On Literature

J. Hillis Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134507603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Debates rage over what kind of literature we should read, what is good and bad literature, and whether in the global, digital age, literature even has a future. But what exactly is literature? Why should we read literature? How do we read literature? These are some of the important questions J. Hillis Miller answers in this beautifully written and passionate book. He begins by asking what literature is, arguing that the answer lies in literature's ability to create an imaginary world simply with words. On Literature also asks the crucial question of why literature has such authority over us. Returning to Plato, Aristotle and the Bible, Miller argues we should continue to read literature because it is part of our basic human need to create imaginary worlds and to have stories. Above all, On Literature is a plea that we continue to read and care about literature.

Three

The Secret of Literature

LITERATURE AS SECULAR DREAM VISION

The definition of literature I give at the end of the previous chapter has, no doubt, little general currency these days. It was, however, widely current in a different form in the medieval tradition of the dream vision. The dream vision gets its greatest expression in Dante’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy (1300 ff.). It goes on having vitality as a genre as late as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792–1822) The Triumph of Life (written in 1822) and even in more recent books. Carroll’s Alice books (1865, 1872) are also, after all, dream visions too. (Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles Dodgson (1832–98).) A dream vision presupposes the independent existence of what the dreamer sees. Dante’s speaks as though the experiences of his pilgrim had really taken place. They are only being reported in poetic language by the poet. Medieval dream visions differ from my theory of literature in that they presuppose a single supernal realm that is glimpsed in the visions, whereas for me each work gives access to a different realm.

Though dream visions are, it must be admitted, out of fashion, nevertheless several curious passages in certain great modernist authors and theorists quite surprisingly affirm one version or another of the concept of literature I have proposed. I shall cite and discuss five of these. This will indicate their variety as well as their compelling claims to be more than simply fanciful. They are more compelling, for us today, perhaps, because they belong to our modern demystified, enlightened era. They were not written in older “superstitious” times. I might have cited many more divergent versions, for example Leibniz on “incompossible worlds,” or Borges on the library of Babel, or Sartre on the imaginary, or Gilles Deleuze’s readings of Leibniz and Borges.

DOSTOEVSKY’S “COMPLETELY NEW WORLD”

In a short work written in 1861, Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) reports an experience he had one evening when walking home along the River Neva, in St. Petersburg. It is the experience of an alternative world:

It seemed, in the end, that all this world, with all its inhabitants, both the strong and the weak, with all their habitations, whether beggars’ shelters or gilded palaces, at this hour of twilight resembled a fantastic, enchanted vision, a dream which in its turn would instantly vanish and waste away as vapor into the dark blue heaven. Suddenly a certain strange thought began to stir inside me. I started and my heart was as if flooded in that instant by a hot jet of blood which had suddenly boiled up from the influx of a mighty sensation which until now had been unknown to me. In that moment, as it were, I understood something which up to that time had only stirred in me, but had not as yet been fully comprehended. I saw clearly, as it were, into something new, a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only through some obscure hearsay, through a certain mysterious sign. I think that in those precious minutes, my real existence began . . .

This powerful passage is echoed later in a similar vision Raskolnikov has in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky goes on in the Petersburg Visions passage to specify that this new world is a grotesque transformation of the real one. It is the same and yet different. Dostoevsky does not speak of it as imaginary, but as real. It is more real than the putative “real world.” He is the witness of this new world, not its creator or inventor. His vision also includes the sense of a laughing malicious demiurge or demon. This demon is a kind of Silenus who is pulling the strings that make these fantastic puppets dance:

I began to look about intently and suddenly I noticed some strange people. They were all strange, extraordinary figures, completely prosaic, not Don Carloses or Posas to be sure, rather down-to-earth titular councilors and yet at the same time, as it were, sort of fantastic titular councilors. Someone was grimacing in front of me, having hidden behind all this fantastic crowd, and he was fidgeting some thread, some springs through, and these little dolls moved, and he laughed and laughed away.

