Close Reading, My Own Thoughts

In reviewing for the Roundtable discussion, I have been reviewing particular critics and have identified what interests me most. I am intrigued by the historical examination of the moment such as wit Said or Barthes, but I am also intrigued by this idea of consciousness - perhaps with Lowes and his desire for unconscious process and  privileging the experience of poetry, or perhaps Auerbachs fascination with a multi-personal representation of consciousness. I guess I am most fascinated by it because I don't enirely grasp it, I understand wanting to situate a text within it's time period but what's to be said of the author's intention for the piece? My own proposal for a method of close reading will surround something that examines this - perhaps having to do with the process of poetry. I sometimes wish I could examine a piece from the authors eyes, was there a political masking that was intentional? Of conservatism? Was the piece merely a moment and the interpretations fell in later? I know I couldn't possibly answer these questions on my own but I am hoping my own method, in examining a writers conscious v. unconscious state, will help me come to better conclusions about close reading. I have also wondered how a particular place in a moment would affect this. If there were ways to determine where an author was in their writing state - outdoors, inside their bedroom - how would placement in a moment affect the conscious (or unconscious) state? This is a brainstorm.

Reflections on Close Reading

Having completed the requirements for an English major at Penn, for me, reading Rabinowitz made a lot of sense because I’ve experienced most of it. It’s true that we are taught that “good reading is slow, attentive to linguistic nuance and [especially] suspicious of surface meanings” (230). At some point, we are conditioned to believe that the best papers are the most subversive to an author’s intention, if that intention is clear, or at least subversive to the norms of the historical period. Also, the idea that close reading can allow a student to reclaim a work to conform to their beliefs is absolutely true. Part of the temptation of being a critic, both in class discussions and in papers, is to make your own soap box and espouse your personal philosophies on life. Interpreting literature is not like math where there is only one right answer.

Two musings on possible ways to go beyond close reading:

1) What does it mean to “read” a text? From Rabinowitz’s observation that the New Critics’ assume the production of texts comes the idea that the physical text is infallible—the words on the page are not to be questioned. We merely assume “that the text we have are the texts the authors wrote, thus conveniently ignoring the interference of publication as an economic and cultural institution” (231). Questioning intentionality, historical context, and the instability of language itself is fair game, but not the materiality of the text. What if we began to think about the meaning behind the print as a way to construct new meanings about a text? What if instead of the relevant literature of the time, we looked at the history of printing and publishing? Thinking specifically about the plays of Shakespeare, and the idea of publisher as author, there are material constraints that limit plot and drastically affect the text we take for authority. There is meaning in the physical process that is often overlooked.

2) In the Well Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks argues that all good poetry, preconditioned by an ability to close read it, is not only paradoxical but meta-poetry. What if we used that same theory to think about epistolary novels as intrinsic commentaries about modes of reading? Without the benefit of narrative voice, a novel comprised entirely of letters necessitates that everyone is a reader. Can parallels be drawn between reading and hermeneutic practice and the way we conceive personal character? Whether it is a detective novel or an early novel of sentiment, how does reading the very act of reading incriminate a plot outside of the one the author may or may not have intended?

Translational Close Reading

The problem with many recent close reading methods is their excessive reliance on extrinsic practices. If we are to follow Jameson's methodology we set ourselves up to read into the text with our ideological precondition, an act the I.A. Richards warned against with the onset of New Criticism. In focusing on a particular interpretive procedure, that of analyzing the narration of metaphorical translation, we would be able to simultaneously historicize the given text while also considering the intention of the author. This method depends upon the breaking down of the modes of translation (idiomatic or literal) in contrast to aspects of Jameson's work. Unlike the political UNconscious, an understanding of moments in which characters relied upon idiomatic rather than literal interpretation would reveal something of the Political Conscious. As Marcus relies on what is on the surface of the text rather than what is absent, this method of dissecting the narration of translational processes could reveal how a character's modes of interpretation/performance correlate with those of the time. For example, Fanny's dependence (as the most moral character) on the literal in contrast to Sir Thomas' dependence (as the most "proprietous" character) on the idiomatic enables interpretation on varying degrees and levels, rather than only what is absent/unconscious. For we can understand the characters themselves in terms of their adherence to the necessity of dependence on idiom, we can say something regarding the mores of the time of setting/composition via what the characters feel needs to be idiom-ized, and we can hypothesize about the author's views on propriety/cultural morality by checking which characters are successful and correlating this success with their method of translation.

