Beyond Close Reading

Whether it be France or in the United States, the foremost characteristic of contemporary criticism is the tendency to expect a reconciliation from poetry; to see it in a possibility of filling the gap that cleaves Being.

—Paul de Man, The Dead-end of Formalist Criticism

Ever since I was seduced, shall we say, by Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of ethnographic materials, in particular, his analysis of myth, I have been puzzled why what became the critical establishment passed over his structuralism in favor of deconstruction. It could not have been that Lévi-Strauss had, after all, been deconstructed. Because every thinker worth consideration can be deconstructed, mostly certainly the deconstructors themselves, who deconstruct in uneasy and uncanny awareness of this peculiar fact.

In time I settled on a simple explanation for this passing over: Lévi-Strauss sought to objectify the thinking behind the artifacts he analyzed, and that, whether he was successful or not, put his methods beyond reach. It is all fine a good to objectify Other People’s Culture, but we, the exegetes of Western texts, we are not going to do that with our texts. No sir. While I still believe that to be the case, the recent Arcade discussion of close reading has caused me to refocus that thought.

But perhaps refocus is not the concept I need. It’s more like regestalt. Where I was looking at a rabbit, or a young woman, they’re looking at a duck, or an old crone, as the figure may be. In a response to comments Andrew Goldstone remarked: “If I could have figured out how to specify it more accurately, I would have added ‘vaguely theological flavor’ to my list of genre requisites.” Later on Lee Konstantinou remarks “. . . though one could argue that being inducted into literary mysteries is a form of appreciation. We move beyond simple evaluation toward appreciation-as-epiphany or appreciation-as-secular-religious-experience.” It is that theological resonance that had escaped my own thinking.

And that depite the fact that I have often thought of traditional critics as a secular priesthood presiding over the sacred texts of their culture. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on the secular term of that description. Perhaps the operative attitude was never so secular. Perhaps traditional humanist criticism takes place in an unstable liminal zone between secular activity pure and simple and explicit religious exegesis of the standard Judeo-Christian Biblical texts.

In any event, I missed that nuance. But I didn’t miss the nostalgia that persisted even among those who questioned the New Critics. Consider Geoffrey Hartman, one of the so-called Yale School of deconstructive critics, though Hartman did not go so far as Miller, de Man, nor Derrida himself. In the title essay from The Fate of Reading (1975) Hartman is grappling with the fact that, no matter how intensely critics are oriented toward the texts of which they write, that very act of writing requires distance from those texts. One cannot write about the text if and while one is immersed in reading it. Complaining that contemporary theorists—mostly French or under French influence—have come to privilege such writing over reading, Hartman asks (p. 272): "To what can we turn now to restore reading, or that conscious and scrupulous form of it we call literary criticism?"

Hartman then observes that "modern 'rithmatics'—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing." Thus Hartman could not, would not, adopt Lévi-Strauss’s analytic methods because they “widen . . . the rift between reading and writing”—shades of distant reading!

It is not obvious to me just what Hartman means, concretely, in his experience as a critic, when he laments the widening rift. I do know, from my own experience as a critic, that one can write criticsm that evokes emotion in onself—I do not know about my readers, who’ve not communicated on such matters—similar to that evoked by the reading of literary texts. I can imagine that that’s what Hartman is talking about and, if so, I see that, yes, the ‘rithmatics will and do get in the way of that.

If poetry is, in Wordsworth’s formulation, emotion recollected in tranquillity, and criticism is (poetic) emotion recollected in expository prose, then ‘rithmatics aren’t the way to go. It’s not, however, that the ‘rithmatics are void and lifeless. They can, in fact, be almost impossibly elegant and, in their way, delightful. But the delight is in the ‘rithmatic, not the text one is examining through the ‘rithmatic. One must cut the cord and take responsibility for one’s delight.

If I may borrow a metaphor from D. H. Lawrence, who suggested that the ideal relationship between a man and woman is like a double-star system. In such systems two stars move with respect to the other, each a center of attraction, neither subordinated to the other. That is, one IS NOT satellite to the other. So it is with ‘rithmatical criticism. The text, or texts, is one star, while the ‘rithmatic system is the other. The two stars balance one another in the critical dance. By contrast New Critical close reading is a single star activity, with THE TEXT being that one star. The critic is a disciple, a servant, a satellite.

I do not see that, in general, deconstruction succeeded in breaking free of this configuration. Rather, it simply replaced the star at the center with a black hole. And then continued with a dance about that void, a tragic dance. That is to say, from my point of view as a descendent of Lévi-Straussian objectification, the continuity between New Critical close reading and deconstrutive reading is more salient than the difference. One the thesis, the other the antithesis.

Aufhebung, anyone?

Or are we already beyond that?