in “Der Findling” for Miller (VP, 121). He makes a distinction there that I am not willing to make. What happens when I read Kleist will not allow me to do that. Why is this? Why am I not willing to make a distinction between finding and reading? Up until now I have been speaking of finding as an active and a passive process, of something apropos of an aleatory event or unlikely happenstance

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and also an active searching. The term I suggested was central to the thematics of Kleist’s story and to Miller’s reading of it. Furthermore, I suggested that the law of misreading Miller notices in “Der Findling” is a result of finding what is desired, occasioned, and produced in and through the act of reading. In other words, reading, as Miller and Kleist are saying, is both an activity and an occurrence, something that must and does happen in a curiously contradictory way by being free and not free: we are free to read whatever we want into a text, just as Nicolo does, but that reading will and always does have consequences for which we must ultimately be held responsible. In short, the text never says: “This is the right way to read me!” We must make that judgment, in the end, alone. This is why I cannot make the distinction. Finding is what happens in reading and I find I just can’t separate the two. I would call this an impossible decision. Derrida is helpful here in seeing why this is the case. The rhetorical heritage of “finding” is astonishingly complex and diffuse, so much so that Derrida’s influential essay “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” following Cicero’s distinction of inventio (as finding) and dispositio (as placing), goes to great lengths to tease out its meanings. The essay is also a wonderful example of how Derrida’s own inventiveness in reading is also a performance of what he is speaking about. “What is invention? What does it do?” he asks, It finds something for the first time. And the ambiguity lies in the word “find.” To find is to invent when the experience of finding takes place for the first time. An event without precedent whose novelty may be either that of the (invented) thing found . . . or else the act and not the object of “finding” or “discovering” . . .. But in both cases, from both points of view (object or act), invention does not create an existence or a world as a set of existents, it does not have the theological meaning of a veritable creation of existence ex nihilo. It discovers for the first time, it unveils what was already found there, or produces what, as tekhnè, was not already found there but is still not created, in the strong sense of the word, is only put together, starting with a stock of existing and available elements, in a given configuration.7

How can you find something for the first time? To find something commonly implies that you were looking for that something. For instance, when you find your car keys on the kitchen table. Derrida complicates the sense in which we also use the word to suggest not only a discovery (a placing) but an event of invention. Invention in the sense he gives it here is always to some extent a finding of what was already there, a realization about what has previously gone unnoticed. It’s a discovery (inventio) and a placing (dispositio). To show this he divests invention of its theological

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conations as creation out of nothing: God’s inaugural act of creating the world out of the formless void in Genesis. Finding as reinvention and discovery (always iterable, repeatable) of what was already possible but not noticeable until the creative event displaced the normal “mind-set” or “statute,” creates a doubling that inaugurates by being indivisible—it is both new and not new. “This double movement harbours the singularity and novelty without which there would be no invention.” This doubling also generates an openness, as Derrida suggests, to a future and a coming (the play on the terms à-venir to come and l’avenir the future which are root meanings of the Latin word inventio), an openness which is not so much a calling to others but an opening of a possibility toward which others may or may not come. Inventions open up the way for these others to come, they do not produce them—the passivity is essential. An invention of the wholly other, Derrida will also say, is impossible. The wholly other, what calls us in acts of good reading or deconstruction, cannot be reduced to the status of the same, institutionalized, calculated, translated. Miller says this in his reading of “Psyche” in Others: “The invention of the wholly other would be a noncalculable, aleatory irruption or interruption, the chance and appearance of the truly monstrous or unheard of” (O, 272). Absolute otherness is therefore something that is directly unknowable, like a black hole, so it can only be prepared for by way of a responsiveness to an event of finding (both passive and active), an expectation of a coming that is always yet to come. A close reading of “Der Findling” is one way of finding this out for yourself. The response to this call is what Miller’s reading of “Der Findling” is performing by emphasizing the trope of prosopopoeia as a process of finding a face for the absent, of inventing catachrestically a term or set of terms that will reach out and momentarily afford us a glimpse [Augenblick] of an otherness across a vertiginous or abyssal gap of reading. That reading is a displacement and a substitution as well as a discovery of something that can never be simply reduced to the same. Indeed, the major crime of “Der Findling” is this reduction of the incomprehensible to the assimilable, to the familiar or the local—the invention of the other as an assimilable identity or causal construction. It is a series of violent impositional positings of proper names where there are no names—a Babel of Yahwehs perhaps. It is also the confusion between this inaugural performative speech act and the materiality of the world of things, the confusion, as Paul de Man says of all ideologies, of taking a linguistic for a material reality. The foundling then, the object of this invention, is both displaced in Kleist’s story and invented (to whatever degree) by the author, the characters, and the readers. This is Kleist’s brilliance. It is the thing found and the

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thing invented; both passively happened upon and actively created. Discovered and invented. It is therefore also the truth and the lie of Kleist’s text, of Miller’s reading of it and my reading of Miller’s reading; each being a separate creation and a separate discovery. “Strange things happen,” according to Carol Jacobs in her review of Versions of Pygmalion, “when one reads a book that insists there is no reading without deviation” (Jacobs 1992, 150). Therefore, this reading and Jacobs’, it goes without saying, is always going to be a deviation, but how far and where this deviation takes us is the key question and the responsibility of the reader, teacher, or critic who performs this act of reading, in the end, alone. Even though, to echo Kafka’s famous line, there is no way, only wandering (TPP, ix). “We reason rashly and at random, says Timaeus in Plato, because our judgements, like ourselves, have in them a large element of chance” (Montaigne 1985, 130). Mnemosyne, like Psyche, Hermes, and Eros, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. The point is to find this again for the first time every time in each act of reading and of teaching. Though, of course, reading cannot be taught. I just have to do it and accept the consequences of my actions.

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Conclusion: Teaching Reading Nescit vox missa reverti1 Horace, Ars Poetica

Lest I be accused of willful obscurity, I return to the final statement of my last chapter. What do I mean when I say that reading cannot be taught? This is a very large claim indeed, especially since it appears as the penultimate line of a book concerning possibilities of reading, and in which I have been arguing in different ways about how acts of reading ought to be performed. What concerns me when I read Miller’s works is a certain experience of what it might be to learn to read. “Learning” to read means learning to be alone in one’s reading, to be surprised by what one finds there for the first time, every time. This is why what Miller calls “good reading” remains always an impossible possibility, something extra- or supra-institutional. It is something that simply cannot be taught or passed on. It is also why you will not find a method of reading in Miller’s works, something you can take home with you, warm up in the microwave, or apply somewhere else later on. What you get is a taste for good reading, slow, patient, responsible responses to literary, philosophical, sociological, political, historical, psychological, theological, even anthropological texts, responses to what happens in the experience of interpretation to undo preconception and prejudice. In his last interview with Le Monde in 2004, just 2 months before his death, Derrida spoke of what it would mean to learn to live, finally: But to learn to live, to learn it from oneself and by oneself, all alone, to teach oneself to live (“I would like to learn to live finally”), is that not impossible for a living being? Is it not what logic itself forbids? To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death. And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is ethics itself: to learn to live—alone, from oneself, by oneself. Life does not know how to live otherwise. And does one ever do anything else but to learn to live, alone, from oneself, by oneself? (Derrida 2006, xvii)

What Derrida means by this “heterodidactics,” I take it, is that teaching is never a one-way street, an Einbahnstraße, as Miller would call it (TNT, 305). It cannot be given in that way. What we ordinarily call “the gift of learning”

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is not something one is given, provided with from some authoritative source. And it is not something one can give. To live is to learn. It is not something one actively takes up. Neither is it something one can fully appropriate from another source outside of oneself. I cannot learn to live from someone else. I am alone in learning. And yet I can only learn from some(thing) other. Teaching is haunted in that way. It is both outside of experience and experience itself. The word “didactics” means “the art or science of teaching.” A “heterodidactics” would be other to this science, the other of science perhaps, even an anadidactics to recall Miller’s terminology (RN, 49). To be alone in learning is a strange way to think about what happens in the university. Ordinarily we think of the university as a place where people get together to learn together, a place where a community of thinkers argue about and sometimes even agree upon ideas and methodologies. But for Miller, as it is in Derrida, this is not exactly the case, at least not in literature departments. When good reading occurs, something happens to question the possibility of a community of readers, of the very idea of a community of readers, and therefore the university itself. If you conscientiously and rigorously follow the protocols of reading espoused by the university system to the letter, says Miller, if you really try to follow your teaching as far as it will take you and be the best reader your teachers could possibly imagine you to be, something odd will happen: In a strange way, Derrida moved counter to the institutions to which he belonged by fulfilling to the letter the protocols of interpretation he had been taught by those institutions themselves, by Guéroult, Hyppolite, and others of his teachers, for example. Something of the same sort, to compare the lesser with the greater, can be said of my own movement from American New Criticism to the rhetorical criticism I now practice. I just did what the New Critics told me to do: “Read closely. Ask questions of the text: Just why is this or that feature there? What is its function? What does it do? Do not say anything that cannot be supported by the actual words on the page.” Strange things happen when you do that conscientiously and with as open a mind as possible. In Derrida’s case, the age-old assumption that a great philosopher’s works form a system, plus the exhortation to micrological reading, led him to try to fit everything in. Behold! He found that you cannot do that. (Miller 2007a, 283)

Miller will go on to call what Derrida does, in a “Southernism” or “Faulknerism,” “refraining,” “the violent gesture made by a horse when it rears back, rolls its eyes, arches its neck, and resists being put in a truck or corral” (284). On the one hand, the argument goes, Derrida’s work follows to the letter the teachings he received as a student at the École Normale,

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that is, a rigorously microscopic or philological reading for which an extraordinary respect has never diminished. On the other hand, there is a movement away from the institutions he has been associated with, a renunciation of the concept of community in favor of a kind of hyper-solipsism. This refraining says: “I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world” (Stevens 1990, 75). Derrida is therefore “enisled,” stranded like Robinson Crusoe, alone, an island unto himself.2 But something of the same thing I claim can be said for Miller. Though not exactly like Derrida’s, Miller’s work is also a paradoxical style of reading that is at once rigorously faithful and unfaithful to its roots. As we’ve seen, there is no absolute turn away from New Criticism and Phenomenology in his writings, merely a reading of those traditions. His work, his ethics of reading (good reading as such), gains its unique force and singularity from a responsibility to an event that is forever unforeseeable. This is why it doesn’t prescribe. It doesn’t tell you how to read. Its response is to a demand from something known as, or better, unknowably known as, the wholly other: My obligation to respond without mediation to the wholly other means I must refrain from responding to any institution’s demands. I must respond rather to an infinite demand for justice, as opposed to right or law. This call comes from no existing institution or counter institution. While taking account of the context in which I find myself, my response enters the context to change it in response to a call from the future, the to-come, “l’à-venir”. Derrida calls this “un messianisme sans religion, un messianique, même, sans messianisme” (“a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism”), and a fidelity to the “democracy to come”. (Miller 2007a, 292)