Reading Too "Close": Invading Other People's Personal Space

There are so many methods of reading, each of which will produce a unique and different reading from a single text. While I by no means am advocating the school of thought which says "You're reading too much into it," I think we need to take a step back as readers.

We carry around our own messages to project onto our readings of texts, a collection of all our personal experiences and our knowledge base. This sort of reading can be valuable on a personal level because you, as an individual, are finding something you value within the text from your own life.

However, when we study close reading through the medium of literary criticism, we are being given readings secondhand. D.A. Miller's book is an enjoyable read and highly thought provoking, but is it too close in a personal sense to be taken as a good model for future readings? The personalization that such an essay projects onto an analysis can be misleading.

When Said capitalizes on the casual references to Antigua of Mansfield Park, he is passing over the reference to the Quarterly Review that allows for a reading of opposite political leaning. His personal history led him to ignore certain facts when historicizing.

Since we all do have histories, we need to recognize that we carry them with us in our writing and reading. As such, close reading cannot be universalized, it needs to be acknowledged as an intensely personal form of analysis. That being the case, when we read criticism we must keep in mind that it is a personal perspective on a written work and not a reading at large. It is a work of art in its own right.

The Boat in the Bottle; The Ancient Tree

Initially, the formalist studies from the first half of the course excited my intellect a great deal. I saw poetry as a linguistic form of music, carrying its own unique flavor of resonance. This is how I thought...

As the written composition or the digital recording leads to certain resonances in a specific and unique pattern, so the words on the page leads to a specific imaginative experience. The poetic experience is neither higher nor lower than the musical experience; it just uses different materials and excites different cerebral components. We might assume that no one person experiences a recording in exactly the same way; likewise, we can say that no recording/composition is ever heard the same way twice because it always resonates in a different environment. So the poem probably affects each person differently, and these differences are probably related to the setting of experience. Musicians who listen to other compositions will here the different elements clearer and will have a deeper appreciation along with the more immediate emotional resonances; likewise the poet/student of poetry will have his poetic experience enhanced by paying close attention to the individual elements working in concert.

So the formalist would say that with music and poetry, these materials were used together in this way/in this pattern, and afterwards, this work was the result. Poets, given that they must work with a language bound by time and space, mean to make timeless works, and so they use their time-bound language in a struggle against itself. This is not so different from music: musicians struggle to draw forth beautiful sounds from an otherwise chaotic array of physical vibrations.

Looking back on 2nd-half-of-the-semester dive into historicist criticism, I see no coincidence that our studies shifted from the poem to the novel. The novelist does something different than the poet: he plants a seed in the soil of his culture, and from this original act of creation, a tree grows forth. If the novelist worked closely with the rigorous exigencies of his cultural clime, and if critics continually cultivate the trees growth through canonization and criticism, then the tree will break nature's threshold and live into sustenance. Every harvest will then bring new seeds that resemble the first seed, and so the original intent is preserved paradoxically as the tree grows and transforms in real time. A valuable novel will thus give readers a window into another time. Readers must put forth much effort in order to draw out the novel's reward, because, like with a tree, the novel's conception is hidden behind countless layers of opacity.
However, if readers have the right tools, they can peel back the layers and gain a view upon a world that is not their own. This is why continual criticism is so important for the novel: the novel was planted using different instruments than the ones available today, and so we have to keep re-inventing new interpretive instruments in order to receive the novel's ever-expanding meaning.

While the poem carries a timeless experience forward in the formalist vessel--maybe like a miniature boat in a bottle--the good novel preserves the feeling of an age by working its materials into fruition. This is to say that the intentions of a poem or a novel--represented by the boat and the seed, respectively--are protected by materials that are durable and fragile at the same time. Glass is hard but breaks if abused; trees stand tall but are susceptible to fire.

