Specificity
Foucault’s contribution to the reading of literature is a double one. His use of tropological inventories to show how rhetorical patterns structure texts through difference provides the reading of prose—both fiction and, as I will show with Melanie Klein and with Freud later on, non-fiction—a specificity of method ordinarily limited to poetry. But it also does more than that. It provides a way of finding history in texts through the avenue of form. This is what is so perplexing about the New Historicism’s appeal to Foucault as an antidote to deconstruction. Nowhere is this misuse of Foucault more prevalent than it is in the study of Victorian fiction, and nowhere is it more amusing. Victorian novels are, as I will show, splendid witness to the historicism implicit in deconstructive reading for a simple reason. Tropological inventories of novels include more often than not the trope of texts. Textuality is central to fiction, not because it makes fiction reflexive, but because it heightens its realism. Texts are not only a metaphor in novels. They are also a plain element in the concrete social worlds that novels represent. J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructive reading of Victorian fiction points out this doubleness with singular efficiency. The anguished New Historicist reaction to it reveals the truth of what it denies by unconsciously appropriating its key insights.
“Bleak House,” writes Miller in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Dickens’s 1853 novel, “is a document about the interpretation of documents” (1971, 11). What does Miller’s easy, avuncular insight reveal? Text and world are no longer copy and original. Narration and story, récit and histoire are one and the same. Why? Because the world itself is made up of languages. Language, by definition, is part of the world rather than its dim and fugitive reflection.
The swell of textuality that makes the unlikely reflexiveness of Dickens’s novels a template for Victorian fiction is not limited to Dickens alone. Casaubon’s fruitless search for the “key to all mythologies” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) is, as Miller points out (1987), another locus classicus for the foregrounding of textuality in Victorian writing. The metaphor of reading makes the personal and the hermeneutical equivalent by virtue of the common activity of interpretation that they share. Casaubon’s brutality as a husband and as a scholar who falls short of nuance in both spheres of life is Victorian fiction’s most persuasive instance of what makes rudeness in one aspect of behavior an index of cruelty in the other. Dorothea is victim in love to what makes Casaubon’s intellectual project victim to a kin indecency. Casaubon’s failure as an interpreter lies in his lack of fluency as a reader. Despite the theological subject of The Key to All Mythologies, the work of the Higher Criticism is unavailable to him because he cannot read German. It leads to his fatal universalism as an interpreter. It also leads to his failure as a husband. He cannot read Dorothea either, whose attraction to him is based on an interest in his work whose details he will not share with her. It is no surprise that her interest in architectural renovation strikes no answering chord in him. Renovation, whether intellectual or personal, is the interpretative impulse whose absence on his part dooms his work and their marriage even before the failure of his heart dooms them both.
Miller’s signature insight also allows one to see that Henry James’s indebtedness to Eliot proceeds from this starting point (2005). Dr. Sloper’s inability to understand his daughter’s desires in Washington Square (1880) is, like Casaubon’s inability to understand Dorothea, an inability to interpret as she does. James’s concern with the clash of the social codes of Americans and Europeans in Daisy Miller (1879) or “An International Episode” (1879) is also one that focuses on their lack of a common code of reading that underwrites their inability to understand one another. This is also what links the early, social James with the later, psychological James. Miller’s reading of James as a whole regards both personal and social interaction as a series of speech acts that move and persuade one’s thoughts and emotions. Its precondition is the notion that the psyche is a text. Here Miller’s unexpected appreciation of Steven Marcus’s edition of Freud’s letters to Fliess (1977) comes into focus as entirely logical. The unconscious, too, is, to borrow Jacques Lacan’s phrase, structured like a language.
