J. Hillis Miller

Abstract

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• J. Hillis Miller
• Jakob Lothe (bio)

J. Hillis Miller made very important contributions to critical trends as different as phenomenology, deconstruction, and narrative ethics. He also made a significant contribution to Conrad studies. Over the course of a career that lasted from the mid-1950s until 2020, Miller turned, and returned, to Conrad’s fiction, reading, rereading, and discussing key texts in the light of theoretical developments to which he had himself contributed.

If Miller’s strong and lasting interest in Conrad says something about the range of his critical interests, it also tells us something about the narrative sophistication and thematic richness of Conrad’s fiction. When John G. Peters and I co-edited Miller’s Reading Conrad (The Ohio State University Press, 2017), we were forcibly struck by Miller’s demonstration of the ways in which Conrad’s fiction responds to varying critical approaches. While Miller draws on aspects of phenomenology in his discussion of The Secret Agent in Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965), an essay entitled “The Interpretation of Lord Jim” (1970) signals his critical move from phenomenology towards deconstruction. There is a link between this essay and his chapter on Lord Jim in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982). There is also a connection between both these discussions and narrative hermeneutics as represented by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Truth and Method, first published in German as Wahrheit und Methode in 1960, Gadamer argues that not only do we as readers interpret the same text differently, but the text itself contains interpretative elements that influence the reader’s interpretation. Lord Jim is an excellent example of such a text since the novel’s characters and narrators give varying, in part conflicting, interpretations of the main character Jim. Miller’s interpretation of these interpretations is thoughtful and thought-provoking.

While Miller’s literary criticism is consistently textual in its orientation, his studies of Conrad reveal a growing interest in, and focus on, elements of context and history. To put this another way, he becomes increasingly interested in the way in which the fiction is framed. Thus, while in an essay on Heart of Darkness from 1985 he writes of the narrative of Heart of Darkness as a general or unspecified process of unveiling, his interpretation of the same literary text [End Page 219] in an essay published in 2002 makes him consider Heart of Darkness as a critique of imperialism. Similarly, the essay “ ‘Material Interests’: Nostromo as a Critique of Global Capitalism” (2008) pays more attention to this novel’s historical context than his earlier discussions of Lord Jim. This historical contextualizing is linked not just to crucial aspects of Conrad’s time but also to the situation of the critic and his readers. To use a key concept from Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Miller is acutely aware of his own horizon. For Gadamer, the reader’s and the critic’s horizon signal a kind of limitation, yet also suggest a critical possibility as the critic can say something about a literary text from his or her own perspective. Miller’s studies of Conrad are a critically productive, and remarkably original, combination of his horizon as a reader, as a critic, and as a human being.

Miller’s contribution to the project “Narrative Theory and Analysis” that I ran at the Centre for Advanced Study, Oslo, in 2005–06 proved invaluable. He wrote excellent chapters for the three books (all of them published by The Ohio State University Press) in which the project resulted: Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre (2008), Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading (2011), and After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (2012). While his chapter in After Testimony is linked to The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz (2011), his contribution to Joseph Conrad is related to, and forms part of the basis for, a long chapter on Nostromo in Communities in Fiction (2015). Entitled “Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community,” and dedicated to the memory of Edward W. Said, this chapter is interestingly linked to Said’s discussion of Nostromo in Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975).

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