Absolute surprise is a good way to speak of what happens when good reading comes about. I say “comes about” because it is simply unexpected in that way. It just comes. But in order for it to come there must be some preparation, and that is where the difficulties lie. It requires the most open and inventive mind for a responsibly responsive reading to happen. And Miller’s preparations are by no means the same as Derrida’s or de Man’s, nor, therefore, are the results. Reading, real reading, not just the idle passing of words through the mind’s eye, is a quintessentially difficult task; it takes an inventive skill and a subtle temperament to try to account for as much as it is humanly possible to account for in any given work. Like the judge in a courtroom, all the evidence must be weighed up meticulously in order for a responsible verdict to be reached. But the final moment of that verdict, when the decision is actually made is outside of the law.3 Something else comes about to remake the law at that moment, to change it. Otherwise the decision is not a just decision but a calculation,

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an application of a rule and therefore uninventive and irresponsible to the singularity of the situation: “The judge or the maker of a moral decision must respect the rules, (e.g. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ one of the Ten Commandments [Exod. 20.12]), but at the same time he or she must respect the singularity of a situation that never fits the rules. . . . It is impossible to decide between these two equally compelling obligations. The conflict is undecidable, though in a given situation one must decide.”4 The response to this event of the wholly other is always a singular occurrence and will be different for everyone. This is, as I’ve been arguing, what is splendidly allusive about that word “just.” One can never say, “I am just.” One can only ever say, “I will try to be just.” Justice is always deferred, always something to look forward to. I look forward to it when I read and it will always surprise me when I can think, momentarily, that my reading has done some kind of justice to a word or a paragraph I’ve been reading. When that moment happens, out of the blue, so to speak, it happens as an absolute surprise. Miller’s work is continually surprising in its inventiveness and openness to what I perceive to be a constant search for just reading. It is continuously surprising because it scrupulously abstains from the kind of dogmatic slumber so easily and unconsciously entered into in an institutional setting. Reading is a risky business, if it is reading at all, with the ever-present possibility of one’s own deepest assumptions being radically and unalterably changed in the process. If this is not the case then reading just isn’t happening. What Miller calls the “excess of reading” is another way toward understanding this precarious situation and why I am arguing that reading cannot be taught. “The phrase ‘excess of reading,’” says Miller, “names the way reading exceeds initial theoretical presuppositions, the use of literary works as examples of a conceptual argument, and any attempt to encompass a work by its historical or cultural contexts. Each work gives knowledge (or nonknowledge—an experience of the limits of knowledge) that is singular and unique, attainable in no other way. If this were not the case, if the work could be completely accounted for by its context, then there would be no reason beyond aesthetic titillation to go to all the hard work necessary to read it” (BH, 487). Another way of reading the “of” in the phrase, Miller continues, is by seeing the phrase as a descriptor of something else that exceeds the act of reading itself: “It deploys the phrase to designate the ‘elusive something’ that is the motivation of reading, its forever unattainable horizon. I have called that elusive ‘centre on the horizon’ the realm of the wholly others. This realm is always in excess of reading” (BH, 487). That excess is what is named in the impossibility of reading or the impossibility of reading “reading” or teaching reading. If reading is always in excess of itself then a teacher cannot pass it on as a practical skill to a student.

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How to learn to live finally? What would it mean if I plugged “read” into this already incomprehensible phrase? “How to learn to read finally?” What Miller teaches us about reading is certainly not how to read finally. It is more like something in the reverse mode perhaps. “How”(?) not to learn to read finally. How to go on reading, impossibly, respectfully, responsibly, alert to the excessive demand made by the otherness of the texts one reads. To learn to read is an impossible demand. We can never do it. One is always alone in reading. One learns reading by oneself, for oneself, all alone. One is also changed by the experience and can never therefore say “I” have learned to read. Reading displaces the “I,” making it something other to itself in its encounter with otherness: “Reading, when it happens, like other encounters, remakes, though perhaps in an almost imperceptible way, the self and all its institutional, interpersonal, social, and political contexts. This is our chance. To that chance I give the name: the university of dissensus to come” (BH, 493). And it is the ghost of a chance. What is Miller’s teaching then? What have I learnt enough of about Miller in order to conclude a book on the subject of reading and of reading Miller reading? How can I justify my learning how to read? Alas, I have found that I am no closer to a final reading. What I can say, unequivocally, is that I have not learned to read finally. Reading is without finality. It cannot be taught. Teaching, also, can only be “Thought,” to use Bill Readings’s wonderful word, otherwise it isn’t teaching. This is Miller’s teaching without teaching. Go and read for yourself, really read, closely, attentively, responsibly. You’re on your own. And you will find that you will have to start all over again tomorrow. This is part of the conduct of life. The strange institution called literature is precisely strange because a final reading cannot encompass it. It goes on, dreaming of a future, opening the future to the other, to a democracy to come, to a radical dissensus of readers. Good reading opens up a chance that the other might come, that others may come to change the situation, open up minds, create new readings, change our deepest assumptions and desires. Reading, real reading, is a radical openness to something unpredictable. It is the most hospitable pursuit because it welcomes what it possibly could not know is coming. Miller’s teaching is therefore, I claim, like Zarathustra’s great Yea-saying, what Nietzsche called his greatest gift to mankind: Now I go alone, my disciples! You, too, go now, alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you. The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends.

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One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil [Man vergilt einem Lehrer schlecht, wenn man immer nur der Schüler bleibt]. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you! [Hütet euch, dass euch nicht eine Bildsäule erschlage!]. You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers—but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me [Ihr hattet euch noch nicht gesucht: da fandet ihr mich]. Thus do all believers; therefore faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves [mich verlieren un euch finden]; and only when you have denied me will I return to you. (Nietzsche 1969b, 220)5

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Coda Interview: For the Reader-to-Come ED: Can I ask you to begin this dialogue from where we left off speaking in Portsmouth?1 What do you mean when, in your reading of Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” in The Linguistic Moment and in the interview in Theory Now and Then, you say “I think my reading of Yeats’s poem is right, that all right-thinking people will come, given enough time, to my reading?” (TNT, 196; LM, xx). Can the act of reading “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” when it stumbles helplessly upon those last few enigmatic lines, when it comes face-to-face with that “it,” the linguistic moment as you call it, be polarized into right and wrong? Can we still speak of the proper or improper reading? JHM: There was a certain degree of irony in what I said. I’ve found that ironic statements I make are often, understandably, likely to be misunderstood. My statement, however, like most ironies, was a double irony. What I said was in hyperbolic response to the widespread false assumption in those days that we so-called deconstructionists say there is no correct reading of a text, meaning that you can make it mean anything you like. On the one hand, I did mean that what I said about Yeats’s poem seemed to me right, correct, a proper and responsible response to the demand the poem makes on me to be read. I gave it my allegiance, and that meant believing, hyperbolically, that “all right-thinking people will come, given enough time, to my reading.” Just because I had to say something about that enigmatic “it” doesn’t mean what I said was not “right” and “proper,” even though what I said was face-to-face with something wholly other and I had to express that confrontation as best I could. You might even say that it was “just because” I had to express as best I could an encounter with enigma, the “it,” the other, that my reading was right and proper. On the other hand, of course I am not so naive as really to believe that a consensus of right-thinking people as to the right and proper reading of Yeats’s poem is likely to happen. That was the other side of the irony. People will always find something more or different to say about the poem, including me myself, but at that moment I really thought I “had it right,” and I wanted to tell my interviewer that. My reading had my full, unreserved, and “excessive” allegiance, otherwise I would not have written it and published it.

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ED: Staying with Yeats for the moment, your reading of “The Cold Heaven” in Others (2001) is an obvious return to this question of the demand or obligation the work makes on you to read it closely, rationalize it, or explain what happens when it is read. You say in several places that you are, and have always been, haunted by this “sense” of a radical otherness in literary works. What strikes me as an overriding concern in this essay is your attention to the urgency of this obligation, the imperative to respond fully to what comes almost as an accident. The word “befalls” in the opening line emphasizes this impromptu event; and your subsequent discussion of the conflicting temporalities of the first word of the poem, “Suddenly,” attempts to explicate this surprise even further still, showing that any attempt to still this movement for the sake of hermeneutical closure will ultimately be in vain. Yet there is a sense here, as I find in much of your work, that this sudden incoming or shock encounter with the other, or rather others, is a kind of mixed blessing since this event also destroys that cold comfort of presupposition or expectation. In which case the act of reading, if indeed it is an active reading and an event of discovery and insight, undoes each time the authority of the university to teach “good” reading. Each surprised encounter seems to me to question what has gone before it, the entire edifice that has brought it to that point. It should therefore follow that each act of “good” reading creates a renewed idea of what an active reading should or ought to be. I take it that this is what you mean in your previous answer by “just because?” Could you also perhaps say something more on the subject of this demand from the other, and what kind of “justice” we owe to the event of good reading when it happens? I hope these questions do not seem overly speculative, but I am interested in the “sense” of what you have been saying in many of your readings. And how the joy of reading is also somehow a painful experience. I’m thinking here also of the ambiguity you have pointed out in the word Derrida often uses: “passion” (SA, 158). JHM: Interesting questions. The fact is that I feel elation and intellectual excitement when being “addressed” by a poem like “The Cold Heaven,” not anxiety, and, as I said earlier, I don’t worry much about whether or not I’ll reach “hermeneutical closure.” I go as far as I can with a given reading, with the experience of doors opening or insights occurring, going further and further, in a direction only that poem can take me, as I try to write down what I think I understand. It’s more passion as intellectual excitement than passion as suffering. Not much suffering in it for me. I don’t care much, either, that each new reading destroys the whole edifice of university teaching. That edifice can take care of itself. It doesn’t really do that anyway, since one of my obligations, at least in the US, is to see things in a given