Dickens en abyme
It is customary to assign the source of Miller’s reading of Bleak House to his shift from the early influence of Georges Poulet to the later influence of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. The deconstructive Miller, however, is already implicit in the phenomenological Miller of Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958). Not only that. To read Miller’s early book on Dickens in the light of his later reading of Bleak House is to be doubly surprised. The familiar tradition of complaint that Miller is not a historical critic of Dickens is misconceived. Not only is his phenomenological approach already structural; his presumable formalism is also historical. How does the identity of récit and histoire lead to a historical approach to fiction? One customarily regards seeing narration and story as doubles as an infinite regress or mise en abyme—as two likenesses reduplicating one another forever, forsaking any referential function they may have and becoming endless, reflexive copies of themselves. Like Warhol’s lithographs of historical figures such as Mao or Marilyn Monroe, historicity is presumably emptied out at the moment of its evocation. Far from being a retreat into the formal, however, the mise en abyme or infinite regress is actually an opening onto history. No falling away into a mysticism of textuality, it is an entrance into textuality as the archive. Foucault (1966, 1969) before the fact rather than Blanchot after the fact (1955), Miller’s archive is the field of history in all its fugitive concreteness, the vortex of all the signs and their tokens left behind in the wake of time in its flight. Both specific and endlessly ungraspable, it is a reconceived resource for the critic and historian rather than a dead end.
While Dickens’s fiction may seem to be a “self-contained entity” (1958, viii), says Miller, “it is” actually “a better clue than any biographical data to the writer’s intimate relation to the material world” (1958, ix). “A thousand paths radiate from the same center” (1958, 14). Pickwick Papers (1837), the entrance to Dickens’s world chronologically, is “a swarming” and “simultaneous plurality” of “centers” (1958, 13). Bleak House, later in Dickens’s career, is the ripe fruit of this early plant, a novel that adduces plural “perspectives from different viewpoints of a condition of reality too complex to be seen from any one perspective” (1958, 163). The doubling of récit and histoire in the novel is manifest, but it is in the service of discovering an archive, not a series of empty forms: “Characters,” chief among them the detective Mr. Bucket, “try to discover in the world an intelligible order” (1958, 167). Each character, Esther Summerson included, tries “to put together the fragments of the world into a coherent whole” (1958, 170). “The real detective” is “the narrator himself, attempting … to discover the laws of the world he sees” (1958, 176). Jarndyce and Jarndyce is no formal model; it is a profoundly concrete one. Although it will “never end”—indeed, “it is the permanent condition of life in Bleak House”—the “endless case … becomes a symbol in the novel of what it is to be in the world at all” (1958, 196). It is the very picture of the archive because it accounts for its complexity in terms of overdetermination, not closure: “The world of Bleak House,” says Miller, “is a vast interlocking system in which any change or action in one place will have a corresponding and reciprocal effect on any other place” (1958, 206). Hardly a phenomenological or formalist reduction, Miller’s reading employs the resources of both methods to produce something beyond them both: a model of fiction as a metatext that presents its own world as a model for discovering its plural relationships to the very real historical archives that prompt its production. The truth of this claim is played out in the subsequent history of Victorian criticism as it both accepts Miller’s influence and wrestles with the anxiety it provokes.
Influence and Anxiety in Victorian Studies
Influence, as Harold Bloom reminds us, has a rocky history. It is marked not only by gratitude, but by quarrels that are not quarrels at all. They are the symptoms of indebtedness that provoke anxiety rather than gratitude. The movement of Victorian studies in fiction in the decades subsequent to Miller’s reading of Dickens reveals both. It also reveals how prescient Miller’s earliest work on Dickens is not only in relation to his later, deconstructive handling of Dickens in the infamous introduction to Bleak House. It also shows how much both kinds of readings enable the historicism that presumably comes to displace deconstruction.
