The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (review)

Andrew H. Miller is with F. H. Bradley: "precept is good, but example is better" (qtd. in Miller 4). He believes that through its specific examples of imagined life, nineteenth-century literature embodies in the variation of narrative and perspective a response to a crisis of human purpose that the generalizations of Victorian conceptual thinking could not answer. As J. S. Mill put it, the age was one "destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism" (qtd. in Miller 5). That crisis was exacerbated by the age's emphasis on progress—an emphasis unsurprising enough at a time of extraordinary industrial and material growth but also symptomatically and confusingly harnessed to the quite different (and sometimes competing) agenda of ethical development and self-improvement.

Miller relishes the Victorian shift between general and particular as itself part of literature's thoughtful interplay with philosophy. On the burdensome demand called ethical perfectionism, he quotes for example Anthony Appiah: "how can we reconcile a respect for people as they are with a concern for people as they might be?" (qtd. in Miller 11, emphasis mine). "To ignore the first term," responds Appiah, "is tyranny; to give up on the second is defeatism, or complacency." That tense and shifting border-line between how we are and how we might be—without clear knowledge of how in any sense we must be—is the subject matter of this always thought-provoking book.

But, ambitiously, Miller also wants to write almost as much about the literary criticism he is trying to create as the books that are its subject matter. He says, very bravely, that when he confronts critical works of historical or ideological scholarship he can find no way to respond creatively to them. Instead he seems to want to write something closer to the ethical aspiration of personal thinking, drawing "something else, something new" out of the works themselves (82). He calls this "implicative" or "conclusive" criticism (26)—a criticism that tunes into the chosen text in much the same way that the technique of free indirect discourse expands the characters of the novel, deducing their thoughts even from within. Such discourse seeks imaginatively to make the work more and more completely what it itself may stand for. Tune into the contained resonance of a text, and we can become it and its people; or, to put it another way, it can finalize itself in us. That is a form of realization, of a text "perfecting" itself or "completing" its implications. It is also a process that, for example, John Henry Newman saw as fundamental to the development of Christian doctrine, as a kind of theological counterpoint to Darwinian evolution. In the course of centuries the explicit doctrine was drawn out of a few words of Jesus and his disciples—words that were nonetheless deeply latent with implicit meaning waiting to find thinkers for itself. Get inside the life of your examples, says The Burdens of Perfection; do not use them all too knowingly only to confirm what you already think in advance, from without; the value of any position can never be appreciated in advance of trying it for size. "This can become an axiom of criticism," writes Miller: "quote nothing merely as confirmation; quote nothing that you do not transfigure" (82).

We can see the Miller doctrine in exemplary action in a novel central to The Burdens of Perfection, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861). The following example comes, famously, from the end of the First Stage of Pip's expectations as he leaves home for London, amid echoes of Paradise Lost:

I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a...