Reading theory now: an ABC of good reading with J. Hillis Miller

Abstract

Eamonn Dunne, Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013)When the subject of a study himself declares, as J. Hillis Miller does of Eamonn Dunne's book (in the Preface), that it is 'the best introduction I know to my work', it gets our attention. Dunne's book is indeed a useful, clearly written and thoroughly informed entry point into the astonishing range and acuity of Miller's many publications, from 1958's Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels to 2012's Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited. I know this because Dunne provides an excellent annotated bibliography of Miller's 'major works' at the end of this book. Before this, as his title suggests, Dunne has, in the manner of a classic primer, used the alphabet as a practical way of structuring his 'provisional, even speculative foray into' Miller's works. Dunne cleverly uses Miller's own thread metaphor to characterize this working-through of both Miller's meditations on reading and the maze of narrative itself.Dunne tells us at the outset that 'what has most interested me about Miller's work ... is [his] attention to the event and act of reading', specifically the ways in which narratives 'have an uncanny way of escaping cognition and will, given half a chance, always exceed a reader's expectations' (xviii). Miller's (post)structuralist readings attest to his keen interest in the uncanny ways in which texts are spatial and temporal - on the page, in the moment of reading - and yet, at the same time, exist in a kind of Platonic, ever-changing, 'virtual' world of words and stories. Dunne bears this out nicely in his A to Z entries. This does not mean that Dunne assumes Miller's work is programmatic, only that this approach is a good as any other possible one.The first entry, 'A before B - of course ... ', exemplifies this. Quoting from Miller's 1999 book Reading Narrative (whose abbreviation Dunne has listed, along with 21 other Miller titles, at the outset), Dunne writes: 'Anacoluthon doubles the story line and so makes the story probably a lie (RN, 149).' In what proves to be characteristic, Dunne goes on to unpack the quotation in brisk and well-illustrated fashion. The line tells us, writes Dunne, 'that storylines are assembled and dismembered by the implicit demand made on each reader to remember the way at all times, to follow the line back and forth from the clue ... to the center of the labyrinth' (1). But doing so is bound to include some 'wandering' from what the text is asking of us. The word anacoluthon - literally, an ungrammatical, nonsensical sequence - here means 'an abrupt breach in the line', such as Proust's habit of switching pronouns mid-sentence to call our attention to the fictionality of all narratives, including ones we think are based on true memory. By drawing on a wealth of literary examples, Miller shows us how storytelling, which after all constitutes memory, rests at the juncture of Tying and remembrance' (3). Since storytelling is both a retrospective act and, as Dunne emphasizes in his book title, the 'now' of active reading, we miss the point if we ask that a text be factual (such as the controversies over so-called lies in certain autobiographies). The trick is, instead, to detect the degree of trust we can (or are willing to) place in our authorial host. This first entry displays Dunne's own (acknowledged) editorialized prerogatives, for he sets out here some of Miller's most significant concerns. …