J. Hillis Miller

It is as if the birth of an image cannot be separated from its deadness. As Roland Barthes observed, “what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me … is Death.”
—W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?

“Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!”
—Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker, in Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journals (1871)

The portrait recalls presence in both senses of the word [recalls]: it brings back from absence, and it remembers in absence. As such, then, the portrait immortalizes; it renders immortal in death.… The portrait is less the immortalization of a person than the presentation of (immortal) death in (a) person.… The portrait puts death itself (in) to (the) work: death at work in the very heart of life, at the very heart of the figure, in full view.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Regard du portrait

The literature of murderous works.
—Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind

What stories about pictures want is to be read, just as pictures want to be viewed. The picture asks, demands, implores that I look at it. The story asks, demands, implores that I read it. Reading a story or looking at a picture not only responds to what they seem to desire. It also fills in a want or lack in both. What is a story that is not read, whose pages remain closed within the covers of a book? What is a picture that is not looked at, that, so to speak, has its face turned to the wall? (I shall return to that figure later.) Reading or looking, in each case, seem to complete a purpose that is not so much that of the writer or painter as a need intrinsic to the works themselves. It is a desire somehow built into the works’ material substance. Stories urgently want to be read. Pictures urgently want to be looked at.

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J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Irvine. His most recent book is Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (2005). He is at work on books about communities in literature and about Jacques Derrida’s late work. His email is jhmiller@uci.edu

Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number S2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
0093-1896/08/34S1-0001$10.00