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text that no one has seen before, so I’m even rewarded for that, if others think what I claim to have seen is really there. Yes, it is accidental, the poem just happens to fall under your eye, but it feels like a happy accident, and you make the best of what befalls you. The obligation is a happy one, to do the best justice to the poem you can by saying the most you can for it in the hope that you might transmit something of the poem to others. As you can see, I’m essentially a cheerful person, like the hero of Mad Magazine: “What, me worry?” I append a piece I wrote for a China conference this past summer and will use to kick off a seminar in Louvain in a couple of weeks.2 You might conceivably find it interesting. As you can see, I really like the Stevens poem. Like “The Cold Heaven,” reading it sends shivers up and down my spine and makes my hair stand on end. I know there is more in either poem than I shall ever see or say, and I rejoice in that. It doesn’t make me anxious. “Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven / That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice.” “The steeple at Farmington / Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.” Wow! What more is there to say? ED: I recently came across the following passage from Opus Posthumous, in which Stevens rebukes Plato’s arid asceticism for what he refers to himself, rather enigmatically (maybe oxymoronically), as “poetic truth”: And the wonder and mystery of art, as indeed of religion in the last resort, is the revelation of something “wholly other” by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched. To know facts as facts in the ordinary way has, indeed, no particular power or worth. But a quickening of our awareness of the irrevocability by which a thing is what it is, has such power, and it is, I believe, the very soul of art. (Stevens 1966, 237)

Needless to say, Stevens’ expression “wholly other” is more than a little uncanny, a remarkable augury, perhaps, of what was to come from your own work and from Derrida’s. And yet, of course, the expression seems to be the only appropriate or justifiable one for that which is utterly unfathomable, unnameable, secret. It seems that this “wondrous” and “mysterious” alogic of which Stevens so eloquently speaks inhabits (if that is the correct word) the language of criticism itself. I think here of Paul de Man’s famous phrase in Allegories of Reading that the difference between criticism and literature is “delusive,” that there is a crossing-over between what happens in the texts we read, when we read them, and what happens in the languages we invent to describe the process (de Man 1979, 19). An example from your own work that suggests this to me is when you are speaking of Stevens in Poets of Reality you say, “Things as they are make up one side of the analogy [between reality and mental fictions], but the poet’s ‘sense of

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the world’ is the other, and the life of poetry is the metamorphosis by which one is swallowed up by the other” (PR, 245). Is there a moment then in what you do in the act of reading and writing (reading/writing) in which you confront this obligation to respond responsibly by creatively rereading and rewriting the texts you read? Do you feel, that is, that Stevens’s critics are being called upon to reinvent the “sense” of that world, that they should know (sense) and not know (sense) this secret simultaneously? Would you say that the fascination you have with the poetry of Stevens and others is the very openness of this secret, an impossible possibility? JHM: The citation from Stevens’ Opus Posthumous is really interesting. I had forgotten that he uses Jacques Derrida’s phrase, the “wholly other.” Come to think of it, I suppose some resonance between them on this point exists, and both, in different ways, have phenomenology as background and context. In answer to your question: yes, I suppose I try to make my own words as much in tune with the writer’s words as possible, but, in my case at least, this “re-reading and re-writing” also means elucidating, making clearer, finding out the reasons for a whole repertoire of procedures designed to bring to light and clarify. The danger, of course, is that the critic loses what you call the “secret” in the process of knowing or sensing. Stevens says “Poetry should resist the intelligence almost successfully,” but he may mean that it loses its status as poetry when it fails to resist the intelligence. De Man was of course right (he is always right) to say there is no difference between literature and criticism, but still I don’t ever feel that I am writing poetry. If I could, I would. Nevertheless, the critic is like Stevens in feeling that he or she has never quite “got it right,” and therefore I go on trying, just as he went on writing poetry. To “get it right” would be to bring the secret out into the open completely, and that is, happily, impossible, as you say. Always more to write about any given work. ED: Your response to this subject of the secret, a bit like the Reverend Hooper’s (if he has one?), brings us nicely, I think, on to my next question. I was wondering if you could say a few words concerning free indirect discourse and irony? This is a topic that I have found to be a commanding presence throughout your work. From The Form of Victorian Fiction to your most recent essays—and perhaps even from your own PhD thesis, where a singular attention to the language of Oliver Twist brings you to an awareness of surprising linguistic and thematic discrepancies—you have been interested in the relationship between the two. You have also spoken of the relationship between FID and irony at some length in Reading Narrative, where you refer to irony as “the pervasive trope of narrative”

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and of citation being a form of incitation. Could you perhaps say something about the importance of developing an awareness of irony in literary study? I’m also conscious of the overlap here between the mode of indirect discourse in my own citations of your work and the nature of the interview. Perhaps there is something to be said about this too? JHM: I don’t have much of anything to say about indirect discourse and irony beyond what I have already said in various places.3 Both interest me, though in different ways. I’ve always been, from the beginning of my literary study, fascinated by places where straightforward univocal meaning, paraphrasable thematic meaning, is complicated by formal or linguistic complications in literary texts, for example, figures of speech. Indirect discourse is a good example, since it is so conspicuous a feature of novelistic conventions, and is so powerful in its ability to present two, not necessarily compatible, points of view at once, that of the character (mimed by the narrator in the third person past tense, whereas it would have been first person present tense when it happened for the character) and that of the narrator, whose miming ironically undercuts the character’s language just by repeating it in another register, as a student mocks his or her professor by repeating exactly, with hardly a curl of the lip, what the professor has said. Indirect discourse both gives the reader wonderful access to what the character was saying or thinking, perhaps something that expresses a prevailing gender, class, race, or social ideology, and at the same time gives the reader a critical distance from that ideological feeling or conviction. Since indirect discourse is “undecidable,” like irony itself, in the sense that you cannot be sure whether it is the character’s language or the narrator’s language (though you can guess), indirect discourse shares the suspension characteristic of irony. Is the narrator really making fun of the character, or repeating what he or she said with full approval and allegiance? You can never be sure. An awareness of irony is therefore necessary for good reading, in order to avoid premature and unjustified certainty in a univocal reading, but a gift for irony is not evenly distributed in the population, even in the population of literature students. Some otherwise smart people have a deaf ear for irony. I’m not sure how you can cure that. It may be incurable, the incurable itself, but, as Friedrich Schlegel observed, those who think they have mastered irony are the most likely to be caught by it. So watch out! You are right to say that your citations of my work are an example of this possible irony. How can I, or anyone, know whether you wholeheartedly approve of what I say or are curling your lip as you write down my exact words?

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ED: In your discussion of Heinrich von Kleist in Versions of Pygmalion (1990), you say that acts of reading and teaching are elements in a series of acts of violence. Following Kleist’s essay “On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking,” and Paul de Man’s reference to it in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, you say “The text read by the teacher was itself originally an act of violent linguistic imposition, a case of the fabrication of thoughts while speaking or writing. This must be forgotten by the teacher, who reads the text as a discourse of achieved semantic and referential meaning” (VP, 114). You say thereafter that acts of teaching are “political” in the full, radical sense of that word. That there is a blindness in the performative act of relaying this reading in a class to a group of students who may or may not be influenced, and who may or may not be influenced in a benign manner. As you recall de Man saying at a Yale seminar in your Speech Acts in Literature (2001), “You aim at a bear and some innocent bird falls out of the sky” (144). Could you say a little more about this “violence” in reading and teaching—perhaps in your own experience of it? Also, how can a teacher be responsible and/or responsive (or) “just” with the foreknowledge of this necessary predicament? JHM: I suppose I meant “violence” in the Benjaminian sense of “Gewalt,” not the same thing as knocking a man down, but an exercise of free sovereignty. That is, neither writer nor teacher can really justify what they say by reference to some achieved truth, so what they write or say is at least metaphorically sovereign in the sense of being outside the law or received opinion, or whatever. Another way to put this is to say that writing or teaching has a performative as well as constative dimension. It is a feature of performatives that they make something happen, but something that can never be exactly predicted beforehand. You aim at a bear and an innocent bird falls out of the sky. As a teacher, I have an obligation or responsibility to tell it like I think it is, that is, to read whatever text I am teaching as best I can and not hide anything. Sometimes, however, a few times in my own experience, the teacher has the feeling that perhaps it would have been just as well for this or that student, for one reason or another, not to have read a given work nor to have heard me say my say about. I remember an adult woman in an evening college class of mine years ago who was, so it seemed to me, unreasonably upset by Mrs Dalloway. For most undergraduates, that novel is a piece of cake, but she was really troubled by it, and I guess also by what I was saying about it, though that seemed to me tame enough, not intended to be “violent.” I suppose that makes teaching “political” in the sense that it has unforeseen political effects, even on the way people vote, even though the teacher hasn’t said anything overtly about politics.

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ED: For the past few weeks, I have been thinking about and reading Hawthorne’s tales and notebooks alongside your work Hawthorne and History (1991). I have also been reading up on your debate with D.A. Miller in the pages of ADE Bulletin and your comments in PMLA (vol. 103, 1988) regarding what you say in your “Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory, The Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base” concerning history, reading, example, and the material base. At all points, you refer to Paul de Man’s writings in one way or another as a crucial point of origin for your ideas in these areas. You also suggest that the topic of the material base will need to be rethought, reexamined and reworked time and again in the future—a suggestion I take to mean that the thinking of the material base will be a way of opening questions about lived-experience and the inaugural performance of acts of reading as they occur in time. So, at the risk of quoting out of context, I cite a few lines from your “Presidential Address” in the hope that you might say a little more about what you mean by the material base and how it has influenced your thinking of history: “The uncriticized notion of the material base is ideological through and through. It is part of Western metaphysics or of logocentrism. It is the specular reflection of idealism, not something outside it” (TNT, 322); “We know the material only through names or other signs” (323). I have also noticed that you compare and contrast Derrida’s le tout autre with de Man’s “rhetoricity” in your recent article “Derrida’s Remains” (Miller 2006b, 39.3), where you say that Derrida’s thought has always been focused on what is “beyond language.” In Literature as Conduct you say something similar of the later de Man: that his thought of the “nonphenomenal materiality of language” is perhaps another name for what Derrida calls “the wholly other” (11). Could you say something about how your own thinking of the performative inaugurality of the act of reading has been influenced by both writers? What is different about it? And what do you mean when you say in Hawthorne and History that in reading history “the ‘I’ becomes a linguistic function in a process that occurs of its own accord and is authorized by no independent witnessing ‘I’?” (126). JHM: It’s not easy to answer these questions in a few lines. I hold, with de Man and Derrida, that the commonsense idea of the material is ideological through and through. What that means is suggested in answers Derrida gave in the question and answer session after his lecture at the famous Hopkins conference of 1966. A certain now forgotten phenomenological critic, from New York (I believe), one Serge Doubrovsky, reproached him for not recognizing the authority of intentionality and perception (terms important for Merleau-Ponty and Husserl). Derrida replied, “Now I don’t

