THE CRITIC AS HOST--J. HILLIS MILLER

THE CRITIC AS HOST

J. Hillis Miller

[Critical summary and analysis by Dr. S. Sreekumar. Exclusively meant for students of Indian Universities]

J. Hillis Miller

Biographical note

Joseph Hillis Miller, Jr. (1928) is an important humanities and literature scholar. He was among the pioneers in introducing phenomenology and deconstruction to Anglo-American audience.

From 1952 to 1972, Miller taught at Johns Hopkins University. In 1972, he joined Yale University where he taught for fourteen years. At Yale, he worked alongside prominent literary critics like Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, where they were collectively known as the Yale School of deconstruction¹.

In 1986, Miller left Yale to work at the University of California Irvine. During the same year he served as President of Modern Language Association (MLA), and was honored by the MLA with a lifetime achievement award in 2005. Both at Yale and UC Irvine, Miller mentored an entire generation of American scholars.

The Critic as Host—An Overview

David Lodge writes:

‘The Critic as Host’ was delivered at the same session of the MLA as Abram’s ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, and is not therefore a direct reply to the latter, though it can be read as such.

Citing Wayne Booth’s and Abrams’ view that deconstructive criticism is a ‘parasite’ on the ‘obvious and univocal’ meaning of a literary text, Miller subjects these words to a brilliant and labyrinthine investigation, revealing paradox and internal contradiction. The aim is to demonstrate by a kind of practical criticism the post-structuralist view that ‘language is not an instrument or tool in man’s hands, a submissive means of thinking. Language rather thinks man and his “world” including poems’. [This is a typical post-structuralist stand point].

‘The Critic as Host,’ is an elaborate reply to the charge that ‘deconstructors’ are nothing but 'parasites' upon the plain meanings of texts.

Detailed analysis

Miller begins his paper with a quote from Thackeray’s novel Henry Esmond. This quote demonstrates the complex relationship between the parasite and the host.

In the novel, Mr. Holt (one of the characters) looks at a picture where an ivy plant is clinging to an oak tree.  Holt says that the ivy in the picture seems to tell the oak: ‘I die where I attach myself’. The ivy clings to the oak like a parasite and kills the oak and dies along with it. Mrs. Tusher (another character in the scene)  calls it ‘parricide’.

Then Miller takes up a citation by M.H. Abrams from ‘Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History’. Abrams had quoted Wayne Booth’s assertion that deconstructionist reading of a poem or a work is ‘plainly and simply parasitical’ on ‘the obvious or univocal reading’. The first quote is from Booth and the second one is by Abrams. Miller says that his ‘citation of a citation’ is a kind of chain. This he plans to analyze in the present paper.

Miller asks a few questions:

·        When a critical essay ‘cites’ a passage, is it different from a citation, echo, or allusion within a poem?

·        Is a citation an alien parasite within the body of its host (the main text) or is the main text the parasite which surrounds the citation (Host) and strangles it?

·        The host feeds the parasite. The parasite lives because of the host. At the same time, the parasite kills the host. [The ivy kills the oak by strangling it].  Like that ‘criticism’ (parasite) kills ‘literature’ (host).

·        Can the host and the parasite live happily together in the same text feeding each other and sharing the food?

Abrams’ views on history & written texts:

If deconstructionist principles are taken seriously, any history which relies on written texts becomes impossible. Miller agrees that a ‘certain notion of determinable reading, might indeed be an impossibility’. And if it is so, it might be better to accept it ‘and not to fool oneself or be fooled’.

Interpretation may become impossible. But it will not stop histories and literary histories. These will continue to be written.

Miller suggests that ‘the impossibility of reading should not be taken lightly’. The ‘impossibility of reading’ is incorporated in our bodies and in the bodies of our ‘cultural life and death’.

Miller looks at the different aspects of the term, ‘parasite’.

The ‘obvious’ or ‘univocal reading’ is like a masculine oak or ash tree, rooted in the solid ground. This tree is in danger because of the insidious (sinister, menacing) ivy twining around it. It is secondary and dependent. It is a clinging plant able to live only by drawing the life of its host, cutting off its light and air. The ivy is the ‘deconstructive’ reading which like a parasite destroys the host [the ‘univocal’ reading].

