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V
The final piece in Deconstruction and Criticism, J. Hillis Miller's "The Critic as Host" (pp. 217-253), is explicitly an apologia for deconstruction, taking as its basic metaphor the reciprocal, reversible relationship between parasite and host and offering, through an analysis of Shelley, "an 'example' of the word 'parasite' functioning parasitically within the 'body' of work by one author" (p. 232). Despite the quotation marks around "body," the essay displays no awareness of any problems surrounding the determination of what words constitute the texts of the works to be discussed. Even a reference to a clause in "one of the drafts of the preface" (p. 239) to Epipsychidion does not serve to open the subject of variant wording and what it implies about the nature of verbal works.[29] In the next sentence we are referred to "the poem itself"—the "itself" being presumably intended to emphasize the distinction between poem and preface but also implying, in the context of the essay, that there is no question about what "the poem itself" is.
For Miller, the word "text" is a simple synonym for "work" or "poem." He begins a sentence, for example, by saying, "The poem, like all texts, is . . ." (p. 226). He speaks of critical essays and "the texts they treat" (p. 226), of "such a text" as Shelley's "The Triumph of Life,"[30] of "all the great texts of Western metaphysics" (p. 228), of "any text in Western literature" (p. 248). In describing the parasitical relationship between a poem and earlier poems, he says, "The new poem both needs the old texts and must destroy them" (p. 225); he refers to "the encapsulation in the poem of echoes and references to a long chain of previous texts" (p. 232); and thus, when he comments on "the relation of the poem to previous and later texts" (p. 233), he does not mean "previous and later texts of that poem" but "previous and later poems." The shift from "poem" to "text" is apparently for the sake of verbal variety; if Miller's point were that poets are influenced by particular texts of previous poems, he would have to say something more about the independent existence of individual documents as physical objects, as well as to recognize that the text of the poem under discussion is just as problematical as the texts of those earlier poems. But this issue is obviously not in his mind. When he is totaling the number of appearances of "parasite" in Shelley, he arrives at the figure of seven "if one counts The Daemon of the World and The Revolt of Islam as separate texts" (p. 247): "texts" here can only mean "works." The essays that critics write, being works,
In the other essays in this volume the use of "text" to mean "work" produces ambiguity, for "text" sometimes seems to convey two meanings in passages that will not support both. There is no such ambiguity in Miller's essay, where—purely and simply—"text" equals "work." But this lack of ambiguity is no compliment to Miller, for through it his essay reflects so great a removal from any thought of textual matters that the two words are never even tinged by an underlying recognition of such issues. He does provide some endnotes citing the editions from which his quotations are drawn, and in them he twice uses "text" to mean the particular arrangements of words in those editions; "works" could not be substituted for "texts" in these instances. But neither this conventional use of "text" nor his reference to the previous publication of part of his essay "in a preliminary form" causes him to pay attention to the variability of texts. He is free, of course, to use "text" and "work" as synonyms in the body of his essay if he chooses; but what he must then do, and does not, is to find some other way of referring to what has traditionally been referred to by the word "text." That he does not refer to texts in this sense at all has serious consequences for his discussion.