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know what perception is and I don’t believe that anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept, the concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. . . . I don’t believe that there is any perception.”4 I still remember thinking that was an amazing claim. No such thing as perception! Wow! How could that be? I think Derrida meant by this two things: (1) that so-called perception of material things is always contaminated by language, not something pre-linguistic; it’s a “concept,” hence (2) since perception is a concept, it is part of the whole ideological system of assumptions or concepts that makes up what we call logocentrism or Western metaphysics. If you buy perception you are buying into the whole shebang. I have said my say about de Man’s “materialism without matter” in my essay in Material Events.5 You can say that I agree with de Man and Derrida on materiality, have learned to think about it as a problem not a predetermined solution from them, and from Marx. Yes, Derrida and de Man converge without quite converging in that both have notions of something “beyond language,” for Derrida the “wholly other,” for de Man those three curious notions of materiality I discuss in the essay mentioned above. They are by no means saying quite the same thing, however. In certain areas one cannot have both de Man and Derrida at once. Il faut choisir. Certainly what I say about the performative singularity of reading is influenced by both writers, but perhaps I put what they say about singularity and about performatives together in my own way. What I say is simple enough. Every reading is singular in the sense of being carried out by a single person in unique circumstances. Who could deny that? Though you (I) should be respectful and cognizant of the whole tradition of readings of a given poem, novel, or philosophical text, nevertheless you (I) have the feeling of being on your (my) own when trying to figure out what to say about a given text in an essay or a class. I also have characteristically the experience of finding that a given poem, novel, philosophical treatise is surprising in the sense of not seeming to mean what the tradition says it means. My reading (anybody’s reading) is performative in the strict sense that it is a way of doing something with words, for example, affecting my students or readers in one way or another by what I say or write, often in unexpected and even dismaying ways, as is the nature or performatives. If you could predict exactly the effect it would not be a performative. Speech acts exceed cognition. I want of course to say just what the text means, with exact accuracy, but in the course of trying to do this I necessarily go beyond the text. Empson’s pastoral book is a good example.6 No one had said just that

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about Alice in Wonderland, but it seems right when you read it. Austin says the judge’s ruling makes the law, in the sense of deciding how to read the text of the law and in the sense of deciding, never with preordained certainty, that a particular law (necessarily general) fits this particular case in a certain way. In a somewhat similar fashion, the critic’s reading makes the meaning of the given text. ED: I’ve just been reading your latest essay in Critical Inquiry, “Derrida Enisled,” in which you tackle the questions of community and alterity in the writings of Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida, among others. In this essay you make a distinction between a Levinasian face-to-face encounter and what Derrida would refer to as the demand made on him by the “wholly other.” Indeed, you stress that one way of thinking of the difference between the two thinkers would be to see that the demand goes in an “opposite direction” for each—“I invoke the other” for Levinas and “the other demands that I respond” for Derrida (258–259). In a recent interview with Constanza del Rio Álvaro and Francisco Collado Rodríguez in The European English Messenger, you say that you are somewhat at odds with Derrida’s notion of the demand from the wholly other because it implies that there is some “little voice” making that demand. You say that you have the feeling that you are “on your own” in decision making and therefore distance yourself from Levinas and Derrida on this point—no God, no voice. Could you say a little more about this experience of singularity in decision making which differentiates or “enisles” your own work? JHM: No great mystery about this. I have great sympathy for the Derridean idea that the “wholly other” makes a demand on me. In that interview I confessed that I don’t ever experience that call from the “wholly other,” to my shame. I don’t hear the “still small voice.” My receiver must be on the wrong frequency. That doesn’t mean that the call (from God or some other form of “the wholly other”) is not being made, just that I don’t hear it. Maybe some day the call will get through. I’m waiting. I’m aware that my deafness may be just stubborn obduracy. You will note that my language is Protestant. The result of my deafness is that I feel pretty much on my own in making decisions, though I make them as “responsibly” as I can, but I agree with Derrida that a true decision is not preprogramed, or else it would be automatic, not a decision at all. I also agree with him that a decision is a break in the continuity of time and history. ED: You have said quite a bit about your decision to study literature in your interview with Julian Wolfreys in The J. Hillis Miller Reader, and

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you have also spoken quite a bit about how you came to study Burke and Poulet in other places. As my own decision to study your work was a direct result of finding a literary critic willing (and able) to discuss Nietzsche as a literary critic, could you perhaps say a little regarding the influence Nietzsche has had over your thinking? JHM: I started reading Nietzsche more or less by accident when I was an undergraduate at Oberlin College, either Zarathustra or Birth of Tragedy, I can’t remember which. I read him initially, I guess, because he was there to be read, probably without much comprehension. I’ve been reading him off and on ever since. The Will to Power and On the Genealogy of Morals were a big influence, but I’ve read most of the other writings too, including of course “Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense.” His rhetorical theory and practice are of most importance to me, his theory of tropes, his sense of the role of language in ethical judgment (Genealogy), politics, and history, so de Man and Derrida on Nietzsche were helpful to me in getting at his work. ED: In his Ethical Criticism Robert Eaglestone makes the following criticisms of your ethics of reading: Miller’s own text, then, has offered a deconstruction of the “ethics” in The Ethics of Reading on two grounds. First, from “within” Miller’s own text, the repression of history served only to highlight and so to “return” the historically grounded nature of language. This has revealed how Miller has chosen the limits of the field of his argument to draw out his own conclusions. Second, Miller has implicitly denied his own leitmotif in The Ethics of Reading by always assuming that “ethics” exists in a certain relation to language which may not be the case—as a result he offers a weak and seemingly insubstantial understanding of “ethics.” This “weak” understanding of ethics is highlighted in Critchley, as pedagogic and specifically American, and by Harpham and Norris as simply unethical, turning ethical concerns into simply a way of reading.7

What would be your response to those critics who speak of your ethics of reading as on the one hand anti- or ahistorical, and, on the other, as a kind of New New Criticism that disengages from ontological questions in favor of linguistic ones? JHM: Any theory of ethics is likely to be controversial, especially if it is of the sort I have proposed. It is likely to bring out unethical self-righteousness, condescension, and distortion. People feel threatened. My critics seem to forget that I was in The Ethics of Reading talking about what the title named, namely the question of whether any sort of ethical obligation is involved in the act of reading, a specific and limited topic. That’s not the

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same thing as the question of my ethical responsibility to my neighbor, though I think it is just denegation to try to deny that language is involved in both cases, but in a different way in each. Language is involved in everything human beings do. I should have thought that was a truism by now, I don’t quite understand what Eaglestone (whoever he may be) means by the repression of history. Does he mean I should have seen moral codes as historically determined, that is, as relative, ungrounded except in the ideological assumptions of a certain time, place, class, gender, race, or that I needed to say that Kant’s ethical theory came somewhat before the Battle of Waterloo, or what? I believe, on the contrary, that each genuine ethical decision and act is historical. It enters the surrounding historical context to change it, in however small a way. It leaves things different from what they were. It is a historical event, but it is by no means fully determined by that surrounding historical context. My ethical theory is historical through and through. An example would be Sethe’s spontaneous decision to try to kill all her children so they won’t be taken back into slavery, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I certainly do not turn “ethical concerns into simply a way of reading.” That is an unethical distortion of what I have said, if I may dare to say so. The opposition, in my view, is between a view of ethical decision as the mechanical application of a rule (“You shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s wife, or his ox, or his ass, therefore I had better avoid doing that in this case”), and on the other hand, true ethical decision, which is always a unique response to a unique demand made on me by a unique, singular person (or, in a different way, a unique book). J.L. Austin says the judge’s decision makes the law, meaning that it is never possible to make a mechanical application of the law, since the judge, at the very least, has to make an autonomous, in a sense forever unjustified, decision that this particular case fits a given law. My response to the ethical demand another makes on me is like that. ED: I find your readings of Nietzsche’s use of aphorism to be particularly helpful for my reading of your recent work.8 I say “recent work” here in terms of the issues presented in Zero Plus One and “Z” in Julian Wolfreys’ Glossalalia, but the question of the zero or zero point brings back to me “instances” in The Linguistic Moment and Ariadne’s Thread where you speak of performative catachresis and anastomosis: I think, that is, of Ottilie in Goethe’s Die Walverwandtschaften undoing the ground of Aristotle’s metaphorical ratio (AT, 213), or of Wallace Stevens’ Abgrund in “The Rock” (LM, 419). Would you say that in some sense both of these terms (catachresis and anastomosis) figure in different ways in your earlier work what you are more recently calling the relationship between zero and one?

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In terms of tempo, you speak of Nietzsche’s writings as a musical gesture, a strange crossover between a combination of signs and physical states, an odd combination, if I read you rightly, that undoes the oppositions between literal and metaphorical language by calling the reader’s attention to “Bild” (image) and “Gleichnis” (likeness, parable). How important, in light of your reading of Nietzsche’s stylistic virtuosity, is the literary critic’s sense of rhythm? And can this be learned or is it innate or instinctual? JHM: I hadn’t thought of the connection, but I guess you are right that the zero/one relation is another version of catachresis and anastomosis. I’ve always been obsessed with the various ways you can figure the unfigurable and unnamable, so I keep coming back to different versions of that, I would hope with increasing wisdom and insight, though I’m not at all confident that is the case. It would be a mistake, however, to see all these motifs as different versions of the “same thing.” Each terminology has its own structure and laws, things you can say only using those terms. I do think rhythm and tempo are important, though hard to talk about intelligibly, but one feels it, as for example the difference between Nancy’s elliptical terseness and obsessive repetition with slight variation of the same phrases, on the one hand, and Derrida’s expansive inexhaustibly inventive developments—a wonderful two hour seminar I once heard on the phrase “je t’aime,” for example—on the other.9 Yes, you are right that something strange happens to the literal/metaphorical distinction by way of the double meanings of “Geichnis” and “Bild” in German. Also a good example of difficulties in translation, since neither English nor French have quite an equivalent word play, just as “Körper” and “Leib” don’t mean quite the same things as “corps” and “chair,” or as “body” and “corpse,” as Derrida himself points out in Le toucher, a book I find wonderful but exceedingly difficult. ED: Though you say that it is difficult to speak intelligibly about the topic of rhythm and tempo, I would like, if I could, to try to push this question in two slightly different directions, which may end up being similar after all. First, in your discussion of Kleist in Versions of Pygmalion you speak of “an encrypted anacoluthon” (111), indicating the residual traces of fissures, caesuras, and “antithythmical” inventions that have led to the completed “period” or grammatical construct. The paradox is, as you point out, that the rhythmic interludes, intonations, punctuations have at once everything to do with the semantic content and nothing to do with it (VP, 110). Could you perhaps say a little more about what you mean by this?

