Reading for Our Future

In dystopian novels the future is often imagined as a place where to read is a disappearing art. For the oppressed women in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, reading is something close to a ‘sin’ and only during an affair is the heroine, Offred, permitted to engage in such ‘illicit’ activity. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, to read is fraught with difficulties because books are subject to a process of ‘continuous alteration’: ‘All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was.’ Perhaps most dramatically, in Doris Lessing’s The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, set after a future ice age, an ancient library is destroyed when it is exposed to the air: ‘The scribes were trying to sort the books into languages they knew, but…as each was opened, it began to crumble. Dann, desperate, grief-stricken, grabbed up book after book and saw it disintegrate in his hands.’¹

George Eliot did not create a dystopia, although ‘The Lifted Veil’ suggests how dreadful a vision of the future might be. In this new study J. Hillis Miller makes Eliot the subject of a discussion about why reading ‘slowly, closely, and carefully’ (p. xiii) is an urgent, and increasingly lost, art ‘in this time of irreversible global climate change [and] worldwide financial meltdown’ (p. xi). In Hillis Miller’s book, it is our own times that are dystopian and he posits that, as a consequence, ‘we need all the help we can get from what the old books say’ (p. 145). This theme is a relatively late addition to the work (‘in revisions over the last year’) and a response to questions about the utility of the literary critical endeavour: ‘I have asked myself, again and again, what use such readings are in the era of catastrophic climate change’ (p. 168). The book is divided into four sections. The first examines the ‘recognition that fictions are necessary to life’ (p. 31) in Adam Bede; the second explores reading Middlemarch ‘right for today’ as both a ‘totalizing representation and a performative text’ (p. 37); the third offers a thought-provoking meditation on chapter 17 of Adam Bede; and there is then a return to Middlemarch that looks at a huge variety of issues, including naming, money as a metaphor and theme, and why the novel is ‘essentially affirmative’ in outlook (p. 138).

The notion of reading for our time, and thus of a text that might be reinscribed at different periods, is also self-reflexive. Hillis Miller describes this book as a ‘palimpsest’ (p. 166), a ‘heavily revised’ version of two chapters on Adam Bede and Middlemarch that were ‘excised’ (p. xv) from the manuscript of his Fiction and Repetition (1982). The ‘formal literary-critical goal’ of studying repetition in these novels is the ‘bottom layer’ of the palimpsest, on to which are added discussions about ‘the role of figurative language’, ‘a study of speech acts in the novels’, ‘a confrontation with the extreme oddness of the telepathic narrators Eliot used’ and an appropriation of Wolfgang Iser’s ‘distinction between the fictive and the imaginary’ (pp. 167–8). The potential futility of reading ‘for our time’ is the final layer. The sense of appropriation – or, perhaps, of conversation – is central. As well as Iser, this book pays homage to the work of Nicholas Royle and absorbs somewhat uncritically his description of Eliot’s narrator as telepathic rather than omniscient. It is also in dialogue with Neil Hertz’s richly original George Eliot’s Pulse, which is preoccupied by various instances of repetitive language and which acknowledges Hillis Miller’s earlier publications on Eliot.²

Hillis Miller sees as central to Eliot’s work ‘the theme of false interpretation’ (p. 21) and our tendency, as Eliot says in Middlemarch, to ‘get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of...