Fiction and Repetition

Seven English Novels

J. Hillis Miller

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1985
• Print ISBN: 9780674299269, 9780674299252
• eBook ISBN: 9780674266100
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

In Fiction and Repetition, one of our leading critics and literary theorists offers detailed interpretations of seven novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved, Conrad's Lord Jim, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts. Miller explores the multifarious ways in which repetition generates meaning in these novels—repetition of images, metaphors, motifs; repetition on a larger scale of episodes, characters, plots; and repetition from one novel to another by the same or different authors. While repetition creates meanings, it also, Miller argues, prevents the identification of a single determinable meaning for any of the novels; rather, the patterns made by the various repetitive sequences offer alternative possibilities of meaning which are incompatible. He thus sees "undecidability" as an inherent feature of the novels discussed.

His conclusions make a provocative contribution to current debates about narrative theory and about the principles of literary criticism generally. His book is not a work of theory as such, however, and he avoids the technical terminology dear to many theorists; his book is an attempt to interpret as best he can his chosen texts. Because of his rare critical gifts and his sensitivity to literary values and nuances, his readings send one back to the novels with a new appreciation of their riches and their complexities of form.

1

TWO FORMS OF REPETITION

ALONG WORK LIKE A NOVEL is interpreted, by whatever sort of reader, in part through the identification of recurrences and of meanings generated through recurrences. I say “in part” because there are of course many types of literary form which generate meaning in novels. These include, for example, the straightforward sequence of unrepeatable events in the order in which they occurred or are retold. The story as such, event following event, tends to arouse passionate human responses. These responses might in one sense be thought of as the “meaning” of the novel. This book for the most part suspends such other sources of meaning in order to focus on the contribution to meaning of the various forms of recurrence in novels. That these forms are various or even disparate I would agree, but insofar as they all involve one instance which then in one way or another reappears in another instance they are all cases of the same identifiable problem of repetition.

Take, for example, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of the novels read in detail in a later chapter in this book. The first instance of the color red in the novel may be passed over as trivial or as merely representational. It is not unlikely that Tess would have a red ribbon in her hair. When the reader encounters the third, the fourth, and the fifth red things, red begins to stand out as a salient motif, repeated in sequence, like those words Tess meets on walls or fences painted by the itinerant religious man, each word oddly followed by a comma: “THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT,” or “THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT——.”¹

A number of different forms of repetition may be identified in Tess, as in realistic novels generally. On a small scale, there is repetition of verbal elements: words, figures of speech, shapes or gestures, or, more subtly, covert repetitions that act like metaphors, as the cigar-smoking Alec d’Urberville is said to be “the blood-red ray in the spectrum of [Tess’s] young life” (ch. 5), while the sun’s rays coming into her room in a later episode are said to look like that phallic-shaped garden flower called “red-hot poker” (ch. 14). On a larger scale, events or scenes may be duplicated within the text, as Tess’s life is made up of reenactments of the “same” event involving the same cluster of motifs: somnolence, the color red, some act of violence done or received. Motifs from one plot or character may recur in another within the same text, as ‘Liza-Lu, Tess’s sister, seems at the end of the novel destined to reenact another version of Tess’s life. A character may repeat previous generations, or historical or mythological characters, as Tess’s violation repeats the violence done to long-dead peasant girls by Tess’s male ancestors, or as her death repeats the crucifixion of Christ or the prehistoric sacrifices performed at Stonehenge. Finally, an author may repeat in one novel motifs, themes, characters, or events from his other novels. Hardy published Tess in 1891, the first version of The Well-Beloved in 1892, Jude the Obscure in 1895, and the second version of The Well-Beloved in 1897. An earlier title of Tess of the d’Urbervilles was Too Late Beloved or Too Late, Beloved. The similarity in titles indicates the way the two novels echo each other thematically and formally. The three adjacent novels are at least as much bound together as, say, adjacent poems in one of Hardy’s collections of lyrics. The second version of The Well-Beloved may have been motivated or to some degree influenced by the writing during the intervening years of Jude the Obscure. (I discuss The Well-Beloved in detail in Chapter 6.)

A novel is interpreted in part through the noticing of such recurrences. This book is an exploration of some of the ways they work to generate meaning or to inhibit the too easy determination of a meaning based on the linear sequence of the story. The reader’s identification of recurrences may be deliberate or spontaneous, self-conscious or unreflective. In a novel, what is said two or more times may not be true, but the reader is fairly safe in assuming that it is significant. Any novel is a complex tissue of repetitions and of repetitions within repetitions, or of repetitions linked in chain fashion to other repetitions. In each case there are repetitions making up the structure of the work within itself, as well as repetitions determining its multiple relations to what is outside it: the author’s mind or his life; other works by the same author; psychological, social, or historical reality; other works by other authors; motifs from the mythological or fabulous past; elements from the purported past of the characters or of their ancestors; events which have occurred before the book begins. In all these kinds of recurrence the questions are the following: What controls the meaning these repetitions create? What methodological presuppositions will allow the critic, in the case of a particular novel, to control them in his turn in a valid interpretation?

