Introductory Note:
This essay originally appeared in Italian, as the preface to a short book by D.A. Miller comprising Italian translations of two of his essays on celebrated mainstream gay movies. The first, “On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain,” appeared in Film Quarterly in 2007. The second, “Elio’s Education,” an analysis of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018. Together they constitute a polemic against the way the “beauty” of these films becomes a closet for gay sex and gay sexuality—an emphasis captured in the little book’s Italian title, Bellissimo.
Moretti’s introduction situates the pieces in Miller’s remarkable career, which has made major contributions to the fields of narratology, the theory of the novel, queer theory and film studies, and decisively shaped our understanding of Austen, Hitchcock, Fellini, and the Broadway musical. Designed in part to introduce Miller to an Italian readership, Moretti’s essay recounts their decades-long friendship, its mutual intellectual influence and ongoing conversation. Most of all, it is an account of the truth-telling aspirations of Miller’s inimitable (if much-imitated) style.
David Kurnick
The Samourai1These pages appeared as the introduction to the Italian translation (Bellissimo, nottetempo, Milano, 2022) of his essays “On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain”, and “Elio’s Education”, originally published in Film Quarterly, vol. 60, n° 3, 2007, and Los Angeles Review of Books, February 19, 2018.
Pescara, 1972. Invited by Carlo Pagetti, in the autumn of 1972 David Miller arrives at the Università “G. D’Annunzio” as an English lettore. In the autumn of 1972 – in Pescara, with Pagetti – I receive a research grant. David twenty-four, I twenty-two, we meet and agree that I will stay at his place in Pescara once a week, and he at mine, in Rome, every now and then. It was a year of long evenings, filled with cigarettes and discussions. David was studying. in the Yale of Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom; he had many things to teach me. He wanted to learn more about Marxism, and there I had something to say. For him, the key figure was Barthes (a structuralist quite close to Marxism), for me della Volpe (a Marxist alert to structural linguistics). I look back, and smile at how lucky we were, half a century ago.
Bad faith. During his Ph.D., Miller works mostly with Peter Brooks, and his dissertation, published in 1981 as Narrative and its Discontents, is a study in narrative theory. Those had been magical years, for this kind of work – the translations of Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose and Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, Lévi-Strauss on myth, Barthes’ Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative and S/Z, Weinrich’s Tempus, Todorov’s Poetics of Prose, Genette’s Figures – and Miller’s book added to the mix an idea of great theoretical elegance: studying, not so much what is being narrated, but what could be: that initial cell that makes a story worth telling in the first place – the “narratable”, as he decided to call it. As the Freudian echo in the book’s title suggests, the narratable is what generates deep discomfort in the narrator’s system of values: the arrogance, lies, gaffes, gossip, injustice … in short, all those events which should not occur, and which the three authors at the center of the book – Austen, Stendhal, and Eliot – have their narrators explicitly and repeatedly deprecate.2Berkeley, 1977. Somehow, David and I are no longer in touch. I am at a new address and a new university, he must have finished his Ph.D. and may be anywhere, such was life in the dark ages. During a brief research grant in Los Angeles, I decide to visit San Francisco and Berkeley; at the English department, I look at the list of professors, find a David A. Miller, room XY, knock, and David opens the door. We start talking again right away, and at a certain point I say, I don’t understand, David, someone like you, so passionate about literary theory, why aren’t you studying poetry? Because novels are more fun to read. It may sound odd, but it had never occurred to me. A few months later, I start studying the Bildungsroman.
