Modernism and Close Reading 2019954541, 9780198749967

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Modernism and Close Reading

Modernism and Close Reading Edited by DAV I D JA M E S

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954541 ISBN 978–0–19–874996–7 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements This collection has been a long time in the making and I owe a debt of gratitude to my infinitely patient contributors. It has been a pleasure to work with such brilliant, imaginative scholars. Somehow, they were able to keep this volume in view as the years went by, despite the many other, doubtlessly more pressing commitments that came their way. Thanks to the diversity and conviction of their perspectives, they have instantiated what was always my hope for this collection: a shared enthusiasm for taking another look at close reading—its histories, its possibilities, its risks—without arriving at any kind of neat, dutifully comprehensive, self-reassuring consensus. Such a hope, of course, contains hazards of its own, particularly with respect to coherence. And for that reason, I’m deeply grateful to the readers for Oxford University Press, who offered both practical and conceptual advice about how I might go about organizing this collection. Their combined re­com­menda­tions proved invaluable, given the many directions in which this book could have moved—and given too the fact that relations in modernist studies between field and method remain in perpetual motion. At the Press itself, Jacqueline Norton has been a paragon of patience and I thank her for entertaining this project in the first place: without her intellectual investment in the kind of conversation I aimed to advance here, this collection would never have materialized. The supremely efficient and supportive production team at OUP have offered a great deal of bespoke guidance along the way. I would finally like to acknowledge the privilege of those many invigorating dialogues about reading for form and about reading literary modernism (including how we feel about the process of doing both) that I’ve had over the years with Heather Love. From the outset of conceiving this book, I had a shortlist of one for the person to write its Afterword. With characteristic energy, Heather eagerly embraced the labour of that commission but sadly illness intervened. While her contribution is irreplaceable, her insights are everywhere audible in the coming pages—pages that, I hope, complement the spirit in which Heather has so generously facilitated conversations, provocations, and productive disagreements about the condition of critical reading.

Notes on Contributors Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York. His interests centre on the language of literature, but radiate in many different directions. His work in South African literary culture includes the Cambridge History of South African Literature (co-edited with David Attwell, Cambridge University Press, 2012) and J.  M.  Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 2004). His renowned work in literary theory includes The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004) and The Work of Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is also well known as a Joyce scholar, having published several works on this author and served for many years as a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. Another interest is poetry and poetic form, reflected most recently in Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Experience of Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Joseph Brooker  is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. His books include Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), Flann O’Brien (Northcote House, 2005), Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and most recently Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing (Bloomsbury, 2020). Rachel Sagner Buurma  is Associate Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College. She is co-author, with Laura Heffernan, of a new disciplinary history of English titled The Teaching Archive, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Excerpts and extensions of this book have appeared in New Literary History,  Representations,  PMLA,  Victorian Studies, and  The Chronicle of Higher Education. Rachel’s recent work on the history of knowledge organization has appeared in Book Parts, ed. Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (Oxford University Press, 2019), and in PMLA. Melba Cuddy-Keane  is Emerita Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto. Her publications include Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2003), the Harcourt annotated edition of Woolf ’s Between the Acts (2008), and, co-authored with Adam Hammond and Alexandra Peat, Modernism: Keywords (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). In addition to numerous book chapters and articles on Virginia Woolf and on modernism (globalism, ethics, periodization), she has published extensively on narrative and cognition, including essays on

x  Notes on Contributors auditory perception, navigation and neuroscience, embodied cognition, mindwandering and mindfulness, distributed cognition, and somatic dance. Hannah Freed-Thall is Assistant Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at New York University. She is the author of Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2015), which was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book. Her second book, The Beach Effect, is under contract with Columbia University Press. Laura Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. She is co-author, with Rachel Sagner Buurma, of a new disciplinary history of English titled The Teaching Archive (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Excerpts and extensions of this book have appeared in New Literary History, Representations, PMLA, Victorian Studies, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her next book, Unliterary Critics: The Study of Modern Literature Before Modernism, will be published by Columbia University Press. Peter Howarth is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His books include British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2006), The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, co-edited with A. D. Cousins (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is currently completing a book about poetry and performance after World War II. Jesse Matz is William P. Rice Professor of English at Kenyon College, Ohio. He is the author of Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture (Columbia University Press, 2016), and, most recently, Modernist Time Ecology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). He is series editor of Frontiers of Narrative at the University of Nebraska Press and a member of the editorial committee for Modernism/modernity. Jean-Michel Rabaté  is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (https://slought.org), he is a managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rabaté has authored or edited forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound, and Joyce. Recent books include A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human (Fordham University Press, 2016), The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns (Bloomsbury, 2016), and After Derrida: Literature, Theory and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Vidyan Ravinthiran is Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. His first monograph, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell University Press, 2015), won the

Notes on Contributors  xi University English First Book Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. Two books of verse have been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Forward and the T.  S.  Eliot; The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019) won a Northern Writers Award, a PBS Recommendation, and was a Financial Times Book of the Year. An award-winning literary journalist, he helps organize the Ledbury Emerging Critics program, which aims at increasing racial diversity in arts review-culture. His next critical monograph, Spontaneity and Form, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Paige Reynolds, Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, has published widely on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, and modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is the author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016). Most recently, she has edited The New Irish Studies: Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions and (with Eric Falci) Irish Literature in Transition, Vol. 6: 1980–2020, both published by Cambridge University Press. Max Saunders is Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham, before which he was Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, where he was Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (2012–18). He is the author of  Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010). He has edited five volumes of Ford’s writing, including an annotated critical edition of Some Do Not . . . (Carcanet, 2010). In 2013 he was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for a five-year collaborative project on digital life writing called ‘Ego-Media’. His latest book is Imagined Futures (Oxford University Press, 2019), a study of the To-Day and To-Morrow book series.

Introduction David James

Modernism and close reading: we would be hard-pressed to think of two more convivial bedfellows. Readers have their work cut out when encountering modernist forms, and the analytic tests such forms present are also testaments to close reading’s indispensability. In this way, the iconoclastic strategies of modernist works have themselves become iconic for legitimating the reading practices they at once solicit and endlessly repay. However much experimental forms seem to thwart and evade the job of interpretation, they ceaselessly invite granular explication.1 Consequently, the very battle to understand modernist innovation offers its own education in response. For countless students, studying modernism has also meant studying close reading. But in the current climate, we might not be able to take that kinship for granted. Literary and cultural studies continue to navigate phases of intense methodological flux and disciplinary self-examination. And amid this metacritical commotion, the rapport between close reading and the proliferating objects, elastic timeframes, and global contexts of modernist studies today no longer feels guaranteed. This collection therefore takes stock of close reading’s history with a view to acquiring some sense of its futurity at a moment of unprecedented expansion and reconstitution for modernist scholarship. It embarks on this endeavour not in the retrogressive belief that close reading needs salvaging in an elegiac gesture of field-adjusting recuperation. Rather, the coming chapters prove that periods of collective self-scrutiny need not aggravate internecine polemics, promote corrective agendas, or culminate in 1  ‘Close reading’, as Timothy Aubry notes, ‘gave English departments a set of skills that they could actually impart to students, and it gave professional literary critics a steadily remunerative, institutionally secure career as university professors’. Relatively safe as pedagogy, the method has also survived, in Aubry’s reading, the radical overhaul of literary studies initiated by late twentieth-century cultural materialism: ‘While later schools of political criticism have purportedly rejected formalist analysis and the traditional canon, they have never successfully sidelined the experience of irony, ambiguity, and paradox that the New Critics sought to encourage’ (Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017], 38, 58).

David James, Introduction In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © David James. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0001

2  David james methodological redundancies; instead, they can serve as useful spurs for examining the historical, conceptual, and institutional contexts for escalating critical priorities—however durable or diverging those priorities turn out to be. In this spirit, Modernism and Close Reading unpacks the sources and reverberations of its own titular conjunction, with the aim of enriching our vocabulary for engaging with the pedagogical, interpretive, and theoretical itineraries of critical method in modernist studies. To be sure, this field is not alone in warranting some consideration of the genealogies and opportunities that close reading now throws into relief against the backdrop of transnational expansion, postcritical self-reflexivity, and interdisciplinary collaboration—just some of the influential ‘turns’ in recent decades that have influenced the way scholars reconsider how they’re reading and what they’re reading for. Early modern studies and nineteenthcentury studies have undertaken their own reassessments along similar lines, particularly with respect to the aesthetic and political potencies of form, reenergizing in the process their critical attention to form for understanding literature’s social, philosophical, ethical, and geopolitical work.2 Although close reading and formalism are by no means one and the same, nor always mutually enriching,3 the surge of debates about the political efficacy and 2  For a useful survey of formalism’s various recalibrations, see Marjorie Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, PMLA, 122 (2007): 558–69. Landmark theoretical and historical interventions from scholars in nineteenth-century studies include: Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Kent Puckett, Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Jesse Rosenthal, Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). V21’s Manifesto asserts: ‘Taking energy from Foucault and Rancière, from postcolonialism and feminism, new formalisms and new ways of working with form explicitly pursue the politics of form, challenging us to reconsider how forms persist across artificially designated historical periods, while recentering formal analysis as the province of literary critical knowing’ (http:// v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/). In a rather less political vein, Garrett Stewart offers a bracing series of rhetorical and grammatical explorations of Victorian narrative in a manner that tunes in to what he calls the ‘microplots’ of style: see Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). In early modern studies, see The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Bauman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Proving that questions of form are in­dis­pens­ able to the history of emotions, Katherine Ibbett supplements the customary ‘therapeutic model’ for understanding literary affect ‘by attending to formal devices and structures’ through which to close read compassion’s expression (Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018], 24). 3  Nicholas Gaskill reminds us of this distinction in his revealing account of abstraction and ‘concrete appreciation’ as destinations for close reading: ‘even though the Formalists and the New Critics shared a concern with defining the ontology of the literary work, and even though they emphasized similar “devices” and “techniques” that poetic language employs to distinguish itself from prose, they had fundamentally different notions about how the nature of the literary object related to the methods needed to study it. These differences are expressed in their divergent uses of “concrete” ’ (‘The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context’, New Literary History, 47.4 [2016]), 511).

Introduction  3 peda­gogic­al­ly sustainability of formal analysis necessarily entails an assessment of close reading’s persistence and adaptability—even if that assessment has been surprisingly absent in discussions of so-called ‘new formalism’. We might assume that modernist studies would be a key player in shaping these conversations. Yet the question framed by the V21 collective concerning whether Victorianists can ‘further develop formalist interpretations that are politically astute and intellectually supple’ is one that arguably hasn’t been posed and probed with the same kind of urgency or shared vigour by the New Modernist Studies.4 Why? One answer is that discussions of form in modernist studies are li­able to become ideologically freighted, if not politically overdetermined. That painstaking formal analysis might amount to an implicit advocacy of the aesthetic autonomy and self-perfecting integrity of modernist experimentation is a suspicion that dies hard. As Mark Goble observes, ‘rigorously formal assessments of early-twentieth-century art and literature, which nobody has much championed for years, still manage to inform a model of modernism that persists as an object of skepticism and disfavor in modernist studies: an aesthetic of pristine self-regard and hypertrophied opacity that denies the historical conditions and politics of the period and assumes that the work of art should never permit itself merely to communicate with its audience’.5 By these lights, close reading risks reinforcing in its own attraction to the challenges of explicating enigmatic forms the alleged exclusivity, rarefication, and social detachment of modernist experimentation. It’s not unreasonable to ask, however, whether any close readers today actually behave this way: arguably, modernism’s ‘denial’ of historical determination and political entanglement is as much as straw figure as close reading’s perceived tendency to become increasingly disengaged from social considerations the more it prioritizes questions of form. At a time when theorists of formalism itself are advocating the method’s political currency,6 these presumptions of ideological crosscontamination between the kind of social detachment that surfaces in accounts of modernism’s aesthetic ‘self-regard’ and what are, in practice, the heterogeneous commitments of close reading need challenging.

4  Thesis 7 of the V21 Collective’s Manifesto: http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collectiveten-theses/. 5 Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 10. 6 Levine, Forms; and Mark C. Jerng, ‘Race in the Crucible of Literary Debate’, American Literary History, 31.2 (Summer 2019): 260–71.

4  David james As does the association of close reading with the afterlives of the New Criticism. Such is another reason for the relative absence (in comparison to scholarship on other literary-historical periods) of sustained discussions of formalism’s futures in modernist studies, one that recapitulates my opening observations. For as we know, close reading remained pedagogically i­ ntegral to modernism’s post-war consolidation as a field, following New Criticism’s fastidious attention to technique—to irony, ambiguity, and contradiction, along with rhetorical, structural, or syntax complexity—as the privileged object of knowledge in undergraduate instruction. It is precisely ‘the unmatched efficacy of close reading’, writes Timothy Aubry, as an ‘ever-versatile’ ‘tool in the classroom’ that has perhaps sidelined it from metacritical deliberation.7 Close reading possesses a well-rehearsed backstory, one that’s li­able to unfold with the help of caricatural vignettes about the ideologically dubious influence of New Criticism in the US and Practical Criticism in the UK. As a result, nothing could seem less ‘new’ for the New Modernist Studies, at first glance, than foregrounding its own affinity with close reading at a time when the field’s expansion is following unprecedented—rather than recuperative—trajectories. However, expansionism as an objective—now the lodestone for twentyfirst-century scholarly advancements and curricula reforms spurred by planet­ary modernisms—need not be inimical to close reading, as this collection hopes to demonstrate.8 What’s more, New Criticism’s paradoxically systematic commitment to modernist poetics in defiance of an increasingly systematized, technocratic culture is only one story in modernism’s multiplot kinship with close reading. This volume savours those other plotlines to make an expansionist contribution of its own, offering a plural perspective on the field’s inherited and ongoing relationship to close reading’s multiple modalities and promises. It does so by acknowledging, as Angus Brown observes, that it certainly ‘isn’t always easy to tell where close reading stops describing a

7 Aubry, Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures, 58, 65. 8  This collection makes no pretences to supplying a sedulously transnational or ethnically comprehensive report on the critical and cultural contexts of close reading’s indispensability for approaching modernist writing at the global scale. But it does hope to open up conversations about method that can inform the ongoing, and necessarily collaborative, project of addressing how archives of global modernism variously refute, refract, or reenergize established modalities of political formalism, aesthetic attention, evaluative judgment, and comparative analysis. For an excellent anthology of sources that furthers that project—bringing together an unprecedented range of texts from sub-Saharan Africa, central Europe, the Arab world, Turkey, Asia, South America, and Australia, which present unique methodological challenges of their own—see Alys Moody and Stephen  J.  Ross’s Global Modernists on Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

Introduction  5 critical technique and starts describing the discipline itself ’.9 With this in mind, the coming chapters initiate conversations about how the multifarious desires and devices that have coalesced around close reading might continue to circulate amid modernist studies’ global dilation and temporal elongation. Such conversations might help us to reassess the legacies of close reading’s undeniably fraught, politically ambivalent aspirations, together with its latest applications and reconstructions. * What would it take, then, to distinguish close reading’s conditions of possibility in modernist studies today from the lineage of New Criticism, whose proto­cols have periodically been portrayed in hindsight as all the more unconscionable because of their decontextualizing devotion to literature’s ‘organic’ systems of signification at the expense of its social affordances and cultural mediations? Extricating method from reputation against this backdrop seems tough indeed. Joshua Gang opens his instructive account of close reading’s imbrication with ‘psychological behaviourism’ with the understandable caveat that ‘[w]e know the long (and often troubling) list of political forces, institutional pressures, and personal biases that had some role in close reading’s development’. And he closes by observing that ‘despite our the­or­­ etic­al knowledge and historical training, despite all our ideological misgivings about the New Criticism, fragments of Richards, Brooks, and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s arguments remain almost second nature to us’, such that many of  the core ‘techniques of close reading have become our default critical position’.10 Default positions can be surprisingly resilient. And in close reading’s case, assumptions about its imputed politics have become ingrained, despite its procedural reorientations over time. In her generous effort ‘to appreciate just how diverse and avant-garde the New Criticism really was’, Jessica Pressman admits that it’s ‘hard for us . . . to consider disassociating ­literature from close reading or to recognize just how revolutionary the ambitions undergirding close reading really were’.11 Hence the challenge that lies ahead: not simply to separate the portrait of close reading’s evolving priorities within modernist studies from New Criticism but to avoid the temptation, in creating that portrait, to homogenize ‘the ideological stakes of the New 9  Angus Brown, ‘The World of Close Reading’, Modernism/modernity, Print-Plus, vol. 3, cycle 3 (3 Oct. 2018): https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/world-close-reading. 10  Joshua Gang, ‘Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading’, ELH, 78.1 (2011), 1, 20. 11 Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 12.

6  David james Criticism as formalism’.12 Contributors in Part I of this collection are alert to these pitfalls when reconstructing a disciplinary history for strands of modernist close reading, without recapitulating what Douglas Mao calls longstanding ‘misreadings of the New Critics as promoters of the idea that the autonomous text-object can be understood as radically separate from all external contexts’. These misconceptions ‘have helped to perpetuate the myths of New Critical ontological naïveté and of a direct connection between the hypostatization of the text and antihistoricism’.13 The opening series chapters help to overturn such myths by remapping the  twentieth-century genealogies of close verbal selection, evaluation, and discernment as practised not only by critics at mid-century but by modernist writers themselves. ‘Whatever else modernism involved’, argues Max Saunders, ‘it advocated what we might call “close writing”: a minute attention to the words being used, the word-choices being justified by the effects they produced’ (19). And close writing, as his chapter reveals, emerged as a mode of literary composition before it became bound up with the exegetical developments of modern literary criticism. Impressionism in fiction was one such mode: ‘a method for letting the reader visualize the perceptions and feelings of the characters’ in ways that presupposed that reader’s close, affective involvement with rhetorical and structural renditions of interiority (28). Modernist literature thus performed close reading, in a sense, by activating the reader’s emotional immersion in the psychological lives of individuals, years before an analytical attention to the formal properties that enable such involvement became pedagogically routine. Peter Howarth extends this performative principle further. ‘Rather than see close reading as just a means to protect the hypostasized text from its social mediation’, he proposes that ‘we see it as one of the many ways in which, over the course of the twentieth century, art has moved from an affair of objects towards one of events, whose modus operandi is performance.’ By ‘fostering this change’, argues Howarth, whether ‘unintentionally or deliberately, close reading is actually moving in the same direction as the contemporary historicists, blurring the borders between art and its contextual medium’ (49). Reminding us of how unnecessary the antagonisms between critical methods actually are in practice, Howarth contends that ‘[w]hen close reading is 12  Ibid., 12. 13  Douglas Mao, ‘The New Critics and the Text-Object’, ELH, 63.1 (1996), 237. Helen Thaventhiran warns that ‘Practical critics are already easy targets; practical criticism of practical criticism risks only amplifying the negative traits—parochialism, or even positivism—that attend on this kind of critical mode’ (Radical Empiricists: Five Modernist Close Readers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 19).

Introduction  7 understood in its modernist context as a performance—a procedure invented to keep the poem as live experience, to pick up and respond to forms as a repertoire of gestures towards an audience, to see the shifting borders between the aesthetic and the sociohistorical become visible in that response—then it should be useful to the historicist project as well’ (68). Howarth’s salutary proposals chime with Rachel Sagner Buurma’s and Laura Heffernan’s contention that contemporary efforts to recalibrate close reading’s operations suggest that the methodological enemies are in fact not ‘New Historicism and cultural criticism but rather the clanging truisms of strong theory—its repeated refrains about what texts and people are like— that can drown out the softer sounds of individual texts’ (71). They shrewdly point out that ‘the rise of close reading was not really a clean sweep, was never about the eclipse of one critical practice by another’ (84), a recognition that is itself easily drowned out by the more pugilistic confrontations that have occasionally characterized our postcritical times.14 Buurma and Heffernan help us to notice that the lineage of close reading’s enduring influence ‘depends not on narratives of eclipse or supersession’ but instead ‘upon an attention to attention—including a sense of how, and to what, and with whom we bestow it’ (85). That there are myriad forms of readerly attention, of course, reminds us of the drawbacks of treating close reading as though it were a single—and ­stable—activity. It’s a pitfall that some recent attempts to summarize literary studies’ methodological factionalism don’t entirely avoid. Deidre Shauna Lynch and Evelyne Ender, for instance, introduce a fascinating PMLA cluster on the ‘Cultures of Reading’ by asserting that ‘[n]ot so long ago close reading was regularly identified as the single methodology literary scholars shared. Now, even a cursory survey of how twenty-first-century literary critics describe their methods reveals the gerund reading combining with all manner of adjectives: not only close, not only critical (near neighbor to close in many accounts of literary pedagogy), but also distant, flat, too close, surface, mid-level, just, reparative, and so on’.15 Their snowballing catalogue gives an ac­cur­ate flavour of reading’s proliferating subspecies, each tendering an uneasy if not potentially conflictive relation to the moods and pledges of those approaches

14  For a particularly aggressive attack on postcritical approaches see Bruce Robbins’s response to Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015): ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017): 371–6. 15  Deidre Shauna Lynch and Evelyne Ender, ‘Introduction: Time for Reading’, PMLA, 133.5 (2018), 1076 (Lynch and Ender’s emphases).