George Eliot is not the only major Victorian novelist who is part of the holistic paradigm for reading that Miller finds in Dickens. Walter Kendrick’s definitive study of Anthony Trollope, The Novel-Machine (1980), reveals an equivalent identity of textuality and manners in a writer presumably immune from such reflexivity. For Kendrick, a formalist approach leads to a formalist conclusion, or so it seems. Trollope’s conception of himself as a writer in his autobiography is that of a machine. He conceives of himself as an engine of production not unlike the world of industrial capitalism whose wealth and manners he represents, a world with which his writing is in point of fact identical as a project and an activity. Realism, according to Kendrick, has a surprising and unexpected precondition: “Writing,” he says, is “prior to the representation of reality,” not the other way around (1980, 3). Writing is primary, reality is secondary. Writing does not represent; it “transmits” (1980, 4). Kendrick appears to verify the notion that Miller’s formalism begets more formalism. But, as with Miller himself, Kendrick’s formalism contains a surprise. It is really an implicitly historical assessment of Trollope based on a theory of writing whose referential function derives from the psychological forms that reader and writer alike share at the level of their unconscious assumptions about Victorian life.
Trollope’s novels do not therefore copy life. Their referentiality comes from elsewhere. They come from what Kendrick calls “conceptions” (1980, 8)—from an archive of ideas in Trollope’s mind. They are located in the novelist’s imagination and in the minds of Trollope’s readers. They meet in a field common to them both—an archive of assumption based on a knowledge of Victorian habits of mind. The Archdeacon Grantly in The Warden (1855), for example, is not a copy of anything real, but the result of Trollope’s own “consciousness” (1980, 19). The imitation is simultaneously reflexive and realistic. The imagination copies, as it were, itself. “Two things become identical”—the image and its representation—“without losing their difference” (1980, 20). “The result is duplication without imitation” (1980, 23). Trollope neither recollects nor imitates. Rather, he “brings his two halves”—half Trollope the writer, half Trollope his own reader—“by letting one sympathize with the other” (1980, 23). The novel exists in its prior conception and in its later reading. What is represented exists nowhere but in this relation. Writer and reader comingle in the archive that they both share. Novels convey reality precisely because they do not. Because life for Trollope is the life almost exclusively of the drawing room, its set of conceptions is extraordinarily strict and delimited. No wonder Lizzy Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds (1873) measures her own being in a fanciful relation to Shelley and to Byron (1980, 66). “The world is structured just as the mind is” (1980, 86), not as a merely psychological principle but as a representational one. “The world and the minds in it speak the same language” (1980, 87). “The Trollopian mind is a sort of internal debating society,” concludes Kendrick, “containing an audience and two speakers who compete for the reader’s attention” (1980, 87). Like Miller’s conception of the world of Dickens, “the structure of any particular novel is unimportant by comparison with the total structure to which each novel contributes a part” (1980, 87). Kendrick privileges He Knew He Was Right (1869) because it is a departure for Trollope. Its singularity exposes the methodical regularity of his other books because Louis Trevelyan’s madness exposes the single real danger to the novel-machine: “the boundless proliferation of signs that the novel is designed to contain and subjugate” (1980, 131). Here the threat of textuality to express itself and overwhelm the realist illusion reveals its endemic presence in the repression to which it is characteristically subject in Trollope’s other novels. Because madness is a proliferation of signs or “conceptions,” the result is the potential exposure of the endless textuality that Trollope ordinarily makes disappear. In this way, Trollope’s realism is always based on the textuality whose control is its repressed and preponderant condition.
Even more explicit in showing the identity of world and texts is D.A. Miller’s study of Victorian fiction, The Novel and the Police (1988). While employing Foucault’s vocabulary from Discipline and Punish (1975) as a smokescreen, Miller the Younger is actually using Miller the Elder’s approach to Victorian writing. It is not surprising that he takes Miller the Elder’s reading of Bleak House as his polemical target. Miller the Elder’s view of the novel as “an interminable proliferation of signs” is “decisive” (1988, 67), but this “identification of form and content” (1988, 84) is insufficient to account for the novel’s wider activity. “The practices of the world” exceed “the practices of representing it” (1988, 84), particularly the mise en abyme of textuality into which novel and world alike are thrown by the insistence upon their isomorphism or shared technical structure. “Differentiating” the two spheres is required (1988, 84). Among the first of the New Historicist critics to employ Foucault’s use of Bentham’s Panopticon to explain narration in fiction, Miller the Younger exploits it to great effect. The Panopticon—the central tower in a prison occupied by a guard whose surveillance of the prisoners cannot be seen by them—is a screen onto which characters and reader, like Bentham’s prisoners, project their own fears and anxieties. This exposes the Victorian novel’s famed morality for what it is: a system of social tyranny and a fiction. Text and world are not the same. The world may employ textual practices—the control of society through duplicitous fictions—but they are not identical with narrative textuality. Narrative textuality is presumably unbiased, mimetic rather than tendentious, transparent rather than persuasive. Textuality and the social uses of representation may be similar, but they are also distinct.