Miller uses two German terms to describe the relationship between ‘deconstructive reading’ and ‘univocal reading’. These terms are ‘unheimlich’ and ‘heimlich’. ‘Unheimlich’ means the uncanny, the alien. The uncanny alien comes into the closed economy of the ‘heimlich’ (German for ‘homely’) like a parasite². [The term ‘parasite’ originally meant a person who received free meals in return for amusing/ flattering remarks]. The parasite is destroying the host.

PARASITE

The word ‘parasite’ has no meaning without the term ‘host’. But both words are fissured [cracked, fractured] already within themselves.

‘Para’ is a prefix in English (sometimes ‘par’). It indicates alongside, near or beside (as in parathyroid), beyond (as in paranormal), incorrect, abnormal (as in paresthesia), similar to or resembling (as in paratyphoid) subsidiary, assistant (paraprofessional). It also means isomeric or polymeric to.

In borrowed Greek compound words, ‘para’ indicates beside, to the side of, alongside, beyond, wrongfully, harmfully, unfavorably, and among. ‘The words in ‘para’ form one branch of the tangled labyrinth of words using some form of the Indo-European root ‘per’. This word is the base of prepositions and pre-verbs with the basic meaning of ‘forward’, ‘through’ and a wide range of extended senses such as ‘in front of’, ‘before’, ‘early’, ‘first’, ‘chief’, ‘toward’, ‘against’, ‘near’ ‘at’, ‘around’. [Miller is pointing out the numerous meanings of the term ‘para’ .We may see that some of these meanings are antonymous. For example the meanings ‘near’ and ‘beyond’, ‘isomeric’ and ‘polymeric’ (words related to chemistry) are antonymous. Miller rightly calls this multiple meanings a labyrinth reminding us of the Greek labyrinth. [Miller’s language is dazzlingly referential. Labyrinth reminds us of the Greek labyrinth built by King Minos of Crete to hold the monster Minotaur]

Miller is not yet done with the multiple meanings of ‘para’. He says:

‘Para’ is an uncanny double anthithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, something at once inside a domestic economy and outside it, something simultaneously this side of the boundary line, threshold or margin, and at the same time beyond it, equivalent in status and at the same time secondary or subsidiary, submissive as of guest to host, slave to master.

However, when we use the term ‘para’, we may seem to choose univocally one of the meanings. But the other meanings are always there as a ‘shimmering or wavering in the word which makes it refuse to stay still in a sentence’. Miller means that the other meanings are there in the word though we have selected only one meaning. We cannot wish them away. [When you are inside a flood-lit stadium, you see your shadows everywhere. Sometimes the shadows may overlap. The meanings of any word are like that. At a particular moment we will be looking at only one shadow/meaning. That does not mean that the other shadows/meanings are absent or unimportant]

Miller provides one more list of words with ‘para’——

Parachute, paradigm, parasol, parapluie, paragon, paradox, parapet, parataxis, parapraxis, parabasis, paraphrase, paragraph, paraph, paralysis, paranoia, paraphernalia, parallel, parallax, parameter, parable, parestesia, paramnesia, paregoric, paragon, paramorph, paramecium, paraclete, paramedical, and paralegal.

Parasite—Etymology

Comes from the Greek word, parasites. Parasitos means ‘beside the grain’. ‘para’ beside (in this case) and ‘sitos’ grain or food. (‘Sitology’ is the science of foods, nutrition and diet).

Parasite was originally something positive, a fellow guest, someone sharing the food with you, sitting with you beside the grain. Later on ‘parasite’ came to mean a professional dinner guest, someone expert at getting invitations without ever giving dinners in return.

From this developed the two modern meanings in English——the biological and social.

Biological meaning:- ‘A parasite is any organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host’.

Social meaning: - ‘A parasite is a person who habitually takes advantage of the generosity of others without making any useful return’.

Miller says: ‘To call a kind of criticism ‘parasitical’ is, in either case’, strong language’.

Parasite—thought/language/social organization.

‘A curious system of thought, or of language, or of social organization (in fact all three at once) is implicit in the word parasite.

There is no parasite without a host.

The host and the parasite are fellow guests beside the food, sharing it.

On the other hand, the host is himself the food, his substance consumed without compensation. The host becomes the host in another sense. The word ‘Host’ is of course the name for the consecrated bread of the Eucharist³ (from the Middle English oste, from Old French oiste, from Latin hostia, sacrifice, victim).