8  David james from which they allegedly depart.16 What this same list downplays, however, is the extent to which close reading is bound up rather than relinquished by many, if not all, these alternative methods. Any quantitative or distant reader has to be a pretty adept close reader of data; more to the point, she may also be interested in tracking transhistorical patterns in recurrent uses of specific features (like free indirect discourse or parataxis), which have been quintessential concerns of stylistic analysis. Indeed, you might have to become a proficient close reader before you can train to be a distant one. Likewise, the most sumptuously reparative readings often entail intimate verbal analyses, especially in their orientation toward a ‘descriptive richness’ that sacrifices ‘hypervigilance for attentiveness’, in Heather Love’s account, modelling an approach that ‘prefers acts of noticing, being affected, taking joy, and making whole’.17 And whatever the critic’s preferred degree of analytic proximity, any close reading after the ‘method wars’ (to use Rita Felski’s frequently-invoked phrase) will likely involve at least some close attention to one’s own inclinations and standpoint, thereby enacting a candid, self-reflexive form of hermeneutic ‘work that attends’, as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus propose, ‘as much to the complexities of the critic’s position as to those of the artwork’.18 This is not to say that close reading is necessarily the overlooked, dis­ avowed, or otherwise maligned substratum of otherwise competing sens­ibil­ities and fractious professional allegiances. It is simply to note that the modifier can, unhelpfully, place the method in needless binaries, when the perceived ­commitment to sustaining closeness is contrasted with the (often politicallyfreighted) convictions of other modalities of engagement. From this dichotomizing perspective, close reading’s concern with delving into and retrieving latent meaning becomes the antithesis to ‘surface’ description, for example, even though describing what a text does needn’t hinder one’s alertness to discrepant, seemingly buried, or inadvertently disclosed varieties of significance. By the same token, the perceived focus of close reading on micro-inflections of literary discourse could not be further removed, at first 16  Understanding critique as a mood, more so than an internally consistent method, Rita Felski and Elizabeth Anker remind us of how useful it can be to theorize reading in terms of its affective ‘dis­posi­ tions’. See their Introduction to Critique and Postcritique, ed. Anker and Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 10–12. Pursuing this term, Christopher Castiglia suggests that readerly dis­ posi­tions ‘are neither inborn character traits nor simply matters of circumstances . . . but a cultivated frame of mind, an orientation toward the text, less self-conscious than method and more sustained than mood’ (‘Hope for Critique?’, in Critique and Postcritique, 213). 17 Heather Love, ‘Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, Criticism, 52.2 (2010): 237–8. 18  Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, New Literary History, 45.2 (2014), v. Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108.1 (2009), 17.

Introduction  9 blush, from the wide-angle lens of historical materialism or the activisms of cultural critique, even though many of the most influential readers of modernity’s ideological catalysts and consequences have tended to make their case through fine-grained accounts of literature’s assimilation of, complicity in, or imaginative opposition to social contradictions. Political demystification has often required athletic displays of close reading.19 And finally, it’s not difficult to see how the cognitive turn in narrative studies and stylistics can make interpretive accounts of literary form appear impressionistic or unsystematic, when there’s no reason to think that a particularizing analysis of style in modernist fiction, say, couldn’t synchronize narratological observation and intuitive, sensuous reflection. In fact, it’s a combination that Vidyan Ravinthiran offers in his commentary later in this volume on the ‘enmeshing’ in Nabokov’s writing ‘of “style” and “privilege” ’ (171); and it subsequently informs Melba Cuddy-Keane’s readings of Cather, Forster, and Woolf, where she demonstrates how spatial close reading operates on both experiential and analytic levels. If ‘as readers’, notes Cuddy-Keane, ‘we most likely experience the effects subliminally’ with respect to the construction of vivid storyworlds, then ‘as critics, we can examine the details for insight into how the cognitive functioning works’ to sustain our involvement in those fictional worlds (212). The latter (cognitively analytic) response does not rely for its credibility on outstripping the former (aesthetically affecting) encounter. If anything, Ravinthiran and Cuddy-Keane exemplify how one can bring the rigours of rhetorical and narratological classification to bear on emotionally charged, ethically alert, and historically sensitive accounts of syntactic characteristics or elements of ­spatial description and their tangible stakes.20 All this is to say that our climate of methodological strife is in danger of distorting our view of the many things close reading can still do—not least in, and for, modernist studies. As Jesse Matz points out in the opening chapter of Part II: ‘successive critical schools of the last decades have typically been correctives, not replacing but supplementing each other and, thus, becoming 19  Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) is perhaps the obvious and most influential case in point, a work that drills deep into modernist style (notably Conrad’s impressionism) to excavate its metabolization of modernity’s damage and disappointments. More recently, Susan Stanford Friedman’s passionate case for reading modernism’s planetary and transhistorical reach is also, implicitly, a case for close reading modernist textual strategies across radically distinct temporalities and cultural traditions: see Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 20  For a demonstration of what close analysis might mean for alternative units of analysis (larger, that is, than the unit of sentence-level aspects of idiom, diction, and grammar) in approaching world fiction, see Rebecca  L.  Walkowitz’s ‘Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing’, Modern Language Quarterly, 74.2 (2013): 171–95.

10  David james options available to readers of all kinds’ (134). Any ‘stress upon a particular approach to reading’, to borrow Matz’s phrase, ‘elides what makes it a part of a process that includes even its putative opposite’ (135). If close reading is itself part of, rather than apart from, that process—one among many complementary ‘options’ for readers who needn’t feel compelled to choose between m ­ ethods that have been made to appear procedurally incompatible—it also houses many options within its own methodological precincts. Which is another reason not to think close reading in the singular (even if, gram­mat­ical­ly, we conventionally employ the category in that form). Redistributing close reading, in the way that Matz implies, by acknowledging its compatibility with schools and ‘turns’ that distance themselves from it, we have a chance to free close reading from its received reputation for institutional functionality. Such a reputation seems to haunt Lynch and Ender’s perspective on close reading, which in their summation begins to sound irreparably normative. They thereby perpetuate even as they admirably seek to redress ‘the notion, which may occasionally be glimpsed when our colleagues defend close reading’s continuing vitality, that if you are not reading closely, complying with the protocols for textual processing imparted in the classroom, then you must be reading casually or carelessly’.21 Why should close reading be understood as a cluster of protocols at all? Can it not become something more for modernist studies than the heritage of instruction that post-war higher education bequeaths to the field? As Derek Attridge intimates, close reading is as much about pleasure as about (inherited) pedagogical mandates. Attridge’s attention to the affective and intellectual ‘close encounters’ that come with Tom McCarthy’s formal innovations suggests that it’s by no means the case that ‘much of what we mean now by close reading’, as John Guillory claims, ‘involves, as we all know, resistance to the seductions of the literary work itself ’.22 Following Attridge’s approach, one might reasonably ask why critical proximity should presuppose a certain vigilance toward readerly pleasure? Is our analytical immersion in a work’s verbal, acoustic, or structural particulars necessarily inimical to enjoying as well as comprehending their seductive effects? Isn’t the formal compulsion to apprehend and eventually categorize the impact a given sentence has upon us not also a phenomenological response to the affective magnetism of the work to which that sentence belongs? If so, why shouldn’t the two go hand in hand across one’s account of the experience of that work? After all, isn’t close reading, in the end, simply a means of doing 21  Lynch and Ender, ‘Introduction’, 1077. 22  John Guillory, ‘Close Reading: Prologue and Epilogue’, ADE Bulletin, 149 (2010), 14.

Introduction  11 justice to that process of solicitation, a chance to slow down and observe aesthetic seductions rather than resist them, an opportunity to figure out how emotions relate to specific sinews of linguistic expression?23 Paige Reynolds unpacks the ethical consequences and pedagogical advantages of taking up that opportunity. Her chapter turns to a novel that reinvigorates modernist strategies for representing psychic and physical violence, Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013), now a paragon of the  continued vitality of experimentation in twenty-first-century fiction. Emotionally strenuous, linguistically adventurous, instantly disturbing—this narrative of chronic sexual abuse and familial tragedy presents the ‘intellectual challenges posed by modernist innovation’, argues Reynolds, ‘but also with the suffering generated by human failing’ (190). For Reynolds, an age of trigger warnings has raised the stakes for close reading such a novel; introducing students to material that’s affectively as well as stylistically formidable can be fraught with risks. Yet a text like McBride’s remains indispensable for helping students to consider why we should still care about experimentalism at all. Her novel’s exacting rendition of trauma proves that ‘[l]earning how to slowly and intelligently sift through the inventive content and form of difficult texts—books with unfamiliar content, oblique allusions and vocabulary, unfamiliar historical or global contexts, challenging formal techniques—is crucial for developing critical thinking skills and intellectual patience’ (190). What better justification for close reading modernism. Reynolds’s example anticipates the way Hannah Freed-Thall invites us to ask whether close reading is ‘less a specific strategy than an ethical relation’ (228). Bringing together Roland Barthes with marine biologist Rachel Carson, Freed-Thall’s comparative approach reveals that ‘[m]odernist close reading is where the aesthetic and the ecological meet’ (228). Freed-Thall traces Barthes’s and Carson’s shared ‘love of the small’, as they each ‘seek to read and describe transience itself, to bear witness to various minute and passing forms’ (229). She thereby offers a most fitting discussion with which to close a collection that seeks not only to historicize the way close reading has shaped the contours of modernism’s literary-intellectual legacies but also to look ahead at alternative conceptualizations of close reading that could transform what its methods involve. ‘Modernist close reading can be understood as an offshoot or variant of reflective judgement’, recommends Freed-Thall (230). And as

23  I have tried to answer some versions of these questions elsewhere by reading the affective implications and contortions of style in narratives of loss. See Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

12  David james this book in its entirety will suggest, the time feels right for turning close reading itself into a destination for such reflection. A supple ‘ethical relation’ more so than a coherent, self-evident ‘strategy’, close reading has much more to say about how modernist studies today relates to its own emerging styles and scales of thought. * ‘As a pedagogical and scholarly goal’, insists John Carlos Rowe, ‘understanding literature’s social purposes is far more justifiable than articulating only the formal aesthetic properties of literary texts, even if it also means that the political purposes of literature cannot be separated from its social work.’24 Scholars and teachers of modernism have long known that there’s little point (pedagogically or interpretively) in trying to speak of the ‘aesthetic properties’ of modernist literature in isolation from their social and political consequentiality. Undoubtedly, the field of modernist studies has in recent years undergone a radical overhaul to revamp its archive, developing insights from new media studies, book history, comparative translation studies, and trans­ nation­al area studies. This rigorous enterprise of self-reform may give the overall impression that critics no longer consider matters of language, structure, or genre to be their principal objects of analysis. Throughout the course of this (multi)disciplinary refurbishment, however, major contributions to the field have continued to suggest that understanding how texts operate crit­ic­al­ly in the world is profoundly enriched by understanding how they tech­nic­al­ly and aesthetically behave. Scholarship in critical race studies and in transnational literary history has helped to reconceptualize modernism’s formal repertoires of cosmopolitan critique, local and global affiliation, and anti-imperialist opposition. Attending to the multifaceted interaction of aesthetic strategies and political commitments, critics such as Jessica ­ Berman, Anthony Reed, Urmila Seshagiri, Evie Shockley, Aarthi Vadde, and Rebecca  L.  Walkowitz have shown that ethically incisive and meticulously historicized accounts of experimental forms in fiction and poetry consolidate rather than dispense with close reading when discerning the socially tangible implications and urgencies of technical invention.25 Likewise, 24  John Carlos Rowe, Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), 202 (Rowe’s emphases). 25  Walkowitz’s effort to show ‘how “style” is a crucial aspect of “cosmopolitanism” ’ when addressing modernist fiction’s critical aesthetics has set a generative example not only for initiating temporal revisionism—inviting scholars to track modernism’s political and aesthetic currents beyond mid-century—but also for attending to technique, revealing that stylistic devices are central rather subsidiary to comprehending the political stakes of modernist writing (Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism

Introduction  13 scholars employing perspectives from gender studies and the history of ­sexuality have made close attention to the fabric of textual construction and affective expression central rather than incidental to queer readings of ­modernist culture.26 Indeed, if anything the New Modernist Studies has thoroughly dispelled the supposition that ‘formal aesthetic properties’ occupy scholars and teachers to the exclusion of political, ethical, socio-economic, racial, ethnic, sexual, and institutional considerations. And yet, despite the field’s careful reassessments of the politics of artistic experimentation, it doesn’t quite feel like close reading is in the clear. Revisiting its histories and envisioning its possible reapplications therefore seems vital, even if that means we have to detach close reading from some of the historically familiar standpoints that continue to mediate opinions about its current position within modernist studies. ‘In the present critical climate’, advises Nicholas Gaskill, ‘when it’s rare to hear a full-throated endorsement of the aesthetic that doesn’t cause at least mild embarrassment, it’s worth asking whether and how the New Critical methods can work apart from the New Critical assumptions.’ This need not imply ‘that we would have to advocate their exact ideas about the aesthetic’, he cautions, ‘but we would likely need some notion of the specificity of art as a way of thinking or understanding if a practice like close reading is to be used a means of producing evidence.’27 Whether the field can afford itself the space to forge a sufficiently permissive vocabulary with which to value that practice as such remains to be seen.

beyond the Nation [New York: Columbia University Press, 2006], 7). Aarthi Vadde has shown how writers as ­distinct as Rabindranath Tagore, George Lamming, and Zadie Smith have ‘extended modernist theories and practices of literary form in order to contest isolationist understandings of national community and to give shape and substance to matters that press for international and global frames of inquiry’. This might sound a now-familiar call for the kind of expansionism that seems antithetical to the ­purview of close reading, a call for standing back and scaling up rather than zeroing in on text­ual granularities. But Vadde proves that reading for modernism’s political affordances at the global scale begins precisely by ‘[p]aying close attention to the formal and theoretical complexities of a deprovincialized modernist internationalism’ (Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914–2016 [New York: Columbia University Press, 2017], 2–3, 3). See also Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), and Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011). 26  As a bibliographically inadequate sample of the variety of work in this area, see Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27  Gaskill, ‘The Close and the Concrete’, 520–1.

14  David james Indeed, one of the questions raised by Modernism and Close Reading echoes Jane Gallop’s provocative reassessment of the state (and fate) of close reading a decade ago. Using terms especially germane to modernist studies, she prompts us to wonder what the value of close reading might ultimately be for rethinking the condition of a field that has fostered it. Instead of justifying close reading in the self-fulfilling manner of the New Criticism—when it insisted that ‘the value of studying literature lay in literature’s intrinsic value’— Gallop argues that ‘it is the value of close reading that justifies the study of literature’.28 It would be unfashionable, perhaps, to suggest that close analyses of form are the primary justification for studying and teaching modernist literature. But given that scholars do indeed value modernist texts for the way they make aesthetic forms do so much political, emotional, and ethical work both at local and global scales, then it seems pertinent to examine the roles— intellectual, affective, interpretive, collaborative—that close reading might alternatively play in making sense of that work. By hosting this examination, Modernism and Close Reading does not pretend to offer an exhaustive archaeology of the field’s emergence, consummation, and variegation; nor does it mean to reconstruct a comprehensive story of the intellectual formations and aftershocks of Practical Criticism and the New Criticism. Taken as a whole, its aim instead is to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close-read. In this way, modernist literary cultures, together with the institutional contexts that have historically influenced the study and teaching of modernism, enable us to ask new questions about close reading that resonate well beyond this particular field. * Today, myriad ways of performing close reading point us to the method’s medium, not only to its motives and precepts. Consequently, in ‘the encounter between close reading and modernist literature’, as Joseph Brooker observes, the performance of proximate attention, reflection, and judgement ‘also involves a mode of writing, with its own tone, character and rhetoric’ (103). Whatever else they do with style as a unit of analysis and phenomenon for 28  Jane Gallop, ‘Close Reading in 2009’, ADE Bulletin, 149 (2010), 16. Pressman reminds us that inasmuch as close reading ‘provided a method of appreciating the experiments of literary modernism’, it epitomized how, as an approach, it ‘was never just a means of understanding literary works but also of discerning and assigning value to them’ (Digital Modernism, 15).

Introduction  15 dissection, close readings generate—and are motivated by—their very own styles of attention and judgement. From this viewpoint, looking closer at close reading means looking at matters of expression as well as exegesis. Revealing this about close reading shouldn’t be surprising, for it’s a practice that remains inescapably affective, as I’ve hinted, and therefore temperamentally idiosyncratic, notwithstanding its pretensions to systematicity or its repu­ta­tion for stringency. Jean-Michel Rabaté recalls that when he first started teaching in the US academy, students encountering critical theory had generally less patience for ‘slow, careful, myopically respectful protocols of reading’, partly because it was ‘harder for them to take close reading as a technique of reading that we would have agreed upon from the beginning’ (114). Understanding close reading as a mode of writing liberates it from the distinct constrictions of viewing it as a single, ‘agreed’ technique to be mastered and redeployed. Indeed, if modernist studies’ geohistorical, multilingual, generic, and interdisciplinary expansions in recent decades tell us anything about the condition of close reading it is that the method’s capacity to transfer across representational modes and cultural contexts means that it no longer revolves—if it ever really did—around a narrowly policed and unquestioned set of protocols. Close reading might be more accurately entertained as a complex of ambitions and passions rather than as a definitive, consistent, systematized pro­ced­ure. Ever in motion, discernible perhaps only through its dispositional proliferations, close reading finds it visual correlative in the ‘Eternal Movement’ of Idris Khan’s captivating 2011 work that you encounter on the cover of this book. Inspired by the perpetual motion of Hajj and the pilgrims’ repeated walk between the Safa and Marwah hills near Mecca, the study is for a mural commissioned by Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and it captures the unceasing dance of close reading’s diversification just as the microscopic references that constitute its verbal starburst elicit intensive close viewing. With its tactics and tonalities of attention following trajectories akin to Khan’s radiating, densely dispersing lines, close reading has become all the more difficult to pin down, its signature operations trickier to circumscribe than the New Critical heritage of methodical explication would imply. Jonathan Culler is therefore right to point out that the ‘fact that we have difficulty saying what close reading is opposed to suggests that it has served as a slogan more than as a name for a particular definable practice’.29 Yet by virtue of its definitional diffusion, close reading harbours the resources of its own 29  Jonathan Culler, ‘The Closeness of Close Reading’, ADE Bulletin, 149 (2010), 20.

16  David james continuous—and productive—reinvention: precisely as an inconstant synergy of approaches that remain unanchored to predictable ideological stances, close reading might well be able to withstand the pieties of methodological one-upmanship, while surpassing what Stephen Best has called ‘the immodest and melodramatic claims of agonistic critique’.30 All of which doesn’t make it any easier, of course, to discern the prospects for close reading in modernist studies, and this collection makes no attempt to supply a de­cisive prognosis. Rather, it operates in the belief that because ‘we cannot just take close reading for granted’, as Culler advises, ‘we should at least reflect on our assumptions and what we believe the practice is’.31 As Modernism and Close Reading sets that process of reflection in motion, its results are necessarily heterogeneous. This collection wasn’t conceived with the intention of gathering complementary attitudes or transculturally all-inclusive perspectives that would comprehensively sum-up close reading’s restive relation to the development of modernist studies over time. A conveniently harmonized compilation of essays that could compendiously audit what close reading has done and should now do was never a feasible goal. My hope instead is that this volume will provide a space for deliberation for any reader, in modernist studies or elsewhere, who doesn’t assume that close reading’s status is a closed book. Sharing this inclination, my contributors come at the topic from diverse angles, drawing on their own equally diverse specialisms. In so doing, they formulate notably different opinions about the stakes of close reading as it modulates between different objects and scales— and as it moves from classroom to research and back again. ‘Close reading’, observes Culler, ‘teaches an interest in the strangeness or distinctiveness of individual works and parts of works.’32 The importance of historicizing the permutations of that interest while also fathoming how modernist works actively model the labour of attention entailed by formal ‘strangeness and distinctiveness’ defines the twinned mission of this collection. At the very least, this venture takes one step toward revealing how central close reading’s myriad purposes remain to modernist studies’ unfolding era of striking transformation.

30  Stephen Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 61. 31  Jonathan Culler, ‘The Closeness of Close Reading’, 20, 21. 32  Ibid., 22.