Miller the Younger gives us Wilkie Collins rather than Dickens to make his point. Far from identifying récit and histoire, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868 ) separates “the relevant signifiers from the much larger number of irrelevant ones” (1988, 33). Not everything counts, even if it requires measuring the difference between one signifier and another to do so. Sergeant Cuff, the official detective, knows this: “I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet” (1988, 35). Cuff fails because the novel’s strategies reach beyond the goals of detection—to the pursuit of a plot distinct from narration. There is no isomorphism between them. Textuality has as its project the discovery of an end to interpretation even though its real effect is to produce the proliferation of interpretation. Miller the Younger’s distinction is no distinction at all. Instead, it leads, ironically, to an identity between the Panopticon and the novel’s own narrative method—the very identity it presumably rejects.
The exclusion of the official police in The Moonstone introduces policing of a different order in the margins of the text. The official police become the unofficial police to be found in the psyche of the characters and in the novel’s own narrative method, one which introduces unofficial policing in the reader. “The Moonstone dismisses the police altogether,” says Miller, “and the mysterious crime is worked to a solution by a power that no one has charge of”: the power of “gossip and domestic familiarity,” which themselves produce the effect of surveillance (1988, 49). Surveillance now occurs in “closed clubs and houses … . The intention to detect is visible only at a microscopic level,” not at a manifestly institutional one (1988, 49). The result is the creation of a new kind of institutional authority, one which, like the Panopticon, is everywhere and nowhere: a social authority produced by the effects of Collins’s writing. Here narration and story are redoubled in a way that may exceed isomorphism, but which requires it in order for it to be overcome. This is how The Moonstone satisfies “a double exigency: how to keep the everyday world entirely outside a network of police power and yet at the same time to preserve the effects of such power within it” (1988, 50).
The same can be said of the novel itself. Its textual strategies both identify and distinguish between the two because, like the world it represents, it is also a Panopticon. Nor is the novel, as Miller the Younger claims, a “monological” text in Bahktin’s sense (1988, 54). On the contrary, because of “discontinuities and incoherencies” (1988, 56)—emblems of the blind alleys down which signifying chains of different authority or dialects may lead—the novel is, by definition, resolutely dialogical. Otherwise, the novel’s buckshot proliferation of anxieties and the fears that prompt them would be impossible to create in either the novel’s characters or in its reader. It creates them in order to control them both. Panoptical authority, by definition, exists everywhere and nowhere. Its effectiveness derives from the presence of its absence. Foucault’s Benthamite device is not an empirical one but a psychological one. Its power comes not from the guard’s actual surveillance of those incarcerated—whether or not there is even a guard on duty in the central tower is always an open question—but from the belief that he is. Surveillance is an effect of the Panopticon’s structure, not its cause. The same may be said of the role of the omniscient Victorian narrator, everywhere and nowhere at once. The narrator is an effect in which the reader believes, calculated by the text rather than by its speaker. Text and speaker are analogous to Panopticon and guard. The former creates the illusion of the latter. Their relationship may be distinct but, when all is said and done, it is also equivalent.
