I am finally taking a class whose main subject is critical theory, and I'm glad. I think about theoretical subjects all the time, of course (such as: theoretically I should get work done right now), but since I did my undergrad at UVA, and UVA is really not a theory-heavy department, and also I study old literature (less apt to be written upon using heavy critical theory research), I usually feel as if I really know nothing about critical theory. Not that everyone doesn't feel that way.
So yesterday we read and discussed several articles having to do with readers. As you will know if you know me, I think about readers – or often, audiences and auditors – a lot. When I'm thinking about early modern drama, I'm often thinking about the way early modern audiences might possibly have experienced the plays, and what the potential differences between their experiences, my experience, and the experience of modern audiences are. I also have a firm belief that a play is brought to life only when it is performed – though it is also useful to study it when it is not fully alive; or more properly, one can also give it a life in the imagination (a different imagination from the effective/affective imagination of the audience) while studying it.
But, as a number of the writings we read yesterday, as well as the professor, pointed out, the logical conclusion of the necessary inclusion of audience to make the meaning of a work is that eventually, there is no text at all. What we call a "work" or a "text" is really just a series of readings – infinitely and constantly variable; historically, culturally, and socially defined; unavoidably individual; communicated only when two readers happen to be part of the same interpretive community.
This all makes sense – it is, in fact, an idea all the people in my age/education cohort were raised with, to some degree. We accept that talking about "meaning" is like talking about one particular wave in the sea – or maybe, like surfing on one wave, although I don't surf, so this is a semi-dangerous metaphor for me. You can feel it and use it while it is there, but soon it will be over, and will never recur. You can keep surfing and ride more waves, even waves that seem almost identical to the first wave, but they're in fact all discrete and cannot be replicated.
So with meanings: you can talk about them, you can use them, but you can't pin them down, and you certainly can't claim they're singular or even finite. Works have as many meanings as they have readers, and though the idea of an author does have some sort of special place in that sea of meanings (now my metaphor falls apart because the author has to be something like the moon, drawing all the waves, but can't quite be like the moon because the moon is knowable and predictable), that still doesn't change the infinite changeability of the work. Like I said, I think this is pretty much doctrine for us – at least it's something we've all heard before.
But it isn't something we live by. It is, in fact, very difficult to live or work by, because we're in a business where communicating about meaning is vital. In fact, communicating about literature, period is vital. In fact, periods – historical periods – and classifications and stratifications and even values (shocking) are vital. Infinite variation is extremely difficult to use. And so we don't use it. One of the professor's main goals for the class was to prompt us to interrogate the technique that's really at the heart of how people are educated in academic reading: close reading.
(I do disagree with her somewhat that close reading is the only thing that gets you anywhere still – I feel as if the extent to which I do close reading is highly variable itself. I've done a number of fairly historical papers that didn't even really have any objects that could be close-read. The Book of Common Prayer, for instance. I mean, you can try to close-read it, but that's going against what it is itself useful for.)
Close reading assumes, at its heart, that there is Something in the text that is discoverable. Something that is not immediately apparent, or whose significance will only be brought out or enunciated if polished by careful, sustained study. It assumes that finding out how a Work works really tells you something – or rather, it assumes that you can find out how a work works at all, simply be reading it by yourself or with a few other people. (I.e., close reading does not assume that a work works differently for every single reader – so significantly differently that no general statement can be made about its operation.) Close reading assumes that there is meaning inside a work (not just meaning in how the work operates in society) and that a reader who spends a lot of time concentrating on the work can discover something about that meaning that can be communicated to and used by other people.
(Another gap: I do a lot of formal analysis. How does this play use the stage and how does that present its object to a hypothetical audience [usually an audience at the time of its first presentation] and what does that tell me about what it means to be an audience or a play? In the renaissance? Now? I do talk about meaning and I most certainly think about meaning, but I am finding myself often to be some sort of historical formalist – under, of course, the direction of lots of people at uva who are precisely that. Also, I am not sure this is really different in kind from the investigation of deep meaning we were talking about yesterday.)
As the professor of my class pointed out, and as you can now see, close reading doesn’t really tally with the infinity of personal/cultural/social/historical meanings suggested by theories on readers. And she asked the very valid question: why, then? Why do we still persist in close reading? Why does it still form the core of our education as readers in an English department, why does it still form the core of our own writing, and why will it be the main ground of our dissertations? Why do we persist in looking for Something Essential (or Somethings Essentielles, anyway) in a work, when we also admit that there may be nothing empirically present there? Why don't we shift our focus to a more empirical more sociological, more specific study of reception/use/history?
