Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading 9781503617254

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]. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

Black Holes

'------------

Cultural Memory

m the Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

]. HILLIS MILLER; OR, BOUSTROPHEDONIC READING

Manuel Asensi

Translated by Mabel Richart

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP

data appear at the end of the hook

Like unicorns and gargoyles, black holes seem more at home in the realms of science fiction and ancient myth than the real Universe. Nonetheless, well-tested laws of physics predict firmly that black holes exist. In our galaxy alone there may be millions, but their darkness hides them from view. Astronomers have great difficulty finding them. -KIP S. THORNE,

Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

Preface

Why write a book with a graphic arrangement in which the rwo texts of the rwo authors face one another? Is it a fancy? Is it a hazardous choice? Is it the classical "modernism" or "vanguardism" of criticism and theory today? Of course, it is neither a fancy nor a hazardous choice. It would be necessary to discuss the question of "vanguardism" somewhere else. What we propose is justified by reasons I shall explain briefly: At first what we see is Hillis Miller making an analysis, for example, of some aspects of Marcel Proust's work; we also see, face to face with that, Manuel Asensi analyzing Hillis Miller's general work. However, this is only an appearance of what really happens. My writing on Miller's work could be classified as "discordant," "strange," "anomalous." Why? In the first place because this writing is carried out by someone belonging to a cultural tradition (the European) different from the American. If we take into account that literary theory bloomed, above all, in European movements (from "Russian Formalism" through "Glossematics" or "nouvelle critique"), this will permit us to see Miller's work in a broad perspective. Up until now, it has perhaps been possible to consider Miller's work in relation to New Criticism or criticism of consciousness, but what happens with the connection or disconnection between Miller

Preface

"Boustrophedonic": the word means turning back and forth, as an ox ploughs a field. It comes from the Greek bous, "ox," and strophe, "turn," as in the strophes and antistrophes of the choruses in Greek tragedies. These were so called because the chorus paused at one end of the stage or the other, turned, and delivered the next "strophe" of its speech. Certain early forms of written language were inscribed in boustrophedonic form, neither from left to right, like English, nor from right to left, like one way of writing Chinese, but back and forth in alternate lines, so the eye could follow from left to right and then back again from right to left across the page. Whether or not my criticism or my way of thinking generally is boustrophedonic I do not know. I must leave it to the reader to follow through Manuel Asensi's part of this book and decide. I am not sure that I even want to know. Could there even possibly be a joke at my expense in Manuel Asensi's choice of that word to name my movement back and forth between my consciousness and the other consciousness, between the text written by the other and the text I write as a "reading" of it? I work my way back and forth, like a dumb ox. I am not sure I want to know either whether that joke is meant. Though I am greatly honored by Asensi's careful attention to my work, I do not, as might have been expected, wholly recognize myself in his portrait, though I must admit it is probably me. The experience is the uncanny one of looking in the mirror and seeing a not wholly familiar face reflected there that must nevertheless be my own face. In any case, my part of this book was drafted before I was able to read Asensi's part. While he was writing his analysis, he asked me to contribute something new that might accompany it. I set to work. Black Holes was the ultimate result, though I did not initially foresee the shape it would take. My first instinct, like an ox turning its head in the gesture

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and Shklovsky, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Greimas, Barthes, Petofi, Eco, and so forth? In the second place, my analysis of Miller's work is heterodox in two senses. On the one hand, my discourse is far from the approaches usually followed in order to classify Miller's criticism. (Critics have shown us Miller changing "movements" and translating ideas of Wimsatt, Poulet, Derrida, de Man, Lacan, etc.) Nevertheless, my writing wants to prove the opposite: all these authors and movements, all their works, have translated Miller's essential concerns. Miller has always been "beyond" "method" and "school" -perhaps this explains his connection with deconstruction and Derrida. On the other hand, my writing does not move among "generalities" as a strategy for approaching Miller's work. It analyzes his analyses. It is not a question of using the formula "Miller's literary criticism is X," but of penetrating into some texts into which he has already penetrated and, of course, into the writing he has created

