D A Miller, "The Novel and the Police" (Book Note)

D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police is a groundbreaking analysis of Victorian novels, arguing that the invisibility of the police in these works is their most compelling feature. Miller argues that the police are invisible not because they are not present, but because the novels have systematically internalized the work of the police within everyday life practices and suppressed the evidence of that operation. This argument is supported by individual readings of familiar texts, which produce an important reassessment of our understanding of the nineteenth-century novel in England.

The novel challenges the idea that the novel is a subversive genre that celebrates and encourages misconduct, and rejects the possibility that the novel emerges out of a dialectic of "authority and molestation." For Miller, these views make a fundamental mistake because they dismiss the "radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police." When the novel promises freedom or originality or lawlessness by disavowing or repudiating the police, it assumes a brilliant disguise. The novel's appearance of subversiveness is, in fact, the most powerful and deceptive weapon it deploys as an enforcer of social discipline.

Miller's arresting interpretations of novels by Dickens, Trollope, and Collins make this case by tracing out the specific ways in which the culture's "policing function" has penetrated the lines of the novel, using fiction to steal into and control the very refuges we have erected to safeguard our privacy - our conceptions of home, family, spirituality, sexuality, and, most importantly, the "self." Like other new historicalist critics who acknowledge Foucault as their inspiration, Miller reveals the ways in which literature serves the interests of certain social institutions and authorities.

Brantlinger's book and the growing field of literature and science can look forward to detailed reconsiderations of Darwinism and social Darwinism, scientific theory, and social telos.

Miller's interpretations of novels by Dickens, Trollope, and Collins reveal the ways in which culture's "policing function" has penetrated the lines of the novel, using fiction to steal into and control the very refuges we have erected to safeguard our privacy. Like other new historicalist critics who acknowledge Foucault as their inspiration, Miller reveals the ways in which literature serves the interests of certain social institutions and authorities. His argument demonstrates how the novel's apparent "delinquency" makes it an especially effective pawn of the "social order whose totalizing power circulates all the more easily for being pulverized"-for being ground down and mixed into the matrix of everyday life. He uncovers this complicity both thematically and formally in a range of representative novelistic genres, from the "massive thematization of social discipline" in Dickens's work to "the two most important inflections" of it in the realist and sensation fiction of Trollope and Collins, respectively.

Miller's analysis of Barchester Towers is representative because it begins with the fact that the police seem completely absent from this novel. He is suspicious of Trollope's containment of the police within the narrator's comic and ironic comparisons of Mr. Slope's tirades about keeping the sabbath to a policeman's pouncing upon a criminal, for example. Such tactics imply that Trollope's is an essentially safe society where "real" police work is unnecessary. However, Miller maintains that the police are negated in this novel only because, in the institutions it represents, in the attitude it encourages toward those institutions, and in the tolerantly omniscient narration it employs, the novel itself is acting as the secret agent of the police.

The obscured disciplining of religious life through Trollope's tolerant representation of it in the realistic novel is performed upon the physical world through the more dramatic tactics of the sensation novel. The themes of physical excitation (like sexual violence or even nervousness), against which the individual normally defines themselves, are inscribed into the individual's "reading body" in the sensation novel, where they can invoke the proper response of repulsion and thus be monitored and "normalized." Miller argues that the morality of sensation fiction lies in its ultimately fulfilled wish to abolish itself: to abandon the grotesque aberrations of character and situation that have typified its representation, which now coincides with the norm of the Victorian household.

For all their imagination and originality, Miller's interpretations of novels can be stunning in a more literal way, tending to constrain our own sense of freedom-as readers and as members of society. The Novel and the Police commits us to an endless labyrinth of double binds in which even our hopes for our own freedom from society's oppressive discipline are exposed as delusive "effects" of that discipline, perpetuating and drawing us further into its all-pervasive power.

The tension between David Miller's individual interpretations and the gloomy implications of his larger argument is the source of this book's peculiar power. Miller argues that even our ideas of freedom are only the effects of our imprisonment, and perhaps the recognition and articulation of that imprisonment may be the first step in effecting a break from it or at least in preserving ourselves within it. This logic may belong more to Freud than to Foucault.