The ethically reprehensible as narratively productive: the thesis parallels Goethe’s view of the novella as an “unheard of” occurrence (“anomalous” and “unacceptable” at the same time), or the idea that happy ages are the “blank pages” of history in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. But there is more. If these objectionable events were indeed not to take place, continues Miller’s argument, there would clearly be no story to tell, and narrator and novel would both immediately disappear. With this neat thought experiment – which brings to light the discrepancy between what a novel declares it wants to do and what it actually does – Narrative and its Discontents moves beyond narratology understood as a “catalogue raisonné of narrative units, functions, and modes”,3D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1992, p 47. to focus on that sort of foundational deception – I deplore exactly what I need – without which narration wouldn’t exist at all. Following Sartre, this escamotage receives the name of bad faith: a term that is still audible – “…he is to believe the bad faith of its boosters, …” – in the essay on Brokeback Mountain. It is a diffidence towards the sources of beauty that will never disappear from his work.
Master-voice. Today things are a little different, but in the past, to be tenured in a place like Berkeley, where Miller taught from 1977 to 1990, in the first 7-8 years you were supposed to turn your dissertation into a book, and be close to finishing a second publication, to mark the break with your past as a student. Let’s see what he’s capable of, now he is on his own.
Miller’s second book, The Novel and the Police (1988), is definitely a new start. His life has changed greatly in these years,4Paris, 1983. Summer. David is in Paris, at the Bibliothéque Nationale, working at The Novel and the Police, and I in London, at the British Library, working at The Way of the World. We are both studying nineteenth-century novels – in some cases, exactly the same – and something happens, which will remain a constant of our friendship: an enormous pleasure in listening to what the other is doing, without either one ever having the slightest desire to follow the same path. That summer, we decide to get together in Paris. We go to the Jardin des Plantes; they still had cages, with a tiger pacing back and forth in a tiny one. At night, we have dinner in a street in Montparnasse, empty, with the tables on the sidewalk, and at a certain point David says: I like men. I return to London a little dazed. and so has the intellectual atmosphere. As a reaction to the blind alley in which narratology has found itself, the study of plot has lost ground to stylistics, which will become the center of his future work. But this shift is overshadowed by another novelty of the book: its constant recourse to Foucault, and to Discipline and Punish in particular. In those years, at Berkeley, Foucault’s influence was decisive for the formation of New Historicism around the journal Representations, whose first issue contained the core chapter of The Novel and the Police¬. Yet Miller remained at the margins of the new critical current, unimpressed by its mesmerizing anecdotes. Better to choose rules, as an object of study: those silent injunctions everybody is aware of yet pretends not to see (the “open secrets” of the book’s final chapter).
The result is a sharp, passionate dissection of the “regime of the norm” enacted by the nineteenth-century novel, with its discipline “characteristically exercised on ‘little things’”, and pervading “the private and domestic sphere” typical of the novel as form.5D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1988, pp. viii, 17, ix. Key technique of this “unseen but all-seeing surveillance”, free indirect style: a linguistic Panopticon that establishes the dominance of the narrator’s “master-voice […] by qualifying, canceling, endorsing, subsuming all the other voices it lets speak.”6ivi, pp. viii, 25. Here, we have clearly moved beyond the bad faith of Narrative and its Discontents: free indirect style – the great linguistic invention of the nineteenth-century novel – is for Miller the sign of an inextricable association between aesthetic forms and social dominion. Diffidence has become certainty.
Drugstore Broadway Hollywood. Miller’s early work had a major impact on the study of the novel – while The Novel and the Police was also the key text in the genesis of queer literary studies.7“Alongside his brilliant meditations on narrative form, point of view, identification, disavowal, closure, and ideology”, writes Heather Love in an extraordinarily perceptive essay, “Miller has provided us with […] the life history and opinions of a gay man. One effect of this generous gift of the person was to authorize queer literary studies, a field whose origin we might as well date to the 1988 publication of The Novel and the Police.” See Heather Love, ‘ “His Way”. Heather Love on D. A. Miller’, GLQ 2011, p. 372. Barbara Johnson’s “Bringing Out D. A. Miller” (Narrative, January 2002), and Frances Ferguson’s “Now It’s Personal: D. A. Miller and Too-Close Reading” (Critical Inquiry, 41, Spring 2015) are also excellent discussions of Miller’s intellectual trajectory. The two essays on the “mainstream gay-themed movie” are a good illustration of Miller’s position within this field of study, and certain passages – like the parallel between free indirect style and the alternating shots of Brokeback Mountain – clearly hearken back to his work on the novel. “The office that the traditional novel once performed has not disappeared along with it”, he had already pointed out in The Novel and the Police, but “has really meant the explosion of the novelistic.”8The Novel and the Police, cit., p. x. True; and it looked like Miller was indeed inspecting the landscape for the traces of the explosion.
