On Literature

On Literature

First and foremost, as the title suggests, Miller is concerned with showing how various modes of repetition function in the novel. There is nothing at all startling in his preliminary suggestion that the “identification of recurrences and of meanings generated through recurrences” forms an important part of the reader's work, as he traces throughout a novel repeated verbal elements, events or scenes, images, motifs from one character appearing also in another, and so on. It soon becomes clear, however, that Miller's definition of repetition is meant to be somewhat unsettling (Miller, 2002).

In addition to the familiar kind of “Platonic” repetition, in which an original model is copied by other examples similar to it, Miller describes “Nietzschean” repetition, paradoxically based not on similarity but on difference. Nietzschean repetitions involve “ungrounded doublings,” in which “It seems that X repeats Y, but in fact it does not, or at least not in the firmly anchored way of the first sort of repetition.” Platonic repetitions seem to establish a “figure in the carpet” of the novel, a general ordering structure; Nietzschean repetitions, on the other hand, complicate or “unravel” simple patterns of order (Miller, 2002).

Though his book lacks a formal conclusion, Miller uses his last paragraph to note somewhat coyly that the relationship between On Literature still remains an open question. Many readers and critics will no doubt be quick to respond to Miller's implicit invitation to a continuing debate by objecting to certain aspects of his approach.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The intertangled themes of this mighty novel express the artistic genius of a mind that, according to Hawthorne, “could neither believe nor be comfortable in unbelief.” Many of those themes are characteristic of American Romanticism: the “isolated self” and the pain of self-discovery, the insufficiency of conventional practical knowledge in the face of the “power of blackness,” the demoniac center to the world, the confrontation of evil and innocence, the fundamental imperfection of man, Faustian heroism, the search for the ultimate truth, the inadequacy of human perception. Moby Dick is, moreover, a unique literary form, combining elements of the psychological and picaresque novel, sea story and allegory, the epic of “literal and metaphorical quest,” the satire of social and religious events, the emotional intensity of the lyric genre (both in diction and in metaphor), Cervantian romance, Dantesque mysticism, Rabelaisian humor, Shakespearean drama (both tragedy and comedy), journalistic travel book, and ...