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Secondly, I had the privilege of hearing your paper on touching at Leeds University last week, in which you play provocatively with the notion of “hand” as “style.” You say here, if I have transcribed you rightly, that “style is meaning” and the various meanings of Derrida’s work on Nancy are a kind of “ceaseless walk from metonymy to metonymy,” exemplified in his lists of “quasi-synonymous” terms for touching. Derrida’s book is therefore marked by “perpetual, frustrated, incompleteness.” What interests me here is this tactful term, “quasi-synonymous” and the attention to style as inseparable from meaning. What is the connection, for you, between touching and catachresis? JHM: Gosh, did I really speak of an “encrypted anacoluthon?” I don’t have the essay at hand in this house, so I must guess what I meant. An anacoluthon is “a failure in following,” such as a subject that doesn’t agree with its verb. I suppose I meant that the invention of thoughts while speaking may look like it’s perfectly coherent, but since you didn’t know what you were going to say when you started speaking and make it up as you go along, what looks like a coherent and grammatical sentence is actually the result of a discontinuous series of “inventions” that only hang together after the fact, in appearance. Something like that. I meant by “ceaseless walk from metonymy to metonymy” that each of the terms is only adjacent to that vacant, unnamable center. I might better have said “from catachresis to catachresis,” but Derrida does not use the word catachresis, whereas he does say metonymy. Well, style is meaning in the obvious sense that Derrida means it when he says Nancy may appear to be saying the same thing conceptually as Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, but is actually saying something quite different from them because he has his own inimitable philosophical style. Like Derrida, and unlike Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (at least to the same degree), Nancy is acutely aware of the limitations of language and of the roots within words, so he is constantly playing with these, as in the double meaning of partage. No two words in those lists say the same thing. Each has a different root and different semantic associations, so they look like synonyms but are not really synonyms. “Style,” in the sense of the choice of one word rather than another that looks like it says the same thing, therefore determines meaning. Since there is no “the” touch, since you can never touch touch, no word for touch is adequate to it. It ain’t namable. It is a vacant center, so any name for it is necessarily a catachresis. ED: In Literature as Conduct you speak of “a desire for infinite freedom and disponsibility.” “Once you have committed yourself,” you say, to a

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certain action, “there is no returning to your disponsibility, your unused freedom and what was, in a sense, your irresponsibility” (77). I find this word “disponsibility” intriguing. What do you mean precisely by disponsibility? Can anyone really ever be said to be or have been disponsible? JHM: “Disponibility” is a somewhat ironic reference to the use of this word by the existentialists, especially Sartre. He had a radical theory of freedom, believing, as I do not, that nothing could alienate a radical “disponibilité,” so that if I join the communist party (his example) I have to commit myself again to it every time I wake up in the morning. I agree with you that one is born committed, for example to a certain race and sex, certain parents etc., so one is never really disponsible, pace Sartre. Nevertheless, I have some measure of freedom, for example, to make promises, to commit myself to a marriage, for example. These commitments are speech acts (unknown as such to Sartre, so far as I remember). They put me where I was not before, however, namely in a position of needing to be true or false to the commitments I have now made. Sartre is no longer disponsible. He cannot renege on his commitment to the Party without betrayal, whereas before he was free to join or not. For me, Meredith’s figure of crossing the Rubicon, in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, is the paradigmatic expression of this loss of freedom.10 I suppose I meant that we all might desire infinite freedom and disponsibility, but can never ever have it. Derrida’s notion of irresponsibility (that we cannot be true to all the responsibilities we have, that we cannot feed all the cats) complicates what I have just said about ethical life quite a bit. ED: “The Aspern Papers” seems to me to be an especially suitable allusion to the kind of reading I am currently engaged in with your work, and, of course, this interview. I think here of a statement in the Preface to the New York Edition that strikes me as particularly correct: “The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take” (James 1947, 162). James as you know refers here to the “odd law” that the “suggestion” serves the artist better than the “maxim,” and is relieved that he did not have to make the decision of whether or not to make contact with Jane Clairmont: “I had luckily not had to deal with the difficult option” (161). The consequences of his not having to make the decision are accordingly inspirational, compelling, provocative. But the gesture here, it seems to me at least, is not toward the relief of not having to deal with an excess of historical information so much as an acknowledgment that the artist is forced to be irresponsible with these “bare facts,” that whether or not he is in possession of them the reader/writer must be willing to accept

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the consequences for having “turned” the “matter,” or for having “done things” with it. Something similar is striking in Derrida’s response to your work in Without Alibi, where he says that in order to do justice to your work he must propose to you “the most demanding interpretation” (165), he must put the figure of the anacoluthon (like an acolyte who gives the slip) to work. Would you say that “The Aspern Papers” can be read as an amplified expression of the necessary irresponsibility or injustice of the active reader’s response to another’s work? Is a just reading in some sense (perhaps this is even too macabre?) a violation of a tomb? I suppose, in a way, I’m thinking here of a responsibility to the archive by way of a writing (perhaps re-vision) of another’s work and a bearing testimony to it. Would I be right in saying that in the recent papers on Derrida’s work, “Derrida’s Remains,” “Derrida Enisled,” etc., you are constantly aware of your responsibility to a memory of a person as well as an obligation to the future of that person’s work? How does one deal with this conflict? JHM: Yes, reading is the violation of a tomb, all right. Like what John says at the very end of the Bible: Cursed be the one who adds one bit or takes away one bit (John says it more dramatically), but of course active reading is bound to do both of those things.11 My essays on Jacques Derrida more or less self-consciously add and take away. They are my way of trying to “work through” my mourning at his death, by way of some irreverent serious frivolity, no doubt an unsuccessful attempt, since I think Derrida is right to say mourning and melancholy cannot be wholly distinguished. My Derrida essays are oriented toward the future of his work by way of their implicit and explicit claim that the way to read him is page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word, and with close attention to words, like “reste,” that recur. That is the way of reading he advises (and practices) in Le toucher: “micrological reading.” ED: You’ll be aware that my questions thus far have steered clear of the biographical. I’ve noticed that I’ve been able to get quite a lot of background from the interviews with Moynihan, Olson, and Wolfreys.12 But seeing as I’m researching a book on your work, I would very much like to know a little more about your own research experience. You’ve said quite a bit about it already in the Wolfreys interview, but I should like to revisit that point here in the event that other researchers might read this book in future years. Here’s a quotation from your doctoral thesis: “relating an author’s life and his work should be, in my opinion, subsidiary to understanding his

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work as a series of individual works of art. A good novel should have life and meaning of its own independent of its author” (DSI, xix).13 I therefore ask with some trepidation how your early interest in Kenneth Burke and Georges Poulet influenced your work at this stage? JHM: Yes, the biographical is boring, certainly so in the case of my quite pedestrian life. My dissertation was written when I was greatly influenced by Burke’s writings. It was an attempt to use Burke’s idea of “symbolic action” in readings of some Dickens novels, though I was also influenced by work by other scholars on recurrent metaphors, for example, in Shakespeare. This took some courage or, actually, some innocence, since the director of my dissertation, Douglas Bush, more or less detested Burke (because he uses the editorial “we” and other stylistic infelicities, according to Bush, but it was really because he was a “theorist,” a Freudian, a Marxist, etc., etc.). Bush read my huge two-volume dissertation in one weekend and had one comment: I think you should use “that” sometimes instead of “which.” He must have somehow liked it, since he recommended me for the job at Hopkins, but I certainly never learned that from anything he said. At the time I wrote my dissertation I did not know Poulet’s work at all. That came later, at Hopkins, by an accidental encounter with the first of his essays translated into English, when I was rewriting the dissertation as a book (really starting all over from the beginning; the dissertation and the book are radically different in theme and procedure). I taught myself to be able to read French seriously in order to read Poulet, Sartre, and Valéry. The Dickens book is much influenced by my reading of Poulet in the early 1950s and by my close friendship with him when he was a colleague at Hopkins, before he left around 1958 or so for Zürich. I especially admired and tried to emulate Poulet’s succinctness and his “dialectical” movement, in an essay, from stage to stage toward some neat conclusion. My reading of Poulet sort of put Burke in the shade for the moment, though my turn to Derrida in the late 1960s was in a way a return to Burke. I still think Poulet is a terrific critic, though I am no longer a “critic of consciousness,” as you have probably noticed. Poulet and I and another colleague, a deep-dyed New Critic named Earl Wasserman, used to have lunch together at the Hopkins Faculty Club at least once a week and argue endlessly about literature and how to write about it. Those lunches were my real education. Ah, those were the days! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!14 ED: You have remained throughout your career remarkably prolific; do you have a working routine?

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JHM: Complex and somewhat tedious story, since my writing practice has been different at different times. My dissertation (two big volumes never published) was written, with invaluable stylistic help from my wife of 3 years, and with a new baby in the apartment, in about 6 months, I have no idea how. Then at Hopkins it took me 5 or 6 years to write my first book, entirely different from the dissertation. I remember wondering, in some despair, if it would ever get finished. The next two books were written in Europe with the leisure provided by a Guggenheim, and another Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship later on helped with later books. When I got to Yale, I was so busy with various small administrative duties (chair of English, director of the Literature Major, director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature) that I set up a regimen of getting up at 5 and working until 8, keeping a notebook even when I wasn’t actively writing an essay or book. Sometimes sort of like playing scales for a pianist. After that my day was given to chairing and teaching. My deliberate model was Anthony Trollope, who wrote his 47 novels that way, while a Post Office employee (not all that different from chairing a big fractious department). I still recommend that practice of writing something every day to my graduate students as the way to get a dissertation done. Write something every day, even if it is just a line or two. Writing is a form of thinking, a way to discover or articulate ideas you did not know you had. Your fingers on the keyboard or grasping the pen seem almost to think for you. Inarticulate, wordless, ideas are just that, airy nothings. I still have the 15 or 20 notebooks, with entries written all over the world, in airports, on planes, in Australia on a lecture tour, early in the morning at home in Bethany, Connecticut, etc. While still at Yale I shifted straight from handwriting to the computer and still keep, though not so compulsively, a digital notebook with dated entries. At Irvine I had more time and managed to write and publish a lot of books, though they all came out of graduate teaching there. Other books from that Irvine teaching still remain in draft form. Now in more or less retirement in Maine I have been able to continue being productive, with less distraction, still writing mostly in the morning. I still try out my ideas in an annual “mini-seminar” at Irvine and of course at all those conferences and in those lectures. I’ve done all this writing because I really enjoy doing it. It is my vocation, along with teaching. I should stress that most of my books and essays, almost from the beginning, have come out of teaching, both undergraduate and graduate teaching, as well as a series of summer seminars for college teachers through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the School of Criticism and Theory. My hapless students have

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been guinea pigs over the years for work I’ve been doing. No better way to see whether or not a reading of some work or other, or a theoretical trajectory, will fly or should sink without a trace. ED: Do you have any advice for critics of your work? In other words, do you have an image of a reader-to-come? JHM: I have no confidence that my work will go on being read, though of course I hope it will. Who knows? I have been lucky in having lots of readers of many different sorts over the years all over the world, mostly generous and good readers. I am immensely touched by an experience I have had fairly often. Young persons (or perhaps not so young nowadays) come up to me after a lecture or at a conference, or send me emails, to say that they want me to know they read some essay or book of mine when they were undergraduates or graduate students or young teachers and that this has strongly influenced their own thinking about literature ever since. What could be nicer! Especially nice is the accidental quality of these events. They just happened on my work or some teacher assigned some essay or book. My own discoveries of Burke, or Poulet, or Derrida happened that way, fortuitously. That serendipitous reader is the readerto-come I hope I go on having. My advice to critics of my work is to pretend they know nothing about received opinion concerning my work but to read it as if they were that undergraduate who just happened to come upon it.