It wasn’t so simple. Eventually, film emerged as the center of his work, with the monograph on 8 1/2 for the British Film Institute (2011), the enigmatic details of Hidden Hitchcock (2016), and the collection of the Film Quarterly columns (Second Time Around, 2021). But the 1990s were more of a mix: an essay on Rope with a coda on Mapplethorpe (Anal Rope, 1990); a short book on Barthes, half history of criticism, half biography (Bringing Out Roland Barthes, 1992); a book on the Broadway musical (Place for Us, 1998). His gay experience moved to the foreground (those titles!), as did the autobiographical dimension (the blueprint of the basement of his parents’ home in Place for Us; Barthes, sighted at the “American Drugstore” in Saint-Germain), while literature, despite a splendid Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style (2004), moved to the background.9New York, 1990s. In 1993, David comes to Columbia, and for several years we teach in the same department, often working weith the same students. Many wondered at such a close friendship betweeen two who were so different, American and Italian, gay and straight, esprit de finesse and esprit de géometrie … Let them wonder. As for ourselves, living in the same city – actually, in the same neighborhood: both giving up subsidized housing near Coulmbia to be in the Village – allowed us to have a relationship made of everyday interactions, and not only of intellectual exchanges: the subway ride at the end of the day, dinners, walks in the cold wind. But if we saw more of each other, we perhaps understood less. In the 1980s, we were both working on the nineteenth-century novel: ten years later, he was writing on the Broadway musical, and I was putting together an atlas of literature. The paths had diverged. His students from those years (Amanpal Garcha, David Kurnick, Kent Puckett) were all writing major books on the novel; Miller no longer felt like it. Enough, he had told me a few years earlier, now that The Novel and the Police is done, no more weighty stuff, better French farce, the stupidest, most indefensible there is, that no one may ever take it seriously.
Though farce was forgotten, there was certainly a turn towards the culture industry, culminating in the book on the musical (“a somehow gay genre, the only one that mass culture ever produced”).10D. A. Miller, Place for Us. Essay on the Broadway Musical, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998, p. 16. Our generation had a reasonably free relationship with “low” forms, that theorists like Barthes or Eco had emancipated from the old academic stricture;11Pescara, 1973. A reasonably free relationship, but never entirely so. An evening, in Pescara, a small group decided to go see a Bruce Lee film. David remained home, at the table, work in front of him: Say, you who are going to spend the night watching kung fu, have you read all of Shakespeare? (No). Let me be clear: our roles could have been easily reversed, with me in the part of the highbrow spoilsport. but Place for Us remains a unique achievement, simultaneously technical, moving, historicizing, sarcastic, analytic … and with its peculiar gusto in dissecting terribly banal melodies in uncompromisingly complex sentences. (So, those who liked the melodies resented the complexity, and vice versa). Not that the sentences of The Novel and the Police had been simple; but now one noticed them more – because they grated more. A critical text that presented its materials – and estranged them at once. Style was acquiring its own force.