If the host is the eater and the eaten (in the above paragraph, ‘host’ means the bread that is eaten), he is also the host and the guest (guest in the sense of a friendly presence and in the sense of alien invader).

Etymology of ‘host’ and ‘guest’

Both belong to the same etymological root.

Ghosti—stranger, guest, host.

The modern English word ‘host’ comes from the Middle English (h)oste, from Old  French, host, guest, from Latin hospes meaning guest, host, stranger.

Guest is from Middle English gest, from Ghosti the same root as for ‘host’.

A host in the sense of a guest..is both a friendly visitor in the house and at the same time an alien presence who turns the home into a hotel, a neutral territory. Perhaps he is the first emissary of a host of enemies (from Latin hostis [stranger, enemy]), the first foot in the door, to be followed by a swarm of hostile strangers, to be met only by our own host...The uncanny antithetical relation exists not only between pairs of words in this system, host and parasite, host and guest, but within each word in itself.

Miller asserts that the above ‘example’ is meant as a deconstructive strategy of interpretation. In this case the strategy is applied not to a poem, but ‘to a cited fragment of a critical essay containing within itself a citation from another essay, like a parasite within its host’.

MILLER compares his ‘example’ to the process in analytical chemistry. In analytical chemistry, by analyzing the miniscule particles of any substance in a tiny test tube, we find out the qualities of that substance which may be in enormous quantities in Nature. [The qualities of oxygen/iron/salt are found out by analyzing miniscule particles of the substance]. Miller extends this analogy to language. From a little piece of language (here ‘parasite’) through ever widening circles, we go to many areas in the family of Indo-European languages, to all the literature and conceptual thought within those languages, and all the permutations of social structures like gift-giving and gift-giving. This is the implication of Miller’s analysis. He says that even in apparently univocal expressions we can recognize great complexity and equivocal richness.

Reasons for complexity and equivocal richness.

1. The complexity and richness is because language is innately figurative.

2. Concepts and figures are joined together with implied stories, narratives or myths. [In the ‘example’, it is the story of the alien guest in the home].

DECONSTRUCTION IS AN INVESTIGATION OF WHAT IS IMPLIED BY THIS INHERENCE OF FIGURE, CONCEPT, AND NARRATIVE IN ONE ANOTHER. DECONSTRUCTION IS THEREFORE A RHETORICL DISCIPLINE.  

Miller points out that his ‘little example’ of deconstructive strategy illustrates the ‘hyperbolic exuberance’ possible in language. The example also provides a model—

‘for the relation of critic to critic’,

‘for the incoherence within a single critic’s language’,

‘for the asymmetrical relation of critical text to poem,

‘for the incoherence (lack of clarity) within any single literary text’ and,

‘for the skewed (twisted) relation of a poem to its predecessors.

If we say that the ‘deconstructive reading’ is a parasite on the ‘univocal or obvious reading’, we will be forced to think about ‘the strange logic’ of the term ‘parasite’. When we think about the logic behind the term ‘parasite’ we have to admit that what we considered as univocal meaning is not univocal but equivocal [Miller’s arguments in the previous paragraphs have already taken us to that conclusion].

Here the main point is that ‘language is not an instrument or tool in man’s hands, a submissive means of thinking’. ‘Language rather thinks man and his world...if he will allow it to do so’. Miller quotes Heidegger:

“It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided we respect language’s own nature”⁴.

The system of figurative thought (Miller comments that all thought is always figurative only) underlying in ‘parasite’ and its associate expressions (‘host’ and ‘guest’) makes us realize that the ‘obvious and univocal reading’ of a poem is not identical with the poem itself. It may be easy to believe that the poem has only one meaning, but it is a false belief. [It will be comfortable also to believe that a poem has only one meaning. But it is a false comfort]

Now, Miller goes back to the analogy he has been teasing his readers with:

Both readings, the ‘univocal’ one and the ‘deconstructive’ one, are fellow guests ‘beside the grain’, host and guest, host and host, host and parasite, parasite and parasite

[pls refer to the previous paragraphs—the term ‘parasite’ has all these different meanings. It means ‘beside the grain’, host, guest etc.]