1 Modernist Close Reading Max Saunders

Nearly a century after its emergence, close reading continues to face powerful challenges. Its original form of minute verbal analysis struggles for traction in the multi-media flood and landslip of Web 2.0. Its method has been challenged too, and from two distinct but compelling new perspectives: the digital humanities, treating texts en masse as ‘big data’, rather than as individual encounters; and the social sciences, providing detailed descriptive accounts of what happens in texts rather than reading for symptoms of hidden depths. This chapter will offer a new account of close reading’s development, and of its relation to modernism, so as to demonstrate how it has been misrecognized by such critiques. Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. Whatever else modernism involved, it advocated what we might call ‘close writing’: a minute attention to the words being used, the word choices being justified by the effects they produced. When  I.  A.  Richards distributed anonymized poems to his students and colleagues for them to analyse, and then analysed their responses in turn, he wrote up his findings in the book that effectively launched close reading as an academic practice and methodology, Practical Criticism (1929). It is an agilely interdisciplinary project, drawing on anthropological fieldwork and related forms of qualitative research in the social sciences; the psychological and neurological basis of Richards’s earlier book, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926); and above all, the theory of communication, informed by the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and the linguistic philosophy of the Vienna Circle, and drawing on the book Richards had written collaboratively with C.  K.  Ogden (of whom more soon), The Meaning of Meaning (1923). What Richards found in Practical Criticism—and what, as a Fellow in English at a Cambridge college he already knew to look for—was that Britain’s educational elite mostly consisted of very poor readers of poetry. So, he set out to Max Saunders, Modernist Close Reading In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Max Saunders. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0002

20  Max saunders classify their representative ‘errors’, in the hope of contributing to an improvement in the teaching of literature. This chapter investigates two kinds of context for the attention to close reading exemplified by Richards, sometimes separate, sometimes intertwined. One, already touched on, and which will provide the second part of the chapter, is the network of writers and thinkers around Richards—especially Ogden, who has a much more significant role in the story than is generally recognized. The other, with which we begin, is modernism.

Modernist Close Reading It is with pre-war modernism that close writing, together with close reading, can be seen to emerge. Or arguably even with pre-modernism. Such dividing up of historical periods and literary movements always has something arbitrary about it. So let us be arbitrary, and begin our story at what seemed to most to be the beginning of the twentieth century. Not to Thomas Hardy, though, who wrote one of his best, most sombre and macabre poems, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, dated 1899 in the manuscript and 1900 in the published versions, to mark what earlier versions of the title called ‘The Century’s End’, or even ‘By the Century’s Deathbed, 1900’.1 The narrator leans on a gate and surveys the bleak winter scene: The tangled bine-stems scored the sky       Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh       Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be       The Century’s corpse outleant[.]

Something has clearly gone terribly wrong here, beyond the demoralization resulting from the Boer War’s blow to British imperial pride. Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge celebrated a pantheistic sense of spiritual unity between the human and the natural world. Ruskin’s category of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ denoted a similar identification between human feeling and nature; but expressed a greater anxiety than the Romantics tended to feel about it (except when they were depressed).2 The relationship is 1  Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan 1976), 150. 2  John Ruskin, ‘Of the Pathetic Fallacy’, Modern Painters, vol. III, Part IV: Of Many Things (London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1856), 157–72.

Modernist close reading  21 more problematic; not a unity or sympathy between humans and the planet but a projecting of human feelings onto the inanimate: a category error, and one in which excessive emotion in the observer distorts perception of the world. Though Ruskin introduced the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in Modern Painters, he is discussing how poetry should be written: criticizing the subjectivism of the late eighteenth-century Romantics as opposed to Tennyson, who is cited as a more successful anthropomorphizer. That he did so in 1856 shows how the sense of a problem in poetic language had a longer history, reaching back at least to mid-nineteenth-century anxieties about agnosticism, and man’s place in a godless universe, and arguably back to Romanticism itself. Three years later, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made the world seem a more men­ acing place. For Hardy’s narrator the landscape is experienced in human terms, but disturbingly, in terms of a dead, inanimate, human. This version is deeply paradoxical. It is a complete identification of the land and a person, but the person is dead. One can read this in at least two ways. First, as a horror version of Romantic pantheism. The wintry barrenness makes the narrator feel like death (he is identifying with the world, but with the landscape as corpse). Alternatively, what has expired is the possibility of anthropomorphism al­together. The winter fields, showing no signs of animation, offer no ground for fellow feeling, for identification with the living. Either way, suddenly the mood changes, as a voice is heard: An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,       In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul       Upon the growing gloom.

The aged thrush is a relic of those Romantic songbirds—nightingale, skylark— whose musical outpourings make them the types of the Romantic poet, as well as his inspiration, and redemption from dejection. But in flinging his soul upon the growing gloom, is he expressing it?—striking a rapport between sentience and environment—or is he merely projecting his spirit onto a vacancy?—and thus performing the pathetic fallacy (or, the verb ‘fling’ seems to suggest, throwing his soul away). Hardy leaves the poem suspended on a profoundly agnostic ambiguity on this point: So little cause for carolings       Of such ecstatic sound

22  Max saunders Was written on terrestrial things       Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through       His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew       And I was unaware.

He could think the bird had grounds for hope; but did he think it? And if he did, does he still think it? And if he thought it, how should we read that final line? The past tense of ‘I was unaware’ suggests a contrast with the present: I was unaware, but am now aware. Yet the speaker may be aware of the possibility of the bird having reason to sing; but is he aware of the reason? Either way, the last quatrain is all subordinated to the conditional ‘I could think’; which is in turn subordinated to the idea that there was so little visible evidence of anything to feel hopeful about that he could only imagine the bird must know something he did not, and possibly still does not. Here too the possible readings bifurcate. The creation of such beautiful music seems inconceivable without the hope of future improvement. If the bird seems to have grounds for hope, whereas the spectator does not, is the thrush a deluded optimist or the poet a perverse pessimist? For the spectator to say he was ‘unaware’ of the hope is odd, since he at least knows that Spring will follow Winter, which the thrush presumably does not. Unawareness— lack of consciousness—is normally understood to be the nature of Nature, as distinct from the human. Anthropomorphism presses in on the poem here too. Is the spectator reading the thrush as part of that natural world, as so in tune with its environment in a way the spectator can’t imagine feeling? Or is the poet reading the bird as a figure for the artist: a self-consciousness set against the inanimate scene, whose creativity seems at odds with a universe showing no sign of an afterlife? And again (the nested bifurcations producing a fractal complexity), if the thrush is a figure for the poet, is it a figure for the kind of poet he is not (finding grounds for happiness in the natural world), or for the kind he feels he should be (acting as if there were such grounds, even if he isn’t aware of them)? These are in part theological questions, as the capitalization of ‘Hope’, and its qualification with the adjective ‘blessed’ suggest. (Though Hardy characteristically manages to make even that sound like an oath of despair, especially in its echo of ‘blast’ in the previous stanza.) But they are also literary questions; questions of how to read what is ‘written on terrestrial things’—that is, to read the world as if it were writing; and questions of how to write about the world.

Modernist close reading  23 That is why I focus on this magnificent lyric so closely here, because of its close reading of what it means to be a lyric. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky       Like strings of broken lyres,

A bine is the flexible stem of a vine, especially the hop vines used in brewing beer. For your traditional anthropomorphist, these might be young shoots promising next season’s growth, and future visionary intoxication. But when Hardy sees these vines dark against the sky, he sees them as like a broken musical instrument. If they ‘score’ the sky in the sense of looking like musical notation scrawled across it, it’s a score that can no longer be played but only ‘scored’ in the sense of scratched into the sky. They resemble not just any broken musical instrument but the lyre. The instrument of Apollo, the god of Art and music; and the word from which we get ‘lyric’ poetry, which was originally accompanied by the lyre: poetry as song. The point is that for Hardy, the classical lyre is broken. And if the thrush can make beautiful music, mankind can’t, because it too has died, or nearly, along with the century. And all mankind that haunted nigh               Had sought their household fires.

The marks of cultivation are signs that people live nearby. But they are only there in spirit. The inhospitable weather turns them into their own ghosts. Another of Hardy’s most famous poems, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, uses an even more surreal image of lyres in its second stanza: Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

In many ways this is very different. Instead of looking back to former certainties and vitalities, it is focused on the present, the Titanic as symbol of technological progress and supposed mastery of the elements. But one of the many strange things about this strange poem is the incongruity between the modern theme and the archaic language: calling the engine rooms ‘pyres’, and using words like ‘salamandrine’ and ‘thrid’. The idea here is that the currents

24  Max saunders going through the boiler rooms or across the funnels are like threads going across a sounding box, and this gives the wrecked ship a phantasmal resemblance to a musical instrument, played by the ebb and flow of the tides. Here too is the vestige of a Romantic trope: Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’ or Aeolian lute, the musical instrument placed in a window for the wind to make its strings vibrate. But where the Romantic image attributes a transcendental intention to the way nature plays upon the poet’s imagination, the coldness of the currents, and the silence of the tidal rhythm, are deeply alienating. It is an eerie funeral music. The shipwreck has turned the engines into funeral ‘pyres’; there is no audience besides the dead to hear the ghost music of the tidal rhythms. Both of these poems present visions so macabre as to reveal an­thropo­ morph­ism under intolerable strain. The spiritual and philosophical crisis is also a crisis of representation, a crisis of poetic language. Our poetic language, Hardy suggests, is so bound up with an animistic or religious attitude to the world that it seems irreconcilable with the modern predicament of agnosticism, materialism, and industrialization. Even the pathetic fallacy can no longer console. The lyres are broken, and all the modern lyric poet can do is write elegies for their breaking. The modernist poets of the following three decades shared Hardy’s sense that the poetic language and conventions of the nineteenth century were moribund and had to be reinvented. That claim is too large to substantiate here, but covers T. S. Eliot’s view of the language of Swinburne and Rossetti as degenerate;3 and Ezra Pound’s abandonment of what he called ‘the stilted language that then passed for “good English” in the arthritic milieu that held control of the respected British critical circles’, from which he testified to being rescued by Ford Madox Ford, and his campaign for a ‘natural language’ for poetry.4 Ford used to say, in a paradox that was to become one of Pound’s slogans, that ‘verse must be at least as well written as prose if it is to be poetry’.5 Ford was increasingly calling himself an impressionist in the years before the war. But what he meant by impressionism was a determined fidelity to ­sub­ject­ive experience and precision in describing it; a Jamesian attention to ambiguity and nuance and confusion captured with verbal accuracy, rather than the fogs and indistinct outlines often associated with Impressionist painting: 3  See, for example, T. S. Eliot on Swinburne in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 14–19. 4  Ezra Pound, ‘Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford: Obit’, Selected Prose (London: Faber, 1973), 431–2. 5  Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford], Thus to Revisit (London: Chapman and Hall, 1921), 210. See Pound/ Ford, edited by Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 17, 53–4.

Modernist close reading  25 I know exactly how I get my effects, as far as those effects go. Then, if I am in truth an Impressionist, it must follow that a conscientious and exact account of how I myself work will be an account, from the inside, of how Impressionism is reached, produced, or gets its effects.

Poetry, for Ford, needed to aspire to the condition of prose to prevent it from lapsing into the kinds of thoughtlessness and imprecision he saw conventional Victorian poetics as susceptible to, the sound gaining primacy over the sense. He demonstrates this by becoming a close reader, as in an amusing critical vignette about W. B. Yeats: But certainly the thought that Mr. Yeats was somewhere about, probably leaning on a mantelpiece with his face to the ceiling, irritated me exceedingly. I didn’t like his confounded point of view. I hated and do still hate, people who poke about among legends and insist on the charms of remote islands. And all that I had read of Mr. Yeats’s work was The Countess Kathleen, which seemed to have to do with legend, and a poem which began, “I will arise and go now.” This always seemed to me to be particularly irritating. How, I used to ask myself, could that gentleman get to Innesfree, supposing he were then lying down, without rising? And why then should he state that he was going to arise? You will observe that this was a prose-impressionist irritation. The prose-impressionist, if he has to deal with a gentleman going out of a door in an ordinary way, does not say that the gentleman walked to the door, starting with his right foot, put his hand upon the handle, turned the handle, drew the door towards him, and stepped across the mat. No, the prose-impressionist treats the matter somewhat as follows: “Mr. Humphrey said he must be going. When the door closed upon him Inez threw herself into a chair and wept convulsively.” So, Innesfree being the centre of Mr. Yeats’s poem, and I being, presumably even at that early age, a prose-impressionist, should have preferred Mr. Yeats’s poem to have run: At Innesfree there is a public-house; They board you well for ten and six a week. The mutton is not good, but you can eat Their honey. I am going there to take A week or so of holiday to-morrow. There might have been in addition some details about the landscape and whether the fishing was good. That was what I wanted in a poem of those days; that is what I still want in a poem. And the Mr. Yeats of the ’nineties seemed to be

26  Max saunders always—when he wasn’t leaning against a mantelpiece—reclining by the side of some lake or other, and then arising and going to some other lake. He seemed, in short, to be self-conscious about his attitude.6

He ends the article by saying that over time he has ‘acquired a great respect for Mr Yeats. Outside my young friends he seems to me to be the one poet that matters in a world where only poets matter’. That probably has much to do with Yeats’s later, more direct, conversational and modern style, a development often attributed to the influence of Pound, who, as we have seen, had his poetics modernized by Ford. Close reading appears here too as the basis for diagnosing a failing poetic. It is by attending to the meanings of words that you can decide if they are effective, accurate, necessary. Though Ford pokes fun at Yeats’s ‘arise and go’ as unnecessarily verbose, there is also an affectation in the archaic ring of ‘arise’ (rather than, say, ‘get up’). It is hard to imagine Yeats telling Maud Gonne that he was going to ‘arise and go to the pub’. It has the ring of a poeticism, of someone striking an oracular or biblical pose, performing being a  poet rather than writing poetry, as Ford thought his aunt by marriage Christina Rossetti had done, unobtrusively. That is what he means about Yeats being ‘self-conscious about his attitude’. One striking feature of this passage is Ford’s rewriting of Yeats’s poem in the manner he advocates instead. That too is an agile critical act, carefully poised between parody of Yeats and self-parody of impressionist mundanity. He says it conveys what he wants ‘in a poem’, without exactly saying what he wants in that poem—which is of course entirely inconsequential except as a commentary (by contrast) on the Yeats. Close reading here is not just reading but writing, and not just the writing of prose commentary but the writing of heuristic verse examples. Not all close readers are as adept at pastiche or parody, or find them as convenient for making their points. But what such an example brings out is the creativity of close reading. It does not just ‘read off ’ from the poem meanings that are already pre-loaded into it but discovers or invents meanings as a result of the encounter with the poetry. Ford’s parody is not a translation of ‘The Lake Isle’; but this model of reading as recreation has much in common with the act of translation. Nowhere do the acts of close reading and translation come into such close and pro­duct­ive

6  Ford, ‘Literary Portraits—XXXIX. Mr W. B. Yeats and his New Poems’, Outlook, 33 (6 June 1914), 783–4. Reprinted in Ford, Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 163–7.

Modernist close reading  27 exchange as in the work of the most creative of modernist translators, Ezra Pound. In his 1915 volume Cathay, the recast translations from classic Chinese poets are models of understatement and concision. ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance’, for example, is a four-line free-verse vignette based on an original by Li T’ai Po, in which the note of grievance is not sounded beyond the title. The speaker comments on the stairs being covered in dew: ‘It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings.’ She closes the curtain, and regards the moon. Pound’s note is a masterpiece of close reading: NOTE. – Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a ­ser­vant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.7

Despite its equally exemplary concision the note (at 65 words) is nearly twice the length of the translation (at 35 words, or 39 including the title). It reads with a quasi-forensic logic, rigorously pursuing the argument of the poem— or rather its two arguments: what the speaker says, and what is said by what she doesn’t say. It is a superb demonstration of what Pound would call, in the title of a 1929 essay, ‘How to Read’.8 Some readers might impute a defensiveness in telling readers how to read his translation rather than leaving it to their imaginations. But he clearly feels an act of cultural mediation is warranted given the unfamiliarity of the Chinese tradition to most Western ­readers. Also, full though his analysis is, he leaves some details for us to dwell on. That her stockings get soaked before she comments, suggests she was so expectant as not to have noticed before. That she is wearing only gauze stockings indicates that she is not dressed to go out, so is probably waiting to let her lover in. Close reading, then, and writing about it, and the ‘close writing’ that was informed by thinking about close reading, was happening in works by modernist writers before (and during) the First World War, and before it was elaborated into a methodology in the context of academic criticism at the end of the 1920s. (Close reading, that is, in something approximating to the 7  Ezra Pound, Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 134. 8  Pound, ‘How to Read, or Why’. New York Herald Tribune Books 5/17 (13 January 1929): 1, 6; 5/18 (20 January 1929): 5–6; 5/19 (27 January 1929): 5–6; reprinted in book form as How to Read (1931); included in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954).

28  Max saunders secular form subsequently adopted in literary education. It had happened much earlier is scriptural exegesis; and one can trace precursors to its modern version in figures such as Ruskin, applying a quasi-scriptural exegetical force to secular concepts, and arguing that ‘you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by ­syl­lable—nay, letter by letter’9.) It was central to the modernist campaign to find new forms and techniques, and a new precision of language. Modernists continued to advocate it and perform it during and after the war. To track the sequel of Ford’s example, he practises numerous versions of close reading. In  one of his two idiosyncratic books of wartime ‘propaganda’, Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915), he devotes a substantial epilogue, ‘Félicité’, to an extended consideration of how to translate the first sentence of Flaubert’s short story ‘Un Coeur Simple’. In 1924 he launched and edited the transatlantic review in Paris, subjecting the manuscripts of a new generation of discoveries such as Hemingway and Jean Rhys to the kind of editorial close reading with which he had advised the writers he had published in his pre-war English Review, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis alongside Pound. Also in 1924 he published his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, recounting their collaborative work on two novels and a novella before the war, and their continual discussions on techniques (a digest of which he includes as Part III: ‘It is Above All to Make You See’). Their impressionism was a method for letting the reader visualize the perceptions and feelings of the characters. Ford’s criticism seeks to make us see how he made us see. His criticism teems with examples, but one of the most memorable and piercing is his reminiscence of reading Lawrence’s story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ for the first time, when it was submitted to him for the English Review in 1909. (The recollection is from 1936, but evokes the standards of intelligence and precision the Review was designed to bring to Edwardian London.) “The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston,” and at once you know that this fellow with the power of observation is going to write of whatever he writes about from the inside. The “Number 4” shows that. He will be the sort of fellow who knows that for the sort of people who work about engines, engines have a sort of individuality. He had to give the engine the personality of a number. . . . “With seven full wagons.” . . . The “seven” is good. The ordinary careless writer would say 9  Ruskin, ‘Of King’s Treasuries’, Sesame and Lilies, in Sesame and Lilies; The Two Paths; The King of the Golden River, ed. John Bryson (London: Everyman, 1970), 11.

Modernist close reading  29 “some small wagons.” This man knows what he wants. He sees the scene of his story exactly. He has an authoritative mind. “It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed.” . . . Good writing; slightly, but not too arresting. . . . “But the colt that it startled from among the gorse . . . outdistanced it at a canter.” Good again. This fellow does not “state.” He doesn't say: “It was coming slowly,” or—what would have been a little better—“at seven miles an hour.” Because even “seven miles an hour” means nothing definite for the untrained mind. It might mean something for a trainer of pedestrian racers. The imaginative writer writes for all humanity; he does not limit his desired readers to specialists. . . . But anyone knows that an engine that makes a great deal of noise and yet cannot overtake a colt at a canter must be a ludicrously ineffective machine. We know then that this fellow knows his job. “The gorse still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon.” . . . Good too, distinctly good. This is the just-sufficient observation of Nature that gives you, in a single phrase, landscape, time of day, weather, season. It is a raw afternoon in autumn in a rather accented countryside. The engine would not come round a bend if there were not some obstacle to a straight course—a watercourse, a chain of hills. Hills, probably, because gorse grows on dry, broken-up waste country. They won’t also be mountains or anything spectacular or the writer would have mentioned them.10

And so Ford said he put it in the basket for ‘accepted’ manuscripts on the strength of the first paragraph alone. ‘We know then that this fellow knows his job.’ After the First World War, that job suddenly seemed very different. Our almost final example of modern creative writers developing close reading methods is the poet-couple Robert Graves and Laura Riding. They produced a jet-stream of critical books and pamphlets about poetry in the years immediately following the war. In Poetic Unreason, published under Graves’s name alone, a strong and influential case is made for what is called (in Chapter IV) a ‘Defence of Poetic Analysis’. The ‘analytic spirit’, it says, is ‘rife among the reading public’ (78). Analysis leads to greater complexity, richness (82). But Graves also advocates a specific version of analysis: ‘the analytic interest developed by this scientific-industrial age’ needs to be addressed by contemporaries (83). So he prescribes a ‘new Poetry’ which would draw upon science 10  Ford Madox Ford, Mightier Than the Sword (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), 101–2.