At the beginning, for example, he quotes a comment from an essay by M. H. Abrams, a comment in which Abrams in turn quotes from Wayne Booth. Miller then asks, "What happens when a critical essay extracts a 'passage' and 'cites' it? Is this different from a citation, echo, or allusion within a poem?" And he proceeds to ask whether the relationship between the quotation and the surrounding words is like that between parasite and host, and, if so, which is the parasite and which the host. All these are important questions—indeed, questions that go to the heart of the nature of texts and works. But Miller does not do them justice, since he does not treat the textual basis of them. He does not—to put it another way—give evidence of recognizing that quotations are mini-editions, raising all the questions about "establishing" texts that are raised by editions of the texts of whole works. Whatever "quoting" means is what "preparing an edition" or "determining a text" means. There is a whole spectrum of standards that can be applied to these
But accuracy to what? This is the central question, regardless of which genre of reference one is employing. Echoes, allusions, and paraphrases are not expected to have the same accuracy to something outside themselves that a quotation has; but their tenor, their general drift, their evocative effect, will nevertheless depend on the details of the text of that outside thing. (The point is not altered by the fact that some writers do not wish to be accurate, intending their paraphrases or quotations to be distorted to serve a particular purpose: they are still responding to what they believe some outside text to be.) If writers who quote from other writers (or refer in another way to them) accept unquestioningly the texts of particular editions (or the texts in their minds based on the reading of particular editions), they are actually referring—whatever they may think—only to documents, not to writers; and anyone reading their writings must try to understand their handling of citations as part of the process of understanding what they are saying. The first answer—preliminary to any other—to the question "What happens when a critical essay extracts a 'passage' and 'cites' it?" is that the quoter either understands or misunderstands the relation of texts to works.
In pursuing the question of quoting, however, Miller ignores this issue and moves into an etymological analysis of words (like "parasite") beginning with "para-," which is a "double antithetical prefix," signifying many sets of opposites. Each "para-" word "may seem to choose univocally one of these possibilities," but "the other meanings are always there as a shimmering in the word which makes it refuse to stay still in a sentence" (p. 219). His examination finds in the "little piece of language" that Abrams quotes from Booth (which includes the word "parasitical") "context after context widening out from these few phrases to include as their necessary milieux all the family of Indo-European languages, all the literature and conceptual thought within those languages, and all the permutations of our social structures of household economy, gift-giving and gift-receiving" (p. 223). In this way the quotation grows like a parasite; but the surrounding essay is also parasitical on the earlier one. This relationship, Miller asserts, is true of all quotations or allusions in all verbal works, poems as well as essays. He presents this analysis as "an 'example' of the deconstructive strategy of interpretation" (p. 223), as "a model . . . for the incoherence within a single critic's language" or "within any single literary text" (p. 224). Deconstruction thus uncovers the "equivocal richness" inherent in verbal expression.
The absence, in this introductory exposition of deconstructive procedure, of any recognition of the difference between texts and works forces one to consider again, perhaps from a new angle, the much-discussed question of the relation of deconstruction to historical study. Textual criticism, as traditionally understood, is a historical enterprise; whether its focus in a given instance is an author's intention or the combined intention of a collaborative group (author, author's friend, publisher, and so on), its goal is the construction of texts of works as intended at some point in the past. The texts in surviving documents form the most important class of evidence for such reconstruction. When, instead of using those texts critically as evidence for textual reconstruction, one accepts them uncritically, one is abandoning any concern with intention. But one may still approach them with a historical interest, for those documentary texts were available to be read in the past and are therefore evidence for examining past readers' responses. One need not, of course, be interested in history at all, in which case one text is as good as another to provide a sequence of words for analysis—though the fact that a particular sequence of words comes from the past in then of no significance, and the sequence could just as well be devised by the critic. These logical possibilities emerge clearly once the text-work relationship is understood; but since Miller does not deal with that relationship, it is not surprising that his position in regard to these basic possibilities is unclear.