In each chapter of this book I attempt to answer these questions for one novel, exploring as fully as possible the working of repetition in it. I have listed the ways a novel represents social or psychological reality as a mode of repetition. As such, it comes up as a topic here and there in the chapters of this book, but my primary focus here is not on the problems of “realism.” Moreover, this book is not a work of theory as such, but a series of readings of important nineteenth- and twentieth-century English novels. The readings are more concerned with the relation of rhetorical form to meaning than with thematic paraphrase, though of course it is impossible in practice to separate these wholly. The focus of my readings is on the “how” of meaning rather than on its “what,” not “what is the meaning?” but “how does meaning arise from the reader’s encounter with just these words on the page?” I try to attend to the threads of the tapestry of words in each case rather than simply to the picture the novel makes when viewed from a distance. This necessitates my focus on details of language in each novel. In order to investigate the kind of repetition involved in the relation between two novels by the same author, I consider two novels by Thomas Hardy and two by Virginia Woolf, though each chapter is meant to stand on its own as an interpretation of that particular work from the point of view of my topic. Taken together the chapters indicate something of the range of ways repetitive structures work in the English novel of the Victorian and modem periods. Each novel has been chosen because it is of special interest and excellence in itself, both among other novels by the same author and among nineteenth- and twentieth-century English novels generally. Each has also been chosen as the best text I know in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction to explore the mode of repetition in question in that chapter: irony and repetition, for example, in the chapter on Henry Esmond; or a certain form of immanent repetition in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. All these types of repetition occur elsewhere in other novels, but my choice of these may be justified in the same way the French ethnographer Marcel Mauss justifies his close study of certain primitive societies rather than others. The societies he has chosen to study, says Mauss, “represent truly the maximums, the excessive, which make it possible to see better the facts than where, not less essential, they remain small and involuted.”² To put this in terms of one of my categories of repetition, all realistic novels in one way or another are ironical texts, but in Henry Esmond irony is a major and pervasive characteristic of the narrative style throughout.

I do not claim that my seven readings represent an exhaustive repertoire of the kinds of repetition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction or in realistic fiction generally. Each novel is to some degree unique, and there are over forty thousand Victorian novels alone. It is my hypothesis that all modes of repetition represent one form or another of the contradictory intertwining of the two kinds of repetition I will identify in this chapter. All the novels I have studied in detail confirm this hypothesis, but that still leaves open the question of how many it would take to prove the case. Would the ways of reading novels exemplified here work for other novels by the same authors, or for other novels by other authors of the same period, or by authors of different periods or countries? Are my readings “exemplary”? That could be determined certainly only by doing more readings, but the diversity of modes of repetition among my seven novels would suggest that it would be well to expect to find as much difference as similarity in further examples, even in further novels by the same authors.

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. The hypothesis of possible heterogeneity of form in literary works has the heuristic value of preparing the reader to confront the oddnesses of a given novel, the things in it that do not “fit.” The seven readings here have attempted to identify the anomalous in each case and to begin to account for it. This means of course attempting in one way or another to make the unlawful lawful, but the law that emerges will necessarily differ from the one presupposed in readings that assume a good novel is necessarily going to be homogeneous or organic in form.

The history of Western ideas of repetition begins, like our culture generally, with the Bible on the one hand and with Homer, the Pre-Socratics, and Plato on the other. The long centuries of Biblical hermeneutics whereby the New Testament was seen in one way or another as repeating the Old are still presupposed in the use of Biblical types in Henry Esmond or Adam Bede. The modem history of ideas about repetition goes by way of Vico to Hegel and the German Romantics, to Kierkegaard’s Repetition, to Marx (in The Eighteenth Brumaire), to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, to Freud’s notion of the compulsion to repeat, to the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, on down to such diverse present-day theorists of repetition as Jacques Lacan or Gilles Deleuze, Mircea Eliade or Jacques Derrida.³

The two alternative theories of repetition are set clearly against each other in a passage in Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du sens. Deleuze opposes Nietzsche’s concept of repetition to Plato’s:

Let us consider two formulations: “only that which resembles itself differs,” “only differences resemble one another” [“seul ce qui se ressemble diffère,” “seules les différences se rèssemblent”]. It is a question of two readings of the world in the sense that one asks us to think of difference on the basis of preestablished similitude or identity, while the other invites us on the contrary to think of similitude and even identity as the product of a fundamental disparity [d’une disparité de fond]. The first exactly defines the world of copies or of representations; it establishes the world as icon. The second, against the first, defines the world of simulacra. It presents the world itself as phantasm.⁴

What Deleuze calls “Platonic” repetition is grounded in a solid archetypal model which is untouched by the effects of repetition. All the other examples are copies of this model. The assumption of such a world gives rise to the notion of a metaphoric expression based on genuine participative similarity or even on identity, as when Gerard Manley Hopkins says he becomes Christ, an “afterChrist,” through the operation of grace.⁵ A similar presupposition, as Deleuze recognizes, underlies concepts of imitation in literature. The validity of the mimetic copy is established by its truth of correspondence to what it copies. This is, so it seems, the reigning presupposition of realistic fiction and of its critics in nineteenth- and even in twentieth-century England. This theory of repetition still has great force. To many it seems the normative one.

