6 - The Illusion of Force and Speed

Summary

To err is probably this: to go outside the space of the encounter.

— Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

THROUGHOUT HIS TEXTS, Miller often writes of movement: literally, figuratively, metaphorically. In a literal sense, the narrator is constantly making use of various modes of transportation, across space and in time. Miller's texts themselves — often filled with diatribes, monologues, racing catalogue descriptions, and other allusions that evoke a sense of movement and the passage of time — seem to be in motion despite their physically static presence on the page. His passages on time and motion are always embedded in a context that extends their figural and metaphorical functions, and they create a sense of velocity through the literal allusions to movement but also through their poetic rhythm and character.

Movement in the text for Miller — in its unending presence, its perpetual flight into something beyond — reflects the overarching mood of his writing, which repeatedly affirms the claim that art, or writing, is not an avenue into an externalized life nor a final statement or fulfillment of a fragmented moment in the world. It is rather an appeal to the emancipation of the imagination from such rubrics that unsuccessfully attempt to use writing as a means towards a certain, intangible and unattainable end. It is a Deleuzian devenir: a necessary constant, uninterrupted, unending becoming. Writing for Miller is a mode for viewing the world without conceptualizing it as something to be settled but something to be left unfettered and unbound.