This is not simply the structure of Victorian narration. It is also the story Victorian fiction tells, again and again. While presumably differing from Miller the Elder’s notion of narration and story, Miller the Younger reconstitutes it by means of its rejection. Miller the Younger’s anxiety of influencer redoubles the structure of authority that he finds at work in Collins. Miller the Elder’s authority returns as a repressed. Miller the Elder’s authority functions the way authority functions in The Moonstone. The strategic departure of the official police has as its ironic result the return of authority in a secret way that expands rather than inhibits its effects.
D.A. Miller’s early New Historicism prefigures the far more thoroughgoing materialism of later studies of the Victorian novel such as Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things (2006). It is a fine example of both the difference from Miller the Elder’s pioneering work and its repressed continuity with it. Like D.A. Miller’s, Freedgood’s enabling rejection of Miller the Elder returns her to its theoretical assumptions. Like Miller the Younger, she, too, begins by claiming to move beyond the formalism of Miller the Elder, casting aside his reading of Dickens in order to do so (2006, 16–17). It allows her to return, consciously or not, to a heightened recapitulation of his enabling premise that texts are about the interpretation of texts. For Freedgood, a material approach leads to a formal one. Absorbing the influence of the New Historicism along with the influence of a reflexive reading of fiction, Freedgood’s focus on “things” shows how effective a materialist supplement to Miller the Elder’s approach can be. The most microscopic details of novelistic representation are mirrors, not of an object-world, but of an object-world that is itself a world of texts and representations. They disclose their historicity because they are parts of a discursive chain that reveals the endless signatures of their productive mechanisms, particularly the production of material goods. “Victorian novels’ penchant for the representation of the emblematic hodgepodge” of objects (2006, 6), she writes, reveals an “overdetermined material” history (2006, 5) that links the political, social, and mercantile in “a grammar of meaning” available to the attentive reader (2006, 6). This reader becomes a historical reader because this reader has already learned to become a formal reader trained in the belief that “documents” are “documents about the interpretation of documents.” A heightened formalism, as Roland Barthes once proposed, returns us to history in a fresh and vivid way.
Like D.A. Miller’s, Freedgood’s argument is a clearer and more extraordinary one than her polemical assertions might lead one to believe. “Cultural knowledge is stored in a variety of institutional forms,” including “the word” (2006, 23). “The commodity is both a material object and a trope” (2006, 27). It is symbolic because it is real and real because it is symbolic. This kind of formalism produces “an interpretative open end of dizzying potential” (2006, 14) that allows the winds of real history to fill the novel with fresh life and lead to a new encounter with the real.
The real, of course, is implicitly redefined in the process. It is the archive to which Miller the Elder is led in his early study of Dickens. Objects in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) are archives of their real histories of production, storehouses of meaning available precisely because they are texts to be interpreted. Freedgood’s particular focus is the “Negro-head tobacco” that Magwich smokes in Great Expectations, an object that is “a very particular kind of memorial” because it contains the history of both aboriginal genocide in Australia and imperial consumerism as a whole (2006, 83). The London press featured mass coverage of the atrocities in Australia alongside advertisements for products whose manufacture depended on the resources of colonialism whose protection depended on the violence of British military practice.
Negro-head tobacco is, writes Freedgood, “a kind of unsupervised metonymic archive: a nearly infinite catalogue of compressed references to social facts” (2006, 84). The well-known and well-documented awareness in contemporary Victorian England of this history is one that the text of the novel assumes on the part of its reader. “It was part of,” says Freedgood, “the ‘hubbub’ of social discourse to which Dickens listened” (2006, 86). Freedgood’s New Historicism is the direct result of her close formalist reading, not a reaction to close reading but its best effect. Once again, Miller the Elder’s text within a text becomes the occasion for New Historicist specificity—precisely that which it presumably forecloses. What we today call “brands” are the sign and signature of a world of texts whose literal specificity is what realist fiction represents. In a hyperbolic realist like Dickens, these accents of the real have a feverish aura and an unexpected exactitude. They complete the vision of Dickens that Miller the Elder enables.