Second Time. “Though I’d certainly gone to the right addresses for literary study that way inclined [i.e., towards close reading] – the Jesuits, Yale, Cambridge, Yale again – any other institutional trajectory would likely have produced the same outcome, since in those days close reading was the master technique of literary studies everywhere.”12D. A. Miller, Second Time Around. From Art House to DVD, Columbia University Press, New York 2021, p. 32. Those addresses were indeed right: one need only look at the pages on the genesis of Brokeback Mountain, or on the final credits in Guadagnino, to see what a superb close reader Miller is. And yet, clearly, he no longer works in the way Cleanth Brooks or R.P. Blackmur did. “Too-close reading”, he calls it, as if acknowledging something slightly pathological about his attitude; an elegant touch, in a critical world that takes itself much too seriously, but that doesn’t do him justice. Better the title of his Film Quarterly column: Second Time Around. Second time, because – unlike traditional close reading, unfolding organically from one textual encounter to the next – his is a discontinuous path, full of missteps, and whose only certainty is that the “first” time he had often missed precisely what mattered most.
The “he” of the first time around took many different forms, from the ten-year-old for whom Vertigo was “by turns too slow-moving for my interest or too fast-paced for my understanding”,13ivi, p. 114. to the grad student who braved Last Year in Marienbad at the Yale Film Society (“If 60s cinephilia had been geometry, Last Year at Marienbad would have been Euclid’s fifth theorem, the place, in other words, where the subject got hard.”),14San Francisco, 2000s. The article on Marienbad is still unpublished, and has in fact been temporarily abandoned, but its opening is so perfect that I couldn’t resist quoting it – after all, I often read David’s work before it’s published, as he does mine. From the early 2000s, we are both in San Francisco; he teaches at Berkeley, I at Stanford, and – especially after my son’s birth – we see each other often. In “disciplinary” terms the distance among us has solidified: he applies “too-close reading” to film, and I the quantitative techniques of “distant reading” to literature. But we continue to share a concept that is central for both: “form”. The form of a line in Racine, of the plot of a western, or of a critical essay; form in its internal articulations, or in the way it shapes its materials, or generates pleasure in an audience. But that’s where we keep coming back – and at times, San Francisco feels like the Pescara of ‘72. It’s not only nostalgia for our twenties, but for a notion whose wonderful potential, has now almost entirely evaporated. or the Miller of yesterday, who is so annoyed at Call Me by Your Name that he leaves early, missing the best scene of the movie.15“I liked this movie so little that I broke my longstanding habit of sitting through the end credits; I left as soon as the words “Call Me by Your Name” appeared in the shot of Elio tearfully looking into the fire. But when (for purposes of this review) I saw the film a second time, I understood that, by leaving when I did, I had cut myself out of the best shot in the film”. All these different – and differently mistaken – “I” are as many instances of what is for Miller the normal state of things: that willful, unshakable misunderstanding of the aesthetic object that the “second time” of critical work is meant to correct.
But why should misunderstanding be so widespread? And if it is, how can one find a way to correct it?
… et j’ai lu tous les livres. Reading Miller, I often think of that line in Mallarmé. It’s not that he shows off his livres (quite the opposite), but that all he observes appears to him as being already “written”: labeled, and almost imprisoned, by messages that combine the stolidity of Barthes’ doxa with the activism of Foucault’s episteme. Whether explicitly foregrounded, as in the chorus of praise for Brokeback Mountain,16‘Lee is praised for “renouncing overt politics,” for making his points “quietly,” with “subtlety,” “delicacy,”“nuance,”“taste,”and even“heroic restraint.” He is admirably “removed in his direction” and attentive to “the thought and emotions being articulated between the words and in the pauses.” The point of this litany becomes plain when there is thrown into its midst, as part of the same approbation, the frequent observation that “there isn’t much sex in the film.”’ obliquely mentioned in passing – “what journalism might call my ‘homosexual encounter’ with Roland Barthes ”17Bringing out Roland Barthes, cit., p. 7 – or compressed in impersonal expressions like “the image’s presumed obviousness”,18Second Time Around, cit., p. 15. the capture of the world by commonplaces is the basso continuo of his recent work, and the reason why misunderstanding is indeed ubiquitous: our perception is incessantly seized and misguided by received ideas. The healthy ignorance of the boy who didn’t understand Vertigo has turned into false knowledge: dead thought, clinging to the aesthetic dimension like a zombie, and thus becoming part of its social significance.
