(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Miller was a literary critic and professor of English.
A work of literature is a “portable dreamweaver” which generates alternative realities that re-enter the real world by means of the readers who were changed by the experience: it is “a use of words that makes things happen by way of its readers” (J. H. Miller 2002, 20). Literature’s strange ability to create worlds in this way can inspire an unconscious fear in us, which we try to appease by seeing it as realised in the real world (p. 33). We may try to demonstrate that a work is characteristic of the class, gender, and race of its author, argue that it’s typical of the historical context, interpret it as of the material and social world, or relate it to conceptual generalisations of how literary language works (ibid.). Miller objects to these approaches because each literary work is incomparable: it creates a singular, sui generis reality. It doesn’t set forth a universal truth, and is neither referential or mimetic. Instead (pp. 34–35):
Each work is closed in on itself, separated even from its author. The work is also separated from the “real world” and from any unified supernal world which all works might be presumed to put to work.
Traditionally, the authority of a book came from its author: knowledge of the author was thought to bring you an understanding of the work (pp. 102, 104). But when each text is sui generis, the work authorises itself (pp. 112–3). When Miller read The Swiss Family Robinson as a child, for example, it “acted on” him “to open up a meta-reality reachable in no other way and impossible to account for fully by its author’s designs or by any other feature of the reading act’s context” (p. 113). The work worked on him despite his ignorance of its author and historical context (ibid.). Miller is asking us to accept literature’s “true strangeness” rather than engage in these attempts at appeasement. We don’t need to know about the author or historical context, and attempting to do so might pull us away from the actual text, muting its power.
These literary worlds of imagination, these alternative realities are not merely available for us to inhabit; entering them requires “a tacit decision to commit all one’s powers to bringing the work into existence as an imaginary space within oneself” (p. 38). This commitment implies that we accept the “particular rules” of the book, and accept that we can know this reality only by what the book tells us—there is no illuminating outside source (p. 39). Reading generates curiosity, “but literature keeps its secrets” as “an essential feature” (p. 40).
It seems unnecessary to teach somebody with basic literacy to read, but how they should develop into a good reader is unclear (p. 115). Miller identifies a “talent for irony” as a requisite to the extent that a reader blind to irony has similarities with the illiterate reader in their incomprehension (pp. 115–116). Further, there exists an “aporia of reading”: Miller’s two, “not easily reconcilable”, prescriptions for reading literature (p. 118).
The first is that we must give our “whole mind, heart, feelings, and imagination” to the task of recreating the reality of the book within ourselves, solely on the basis of its words (pp. 118, 120). This “takes much mental, emotional, and even physical energy” and requires an “innocent, childlike abandonment to the act of reading, without suspicion, reservation, or interrogation” (pp. 119–120). To successfully generate the virtual reality the work offers to create we cannot “linger too long over the words”, lest they lose their power to act as windows on the unknown; we must read “rapidly, allegro, in a dance of the eyes across the page” (pp. 120–121).
However, good reading is also slow, “lento”: we read well when “nothing in a text is lost” (p. 122). The lento reader is “suspicious at every turn, interrogating every detail of the work…attending not to the new world that is opened up by the work, but to the means by which that opening is brought about” (ibid.). This critical reading takes two forms. Rhetorical reading “means a close attention to the linguistic devices by which the magic is wrought: observations of how figurative language is used, of shifts in point of view, of that all-important irony” (pp. 122–123). Another form, cultural criticism, involves an “interrogation of the way a literary work inculcates beliefs about class, race, or gender relations”, which it presents as objectively true but are in fact ideological (p. 123).
Both types of critique deprive the literary work, for given readers, of the sovereign power it has over them when read allegro (p. 126). This critical reading has “contributed to the death of literature” (ibid.). Yet in demystifying literature we seek knowledge in itself, and perform a “hygienic or defensive” function of preventing people becoming unwillingly, and possibly detrimentally, enchanted or mystified (pp. 124–5, 159). The innocent, allegro reading is still necessary, however, to provide what we come to resist and criticise (p. 159).
The aporia of reading, then, is that the innocent and demystified way of reading each prevent the other from working; they “go counter to one another” (p. 124). Miller suggests: “you must read in both ways at once, impossibly” (p. 159).