According to this model, then, I posit four types of artistic works:

The Good Poem: provides the raw materials for a super-rational experience by juxtaposing otherwise disparate mental shades and timbres. The project of superseding rationality coordinates with the desire to step outside cultural limits. Incredible attention is payed to making "the boat" so that future generations will be careful with its glass case.

The Bad Poem: pines for a state of affairs without making it explicit that its language of pining is exactly the thing to be shirked. The glass will break from neglect.

The Good Novel: planted in fertile cultural soil; tilled by the author in his final stages of editing; continually protected, expanded, and altered by critics of the future who preserve the tree in order to look into the past.

The Bad Novel: planted in rocky, culture-less soil. Either overly-schematic to the point of cultural blind faith, or else so explicitly satirical that critics had no desire to protect the tree using constructive/deconstructive criticism. It gets cut down; either forgotten or chopped to pieces by evil super-intendents with a capitalist agenda.

Musings on Close Reading

It was only in my senior year of high school in AP English Literature that I learned about close reading. In fact, my teacher was shocked that we hadn’t learned about it sooner. Hitherto, I was expected to read for plot detail and perhaps obvious themes. It was only after I learned how to close read that I appreciated poetry because I was easily frustrated by my inability to immediately glean the poem’s “message” (I assumed that all poems had a moral, or message). In high school, close reading a poem meant identifying all of the literary devices and discussing how they all contribute to the poem’s “purpose”. To argue that a poem was in fact, metapoetry was considered a “cop out,” what English students argued when they didn’t understand the poem. Even in my poetry class last year at my old school (I transferred as a sophomore this year to Penn), this metapoetry argument was laughable and there was such a thing as “reading too closely” to the point of making things up and seeing what you wanted to see in the text for the sake of a paper.

I think that with all works of art, including literature, sometimes the meaning that we derive from the text and how the text is used is more important than those that the author intends. I remember hearing from an ethnomusicology lecture that Aretha Franklin’s song “Respect” was used in some Women’s Rights movements despite the lyrics’ references to prostitution. The point was that the people paid attention to the word “respect” of the chorus and derived their meaning from it, independent of its lyrics or of the composer’s intention. In the end, it didn’t matter what the song actually said, but how it was used/how it was read by its audience. Similarly, while Uncle Tom’s Cabin was intended to be an abolitionist novel, “Uncle Tom” is now used to describe blacks that sympathize with whites. But this method of reading/or understanding music is obviously specific to the reader. In my case, I don’t listen to the lyrics of a song and its significance to me comes from its rhythm/mood, if I can dance to it. I suppose that I approach some literary texts in the same manner. While I can objectively see the value in all literary texts (I can appreciate the author’s experimentation with a new sort of narration, for instance), I am particularly fond of texts in which I have discovered a personal significance, at least initially. Deriving personal meaning from a text is especially useful when attacking a dense work of fiction—it becomes less intimidating and has helped me examine the text more critically without qualms. This personal approach to reading is how D.A. Miller approaches Austen. He finds that he, like Austen herself, is a master of Style for he does not subscribe to societal norm of heterosexuality and of a man disliking Jane Austen. Miller does not sacrifice Style in exchange for Personhood just as Austen’s narrative voice remains neuter in not engaging in the marriage plot of which it narrates.

Self-Awareness of Character in "The Type-Writer Girl"

One of the most noticeable characteristics of Juliet’s conscience (and narration) is her rationalization of her reality to literature. In this she often superimposes her own “Homeric” adventures onto those of characters that she deems worthy of emulation or at least notice. Nowhere is this more evident that in her naming of most of her characters from past literature. This is especially important because her own name is that of one of Shakespeare’s heroines. Because of this fact she is, perhaps unwittingly, forced into this methodology of life and, in particular, to her self-proclaimed search for a Romeo: “My name is Juliet; you may well believe I have had moments when I thrilled with the expectation of a Romeo” (74). This proves to be an essential aspect of her character, as Allen must have clearly known in providing us with a main character keenly aware of her “character-ness”.
This fact is precisely what complicates her style as that of a “new woman”. Though she exhibits many of the attributes that are meant to characterize her as such (bicycle riding, her dress, smoking, etc.), she harbors these sentiments of a Shakespearean Juliet in her search for a man and in her own awareness that “woman is plastic till the predestined man appears” (85). From her narration we see that with the arrival of her “Romeo”, she becomes far more aware of the character-like quality that each of them are meant to play. She adopts somewhat of a persona even upon their first meaning, trying her best to maintain and fulfill her role as the “employee” when she sees that he is willing to give her undue treatment with regard to the carrying of her typewriter. Such intentional self-characterization may equally be said to stem from her awareness of her self as a literary Juliet or have provided her with later insight into her behavior as such. Either way, the notion of her modernity is brought into question with this adoption of the quintessentially female persona.