The omnipresence of doxa explains the frequency with which Miller takes idées reçues as the starting point of analysis. “In one scene, the Homosexual appears as the declared enemy of the family; but in another, he rises nobly to its defense; he hates women, of course—at least when he is not shown loving and caring for them”; “ Having made the Homosexual a Martian, they may then congratulate themselves for finding in him their fellow man”. The adverb “of course” is the mocking cue for ideology to come onto the stage: “the mask of the Gay Man, whose role in this comedy, of course, is as thoroughly prescripted as the others” … “ he hates women, of course” … “ Of course, like good naturalist protagonists, the horny cowboys…”
Why “of course”? Because these are truly widespread and “normal” ideas – widespread and normal, that is to say, because normative: this is how you should look at the world so as to feel at home in it, by effortlessly sharing with your neighbor what goes without saying. It is the bland, blandly welcoming visage of the regime of the norm.
Le Samouraï. But – of course – not quite welcoming everybody. Those like David Miller – with their obscene, and, up to yesterday, criminal sexuality – no. It is this tacit yet steely ban that he reacts against. Do I, in order to be accepted, have to hide who I am?19“It is not that gay men are denied access to the sphere of cultural origination, but that as the price of admission they must surrender all right to being recognized in this identity”: Place for Us, cit., p. 37. Then I will hide nothing. My gay tastes and distastes, all in full view:
In fact, erotic disappointment may well be the only genuine homosexual response to Brokeback Mountain—and hence the only genuine basis for a political critique of the film.
It is therefore worth insisting at the outset that, contrary to the playbill, we weren’t born to play this part. In this phony war of ideas, queer intellectuals need to develop forms of what, in other wars, is called conscientious objection.
Conscientious objection – or turning the phony war into a genuine one? “The part played by wonder in scientific thought”, writes Philip Fisher in his great book on passions, “is played by anger in discovering or marking out for us unmistakably the contours of injustice.”20Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions, Princeton UP, 2002, p. 2. How much anger, in these two essays, and how many injustices they mark out for us: art as the Closet of the Closet, liberal hypocrisy, the cruel blindness of the “conjugal imperative” …
Like the samurai of Melville’s noir, in his struggle against the doxa Miller is alone. Whence anger. How can one counter the misunderstanding that distorts our aesthetic response? Via this passionate individual reaction, to make up for the absence of a collective force. To an art that presents itself as “our Switzerland […] at once political sanctuary and psychic sanatorium”, he retorts, like the fin-de-siècle Anarchists expelled from Lugano: Repubblica borghese / Un di’ ne avrai vergogna.
I have to say: if only Marxist criticism were capable of such intelligent fury.21San Francisco, late 1950s. In San Francisco, before dinner, David and my son often watch films together; first Tom and Jerry or Miyazaki, then Red River or Singing in the Rain; an evening just before our return to Europe, David was showing him the first version of The Man Who Knew too Much. Perhaps it’s for this that, one evening, he recalls his own school days, and tells me how he discovered, in the danger zone of a school playground, that language could be a weapon, which he knew how to use it just as others used hands.
Essay. Intelligent, because fine-tuned by style: the “sharp point” that “pierces [our enemies] to the quick” Heather Love had already noticed in the Austen book.22Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 2; Heather Love, ‘ “His Way”. Heather Love on D.A. Miller’, GLQ 2011, p. 371. To be sure, Miller’s writing lies at the opposite extreme from Austen’s “truly out-of-body voice […] so stirringly free of what it abhorred of ‘particularity’ or ‘singularity’ that it seemed to come from no enunciator at all”;23Jane Austen, or, the secret of style, cit., p. 1. especially of late, his style is all singularity: it’s the stance he describes in Hidden Hitchcock as typical of the essay, which “welcomes the critic’s moods, tones, and emotions”.24D. A. Miller, Hidden Hitchcock, University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 20. Unlike the book, whose polemical purpose is fatally undermined by the mass of its materials, the essay is agile, spirited, and turns even technical analysis into a weapon. Although “to displace and generalize”, writes Miller of Brokeback Mountain, is certainly
a classic mechanism of homosexual repression […] – think how many closet cases come off as asexual – Ledger’s performance is governed by this mechanism, whose logic it obeys rather than lays bare. The overproduced signs of “the clenched” reinforce Ledger’s distance from Ennis, who has no more acting ability than, in a former life, he had Proulx’s fluency in style indirect libre. The performance of repression continues repression’s work.