(xi)

All Dostoevsky’s fiction, it could be argued, is devoted to bringing news to the reader of events in this “completely new world.” Richard Pevear, one of the translators of an admirable new version of Crime and Punishment in English, done with Larissa Volokhonsky, asserts just that in his preface to that translation:

The ambiguous laughter of this demiurge or demon can be heard in all of Dostoevsky’s later works. Here, in germ, was the reality that challenged his powers of imitation, an indefinite “something new,” a completely new and unfamiliar world, prosaic and at the same time fantastic, which could have no image until he gave it one, but was more real than the vanishing spectacle he contemplated on the Neva.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S DANGEROUS HABIT

Only a few years later, in 1875, on a ship bound from New York to England, the great English novelist, Anthony Trollope (1815–82), began to write An Autobiography, published posthumously in 1883. No works could seem more different from Dostoevsky’s novels than Trollope’s forty-seven novels. Dostoevsky’s novels have a hectic, melodramatic intensity. The characters seem always to live in, or to be about to vanish into, that hyperreality Dostoevsky glimpsed in his vision by the Neva. Trollope’s novels, on the contrary, present stories of everyday courtship, marriage, and inheritance. These involve what look like ordinary middle- and upperclass Victorian men and women. As Henry James observed in his essay of 1883 on Trollope’s work, Trollope’s “great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual.” After Barchester Towers Trollope, says James, “settled down steadily to the English girl; he took possession of her, and turned her inside out . . . he bestowed upon her the most serious, the most patient, the most tender, the most copious consideration.”

This formulation makes it look as if Trollope’s novels are to be valued for their accuracy of representation, for their truthful correspondence to the social realities of Victorian English middle-class life. Nothing could be further from the case. When the reader enters the world of a given Trollope novel he or she enters a place that is the ordinary, usual, Victorian world transfigured into something uniquely Trollopean. This is evident, for example, in the quite extraordinary assumption, mentioned earlier, that is a law of Trollope’s fiction. This is the assumption that people have clairvoyant insight into what other people are thinking and feeling. Trollope’s novels are more like science fiction, or even, in their own way, like Dostoevsky’s novels, than like what we ordinarily think of as a transcription of reality, things as they are, or were. The multitude of Trollope’s characters is each surrounded by his or her own circumambient social world. They are certainly among those who have come alive in my imagination and remain alive for me. Lily Dale, Septimus Harding, and the rest are going on living somewhere in my mind as ghosts or specters. They abide there, waiting to be reinvoked the next time I read the particular novels in which they appear.

Proof of this detachment of Trollope’s novels from the “real world” is given in a strange confession Trollope makes early in An Autobiography. The passage is a key to understanding his conception of the imaginary, that is, to understanding the mode of existence of his novels. The passage presents Trollope’s version of a conviction that literature is a recording not of the real world but of an independently existing imaginary world. In this passage Trollope is speaking of the way he was ostracized as a youth at Harrow because he was a day pupil at an elite boarding school and had little pocket money or good clothes. He says that since play with the other boys was denied him, he had to make up his own solitary play for himself: “Play of some kind was necessary to me then, – as it has always been.” Trollope’s solitary play took the form of what today we would call “daydreaming”:

Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle-in-the-air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions and proprieties and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced, – not even anything which from outward circumstances would seem to be violently improbable.

What is a daydream? It would seem to be distinguishable from a real dream. The daydream is quasi-voluntary, while the real dream seems to proceed of its own accord, outside the dreamer’s control. Trollope’s account seems to agree with this in the way he uses a metaphor of architecture for his daydreams, as if to suggest that they were deliberately constructed. He also indicates that he bound himself down to certain laws, proportions, proprieties, and unities, as though the shape of the daydream were more or less within his control. Things are not quite so simple, however, as anyone who has ever daydreamed (most people, I suppose) will know. Though the daydream seems voluntary enough, or at least half-voluntary, in its origin, once its presuppositions get established it seems to continue more or less of its own accord, as a kind of involuntary wish-fulfillment. The daydream takes on a life of its own.