Indeed, Freedgood’s title and the method it employs constitute a broadside deconstruction of the notion of immanence and of the thing-in-itself as a category. Despite the logocentrism of Bill Brown’s “thing theory” in A Sense of Things (2002), Freedgood’s critical practice is not only materialist, but also deconstructive. “No ideas,” says William Carlos Williams in Paterson, “but in things” (1927, 6), even as sensory entities. Things exist as ideas, but not because they are the phenomena that express the noumena of Platonic forms or inherent ideas. It is the other way around: Things exist as ideas because they are the tokens of the types conceived of by the production of material goods and the categories of pertinent perception, even in a pre-capitalist setting. The type/token ratio, as Umberto Eco calls it (1976), measures the way something concrete is the function of its satisfaction of the demands of a semantic inventory. A table is a table because it corresponds to the notion of what a table is. Virginia Woolf gives a familiar exemplification in To the Lighthouse (1927). When Lily asks what Mr. Ramsay’s work is about, his son Andrew advises her to “think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there” (1927, 38). This is not an idealist presentation of a thing-in-itself, but a presentation of the “thing” as it is presented by Freedgood. Victorian objects, like all objects, are “things” because they are parts of a protocol of sensory production whether mechanical or biological. The result is a formidable critical synthesis that is both formal and concrete, synchronic and diachronic, deconstructive and historical.
In Memoriam Virginia Woolf
What lies beyond the archive? No metaphysical question, this, too, is a strictly material one. What lies beyond the archive is also what lies beyond its vortex: the ungraspable end to interpretation known as death. Here the continuity between Victorian and modern is, as it were, palpable. Without Miller to guide us, however, this palpability is evanescent and inexact. Like Jarndyce and Jarndyce, death, too, is not an end but a constant new beginning. Not the moment when there is no page left to turn, death is, like Borges’s “Book of Sand” (1975), a volume with no beginning and no end. It has new pages every time one consults it. What one consults is the book of death, which, for those left behind, becomes a book of new life. Those who are left behind to mourn are the readers. Virginia Woolf is the most eloquent exemplar of this new kind of life within death.
Miller’s shocking essay on Mrs. Dalloway (1982), originally written a year before his introduction to Bleak House (1970), cleared away the customary assumption that the modern novel is characterized by the inner speech of its characters in favor of a radical assertion—that a novel like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) has, like a Victorian novel, an omniscient narrator. It also gave the notion of the omniscient narrator a new weight. The omniscient narrator is not simply an observer or even an interpreter. The narrator also has an additional role—that of the mortician. Contra Pater, art no longer aspires to the condition of music. It aspires to the condition of film. “It embalms time,” to use André Bazin’s words, “rescuing it from its proper corruption” (1945, 14). The narrator of Woolf’s novel gathers up all the novel’s characters, living and dead, in a loving embrace. This is true not only of Septimus, who has committed suicide, but also of the old lady whom Clarissa observes in the window across from hers as she imagines her imminent decline as the novel concludes. This Miller calls the modern novel’s funereal function as “the raising of the dead,” as he puts it in Distance and Desire (1970), his book on Hardy. Here the continuity between Victorian and modern fiction is made explicit in a way that throws special light not only on the modern novel but that also spells out the way the modern novel elaborates what is already at work in the nineteenth-century novel.
