Chimes at Midnight: Harold Bloom's Literary Memoir

   Threaded through with reflections on his life and many friends, Harold Bloom's posthumous volume of criticism, Take Arms Against A Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death (2020), is a summary account of the poets that obsessed him for almost eighty years, since he began reading through the New York Public Library at the age of ten. It is, however, far more. It is a vivid dramatization of one of his chief principles as a critic: self-revision. Well beyond wrestling with prior writers, wrestling with one’s earlier self, says Bloom, is the defining factor in every writer’s life because every writer takes herself--he began using the feminine pronoun as generic many years ago--as her own most important precursor. Here Bloom’s pas de deux is a dance with his own past, a past with which he converses by splitting himself in two, repeating himself on the one hand--the poets that consume him remain the same canonical figures from Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens--while, on the other, shifting their positions in his mind because their roles change in his changing estimation of literary history. The shifts open a dialogue between the present and what has come before. Troubled by age and subject to its cognitive vicissitudes, Bloom harnesses these new affections and disaffections to a careful dramatic strategy festooned by autobiography and achieving its desired end with stunning effect: making what is old young again by changing his mind, giving his last book a fresh, sharp ring as the bell tolls its evensong. Self-revision is “metalepsis” (275), looking backward from the future in a way that alters the past. It is the cornerstone of Bloom’s notion of literary influence, which is, as he reminds us, “dialectical” (240). Bloom is not, of course, original here. It is the great secret of his success. He borrows the notion of both metalepsis and its effects from his arch-enemy, T.S. Eliot, in this familiar passage from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919): 

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely, historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. 

    There is no clearer statement of Bloom’s principles as a critic, so much so that this passage is an example of what it describes. It is Bloom talking now, not Eliot, and reveals the mechanism at work in Bloom’s notion of influence: how, by virtue of what Freud only the year before Eliot’s essay called deferred action, the future casts new light over the past and revises it. Eliot refines Bloom—or, rather, Bloom refines Eliot—more and more as the famous passage concludes: 

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. 

    This is why the one sustaining feature of Bloom’s stance throughout his career-the indebtedness to Eliot and the anxiety that accompanies it--remains unchanged. It falls across his work like the melancholic shadow that it is. Bloom has stolen what the thunder said from the poet of The Waste Land. This is the terrible fact that requires endless repression. It exhausts him. It is the true source of his rapturous depression. As Freud reminds us, the melancholic shadow derives from an unconscious identification that will not go away no matter how unhappy it makes the sufferer: “I tend,” says Bloom, “to struggle against being moved by Eliot, having battled all my life against his influence in our decaying academies” (26). That influence is the influence on Bloom himself, for whom clearing away Eliot is the prime directive. As a critic, says Bloom, “Eliot surpasses himself in violent dogmatism” (12). As a poet, the situation is much worse. Eliot’s influence as a poet is not dogmatic but genuine. It directs the history of modern and contemporary poetry down to the present day: “Turn Eliot’s verse every which way and its idiosyncratic development of late Romanticism is palpable” (13). The hatred of Eliot is not a strategy. It is real. 

    What Bloom revises in his conversation with himself are two crucial aspects of his work, the one early, from his days as a Romantic specialist, the other later, when his preoccupation with Shakespeare comes to dominate his thinking. The first is his estimation of Keats; the second is Shakespeare’s relation to Milton. It is this latter that takes center stage, as it were. The change in the status of Keats follows from it. 

    The chief contribution of Bloom’s study of Shakespeare (1998) that splits his career in two is the connection it draws between Shakespeare and English literature as a whole. It rests on Milton’s indebtedness to Shakespeare in Paradise Lost, a connection that no critic before Bloom has had either the wisdom or the temerity to draw in so coherent a way. “I have,” says Bloom, “been unable to find any lucid and compelling account of the Shakespearean shadow that falls across all of Milton’s poetry, and in particular darkens Paradise Lost. This has been for me a lifelong obsession” (39). Bloom elucidates it for the first time in his book on Shakespeare by finding Satan’s origins in Iago. Iago, argues Bloom, is Satan’s chief literary progenitor. In the new book, this relation changes. The relation is no longer one between Satan and Iago. It is now one between Satan and Hamlet. It is a welcome step forward. Still preserving the new and salutary link between Shakespeare and the later tradition of English poetry that has Milton at its head as the progenitor of English Romanticism, it is nonetheless a far richer relation between Shakespeare and Milton because Hamlet is a far richer figure than Iago and a far more compelling model of mind with which to grant Satan a tutor. No wonder a line from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy gives the new book its title. The change from Iago to Hamlet begins in Bloom’s chapter “Milton’s Hamlet” in The Anatomy of Influence (2011). It is the centerpiece of the self-revision regarding Shakespeare and Milton here. Before, says Bloom, “I recall once writing”--the avuncularity is disarming--”that Milton’s Satan was indebted to Iago for his sense of injured merit” (58). Now he is indebted to Hamlet for his “relentless self-questioning” (49). Hamlet’s new role also serves as an emblem for Bloom’s own self-defining principle, the principle of endless self-revision. Milton’s Satan is no longer the disciple of Iago. He is “a version of Hamlet” (6). 

