“the strange and difficult notion that reading is subject not to the text as its law, but to the law to which the text is subject. The law forces the reader to betray the text or deviate from it in the act of reading, in the name of a higher demand that can yet be reached only by way of the text.”
—J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading
Reading around J. Hillis Miller’s incisive reflection on Heart of Darkness lead me serendipitously to Lord Jim, a favourite from a mostly-forgotten Conrad phase. I had underlined and appended an exclamation mark to the following sentence in chapter 12:
” . . . that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection which is the last word of the highest art.”
Detecting the means of that power is what Miller does effectively in his study of Conrad’s nihilism. But, in a much smaller sense, I suppose, it is what all of us that have the temerity to comment on literature at least aspire toward.
‘Anglophone literary studies between about 1920 and 1970 are to be understood, I think, as one of the twentieth-century’s most significant and original intellectual accomplishments.’ Simon During’s argument is worth reading for anyone interested, as I am, in this most formative period of literary criticism. During lists the ‘path-breaking and exciting’ works, which establish an aspirational reading list, many which I’ve yet to read.
J. Hillis Miller was part of the ‘Yale School,’ along with Paul de Man and Harold Bloom. Initially associated with Derrida, their strategy of deconstruction was little more than a way of prolonging the intellectual snobbery of American New Criticism, incisively critiqued in later years by Geoffrey Bennington and others.
From the J. Hillis Miller Reader comes this essay How To Read Literature, which I quite enjoyed for capturing the aporia or unresolvable contradiction between the urge to “read rapidly, allegro, in a dance of the eyes across the page,” and a wish to pause “over every key word or phrase [..] anxious not to let the text put anything over” you.
I am less convinced by the essay’s conclusion that, outside the academy at least, critical reading robs readers of the necessary mystification to maintain a love affair with literature. What do you think?
Time's Flow Stemmed 