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or success (as in the case of Emily Bronte) to reconquer this space,
coincides with failure or success to reach God-and Hillis Miller is very
careful and rigorous in not making this failure or success into an
evaluative criterion. One can say that, for Miller, the artist's God is
space. The entire method proceeds from there.
Before taking this question a bit further, I want to stress that
Hillis Miller's insight allows
him
to extend our understanding of these
writers well beyond the point reached until now.
The Disappearance of
God
is without doubt one of the most penetrating and original works of
criticism to appear in this country for quite a while. There is much to
take issue with, in detail as well as in the general considerations
to
which
I must here confine myself. But in general conception as well as in specific
contributions, this is an impressive achievement. Mr. Miller has a sly
way of making his argument rebound; at the very moment that one
suspects him of going astray, he turns about in his last paragraphs and
forces one to reconsider one's judgment. The entire book is organized in
that way; after working through an amusing de Quincey, a somewhat
lengthy Browning and a somewhat sketchy Emily Bronte, one is suddenly
stirred up by an extremely convincing Arnold, to end up with truly
outstanding pages on Hopkins. But when all this is said, I still must
confess that I find Mr. Miller's concluding sentence and his introduction
(which is in fact a summarizing conclusion and was written last) disap–
pointing. Not because of any real slackening in his thought, but because
they reveal a flaw in the method.
Both Mr. Frank and Mr. Miller write very disparagingly about
history. "By this [spatial] juxtaposition," says Mr. Frank, "history be–
comes a-historical ... What has occurred ... may be described as the
transformation of the historical imagination into myth-an imagination
for which historical time does not exist. . . ." And in his introduction
Mr. Miller argues against historicism with an ardor reminiscent of
Nietzsche's second
Unzeitgemiize Betrachtung,
"Of the use and misuse
of History for Life." This aversion to history seems consistent enough ;
history being, by definition, temporal, it is bound to appear as the very
chaos which the esthetic consciousness is obliged to put into shape. And
historicism, which implies a certain priority of temporal over spatial
events, thus naturally becomes the main enemy of the literary sensibility.
Is this not the point where the assumption of spatial form begins to
reveal its inadequacy, in that it dangerously oversimplifies the dialectical
relationship between space and time in the work of
art?
What
is
called
"time" here is the inauthentic, degraded, evasive temporality of everyday