One answer: because then we wouldn't have a discipline. We'd just be a branch of sociology and history, a very oddly specific branch that focuses on books, plays, and sometimes movies. That's one selfish answer. Another selfish or self-centered answer: because then we couldn't use the work of the people who have come before us and who have done close reading. A third: because we know how to teach close reading and we don't know how to teach other methods.
But these aren't the strongest reasons, or at least they aren't for me. The professor of my class suggested that there is, at base, something meditative – something, in fact spiritual, almost akin to medieval ways of reading that focused on deep, sustained meditation on a small number of sacred texts in order to achieve enlightenment and spiritual metamorphosis from them – in the practice of close reading. She suggested this as something that is empirically unsustainable, and indeed, one of the great bugbears of modern literary studies has been Superstitious Religiosity. The New Critics of the 1930s and 40s railed against their predecessors, mystical aesthetes, they said, who had reverenced authors instead of calmly, scientifically examining works, who had made reading into a kind of second-rate spiritualist experience, like going to a medium who shakes the table with her leg and claims to be talking to your deceased grandmother. The New Critics' method, however (the method we now call close reading) was scientific. It was clear-headed. It was strong, vital, sinewy, sustainable. (It was masculine.)
We are at the point now where New Critical, formalist close reading may itself seem to be weak, superstitious, invalid, excessively personal and reverential – we have made gods, says Barthes, out of Authors. No, says Foucault, we have made gods out of Texts. You're both wrong, says Fish – we've made gods out of ourselves.
But what does this show me? I decided, after class, that it shows me that when I read, I do not, in the end, seek Facts. I do not seek objects with which to surround my mind, although sometimes I find them. Instead, when I read, I am, in fact, seeking God.
And I think that's right. At least it's right for me, and it's right for a vast number of other people. I don't, of course, necessarily mean that I am seeking a Judeo-Christian God, or even a Creator Deity or a NonCreator Deity per se. But do mean this:
Yes, close reading is a spiritual, a vatic, a theological, a mystical experience. Yes I want to meditate on King Lear in a way somewhat similar to the way that a medieval monk meditated on the Summa Theologica. Yes, yes yes – I believe.
And I believe in belief. I believe in meaning. I believe in spiritual – or even, I'll use the word – magical change that allows the communication of human-ness or meaning-ness or essence-ness across the void between one person and another.
I believe in the vision I had the first time I understood close reading (I was maybe fifteen): I had this vision of myself, peeled off from my body, hands ecstatically stretched forwards, drifting down, down, down into a brilliant green well filled with soft, tangled vines. And as I fell, I followed those vines; I untangled them and tangled them back together. I found where they met and where they diverged. As I fell, too, the water grew deeper and deeper green, and finally black, and at the bottom – and is there a bottom? – what was there? Maybe God. Maybe Understanding. I don't know. I don't really think I intend to get there. Ineffability is important to me. The forever-indeterminacy of living, working, drifting downwards is itself ecstatic. I believe in that. And that is why I close-read, and that is why I will continue to do so. Because, yes: I believe that a single object may contain -- will contain -- all the world.
That isn't, of course, all I do. I also value history, and I value sociology, and I value cross-historical, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary analysis. I value works in action. I value application and use. I will strive towards these things because I value them. But I value them because I believe in meaning.
One day when I was in the MLitt program, we were in the sort of crash-course Shakespeare lecture course we had. People tended to look to me as some sort of expert on the academic analysis of Shakespeare and, in fact, I'd heard and done most of the things we did in that class already. (After all, I've had Shakespeare lectures.) One of the others students finally asked me, frustrated, "But why do we do this? We all agree that we value these plays in performance. That's why we're here! We just want to perform these things! Why does it matter whether you can relate Macbeth to King James I's obsessions, or that Romeo and Juliet speak a sonnet when they first meet? What possible bearing can that have on somebody who just wants to direct the damn thing on stage?" (In fact, a lot of directors and actors actively loathe close-reading analyses of plays, because theater is a violently anti-intellectual world. Thinking slows you down and makes it so you can't work, goes the received wisdom. That's a large part of why I finally left off – I can't stop thinking. I don't want to.)
I didn't really think long then, though. I knew my answer – I have known it. "Because I believe that this stuff is really there," I said. "And that means we have a duty to examine it."
That was it. That was the only answer I had then and it is, really, the only answer I'm going to have. If a work moves me, or if I want it to move me, or if artistic works in general move me, I believe there is moral, spiritual value in examining them as if there were Something There. (Not, mind you, only one Something or an incontrovertible Something. Just something.) At least sometimes. At least for some purposes. And you know what else? I love that. And I believe in it. And I hope I always will.