The "Modern Woman" and Her Irrationality

In The Type-Writer Girl, Grant Allen assumes not only a female voice for narration but a female persona for author as well. Instead of a man writing as a woman, Allen presents the novel as a woman writing as a woman. Since the protagonist’s concerns are those of what the Introduction calls “Modern Woman” –financial independence, freedom from male-oriented social constraints, et al. – it would be hard to accept as genuine if attributed to a man: the author would be emasculating himself.

Through the use of a female pseudonym Allen is able to skirt this problem for the most part, but his true identity, at points, shines through. The natural equality of the sexes that Juliet purports to believe in is contradicted by her own actions. When she goes to the auction house she bids on a piece of art even though she has no money to her name simply because she “could not bear to think that that coarse-looking dealer with the vulgar laugh” should own her favorite piece (72). From there, she is quickly overcome by her emotions – “I could no longer contain myself…. With an effort I gasped out”(72).

She has now, through her impetuousness, put herself in an irreconcilable position. Thank God, then, for “the young man with the sweet voice” who approaches her and offers to buy the Fra Angelico from her – and for more than she bid in the first place (73). The “Modern Woman” was saved from her irrational behavior by the benevolent and levelheaded male.

Juliet's bicycle

Juliet’s bicycle is the literal and metaphorical vehicle by which she creates relationships with others. (Juliet makes a similar comparison between herself and her bicycle when she dismounts it to “tighten her loose joints”—that is, those of her bicycle and her own.) The bicycle allows her to obtain her first typewriting job quickly thereby hearing of the anarchist commune later that very day at lunch. Juliet’s fellow anarchist comrades warmed up to her because they were interested in learning how to bicycle. Upon leaving the commune, she crashes into Michaela who we, the reader, learn to be Meta, the fiancé of Juliet’s love interest Romeo.

At the opening of chapter eight, Juliet mentions “bicycle face” along with other disadvantages of her beloved bicycle—its loosened screws as well as the inability for calm reflection whilst riding it. The shift in Juliet’s attitude about her bicycle marks the end of its life—crashing into Michaela about in corner. Here too, Juliet realizes that she is indeed a woman before she is a cyclist because she looks at her own wounds before those of her bicycle; an observation that separates her further from the independent, progressive, bicycling woman in a cycling suit.

When she had her bicycle, Juliet was essentially alone (with the exception of Commissioner Lin). It was a vehicle meant for one person and as such, it is during this time in the novel where Juliet does not have any meaningful (human) relationships. The death of Juliet’s bicycle and her use of trains and gondolas later in the novel coincide with her emotional involvement with Romeo and Michaela (Meta). Even when Juliet must leave Venice, she depends on Meta to return to London (or more specifically, she depends on Meta’s funds).

While the novel begins with a bicycle, it ends with a romantic image of Juliet revealing her identity and bidding goodbye to Meta on a gondola. The gondola, unlike a bicycle with its clunky, mechanical gears and chains, is more aesthetically simple with a smooth, traditionally wooden, body that glides along the Venetian canals. It is noteworthy that the novel’s most dramatic action surrounding Juliet’s emotional affair is discussed with Romeo and Meta on the more aesthetically simple of the two vehicles.

"The Bacilli at Flor and Fingleman's"

Juliet Appleton, upon accepting her post as a typewriter (female), comments on the copious amounts of dust that saturate every nook and cranny of the small office at Flor and Fingleman's.  "The bacilli," she says, "flew about me visibly whenever I lifted a book; they settled in myriads on my poor black dress; they invaded my hair and required to be daily dislodged by violent hostilities."