30  Max saunders not just for theme but for method. That idea must have captured the attention of the young William Empson, who would draw on scientific method not only for his poetry but his paradigm-shifting criticism. This moment of wanting to subject poems to close analysis owes much to the experience of poets like Graves, Sassoon, and Owen encountering psychotherapeutic techniques as a result of their war neuroses. Poetic Unreason is  dedicated to the neurologist Henry Head, the collaborator of Graves’s ­wartime therapist W. H. R. Rivers, and literary amateur and friend of many ­writers. (Virginia Woolf was taken to him for a consultation, and he is said to have become a model for Sir William Bradshaw in Mrs Dalloway.11) Graves explains that: though I have been at pains to respect the particulars of History, the strength of my position lies rather in a synthesis suggested between modern analytic psychology and the reading of poetry ‘emotionally’, if you like, and ‘for its own sake’.12

What he draws upon from psychology is essentially a ‘conflict’ model of personality and of poetry. Poetic geniuses are those whose ‘lives symbolize and include the principal conflicts of the period in which they lived, and the solution or most favourable attitude towards these conflicts which has been found hitherto, occurs in the works of these individuals’ (242–3). He cites Rivers’s argument that poetry is produced in similar ways to dreams (99–100). But he isn’t advocating that the poet or reader should remain unconscious of the wishes and repressions that shape them. He is scathing about the argument that poetry should be appreciated as pure sound (94–5), as Empson would be in turn. He draws his method too from psychoanalysis: to use verbal analysis to identify the unconscious conflicts. And he gives an excellent description of the unconscious dimension of composition: As I write this sentence or any other I have no exact foreknowledge of its structure or sense; I know that I am writing and that is all, but so soon as the sentence or paragraph comes to an end I read it through and discover that the sense and the structure is of a certain kind, that its implications are this or that and in its relation to the rest of the argument it can be either approved or disapproved. This is the stage of knowledge.  (151) 11  See for example Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press—CUP Archive, 1995), 143. 12  Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925) ‘Author’s Note’; Unpaginated.

Modernist close reading  31 That practice of moving from unforeseen utterance or encounter to analysis of the relation of its parts to the whole, issuing in knowledge, might be termed practical self-criticism. In 1927 Graves and Riding published A Survey of Modernist Poetry. The third chapter, ‘William Shakespeare and e. e. cummings: A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling’, offers a detailed reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet 129, arguing that modern editors have repunctuated the text so as to curtail its complex ambiguities. Their point is that the disconcerting typographic idio­syn­crasy of a modernist like cummings is simply a visual expression of the kind of openness to multiple meanings characteristic of Shakespeare. It is comparable to Eliot’s exhortations through the 1920s that the modern poet should reconnect with the difficulty of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. What Graves and Riding offer, though, which Eliot does not, is a method of reading, teasing out the ambiguities enabled by the light punctuation of the seventeenth-century text with a rigour to match Ford’s attempt to capture the nuances of Flaubert’s prose. The line ‘Had, having, and in quest, to have extreame’, for example, is analysed to yield five different possible meanings, which are then analysed further in turn. ‘All these and even more readings of the line are possible and legitimate’, say Graves and Riding, ‘and each reading could in turn be made specially to explain why the taker is made mad or how lust is to have extreme or why it is both a bliss and very wo’.13 They are ostensibly rebuking readers too lazy to make the effort to understand Shakespeare properly or cummings at all. But in the process they also articulate a new theory of poetic meaning: All these alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously dynamic crossword puzzle which can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others. This intensified inbreeding of words continues through the rest of the poem.  (38)

Graves and Riding are thus certainly crucial figures in the emergence of the technique of close reading, and in contributing to its theorization. They have been seen as the chief precursor to Empson’s books, as Empson’s ac­know­ ledge­ment of the influence of their Shakespeare analysis indicated.14 Certainly, 13  Robert Graves and Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927), 35. 14  See Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 307–16. Donald J. Childs, The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.  A.  Richards, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).

32  Max saunders Graves’s and Riding’s method of analysing ambiguity gave him what he needed. But, as the preceding readings are intended to show, that is only part of the story of close reading, which has a much longer and broader cultural history, which comes to a head at the turn of the century and is determined by early modernism. Graves wanted to understand the sources of creativity in the human mind, and the relation between conflict and creativity. His therapy with Rivers helped him see how he could write about the war. His memoir Goodbye to All That was to follow later in the decade. Empson, also a scintillating poet, was interested in these things too. But he also wanted a more capacious and more objective theory of poetic language. The kind of unconscious conflict Graves sees as foundational for all poetry describes only one of Empson’s seven types of ambiguity. Graves took up the language of psych­ ology, with its claim to scientific status. But he was interested in it as a method for creating poetry, rather than for criticizing it, gaining knowledge about it. Psychology was the other chief driving force of Practical Criticism, particularly in Cambridge, where the scientific discoveries of men like Rutherford, Sherrington, and Adrian, and the social science theories of men like Keynes, and the philosophical rigour of Wittgenstein, had a prestige which aspiring critics sought to emulate. Richards and Empson, as I shall demonstrate in the remainder of this chapter, moved in an intellectual world in which the quest for a scientific basis for the humanities was urgent and exhilarating.

‘Psyche’ Ogden In between Poetic Unreason and A Survey of Modernist Poetry Graves had written a pamphlet, Another Future of Poetry, published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in 1926. This was a rejoinder to R.  C.  Trevelyan’s thesis, in Thamyris, or Is There a Future for Poetry? (1925), that poetry was endangered as it lost contact with its roots in song in favour of modernist typographical effects—the typographical effects Graves and Riding would elaborate in the comparison between cummings and Shakespeare in the Survey. Thamyris was a lacklustre contribution to an ingenious and generally sparkling book series, In Seven Types of Ambiguity Empson acknowledged Graves alone—probably because he could see the continuity between Poetic Unreason and the Survey, and therefore assumed it was Graves who had produced the Shakespeare analysis. This got him into a row with Riding. See Mark Jacobs, ‘Contemporary Misogyny: Laura Riding, William Empson and the Critics – A Survey of Mis-History’, English, 64.246 (1 September 2015), 222–40, who argues that the analysis of Sonnet 129 was in fact written by Riding alone—this despite the assertion published at the head of the volume that ‘This book represents a word-by-word collaboration, except for the last chapter’.

Modernist close reading  33 To-Day and To-Morrow, whose contributors predicted the future of a wide range of disciplines and practices.15 Literary writers were well represented— Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, André Maurois and Hugh MacDiarmid wrote for it, as did a wide range of intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and J. B. S. Haldane. Graves was soon recruited to write for the series rather than against it, and produced two entertaining volumes: Lars Porsena; or, the Future of Swearing and Improper Language (1927); and Mrs Fisher or the Future of Humour (1928). While these may sound remote from close reading, both are concerned with language, and what a reader needs to know about context to understand the meaning of written utterances. Lars Porsena turns on the conceit that when the taboos on swearing relax enough to let it be written about explicitly, it will have become something so different that the ana­lysis will be unintelligible. To-Day and To-Morrow was edited by C. K. Ogden, and it is to his influential part in the development of modern close reading that we turn next. He was President of the avant-garde Heretics society in Cambridge, to which scientists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, philosophers such as Russell and Wittgenstein, and literary writers including Shaw, Forster, Frank Harris, T.  S.  Eliot, Rebecca West, Edith Sitwell, and Woolf all came to give talks. Ogden edited the journal Psyche, which had started out with an emphasis on psychical research but under Ogden became more concerned with psych­ ology. He edited four other book series, the most important of which was the gigantic International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. Its first volume was Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which Ogden helped translate. Ogden was a polymath with wide enough knowledge to be able to review the Encyclopaedia Britannica.16 His breadth of interests made him a brilliant editor. But three main currents, flowing into each other, are evident in his projects: psychology; philosophy, especially the philosophy of language; and language itself. This combination, and his close friendship with I. A. Richards, were foundational for the development of the version of close reading that developed in Cambridge as ‘Practical Criticism’. The ‘Practical’ in the title of Richards’s seminal Practical Criticism (1929), signals clearly, when read in this context, that the book will apply the scientific method to a field dominated by belles lettres and connoisseurship. It will 15  The series was published in London by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., and in New York by E.  P.  Dutton from 1923–31. It eventually ran to 110 volumes. See Max Saunders, Imagined Futures (Oxford University Press, 2019). 16  Ogden’s review is reprinted in C.  K.  Ogden: A Collective Memoir, ed. P.  Sargant Florence and J. R. L. Anderson (London: Elek Pemberton, 1977), 192–212.

34  Max saunders not only be of practical use—by identifying what goes wrong when readers try to analyse poetic language—but it will proceed by experiment: what science students do in their ‘practicals’. Richards sought to taxonomize literary responses according to what he saw as ‘Four Kinds of Meaning’, namely Sense, Feeling, Tone, and Intention.17 The debt to his semantic work with Ogden is clear. Practical Criticism assumes that a poem is a communicative act; that meaning is intelligible and essentially unproblematic; but that it often gets garbled in the transmission; distorted by ‘noise’, such as what Richards terms ‘stock responses’ or ‘mnemonic irrelevance’ (when something in a poem reminds the reader of a personal experience which has nothing to do with the meaning of the poem). As Richards was working on Practical Criticism, Ogden was attempting something comparable with the English language. Like many in the period, he believed better international communication was the best hope of preventing future wars. He had edited the Cambridge Magazine during the First World War, publishing a digest of news from the foreign press, including the German: a brave act which led to his bookshop being vandalized. In the late 1920s he focused increasingly on the development and advocacy of BASIC English—a drastic reduction of the language to a core vocabulary of just 850 words, for use as an international auxiliary language. BASIC became a serious contender. It was recognized and supported by Churchill towards the end of the Second World War. But the ensuing postcolonial period was unpropitious for such a scheme. Ogden worked tirelessly for it, and had published several books on it in another series, Psyche Miniatures. The title of one—Debabelization— expresses what he hoped BASIC might achieve: an expression which captures both the redress of the incomprehension arising from different national languages, but also, within a single language, the attempt to clarify messages— very much what Richards was attempting for the reading of poems. Ogden’s projects are significant for Cambridge criticism on at least two further grounds. First, a number of its key texts were published in Ogden’s series. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) was, like The Meaning of Meaning, an early volume in the International Library, its grounding of the theory of literary responses in neurology another mode of reconciling linguistic phenomena with scientific method. His Mencius on the Mind: experiments in multiple definition was added in 1932. Three of his other books—Science and Poetry; Basic Rules of Reason; and Basic in Teaching, East and West—appeared as Psyche Miniatures in 1926, 1933, and 1935. Both series included several further titles on literature and language, and related topics, several of which 17 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, 1929), 179–82.

Modernist close reading  35 became influential in different ways. The International Library acquired works such as: Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If ’ (1924) T.  E.  Hulme, Speculations: essays on humanism and the philosophy of art, edited by Herbert Read (1924) June Etta Downey, Creative Imagination: Studies in the psychology of literature (1929) Sir Richard Paget, Human Speech: Some observations, experiments, and conclusions as to the nature, origin, purpose, and possible improvement of human speech (1930) Karl Britton, Communication: A philosophical study of language (1939) Ogden’s and Richards’s aspiration that traditionally humanistic disciplines like philosophy, the study of language and literature could be reconceived in terms of scientific method was developing in parallel with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Ogden published Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language (1937) in the International Library; the Psyche Miniatures included his Philosophy and Logical Syntax (1935) as well as International Picture Language: The first rules of Isotype (1936) by Otto Neurath, another member of the Circle, whose logical graphic system, ‘Isotype’, sought to do for visual design what BASIC English was attempting for language. Other Psyche Miniatures especially relevant to the development of literary studies are: Bronisław Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926) Leonora Lockhart, Word Economy. A study in applied linguistics (1931) John Wisdom, Interpretation and Analysis, in relation to Bentham’s theory of definition (1931) Herbert  N.  Shenton, Edward Sapir, and Otto Jespersen, International Communication: a symposium on the language problem (1931) Ogden, Opposition: A linguistic and psychological analysis (1932) A. P. Rossiter, Statement and Suggestion: The Basic English system as an instrument for reading verse (1935) These were among the books that the Cambridge critics were reading (and, in the cases of Richards and Rossiter, writing). But they weren’t reading only the  volumes on language and literature; and they weren’t only reading them. When Ogden commissioned two Psyche Miniatures by the biologist

36  Max saunders J.  B.  S.  Haldane—whose brilliant Daedalus had launched the To-Day and To-Morrow series—he got William Empson to convert them into BASIC in 1935, one of them under the title that could stand for the entire cluster of Ogden’s projects and Cambridge English: The Outlook of Science.18 Ogden’s eccentricities have tended to marginalize him in literary and cultural history. But his work on psychology, philosophy, language and its uses and misuses, and semantics, are central to the development of Cambridge criticism. When Ford went to visit his old friend Ezra Pound in Rapallo in 1932, Pound interviewed him for the local newspaper, asking him ‘What are the most important qualities in a prose writer?’ Ford’s mock-exasperated answer—‘Oh Hell! Say philosophical grounding, a knowledge of words’ roots, of the meaning of words’—accords with the view of Ogden and Richards, and of modernist writers such as Pound and Eliot too, that literary language had  become debased, that communication was failing, that meaning was problematic.19 That was the problem that close reading, in its initial Cambridge incarnation, was intended to solve. In its most brilliant elaborations—from Empson’s Seven Types to the work of Christopher Ricks, and in particular his and Jim McCue’s magnificent annotated critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s poetry—it has led somewhere that was both the same place and also somewhere rather different. It is clarification of a sort, but not simplification. The more thorough and precise the analysis, the more complex the communicative act was shown to be than we normally thought. Some have thought Empsonian close verbal analysis either over-complicated, or an interference in enjoyment, further evidence of how ‘We murder to dissect’.20 Such objections were unlikely to be quelled by Graves’s and Riding’s image of ‘a furiously dynamic crossword puzzle’. For its adherents, though, it constituted a compelling case for the intellectual seriousness of poetry, making it seem suddenly more grown up and endlessly fascinating.

18  The volume was a selection from two of Haldane’s essay collections: Possible Worlds (1927) and The Inequality of Man (1932). Science and Well-Being (1935) was the other Haldane Psyche Miniature. 19 ‘Madox Ford at Rapallo’, in Pound’s Pavannes and Divagations (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1958), 153–5. See Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2 vols, vol. 2, 428–9. 20  Bonamy Dobrée, for example, in his Clark Lectures for 1952–53, wrote that ‘We have been urged to investigate the recondite significance of imagery and symbol, of paradox and ambiguity, of irony and wit, and to embark on the treacherous oceans of the philosophy of language’; and worried that in becoming so specialized, criticism had brought poetry not into the wide halls of judgement but into the academic laboratory? The Broken Cistern (London: Cohen and West, 1954). See Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Paul de Man’s Proverbs of Hell’, London Review of Books, 6:5 (15 March 1984), 8–10.

Modernist close reading  37

The Afterlives of Close Reading Once close reading became the critical orthodoxy, especially in its more ­doctrinaire form in the American New Criticism of the 1950s and 1960s, it in­ev­it­ably provoked resistance from successive waves of theorists. Marxists saw it as fetishizing individual works isolated from their socio-economic contexts. Where for them it seemed to bracket off considerations of class, for feminist and postcolonial critics the decontextualization of writing seemed to erase considerations of gender or race, and embodied liberal individualism’s fantasy of the autonomous, atomistic subject. Thus for them, as for structuralists like Roland Barthes, it perpetuated hierarchies of authority. For New Historicists it was a work’s embeddedness in a society’s systems of signification that gave it meaning. Book historians argued for the need to understand texts in relation to the sociological conditions of their composition, publication, and reception. And so on. Close reading needn’t detach texts from their authors, as our modernist precursors have demonstrated. Getting volunteers to comment on unidentified poems proved a useful research methodology for Richards, revealing how the processes of interpretation worked (or didn’t) precisely when the supporting cues of author, date, and gender were bracketed off. But it was rapidly coopted as a teaching method. Generations of children have been schooled to catalogue alliteration and count metrical feet in the hope that it will provide a solid foundation on which to base an interpretation. Generations of students have been taught ‘Prac. Crit.’, preparing for exam­in­ations to test their close reading skills. This added a further dimension of puzzle-solving to the exercise, as I remember all too vividly: the puzzle of the exercise superimposed on the puzzle that was the poem. Was that Renaissance-sounding word a marker that this was a Renaissance poem? Or was it a modernist allusion to an earlier period? Or a parody? Or a pastiche? Such questions show the limits of the attempt to understand anonymized, decontextualized, and dehistoricized texts. Notwithstanding, the method had great advantages, less as a model of how one ought always to read than as a consciousness-raising exercise in how we normally do read. Bracketing off information about the author makes us aware of the assumptions guiding our reading when we have that information. Stop reading that lyric as a typical piece by Hardy, and read it closely, and you are likely to notice more alertly how it works. Which might change your view of Hardy. What used sometimes to be regarded the awkwardness of an autodidact appears as subtle, complex innovation, making a haunting new music out of a poetic tradition that had

38  Max saunders given up the ghost. That is the real justification of close reading. It shortcircuits lazy habits and assumptions that actually stop us seeing the work in front of us, and allows a glimpse of what is distinctive about it, with a freshness as if it had just been written. By way of a conclusion, let us turn to two further schools of critique of close reading which have commanded considerable assent more recently. At the end of the twentieth century, poststructuralists attacked the New Criticism as fixated on the phantom of an ultimate and deliverable meaning. The representative figure here is Paul De Man in an influential essay, ‘The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism’. Empson always remained fiercely loyal to Richards, whose libertarian tutorial style had famously encouraged him to draft Seven Types while an undergraduate. He tended to present his own work as an extension of Richards’s. De Man took the opposite view, seeing Empson’s brilliant elaboration of semantic analysis as undermining Richards’s views: Any poetic sentence, even one devoid of artifice or baroque subtlety, must, by virtue of being poetic, constitute an infinite plurality of significations all melded into a single linguistic unit: that is the first type. But as Empson’s inquiry proceeds, there occurs a visible increase in what he calls the logical disorder of his examples until, in the seventh and last type of ambiguity, the form blows up under our very eyes. This occurs when the text implies not merely distinct significations but significations that, against the will of their author, are mutually exclusive. And here Empson’s advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent. For under the outward appearance of a simple list classifying random examples, chapter seven develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider: true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division. [. . .] The promise held out in Richards’s work, of a convergence between logical positivism and literary criticism, has failed to materialize. After the writings of an Empson, little is left of the scientific claims of formalist criticism. All of its basic assumptions have been put into question: the notions of communication, form, signifying experience, and objective precision.21

This is shrewd about Empson taking close reading much further than Richards. But it is wrong in seeing the method Empson and the New Critics developed as ‘exploding’ meaning, or revealing a reductio ad absurdum of the 21  Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd rev. ed., intro. by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1983), 237–8, 241.

Modernist close reading  39 method. At the very least, it is based on a wilfully selective reading of Empson. For example, in Some Versions of Pastoral, he performs the Graves/Riding trick with another Shakespeare sonnet, this time Sonnet 94. Invoking the first part of his undergraduate study as a mathematician, he works out that, selecting a particular combination of key ambiguous terms enables 4096 possible permutations of meaning—not an infinite number, certainly, but too vast for readers (or indeed writers) to keep in their minds while engaging with the poem. But Empson’s point is precisely not that such proliferation defeats the critic but that it forces interpretative choices: ‘the niggler is routed here; one has honestly to consider what seems important’.22 De Man discusses Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, but says ‘A third, and somewhat more technical, work is outside the scope of our study’.23 This is The Structure of Complex Words, with its elaborate analyses of the multiple significations of individual terms such as ‘all’, ‘wit’, or ‘fool’. In fact this book follows on logically from the earlier two. Empson had defined pastoral as a putting of the complex into the simple, a formula that describes the effects all these books analyse. The Structure of Complex Words simply focuses on the lexical rather than the syntactic or generic aspects. He doesn’t regard semantic multi­ pli­city as undermining the hope of logical analysis; on the contrary, he remains committed to understanding the complexity of literary language in order to interpret it better. He remained a rationalist to the end, even in the superb poem that De Man could have quoted to illustrate a glimpse of the despair of language being able to express being: Let it Go It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.               The more things happen to you the more you can’t                             Tell or remember even what they were. The contradictions cover such a range.                The talk would talk and go so far aslant.                             You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.24

If this recognizes that close reading can lead to an obsessional analytic urge that may be, or cause, a kind of madness, it is also clear in resisting the

22 Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935), 89. 23  De Man, Blindness and Insight, 235n10. 24  The Complete Poems of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 99.

40  Max saunders ir­ration­al while also finding a way to wonder at mystery and unknowing. Empson’s best readings, like his best poems, are open to a sense of awe at the universe and the human. They don’t confuse language with the real; but they know that we have to use language, and know how to use it, to be able to understand anything. They take verbal analysis further than it had ever gone. But they know when to stop. Empson’s answer to De Man, given avant la lettre, is that: ‘we could not use language as we do . . . unless we were always floating in a general willingness to make sense of it’.25 It seemed common sense to Empson that making sense is what we ought to do. But with the advent of structuralism, the practice of interpretation itself was challenged. Susan Sontag published her famous collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays in 1966. Interpretation had come to seem like an industrial process, refusing to let works be themselves, but making them over in the critical fashions of the day. De Man’s scepticism builds on structuralism’s attempt to shift criticism from assigning meanings to understanding how meaning is constructed. But he, following Derrida, takes the argument further, deconstructing the very concept of meaning itself. These challenges to interpretation have in turn shaped the pair of critiques of close reading that has been gaining prominence in the twenty-first century. The first, termed ‘distant reading’ by its chief advocate, Franco Moretti, emerges out of digital humanities. Moretti argues that the digitization of a vast corpus of texts offers new perspectives on literary works. A database of thousands of novels holds much more information than the mind of an individual reader can ever encompass. So if you really want to know what is new, original, or unusual, or influential, ask a computer. Distant reading stands back from the detail of individual works, seeking to map the contours of texts en masse; to understand genres, periods, trends. The individual reader gives way to the ‘humanities lab’, researchers in literary studies collaborating with software analysts to design databases to answer specific ‘queries’. Literature becomes data, significant for the ways it can be tagged.26 Such a method can answer certain questions more accurately than lone researchers. It could tell you who used free indirect style before Jane Austen; or how many poems were written about the sinking of the Titanic. Its ­verdict on whether or not an anonymous text is by Shakespeare will be more statistically-grounded than the opinion of a Shakespeare expert. It is less help in the question of why we should care about such answers. 25 Empson, Milton’s God (London: 1961), 28. 26  Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).

