Exchange of Letters About Literary Theory Between Zhang Jiang and J. Hillis Miller

The Identifiable Theme of a Given Literary Work: Consulting with Professor J. Hillis Miller

January 1, 2015
Beijing

Dear Professor Miller,

As a well-known American literary theorist and critic, your theoretical and critical writings have a wide influence in China. Your great work Fiction and Repetition carries out a penetrating analysis of seven classical English novels, which forms a very important contribution to critical thoughts and provides us with an excellent model of contemporary literary theory and criticism. This book was translated and published in China several years ago. Since then its popularity has been lasting for years, and now the book is still highly praised by China’s literary scholars. In recent years, I have repeatedly read this book, feeling deeply impressed and rewarded, but at the same time, I also have many questions and uncertain thoughts. Accumulating them for years, I would here venture to put them into words and send them to you in the hope of seeking your insightful advices.

The question haunting me for long is whether a definite text has a relatively definite theme that could be generally identified by most people. From the information supplied in various textbooks on your ideas in China, we have learned that your theory started from new criticism, went through phenomenological criticism, and finally converted into deconstructive criticism with the influence of Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, and you became a very important representative figure of this critical school. In the mentality of Chinese scholars, deconstruction is a powerful trend of thoughts that rejects reason, doubting about truth and trying to subvert order. Its manifestation in literary criticism is denying all the previous critical theories, advocating a sort of decentralization and anti-essentialism, and deconstructing the fixed meaning, structure and language of a given text, or to use your own words, “The word ‘deconstruction’ suggests that such criticism is an activity turning something unified back to detached fragments or parts. It suggests the image of a child taking apart his father’s watch, reducing it back to useless parts, beyond any reconstitution.”¹ You have also openly suggested that interpretation should step beyond the limitations of logocentrism. In “The Critic as Host” you even stress that any reading could be proved a misreading by the evidence from the text itself. The text is just like the Cretan labyrinth or cobweb, and every text contains “a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts.” As “a cannibal consumer” of the previous texts, the text itself is self-destroyed.² Therefore, it is impossible trying to find a single univocal reading of a text, as the text has formed a system of figurative thought inscribed within the word parasite and its associates, both host and guest, which causes a result that the reading of a text cannot be identical to the text itself. This view of yours has become the mainstream of contemporary literary criticism, especially hermeneutic criticism and wields profound influences.

However, in your actual text interpretation, it seems that the result is not like that, or at least is not consistently like that. We are confused about your interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles in your Fiction and Repetition, because it deviates a bit from the principles of deconstruction. In the interpretation of that novel, you repeatedly emphasize that Hardy’s texts contain many elements, which “taken together, form a system of mutually defining motifs, each of which exists as its relation to the others.” We readers “can never find a passage which is chief, original, or originating, a sovereign principle of explanation.” Then what is the result of your interpretation? Though winding and confusing, you offer many explanations and eventually lead readers to a result of “seeking answers to the question of why Tess is compelled to repeat herself and others and to suffer through those repetitions.”³ Isn’t it the theme of Hardy’s novels? The theme is that it is hard for Tess to escape fate, and she is destined...