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William Faulkner calls "refraining," was to try to write something so discontinuous with the work I had already published, that is, the work Asensi was then able to read, that it would disqualify whatever Asensi might say about me. That has remained a strong part of my motivation for writing Black Holes. I do not think, however, that I have been wholly successful in my attempt to escape Asensi's reading. Why should I want to escape it? To avoid being monumentalized, as by a tombstone. Life, so it seemed to me, means change, and I wanted to show that I was going on changing. The initial donnee for Black Holes was the notion of the other, or rather of "others," since the other is always plural. That notion or problem was the track I was then following, and am still following, in my teaching and writing. It seemed to me something genuinely new in my work. I was, I believe, to some degree mistaken in thinking that, as Asensi's book has persuaded me. What I have to say now about the "others" is more a making explicit of something latent or implicit all along than an irruption of the wholly new. So much for my attempt to derail Asensi's project, to get his plow out of the furrow. The reader will see how fundamental the question of otherness remains in Black Holes, but my interest in that became crossed with two other strong motivations. Pardy instigated by my reading in manuscript of Bill Readings's brilliant The University in Ruins, partly moved by my own experience of the unusually rapid changes in literary study in the United States research university, I found myself wanting to understand those changes, to account for them in my own way, and in relation to that idea of the "others." The first half of this book does that. The second motivation was an example of what is most abiding in all my teaching and writing from the beginning: the desire to account for, to understand, to "read" in the sense of seeing through, the strangeness of particular literary works. In this case the works were Anthony Trollope's Ayala's Angel and Marcel Proust's A Ia recherche du temps perdu. Another book in progress, to be called Others, will investigate otherness in other works. Though Trollope and Proust are two dead white males (one straight, one gay, apparently), I do not see any reason to apologize for that. Reading such "canonical" works has always been, and still remains, my vocation. That vocation has been from the beginning defined by my sense that the Western tradition is other to itself, inhabited by its own otherness. I call that otherness the "strangeness" of canonical works. Just as my attempt to think out what is happening to United States

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about these texts. This strategy implies the superimposition of different texts in which the differences and dissonances between them can be perfectly seen. (Asensi gets into a book by Thomas De Quincey and into Miller's analysis of De Quincey; at the same time, Asensi underlines the methodology used, its achievements and its limits.) In the third place-and as something that follows from the two previous points- it is possible to assert that my discourse goes beyond the assumptions and beliefs of Miller's work itself. Deep down, the question is: to what extent does Miller recognize his own work in my words? No doubt, he will or won't agree with me, but can he really recognize his words in my words, his discourse in my discourse, his criticism in my criticism of his criticism? The reading I claim to accomplish wants to interrupt and disturb not only what the history of criticism and philosophy have said about Miller (the reader will find a sharp discussion with Rodolphe Gasche and Suzanne Gearhart), but also the presupposi-

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literary study took its own to some degree unforeseen course once I got started with it, so the readings of Ayala's Angel and A Ia recherche du temps perdu took over my interest and assumed their own form. I became more interested in the questions of how Ayala knows she is in love or why Proust has Marcel hear the Venetian boatman sing "0 sole mio!" than in abstract questions about the "others." For me initial conceptual questions, far from being answered, are always distorted, deformed, changed so much that they become almost unrecognizable, by each act of reading. That might be one meaning of saying that the other is always plural, always "others." Those others always make their demand on the one who encounters them. Both Ayala's Angel and A Ia recherche du temps perdu center on intuitions of otherness, but each intuition is special, sui generis, not fully able to be subsumed under a common concept. That is one reason why I need to go on reading and re-reading literature, even works that seem most familiar, most predictable. Each such reading to some degree remakes me, in a version of the back and forth Manuel Asensi calls "boustrophedonic."

*

Bits and pieces of this book or alternative expressions of ideas that went into it have been published in preliminary form in various places and in various languages. All have now been reworked to fit the argument of this book and to conform to my present understanding of its topics. I am grateful to the editors of books and journals and to sponsors of conferences that gave me a chance to try out my ideas on diverse audiences. I am grateful also for comments, oral and printed, including resisting ones, on various lectures and essays drawn from this work. See, for example, Graham Bradshaw's review of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea volume listed below. This appeared in Studies in English Literature, a publication of The English Literary Society of Japan, English Number 1998, 149-54. These opportunities and responses have greatly helped me in the further development of my ideas. I am grateful also for permission to reuse the material listed below in revised form. "Return, Dissenter," The Times Literary Supplement, July 15, 1994, ro. "Literary Study in the University Without Idea," English Studies in Korea: Retrospect and Prospect, Proceedings of the 1994 ELLAK (English Language and Literature Association of Korea) International Symposium (Seoul: ELLAK, 1994), 283-302.