    This change adds both dignity and youth to Satan, the former something Satan does not require, the latter something he does. This is a reflection of Bloom’s own need—it is youth he seeks now. It is also why the self-revision regarding Keats is forthcoming only later in the book. It is a function of the substitution of Hamlet for Iago as a model for Satan. This newly found interest in Keats was never before one of Bloom’s obsessions. It is the subject of not one but two chapters here. Like Hamlet, Keats is the soul of youthfulness, its emblem not only in English poetry but in English culture at large, the prototype of Romantic affection through disaffection, of the delicacy of despair and the brim of youth heightened by its own self-regarding loss in a deft and elegant orgy of narcissistic self-display. What more than a love for one’s own body defines youth, and youth at its moment of sexual self-discovery, even to the point of revisiting the possibility of gender acquisition and expanding its potential to the point of pansexuality? Keats’s early death and the degeneration of his young body focus for Bloom his twin preoccupations: his nostalgia for youth and his knowledge of oncoming death. They come together in Keats. Bloom requires a screen to mask this, of course, and he does so by claiming that Keats is more Shakespearean than Miltonic. “Keats Shakespeareanizes Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth” (104) all alike. This may be a dubious claim to make about so Miltonic a poet as Keats--Bloom admits as much by acknowledging how Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion derives from the invocations in Paradise Lost. But it does not deter him from the wider purpose it serves. 

    Bloom finds more than youth in his new enthusiasm for Keats. Keats—and Bloom—also find a solution to the same problem that Shakespeare solves. Keats’s identity with Shakespeare is without critical duplicity because it rests on a sound critical premise: “Setting aside Shakespeare,” says Bloom, “Keats is the first major English poet free of religion” (316). Here the role the new estimation of Keats and Shakespeare both play in Bloom’s self-revisionism becomes entirely clear. “The relation of poetry to belief has vexed me for too many decades” (615), he writes. His Orthodox upbringing, his critical flirtations over the years with the Hebrew Bible, with Gnosticism, with Kabbalah, even with the Christian Bible--all were witness to this vexation. Now, the new estimation of Shakespeare provides the ground for the new solace to be found in Keats at this late hour. “For me,” says Bloom now, “Shakespeare has replaced God” (110). With it comes the reason a new feeling for Keats.is possible. Keats’s Shakespeareanism, however arguable critically, is essential to Bloom experientially: Keats is, like Shakespeare, an entirely physical, not metaphysical, poet. “Keats is completely physical in a physical world” (297). Like Shakespeare, his divinity--both his sense of it and his own—is concrete. It lies with the words to be found on the page. One can see the invocation of the famous fragment coming before Bloom even quotes it: 

This living hand, now warm and capable 

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold 

And in the icy silence of the tomb, 

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights 

That thou would[st] wish thine own heart dry of blood 

So in my veins red life might stream again, 

And thou be conscience-calm’d--see here it is—  I hold it towards you.

    Hence, too, the durability of Stevens in the Bloom canon. Despite the numerous changes in Bloom’s self-revisions, the enthusiasm for Stevens not only remains. It grows steadier because it has a sharper focus. While Bloom retains his enthusiasm for Blake, Yeats, and Crane, its reasons remain as puzzling as ever; no amount of elucidation can explain it, now or in the past. But with Stevens, the change in the estimation of Shakespeare and, even more, of Keats draws the appreciation in finer lines because they have clearer reasons behind them. Like Whitman, though in a lower key, Stevens is not simply a poet of daily life, but also a poet entirely free of religion. No poet is more adequate to Whitman’s requirement that “Creeds and schools” be held “in abeyance.” “I am happy,” says Bloom, “to join Stevens,” as he does Whitman, “in an air clear of everything” (443). 

    Bloom’s secularism also has a surprising collateral effect. His presumable conservatism as a critic masks a political radicalism on a par with Milton’s own. Reminding his reader that Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in jail, he remarks that “Milton still speaks,” in an unlikely allusion to Fanon, “for the wretched of the earth” (154). Nor is his influence on feminism to be underestimated, as his disciples Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) proved many years ago. The anxiety of influence is nothing at bottom but a political notion, its dialectic perhaps even more Marxist than Freudian, and a reflection of Bloom’s roots as a first-generation American who as a child spoke Yiddish at home and absorbed the labor-movement atmosphere of Jewish New York in the 1930s. Even his sexual politics were as a rule always of a welcoming kind socially, leading him here to celebrate outright Whitman as “pansexual” and Lawrence as “omnisexual” (382, 468). 