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Notes Preface 1. For an insightful essay on this topic see also “How About a Game of Tennis?” by Megan Becker-Leckrone in The J. Hillis Miller Reader ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 289–294.

Chapter 1 1. All quotations from the “Preface to ‘The Aspern Papers’” and from the prefaces to James’s other works are from Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), pp. 159–179. I am also using the Penguin Classics edition of The Aspern Papers (London: Penguin, 1986) published together in one volume with The Turn of the Screw. The editors of this volume have reproduced James’s extensively revised version of the story for the New York Edition appearing in 1907–1909. 2. See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). All further quotations from Austin are from this edition. 3. What has interested Miller in this is the way that Austin’s theories repeat the crime that they condemn. See, for example, On Literature: “That Austin a few pages later welshes on his commitment and makes sincerity a condition of a felicitous performative is a major crux or contradiction in his speech act theory. He has to have it both ways, but of course he cannot logically have it both ways,” p. 112. 4. I am thinking of “conduct” here and elsewhere as a noun and a verb. In doing this I am repeating a question concerning the relationship between conduct as a character definition (“your conduct”) and as a medium (“literature conducts us to a virtual world”) which is being toyed with throughout Literature as Conduct. In one of its chief senses, the word recalls the notion of prosopopoeia, the inaugural trope of reading, by insinuating that all reading is a form of conduct in the manner in which we raise the dead or in the way we are conducted to their shadowy world beyond our own. We are carried over, translated, teleported or conducted to a new dimension. This process is reciprocal since we are in effect invaded by it also. Prosopopoeia, the conjurer’s trope, is also the conjuring trope. 5. J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Ethics of ‘Irresponsibilization’; or, How to Get Irresponsible, in Two Easy Lessons,” p. 4. I thank J. Hillis Miller for generously sending me a copy of this article, delivered at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore on September 30, 2006. A revised version appears as chapter 9 of For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 6. See Gary Olson’s “Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Critical Theory: A Conversation with J. Hillis Miller” in JAC, vol. 14.2, 1994.

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7. Jacques Derrida, “Justices” in Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come ed. Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundžic´ (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 228–261. 8. I will return to this remarkable passage in Derrida’s work for a fuller discussion of how this thinking of the secret appears in Miller’s writings in a later chapter. The passage is practically inexhaustible in its resonance and deserves a much fuller account than I can give it here.

Chapter 2 1. Miller is first referred to as “a critical rhapsodist” in a review article of The Disappearance of God by Kenneth Allott in Review of English Studies, vol. 16.61 (February 1965), p. 64. 2. J. Hillis Miller, “Humanistic Discourse and the Others,” Roundtable Discussion, Surfaces, vol. 4 (1994), pp. 5–41. The roundtable can be downloaded on: www.pum.montreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/miller_1.html (June 22, 2009). 3. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 20. Further citations will be to this edition. 4. I’m extremely grateful to Sarah Dillon for her book on palimpsests, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007), and for her insightful conversational remarks that have helped me think through some important issues on the subject. 5. See Miller’s Preface to the 2000 paperback edition of The Disappearance of God where he speaks of having read through the entire Masson edition of the collected works in Florence. He also, importantly, discusses here the three “enabling fictions” which allowed him to write the work: (1) the assumption of a unified selfhood or consciousness; (2) the positing of a point of departure and a dialectical sequence; (3) the presupposition of a zeitgeist. See also the preface to the 1975 edition for a wonderful discussion on the uniqueness of the act of reading and a defense of a Pouletian strain of identification. 6. For two essays concerned specifically with questions of rhythm and tone in De Quincey’s “Dream-Fugue” see Calvin S. Brown, Jr. “The Musical Structure of De Quincey’s ‘Dream-Fugue’,” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 24.3 (July 1938), pp. 341–350; and Richard H. Byrns “De Quincey’s Revisions in the ‘Dream-Fugue’ ” in PMLA, vol. 77.1 (March 1962), pp. 97–101.

Chapter 3 1. In discussing this line in his essay “The Concept of Irony,” a transcription from an audiotape of a lecture de Man gave at Ohio State University on April 4, 1977, he says: “You will never understand—so we can stop right here and all go home.” See Aesthetic Ideology ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 164–184.

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2. See Friedrich Schlegel’s “Über die Unverständlichkeit” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 32–44. Her translation of the title of this essay is “On Incomprehensibility.” For the German version see Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften (München: Carl Hanser, 1964), pp. 530–542. 3. See Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 51–59. 4. For what are amongst the most damning criticisms of Miller’s work see Daniel Schwarz’s The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller, especially chapter 10, “The Fictional Theories of J. Hillis Miller: Humanism, Phenomenology, and Deconstruction in The Form of Victorian Fiction and Fiction and Repetition,” and Jonathan Loesberg’s “From Victorian Consciousness to an Ethics of Reading: The Criticism of J. Hillis Miller” in Victorian Studies, Fall 1993. See also Miller’s response to Loesberg in the same issue. 5. Anthony Trollope, The Warden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 83. 6. In “The Concept of Irony” de Man accuses Wayne Booth in A Rhetoric of Irony of being “eminently sensible” in this regard. For de Man “Irony in itself opens up doubts as soon as its possibility enters our heads, and there is no inherent reason for discontinuing the process of doubt at any point short of infinity,” p. 166. Another reason why speaking critically of irony is dangerous. Once you start, you never quite know when to stop. 7. See Miller’s response to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan “A Guest in the House” in Poetics Today, vol. 2.1b (1980), pp. 189–191; and Kenan’s “Deconstructive Reflections on Deconstruction: In Reply to Hillis Miller,” pp. 185–188, in the same issue; and the paper that started their uncanny discourse “The Figure in the Carpet” Poetics Today, vol. 1.3 (Spring 1980), pp. 107–118. 8. “Terminologisation” is Mark Currie’s playfully sardonic word in Postmodern Narrative Theory (London: Macmillan, 1998) for the kind of bizarre terminological coinages proliferating in narrative poetics. 9. For German version see Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964), p. 538.

Chapter 4 1. W.B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 429. All further references are to this edition. For “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” see pp. 428–433. 2. C.K. Stead. “Yeats the European” in Yeats the European ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smith, 1989), pp. 119–130. In an astonishing historical survey, Stead points to a series of anachronisms ignored in most major criticisms of the poem.

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3. See Patricia Parker, “Metaphor and Catachresis” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 60–73. Parker argues convincingly that the history of the distinction from Quintillian to Cicero up to and including Puttenham, Fontanier and Dumarsais relies heavily on the conception of metaphor as mere ornament and catachresis as necessity. For each theorist, the distinction, however, becomes untenable and catachresis, as in the praeteritio Johnson identifies, enters in as an uncanny other. In a fine sentence, she calls catachresis “the gothic underside of the mastery of metaphor, the uncanny other of its will to control.” 4. Wallace Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 288.

Chapter 5 1. “The god is veiled by his beauty: thus you hide your stars. You do not speak: thus you proclaim to me your wisdom.” 2. See Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics ed. Shaobo Xie and Fengzhen Wang (Calgary, AB: Calgary University Press, 2002), pp. 115–137. These are Miller’s opening words in the interview. “I feel like the ghost of Hamlet’s father charged to speak and account for myself.” 3. See the final line of “The Idea of Order at Key West” in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, p. 130, where Stevens uses the phrase “ghostlier demarcations.” The editors of a popular volume of responses to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx punningly entitled their volume Ghostly Demarcations. 4. All references to Shakespeare are to The Complete Works ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 5. All further references to Hawthorne’s short fiction are to Selected Tales and Sketches ed. Michael J. Colacurcio (London: Penguin, 1987). 6. Throughout this chapter all biblical references are to The King James Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002). 7. Doubtless, I will leave out some references, but apart from HH Miller has addressed the problems with reading parables at some length in TNT (pp. 277–291), TPP (pp. 135–150; 181–194), T (pp. 169–191; pp. 316–337), VP (pp. 23–81), O (pp. 65–82), AT (pp. 144–222), LM (pp. 3–58, pp. 423–433), FR (pp. 73–115), LC (pp. 84–150), VS (pp. 303–319), and “Teaching Middlemarch: Close Reading and Theory” in Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Middlemarch ed. Kathleen Blake (New York: MLA, 1990), pp. 51–63. For an essay dealing specifically with Miller’s reading of parables in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, see Julian Wolfreys’ Deconstruction • Derrida (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 159–181. 8. Readers interested in following up a lively argument between J. Hillis Miller and David Miller on the contexts of such readings should see ADE Bulletin 88 (Winter 1987): www.web2.ade.org/ade/bulletin/N088/toc/088toc.htm 9. See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 127. “It sometimes seems to me,” says Levinas, “that the whole of philosophy is

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only a meditation of Shakespeare,” quoted in Jeremy Tambling’s “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death’ ” in Essays in Criticism, vol. 54.4 (October 2004), p. 351.

Chapter 6 1. All references to “The Foundling” are to 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 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1952), pp. 213–230; for an online text see the Kleist archive on www.kleist.org/text/derfindling.pdf. 2. What is interesting about Kleist’s critique of Kant’s philosophy—especially the infamous “second analogy”—is the central topic in Kleist’s work, 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 Groundwork of the Metaphysic 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; also his “Aesthetic Ideology and the Ethics of Reading: Miller and de Man” in Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 102–124; and H.P. Rickman’s Philosophy in Literature (Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson, 1996), pp. 81–89. 3. J. Hillis Miller, “Who or What Decides: For Derrida; A Catastrophic Theory of Decision,” p. 12. I refer here to a manuscript version of an essay appearing in revised form as chapter 2 of For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 4. 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. 103.1 (January 1988), pp. 57–60 and PMLA, vol. 103.5 (October 1988), pp. 819–821. 5. For the wider implications of what is being said here, see Nicholas Royle’s “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

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account for what happens in the always already uncanny event of reading. “Point of view does not exist, any more than does omniscience.” The telepathy effect, Miller’s phrase, “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.” 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.” That Rushdie is so close to Joyce on this aspect is in itself uncanny, but the really spooky thing about what Royle says here concerns the experience of a self emptying itself out in reading, becoming other to itself in the experience of a telepathic projection of one mind into another. This mode of thinking has a vast and as yet really under-explored significance for what a responsibility in reading could mean. 6. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 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, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 339–364. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” in Reading de Man Reading ed. L. Waters and W. Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: 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.