Let’s do a little close reading for once. Miller begins by isolating a rhetorical choice (the tendency to displace and generalize described in the essay’s previous paragraph), and interprets it a form of interiorized violence (mechanism of homosexual repression); he then evokes lived experience with a touch of melancholy (think how many closet cases…), and ends the first sentence by showing how the film remains blind to the meaning of its own choices (it obeys rather than lays bare). The second sentence also starts with a technical detail (the signs of “the clenched”), which acts as the basis for further stylistic choices (Ledger’s distance, style indirect libre, and the characters involved), and the passage ends by amalgamating film analysis and political judgment (the performance continues the work of repression).
In six lines. I would have written twenty. And since, in writing, quantity is never just quantity, this condensation conveys two distinct points: first, that the comprehension of what is complex must in its turn take a complex form25Berkeley 1985. I take a walk through campus with an English professor; he sighs, a little theatrically: talking with David is becoming more and more difficult these days, as he is more interested in “chiselling sentences” than in “hammering concepts”. I’m not sure what to say; if you work on language, you ought to feel pleasure in well-constructed sentences … and yet, it took me a long time to understand how much work was deposited in David’s style, and how obliquely eye-opening it could be.; second, that from within such complexity, conflict must somehow be made visible The Whole is neither Hegel’s True nor Adorno’s False: it’s the battlefield among opposite forces that criticism gives voice to.
An almost blinding light. Maybe someone has noticed: from the last quote on Brokeback Mountain something is missing. “The overproduced signs of ‘the clenched’ ”, goes Miller’s text, “point us more to the actor’s remarkable craft than to the character’s restive ass. In admiring this craft, we reinforce Ledger’s distance etc. etc.” I had excised it, that ass, to make it more salient: because it is as typical of Miller’s style as his caustic similes, or the unmasking of ideological commonplaces. Given that the bad faith of the mainstream gay-themed movie consists in hiding male gay sex behind a beautiful cinematography, the truly critical act will bring it back to light in wholly unadorned fashion. If it cannot be seen, let it at least be said:
Even the film’s discreet connotative codes are more precise, and everyone who hasn’t willfully ignored them knows exactly what it would be unkind to show or off-putting to see here: the unlovely spectacle of blood, shit, and pain that is the initiation of Elio’s desiring asshole.
There is no true life in the false, reads a famous sentence of Minima Moralia; but this does not mean that it should always be false. It’s the final movement of Miller’s critical work: an irrepressible passion for – truth. Certain sequences in Cruising, we read in Second Time Around,
the shots cast an almost blinding light on a sexuality that had been so deep in shadow as to be, until now, cinematically invisible […] even to let us see the “sexual” in the “homosexual” to any extent, let alone as copiously as Friedkin has done, is a territorial conquest worthy of Cortez […] For all their manifest aesthetic enhancement, these shots also carry documentary power.
San Francisco, 2010s. Maybe it’s not easy to recognize David’s will-to-truth, maybe it only strikes you if you’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to him, and have seen him – the stylist capable of preserving his balance in the most labyrinthine syntactical maze – explode in a “This is what it means. This is what it really means!” Having been so utterly complex, without ever losing sight of that direct aspiration: this is one more intellectual and political lesson I have learned from my friend David Miller.