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tions and statements of Miller himself. It is like becoming immersed in the black holes of his texts. For these reasons, if we were to publish two separate books, we would lose an essential part of the project: the interference that is not only readable and audible, but also and above all visible. It is necessary that my words be juxtaposed to Miller's words, because through this arrangement the reader will perceive in the form something that comes from the content: the instability of two strange and alien discourses. Only from the perspective of that strangeness and that otherness is it possible to illuminate one of the main works within the field of twentieth-century literary criticism and philosophy: the work of J. Hillis Miller. Therefore what we see in the format is the dialogue, the discussion (even the breaking up) of diverse traditions, of diverse critical viewpoints, and of two discourses that light up in their juxtaposition. This format brings into the open something disturbing and uncanny that is essential for us.

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"Wangji wang lu yinhezhongde hetong: Meiguo wenxue yanjiu xin quxiang," trans. Chen Dongrong, Zhongwai wenxue 24, no. I (June I995): 72-89. "The University of Dissensus," The Oxford Literary Review, issue on The University in Ruins I7, nos. I-2 (I995): I2I-43· "Daxue renwen yanjiude quan qiu yitihua qingxiang," trans. Chen Dongmei, Guowai wenxue 3 (I995): 3-9. "What Is the Future of the Print Record?," Profession 95, 33· "Hypertekstens etik," trans. Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Passage 20j2I (I995), 24I63. "The Ethics of Hypertext," Diacritics 25, no. 3 (Fall I995): 27-39. "The Other's Other: Jealousy and Art in Proust," Skrift I6 (I/96): 52-67. "Governing the Ungovernable: Literary Study in the Transnational University," Between the Lines 2, no. 2 (Winter I995), 2-3. "Literary Study in the University Without Idea," ADE Bulletin II3 (Spring I996): 30-33· "Wangjiwanglu yinhezhong de hetong: Meiguo wenxue yanjiu xin quxiang," trans. Chen Dongrong, in Francis K. H. So and Hsiao-yu Sun, eds., Modern Literature and Literary Theory Revisited (Kaohsiung: Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, I996), 17-41. "Literary Study in the Age of Reproduction," in Ri.idiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann, eds., Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, I996), 297-310. " 'Le Mensonge, le Mensonge Parfait': Theories du mensonge chez Proust et Derrida," trans. Yasmine Van den Wijngaert, with Chantal Zabus and Cecile Hayez, in Michel Lisse, ed., Passions de fa litterature (Paris: Galilee, I996), 405-20. "Literary Study in the Transnational University," Profession I996 (I996), 6-I4. "Ideology in Trollope's Ayala's Angel," journal of Literary Criticism I (June I996): I-6. "Los estudios literarios en Ia universidad transnacional," trans. Mabel Richart, Eutopias, 2 o Epoca I42 (I996): I-23. "English Literature in the United States Today," in Loesley Marx, Loes Nas, and Lara Dunwell, eds., Fissions and Fusions, Vol. III, Proceedings of the First Conference of the Cape American Studies Association (Bellville: University of the Western Cape, January I997), 4-20. "Cultural Studies and Reading," ADE Bulletin, no. II7 (Fall I997), I5-I8.

Contents for

J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading'

Abbreviations for Works by J. Hillis Miller

xvm

1

Prolegomena, Connection, and Disconnection

2

A Human Head with an Equine Neck

I84

3 Narrativity, Example (Exemplarity), Endlessness, Uncontrolled Performatives

Works Cited

496

JI2

2

Contents for 'Black Holes'

1

Literary Study in the Transnational University

2

The Grounds of Love: Anthony Trollope's Ayala's Angel

3 Fractal Proust

JI3

Coda: The Excess of Reading Notes

497

485

3 I85

Abbreviations for Works by]. Hillis Miller

AT

Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

CD

Charles Dickem: The World of His Novels. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

DG

The Disappearance of God. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.

ER

The Ethics ofReading. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

FR

Fiction and Repetition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

FVF

The Form ofVictorian Fiction. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

HH

1 ITER

LM

Hawthorne and History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Illustration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. "Is There an Ethics of Reading?" In James Phelan, ed., Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1989. 79-101.

The Linguistic Moment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

PR

Poets of Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.

RN

Reading Narrative. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

T

Topographies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Abbreviations

xx TH

Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.

TNT

Theory Now and Then. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

TPP

Tropes, Parables, Performatives. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

VP

Versiom ofPygmalion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

vs

Victorian Subjects. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.

]. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

Black Holes

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Prolegomena, Connection, and Disconnection

Matrix: A Rhapsodic Criticism The position J. Hillis Miller adopts toward literary criticism begins with a problem both salient and complex: the relation between the critic and the author, between the critic and the text, between the critic's language and the text's language. What does "relation" mean here? Miller has assured us on several occasions that "literary criticism is language about language" or "a recreating in the mind of the critic of the consciousness inscribed in the texts studied" (TH, vii). But reading his vast work, one immediately realizes that, in spite of outward appearances, such a relation with the other can by no means be expounded on the model of Emmanuel Levinas (1968, 1969), for whom the answer of the "I" to the other, by means of language, merges the world that is named with the world of the one who names. Nor is it possible to consider it in the manner of a scientific metalanguage protected by a hypothetical deductive system. But if this relation is neither a merging nor a movement of objectivity, how can it be defined, assuming we accept its existence?

Literary Study in the Transnational University

The Fractal Mosaic Something drastic is happening in the university. Something drastic is happening to the university. The university is losing its idea, the guiding mission that has sustained it since the early nineteenth century. 1 It was then, in Germany, that the modern research university was invented. John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University (1852, 1859, 1873) expounded for English readers both this concept of the university and, among other things, the place of literary study in it.2 Idea- the word has a Platonic resonance. It names a transcendent form-presiding, generative, paternalon which particular material embodiments are modeled. The university governed by an idea is rapidly being replaced by what Bill Readings calls the university of "excellence." Whatever a given discipline defines at the moment as important work is "excellent." Excellence does not refer to an ahistorical transcendent model operating above the university to determine what it should be and do, giving it a mission and a goal. Excellence is, as Readings observes, a tautological self-definition. What is the use of literary study now, in this new university without idea? Should, ought, or must we still study literature? What is the source now of the obligation to study literature? Who or what addresses to us a call to do so? Why should we do it? To what purpose? Can literary study still be defended as a socially useful part of university research and teaching or is it just a vestigial remnant that will vanish as other media become

Literary Study in the Transnational University

The Fractal Mosaic Something drastic is happening in the university. Something drastic is happening to the university. The university is losing its idea, the guiding mission that has sustained it since the early nineteenth century. 1 It was then, in Germany, that the modern research university was invented. John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University (1852, 1859, 1873) expounded for English readers both this concept of the university and, among other things, the place of literary study in it.2 Idea- the word has a Platonic resonance. It names a transcendent form-presiding, generative, paternalon which particular material embodiments are modeled. The university governed by an idea is rapidly being replaced by what Bill Readings calls the university of "excellence." Whatever a given discipline defines at the moment as important work is "excellent." Excellence does not refer to an ahistorical transcendent model operating above the university to determine what it should be and do, giving it a mission and a goal. Excellence is, as Readings observes, a tautological self-definition. What is the use of literary study now, in this new university without idea? Should, ought, or must we still study literature? What is the source now of the obligation to study literature? Who or what addresses to us a call to do so? Why should we do it? To what purpose? Can literary study still be defended as a socially useful part of university research and teaching or is it just a vestigial remnant that will vanish as other media become

4

Prolegomena, Connection, and Disconnection

Miller's work generally has been treated as a series of abrupt transitions from one critical methodology to another. Recently, Vita Fortunati and Giovanna Franci have asserted that toward the end of the sixties his rhetoric of consciousness was replaced by a rhetoric of textuality and by devotion to the diffusion of Derrida and the deconstructionist doctrine (Fortunati and Franci, 1989: 194). Earlier, Donald Pease spoke of "conversions" (Pease, 1983: 77). Does this mean we confront an individual who dismisses logical contradiction, "who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity" (Barthes, 1975: 3)? Should we believe Miller himself when, on being asked about his changes of critico-literary perspective by Martin Heusser, he replied: "It would be boring, I think, if you didn't change" (Heusser and Schweizer, 1991: 155). Is this a question of capricious and gratuitous boredom? Why would someone get bored doing literary criticism? What does Miller mean by that? Is this sentence literal or ironic? How can we read it, or how should we read it? That will be one of the central problems of this essay. I will not question the advisability, much less the necessity, of establishing chronological periods or proving particular facts, even through discontinuities, that might contribute to a historiography of the humanities. Nor will I claim that Miller's work is coherent from beginning to end. To do this would be more problematic than problem solving. In my opinion, one of the values of Miller's entire oeuvre is that it grows precisely out of the contradictory, oxymoronic, and paradoxical nature of his writing. If any thesis is going to be defended here, it will be that the contradictions are not a result of simple external influences whose change