So yesterday we read and discussed several articles having to do with readers. As you will know if you know me, I think about readers – or often, audiences and auditors – a lot. When I'm thinking about early modern drama, I'm often thinking about the way early modern audiences might possibly have experienced the plays, and what the potential differences between their experiences, my experience, and the experience of modern audiences are. I also have a firm belief that a play is brought to life only when it is performed – though it is also useful to study it when it is not fully alive; or more properly, one can also give it a life in the imagination (a different imagination from the effective/affective imagination of the audience) while studying it.
But, as a number of the writings we read yesterday, as well as the professor, pointed out, the logical conclusion of the necessary inclusion of audience to make the meaning of a work is that eventually, there is no text at all. What we call a "work" or a "text" is really just a series of readings – infinitely and constantly variable; historically, culturally, and socially defined; unavoidably individual; communicated only when two readers happen to be part of the same interpretive community.
This all makes sense – it is, in fact, an idea all the people in my age/education cohort were raised with, to some degree. We accept that talking about "meaning" is like talking about one particular wave in the sea – or maybe, like surfing on one wave, although I don't surf, so this is a semi-dangerous metaphor for me. You can feel it and use it while it is there, but soon it will be over, and will never recur. You can keep surfing and ride more waves, even waves that seem almost identical to the first wave, but they're in fact all discrete and cannot be replicated.
So with meanings: you can talk about them, you can use them, but you can't pin them down, and you certainly can't claim they're singular or even finite. Works have as many meanings as they have readers, and though the idea of an author does have some sort of special place in that sea of meanings (now my metaphor falls apart because the author has to be something like the moon, drawing all the waves, but can't quite be like the moon because the moon is knowable and predictable), that still doesn't change the infinite changeability of the work. Like I said, I think this is pretty much doctrine for us – at least it's something we've all heard before.
But it isn't something we live by. It is, in fact, very difficult to live or work by, because we're in a business where communicating about meaning is vital. In fact, communicating about literature, period is vital. In fact, periods – historical periods – and classifications and stratifications and even values (shocking) are vital. Infinite variation is extremely difficult to use. And so we don't use it. One of the professor's main goals for the class was to prompt us to interrogate the technique that's really at the heart of how people are educated in academic reading: close reading.
(I do disagree with her somewhat that close reading is the only thing that gets you anywhere still – I feel as if the extent to which I do close reading is highly variable itself. I've done a number of fairly historical papers that didn't even really have any objects that could be close-read. The Book of Common Prayer, for instance. I mean, you can try to close-read it, but that's going against what it is itself useful for.)
Close reading assumes, at its heart, that there is Something in the text that is discoverable. Something that is not immediately apparent, or whose significance will only be brought out or enunciated if polished by careful, sustained study. It assumes that finding out how a Work works really tells you something – or rather, it assumes that you can find out how a work works at all, simply be reading it by yourself or with a few other people. (I.e., close reading does not assume that a work works differently for every single reader – so significantly differently that no general statement can be made about its operation.) Close reading assumes that there is meaning inside a work (not just meaning in how the work operates in society) and that a reader who spends a lot of time concentrating on the work can discover something about that meaning that can be communicated to and used by other people.
(Another gap: I do a lot of formal analysis. How does this play use the stage and how does that present its object to a hypothetical audience [usually an audience at the time of its first presentation] and what does that tell me about what it means to be an audience or a play? In the renaissance? Now? I do talk about meaning and I most certainly think about meaning, but I am finding myself often to be some sort of historical formalist – under, of course, the direction of lots of people at uva who are precisely that. Also, I am not sure this is really different in kind from the investigation of deep meaning we were talking about yesterday.)
As the professor of my class pointed out, and as you can now see, close reading doesn’t really tally with the infinity of personal/cultural/social/historical meanings suggested by theories on readers. And she asked the very valid question: why, then? Why do we still persist in close reading? Why does it still form the core of our education as readers in an English department, why does it still form the core of our own writing, and why will it be the main ground of our dissertations? Why do we persist in looking for Something Essential (or Somethings Essentielles, anyway) in a work, when we also admit that there may be nothing empirically present there? Why don't we shift our focus to a more empirical more sociological, more specific study of reception/use/history?
One answer: because then we wouldn't have a discipline. We'd just be a branch of sociology and history, a very oddly specific branch that focuses on books, plays, and sometimes movies. That's one selfish answer. Another selfish or self-centered answer: because then we couldn't use the work of the people who have come before us and who have done close reading. A third: because we know how to teach close reading and we don't know how to teach other methods.