Modernist close reading  41 The second critique shares a sense of detachment. But in ‘surface reading’, as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have termed it, what is prized is detachment from analysis and (again) interpretation rather than from individual works. In the title phrase of a seminal essay by another of its leading advocates, Heather Love, surface reading is ‘Close but not Deep’. These critics argue that the dominant version of close reading has been ‘a specific type that took meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter’; a type which ‘went by the name of “symptomatic reading” ’:27 The notion underlying all forms of symptomatic reading, that the most ­significant truths are not immediately apprehensible and may be veiled or invisible, has a very long history. Umberto Eco traces it back to the Gnostics in the second century CE, who, in contrast to Greek philosophers who defined reason as noncontradiction, posited truth as secret, deep, and mysterious, and language as inadequate to meaning.28

The belief that texts require interpretation for their meanings to be apprehended draws on a much broader tradition of biblical hermeneutics, one which can be seen as prefiguring the poststructuralist scepticism about meaning.29 Symptomatic reading can itself take different forms, according to what kind of condition the symptoms are supposed to be symptoms of— whether ideological, moral, or psychological: the three versions yoked together by Paul Ricoeur under the rubric ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’, and associated respectively with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.30 But it is specifically the psychoanalytic form that most critics of close reading assume to be its ground: the uncovering of conflicts or repressions that would enable a reading of the text or its author in terms of depth psychology. Certainly, there is psychoanalytic criticism that reads closely. But it is one kind of misprision of Practical Criticism to see it as always and only working in that mode. What surface reading offers as an antidote to symptomatic reading is what Love calls ‘the Descriptive Turn’: I outline an approach to literary texts that derives not from hermeneutics but from a different tradition. The encounter between literary studies and 27 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108.1 (Fall 2009), 2. 28 Ibid., 4. 29  Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Harvard University Press, 1979). 30  Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008), 32.

42  Max saunders sociology that I stage here does not rely on a complete renunciation of the text (to focus, for instance, on books as objects or commodities). Instead, I play out the possibilities for a method of textual analysis that would take its cue from observation-based social sciences including ethology, kinesics, ethnomethodology, and microsociology. These fields have developed practices of close attention, but, because they rely on description rather than interpretation, they do not engage the metaphysical and humanist concerns of hermeneutics. Through studying such models, I suggest we can develop modes of reading that are close but not deep.31

There seem to me to be two related problems with this, not as a meth­od­ology— Love’s essay demonstrates how in the hands of an observant reader, the surface details of a text can be made to signify—but as a theory of criticism, and as a critique of symptomatic reading. As a theory of criticism, it ignores how those observation-based social sciences do not stop at observations but work through them to analytic conclusions. If they did not, the observations would be literally insignificant, meaningless. So, in a literary work, how does it help us to observe that a word is repeated, or that a poem uses a particular rhyme structure, unless it contributes something to the overall sense (we try to make) of it? As a critique of New Critical close reading as symptomatic reading it seems also wide of the mark. One of the foundational essays of the American school was ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, written by W. K. Wimsatt in collaboration with the philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley. This was an argument against moving from the text to claims about what it ‘really’ meant which were grounded elsewhere—i.e. in the author’s mind, biography, or other texts which could be adduced in support, such as drafts, letters, or criticism.32 The only reliable evidence for what a writer meant in a poem was the poem itself. Any supplementary material is likely to be partial or distorting. As such, it was an argument for focusing only on the text, and not trying to move away from, beyond, or through it to another kind of meaning. In the phrase often invoked when characterizing close reading, what is important in the text is said to inhere in the ‘words on the page’. The method was, thus, all along, an injunction not to be distracted from the verbal surface, or to forsake it for transcendental 31 Heather Love, ‘Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History, 41.2 (Spring 2010), 375. 32  W.  K.  Wimsatt, Jr, and Monroe  C.  Beardsley ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review, 54.3 (1946): 468–88. Reprinted in Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 3–18.

Modernist close reading  43 meaning claims. What the best practitioners of close verbal analysis do is first tease out the complexity of that verbal surface, and then try to make sense of it. The sense being made, that is, isn’t claimed to be hidden in some in­scrut­able depth but to be inscribed on the surface when you look closely enough. Colin Burrow has posited recently that the verbal analysis pioneered by Graves and Riding implies a model of the brain as like a mechanism.33 Certainly the Russian Formalist critics approached texts like mechanics, just as the Italian Futurists had gloried in the mechanization of man before the war. Man’s entrapment in the war machine, the encounter with mass-produced mechanized war, and the wartime developments in neurology and psychotherapy lent credence to the view of mind as mechanism. This was the stance of behaviourism too, psychoanalysis’ prestigious rival account of psych­ology between the wars. In Ogden’s Psyche Miniatures series Eugenio Rignano and Joseph Needham battled out the debate in volumes called Man not a Machine (1926) and Man a Machine (1927) respectively. Distant reading and surface reading could be described as behaviourist projects, eschewing empathy and interiority in favour of objective observation of externals. But they are behaviourist in a new way, the way of our digital reality, of online surveillance, and the dawn of artificial intelligence. As Laurence Scott writes, in the age of the Internet of things, the ‘old literary device of the pathetic fallacy [. . .] no longer seems so fallacious’.34 In an article on the visual artist Trevor Paglen, Hal Foster argues—with an echo of The Meaning of Meaning—that, in ‘a culture in which the vast majority of images are produced by machines for other machines, with humans left out of the loop’ (as with facial-recognition programs), the difficult question is this: how does machine vision affect our usual ideas about representation, meaning and critique? As Paglen sees it, all the talk about the digital trans­for­ma­tion of images, about viral reproducibility and lost indexicality, has distracted us from the crucial change, which is machine readability and image invisibility. And all the focus on semantic ambiguity in cultural criticism has overlooked the central fact of the algorithmic scripting of infor­ma­tion. What does ‘communication’ communicate, what does ‘meaning’ mean, in our technological set-up today, and what form should critique take if its old protocols of exposure and demystification no longer have much purchase?35 33  Colin Burrow, ‘Adjusting the Mechanism’, London Review of Books, 40: 19 (11 October 2018), 31–4. 34  Laurence Scott, Picnic Comma Lightning (London: Heinemann, 2018), 71. 35  Hal Foster, ‘You have a New Memory’, London Review of Books, 40: 19 (11 October 2018), 43–5.

44  Max saunders So with machine speech and writing. When words are under greater pressure than ever from images on the one hand, and numbers on the other, Foster notes that ‘ “Literacy” is a problematic term’ which ‘sets us all up for perpetual retraining’, and he asks ‘what counts as the requisite competence in this strange world?’ Strange not least because the agency of reading has undergone a seismic shift. Reading used only to be something we did to inanimate texts. Now, close reading is what machines do to us. We acquiesce in the view that that is the only kind of close reading that matters at our peril.

2 Close Reading as Performance Peter Howarth

The New Modernist Studies and Close Reading are both critical developments from modernist literature. But they do not appear, on the surface of it, to have much else in common. Broadly speaking, the close readings developed by the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s require intense focus on the internal dynamics of a particular work (usually a poem), and use that focus to define themselves against dominant philological, social-scientific, or his­­ toric­ al frameworks which, they believed, reduce the individual work to an ex­ample demonstrating some larger social process.1 Without close reading, ‘the poetry of the past becomes significant merely as cultural anthropology’, warned Cleanth Brooks, ‘and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or moral instrument’.2 Close reading technique aimed both to reveal the peculiarly literary qualities of the work, and in doing so, to ‘protect’ this ‘distinctive mode of thinking and writing from . . . absorption and displacement’ by the rapid growth of social-scientific models of knowledge.3 It wasn’t that close reading had to be ignorant of the work’s distinctive social or historical contexts: on the contrary, John Crowe Ransom remarked, ‘an immense labor of historical adaptation is necessary before our minds are ready to make the aesthetic approach’.4 But understanding that was only the preliminary labour before the real work of criticism could begin, the close reading which would tease out the work’s internal ‘tissue . . . of connotation’.5 And all the value—the experience which justifies the contextual spadework—lies in the criticism, because close-reading the connective tissue of the text brought the reader to a more ethical, more holistic way of knowing in general: ‘what we cannot

1  Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 86–7. 2  Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), xi. 3  Douglas Mao, ‘The New Critics and the Text-Object’, ELH 63 (1996), 230. 4  John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 340. 5  Ibid., 349. Peter Howarth, Close Reading as Performance In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Peter Howarth. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0003

46  Peter howarth know constitutionally as scientists is the world which is made of whole and indefeasible objects, and this is the world which poetry recovers for us.’6 The broad trend in more recent modernist studies, by contrast, has been to show how these ‘whole and indefeasible’ literary objects discovered through close reading are in fact thoroughly mediated by and dependent upon their financial, technological, and social surroundings. In their survey of the new modernist criticism, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz quote Edward Cutler’s claim that ‘the scene of modern writing is . . . the recursive print exchange between urban nodes throughout the US and Western Europe’, and also its broadcast networks across the globe.7 It is not the scene within the individual reader’s mind or within the seminar room, but all the places where we see the exchange of cultural and social capital: advertising, publishing, journalism, guidebooks, radio. No longer safely background for the literary, as they might once have been, these are the venues where cultural identities are being negotiated and social hierarchies performed by literary and non-literary texts alike. ‘Predictably,’ Mao and Walkowitz add, ‘such work has drawn the fire of critics . . . who see it as abetting a general devaluation of the specific literary qualities of literature.’8 But for those watching the nodes of information exchange, any ‘specifically literary qualities’ are actually a function of the kind of social attention the works are getting anyway. Where the aesthetic qualities of the difficult poem used to seem self-evident, modernist studies now thinks more about the global networks within which these ex­peri­ences make sense, ‘nudging the field from the study of masterpieces to the study of circulation and consumption in the global marketplace’.9 A close reading is then one episode among many in the social construction of literary value, while a study of the work’s marketing strategy, its dependence on non-literary works, or its collusion with the forces of social privilege, is another. During the late 1980s and 1990s, a number of important books examined the social manoeuvres that close reading itself performs, putting the practice in the context of turf wars within English departments between generalists and specialists (Gerard Graff), between historically minded criticism and creative-writing specialists (D. G. Myers) and/or as a consequence of the need in university English to create a new class of professionalized readers (John Guillory).10 6  Ibid., xi. 7  Quoted in Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123:3 (2008), 743. 8  Ibid., 744. 9  Ibid., 742. 10 Gerard Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History [1987] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 183–208; D.  G.  Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 12–14; John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problems of Literary Canon-Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 143–85.

Close reading as performance  47 In showing what status-transactions close reading is engaged in, modernist studies also reflects contemporary criticisms of the technique, which by and large accuse it of being a cultural policing strategy disguised as a model of sophisticated appreciation. To Terry Eagleton, close reading’s search for ‘irony’ or ‘tension’ within the literary text actually predisposed the reader not to notice ironies or tensions between the work and its context.11 What the New Critical professors of close reading called ‘paradox’ was really a formula for conflict-free aesthetic wholeness because no discordant elements could remain ultimately discordant, and this shored up the aesthetic ideology that the works of art are miraculously self-constituting escapes from the damage done to individual imaginations by social injustice. Close reading always makes works organic wholes, or nostalgic havens, Eagleton charges, which was their secret attraction for Southern Agrarians all along. Close reading has also come under fire for the way it has tacitly narrowed the canon. It extrapolates from the internally complex, non-linear, multiplevoice experience of reading a modernist like Eliot, and makes that the literary model by which all others are judged. For Brooks, emotional complexity required literary cubism: All of the subtler states of emotion, as I A. Richards has pointed out, necessarily demand metaphor for their expression. The poet must work by analogies, but the metaphors do not lie in the same plane or fit neatly edge to edge. There is a continual tilting of the planes; necessary overlappings, discrepancies, contradictions.

To its critics, this provides spurious emotional justification for ignoring work in which modernist-style irresolution (‘continual tilting’) isn’t found. Since close reading only really likes work that is, in Cleanth Brooks’s words, ‘being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience’, Peter Rabinowitz charges that it can’t actually recognize works in which statements about experience are the point: If you privilege close reading, you also tend to privilege figurative writing over the realistic portrayal of material social conditions, deep meaning over surface meaning, form over content, the elite over the popular, and indirect

11  Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 46–7.

48  Peter howarth expression over direct. In the realm of poetry, you privilege lyric over narrative; in the realm of fiction, symbolism and psychology over plot.12

Robert Scholes claims that close reading had no way to value protest literature, popular songs, or any form of literature which relies on direct sentimental or rhetorical appeal.13 Paying so much attention to the ‘live’ experience of a single text, close reading also had little to say about the genres, topoi, and genetic taxonomies produced by the evolution of popular fiction, as Franco Moretti’s distant reading has shown. Close reading creates a canon of works which reward its approaches, a canon in which high modernism will always come top. It is not a way to clear away extraneous considerations and appreciate the real value of the work, as the New Critics held: it is a technique which produces the pure literariness it claims to be finding. The idea that close reading in some way constructs the literariness of its object would not have come as a surprise to Laura Riding and Robert Graves, the originators of the close reading model, however. In A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), they complain that most poems are written to please the moribund standards of literary journalism; their kind of poem works instead by layers of multiple suggestiveness and unresolved connotations, and readings which embrace this are a way for a reader to start thinking like the modernist poet, or more accurately, for the reader to become an extension of the modernist poem’s life. ‘For such a method turns the reader into a poet’, they wrote, while the poem becomes ‘the poem of anybody who will be at pains to write it’.14 Close reading here sounds like an early form of participation art. But having introduced the Survey of Modernist Poetry through the idea that modern poetry’s job ‘is to teach the proper reading of poetry’, the paradox running all through their book is that the autonomy of the poem, on which they insist, is always framed by its readers, good and bad, on whom they also insist.15 The textual independence protected by close reading is still part of the new ­contract between writer and reader. Despite their hypostatization of the poem, an element of this audience-relation survives in the New Critics, who maintained a strong belief that the poem should be read as a miniature drama. As a work which ‘builds conflict into its very being’, the poem-drama has to 12 Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, 194. Peter Rabinowitz, ‘Against Close Reading’, Pedagogy and Politics: Literary Theory and Critical Teaching, ed. Maria-Regina Kecht (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 230. 13  Robert Scholes, The Craft of Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 28. 14 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, ed. Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 19–20. 15  Ibid., 19.

Close reading as performance  49 be performed temporally in the reading experience, insists The Well-Wrought Urn, for the poem is ‘an action rather than . . . a formula for action, or as a statement about action’.16 Learning to turn oneself into a private theatre in which this action could be played out was the New Critics’ remedy for the instrumental, disenchanted and uninvolved knowledge offered by science. But once you accept the idea that the reader is the theatre or the venue in which the poem unfolds its present-tense performance, it becomes possible to notice the dependence of the work on the different kinds of theatres it is played in, and the effect of varying conditions on that performance. Riding and Graves’s Survey and I.  A.  Richards’s Practical Criticism were deeply worried about some of those conditions (stock responses, middlebrow journalism), and invented close reading to counter them; critics of close reading’s social and canonical myopia notice others (the University seminar, the bourgeois order of art) but continue to see the difference a financial or historical frame makes. In regarding poetry as essentially dramatic in structure, New Critical close reading could not help but promote the idea, contrary to its dogmas of autonomy, that the poem is both the script and its enactment, and so ontologically dependent in some degree upon its mediations—an effect which only became more obvious as the performance revolution of the 1960s took off. As plays were performed in the round and on the streets, audiences became aware that the drama was now happening, and had always been happening, in the work’s relation to its audience and environment, not just between its characters. From there it is not so far to today’s stress on the global cultural networks and information exchanges within which literary texts jostle for space with every other kind of cultural production, and in which we can take critical interest in seeing the work being spun round by factors well outside its control. Rather than see close reading as just a means to protect the hypostasized text from its social mediation, in other words, I propose we see it as one of the many ways in which, over the course of the twentieth century, art has moved from an affair of objects towards one of events, whose modus operandi is per­ form­ance.17 In fostering this change, unintentionally or deliberately, close reading is actually moving in the same direction as the contemporary historicists, blurring the borders between art and its contextual medium. Returning close reading to its beginnings as the companion to a theory of modernist poetry will not help it sound less elite, unfortunately. But it will make clearer how modernist poetry was partly aware from the start of the ‘real social 16 Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, 187. 17  Arnold Berleant, Art as Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

50  Peter howarth conditions’ of its reception, and got some of its aesthetic kicks from trying to outmanoeuvre its own audience.

Riding and Graves To see how the doctrine of the autonomy of the poem relies on a performative conception of it, we need to restore the place of Laura Riding and Robert Graves to the history of close reading. This task has been made much easier by Donald Childs’s The Birth of New Criticism, which patiently, convincingly, and exhaustively sets out all the similarities between their project and the more celebrated ideas of Richards and Empson which are normally taken as the foundation. The connection has been obscured both because of Empson’s unwillingness to concede Riding’s influence, and because of Riding and Graves’s quarrelsome relationship with Empson, Richards, and many others in the years following their withdrawal from the British literary scene to Majorca.18 Nonetheless, A Survey of Modernist Poetry celebrates the multiple possibilities of meaning in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 which generations of editors had tried to eliminate by correcting the punctuation. By showing that the poem became emotionally far richer when all the possible meanings were in play, Childs argues, their chapter inspired the basic move of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1929), to ‘convert the critical tradition of editorial either/or into readerly and writerly both/and’.19 In fact, Graves had already been an influence on Empson for some years previously, thanks to his psychological theories locating the origins of poetic images in mental struggle, ideas that came from personal experience. In the consulting room of W.  H.  R.  Rivers shortly after the First World War, Graves realized that his traumatic post-war dreams were themselves battlefields: The images of a dream are symbols of the elements which enter into the conflict by which. . . . the dream has been determined. The process of dramatisation is closely connected with this use of symbols. The dreamer sees in the dream persons moving before him and events happening which give it a dramatic character by which the conflict is made concrete and, though in altered guise, conspicuous.20

18  Mark Jacobs, ‘Contemporary Misogyny: Laura Riding, William Empson and the Critics – A Survey of Mis-History’, English 64.246 (2016): 222–40. 19  Donald Childs, The Birth of New Criticism (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013), 47. 20 W. H. R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 21.

Close reading as performance  51 Graves’s On English Poetry (1922) turned Rivers’s dream-characters into a theory that poetic images are creative compromises generated by the artist’s conflicting wishes—an idea which Empson later called his ‘Conflict Theory of poetry’, adding that it was ‘the necessary background for a theory of poetical ambiguity’.21 This conflict-compromise worked itself out in the difference between the denotative and connotative use of words, or the ambiguities allowed by rhythm, punctuation, and syntax, but the inevitable result was that the poetic experience allowed things to be said which could not be said any other way, or in prose.22 Where Empson was concerned with the uniqueness of the poetical text, however, his supervisor I. A. Richards was more interested in poetry’s therapeutic potential. Graves gets harsh treatment in Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) for his habit of trying to reach back behind the text to reconstruct what went on in the author’s mind, but Childs points out that the mainstay of Principles is still the Gravesian theory, first developed in On English Poetry, that poetry is ‘a form of psycho-therapy in itself ’, because writing it requires ‘reconciliation’ of the ‘conflict of the poet’s sub-personalities’—or, as Richards put it, ‘conciliation of impulses which in most minds are still confused, intertrammelled and conflicting’.23 Richards’s hope for a scientific psychology of reading would become anathema to Riding and Graves, who fiercely defended poetry against any positivist claims, but Richards’s discussion of the poet’s uniquely-interconnected psyche in Principles follows the lines of Graves’s 1922 essay ‘What is Bad Poetry?’, and by the time of Science and Poetry (1926), Richards had started to pick up Graves’s language of the poem as conflict resolution, and his metaphors of poetic composition as winning a compromise out of a fractious committee.24 Riding and Graves, in return, develop Richards’s idea of stock responses. But Richards, Graves, and Riding’s deepest unity lies in their own dis­agree­ ments with themselves about the poem’s dependence or independence, dis­ agree­ments that they would sometimes go on to blame each other for. Coming from behavioural psychology, the early Richards firmly locates the poem’s form in the mind of its reader: the balance of differences that a poem allows ‘is not in the structure of the stimulating object, it is in the response’.25 But

21  Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 428–9. 22 Childs, Birth of New Criticism, 131. 23  Robert Graves, On English Poetry (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 85; 36–7. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1924), 61. 24 Childs, Birth of New Criticism, 235. 25 Richards, Principles, 248.

