Communities in Fiction by J. Hillis Miller (review)

J. Hillis Miller’s Communities in Fiction explores the concept of community, elaborated sometimes contradictorily by critics like Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida in relation to six fictional works. His analysis extends from the Victorian community of Anthony Trollope (The Last Chronicle of Barset) to the postmodern community of Thomas Pynchon (“The Secret Integration”), circling back to Miguel de Cervantes’ “The Dogs’ Colloquy” in order to examine “the ways community or its lack is presented in each work” (Miller 308). Among the strengths of Miller’s book are his familiarity with narrative theory, his detailed rhetorical readings, and his warm conversational prose, which make the text eminently lucid and accessible, particularly in its early theoretical chapters. His exploration of Derridean “communities of self-destructive autoimmunity” forms the cornerstone of the book (17). “Real communities,” or “true communit[ies],” Miller argues, are governed by the “self-destructive” (17) and “autoimmunitary (il)logic” that Derrida describes (308), which is visible in our contemporary world, particularly in the United States (17). Throughout the book, Miller returns to this claim about communities in order to argue that “what is happening in the United States and worldwide today . . . indicates that this self-destructive community behavior is not just a fiction” (308). These novels of community, or lack thereof, Miller contends, speak to the “relevance” of the humanities “to our globalized political and economic situation today” (152): by reading these novels and exploring their representations of communities, readers may “see their own [communities] differently, and . . . behave differently as a result” (153).

Miller’s general claims about the relevance of the humanities and literature occasionally detract from his specific claims about the nature of the particular communities in the stories that he examines, largely because he does not spend much time expanding on these claims. Miller draws analogies from the novels he examines to our contemporary twenty-first-century world, but with limited space for this secondary purpose, his analogies fall short on actual evidence and end up as sweepingly broad statements with some inaccuracies. This is especially evident in his chapter about Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, which runs just shy of a hundred pages (in a three-hundred page book). In addition to explicating the depiction of community within the novel—which he does in detail—Miller simultaneously draws on contemporary world events as evidence for his claims about Nostromo’s (non)community. This leads him to argue against the global capitalism of an imperialist US, and particularly the “American neo-conservative arguments for bringing democracy to Iraq in order to secure the smooth working of the oil industry there” (186), which distracts from his compelling argument about Conrad’s text. Miller acknowledges that “it would be too long a tale to tell the whole story here of United States military and economic intervention . . . in South America” but attempts to do so anyway through Nostromo’s “emblematic fictional example” (190). Although he ties his argument about the contemporary US to the “material interests” advanced in Conrad’s novel (186), the length and bifurcation of the chapter limits his ability to sustain an analysis of the community in Conrad’s text. The chapter would be much improved as either a shorter piece more focused on the nature of community or an in-depth explanation of “Conrad’s prescience” (189) about twenty-first-century American interventions in South America.

The book also launches attacks on unspecified “humanities professors” who have apparently felt compelled in recent years to “disguise their love of literature . . . in the masquerade of hard-headed, empirical, politically progressive cultural studies, or feminist studies; or studies in gender, class, and race; or investigations into the material bases of culture; or studies based on the recent vogue in the humanities of cognitive science” (150). By collapsing several distinct strands of literary criticism into a straw-man argument about the current state of the humanities, Miller fails to recognize that scholars of feminism or cultural studies frequently question empiricism. The book often...