Trollope’s account of his youthful daydreaming is a hyperbolic version of this. Most daydreams are short and intermittent – mine at least. For a brief period I imagine an alternative reality, not a very vivid one, alas. That is why I need to read novels and could not write one. In Trollope’s case, however, the same daydream was carried on from week to week, from month to month, even from year to year, like a long-running television serial. Trollope was that reprehensible thing, a daydreamer, with a vengeance. During all the time of the serial daydream Trollope lived in two worlds. One was the real and not very satisfactory one (for Trollope at that time). The other world was an imaginary one in which the goals were attained that Sigmund Freud ascribed to the virtual world of literature. Freud said art is the attainment in imagination of what all men (sic!) want, that is, honor, wealth, and the love of women, by someone who has been deprived of those in real life. Trollope’s continuous daydreaming is an extravagant example of this. He tells the reader just that in his confession:

I myself was of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king, or a duke, – much less, when my height and personal appearance were fixed, would I be an Antinous, or six feet high. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart and open of hand and noble in thought, despising mean things, and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since.

The only parallel I can think of to Trollope’s account of his daydreaming habit is one of the stories in The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (1954). This is a set of narratives, apparently about his patients, told by a practicing psychiatrist, Robert Lindner (1914–56). “The Jet-Propelled Couch” is the story of a high-tech scientist, habitual reader of science fiction, who begins gradually to believe that he is two persons, one the sober scientist doing his (more or less) ordinary, everyday work, the other having all sorts of adventures in outer space. The twist at the end is that the psychiatrist, rather than curing the patient, comes himself to believe in that other world, just as I as a child believed in the metaworld of The Swiss Family Robinson, or just as I believe even today in the worlds of Trollope’s various novels when I read them. Reading literature might be defined as a way of letting someone else do your daydreaming for you. A crucial difference exists, however, as I shall specify, with Trollope’s help.

The young Anthony Trollope’s daydreams were remarkably like the grown-up Trollope’s novels in one important way at least. They were long continuous stories that strictly obeyed rules of consistency and probability. The reader can count on several reassuring things in any Trollope novel. The characters will go on being consistent with themselves from one end of the novel to the other. The world they dwell in will remain the same too. Moreover, nothing beyond the “usual” will often occur. The “English girl,” for the most part, will win her true love and live happily ever after. The exceptions to this are of great interest, just because they are unusual, for example the story of Lily Dale’s failure to marry as it is carried on from The Small House at Allington to The Last Chronicle of Barset.

That Trollope’s published novels were a transformation of his youthful habit of daydreaming is made explicit by Trollope himself. Speaking of that bad habit of daydreaming, Trollope says,

There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice, but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life.

By this point, toward the end of the passage I have been analyzing, Trollope is describing the imaginary universe of his daydreams or of a given novel as having been created, perhaps, by his own imagination, but as then coming to have an independent existence. He can enter into it and dwell within it.

Two crucial differences differentiate Trollope’s daydreams from his novels. The daydreams remained private, secret, hidden, solitary. We shall never know anything more about them than the meager generalities he gives in this passage. The novels, on the contrary, were written down and published. This made them accessible to all who choose to read them. A Trollope novel, one might say, is the transcription in words of a “world altogether outside the world of [Trollope’s] own material life.” In that peculiar way I am attempting to define, the imaginary world is not dependent on words for its existence. It is not brought into existence by words. The novel’s words are performative, all right, but their performative function is to give the reader access to a realm that seems to exist apart from the words, even though the reader cannot enter it except by way of the words.

Another difference is equally important. Trollope was his own hero in his youthful daydreams. The novels are about imaginary characters, many of them women. These can only by a series of hypothetical and unverifiable relays be identified with Trollope himself. Trollope says as much at the end of the paragraph: “In after years I have done the same [i.e. dwelled in imaginary worlds], – with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity aside.” Literature begins, as Kafka asserted, when “Ich” becomes “er,” when “I” becomes “he” (or, in Trollope’s case, often “she”). That transformation turned Trollope the guilty daydreamer (“There can . . . hardly be a more dangerous mental practice . . .”) into Trollope the great and admirably productive novelist.