The relation is a triangle, not a polar opposition. [We usually think of ‘host’ and ‘guest’ as polar oppositions]. There is always a third to whom the two are related something before them or between them, which they divide, consume, or exchange, across with they meet. [Host and guest are related to the food kept before them]

The relation is always like a chain. It is a strange sort of chain without beginning or end in which no commanding element may be identified. [No part is more important than any other part]. In this chain there is always something earlier or something later to which any part of the chain refers. Therefore the chain remains open, undecidable.  The relation between two contiguous elements [neighboring, adjacent] in this chain is a strange opposition (of intimate kinship and at the same time of enmity as is there between the host and the guest).

The ‘obvious or univocal reading’ of a poem always contains the ‘deconstructive reading’. The latter is like a parasite within the former. At the same time the ‘deconstructive reading’ cannot free itself from the metaphysical, logo-centric reading (univocal) though it is contesting it. The poem is the food the ‘univocal’ and the ‘deconstructive reading’ need. It is ‘host’ in another sense. (‘The word ‘Host’ is the name of the consecrated bread or wafer of the Eucharist (see notes 3). It comes from the Latin word hostia which means sacrifice, victim).  It is the third element in the triangle. Both univocal and equivocal (deconstructive) readings are ‘on the same table bound by the strange relation of reciprocal obligation, of gift/food-giving and gift-or food-receiving’.

The Gift

Miller takes us to the practice of gift-giving and gift-receiving which Marcel Mauss had analyzed in his essay ‘The Gift’^5.

Miller, then, takes up the different aspects of the term, ‘gift’.

·        The term contains puns or figures which is similar to the relation between ‘host’ and ‘parasite’.

·        ‘Gift’ in German means poison. To receive or give a gift is a profoundly dangerous or equivocal act.

·        The French term for ‘gift’ is cadeau which comes from Latin catena. Catena means little chain, rings bound together in a series. Every gift is a ring or chain.

·        The gift- giver and gift-receiver enters into the endless ring or chain of reciprocal obligation. [Mauss has identified this practice as universally present in ‘archaic’/‘civilized’ societies [see notes for further details].

Heidegger’s views on ‘The Gift’

Martin Heidegger’s splendid word play on the gift is noteworthy. For Heidegger ‘the world’ is a four fold entity comprising of the earth, sky, man and the gods. The gift is a thing mirrored, passed back and forth among these. It is part of the perpetual interplay or mirror play among these four entities.

Earlier it was stated that the gift is like a chain. It is a little chain, rings bound together in a series. Here each ring is open to receive the next and enclosed by the next.  The whole is possibly open-ended, ‘always open to the possibility of having another link added’. The chain is thus always ready to receive the alien, the inimical, the ‘hostile’ (from which ‘host’ comes).  Miller says:-

My argument is that the parasite is always already present within the host, the enemy always already within the house, the ring always an open chain

         

Gift- giving and gift- receiving is a mutual obligation. Men give and take certain gifts at certain times, at weddings, at birthdays, or when one is a guest in another man’s house. Gift giving is the binding or sealing of the reciprocal obligation. It is also a means to drive away the evil the parasite may do you or the evil the host may do if you do not recompense him for feeding you.

A parasite in the wholly negative sense is the one who does not make the recompense and so goes though the world blocking the endless chain of gifting. At the same time the gift itself may be the poison (meaning in German), the dangerous parasite. A useless present (a white elephant) which gathers dust in the attic is a dangerous element which blocks the chain of perpetual self-generation. Miller concludes thus his arguments on gift-giving and gift-receiving:

The gift is the thing always left over which obliges someone to give yet another gift, and its recipient yet another, and so on and on, the balance never coming right, as a poem invites an endless sequence of commentaries which never succeed in ‘getting the poem right’.

The Poem as Gift

A poem is an ambiguous gift, food. It is host in the sense of victim, sacrifice that which is broken, divided, passed around, consumed by the critics. These critics are in the odd relation of one another as host and parasite. A poem is parasitical on earlier poems. It contains earlier poems as enclosed parasites within itself, in another version of the perpetual reversal of parasite and host. If the poem is food and poison for the critics, it must in its turn have eaten. It must have been a cannibal consumer of earlier poems.

Miller takes Shelley’s The Triumph of Life as an example of parasitism and cannibalism.

The Triumph of Life⁶

Shelley’s poem is an example of ‘a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts’.

These are present within the domicile of the poem in that curious phantasmal way, affirmed, negated, sublimated, twisted, straightened out, travestied...

