. 300
PARTISAN REVIEW
Eliot, Henry James, Walter
Be~amin,
and Paul de Man. But while the line of
deconstruction, the line of relative and variable meanings, runs throughout the
entire text, one is constantly thrown off balance by apparent contradictions.
Moreover, the contradictions are veiled
in
a prose that is tantalizingly obscure
and ambiguous.
It
is as though Miller's book is itself a showcase of different
meanings - all operating simultaneously. Thus he talks a good deal about the
morality of literature, particularly in relation to George Eliot. But he never
lets go of the primacy oflanguage. Similarly, Miller refers to the mimetic, the
realistic quality of fiction, but he immediately repeals this common idea by
emphasizing the revision that takes place in the mind of the writer. In the
chapter on Henry James and Walter Benjamin, he also emphasizes the un–
known essence behind writing, which is, according to him, "translated into the
actual literary texts, and then retranslated when rendered into another lan–
guage." He seems to be trying to deconstruct some of the more accepted
critical views to bring them into the orbit of deconstruction theory itself.
In the heat of the controversy over deconstruction, we tend to forget
that many poems and parts of poems and the greater part of most narratives
are clear and unambiguous.
It
is only in some poems and lines of poetry and
when we dig deeper into characters and events that there is room for
alternative meanings. Indeed, one of the requirements of literary theorizing is
that the issue of interpretation be blown up.
It
would also seem that the
question of the relation of literature to something called "Life" or "Reality" is
unduly complicated by literary theorists. For, patently, characters and their
fates have their origin in observation and mimesis, but these are shaped and
twisted by the special and sometimes obsessive views of the authors. An
even more crucial issue for literary theory is that of the nature of the reader.
Both Alter and Miller seem to have a general reader in mind, and
indeed most contemporary theorists and critics appear to postulate a reader,
as it were, in the abstract, who is then thought of as a common reader. Some
critics go so far as to designate this reader as the ideal creation of a
democratic culture. This conception I think can be dismissed as a radical piety,
a hortatory notion born of populist and misguided socialist thinking. And I
suspect that even many of those literary theorists who do not see the reader
as a triumph of democratic culture, who indeed, are open or closet elitists,
invent the so-called common reader to conceal the fact that they are really
talking about the uncommon reader. For the learned and intricate in–
terpretations that most theorists and academic critics go in for are clearly
addressed to advanced students ofliterature.
I cannot claim that my views about reading are based on any scientific
evidence, but many years of teaching and observing the reading habits of
untrained readers have convinced me that if there is such a creature as a
common reader, he or she reads for the immediate and obvious flow and
meaning of a story, unencumbered by the possibilities of recessed meanings