52  Peter howarth Richards does focus a lot of his attention on how the poem itself organizes that response, ‘asking not how a reader completes himself, but how the model poem . . . completes itself ’.26 This is an alternation within A Survey of Modernist Poetry, too, and it generates many of the puzzles in the subsequent history of close reading. A Survey of Modernist Poetry might well be subtitled ‘A Story of Two Readers’, for its argument about why modernist poets write as they do relies on contrasting the laziness of the general reading public with the active and imaginative work of a hoped-for super reader. It opens by explaining the strangeness of E. E. Cummings’s ‘Sunset’ (published in Broom, 1922) through reconstructing the poem Cummings didn’t write—one with conventional capitalization, fewer unexpected adjectives, and much more explanatory, contextualizing syntax. Their hackwork version is the poem you’d find in an anthology, and they conclude that ‘Cummings was bound to write the poem as he did in order to prevent it becoming what we have made it’.27 Anthologies are not merely collectors of the best poems, they insist; following the success of Georgian Poetry and the Imagist collections (in which Graves himself appeared), they have become a genre in themselves, and the majority of contemporary poetry is written to get published in them. But anthologies ‘compiled to refresh tired minds’ are full of poems written down to the general public’s ‘lazy reading habits’28. Cummings’s poem, and modernist poetry in general, is written instead to break the rules for poetry made by the reading public: ‘Poems in such a time, indeed, may forget that they have any function other than to teach the proper approach to poetry.’29 There is an ambiguity to this opening gambit, nonetheless. Does it mean that modernist poetry must teach the proper approach, or that being busy teaching the proper approach might come to dominate the writing of the poem itself? This hesitation between the poem-in-relation—didactic or ­participatory—and the autonomous poem will develop into one of the book’s fault lines. At first, the poem lives in its reception. Cummings’s poem, they continue, is a ‘complicated recipe for a sunset experience, as if for a pudding, not merely a description of what the pudding looked like or how it tasted’.30 It is not a rhetorical act of persuasion by a subject to a largely passive audience but a form of words allowing the ideal reader to start recreating the experience in her own mental kitchen. By ‘avoiding that conventional form which

26  John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (London: Routledge, 1989), 265. 27  Riding and Graves, A Survey, 9. 28  Ibid., 5. 29  Ibid., 10. 30  Riding and Graves, A Survey, 19.

Close reading as performance  53 does stand between the reader and the poem’, it ‘turns the reader into a poet’31. The form is not only ready-made in the poem but is created by the dynamic relation that the modernist poem sets going within the reader’s mind. This is always unfinished business; the test of real poetry, in fact, is whether ‘one can go on discovering new surprises in it’.32 Modernist poems combine the impressions of the event and the poet’s response to them into one impressionistic ‘blend’, a ‘living whole’—which includes the reader: ‘Indeed, if we look upon form as something distinct from the subject-matter of a poem, in this sense true impressionist poems are usually without form; or rather they are capable of having a new form with every reader.’33 But only if those readers are willing. Modernist poems reproduce the feelings of the experience as it happens, they argue, whereas the conventions of the nineteenth century show ‘the lazy poet taking advantage of his reader’s faith and industry’ rather than making the ‘lazy reader think and work along with the poet’.34 Cummings is driven to such syntactic and punctuation extremes because he is determined to make language faithful to his thought and speech, a ‘deadly accuracy, and that accuracy makes poems difficult rather than easy’.35 This claim for difficulty then frames the famous analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, which effectively treats Shakespeare as Cummings: the poet whose every syntactic and grammatical gesture is deliberately ­chosen, but whose effect is to create a maximum of syntactic ambiguity so that the complex emotions of desire and self-defensiveness, lust and regret can blend and clash simultaneously in the reading of it: Shakespeare’s punctuation allows the variety of meanings he actually intends; if we must choose any one meaning, then we owe it to Shakespeare to choose at least one he intended, and one embracing as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning . . . No prose interpretation of poetry can have complete finality, can be difficult enough.36

This is the point at which modernist poetry becomes the template for all close reading. Recognizing ambiguity means fidelity to the poet’s emotional and temporal complexity, while difficulty ensures an ongoing and always-unfinished expansion of possible meanings, keeping the surprises coming.

31  Ibid., 20. 32  Ibid., 12. 33  Ibid., 20. 34  Ibid., 26. 35  Ibid., 30. 36  Ibid., 36, contra Jacobs, ‘Mis-History’, which claims that Riding and Graves read the sonnet not for ambiguity but as the plain statement of words, in the manner of Riding’s later project.

54  Peter howarth But the point of starting with Cummings was to set him up against the ­general reading public, the enemy of modern poetry; and from here on, the Survey complains with increasing bitterness about its influence. The modernist poet wishes to use ‘thought and language of a far greater sensitiveness and complexity than the enlarged reading public will permit it to use’, and therefore has to ‘run the risk of seeming obscure or freakish, of having no reading public’.37 Real poetry involves real commitment, a willingness to work against the whole cultural division of labour which treats poetry as an entertaining diversion from the real business of living. The authors make a telling comparison with religious faith: No common Christian could seriously turn the other cheek when smitten or sell all that he had and give it to the poor, and no common poetry reader could bring himself without great effort to meet the demands to thought put upon him by an authentic poem. An advocacy in modern Christianity of the turning of the other cheek and of the communalizing of private property would be regarded as an obnoxious modernism in the most devout Christian; as an increase in poetry of the demands put upon the plain reader antagonizes him against modernist poetry no matter how much he loves poetry in general. Poetry, then, like religion, has to be dissociated from practical life, except as a sentimentality.38

‘Modernism’ here combines its older theological sense with its newer artistic sense; to read it well is to believe it, but also to suffer cultural dislocation so acute that hardly anyone could bear it. (Meanwhile, the implied comparison of their poems with the Sermon on the Mount hangs flatteringly in the background.) Brought up by his strongly evangelical mother, Graves would have known the Lutheran interpretation of the Sermon which argues Christ’s demands are so high that they are actually meant to demonstrate the need for repentance rather than any practical code for living, as liberals like von Harnack tended to hold.39 Clearly close readers are a select group, and then the Survey makes them rarer still. Difficult poems annoy ordinary readers, Riding and Graves complain, because they don’t have one simple, intended meaning which the poem hands over: they mean what the fullest possible experience of the words means: ‘This is why the plain reader feels so balked 37  Ibid., 40. 38  Ibid., 47. 39 Grant R. Osborne, Matthew (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 159.

Close reading as performance  55 by it: he must enter into that matter without expecting a cipher-code to the meaning. The ideal modernist poem is its own clearest, fullest and most ac­cur­ate meaning.’40 That claim against paraphrase would become a hallmark of the New Critics, but the phrase ‘its own’ is now starting to swallow the hoped-for reader too. The two strands are briefly visible again when the Survey reaffirms the ideal reader’s commitment: ‘the reader should enter the life of the poem and submit itself to its conditions in order to know it as it really is’.41 Twelve pages later, they are claiming that ‘once the poems are made’, the poet’s ‘personal activity ceases in them’ and ‘they begin a life of their own’; poems are now autonomous, and the fact ‘that they teach the reader at all is an accident’.42 The irony, though, is that Riding and Graves never really stop thinking of the reader as a necessary environment for the poem, either positively or negatively. Rather than complain that nobody reads poetry any more, their whole book accuses bad readers—and authors’ and publishers’ anticipation of them—of poisoning poetry at its source. Modernist poetry, even the idea of being ‘modernist’ itself, is contaminated by secretly flattering the middlebrow reader’s need for social gentility, or the contemporary reader’s longing to be up to the minute.43 Riding’s Contemporaries and Snobs, whose essay on Gertrude Stein is also the last chapter of the Survey, locates the corrupting influence of external factors in dimensions well beyond New Critical suspicion. Eliot’s aesthetic of impersonality is produced by the author’s personal troubles, she claims: ‘the detachment in such poetry, of which The Waste Land is an easy clue for identification . . . is not voluntary but forced on the poet by the universe from which he has been banished’.44 The idea that the poem is like a machine—which would become dear to later New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley—borrows an industrial ideal of self-creation, and substitutes purity for poetry; the designation ‘art’ itself restricts the poem to a specialist role delineated by science.45 Even the idea that the poem is a ‘thing in itself ’ is secretly a product of criticism which serves scientific positivism.46 If ‘a forced dignity attends any effort to free the poem from destructive circumstances which the poet is himself subject to’, argues Riding, then only the poem which reveals itself to the poet, which is ‘even able to make a reader out of its author’, is truly independent.47 40  Riding and Graves, A Survey, 57. 41  Ibid., 59. 42  Ibid., 70. 43  Ibid., 78. 44  Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, ed. Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 13. 45  Ibid., 22, 62. 46  Ibid., 60. 47  Ibid., 13, 23.

56  Peter howarth Yet the net effect of Riding’s book is to confirm the very thing she rails against, the nigh-on total influence of the reader’s context, circumstances, and cultural categories on contemporary poetry. ‘How shall this true poem be ­recognized?’, she asks rhetorically, and answers, ‘by those tests of reality it imposes on the reader; perhaps, then, only by the strength of the hostility it arises [sic] and the extent of its unpopularity.’48 This isolationist criticism is only possible if the poem is being thought of at some level as an event between poet and reader. Touting the poem’s autonomy is a move which only makes sense within that antagonism, a gesture of defiance not unlike Graves and Riding’s own pointed removal from the London literary world, and the world of Graves’s family, to Majorca, a defiance summed up in the memoir Graves was writing at the time: Goodbye to All That. It was the sad recognition that some kind of contaminating exteriority might actually be in the nature of poetry itself that drove Riding’s resignation from it following her Collected Poems of 1938. Nonetheless, the terms in which she recants her former ‘creed’ in ‘The Failure of Poetry’ (1973) reveal that the poem she had always hoped for had never been a thing of words on the page but a rapturous state of shared mutual awareness between the poet and the reader, so free of ‘the gross ­physic­al preoocupations’ of human existence that it could enable the merging of the poet and the audience’s mind: The effects of the realized condition, for the poet and the participant ­audience, constitute, by the creed, a peculiar state of being, in which there is  suspension of the pettier life-values, and a grand sense of things, a sense  of  a  grand scope of existence, suffuses the being, and moves the understanding.49

Poetry was supposed to bring about this exalted state of mutual awareness, but its internal techniques and the zone of influence allotted to it warp the poet–reader relationship: Poets can, by the allowances of poetic craft, exert fascinations upon the aural and visual imaginations of readers, listeners, that transfix them permanently in certain orders of ideas and emotions . . . In exerting such influence, poets exaggerate the weaknesses of poetry: they become locked in impotent acceptance of a relationship to the others (the readers, etc) that makes the 48  Ibid., 23. 49  Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language, ed. John Nolan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 32.

Close reading as performance  57 others slavish attendants, where their rôle is theoretically that of vigorously responsive participants in the poetic act of utterance.50

In other words, Riding had been so vigorous in condemning the interference by author and reader of the true poem not because she believed in the poem as an autonomous object but the opposite: because it should enable a shared spiritual experience, bigger than both poet and reader. But poetry’s hypnotic and magical powers create false admirers, a fan club whose presence is toxic to the poet’s own self-image and imagination. One does not have to be much of a biographer to see the relevance of this to Riding’s break-up with Graves, whom she felt had trapped her by his own hypnotized, rather masochistic admiration, later theorized in Graves’s The White Goddess into a general theory of poetic inspiration by the muse as cruel mistress.51

The Temporality of Reading Riding and Graves’s theory that good reading should be a context-defying experience survives into the New Critical idea of close reading the poem as an unfolding drama. But so, too, does the paradox in the Survey that the reader is also the place where historical circumstance keeps re-entering in the act of dramatizing. To John Crowe Ransom—whose first English volume of poems, Grace After Meat, had an introduction by Graves—poems are ‘little dramas, exhibiting actions in complete settings rather than pure or efficient actions’; in that dramatic difference between speech and the speaker’s situation ‘lies the possibility of critical understanding and at the same time of the illusion and the enjoyment’.52 In the industrialized world which is so threatening to religion, to the discipline of English in the University, and to the white male of the American South, prose, the language of efficiency, has become ‘the ­language of the actual’, displacing poetry into the realm of make-believe: ‘poetry has had to resort to - the Stage’.53 But this does not make it untrue; instead, it offers us a unique slow-motion replay experience from multiple angles: On the stage the actors are trying to show us, and we are crowding the hall trying to discover . . . just how we would have transacted certain businesses if 50  Ibid., 33–4. 51  Devindra Kohli, ‘The Necessary Trance and Graves’s Love-Ethic’, in Graves and the Goddess, ed. Ian Firla and Grevel Lindop (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2003), 58. 52 Ransom, The World’s Body, 249, 254. 53  Ibid., 247–8.

58  Peter howarth we had been integers, and not actual historic men; that is, alternations of business man and unhappy resentful aesthetic man by turns. Even if the business is murder, we should transact in the manner of Othello, with fury, pity, horror, love and circumstance, and not, let us say, in the professional and infra-human manner of Chapman or Dillinger. The stage shows how to enjoy business while transacting it . . . to transact with the whole of our being.54

Ransom is really claiming that poetry is more contextual than prose because it is more dramatic, more intrinsically aware of the setting of its own statements and their ironies. Needless to say, this is a dangerous thing to notice for the man who, in ‘Criticism, Inc’ (1938) had given New Criticism its charter: ‘the first law to be prescribed to criticism . . . is that is shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject’.55 Rejecting any ‘box-office’ designs on the reader, true criticism will affirm ‘the autonomy of the artist as one who interests himself in the artistic object in his own right, and likewise the autonomy of the work as existing for its own sake’.56 But in ‘Poetry Without Laurels’ (1934), Ransom had argued that modern poetry was fatefully cut off from religion when American Puritanism divorced belief from the social world of guilds, art, and commerce, and ‘lopped off from religious [life] the aesthetic properties which simple-hearted devotees and loving artists had given it’.57 The poets: have been pushed out of their old attachments, whereby they used to make themselves useful to public causes, by the specialists who did not want the respective causes to be branded with amateurism . . . they are moved by a universal tendency into their own appropriate kind of specialisation.58

But ‘Criticism, Inc’ would argue that close reading practices must become the hallmark of a new breed of specialist critics who will be able to protect poetry as poetry. When printed alongside ‘Poetry Without Laurels’ in The World’s Body (1938), that is to say, ‘Criticism, Inc’, now repeats the Puritans’ gesture, and reveals its own professionalizing to be part of the greater problem. The experience of the objective reader, so important to preserving the poem, is also the very point at which the historical situation constructing the poem’s reading becomes visible. A similar twist is visible in Cleanth Brooks’s classic text, The Well-Wrought Urn. Like Riding’s work of the twenties and thirties, it is written to show how 54  Ibid., 248.

55  Ibid., 342.

56  Ibid., 343.

57  Ibid., 62.

58  Ibid., 68–9.

Close reading as performance  59 poetry can never be made an instrument of its historical or social background. But Brooks makes his point through demonstrating the acts of mental staging the reader must undertake to grasp that poems busy saying one thing are leaving an irony of the speaker’s situation or an obvious conclusion unsaid but unavoidably there for the reader. She has to grasp that the sinful lovers in Donne’s ‘The Canonization’, for instance, will find a more lasting union in the ‘trifling and insubstantial’ sonnet that she is at that moment reading than in the ‘pompous and stately’ memorial, implying that the sonnet itself will become the holy relic containing the remains of love’s saints, to be visited by other lovers for continual healing—implying in turn that the reader should wonder about her own unexamined longings behind her reading.59 To realize these multiplying ironies has to be an involving experience, for the connotative has to be played off against the denotative, while ‘the terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings’.60 Like the ‘continually tilting planes’ of a modernist composition, the poem has its being in the present, unfinished, tense: ‘deprived of the character of paradox with its twin concomitants of irony and wonder, the matter of Donne’s poem will just unravel into “facts”, biological, sociological, and economic’.61 No paradox, no drama. The significance of time becomes clearer as Brooks builds his case through reading a number of elegiac poems about the continuing life of the beloved dead—Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, Gray’s ‘Elegy’, Donne’s ‘The Canonization’, Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and The Turtle’, and Keats’s Ode which gives Brooks’s book its title: The urns are not meant for memorial purposes only, though that often seems to be their chief significance to the [historicist] professors of literature. The phoenix rises from its ashes; or ought to rise; but it will not arise for all our mere sifting and measuring the ashes, or testing them for their chemical content.62

The metaphor is clear; without dramatic paradox, ashes stay ashes, traces and histories of what was. With paradox, the poem becomes an ‘is’, and reading is creating the time for the dead to live on: Keats’s urn must express a life which is above life and its vicissitudes, but it must also bear witness to the fact that its life is not life at all but is a kind of

59 Brooks, Well-Wrought Urn, 13.

60  Ibid., 8.

61  Ibid., 16.

62  Ibid., 19–20.

60  Peter howarth death. To put it in other terms, the Urn must, in its role as historian, assert that myth is truer than history.63

And myth here, in its best modernist manner, means a story which cannot be historically distanced but which is happening again in the present. Paraphrase tries to compress the experience of the poem into an objective, time-neutral statement, whereas ‘the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or mu­sic­al composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and har­mon­iza­tions, developed through a temporal scheme. Or, to move still closer to poetry, the structure of a poem resembles that of a play’.64 A footnote to this passage indicates Brooks’s sympathy with Kenneth Burke’s idea of the poem as a ‘mode of action’: Burke’s argument had been that poetic form is ‘a way of experiencing’ rather than a way of containing and distancing the experience onto an object.65 Yet The Well-Wrought Urn also has a closing appendix in which the problem of the experiencing reader’s historical situation, and the poem’s dependence on it, reappears. Discussing the dispute between I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot over whether one can really appreciate a poem whose beliefs one finds repugnant, Brooks sides with Richards and argues that the reader merely suspends her own beliefs while reading. This is actually what is meant by treating the poem as drama, in which every statement is made in character, as it were, and the point is the total arrangement, not the truth-value of any one of them. Brooks adds: We may need to have impressed upon us, for example, if we are to understand Antigone, the nature and importance of the Greek burial rites. But our understanding of the play, though it may depend on our knowing what is at stake for the characters, does not depend upon our accepting the im­port­ ance of such burial rites for ourselves.66

But the fact that the reader appreciating the poem as drama has to do this indicates that she has a historical position which is making such beliefs impossible. The action of treating the poem’s statements as drama, the entry into the present tense, is the point at which the autonomous poem is most historically being received.

63  Ibid., 195. 64  Ibid. 186. 65  Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 181. 66  Ibid., 227.

Close reading as performance  61 If Brooks and Ransom’s example suggests that a good deal of New Critical practice was actually about teaching the reader to stage the autonomous work, Richards himself was explicit about it. Russo notes how ‘from the angle of the poem, Richards speaks as if it possessed “autonomous being”, with its own rights and responsibilities’.67 But Richards also wrote as if the poem depended on being read well. The difference between the set quality of Dryden and Donne’s ‘The Anatomy of the World’, he remarked in an essay for Allen Tate, was that: In the Donne there is a prodigious activity between the words as we read them. Following, exploring, realizing, BECOMING that activity is, I suggest, the essential thing in reading the poem . . . Understanding it is not prep­ar­ ation for reading the poem. It is itself the poem. And it is a constructive, hazardous, free creative process, a process of conception through which a new being is growing in the mind.68

So seriously did Richards take the reader’s role that he even wanted to formulate the question of poetry’s ontology as the problem of audience. Practical Criticism would not have been so agitated by people’s terrible readings had it not felt that the poems themselves were in danger, and it quotes Waley’s Nō Plays of Japan: If you look deeply into the ultimate essentials of this art, you will find that what is called ‘the flower’ has no separate existence. Were it not for the ­spectator who reads into the performance a thousand excellencies, there would be no ‘flower’ at all.69

In a late lecture, ‘Principles of Dramatic Utterance’, Richards argued that problem is not understanding how readers or audience interpret the poem, it is how poems are even possible when they are created by the reactions they set up in the readership: We have developed quite extraordinary resources for hiding the real situ­ation from one another and from ourselves, and that the chief of these is the 67 John Paul Russo, I A Richards: His Life and Work (London: Routledge, 1989), 284, quoting Richards, Poetries: Their Means and Ends (Den Haag: Mouton, 1974), 77. 68  Richards, ‘The Interanimations of Words’, in The Language of Poetry, ed. Allen Tate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), 76. 69 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism [1929] (London: Routledge, 2001), 333.

