BOOKS
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rists seem to forget and do everything to prevent with their highly abstruse
and almost unreadable discussions ofliterature in general and of specific texts.
Alter's book is a conspicuous example of discursive criticism, moving as
it does with a knowledge of literary theory but with a light touch, and making
his polemical points with grace and without overkill. For example, Alter
counters the notion that the literary canon consists of works that have con–
formed to the entrenched social biases by reminding us that many of the
great works in our hierarchical tradition have been adversarial and even
subversive either in intention or execution. In addition, Alter cites many ex–
amples of the fact that writers, as
T.
S. Eliot has put it, have the literature of
the past in their bones. Also, countering some of the wild interpretations of
works by advocates of multiple readings, Alter provides a number of inter–
pretations of classical texts that are plausible but are neither dogmatic nor
strained. And his quotations of pompous,jargon-filled, and ideological state–
ments by some contemporary theorists are devastating. Here is one from
the French critic, Helene Cixous, whom Alter characterizes as "at once
Derridean, Freudian, and Marxist," and says, "... she describes the literary
work in which character occurs as a 'machine of repression'." Miller quotes
her further as saying, "The marketable form of literature ... is closely
related to that familiar, decipherable human sign that character claims to be."
On the whole, Alter has restored literary theory and literary criticism to a
place closer to the experience of literature.
J.
Hillis Miller, on the other hand, provides a ready-made illustration of
everything Alter says is inimical to the reading and the study of literature.
Here I must confess to some of my own difficulty in grasping Miller's tortu–
ous prose. However, if I understand him correctly, he appears to be devel–
oping the idea that both reading and writing are ethical acts. But by this he
does not mean the commonly accepted notion of moral behavior, though at
times he does lean in that direction. What he refers to as ethics, or "ethicity"
as he calls it, a term apparently taken from Derrida, is doing, which in his
scheme includes the act of reading and ofwriting. In this connection, Miller
cites a remark by Henry James that life consists of doing, endless doing,
which Miller further takes to support a basic tenet of deconstruction, accord–
ing to which all activity,
all
meanings,
all
interpretations are endlessly varied,
complex, unexpected . James's observation may be true , but just what it
means for the interpretation of any piece ofwriting is another matter. Miller
also says critics of deconstruction simplify and distort it: he denies that they
believe any interpretation is possible or that they ignore the context of liter–
ary works. But his main thrust is in the direction of the multiplicity and inde–
terminacy of meanings. In general, Miller does not go into the nature of the
"reader," but the idea ofa "common reader"
is
implicit in his conception of the
ethics of reading.
Miller pursues his thesis through chapters on Kant, Trollope, George