The other, Nietzschean mode of repetition posits a world based on difference. Each thing, this other theory would assume, is unique, intrinsically different from every other thing. Similarity arises against the background of this “disparité du fond.” It is a world not of copies but of what Deleuze calls “simulacra” or “phantasms.” These are ungrounded doublings which arise from differential interrelations among elements which are all on the same plane. This lack of ground in some paradigm or archetype means that there is something ghostly about the effects of this second kind of repetition. It seems that X repeats Y, but in fact it does not, or at least not in the firmly anchored way of the first sort of repetition. An example would be the way Henchard, in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, thinks, during his wanderings at the end of his life, that he returns to the spot where he sold his wife in the scene that opens the novel. In fact, as the narrator tells us, with Hardy’s characteristic insouciant ironic cruelty, he has not correctly identified the place.

A passage in Walter Benjamin’s “The Image of Proust” (“Zum Bilde Prousts”) will help to specify further the distinction between the two kinds of repetition. If Penelope unwove by night what she wove by day, Proust’s writing, says Benjamin, was the reverse of this. It wove by night and unwove by day. The distinction is between the rational, willed, intentional remembering of the daytime, and that kind of involuntary memory which Benjamin calls forgetting. The first kind of memory constructs a lucid pattern from which the “life” has disappeared, like a dry historical recital of facts. The second kind of memory constructs an imaginary life, “lived life,” as dreams make for us a strangely powerful affective “memory” of things which never happened as such. The originality of Benjamin’s insight here is his recognition of the constructive, fictive, falsifying aspect of Proust’s involuntary affective memory. This “memory” creates, for the one who experiences it, as Marcel’s narration creates for him, a vast intricate network of lies, the memory of a world that never was. This world is posited on the negative work of forgetting. The paragraph in Benjamin’s essay is of great concentration and beauty:

We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. And yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection [Eingedenkens]. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s mémoire involuntaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? And is not this work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart [Gegenstück] to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness [Ebenbild]? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. This is why Proust finally turned his days into nights, devoting all his hours to undisturbed work in his darkened room with artificial illumination, so that none of those intricate arabesques might escape him.⁶

The relevance of Benjamin’s oppositions to an understanding of repetition lies in the fact that a different form of echoing occurs in each form of memory-work. The tapestry of memory in each case is woven on the basis of the experience of recurrence, but the two forms of recurrence differ. Daylight, willed memory works logically, by way of similarities which are seen as identities, one thing repeating another and grounded in a concept on the basis of which their likeness may be understood. This corresponds to Deleuze’s first, Platonic form of repetition. (The reader will note that in saying “corresponds to” I am using the form of relation which I am discussing. Repetition cannot be analyzed without using it, in forms of language which inevitably turn back on themselves and lose their lucid or logical transparency. Benjamin “repeats” Deleuze. In which way? According to which mode of repetition is my own tapestry being woven here?)

The second, involuntary form of memory, which Benjamin calls the “Penelope work of forgetting [Penelopewerk des Vergessens],” is woven also out of similarities, but these are called by Benjamin “opaquely similar [undurchschaubar ähnlich].” These similarities he associates with dreams, in which one thing is experienced as repeating something which is quite different from it and which it strangely resembles. (“It was a sock, but it was my mother too.”) This repetition is not grounded. It arises out of the interplay of the opaquely similar things, opaque in the sense of riddling. How is a mother like a sock? This repetition is the true mode of Proust’s novel. It corresponds to Deleuze’s second, Nietzschean form of repetition. Benjamin, accordingly, writes of “Proust’s frenetically studying resemblances, his impassioned cult of similarity [Ahnlichkeit].” “The true signs of [the dream’s] hegemony [Herrschaft],” he continues, “do not become obvious where [Proust] suddenly and startlingly uncovers similarities in actions, physiognomies, or speech mannerisms. The similarity of one thing to another which we are used to, which occupies us in a wakeful state, reflects only vaguely the deeper resemblance of the dream world in which everything that happens appears not in identical but in similar guise, opaquely similar to one another [nie identisch, sondern ähnlich: sich selber undurchschaubar ähnlich].”⁷

In explaining what he means by “opaque similarity,” Benjamin has recourse to an emblem which is an example of what he is trying to define. The defined enters once more into the definition, disqualifying that definition, as in my own language here, according to a necessity of this second form of repetition. If the similarity is not logical or wakeful, but opaque, dreamlike, it cannot be defined logically, but only exemplified. The example will then only present again the opacity. Another necessity of the second form of repetition, “exemplified” b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1 Two Forms of Repetition
• 2 Lord Jim
• 3 Wuthering Heights
• 4 Henry Esmond
• 5 Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• 6 The Well-Beloved
• 7 Mrs. Dalloway
• 8 Between the Acts
• Notes
• Index