Words do have their genealogies, both etymological and associative; and it is not only the words of quotations that are importations into a work but, as Miller understands, all the words making up the work, for all are outsiders with their own histories. If, as a result, works (or individual texts of them) are "incoherent" (cf. p. 224), "unreadable" (p. 226), and "self-subversive" (cf. p. 228) in that they contain the basis for contradictory interpretations, one would assume that this universal condition either (1) eliminates any useful interest in what human beings have attempted to express in words or (2) can itself be eliminated, as a given, in order to focus on what human beings have attempted to say in spite of it. At times Miller seems to be leading toward the former view, as when he cites "the law that language is not an instrument or tool in man's hands, a submissive means of thinking," and concludes, "Language rather thinks man and his 'world,' including poems" (p. 224). This "triumph of language" (p. 233) would seem to make irrelevant any interest in the authorial intention behind certain sequences of words; how the words came to be combined would be of no significance. One text would serve as well for analysis as another—but there would still be textual decisions to make, for there would be no reason why any pre-existing sequence of words had to be kept intact, and critics would be free to alter any words
Such a position would be a tenable one, if carried through in this way. But, despite the similarity of the conclusion to Miller's host-parasite concept, this is not the position Miller takes. It is revealing that, when Miller says, "Language . . . thinks man and his 'world,'" he adds, "if he will allow it to do so" (p. 224). That man has any choice in the matter is an unexpected revelation, and how it can be is not clear. Of course, our world is what we decide it is; but Miller's "law"—"the law that language is not an instrument or tool in man's hands" (p. 224)—is presumably independent of our wishes, and language has had its way with us even if we think we did not "allow it to do so." In any case, contrary to what would seem to be consistent with the framework Miller sets up at the beginning, he continually refers to works and texts as the products of individual human beings, especially in the last three sections of his essay, where he is concerned with "the 'body' of work by one author" (p. 232), Shelley. Why should an analysis of the implications of the word "parasite" in various contexts stop at the boundary separating work by Shelley from other verbal work, unless there is an interest in seeing how this one human mind struggled with the difficulties of expressing ideas in language? If that is indeed the interest, then the focus has shifted from the helplessness of man in "the prisonhouse of language" (p. 230) to the intended meanings of individuals as they attempt to express themselves in spite of the obstacles thrown up by words with ancient heritages. And further, if that is the case, one must try to reconstruct, from the documentary texts that have come down to us, the texts intended by their authors—for there is no point linking two works on the grounds that they are by the same author unless one has made an effort to ascertain the author's intended texts of those works.
Fleetingly Miller seems to sense the impasse he has placed himself in. He asks, "Who, however, is 'Shelley'? To what does this word refer if any work signed with this name has no identifiable borders, and no interior walls either?" (p. 243). It is crucial for his argument to deal with this question, but he does not do so satisfactorily. He does not even explain appositely why Shelley's work (or anyone else's) may be thought to have "no identifiable borders": "It has no edges," he says, "because it has been invaded from all sides as well as from within by other 'names,' other powers of writing." But if those other "names" possess "other powers of writing," they are individuals who have placed their own stamp on intractable language; presumably Shelley's use of them would make them an element in his own personal "power of writing." The real reason that a writer's words could be considered to have no borders is that they are
Miller's essay is thus incoherent in argument, which is a different kind of incoherence from the one he finds in all verbal works. That one may distinguish two levels of coherence or incoherence is implied by Miller's own treatment of Shelley, for he does not regard Shelley as confused, even if Shelley's poetry, containing the contradictions and "blind alleys" (p. 230) embedded in language, must inevitably be "the record of a perpetually renewed failure" (p. 237). Miller's concern is, finally, biographical, a concern with the dignity and pathos of Shelley as a human being who, like all artists, attempted to reproduce in some lasting form outside his mind the sense of life that existed within it. In the case of literature, that lasting form is intangible and can only be brought to our attention through the second-hand reports of documents or of oral recitations; Miller's neglect of this situation is the basis of the incoherence of his essay. Of Shelley's "failure," he says, "The words, however, always remain, there on the page, as the unconsumed traces of each unsuccessful attempt to use words to end words" (p. 237). The words on paper are indeed the evidence of a human struggle—that of the producer of the document (whether author, scribe, or printer) to transmit a text accurately. But the work of poetry is not "there on the page."[31] Miller presents deconstruction as "simply interpretation as such" (p. 230), "analytic criticism as such" (p. 252),[32] because it deals with the fundamental nature of language. His account, however, overlooks something no less fundamental: that verbal works are not coequal with their representations in tangible form. This oversight causes him to confuse the deconstruction of particular texts with the deconstruction of authors' works and, as a result, to write an unpersuasive brief for deconstruction.
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