HENRY JAMES’S UNTRODDEN FIELD OF SNOW

Trollope’s novels are radically different from Dostoevsky’s. Nevertheless, they unexpectedly have, according to the authors themselves, somewhat similar origins in imaginary worlds outside the real world. Henry James (1843–1916) differs sharply from both these writers in the texture and quality of his fictions. James’s work deals with super-subtle nuances of intersubjective interchange between characters who are nothing if not intelligent and sensitive. A whole page, for example, is devoted in The Wings of the Dove to reporting the analysis by one character of the implications of an “Oh!” uttered by another character. Nevertheless, for James too, in an even more surprisingly affirmative way, a literary work does no more than report with more or less accuracy an independently existing hyper-reality.

In the last of the magisterial prefaces James began writing in 1906 for the New York edition of his work, the preface to The Golden Bowl, James discusses his re-reading of his novels and tales. He re-read them not only in order to write the prefaces, but also in order to perform the work of revision to which he subjected some of them. This was especially the case with the earlier works. An example is The Portrait of a Lady, for which he made hundreds of small and large revisions. The Golden Bowl, he reports, did not require any revision. The figures James uses to describe his experiences of re-reading are characteristically extravagant and baroque. The figures define James’s sense of the way each work gives access to an independently existing imaginary world, a different one for each work. Re-reading, James says, is re-vision. To re-read is to see again what James calls the “matter of the tale.” This “matter” is its basic substance, something independent of the words that record it. The word “matter” was used archaically to name a body of narrative material that might give rise to many different written works. In medieval times one spoke of “the matter of Arthur” or of “the matter of Troy,” meaning the whole collection of legends centering on King Arthur or on the Trojan War.

James figures the “matter of the tale” for The Golden Bowl as a great expanse of untrodden snow. It is a striking image. The story recorded in The Golden Bowl is substantially there. It is a material substrate or “subjectile.” This is the odd French word that names the basic surface of underlay, or paper, or plaster on which a painting is applied. The “matter” is a surface on which to write, and, at the same time, that about which the story is written. Jacques Derrida uses the word “subjectile” in the title of his long second essay on Antonin Artaud, “Forcener le subjectile (To Unsense the Subjectile).” He defines “subjectile” as follows:

The notion belongs to the code of painting and designates what is in some way lying below (subjectum) as a substance, a subject, a succubus. Between the beneath and the above, it is at once a support and a surface, sometimes also the matter of a painting or a sculpture, everything distinct from form, as well as from meaning and representation, not representable (ce qui n’est pas représentable).

James’s field of snow, the “matter of the tale,” is just such a subjectile, though for a novel, not for a painting or a sculpture.

The actual words of a given novel or story James figures as his footsteps on the untrodden, virgin snow. With his earlier works, James says, his feet no longer walk easily in the old footprints, and so he must revise. He finds, he says, in the ponderous manner of his late style (like an elephant stepping delicately), a

frequent lapse of harmony between my present mode of motion and that to which the existing footprints were due. It was, all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread, for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself naturally falling into another, which might sometimes indeed more or less agree with the original tracks, but might most often, or very nearly, break the surface in other places.

With his more recent works, The Golden Bowl, for example, James says his feet and stride fit perfectly in the old footmarks. In that case, revision does not need to follow “re-vision,” the re-reading that leads to a renewed vision of the primary matter of the tale:

As the historian of the matter sees and speaks, so my intelligence of it, as a reader, meets him half-way, passive, receptive, appreciative, often even grateful, unconscious, quite blissfully, of any bar to intercourse, any disparity of sense between us. Into his very footprints the responsive, the imaginative steps of the docile reader that I consentingly become for him all comfortably sink. His vision, superimposed on my own as an image in cut paper is applied to a sharp shadow on a wall, matches, at every point, without excess or deficiency.

This does not mean that the account of that particular tale’s matter James gave in The Golden Bowl was any more adequate than was the correspondence of The Portrait of a Lady to its matter. This inadequacy holds in both cases, even though the latter was substantial...