FORUM RESPONSES
ALBRECHT CLASSEN, The University of Arizona
Close Reading - from a philological and philosophical perspective
Any interpretation or analysis of a text or an image, of a map, or a constellation of stars requires full attention to the details in order to reach a maximum understanding of what is presented to us, whether we consider, for example, a fifteenth-century poem by Oswald von Wolkenstein or a novel by the Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller. If we do not first gain a comprehensive knowledge of the meaning of every word, the individual phrases, sentence components, and then of the complete text, we hardly can venture into the critical examination. No interpretation will be solidly built, whether from a Marxist, Feminist, Structuralist angle, or drawing on the history of mentality, without that condition being met postulated by New, and in this regard actually Old, Criticism. We can easily fail to perceive the important messages of a text if we do not grasp, for instance, dialect variations, jargons, metaphorical expressions, but then also the meter, rhyme, and tonality of the language used, not to mention style, idiosyncratic expressions, idiomatic phrases, etc. Every text, like any other object, is built on a highly sophisticated structure, and without knowing all the nuts and bolts, we won’t have a chance to penetrate deeper into its fundamental content and essence. To use a metaphor, I cannot venture into analyzing the spiritual meaning of a Gothic cathedral if I do not have the virtual blueprint in front of me. As a matter of fact, every foreign language teacher, that is, every teacher, for instance, lays the foundation for the task at hand, a close reading, which grows over time and should get closer and closer to the core of the matter as a natural progression. In that process, however, something surprising happens with which we are all familiar.
Since the earliest Biblical times, and throughout the ages until today, reading has been a medium to uncover the many different levels of meaning, that is, we practice exegesis. Dante knew this exceedingly well (10th Letter to Can Grande della Scala), and before him Thomas Aquinas had explicated it in a magisterial way in his Summa Theologica, beginning with the literal dimension, turning to the typological or allegorical, then to the tropological or moral, and finally reaching the anagogical or spiritual (Henri de Lubac, S.J., Exégèse médiévale, 1959). Of course, some of the most painful conflicts in the history of Western civilization were the results of differing readings of texts (Jews versus Christians; see now Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 2007) and their meanings. But if there is anything in the world of literary studies we all can agree on, then it is the variety of guaranteed conclusions as to the technical nature of a text which a close, that is, philologically correct, reading can yield. Of course, conflicts, disagreements, struggles and arguments will certainly follow suit when the interpretation sets in, but there is hardly any room to quibble over the grammatical nature of a verb, a noun, or an adjective. A good reading that provides satisfaction, or Leseglück (ed. Alfred Bellebaum and Ludwig Muth, 1996) proves to be one of the most rewarding experiences in life, especially if we know with confidence that we have understood the text through a close reading of its building blocks and structural elements (A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, orig. 1995, 1999).
Having said all that, we also know only too well of the dangers implicit in the school advocating Close (Immanent) Reading only, especially after it had radically turned against all other types of interpretations, such as Geistesgeschichte, which had been previously abused by the Nazi and other Fascist regimes. Since the “linguistic turn” we are highly attuned to the arbitrariness of all language expressions, and hence of literature, and since the recent rediscovery of the visual strategies that inform text illustrations (Horst Wenzel, Spiegelungen, 2009) it has also become most apparent that a close reading alone is not good enough. The social and economic context proves to be as important as the religious, mental-historical, political, and philosophical. Only through the comprehensive combination of a close reading with the plethora of other types of critical approaches will the text (the image, the map, etc.) yield the message/s that we are so much in search of (see Karin Littau, Theories of Reading, 2006). Yes, we need to be as intimate with our texts as possible (Jane O. Newman), but only if we steer clear of the Scylla drowning in the text and getting blind to the overarching theme, intent, and function because of a too ardent adherence to the textual analysis in an old-fashioned philological way, and the Charybdis of a helter-skelter of free-ranging interpretations imposed on a text without a solid understanding of its linguistic elements.