5 - Theotropic Logology: J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke

Summary

I'll begin with a footnote attached to J. Hillis Miller's 1979 essay, ‘Theology and Logology in Victorian Literature’. The footnote concludes:

‘Influence’ is not a matter of conscious borrowing, but something that, like a disease, in fact like ‘influenza’, insinuates itself into the air we breathe, or something that is present, whether or not we know it or wish it, in the intimate texture of our material, in the words we must use to speak or write at all. If we are another footnote to Plato, Plato was himself already a footnote to still earlier footnotes, in an endless chain of footnotes to footnotes, with nowhere a primary text as such.

My goal in this chapter is simple: to explore some published and unpublished exchanges among Miller, Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke, all of whom practised a kind of theotropic logology, the study of words about words related to words about God. Taking my cue from Miller's footnote, I'll focus on the disease of referentiality, psychological in particular and ultimately theological, or more exactly, in de Man's word, theotropic, figuratively god-centred.