But these aren't the strongest reasons, or at least they aren't for me. The professor of my class suggested that there is, at base, something meditative – something, in fact spiritual, almost akin to medieval ways of reading that focused on deep, sustained meditation on a small number of sacred texts in order to achieve enlightenment and spiritual metamorphosis from them – in the practice of close reading. She suggested this as something that is empirically unsustainable, and indeed, one of the great bugbears of modern literary studies has been Superstitious Religiosity. The New Critics of the 1930s and 40s railed against their predecessors, mystical aesthetes, they said, who had reverenced authors instead of calmly, scientifically examining works, who had made reading into a kind of second-rate spiritualist experience, like going to a medium who shakes the table with her leg and claims to be talking to your deceased grandmother. The New Critics' method, however (the method we now call close reading) was scientific. It was clear-headed. It was strong, vital, sinewy, sustainable. (It was masculine.)
We are at the point now where New Critical, formalist close reading may itself seem to be weak, superstitious, invalid, excessively personal and reverential – we have made gods, says Barthes, out of Authors. No, says Foucault, we have made gods out of Texts. You're both wrong, says Fish – we've made gods out of ourselves.
But what does this show me? I decided, after class, that it shows me that when I read, I do not, in the end, seek Facts. I do not seek objects with which to surround my mind, although sometimes I find them. Instead, when I read, I am, in fact, seeking God.
And I think that's right. At least it's right for me, and it's right for a vast number of other people. I don't, of course, necessarily mean that I am seeking a Judeo-Christian God, or even a Creator Deity or a NonCreator Deity per se. But do mean this:
Yes, close reading is a spiritual, a vatic, a theological, a mystical experience. Yes I want to meditate on King Lear in a way somewhat similar to the way that a medieval monk meditated on the Summa Theologica. Yes, yes yes – I believe.
And I believe in belief. I believe in meaning. I believe in spiritual – or even, I'll use the word – magical change that allows the communication of human-ness or meaning-ness or essence-ness across the void between one person and another.
I believe in the vision I had the first time I understood close reading (I was maybe fifteen): I had this vision of myself, peeled off from my body, hands ecstatically stretched forwards, drifting down, down, down into a brilliant green well filled with soft, tangled vines. And as I fell, I followed those vines; I untangled them and tangled them back together. I found where they met and where they diverged. As I fell, too, the water grew deeper and deeper green, and finally black, and at the bottom – and is there a bottom? – what was there? Maybe God. Maybe Understanding. I don't know. I don't really think I intend to get there. Ineffability is important to me. The forever-indeterminacy of living, working, drifting downwards is itself ecstatic. I believe in that. And that is why I close-read, and that is why I will continue to do so. Because, yes: I believe that a single object may contain -- will contain -- all the world.
That isn't, of course, all I do. I also value history, and I value sociology, and I value cross-historical, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary analysis. I value works in action. I value application and use. I will strive towards these things because I value them. But I value them because I believe in meaning.
One day when I was in the MLitt program, we were in the sort of crash-course Shakespeare lecture course we had. People tended to look to me as some sort of expert on the academic analysis of Shakespeare and, in fact, I'd heard and done most of the things we did in that class already. (After all, I've had Shakespeare lectures.) One of the others students finally asked me, frustrated, "But why do we do this? We all agree that we value these plays in performance. That's why we're here! We just want to perform these things! Why does it matter whether you can relate Macbeth to King James I's obsessions, or that Romeo and Juliet speak a sonnet when they first meet? What possible bearing can that have on somebody who just wants to direct the damn thing on stage?" (In fact, a lot of directors and actors actively loathe close-reading analyses of plays, because theater is a violently anti-intellectual world. Thinking slows you down and makes it so you can't work, goes the received wisdom. That's a large part of why I finally left off – I can't stop thinking. I don't want to.)
I didn't really think long then, though. I knew my answer – I have known it. "Because I believe that this stuff is really there," I said. "And that means we have a duty to examine it."
That was it. That was the only answer I had then and it is, really, the only answer I'm going to have. If a work moves me, or if I want it to move me, or if artistic works in general move me, I believe there is moral, spiritual value in examining them as if there were Something There. (Not, mind you, only one Something or an incontrovertible Something. Just something.) At least sometimes. At least for some purposes. And you know what else? I love that. And I believe in it. And I hope I always will.
Labels: audience, books, morality, reading, spirituality
0 Responses to “In defense of close reading”
Post a Comment