Close reading? You really mean it? Just what is “close”? And “reading”?

Back on July 25, 2011 Andrew Goldstone made a post at Stanford’s Arcade: Close Reading as Genre [1]. It began:

Just what is that infamous thing, a close reading?

I have recently been seething with irritation at a certain scholarly book. Tempting as it would be to use the internet for its natural purpose and gripe about that book in detail, I am instead going to channel my energies into something with a little more intellectual value. The source of my irritation, you see, is that this book exaggerates to a fault—an incredibly irritating fault—all the virtues of “good” close reading. But what do I mean by that, my rational self asks my (normally dominant) griping self? Hmm. Fair question, rational self.

Close reading, ostensibly widely taught and widely practiced in literature programs, remains a bit of an enigma. It is learned mostly by imitation, and like pornography, it is most often distinguished by an “I know it when I see it” test. Now this just means that professional literary scholars, and our apter students, internalize the rules for doing close reading without ever needing to make them fully explicit. And what I’d like to do with this post is make a first stab at enumerating some of those rules—and try to provoke you, dear readers close, distant, suspicious, generous, and otherwise, to help me expand and refine the list. 

So he proceeds to make his list, enumerating 19 characteristics of this rough beast, close reading.

Down in the comments Natalia Cecire observes:

What we're teaching, of course, is not the reading (“close”) so much as the writing (of close reading), as you suggest, and I find the distinction you're making useful. But the “so much” is key, too: the kind of writing that we call a kind of reading is one of those privileged sites where the practice of writing and the practice of reading converge. That is, there's something about the writing that we call “close reading” that is so close to reading that we just go ahead and call it reading.

She too is a bit skeptical about this reading business. Let me suggest that there is, in fact, NOTHING IN PARTICULAR that’s special about this kind of writing “that we just go ahead and call it reading.” We do it out of convention. The convention had been long established by the time Goldstone and Cecile entered the profession, but it hadn’t become completely stabilized at the time I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins (1965-1969). I remember wondering to myself “Why are they calling this interpretive activity a kind of reading?”

Another passage, this one from a 2003 essay by Tony Jackson [2]:

That is, a literary interpretation, if we are allowed to distinguish it as a distinct kind of interpretation, joins in with the literariness of the text. Literary interpretation is a peculiar and, I would say, unique conjunction of argument and literature, analytic approach and art form being analyzed. (p. 202)

There we have it, Cecire’s privileged site “where the practice of writing and the practice of reading converge.” Same trope, different words.

Now let us go back in time, to Geoffrey Hartman’s 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading. In the title essay 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: “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing.”

He’s right about those modern ‘rithmatics’. But are they really all that different with respect to this magical mystical closeness than other analytical techniques? When you’re writing a critical essay, fer chrissakes! – as Cecire observes – you’re writing, not reading – though you may dip into passages from your primary text from time to time. I submit that what is lost, and hence must be restored, is not so much that mystical communion, but the nostalgic rhetorical stance that such textual communion is the proper and possible end of literary criticism.

And that, I believe, is why structuralism and linguistics were rejected by literary critics in the mid-1970s. Whatever philosophical reasons were given – scientism, reductionist, naïve – they were mostly intellectual cover. The real reason was that, by directly focusing on language as such, they exposed the trope of closeness for what it was, a convention. Us critics are examining someone else’s language, and examining it is not the same as simply and directly reading it.

Still older, let’s visit the “Polemical Introduction” to Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (pp. 27-28):

The reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature. Otherwise the reading will not be a genuine literary experience, but a mere reflection of critical conventions, memories, and prejudices. The presence of incommunicable experience in center of criticism will always keep criticism as art, as long as the critic recognizes that criticism comes out of it but cannot be built on it.

Here we have it, a clear distinction between simple reading and interpretive or critical reading. A page later he says (p. 29) “The strong emotional repugnance felt by many critics toward any form of schematism in poetics is again the result of a failure to distinguish criticism as a body of knowledge from the direct experience of literature, where every act is unique, and classification has no place.” Poetics doesn’t destroy literature, Frye says, because the experience of literature is one thing, while thinking about literature, classifying its forms and techniques, analyzing its themes, and delineating its styles, is quite something else again.

Just what happened between Frye, writing in 1957, and Hartman in 1975, I don’t quite know. But I was skeptical of it in 1975 – I had gone over to the “dark side” by then, and as fully immersed in the modern ‘rithmatic of cognitive science (computational semantics) – and I remain skeptical. One reason for my skepticism is that I remember those times when I’d stay up all night engrossed in a novel, as though I’d but entered a waking dream. Now that’s close.

And literary criticism has nothing to do with such absorption. One problem I’ve got with the orthodox doctrine of closeness is that it tends to devalue ordinary reading: the only real reading is critical reading. That makes most readers and most authors into zombies. One wonders why such creatures ever bothered with literature at all.

But there is more to my skepticism about the doctrine of critical closeness than my memories of adolescent absorption – and, before that, as a six-year-old being immersed in pushing around small cars and trucks in my sandbox. There is an experience that happened to me in my senior year of college, Fall 1969. I had enrolled in Earl Wasserman’s course on romantic literature and was writing a term paper on Keats’s poem “To–[Fanny Brawne]” in which I argued that Keats was faced with a contradiction between what he espoused as a poet, that love is higher than art, and his fear that love–his for Fanny–would destroy his poetic gifts. As a matter of rhetorical strategy I placed him between the horns of a dilemma, thus, “does Keats remain a poet, or does he hew true to the poet’s creed and become a lover and perhaps a doer?” At this point in the revision an impulse hit me, a way to produce a deft ironic twist. I typed, “Unfortunately, he did neither. He died.” As I typed the word “died” something snapped in my mind. The brute finality of the word altered my intention, or, if you will, my intention altered itself through the word. To continue with my original text was impossible. I went on to type a passage from one of Keats’s last letters to Fanny:

“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me–nothing to make my friends proud of my memory–but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you--now you divide with this (may I say it) “last infirmity of noble minds” all my reflection.

          God bless you, Love.

                             J. Keats–letter to Fanny Brawne, Feb. 1820

Though this passage was copied, I experienced the act of typing it as though I were writing a letter of my own.

This done, words and phrases we're floating about in my mind and vague feelings were astir. Searching for the source of these phrases I found the second stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

   Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d

   Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

   Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

      Bold lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal–yet, do not grieve;

   She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

      For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

As I read those words, silently, but with rhythm, my gaze seeming slightly ahead of my comprehension, and comprehension flowing from me into the text, I experienced a complete and absolute understanding, a perfect feeling, of those words–as though I had for a moment re-created within myself the consciousness of John Keats, thereby making his words, and the intentions incarnated therein, mine. [3]

Now THAT’s close. But also, if you will, meaningless. I had become the words, which is a different thing.

And I’m afraid the doctrine of “close reading” cannot hold up against that (kind of) experience. So why not own up to what you’re doing? You are doing criticism. You are writing about someone else’s words. You read them, in the ordinary sense of the term, and you think about them. You analyze them with whatever conceptual tools you favor, and then you write up your results.

It’s that simple.

* * * * *

[1] Andrew Goldstone, Close Reading as Genre, Arcade, blog, accessed October 1, 2017, http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/close-reading-genre

[2] Tony Jackson, “Literary Interpretation” and Cognitive Literary Studies, Poetics Today 24 (2) 2003: 191-205.

[3] This passage about my “Keats experience”, as I came to call it, is from my MA thesis: THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”, The Johns Hopkins University, 1972.