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more dominant in the new global society that is rapidly taking shape? My part of this book attempts to confront and answer these questions. A provocative passage toward the end of Marcel Proust's A Ia recherche du temps perdu, that huge assemblage of provocative passages, proposes an analogy between understanding individual people and understanding politics. Literature, for the most part, deals with imaginary characters. It usually approaches larger political, social, religious, or philosophical issues only through these characters' stories. The passage I shall cite from Proust makes this connection explicit. It might therefore serve as a defense ofliterary study at a time when its social utility is not always evident to everyone. Some students these days in literature programs seem more at ease when they are reading works of theory, more confident that they are doing something important, than when they are reading the literature those works theorize. That is understandable. The political import of literary works is indirect. It has to be worked out through a laborious process of reading and deciphering, while contemporary theoretical works talk directly about race, class, gender, and other urgent political or social issues. Reading theory, so it may appear, saves one the hard work of reading literature. In 1871 George Eliot was already worrying uneasily about the apparent triviality, provinciality, and lowness of the characters in Middlemarch. Do not be anxious, she tells her readers, in an admirably ironic passage, you may take my narrative of middle-class people as a parable. You can then transfer what I say to higher and more important levels of society: "Since there never was a true story which could not be told in parables where you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa-whatever has been or is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled by being considered a parable.... Thus while I tell the truth about loobies, my reader's imagination need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords." 3 I have discussed this passage in detail elsewhere.4 What is important here is the contingency and reversibility of the analogies affirmed in parables. "Monkey" just happens to sound like "margrave," as "looby" alliterates with "lord." These accidental and senseless linguistic similarities justify putting one of either pair in the place of the other, but in either direction: margrave for monkey, lord for looby, and vice versa. Reading the political import of literature is like decoding a parable or an allegory. It takes special training to do so, since it depends on certain cryptological assumptions. Proust indicates what those might be.

6

Prolegomena, Connection, and Disconnection

(Wimsatt, Poulet, Derrida, de Man) is immediately reflected in the receiver, but reflect a matrix- Millerian- that existed before those differences, schools, and methodologies. This matrix is contradictory and plural in itself. It makes use of different critical discourses in order to circulate throughout literature and to interrogate its own concerns. It is a matrix to which such discourses adapt themselves, of course transforming it, but also, and above all, receiving its particular trace. Because deconstruction (Derrida or Miller himself) has already reflected on translation, we hardly need raise such questions as the following: What would it mean to affirm that Miller translates Derrida or de Man? What does the acclimatization of deconstruction in the United States or in other countries mean- in Spain or China for instance? Why do some, such as Gasche, say that someone has "mistranslated" or displaced Derrida's work from its "real" field when he or she uses it in literary criticism? The answers to these questions will be found throughout this book, though it is basically devoted to analyzing the (contradictory, plural and split) "matrix" that I consider fundamental in understanding what Miller brings to twentiethcentury literary criticism. In fact, Miller has sometimes referred to that matrix: "I do not think this commitment to close reading is 'an inheritance from the New Criticism.' It springs rather from an initial and persistent fascination with local strangeness in literary language. This fascination possessed me before I ever heard of the New Criticism, much less of Freud, Lacan, and Abraham and Torok. It was my motivation for turning from physics to literature in about 1946" (TPP, vii). Further, he has said, "literature continually exceeds any formulas or any theory with which the critic is prepared to encompass it. The hypothesis of possible heterogeneity of

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Proust makes a use of analogy somewhat analogous to Eliot's. It would seem to confirm the choice of those who prefer literature to theory. Marcel has been talking about the way "life with Albertine and with Franc:;:oise had accustomed [him] to suspect in them thoughts and projects which they did not disclose." This experience of deception has led him, transferring personal experience to a national level, to doubt assertions of "pacific intentions" by Germany, Bulgaria, or Greece. These nations are here personified as like single living persons, that is, as having a unity like that of an organism or a consciousness. Moving from this, as Marcel often does, to a high level of generalization, expressed by means of a brilliant metaphor, he asserts that individual life is to national life as a single cell is to the large living body of which it is a part: Of course my quarrels with Fran