Conclusion 1. A word once uttered is irrevocable. 2. See “Derrida Enisled” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 33 (Winter 2007), pp. 248–273. In speaking of what Derrida suggestively calls “auto-co-immunity,” Miller says “Every community strives to keep itself pure, safe, sacrosanct, uncontaminated by aliens. At the same time, every community is inhabited by a tendency to shoot itself in the foot, as we say, in the act of trying to shoot the invader,” p. 270. 3. See also Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature: “No justice is possible without the singularity of the case—and of the individual standing trial—being so affirmed (and only, it might be added, in similar acts of affirmation throughout daily existence can just or ethical social life prevail). To act morally toward other persons entails, it hardly needs saying, as full an attempt at understanding them and their situation as one is capable of; yet both the primary claim of

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another person upon one and the final measure of one’s behaviour lies in the response to, and affirmation of, the otherness which resists that understanding,” p. 129. 4. From “Who or What Decides: For Derrida; A Catastrophic Theory of Decision,” a paper delivered at the “Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics” conference at the University of Ghent on April 23, 2005. I thank J. Hillis Miller for kindly sending on a copy of this paper, which appears as chapter 2 of For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). The quote appears on p. 18 of For Derrida. 5. I refer to Walter Kaufman’s English translation of this section from Zarathustra which Nietzsche quotes in the Preface to Ecce Homo, p. 220. Here Nietzsche also says “Among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far . . . It is no fanatic that speaks here; this is not ‘preaching’; no faith is demanded here: from an infinite abundance of light and depth of happiness falls drop upon drop, word upon word: the tempo of these speeches is a tender adagio,” p. 219. For its appearance in the context of the original work in English translation see Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1969a), p. 103. For the German edition, see Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen in Nietzsche Werke IV ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1968), p. 97.

Coda: Interview: For the Reader-to-Come 1. I begin here by returning to a question I first put to Miller at the “CounterMovements: Institutions of Difference” conference at the University of Portsmouth on July 24, 2006. 2. I am grateful to J. Hillis Miller for sending on an essay entitled “A Defense of Literary Study in a Time of Globalization and the New Tele-Technologies.” Here Miller argues, via a subtle reading of virtuality and secrecy in Wallace Stevens’ poem “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” that literature’s performative force often reveals something “other” which cannot be so effortlessly achieved in other media. “I conclude,” he says here, “that what we call written literature has an almost unique and irreplaceable performative function in human culture, even in a time of globalisation and the increasing dominance of new teletechnologicoprestidigitizing media.” 3. See especially “Friedrich Schlegel: Catachresis for Chaos” in Others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 5–42; “Friedrich Schlegel and the Anti-Ekphrastic Tradition” in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today ed. Michael P. Clark (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 58–75; and “Indirect Discourse and Irony” in Reading Narrative (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 158–177. 4. See Jacques Derrida’s response to Serge Doubrovsky’s criticism of his “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

Man ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 272. J. Hillis Miller, “Paul de Man as Allergen” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 183–204. See William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 203–233. Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 82. See J. Hillis Miller “Aphorism as Instrument of Political Action in Nietzsche” in Parallax, vol. 10.3 (2004), pp. 70–82. Miller has discussed this example at some length in Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 134–139. See also his meditative responses to the question posed in Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel “How can I know when I am in love?” in Black Holes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 279–311 (alternately). The remarkable passage from George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Westminster: Archibold Constable, 1902) is as follows: “Although it blew hard when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the passage of that river is commonly calm; calm as Acheron. So long as he gets his fare, the ferryman does not need to be told whom he carries: he pulls with a will, and heroes may be over in half-an-hour. Only when they stand on the opposite bank, do they see what a leap they have taken. The shores they have relinquished shrink to an infinite remoteness. There they have dreamed: here they must act. There lie youth and irresolution: here manhood and purpose. They are veritably in another land: a moral Acheron divides their life. Their memories scarce seem their own! The Philosophical Geography (about to be published) observes that each man has, one time or other, a little Rubicon—a clear or a foul water to cross. It is asked him: ‘Wilt thou wed this Fate, and give up all behind thee?’ And ‘I will,’ firmly pronounced, speeds him over. The above-named manuscript authority informs us, that by far the greater number of caresses rolled by this heroic flood to its sister stream below, are those of fellows who have repented their pledge, and have tried to swim back to the bank they have blotted out. For though every man of us may be a hero for one fatal minute, very few remain so after a day’s march even: and who wonders that Madam Fate is indignant, and wears the features of the terrible Universal Fate to him? Fail before her, either in heart or in act, and lo, how the alluring loves in her visage wither and sicken to what it is modelled on! Be your Rubicon big or small, clear or foul, it is the same: you shall not return. On—or to Acheron!— I subscribe to that saying of The Pilgrim’s Scrip: ‘The danger of a little knowledge of things is disputable: but beware the little knowledge of one’s self!’” p. 232. See St. John of Patmos’ account of this dangerous supplement in the closing remarks of the Bible, Rev. 22.17–21. “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him

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the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” I am here using The King James Version for my quotation. 12. For interviews with Miller covering this ground see especially Robert Moynihan’s A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986), pp. 99–131; Imre Salusinszky Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 209–240; Julian Wolfreys, ed., The J. Hillis Miller Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 405–422; and Gary Olson’s “Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Critical Theory: A Conversation with J. Hillis Miller” in JAC, 14.2 (1992), pp. 317–345. 13. Miller’s thesis, Dickens’ Symbolic Imagery: A Study of Six Novels, was presented to the English Department at Harvard University on March 31, 1952. My copy, obtained from The British Library, is in three volumes and is 580 pages long. 14. The allusion here is to Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Book xi. l. 108 (1850 version): “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven.”

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Kleist, Heinrich von. “Der Findling” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Helmut Sembdner (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1952), pp. 213–230. ——. The Marquis of O and Other Stories trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (London: Penguin, 1978). ——. An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist, with a Selection of Essays and Anecdotes trans. Philip B. Miller (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1982). Kristeva, Julia. The Portable Kristeva, updated edition, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1986). Lawall, Sarah N. Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism (London: Methuen, 1980). Macksey, Richard and Eugenio Donato. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1970). McQuillan, Martin. Paul de Man (London: Routledge, 2002). Meredith, George. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Westminster: Archibold Constable, 1902). Miller, D.A. “The Administrator’s Black Veil: A Response to J. Hillis Miller” in ADE Bulletin, vol. 88 (Winter 1987), pp. 49–53. ——. “The Wrong Man: A Response to J. Hillis Miller’s Reply” in ADE Bulletin (Winter 1987), p. 58. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Figure in the Carpet” in Poetics Today vol. 1.3 (Spring 1980), pp. 107–118. ——. “A Guest in the House: Reply to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Reply” in Poetics Today, vol. 2.1b (Winter 1980–1981), pp. 189–191. ——. “Theory–Example–Reading–History” in ADE Bulletin (Winter 1987), pp. 42–48. ——. “Reply to David Miller” in ADE Bulletin (Winter 1987), pp. 54–57. ——. “Reply to Eugene Goodheart” in PMLA, vol. 103.5 (October 1988), pp. 820–821. ——. “Teaching Middlemarch: Close Reading and Theory” in Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Middlemarch ed. Kathleen Blake (New York: The Modern Languages Association of America, 1990), pp. 51–63. ——. “Response to Jonathan Loesberg” in Victorian Studies, vol. 37.1 (Fall 1993), pp. 123–128. ——. “Humanistic Discourses and the Others” in Surfaces, vol. 4 (1994), pp. 1–18. ——. “Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Critical Theory: A Conversation with J. Hillis Miller” with Gary Olson in JAC, vol. 14.2 (1994), pp. 317–345. ——. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers, Paperback Edition with New Preface (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000) ——. “Friedrich Schlegel and the Anti-Ekphrastic Tradition” in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today ed. Michael P. Clark (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 58–75. ——. “Paul de Man as Allergen” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and

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——. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park, IL: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968). ——. “On Incomprehensibility” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). ——. Philosophical Fragments trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota, 1991). Scholes, Robert. Protocols of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989a). ——. “The Pathos of Deconstruction” in Novel, vol. 22.2 (Winter 1989b), pp. 223–227. ——. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Schwarz, Daniel R. The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (London: Macmillan, 1986). Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (London: Macmillan, 1962). Stead, C.K. “Yeats the European” in Yeats the European ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smith, 1989). Stein, William Bysshe. “The Parable of the Antichrist in ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ ” in American Literature, vol. 27.3 (1955), pp. 386–392. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen ed. Melvyn New (London: Penguin, 1997). Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). ——. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990). Stoker, Bram. Dracula (London: Penguin, 1994). Tambling, Jeremy. “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death’ ” in Essays in Criticism, vol. 54.4 (October 2004), p. 351. Trollope, Anthony. The Warden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Wasserman, Earl. The Subtler Language, paperback edition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1968). Williams, Jennifer H. “Hillis’s Charity” in Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come ed. Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundžic¢ (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 64–79. Wolfreys, Julian., ed. The J. Hillis Miller Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). ——., ed. Glossalalia – An Alphabet of Critical Keywords (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). ——. Deconstruction • Derrida (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Wordsworth, William, The Prelude: or Growth of a Poet’s Mind ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959). Yeats, W.B. The Variorum Edition of the Poems ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966). Young, David. Troubled Mirror: A Study of Yeats’s The Tower (Iowa City, IA: Iowa University Press, 1987).