Appleton leaves, and after negotiating "complicated topography," she achieves her temporary end at the anarchist colony in Sussex.  That colony, in contrast with the London offices, could be best figured by the "bald, bare dining hall" that stood at its center.  Here, the influence of women is nearly totally absent.  Families exist, but the women and children blindly follow the doxy of the men.

Somehow, simplicity has become foreign (hence the anarchist "furriers,") and complexity has become familiar.

With Austen, we read the austerity of the countryside as a feature that symbolizes and culminates the 19th century nationalist spirit of England.  With Allen's novella, however, this austerity typifies the opposite: now, national character is linked with the complex and the accumulated, and the austerities of anarchy and futurism--male dominated phenomena--are marginalized.  To borrow a trope from Moretti: In its (moral) emptiness, the simple countryside is inverted as the site of complication in the unfolding plot.

The mechanics of inversion shine yet brighter in the case of narrative voice.  A man, Grant Allen, has assumed the first person limited omniscient point of view of a woman, albeit a somewhat independent (masculine) one.  Where Austen took a neutered and highly distant position, Allen works the opposite angle by getting moving the narrative voice so close to his character that it moves across the gendered divide.  This intense closeness is accentuated time and time again in the novella when Appleton describes moments of "penetration": we feel the dust in her nostrils, the stares upon her figure, the dirt on her dress, the cuts in her hands.

Finally, to tie all this together, the inversion of narrative voice and the inversion of national character simultaneously signify the new-mystical experience of urban modernity.   In London, "the phantom-crowded Strand, [the] streaming street full of those hurrying, scurrying men with black bags, bound as ever for the Unknown," offers a brilliant after-image of the "vagueness, the elusiveness, the melting, hazy charm of feminine craft" found in The Odyssey.  For wherein the country, peoples and structures lie far from one another, in London experience is condensed.  And given the new socialized structure, whereby Woman is to compete with the men, the city re-emerges as the site of nationalism.  With its condensation of personalities, ideas, and genders, like bacilli heaped upon old books, London can replace the countryside as the space of mystery and possibility.  As Allen looks through new eyes with Juliet Appleton, so we are to understand the urban space as the best place to look mystically through the eyes of others.

Type-writer (not male, but more than female)

When Juliet first enters Flor and Fingelman, she is ignored by all three clerks. In their “ostentatious unconsciousness” of her presence, “[t]heir talk turned upon that noble animal, the horse” (29). They don’t dwell on the horse, instead they turn to talking about Fleet Street. Yet interestingly, once their attention does turn to Juliet, she describes the “pulpy youth” running his eyes over her “as if [she] were a horse for sale” (30). They have stripped her of her personhood and naturalized her into their discussion of horses. As a response to their impersonal scrutiny, she reverts to style since she cannot be a legitimate person in their eyes. Instead, she is a horse—no different from any other horse from their earlier conversation. In being conscious of their gaze, she subsumes their gaze into her own narrative voice, weighing herself as a scientific specimen with her attractiveness in her little black dress and hat.

Rather than reject their condescending gaze and attempt to persuade the reader otherwise, Juliet allows the reader to read her in the same way. She adopts the clerk's perspective, even though she does not endorse that particular view of herself. Thus, she becomes a detached animal in the eyes of the reader, if only for a short time. In the struggle for life, she permits the episode, showing herself humbled, yet knowing enough to read their reading of her. When the pulpy clerk turns to his fellows and pronounces her “good enough” (30), Juliet suspects it as a reference to her outward face and figure rather than her typing skills. She is powerless at this moment to distinguish herself from a horse. At same time, she ironically turns their own kind of gaze against them as she observes the straight black hair, features modeled after an oysters, hairy hands, and goggle-eyes. In that sense, her retaliation wins back part of her personhood, by using the authoritative objectifying gaze usually reserved for men looking at women to look at men.

Coming from an audacious type-writer (female), the power of narration makes any gaze or pronouncement from the clerks secondary. Though Juliet never achieves the privilege of (male), as the author and narrator of her own story, she can definitely claim the authority of a more than female.