62  Peter howarth assumption, which we ceaselessly encourage in one another, that there is an easily accessible public object – the utterance King Lear, say, the play, the performance, the speech, the what not – a public object we just have to take in aright. . . . This problem is itself a mass delusion . . . the real problem is how do we manage to persuade ourselves that the separate private appearances we severally enjoy are sufficiently alike to let us go on with the public object.70

But if Richards here shows the poem’s ontological dependence on its reception, then his example reveals a vital historical context for close reading technique. That lecture was a memorial for Ted Spencer, his Harvard colleague who had done a great deal to encourage the live reading of poems at the University. In the 1950s, Richards himself had encouraged the fledgling Harvard Poets’ Theatre, whose modernist-inspired verse plays experimented with many forms of metadrama, in which the audience were made aware of their part in the performance, whether in modern Noh plays by W. B. Yeats, Frank O’Hara, and Bunny Lang or musical Pirandello-esque comedies by John Ashbery, where the characters seem to know they are on stage.71 The Poets’ Theatre also hosted solo readings, including an early solo performance of Under Milk Wood, still then unfinished, and tried out brand-new plays— including one for private performance by I.  A.  Richards, A Leak in the Universe. This curious piece concerns a conjuror who comes across a box which absorbs everything you put in it. It is a scientific miracle, but also deadly to everything near it, and everyone who studies it—and a medium who tries to discover its secrets starts producing poetry made almost entirely of quotations. Scene three shows the conjuror, played by Richards himself, trying to figure out the poetry and slowly realizing his own desires to find its secret put him in peril. Scene four shows the conjuror in dialogue with a Japanese professor about the box’s sinister author: Omori. Near the heart of it. Our teacher: Let’s say he simply took this box and taught it This trick we can’t conceive.

70  ‘Principles of Dramatic Utterance’, I. A. Richards Papers 84M–50, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 6. 71  See Alison Lurie, V. R. Lang: Poems and Plays, with a Memoir by Alison Lurie (Random House: NY, 1975); Nora Sayre, ‘The Poets Theatre’, Grand Street 3:3 (1984) 92–105; John Ashbery, The Compromise, or, Queen of Cariboo, repr. in Three Plays (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1978).

Close reading as performance  63 Conjuror. Or we conceive it In too many ways and cannot choose between them! Omori. It’s still a cannot! Conjuror. And yet an invitatio: the kind of invitation The magnet offers to its filings. Sometimes, I think . . . I think I see how it works. It’s maybe no more Than a little switch of attention, a lifted stress, A break in a circuit, a shift of love . . . and then I think I too see how to do it.72 The box is clearly some kind of analogy for the literary object and its close reading environment—but of course the play makes the selected audience aware that it knows they know that close reading is what it is performing, right now: . . . This play’s about itself, and so are you: Stalking yourselves and studying what you lost, What to give up for what and what to do With what is left to you and at what cost.73

Richards’s turn into a poet-dramatist is less evidence of a sudden conversion than of real continuity. Close reading was always a version of closet drama because the ‘words on the page’ were really being treated as words on the reader’s internal stage. If so, the 1950s context for close reading is not only the squabbles within English departments to divide up the territory between ­literary historians and literary critics, nor only the wish by Southern New Critics to disseminate their criticism of modern America by promoting close reading as its remedy.74 It must include the general turn towards making poetry a performed affair, fostered by the rapid rise of performance poetry not only at Harvard, but events at the Museum of Modern Art, the reading 72  A Leak in the Universe, reprinted in Playbook: Five Plays for a New Theatre (New York: New Directions, 1956), 280. 73  Ibid., 243. 74  Mark Jancovich, ‘The Southern New Critics’, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, VII: Modernism and the New Criticism, ed. A Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 213.

64  Peter howarth series run by the Poetry Centers at New York’s 92Y and San Francisco State University, the growth of radio shows devoted to poetry like Cid Corman’s This is Poetry on Boston’s WMEX, Kimon Friar’s Magic Casement on New York’s WNEW or Berkeley’s celebrated KPFA, where the poets would sometimes phone in—and the sudden development of the literary reading tour, following Dylan Thomas’s blazing example.75 If so, we can make a little more sense of the fact that, as poets, the New Critics would not let the words stay on the page, but read live regularly; that Allen Tate was the Librarian of Congress who founded the first recording series to document poets’ reading, and that Brooks was the editor of the Yale Series of Recorded Poets. Derek Furr has argued that the desiccated, audience-free sound of the Library of Congress recordings is ‘essentially the New Criticism on record’ because it eliminates both drama and context.76 Dry as they are, I would suggest that the recordings represent the same tension that runs throughout New Criticism: wanting to protect the poem from time’s contamination, and yet also wanting to make the reading of it a dramatic experience, a move which more or less openly declares the poem’s need for an audience. It was not the performance revolution of the 1960s, in which the audience’s response were brought into the play itself, through metatheatre, real-life locations, or an anthropologicallyaware desire to turn dramas away from representations and back into ritual processes that channel the tensions between those watching them. Brooks and Heilman’s Understanding Drama (1946) is wholly innocent of such ideas. But nor should we think that New Criticism only moved poems away from performance, for its thinking of poems as dramas must give them audiences and venues, and both are a necessary first step in seeing how ‘secondary’ mediations (readers, printings, publications) can in fact be continuous with the ‘primary’ creative dimension of the poem, that the drama takes place in the space between performers, texts, audience, and environment.77 Douglas Mao, who coined the term New Modernist Studies, noted over twenty years ago that everyone agreed that ‘the New Criticism’ was dead, but that its legacy lived on in ‘the governing assumption that the meaning of the text is not remotely exhausted by what the text seems explicitly to ‘say’.78 The 75  John Malcolm Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955). 76  Derek Furr, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 39. 77 See Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 112. For the opposition between New Criticism and performance, see Kenneth Sherwood, ‘Elaborate Versionings: Characteristics of Emergent Performance in Three Print/ Oral/Aural Poets’, Oral Tradition 21.1 (2006), 120. 78  Mao, ‘The New Critics and the Text-Object’, 258.

Close reading as performance  65 ‘hypostatization of the text’, he added, ‘ultimately grounds rather than opposes the historicist project’. I agree, but would add that turning a text into an hypostasized object defined by its independence from its author’s intentions for it is not the only way that it can be historicized. In Riding and Graves’s original account of close reading, I have been arguing, the modern poem’s form is to be read as a dramatic anticipation of its historical readership, be that predatory or welcoming. To write like a modernist is to be pre­ter­nat­ur­al­ly aware of the efforts of your future readers to turn the poem into a version of something they already know it says, or to make it an accessory for a feeling of upward social manoeuvring—and to be already working to pre-empt them. Riding and Graves’s generally suspicious view of the world would never let them see any text or reader as neutral: poems and readers are always making claims on each other, and from their analysis of Shakespeare’s punctuation forward, the work of close reading is to recognize how texts frustrate their readers’ insensitive reductions of their psychic complexity. The ideal close reader must keep asking herself if she is being sensitive enough to it, and if the poem is to continue being a surprise, then the answer can never be ‘yes’; one reader can never be sensitive enough to contain all the poem’s meanings, and the poem must be re-staged again. But the interesting thing about seeing close reading as a technique to keep literature a live experience is that it was not invented in denial of historical context or circulation or PR opportunity; it was developed in order to make those forces visible through the act of catching them in operation within the reader’s own stratagems. The unfortunate history of close reading is that the dynamic, dramatic relation which was reading became turned into an inherent property of the poem itself, and Riding and Graves were partly to blame for this objectification. * Understanding the modernist dynamics within close reading may bring home another possible future for it, however. As John Guillory remarks, in the age of New Criticism, close reading became a disciplinary marker for the professional literary critic. Those professionals usually have students, and the arguments over close reading of the last thirty years have got much of their energy from a lingering sense of it as a formational activity, something that will shape the emotional capacities as well as the politics and the ethics of a younger generation. Opponents draw their moral force from wanting to keep the large-scale operations of capital and cultural power visible in the apparently self-contained lyric voice or personal narrative, by paying attention to the ­historical operations by which the feeling of self-containment or personality

66  Peter howarth or aesthetic wholeness is created. But summarizing a number of recent voices, Annette Federico has recently suggested that reading only to unmask the ‘capitalist, patriarchal, or imperialist contexts of the work’s production, its packaging, and its consumption by readers’ is, regardless of its political aims, an emotionally thin practice.79 The hermeneutics of suspicion alone cannot give readers any ‘sense of involvedness in which we feel our personal bound­ ar­ies expanding . . . and a sense of the psyche’s plasticity as it adapts itself to various competing imaginative demands’.80 Her point is not ‘to preserve a text from the contaminations of theory, or guard it as a precious aesthetic object, valued above all for its timeless truths and supposedly universal qualities’, for the social values and the ‘economic imperative that may have affected the works we are reading are needed background that should still be brought to the table’.81 But the discipline needs a revived, affectively-aware close reading which is ‘just as attached to concepts of freedom, justice and survival’, but fosters within its slow, reflexive attention to textual complexity certain ‘revitalizing capacities’ which offer the reader ‘a dynamic freedom for self-making’ too.82 Only drawing ‘our eyes back to the words on the page’ can bring back the formal, affective, and ethical dimensions of reading, she claims.83 This identifies a real pastoral need, but its analysis of the problem also misses the full force of the historicists’ point against close reading. Reading can’t be a realm of ‘dynamic freedom for self-making’ without encountering the very powers that shape us in history: ‘working on ourselves in the name of freedom’ has been, as Nikolas Rose points out, the general project of Western liberal government for the past century, and the practice of freedom itself asks us to understand genealogically ‘the ways in which what we take to be freedom has been historically put together’ in institutions and practices— including reading.84 For the same reason, close reading cannot be a ‘direct encounter with a work of literature’, in safe contrast with the historical and non-literary background, because the scene of reading is itself a sociallyconstructed boundary-drawing exercise.85 It’s not that there is no difference between ‘ “literary foreground” and “political background” ’, or, more generally,

79  Annette Federico, Engagements with Close Reading (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016), ebook, paragraph 10.53. 80  Ibid., paragraph 12.183 (quoting Charles Altieri). 81  Ibid., paragraph 10.93. 82  Ibid., paragraph 12.183. 83  Ibid., paragraph 8.5. 84  Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61, 63. 85  Ibid., 26.

Close reading as performance  67 between artistic production and other kinds of social production, wrote Stephen Greenblatt over thirty years ago: Such distinctions do in fact exist, but they are not intrinsic to the texts; rather they are made up and constantly redrawn by artists, audiences, and readers.86

Close reading extends a series of disciplinary conventions—a willingness to treat every acoustic and graphic feature of the text as potentially significant, an emphasis on the temporal experience of the reading, a keen interest in the play of denotation and the text’s potential self-subversion—to give us the irreducibility of the literary ‘experience’ to determinate summary. It is like one of Erving Goffman’s frame situations, a particular set of agreed social moves which key the experiences that follow. But Greenblatt’s point about the literary–historical boundary being ‘constantly’ redrawn by both artist and audience is that the ‘past’ (the historical context, the effects of social power) is itself not fixed and safely past. History must be operating in the procedures of reading for history as well because power must keep reproducing itself, or dividing itself, in the present. Federico is right to draw attention to the missing experience of affect or textual complexity in some kinds of contextual reading because their absence is also a sign of power at work, rendering certain reading experiences unimportant. Contemporary contextual approaches have a builtin ‘suspicion of the lived experience of reading’, Paul Armstrong points out, because they always want to see the reader’s subjectivity as an effect produced elsewhere, by the market, or the terms in which readers are given to understand themselves, or the operations of the unconscious. But there is no meaning to  be produced without a scene of production, and that scene requires the unpredictable present, or we would all be reading the same context the same way. ‘Historical interpretation itself runs the risk of becoming ahistorical’, he adds, ‘unless the historicity of reading is integrated into its analysis’.87 All readings—from those that closely attend formal nuance to those which treat the poem simply as a high-status cultural commodity to be traded for prestige—involve decisions about what to prioritize. No internal nor external

86  Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 52. 87  Paul  B.  Armstrong, ‘In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading still Matters in a Contextualist Age’, NLH 42.1 (2011), 93.

68  Peter howarth contextual horizon will unequivocally tell the reader reading how to frame their experience: A meeting of past and present is a truly historical encounter only if it is dynamic, interactive and unpredictable. To dismiss reading as universalising is to exclude the very domain where this encounter happens.88

When close reading is understood in its modernist context as a per­form­ance—a procedure invented to keep the poem as live experience, to pick up and respond to forms as a repertoire of gestures towards an audience, to see the shifting borders between the aesthetic and the socio-historical become visible in that response—then it should be useful to the historicist project as well. Armstrong adds, provocatively: Whether to be either ‘formalist’ or ‘historicist’ is not a useful or even tenable alternative . . . the genuinely debatable, potentially productive issue is how to stage the interaction of form and history in the doubled performative interaction where they meet in the reading.89

Brooks’s worst fear was that without the entering into the drama revealed by close reading, the poem would be treated as just facts for cultural anthropology. But, as Richards told his lecture audience, ‘the study of dramatic utterance is just anthropology pursued—shall I say? at the molecular level’.90

88  Ibid., 94–5.

89  Ibid., 106.

90  Richards, ‘Principles of Dramatic Utterance’, 15.

3 Poetry Explication The Making of a Method Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

In 1950, Joseph Kuntz and George Arms published a remarkable work of ­distant reading. Their Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretation since 1925 of British and American Poems Past and Present aimed to provide ‘a just and reasonably complete listing of poetry explications published in the last twenty-five years’.1 The editors note that ‘Intensive analysis of individual works of literature has more and more become the basis of criticism’ in these years, and the index seems to prove this claim, offering citations for more than 4000 explications of over 1200 poems, from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ to W. B. Yeats’s ‘Withering of the Boughs’.2 To gather this collection of citations—mostly one- or two-page excerpts drawn from longer essays—the editors searched over one hundred published sources ranging from monographs (Yvor Winters’s Primitivism and Decadence, G. Wilson Knights’s The Starlit Dome) to anthologies (Richard Stallman’s Critiques and Essays in Criticism, Cleanth Brooks, John Thibaut Purser, and Robert Penn Warren’s An Approach to Literature) to scholarly periodicals (The Explicator, Kenyon Review, PMLA, Poetry), and modernist magazines (The Criterion, The Dial). Organizing these thousands of close readings alphabetically by author of explicated poem, the editors offer up the Checklist as ‘a means of locating explications both for their use as such and for fuller perspective in this new aspect of criticism’.3 Surveying the twenty-five year history of ‘this new aspect of criticism’, Kuntz and Arms recount the by now familiar story of how close reading overtook the academy in the decades after modernism. Citing I. A. Richards’s 1  George Arms and Joseph Kuntz, Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretation since 1925 of British and American Poems Past and Present (New York: The Swallow Press and William Morrow and Company, 1950), 11. 2  Arms and Kuntz, Poetry Explication, 17. 3 Arms and Kuntz, Poetry Explication, 9. Though the volume is organized by poet, Frank Lieberman’s design for the volume’s layout and typography, with small-capped critics’ names indented beneath the large-capped poets’ names, makes skimming for particular critics relatively easy. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, Poetry Explication: The Making of a Method In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0004

70  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan Practical Criticism (1929), William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s A Survey of Modernist (1928) as ‘some of the earliest work in modern explication’, the editors go on to define explication ‘in the modern sense’ as not merely an ‘unfolding’ of meaning but ‘the examination of a work of literature for a knowledge of each part, for the relation of these parts to each other, and for their relation to the whole’.4 Though Kuntz and Arms refer neither to ‘New Criticism’ (though the phrase does appear in the book twice via the titles of two articles they index) nor to ‘close reading’, their description of ‘explication’ matches standard accounts of New Critical formalism. Distinguished as much by its exclusions as its inclusions, they explain, explication distinctively ‘faces up to the poem as poem’ in opposition to criticism ‘that extolls the moral or condemns the moral’, criticism that ‘gasps ecstatically over a line’, or criticism that draws connections between the literary work and the author’s life. The underlying assumptions of explication are four: ‘the uniqueness of every work of literature’, ‘isolation of the work from biographical considerations’, ‘[d]etachment of the work from historical considerations’, and, crucially, ‘[u]nity as an essential of art’.5 By the time a second edition appeared in 1962, Kuntz (now editing alone) notes that it ‘no longer seems necessary’ to ‘define explication’—now used interchangeably with ‘close reading’—in view of ‘a great many critical studies that have since appeared’.6 Yet, while the Checklist’s preface and introduction tread a well-known path in critical history, the index itself maps a much less familiar territory: the published record of what and how critics actually close-read during these years. Exploring a wide array of journals and books, Kuntz and Arms discover and cite explications of expected and unexpected poems in expected and unexpected places. The index points us to the expected; it cites explications of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ from Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947), Robert Penn Warren’s explication of John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Nightingale’, and T.  S.  Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ in Understanding Poetry (1938); it sends us to Earl Daniels’s reading of H. D.’s ‘The Oread’ in The Art of Reading Poetry (1941). It directs us to Empson’s explication of Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930); it reminds us of F. R. Leavis’s explication of Ezra Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’ in New Bearings on English Poetry (1932), and suggests Elizabeth Drew’s reading of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ in

4  Arms and Kuntz, Poetry Explication, 18. 5  Ibid., 20–2. 6  Joseph Kuntz, Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretation since 1925 of British and American Poems Past and Present (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1962), 15.

Poetry explication: the making of a method  71 Discovering Poetry (1933). But cheek by jowl with these lists of canonical and expected texts and critics we find a wider range of writers and a more varied set of texts from less expected sources. They index, for example, Yeats explicating Dorothy Wellesley’s ‘Poem’ along with his own ‘To D.W’. in a letter to Wellesley; Arthur Wormhoudt’s explication of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ in The Demon Lover: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Literature (1949); a few pages’ summary of The Waste Land from Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (1931); and Reuben Brower’s explication of Lady Anne Winchilsea’s ‘A Nocturnal Revery’ in an article on seventeenth-century poetic traditions published in Studies in Philology in 1945. Rarely, in practice, do they isolate the work from broader considerations, as they may seem to do when presented as excerpts. Our recovery of this broader history of how close reading was practised rather than theorized speaks to our contemporary moment. Recent critics have attempted to rescue the practice of close reading apart from the strictures of strong theories of all stripes. They have variously wanted to centre ‘a modest sort of close reading’,7 to develop a kind of close reading that exemplifies ‘weak theory’,8 to practise a model of ‘literary reading without organic form’,9 or perform a kind of reading that is ‘close but not deep’.10 For these critics, close reading is and should be a practice that demands fine attunement to the text at hand, a practice that prompts an account of the text that can’t be transported elsewhere. Their enemy is not New Historicism and cultural criticism but rather the clanging truisms of strong theory—its repeated refrains about what texts and people are like—that can drown out the softer sounds of individual texts. This is the same tension we see between the Checklist’s Introduction and its contents, which show that close readings have always wandered free from the corral of theory—even at mid-century. By preserving, albeit in citational form, this wider ecosystem of weak readings, the Checklist also challenges us to move beyond a contrapuntal map of methodological change that always begins with mid-century formalism.

7  Zachariah Picard, ‘In Defense of Close Reading: Elizabeth Bishop’s Fish’ in The New Criticism: Formalist Literary Theory in America, ed. Alfred J. Drake (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 65. 8 Eve Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, Touching Feeling: Affect Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 145. See also ‘Weak Theory’, ed. Paul Saint-Amour, issue of Modernism/ Modernity, 25.3 (Sept. 2018). 9 Mark David Rassmussen, ‘Introduction: new Formalisms?’ in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 7. 10 Heather Love, ‘Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History, 41.2 (Spring 2010), 375.

72  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan At certain moments, Poetry Explication: A Checklist announces this gap between the theorization of close reading and its practice—the distinction between the set of essays theorizing poetic form canonized by mid-century New Critics and the mostly-forgotten essays that actually explicated poetry. In their appendix to the volume, for example, Kuntz and Arms list the ‘Main Sources Consulted’ in compiling their index and describe, in a footnote, how many modernist and New Critical texts that readers might expect or assume would include examples of explication are actually devoid of close attention to particular texts: When explication might generally be assumed to appear in a book that we have examined, we have listed that book even though no explication has been found in it. We have, however, added the parenthetical comment that it contains ‘no explication’.11

Tracking the parenthetical ‘no explication’ designation through the Checklist’s list of sources compiles a stack of canonical modernist and New Critical works—Richards’s Science and Poetry, Eliot’s The Sacred Wood, Ransom’s God and Thunder, Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change. These texts champion or theorize close reading (and the formalist model of the literary text) yet do not practise it. By dutifully including them in their list of sources Kuntz and Arms suggest that by 1950 readers had already conflated the formalist theorization of close reading with the practice of textual exegesis and summary. Their use of the ‘no explication’ designation draws attention to the absence of close reading in these core works of criticism, yet preserves their place in the index’s bibliography. It reminds us that, while modernist critics such as Eliot and Richards rarely practised explication, we have retro­spect­ ive­ly and imaginatively amended the critical history of close reading to place modernist critics at its centre. Ultimately, then, the Checklist not only preserves a remarkable record of how and where close reading flourished in the decades after modernism but also allows us to witness the construction of the myth of close reading’s dom­in­ance. Pointing us to the scholarly substrate that subsists beneath the cyclical and contrapuntal rhythms of methodological manifestos and theoretical accounts of form, it allows us to ‘return a sense of the activities of reading that  critical history characteristically obscures’, in the words of Helen

11  Arms and Kuntz, Poetry Explication, 179.

Poetry explication: the making of a method  73 Thaventhiran.12 Opening up an alternate map of critical practice leading up to mid-century, it prepares us to see close reading’s enmeshment with and dependence upon other modes of scholarly practice. Indeed, the Checklist’s very format—a bibliographic index devoted to close reading, a classroom resource that excerpts and repackages scholarship as models for students— testifies to the ongoing relevance of the scholarly methods that mid-century close reading purports to replace or eclipse. Why has it been so hard to retain an accurate representation of the varied nature of critical practice through each generation? The Checklist may provide an answer here as well, for it suggests that formalist close reading became dominant by rendering explications—rather than poems—as autonomous. By excerpting explications from their original print contexts, the index excises the immediate considerations—historical, biographical, bibliographical, and otherwise—that prepare or extend from a critic’s turn to a poem. Shorn of critical context, these many and varied explications are gathered together and seem to approach an asymptotic ideal of what close reading is and does. Revealing that formalism’s rise required a curation of criticism, the index invites us to think about how scholarly tools that usher readers in and out of scholarly textual worlds had a role to play in the making of ‘close reading’. Close reading, we argue, emerges as a way to read when there’s too much to read. Likewise, the critical classics and critical clickbait of each generation—including today’s frequently-cited methodological manifestos—rise to the top of a wide and varied field of scholarship, allowing us to share a gravitational centre and to organize a professional social world in the face of the varied methods of literary, humanistic work. At the end of this essay, therefore, we turn from the practical history of close reading preserved by the Checklist to describe how the incredible variance of scholarly production since the nineteenth century has called forth not only new methods of reading closely and distantly but the increasing demand for simplified stories about what our past has been.