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Index Abraham 112 Abraham, Nicolas 13 anacoluthon 60, 107–8, 110–11, 134–5, 137 ananarratology 56 anastomosis 133–4 aporia in reading 16, 107–8, 111–12 Asensi, Manuel 26, 35–6 Attridge, Derek 76–7, 82–3, 146–7 n.3 Augustine, St. 80 Austin, J. L. 3–5, 7, 16, 19, 24–5, 37, 66, 109–10, 112, 131, 133, 141 n.3 Bach, Johann Sebastian 38–40 Bachelard, Gaston 36 Bakhtin, Mikhail 55 Baudelaire, Charles 34, 55–6 Benjamin, Walter 29, 128 Bennington, Geoffrey 20 Bersani, Leo 38 Blackadder (BBC series) 45 Blake, William 73 Blanchot, Maurice 18, 26 Bloom, Harold 78 borders 9–15, 27–8, 84–5, 117 Brontë, Charlotte 45 Brontë, Emily 35 Brower, Reuben 106–7 Brown, Calvin S. 41, 142 n.6 Browning, Robert 35 Burke, Kenneth 7, 18, 31, 132, 138, 140 Bush, Douglas 138 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 1 Caputo, John D. 97 catachresis 19, 29, 53–4, 67–8, 72, 77, 78–81, 91, 107–8, 115, 133–5, 144 n.3 Cicero 80, 114, 144 n.3 Clairmont, Jane 1, 136 Cohen, Tom 20 Critchley, Simon 132 criticism of consciousness 30–2, 35–8, 47–9, 138, 142 n.5 Curtius, Ernst Robert 36

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decision 4, 21, 78, 97–8, 111–14, 119–20, 131–3, 136 deconstruction 23, 32, 47, 68, 83, 100, 105, 115, 123, 132 De Man, Paul 16, 18, 28, 43, 45–7, 48, 80, 112, 115, 119, 129–30, 132, 142 n.1, 143 n.6 Aesthetic Ideology 47, 52–4 Allegories of Reading 46, 71, 93, 104–5, 125–6 Blindness and Insight 52 “Interview with Robert Moynihan” 46 The Resistance to Theory 29, 36, 105–7 The Rhetoric of Romanticism 71, 90–3, 128 “Spacecritics” 36–7 democracy to come 7, 19, 62, 80–1, 119, 121 De Quincey, Thomas 32–42, 43–5, 51, 54 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 33, 37–8, 41, 43–5 The English Mail-Coach 38–42 Suspiria de Profundis 34, 37 Derrida, Jacques 11, 16, 17, 18–19, 27, 31, 36, 48, 49, 53, 55–6, 60–1, 63, 79–80, 91, 111–12, 114–15, 124, 125–6, 129–31, 132, 134–8, 140, 146 n.6 “Before the Law” 109–10 “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event” 74 “Deconstruction and the Other” 79 “Force of Law” 100 “Fors” 13–14 The Gift of Death 24, 85 Given Time 7 “Justices” 32, 74 “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch Over Thinking” 146 n.6 “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties” 75

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158

Index

Derrida, Jacques (Contd’) “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering’” 21, 96–7 Positions 75–6 The Post Card 66 “Psyche: Invention of the Other” 114–16, 146 n.7 “The Strange Institution Called Literature” 76–7 Spectres of Marx 82–5, 117–18, 121 Writing and Difference 6 destinerrance 19, 23, 66–7 Dickens, Charles 5–6, 18, 30, 31, 32, 48, 126, 138, 149 n.13 Dillon, Sarah 38, 142 n.4 Donoghue, Denis 78, 89, 92 Doubrovsky, Serge 129–30, 147 n.4 Dryden, Edgar 87–8 Eaglestone, Robert 132–3 Eliot, George 17, 51–2 Empson, William 89, 130–1 free indirect discourse 49–50, 54–60, 126–7 fugue 36, 38–42 Genette, Gérard 55 ghost writing 82–3 Godwin (Shelley), Mary 1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 133 Guéroult, Martial 118 Hardy, Thomas 17, 18, 41–2 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 102, 132 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 86–7, 89, 93, 96, 98, 129 “The Minister’s Black Veil” 85–99 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 53–4 Heidegger, Martin 12, 64, 65, 93, 131, 146 n.7 Heraclitus 34 Hitchcock, Alfred 20 Hogg, James 82, 88 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 19 Horace 117 hospitality 24, 44–5, 81 Husserl, Edmund 129, 135 Hyppolite, Jean 118

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intention 4–6, 16–18, 21, 23, 47, 55–6, 97, 100, 109–10 invention 10, 13, 21, 60–2, 101–5, 113–16, 119–21, 134–5 irony 19, 43–62, 123, 126–7, 142 n.1, 143 n.6 irresponsibilization 7, 112, 146 n.6 Isaac 112 Iser, Wolfgang 31 iterability 110 Jacobs, Carol 116 James, Henry 1–4, 6–8, 10–12, 15, 17–20, 22, 24–5, 57–60, 65, 92, 136–7 The Aspern Papers 1–2, 6, 8–24, 136–7 Preface to The Golden Bowl 2–3 The Turn of the Screw 8, 92 What Maisie Knew 57–60, 65 The Wings of the Dove 10 James, William 3 Jeffares, A. Norman 78 John, St. 137, 148–9 n.11 Johnson, Barbara 66, 90, 91, 144 n.3 joy 80–1, 124–5, 139 Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist 28–9 Ulysses 6, 108–11 Kafka, Franz 83, 104, 116 Kant, Immanuel 4, 64, 100, 102–3, 108–11, 133, 145 n.2 Kermode, Frank 26, 78, 88, 94 Kierkegaard, Søren 43 Kleist, Heinrich von 100–5, 108, 111–15, 128, 134, 145 n.2 “The Foundling” 100–6, 108, 110–11, 113–16 “Michael Kohlhas” 112–13 Krieger, Murray 31 Kristeva, Julia 38–9 Kundera, Milan 45 Lawall, Sarah 30–1 Lentricchia, Frank 36–7 Levinas, Emmanuel 92, 94, 131–2, 144–5 n.9

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Index Lewis, Philip 82, 97 Lukács, Georg 48 Marx, Karl 130 McGuffin effect 20 Meredith, George 136, 148 n.10 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 129, 135 metonymy 24, 39, 59, 135 Miller, D. A. 129, 144 n.8 Miller, J. Hillis, works Ariadne’s Thread 133, 30, 56, 79, 133 Black Holes 53–4, 64, 68, 72–3, 78–80, 120–1 Charles Dickens 30–1 “Derrida and Literature” 63–4, 97 “Derrida Enisled” 118–19 “Derrida’s Ethics of ‘Irresponsibilization’; or, How to Get Irresponsible, in Two Easy Lessons” 8 “Derrida’s Remains” 129 Dickens’ Symbolic Imagery 31, 137–8 The Disappearance of God 32–42 The Ethics of Reading 2, 4, 6–7, 8, 93, 104–6, 108, 109, 132–3 Fiction and Repetition 27, 31, 45, 52, 68, 77–8, 112 The Form of Victorian Fiction 47–50, 54, 126 Hawthorne and History 76, 88–94, 100, 129 Illustration 26, 65 “Interview with Robert Moynihan” 17–18 The Linguistic Moment 29, 53, 67–9, 71–3, 77, 123, 133 Literature as Conduct 2, 4, 6, 8, 81, 82, 107, 108, 109, 129, 135 On Literature 32, 61, 107, 110 The Medium is the Maker 49 Others 16, 21, 31, 45, 47, 52–4, 72–3, 77, 96, 98, 115, 124 Poets of Reality 125–6 “Promises, Promises: Speech Act Theory, Literary Theory and Politico-Economic Theory in Marx and de Man” 93

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159

Reading Narrative 19, 50, 54–7, 62, 80, 110–11, 118, 126–7 “Roundtable: ‘Humanistic Discourse and the Others’” 31–2 Speech Acts in Literature 16, 37, 109–10, 124, 128 Theory Now and Then 21–2, 26–7, 31, 68, 74, 107, 117, 123, 129 Thomas Hardy 68 Topographies 6–9, 13–14, 27–8, 68, 73, 83, 89, 112–13 Tropes, Parables, Performatives 41–2, 49, 83, 88, 99, 116 Versions of Pygmalion 2, 27, 59, 61, 67, 83, 85, 91, 100, 103, 104, 108, 110, 113, 116, 128, 134 Victorian Subjects 144 n.7 “Who or What Decides: For Jacques Derrida; A Catastrophic Theory of Decision” 103, 120 Zero Plus One 11, 51, 133 Montaigne, Guy de 116 Morrison, Toni 133 Moses 86–8, 94 Moynihan, Robert 46, 137 Nancy, Jean-Luc 134, 135 Newman, John Henry 28 Nietzsche, Friedrich 61, 69, 82, 100, 121–2, 132, 133–4, 147 n.5 Norris, Christopher 132, 145 n.2 Olson, Gary 17, 137, 141 n.6 others 19, 21, 25, 31–2, 52–4, 61–2, 74, 80, 83, 98–9, 115, 120–1, 124 parasite 26–7, 107–8 Paul, St. 87 perverformative 66 perversion 66–9, 72–4, 80 Plato 4, 12, 64, 116, 125 Poe, Edgar Allan 89 Poulet, Georges 7, 18, 27, 30–1, 36, 42, 48, 132, 138, 140, 142 n.5 prosopopoeia 9, 83, 85, 90, 96, 104, 107–8, 109, 115, 141 n.4 Proust, Marcel 110 Puttenham, George 80

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Index

Readings, Bill 31, 64–5, 73, 76, 121 Richards, I. A. 106 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 55, 143 n.7 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 11 Royle, Nicholas 56, 145–6 n.5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 136, 138 Schlegel, Friedrich 45, 46, 50, 52–4, 61, 106–7, 127 Scholes, Robert 67, 75–6, 80 Schopenhauer, Arthur 63 secrecy in literature 14, 18–22, 24–5, 29, 38, 55–6, 84–5, 89, 93–9, 102, 125–6 Shakespeare, William 59, 128 Hamlet 84, 97 Macbeth 85, 94–8 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1 singularity 22–5, 28, 32, 60–1, 74–7, 107, 111–12, 115, 119–20, 130–1, 146–7 n.3 Spark, Muriel 63–4, 76 Spitzer, Leo 36 Stead, C. K. 78, 143 n.2 Stein, William Bysshe 89 Sterne, Laurence 22 Stevens, Wallace, works “Bantams in Pine-Woods” 119 “Connoisseur of Chaos” 93 “The Idea of Order at Key West” 84, 144 n.3 “The Motive for Metaphor” 81 Opus Posthumous 125–6 “The River of Rivers in Connecticut” 125, 147 n.2 “The Rock” 133 Stoker, Bram 96

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teaching 27, 63–6, 75–6, 80, 100, 105–6, 108, 116–22, 124–5, 128–9, 139–40 Thackeray, William Makepeace 52 Torok, Maria 13 translation 26–42, 53, 64, 73, 134 Trollope, Anthony 18, 50, 139, 148 n.9 uncanny 49, 55–6, 76, 80, 101, 144 n.3, 145–6 n.5 ungovernable 76–9, 81 unreadability 21, 78 Valéry, Paul 138 Wasserman, Earl 34, 138 Wilder, Billy 1 Williams, Jennifer 80 Wolfreys, Julian 131, 133, 137 Wordsworth, William 149 n.14 Yeats, W. B. 65, 68–74, 77–8, 123–5, 143 n.2 “Among School Children” 71 “Byzantium” 72 “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” 69 “The Cold Heaven” 73, 124–5 “Crazy Jane and the Bishop” 71 “A Man Young and Old” 71 “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” 68–74, 78, 123 “The Second Coming” 70 “September 1913” 69 Young, David 69 Žižek, Slavoj 26

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