Miller cites Foucault repeatedly and announces his debt to Surveiller et punir in the very first chapter. He mentions Freud twice, but then only in passing, toward the end of the book. Nevertheless, Freud is everywhere present in The Novel and the Police. The book's interests and rhetoric increasingly reveal themselves to be more psychologically oriented than its title suggests.

The novel centers not on the police, but on "less visible, less visibly violent modes of social control," on the subject who has internalized the modes of social discipline and become "habituated to psychic displacements, evacuations, reinvestments." Miller seems to be less interested in the political nature of the unconscious than he is in the fact that the political is itself unconscious. When he sought to explain the disguised and conflicted workings of the psychic agency of censorship, he found in the political writer "a social parallel to this internal event in the mind" to assist him in making his case.

Miller also reaches beyond psychoanalytic paradigms in The Novel and the Police by questioning the very opposition between the "individual" or the "psychological" on the one hand and the "social" or the "institutional" on the other. In his chapter on Collins's The Moonstone, Miller portrays these oppositions as further "effects" of the discourse of power, more seemingly "ordinary practices of the world" which a ghostly, omnipresent "policing power" has produced as disguises for itself to hide behind.

Miller tells essentially the same story of enclosure, betrayal, erasure, and compliance in his chapters on Bleak House, Barchester Towers, The Woman in White, and David Copperfield-each time from an ingeniously different angle. The same regulatory function that orders the detective novel and neutralizes resistance to the police is also performed by the various "representational technologies" of the nineteenth-century social novel, realistic novel, sensation novel, and autobiographical novel. Each chapter raises the dim specter of release from this confinement, in the family, body, and mind.

The Novel and the Police by Robert Miller is a book that aims to challenge the totalization of the subject matter of "the police" through a series of essays. The author believes that to resist the policing power he represents as irresistible, we should emulate the vigor of his essayistic process rather than submit to the accumulating force of his nearly totalizing conclusions. The form of the book seeks to make legible a set of "ambiguities" about our conceptions of ourselves as "liberal subjects."

The form of The Novel and the Police reinforces the suspicion that achieving "legibility" and recognition may not entirely cure or liberate us from the control of the disciplinary powers of social institutions, but it may at least "frustrate" their control. Miller's book begins by treating a novel by Collins, moves on to works by Dickens and Trollope, then returns to Collins, and finally to Dickens. This pattern of progressing by returning is the form Miller gives to his desire to return to (and escape) the unmastered past, to penetrate the barriers that seemed impenetrable in the first treatment, and to make legible what had previously remained invisible.

In his analysis of Bleak House, Miller views the transformation of Bleak House from a novel about a Chancery case to a murder mystery as the necessary consequence of a system that deprives it of all the requirements for its accomplishment. He seeks an interpretative project that would not be so balked, producing "a legible version" of a seemingly unreadable situation.

In his final chapter, Miller addresses the subject of making the self legible in writing, merging the form and themes of The Novel and the Police with those of the novel he subjects to his own evolving "interpretative system." In Copperfield, Miller confesses that David's story is "hopelessly entangled with my own," expressing a desire both to return to and to escape from the entangled condition with which the book began.

In Copperfield, the writer implies the existence of an illegible someone outside the text, an unknown and unknowable self that is safe from surveillance and regulation by any policing power. This final chapter of The Novel and the Police is not Miller's most accessible or best, but it is the most elaborate demonstration of how the novel has superimposed itself upon our life stories and how it has by implication continued to resist the very forces with which it has complied.

In The Novel and the Police, Miller offers a series of original readings that link the work of the novel with the work of culture in surprising and subtle ways. His essay on Bleak House is the most provocative and intelligent piece on Dickens's masterpiece, while his analysis of A Woman in White is one of the most sophisticated treatments of the body as social text and the cultural construction of gender. Miller's implication of himself in these issues reminds us that reading, despite its challenges, is a discipline that matters.