Forum 82.4: Close Reading
JANE O. NEWMAN
University of California, Irvine
Textual Intimacy
In his account of the New Criticism as the movement most often associated with “close reading,” Frank Lentricchia describes “a desire for textual intimacy” at once gentle and proud, “humble” before an “ontologically” greater creativity, yet also, “against its own logic,” self-profiling in the production of intricacies often more complex than those of the “text being read” (138–39). The notion of either gentle or aggressive “intimacy” with a text may seem strange, but makes sense in the company of I. A. Richards or John Crowe Ransom, for example, who doted on their preferred poems in amorous ways. Endorsing Barthes’ “plaisir du texte” well before the fact, Ransom rejected the distance from the image endorsed by a “Platonic poetry” devoted to “ideas,” championing instead both “Physical” and “Metaphysical poetry” that allow the critic to “know” the verbal “thing” “impulsive[ly]”and with a“minimumof reason”; the more “sensibilia” (meter, tropes, and so on) displayed for the (nearly always male) reader to “enjoy,” the better (44–54). Richards had already suggested nearly a decade earlier that reading should consist in the procuring of sustained pleasures; poets who can “compel slow reading” have “an initial advantage,” he wrote (cited in Russo 278). Andrew DuBois has recently—and perhaps too innocently—described this kind of “formalist” devotion to “slow-motion reading” (the term is Reuben Brower’s) as the “decent” kind of “love” that “the [new] critic ha[d] for the object of art” (9) In any case, unlike the business oriented “speed reading” that began to be marketed a decade or two later (and that Marshall McLuhan rejected as symptomatic of post- and Cold War “mass culture”), the New Criticism successfully propagated on U.S. college campuses this version of close reading (albeit of a more “responsible” sort, DuBois 9) as a NewWorld adaptation of the “venerable art” of philology’s “connoisseurshi" of the word” that Nietzsche already in 1881 had insisted its “votaries” adopt vis-à-vis the text (cited in Mikics 232). Rejecting the “fast politics” of the New Historicism and, more recently, of Cultural Studies (see Babiak), those who mourn the passing of close reading call instead for the reinstatement of the more unhurried “intimacy” with the text that it allegedly guarantees. When told in this way, the history of close reading reveals what was always its fundamental Platonism and aligns it with an aestheticizing formalism often (and perhaps too quickly) associated with Modernism. The preferred “object” of its affection is in fact an abstract creation. The embrace of the Idea of the Text, however figured and worked, thus actually abjures a textual “world populated by the stubborn and contingent objects,” the very world that for Ransom was actually supposed to “defeat” “ideation” by “turn[ing] back to things” (48–52). A “new,”post-“Modernist” close reading ought to turn to the more full-bodied objects that texts always are by recognizing that, as historian-of-the-book, Roger Chartier, famously wrote, “to read is always to read something” (ix). The gulf between methods that consider “material outside the text” (DuBois 9) and those that cleave to the “texts themselves” disappears in the face of the “material forms” that “discourses” perforce take so that we may read them (Chartier 2). Indeed, all texts come to us as printed (or scanned or digitized) “things.” The New Critics themselves relied on just this kind of physical intimacy with the text, even if they did not theorize it. Ransom writes of R. P. Blackmur in the eponymously entitled The New Criticism (1941), for example, that Blackmur’s “critical writing gives us the sense of materials turned over a great many times” (cited in DuBois 19). A more inclusive assemblage of Ransomian “percipienda” (54) would include, in the case of books, the editions in which texts are published, with attention paid to paper and typeface, publisher, and place. “Close readings” of any given volume’s textual apparatus and editorial scheme would likewise heighten our “aesthetic” experience of the work in the original sense of the term. Not to be spurned in this new close reading, finally, is the history of the purchase and ownership of individual books, for, as Walter Benjamin wrote, individual “copies” (Exemplare) of texts are nothing less than the “theater” of their “fate” (das Theater ihres Schicksals, 389). If we are to indulge in the pleasures of the text, let us do so not as Plato engaged with Woman only in the form of his Diotima. Close reading demands a greater intimacy with its texts as real objects.
Works Cited
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