Bartleby is Dead

Abstract

J. Hillis Miller. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Pp. iii + 256. The origins of this book are traceable to A. Bartlett Giamatti's "vigorous attack on literary theory written while he was still president of Yale Uni- versity. He was of course implicitly criticizing some influential colleagues at Yale" (14). In response to Giamatti's charge that deconstruction is radically incapable of situating the literary text within the social domain of ethics, Miller undertakes close readings of James's What Maisie Knew, Kleist's "Der Findling," Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," Blanchot's L'arret de mort, and James's "The Last of the Valerii," in order "to exemplify... the claim that the rhetorical study of literature is indispensable to exploration of the so-called extrinsic relations of literature: the relations of literature to his- tory, politics, and society, to personal and institutional relations" (13). In exploring "the extrinsic relations of literature," Miller's project, a continua- tion of that explicitly begun in his Ethics of Reading (1987), is theoretically relevant to the discipline of American Studies and the cultural studies movement in general, for which literary texts participate in, represent, and mediate—often in extraordinarily complex ways—the material conditions and social contradictions of a surrounding culture. In practical terms, how- ever, Miller's readings tend to reinscribe a gap or aporia between narrative and ethics, between literature and that social space one might designate, in the broadest sense, as history; accordingly, Versions of Pygmalion will do little to appease either the "liberal" or the "materialist" critics of decon- struction.