    Bloom’s appreciation of Lawrence, however, falls short of political radicalism because it requires a view of death that he cannot abide. No wonder Bloom has little to say about Lawrence here other than noting the contrast he provides with Eliot in a chapter devoted to Yeats and Lawrence. Yeats, alas, is always the focus of the conversation. This is unfortunate--one wants to know whether Bloom’s view of Lawrence, too, has undergone revision. The young Bloom was a champion of Lawrence’s verse at a time when R.P. Blackmur’s dismissal of Lawrence’s poems as primitive guided academic opinion. Bloom, by contrast, distinguished the primitive from the bardic; Lawrence the poet was different from Eliot because the craft was invisible, prophetic and unsummoned rather than mannered and ostentatious. Bloom reprises that judgment here in a single key remark about Eliot’s estimation of Lawrence: “What persuaded Eliot that anything about Lawrence was unsophisticated, I cannot imagine” (471).

     Bloom cannot elaborate the reasons for Lawrence’s sophistication because they are at odds with what he wishes to imagine now about life and death. Lawrence is sophisticated because he is the bard of a younger man with time on his side. Lawrence rhapsodically destabilizes the voice of the poetic speaker, dissolving the speaker into the landscape he beholds. The egotistical sublime, as Keats called the cool ecstasis of Wordsworth’s speaker, becomes in Lawrence an ecological sublime. This is Lawrence’s environmentalism--a political radicalism that Bloom cannot endorse. The poet slips into the landscape, finding no privilege in being human. This self-burial will not do as Bloom approaches the midnight hour. The literary judgment may remain the same, but its existential valuation does not. It is too costly an appreciation. 

    Bloom’s final self-revisions don’t so much provide wisdom, as a middle-aged Bloom believed literature should do when he thought of himself, as he put it then, as “the Yiddische Dr. Johnson.” They provide youth. The shift in identifying Satan with Hamlet and Romanticism with Keats are the fresh self-identifications that allow Bloom a new, twin persona that combines wish and reality, memory and desire: Hamlet, the doomed undergraduate; Keats, the young poet shadowed by his imminent demise. The new heroes are dialectical self-portraits of earliness and lateness in perfect equipoise, they allow the aged Bloom, as he liked to call himself, the imagination of rebirth while haunted, as he always was, by the reality of death. 

    The identification with Keats and Hamlet is also what provides Bloom his long-sought victory over Eliot. For Eliot, Hamlet fails as a play because Hamlet as a character feels “in excess,” as Eliot puts it in "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919), of what facts the play presents, or fails to present, to Hamlet’s imagination. It provides, in the famous formulation, no “objective correlative” for them. There is no proof for his mother’s presumable complicity in murdering his father. Her twice cuckolding him as a son--this is why Ernest Jones suggested the Oedipus complex has its origins for Freud in Shakespeare rather than in Sophocles—is, for Eliot, insufficient. It is no wonder that Hamlet thinks too much about too little. All mothers cuckold their sons, though not, to be sure, twice over and by also so usurping the son as to murder the father in the process. As a Freudian, Bloom finds in the play what Eliot cannot--the reason for Hamlet’s endless reflectiveness. Like Hamlet, Bloom thinks too much. Unlike Hamlet, Eliot thinks too little. Eliot cannot gain access to his own “idea of order” in life or in literature in order to reorder it. Therein lies Bloom’s triumph thanks to a durable surfeit of lust and anxiety. Bloom thereby deconstructs the difference between thought and feeling, too—Eliot’s equally famous “dissociation of sensibility” in  “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)—allowing him to shuffle the cards of tradition at will. 

    For all his learning and the formidable buzzing of allusion that makes his mind a cave of verbal echoes—“I should,” he says, “blame myself for piling up authorities” (607)—Bloom remains, as he insisted, an experiential critic. All criticism, he said, is autobiographical, and nothing in his work proves it more than this last testament to his faith in himself and his good will toward others. His deceptions are in the service of his critical art alone. Unlike Eliot’s, no ill will or dogmatism pervades it. Even his Freudianism is benign rather than resigned, a paean to his undiminished wish for earliness--for youth and gaiety--that his preoccupation with belatedness belies. He knew that and makes it explicit here. 

D.H. Lawrence Review, 2020. Volume 45:1 & 2

J. Hillis Miller's All Souls' Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies

Dickens en abyme

    “Bleak House,” writes J. Hillis Miller in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Dickens’s 1853 novel, “is a document about the interpretation of documents” (1971, 11). It was the moment for which we had all been waiting. We had been struggling to understand what the new criticism from France meant and how to use it in our own reading of fiction. Suddenly, everything fell into place. In one sweeping gesture, Miller’s easy, avuncular remark showed us the way. No single insight could have made it clearer.

     What did Miller reveal? Text and world are no longer copy and original. Narration and story, récit and histoire are one and the same. Why? For a simple reason that changed the rules--the world itself was made up of languages. And language, by definition, was part of the world rather than its dim and fugitive reflection. It took years, however, for the consequences of this thunderclap to play out. The welcome rain came slowly, and without the aid of Bakhtin. It changed the way one read Victorian fiction, and, in a second wave of influence, it changed the way one read modern fiction.

    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.

    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.