The previous text (Shelley wrote more than four manuscripts of the poem) is the ground for the new one. The ‘new’ poem has to annihilate the ‘old’ by incorporating it. The poem tries to perform its ‘possible-impossible’ task of becoming its own ground. The new poem needs the old texts and must destroy them. It is a parasite, feeding on the substance of the old text. Each previous link in the chain, in its turn, played the same role, as host and parasite, in relation to its predecessors.

From the Old Testament to the New Testament, from Ezekiel to Revelation, to Dante, to Ariosto and Spenser, to Milton, to Rousseau, to Wordsworth and Coleridge, the chain leads ultimately to ‘The Triumph of Life’.[Miller implies that all these poems/works are parasites in one sense or other] That poem, in its turn, or Shelley’s work generally, is present within the work of Hardy or Yeats or Stevens and forms part of a sequence in the major texts of Romantic Nihilism including Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot, in a perpetual re-expression of the relation of host and parasite which forms itself again today in current criticism.

It is also present in the ‘univocal’ and ‘deconstructionist’ readings of Abrams and Harold Bloom.

Conclusion

Miller concludes this paper by stating that The Triumph of Life ‘contains within itself, jostling irreconcilably with one another, both logocentric metaphysics and nihilism’. No wonder that critics have disagreed about the meaning of the poem.

The meaning of The Triumph of Life can never be reduced to any one ‘univocal’ reading, neither the ‘obvious’ one nor a single-minded deconstructionist one, if there could be such a thing , which there cannot. The poem, like all texts is ‘unreadable’, if by readable one means open to single, definitive, univocal interpretation. In fact, neither the ‘obvious’ reading, nor the ‘deconstructionist’ reading is ‘univocal’. Each contains, necessarily, its enemy within itself, is itself both host and parasite. The deconstructionist reading contains the obvious one and vice versa.

Miller generalizes this phenomenon by stating that ‘nihilism is an inalienable alien presence within Occidental metaphysics, both in poems and in the criticism of poems’⁷. 

NOTES

1. Yale School of deconstruction

The Yale School was anathema for some.  In fact the group was sometimes called the ''Hermeneutic Mafia'. [At other times they were called “Yale Critics”, the “Yale School of Criticism”, or simply “wild men”]. Miller, especially, has been attacked by some traditionalists for obscurantism and nihilism. He has been accused of perversely indulging his own hermeneutic ingenuity at the expense of the texts and authors he discusses.

2. Lodge comments that Miller seemed to have underestimated the duplicity language is capable of because ‘Heimlich’ also means secret.

3. Eucharist is a Christian ceremony or sacrament commemorating the Last Supper. The bread and wine used in the supper are consecrated and consumed. These are referred to as ‘host’.

4. Derrida was much indebted to Heidegger. It is one of the cardinal doctrines of deconstruction that Man is born into language. Not that the world was there in the beginning and that Man invented language to communicate with Men. We understand the reality of nature only through language. Heidegger nevertheless gives a warning that we have to be cautious about the nature of language which is basically equivocal. So what language says about the world is ambiguous, multivalent, shifting, and never univocal.

5. Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was a French sociologist. In 1923 he published an essay, “The Gift”. In this he argued that exchanging objects between groups builds relationships between humans. He drew on a wide range of ethnographic examples, especially on Maori tribes. Mauss described the process of giving into three stages— giving, receiving and reciprocating. Gifts always imply reciprocity. Mauss said that gift has magical properties as the person who gives it gives a part of himself. The object given is intimately connected to the giver.

6. The Triumph of Life is an unfinished poem by Shelley. Of this book only 25 copies have been printed. The poem is acclaimed as the ‘epic of human life—the tragic story of the Promethean struggle of the Spirit of Man against the disintegrating forces of the world.’. ‘The Fragment stands , like the torso of a Phidian god, the revelation of regions new and fair in the world of man’s creation’ ( John Todhunter, 1887).

Shelley started composition of the Triumph in 1822. He fashioned the poem after Dante’s Divine Comedy. The poem caused him much trouble; most of the manuscript is heavily revised. He made several attempts to complete the poem.

7. Rene Wellek, a distinguished intellectual historian and critical theorist has written that Miller's typically Derridean reference to nihilism as ''an inalienable alien presence within occidental metaphysics, both in poems and in the criticism of poems'' is a boast of Miller's own ''allegiance to nihilism.'' The doctrine of ''the prison house of language'' (words referring only to other words) is absurd, Wellek says.

 Meant for students of  Indian Universities

Dr. S. Sreekumar