What Clarissa sees in the window is the continuity between herself and everything around her, living, dead, and about to die. Her act of sympathy is an epistemological one. So expansive is the field of determinations within which Woolf’s omniscient narrator situates Clarissa’s character that character as such—discrete, individualized, specific—ceases to exist. In the very act of exalting subjectivity to its presumably most decisive moment in the history of literature, subjectivity is in point of fact disassembled. No wonder Clarissa appears to die at the novel’s close. The machinery of both consciousness and its representation unpacks the coherence of both because it apprehends them both at their real moment of emergence in a social and a historical field—in an archive. This deconstructive turn in the procedure of the modern novel does not separate its achievement from the fiction of the past. It actually recapitulates the structure of the nineteenth-century novel in overdrive. The characteristic structure of the Bildungsroman is a double one, focusing on both the development of an individual and the grand sweep of historical events that underwrites birth, life, and death. Woolf’s narrator does precisely what its precursors in Dickens or Flaubert do, revealing a continuity with them that vitiates our customary assumption that a radical break accompanies the movement from one century to the next. This double focus is a dialectic, one that shows how the individual is a function of cultural forces and how cultural forces are processed through and by the agency of individual subjects. When Woolf expands character to the point of showing how it dissolves into the public force fields that constitute and determine it, she is simply drawing out the implicit dialectic of the Bildungsroman in an explicit way.
Poised between specificity and oblivion, character inhabits the archive. Once again the infinite regress of textuality is not a hollow formalism, but its very opposite. The fall into the archive is not a fall into a vacuum but into a plentitude. This for Miller is Woolf’s “All Souls’ Day” (1970)—the condition of literary immortality. This literary immortality is located in the reader because the reader also is the archive. “The reader,” says Barthes, “holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (1968, 148). Generation to generation, the reader as archive is where the threads of literary memory are gathered.
It is in To the Lighthouse that Miller’s insight is played out to greatest effect. Here Virginia Woolf’s own immortality is vouchsafed in an unparalleled instance of this funereal mechanism. To the Lighthouse registers the death of Julia Stephen in the death of Mrs. Ramsay. This is the classic understanding of the novel from an autobiographical point of view. It is Woolf’s way of mourning her mother and of terminating her melancholia. The novel is an act of Kleinian reparation—a forgiving of the mother because of her imagined cruelty to the child. Because the Duckworth brothers’ abuse of the young Virginia is the direct result of Julia’s death—the mother is no longer there to protect the child—Woolf retrospectively blames her mother for the abuse. She is not there to protect her because she is dead. Woolf unconsciously revenges herself upon her by disrupting her wholeness in her memory. Lily’s completion of her painting, as generations of critics have noted, is the sign and seal of the lifting of this revenge and the salutary closure of the daughter’s depression. Mourning replaces melancholia.
After 1941, however, mourning takes on an entirely new and different status in the novel. In the light of Woolf’s own death, the novel’s object of mourning is no longer Julia Stephen, nor is the mourner Virginia Woolf. The mourner is now Virginia Woolf’s reader and the object of mourning is Virginia Woolf herself. To the Lighthouse becomes a mausoleum. The plural reality to which it is subject as a book of mourning requires us to conceive of it as an archive of souls. The distance with which the reader beholds the novel as Woolf’s mourning for her mother has a second kind of life when it becomes the longing the reader feels for the departed author. It gains speed as history speeds up and it is infinitely personal because it is not personal at all. We create the woman whose death we mourn. It leads to a new kind of archive—the myth of Virginia Woolf.
The Return of the Dead
Woolf’s prophetic account of her own futurity returns us to Miller’s prophetic role in the later history of the study of Victorian and modern fiction. His enabling recognition that texts are about texts not only opens our awareness of the novel as a form to the reflexivity of its realism, whether the social realism of Victorian fiction or the psychological realism of modern fiction. It also enables the methodology of its presumable opposite, that of the New Historicist reading of fiction. Far from a formalist criticism, Miller’s criticism alerts us to the production of discourse as the key activity in both fiction’s representationalism and its represented worlds. Even more, it provides an enabling role for the reader that unlocks this daunting and endlessly provocative style of critical will. It is, moreover, a reflexive instance of what it describes. It enacts its principles in its own behavior as criticism. All influences gather in an empyrean not unlike the return of the dead in Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Poulet, Derrida, Iser, Barthes, Austin, Foucault, even Freud and Lacan—all come to rest in his work.
"J. Hillis Miller’s All Souls’ Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies". Reading Victorian Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller. Ed. Julian Wolfreys and Monika Szuba. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 284-296.
