J. Hillis Miller. On Literature.

Gross, David S.

J. Hillis Miller. On Literature. New York. Routledge. 2002. xii + 164 pages. $12.95. ISBN 0-415-26125-2

THIS VERY ENJOYABLE AND INTERESTING BOOK is part of a series from Routledge bearing the title "Thinking in Action" that promises to "take philosophy to its public." Each book "by a major international philosopher or thinker" is said to be not only "clearly and accessibly written" but even "punchy, short and stimulating." Derrida and Zizek are among J. Hillis Miller's fellow contributors to the series. The book is generally accessible, and Miller's voice is personal and direct, sometimes informal and casual. He acknowledges, for example, that the "virtual world" in a novel like Finnegans Wake is "pretty weird." On the other hand words like "proleptic," "catechresis," and even "anacluthonic shift" are used more or less without definition or explanation.

Miller's discussion is very wide-ranging and consistently thought-provoking. This is a major work by an important author that engages the broadest and deepest questions regarding literature--what it is, what it does, how it does it, and why it matters. On the first page, Miller insists both that "the end of literature is at hand" and that "literature is a feature of any human culture at any time and place." This is the first of many key paradoxes or contradictions employed by Miller in the book. Near the end, for example, discussing how we should read, Miller says we should read fast, giving ourselves over to the book and its imaginary world entirely, falling under its spell, as those of us did who loved books as a child, but we should also read slow, lento, holding the text at arm's length as we puzzle out and reflect upon and savor how it achieves its fabulous effects. Miller terms these contradictory instructions about how to read "the aporia of reading."

Miller employs several different theoretical schemas in the course of his reflections on literature, among them speech-act theory after Austin, arguing that literature is primarily performative rather than constative or referential. In terms of the influential traditional image whereby literature is said to mirror the world, Miller grants it partial validity, but he insists that we must also see the text as a mirror more like the looking glass in Alice in Wonderland, one through which we pass to enter enchanted realms.

Another key argument is that literature's enchantment and its attendant rapture are connected to transgressive violence. He cites Nietzsche in support of the idea that such superabundant rapture is at the heart of the tragic feeling in all art. That is in turn associated, says Miller, with "death, sexuality, and the irrational side of language." The strangeness that results from the presence of such irruptive violence is the source of the sui generis nature of each literary work. It is often tamed by courses in literature or literary theory.

Miller argues that humans need the imaginary, that it would be impossible to imagine a human world without some form of storytelling. But what we call "literature" is but one form of the imaginary, that of a paper culture, a communication regime which has lasted only a few centuries, and the passing of which should not be a cause for shock and mourning. He discusses at length the authority granted to literature, its sources or grounds and its importance in what the German's call Bildung, the instilling of a national ethos, also one of the main traditional functions of the university. He also considers the ways in which deconstruction after Nietzsche has spent a century demystifying that authority, critiquing its ideological functions.

I have only scratched the surface of this wonderful little book. I have not mentioned, for example, that alongside sophisticated philosophical reflections, Miller returns often to his childhood reading of The Swiss Family Robinson, along with an adult rereading, after many decades, undertaken in the course of writing On Literature. He acknowledges the ideological indoctrination in a certain version of the Protestant ethic that now seems obvious to him in that novel. At the same time, however, he stresses the enchantments of entering fiction's virtual reality, giving oneself over to a world so different from one's own. I know that that is the main reason I still love to read novels. I am not at all sure that such a love is acknowledged and nurtured in university literature courses in our day. One of the many reasons why Miller's thoughts on literature are so rewarding is in his defense of the primal love of reading.

David S. Gross

University of Oklahoma