Close Reading in its Natural Habitats With its wide sweep of sources, Kuntz and Arms’s checklist provides an ­excellent source of data on both how and what scholars and critics actually 12 Helen Thaventhiran, Radical Empiricists: Meaning and Modernist Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 21.

74  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan close-read during the second quarter of the twentieth century. In theory, their work should offer us a view of the canon of poems that ushered close reading into prominence. Based on their introduction’s adherence to New Critical precepts, we would expect the index—organized by poet and poem—to reflect the rise of the New Critical canon as we know it: metaphysical poets, but not many Victorians; austere modernists, but not eerie and expressive Romantics. We expect to see poems that respond well to the fourfold op­er­ ations that Kuntz and Arms detail in their definition of exegesis: poems about poetry, poems that form organic wholes, poems that do not require biographical or historical contexts to be understood or to be significant. Based on the ­relative narrowness of these avowed criteria, which square with the stories we still tend to tell ourselves about close reading’s original canon, we might expect to encounter a narrow canon of these kinds of poets and poems rather than a wide range of texts. And the Checklist does in fact include one version of the modernist close reading canon we expect: a look at the 1950 edition reveals a dense thicket of close readings centred around poems by Donne, Yeats, Stevens, Eliot, and Shakespeare, while the 1962 edition also shows new clusters of close reading formed around Dickinson, Frost, Browning, and Wordsworth. Yet the index also reminds us that close reading was not as tightly tethered to a narrow canon as many accounts assume. The 1950 index includes 1922 explications of 1091 poems by 224 poets, living and dead. The 1962 edition includes 273 poets and 1974 poems, thereby adding an additional 49 poets and 883 more poems to the initial list. Just as in other counts of canonicity, in the Checklist we see a power law distribution, including a high-frequency head of these popular, often-read poets and a very long tail including a much wider array of poets with single poem included, and poems with only a single reading.13 What were the working presumptions, social contexts, intended effects of the thousands of explications that cluster around this ‘long tail’ of lesserknown poets and poems? There has accrued a long tradition of both establishing and critiquing the socio-cultural functions of the New Critical close

13  In addition to the relatively small number of often-read poets and poems, there is considerable variation in the patterns of how reading frequencies are distributed. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ received 22 readings before 1949, ranging from E. E. Stoll to Robert Penn Warren; his ‘To the River Otter’ has only a single reading. Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’ has 12; the 47 Donne poems included almost all have more than one reading, but the most-read of the 47 (predictably, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’) has just 8. A look at the history of readings of even the most ‘canonical’ poets in the Checklist, then, reveals a complex world in which the distribution of critical attention is uneven across some oeuvres and uniform across others.

Poetry explication: the making of a method  75 reading of a narrow canon of texts. We think we know where close reading lives, who it is for, and what it is supposed to do for them. We can conjure up GI Bill students, for whom classroom close reading is a democratic leveller and a bulwark against an increasingly fact-devoted modern public sphere; we can conjure up the picture of mandarin modernists giving up journalistic belletrism and public intellectualism to heed Eliot’s call to become serious and professional by looking at poetry ‘as poetry and not another thing’14; we can imagine monograph-length studies in which each chapter focuses on a single poem, detailing how the interrelation of its parts produces a set of para­doxes that ultimately convey an aesthetic experience. But because Kuntz and Arms in fact cast a much wider net than their introduction’s familiar narrow theorizing of close reading suggests, the Checklist captures many lesser-known species of the explication genus. Here, we will examine just three, but many more lurk within the Checklist’s pages awaiting recognition and classification. By ignoring Kuntz and Arms’s own introductory description of what textual explication is and instead tracking the Checklist’s citations back to their natural habitats in the pages of longer art­icles, collections, and monographs, we hope to resettle the story of modernism’s relation to close reading on the firmer foundations of actual scholarly and critical practice. By uncovering how close reading works in the day-to-day practice of literary study and poetic production, we also suggest that grand narratives about sea changes in critical method might be set aside in favour of a more durable assessment of the much wider range of readings of poems by critics for whom close reading was not tightly wound up in a strong claim about formalism’s role in constructing or revealing literary value. Kuntz and Arms’s indexing of a number of relatively recently-published poems shows us one alternative formation to the expected canon: the ‘small world’ of poet-critics who appear in the Checklist as both poets and explicators. We can bring this world into fuller view by following its chain-letter style connections: Allen Tate explicates R.  P.  Blackmur’s ‘The Spear;’ Blackmur explicates Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream;’ Stevens explicates Marianne Moore’s ‘He “Digesteth Harde Yron” ’. Joseph Frank explicates John Peale Bishop’s ‘Divine Nativity’ while Bishop explicates Cummings’s ‘among these red pieces of ’; Hayden Carrouth explicates John Ciardi’s ‘To Judith Asleep’ while Ciardi explicates Ransom’s ‘Blue Girls’, while Ransom explicates Tate’s ‘The Subway’. Earl Richardson Daniels explicates Louise Bogan’s ‘Solitary 14 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood [1920, rev. 1928] (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), x.

76  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan Observations . . .’ and Bogan’s 1953 explication of Marianne Moore’s ‘The Steeplejack’ appears in the 1962 edition. Michael Vinavert reads Karl Shapiro’s ‘The Poet’; Shapiro reads Spender’s ‘The Funeral’; Spender reads Jarrell’s ‘A Camp in a Russian Forest’. The majority of these ‘small world’ explications of contemporary poetry appear in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review (with a few appearing in The Western Review or Poetry). These journals, dubbed the ‘major journals of New Criticism’ by John N. Duvall, were already ‘intertwined, at times almost incestuously so, with overlapping editorial boards’.15 The ‘small world’ explications of living poets by living poets seem to differ from the other explications of mostly dead poets (Herrick, Dickinson, Tennyson) or from high modernist poets (William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Eliot) drawn from these same journals; explications of living poets by living critics tend to combine evaluative with interpretive language. In the Checklist’s introduction Kuntz and Arms suggest reasons for this: explaining that their criteria for including contemporary poetry is quantitative not qualitative, they write that because ‘our selection was based on recognition and not on merit’ they ‘have omitted explications of poems by about thirty-five con­tem­por­ary authors for whom general recognition does not yet exist’, while admitting that for ‘many of the poets not included we have a higher regard than for past and present poets who do appear’.16 The fact that the quality of these newer poems was still considered generally to be under consideration appears in the language of the indexed readings of them; evaluative, review-like language appears more in these readings than anywhere else. Reading Ransom’s ‘Blue Girls’, for example, Howard Nemerov notes that ‘The most immediately striking thing about John Crowe Ransom’s poems is their elegance’.17 The combination of the chain-letter-style sociality of poet-critics’ close reading of their counterparts’ poems that convey value through the gesture of critical attention along with other critics’ more evaluative, review-like attention to these new poems suggests the degree to which the relation between explication and canonicity was a two-way street: critics both explicate ca­non­ ic­al poems and make poems canonical through explicating them. We see this second function at work in a second category of explication we can identify in 15  John N. Duvall, ‘New Criticism’s Major Journals: The Southern Review (1935–42), The Kenyon Review (1939–70), and The Sewanee Review (1892– )’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford University Press, 2012), 929. 16  Arms and Kuntz, Poetry Explication, 10. 17  Howard Nemerov, ‘Summer’s Flare and Winter’s Flaw’, Sewanee Review, 56:3 (Summer 1948), 416.

Poetry explication: the making of a method  77 the Checklist: the use of explication by historicist scholars to canonize or bring attention to forgotten or minor writers of the past. This strategic use of explication—as a tool a critic might use to attempt to usher an under-read and undervalued work of literature into the canon—experiences a bump between the first and second editions of the Checklist. One good example of this approach to exegesis is George Arms’s own The Fields Were Green: A New View of Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow; with a Selection of Their Poems (1953). Perhaps written in part expressly to be indexed in the second edition of the Checklist, The Fields Were Green makes a case for the ‘literary worth’ of these nineteenth-century American schoolroom poets. Arms does this in part by close-reading these poets to demonstrate their underappreciated complexity. At the same time, Arms historicizes con­tem­ por­ary preferences in order to separate out aspects of contemporary taste that are masquerading as transhistorical standards of literary value. He admits that the schoolroom poets’ tendencies to ‘literary rather than a colloquial diction, the use of poetical-picturesque subject matter, and an effect of relaxation’ are ‘drawbacks to most of us’. Yet they are in reality drawbacks only ‘in the realm of fashion’ rather than ‘of principle’; ‘none of these characteristics can be regarded as elemental in literary art . . .’.18 And despite his claim that ‘in making a literary estimate’ he has ‘consciously avoided biography’, Arms also points out that some countering of the ‘pious filial biographies in one gen­er­ ation’ and the ‘debunkers’ in the next generation is necessary to achieve a level critical playing field.19 Each of Arms’s poet-specific chapters narrate and analyse the poet’s reception and critical history before offering close readings that answer critical history’s charges. Arms turns, for example, from the complaint of Longfellow’s didacticism to uncover via close reading ‘the method by which Longfellow handles his didacticism’.20 Each chapter then offers a new selected collection of poems. As much as through rereading the history of criticism as through the manufacture of close readings that reveal the hitherto unexpected complexity and nuance of the schoolroom poets, Arms works to clear a field that will allow for a more just critical engagement with the five poets. These small worlds of poet-critics reading each other chain-letter style and critics using explication to bring older poems and poets into prominence 18  George Warren Arms, The Fields Were Green: A New View of Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow; with a Selection of Their Poems (Stanford University Press, 1953), 3. 19  Arms notes that though provincial by some definitions, the schoolroom poets also had ‘a breadth of learning’ and were ‘attuned to the life of their time’: he notes, for example, that Longfellow offered a course on Goethe at Harvard just five years after Goethe’s death and asks readers to compare this offering with ‘their own college’s curriculum in modern continental authors’ (8). 20 Arms, The Fields Were Green, 207.

78  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan relate closely to a third among the many mappings of the terrain of explication the Checklist reveals. This third explication ecosystem emerges from the work of scholars pursuing primarily literary-historical or psy­cho­ana­lyt­ic argument. Like many literary historians narrating the recent past of scholarly method, in  their Introduction Kuntz and Arms treat historicist or contextualist approaches and exegesis as natural competitors. As is common, they narrate an unmistakable shift from the first to the second occurring during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Kuntz and Arms illustrate the way this shift took place not only in the pages of published criticism but also in everyday classroom practice with the ‘the sharp change’ in term paper assignments from topics like ‘A History of Elizabethan Theaters’ to directions like ‘write on the relation of two scenes to each other in Hamlet or on the symbolism in Lear’.21 They offer anecdotal evidence of how very polarizing this controversy over method was, describing how in 1940 the English department of ‘a leading university’ ‘split wide open’ over the question of adopting Cleanth Brooks’s Understanding Poetry as a freshman textbook. Yet the movement of explication from fringe practice to centre of the profession was so swift that by 1950 at that same unnamed university ‘the graduate school catalogue lists at least twelve master explicators in its English staff of twenty four’.22 Yet despite imagining a contest between historicism and close reading that gives way by mid-century to the latter’s dominance, they also acknowledge that in practice exegesis is not necessarily incompatible with historicist approaches. A consideration of historical factors might even be an aspect of exegesis itself: Kuntz and Arms’s introduction notes that though explication was sometimes imagined as demanding an absolute ‘detachment of the work from historical considerations’, ‘in actual practice it has been merely less interested in history than in art’.23 But despite this acknowledgement of potentially historicist aspects of exegesis itself, the Checklist is silent about what it might mean to pluck exegetical passages from the pages of books and articles whose larger claims are primarily literary-historical. For example, Kuntz and Arms draw eight explications from F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, in which a one-page explication of Emerson’s poem, ‘Days’, is surrounded by quotations from Emerson’s letters, the tracing of certain images through multiple Emerson texts, a characterization of Emerson’s ‘positive doctrine’, and the foregone conclusion that Emerson was hardly a poet at all: ‘Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman all conceived of themselves primarily

21  Arms and Kuntz, Poetry Explication, 17.

22  Ibid., 19.

23  Ibid., 21–2.

Poetry explication: the making of a method  79 as poets, though, judged strictly by form, none of them was’.24 So, too, do Kuntz and Arms leave aside entirely the question of the very heterogeneous contexts from which the indexers drew the explications. While the Preface explains broadly the principles of inclusion and exclusion of books and journals indexed, it does not mention the significant differences likely to be found in the kinds of work that appear inside the Explicator as opposed to, say, PMLA. Neither does it pinpoint what it is that distinguishes the experience of searching for explications across issues of PMLA as opposed to Poetry, or across I. A Richards’s Practical Criticism as opposed to the collection Readings for Liberal Education. Looking across the range of explications drawn from journals and books known to be, even at mid-century, hospitable to or even traditionally oriented around historicist and contextualist literary scholarship can help reconstruct the landscape. For example, in PMLA, Kuntz and Arms also find explications supporting the very un-New-Critical discovery of the doctrine of a literary work’s author, or the intended moral of work itself. Newton Phelps Stallknecht’s ‘The Doctrine of Coleridge’s Dejection and Its Relation to Wordsworth’s Philosophy’ explicates ‘Dejection’ in order to identify the ‘doctrine’ of Coleridge’s Ode and compare and contrast it with Wordsworth’s ideas about imaginative love.25 Elizabeth Nitchie’s ‘The Moral of the Ancient Mariner Reconsidered’ similarly seeks to identify a ‘moral’, mixing evidence from historical sources and readings of the poem in order to do so.26 Kerby Neill’s ‘Structure and Symbol in Crashaw's Hymn in the Nativity’, by contrast, draws on older bibliographic techniques to make an argument that adheres as fully to the official definitions of close reading as could be imagined. Neill tracks changes in Crashaw’s poem, close-reading them in order to argue that the successive revisions take the poem’s theme of theological unity and rework it so that it comes to undergird the poem’s formal unity; the poem becomes more unified, better and more literary over the course of the revisions that draw theme and form together. Crashaw’s revisions of his poem express his ‘growing sense of form’; the revisions not only lend greater unity to the poem but even bring greater unity to ‘Hymn’ and ‘two poems that followed it in the later editions’.27 By tracking Crashaw’s revisions, Neill contends, ‘changes 24 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance; Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 55. 25 Newton Phelps Stallknech, ‘The Doctrine of Coleridge’s Dejection and Its Relation to Wordsworth’s Philosophy’, PMLA, 49.1 (March 1934): 196–207. 26  Elizabeth Nitchie, ‘The Moral of the Ancient Mariner Reconsidered’, PMLA, 48.3 (Sept. 1933): 867–76. 27  Kerby Neill, ‘Structure and Symbol in Crashaw’s Hymn in the Nativity’, PMLA, 63.1 (March 1948), 102.

80  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan in imagery that introduced new figures and placed the old ones in new contexts tended to bring all these figures into closer structural harmony with the whole’. While some explications consider an author’s intentions or incorporate genetic approaches to the text, others consider an author’s unconscious. The Checklist cites nine explications drawn from Wormhoudt’s The Demon Lover: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Literature (1949). Building on the clinical work of Dr Edmund Bergler, former director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Clinic ‘who analyzed 36 cases of practicing writers’, Wormhoudt’s book argues that the writer is a ‘chronic rebel’ who ‘attacks institutions, mores, or prejudices’ all to ‘prove to himself that he has an aggressive and not a passive attachment to mother’.28 His readings of Romantic poems—including Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia’, ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Michael’, and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’; Keats’s ‘Eve of St. Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and ‘Lamia’; and Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and ‘Ancient Mariner’—search out the ‘breast image’, or the ‘unconscious mother image’, and pinpoint conflicts and defences.29 By comparison, Roy  P.  Basler’s Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature (1948), which donates seven explications to the Checklist, takes a less clinical approach: ‘I must admit that sex is the subject of these essays not merely because I, or the poets about whom I am writing, have chosen sex as a theme, but because sex is as inescapable in literature as it is in life.’30 ‘A fundamental duty of criticism is explication’, Basler writes, and his readings of Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, and several poems by Poe draw on Freudian concepts to show ‘how an understanding of the nonrational’ helps overturn ‘certain critical opinions and explanations’ of these poems.31 These many examples show how often the explications, excerpted and drawn into the Checklist, serve in their original contexts as ways of testing or exploring an ‘outside’ of the poem—the author’s intentions, or the author’s compositional process, or the author’s unconscious. Unlike the ‘small world’ explications, these literary-historical or psychoanalytic explications tend to cover the well-worn ground of canonical poems. And unlike the ‘small world’ explications, these scholars are engaged in conversation with other explicators 28  Arthur Wormhoudt, The Demon Lover: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949) 6. 29  Arthur Wormhoudt, The Demon Lover: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949) 55. 30 Roy P. Basler, Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1948), 3. 31 Basler, Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature, 144. Basler’s book—like Brooks’s The WellWrought Urn—reproduces the entire text of each poem he discusses (including all 45 pages of ‘Maud’).

Poetry explication: the making of a method  81 of these poems: for example, Basler cites Mathiesson’s and Richards’s ­readings of ‘Prufrock’. We can track a debate over the origins and meaning of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ through the close readings supporting both sides we find in the Checklist. In ‘The “Dream” of Kubla Khan’, Elisabeth Schneider first marshals evidence from medicine and psychology (‘the foregoing exposition has taken us far from Kubla Khan’) against the received claim that Coleridge wrote ‘Kubla Khan’ under the influence of opium and against the claim that ‘Coleridge’s process of composition in this poem was radically different from that in other poems’32. She deploys explication as supporting a literal or obvious reading against J. L. Lowes’s ‘erudite’ reading of the poem’s ‘flashing eyes’ and ‘floating hair’.33 Elmer Edgar Stoll—the ‘Professor Stoll’ familiar from Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘The Intentional Fallacy’—appears with exegesis for the other side; aligning himself with Lowes, he complains about the ‘symbolist poets and critics’ who so ignore authorial intentions that their writing is not criticism but rather constitutes ‘a new creation’.34 Decontextualized by the Checklist and converted into citations of a few pages, these mixed-method critical conversations and debates over method come to seem like a part of the proof of the evolution of a single method: formalist close reading. And yet to use the Checklist as intended, by tracing its references back to their original contexts, necessarily undoes the apparent critical singularity the volume appears to represent and the Introduction seems to describe.

Close Reading and Information Overload In the final chapter of Mimesis, his long history of realist representation since Homer, Erich Auerbach turns briefly away from his close analysis of the techniques of the modernist novel to offer a sketch of the twentieth century as the century of information overload. A portrait of an era emerges in which so much is known that no perspective exists from which human knowledge can be surveyed, objectively interpreted, evaluated: The widening of man’s horizon, and the increase of his experiences, know­ ledge, ideas, and possible forms of existence, which began in the sixteenth century, continued through the nineteenth at an ever faster tempo—with such a tremendous acceleration since the beginning of the twentieth that 32  Elisabeth Schneider, ‘The “Dream” of Kubla Khan’. PMLA, 60.3 (Sept. 1945), 793. 33  Ibid., 798. 34  Elmer Edgar Stoll, ‘Symbolism in Coleridge’, PMLA 63.1 (March 1948), 228.

82  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan synthetic and objective attempts at interpretation are produced and demolished every instant.  The tremendous tempo of the changes proved the more confusing because they could not be surveyed as a whole.  They occurred simultaneously in many separate departments of science, technology, and economics, with the result that no one—not even those who were leaders in the separate departments—could foresee or evaluate the resulting overall situations.35

This rapid proliferation of human knowledge and experience—which has left even experts unable to survey their respective fields as a whole—has, according to Auerbach, caused modern novelists to abandon the project of omniscient perspective and experiment instead with refracted viewpoints and uncertain, unknowing narrators such as the voice that hesitantly and questioningly threads through Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. The proliferation of knowledge also accounts for modern fiction’s devotion of close attention to small details such as the brown stocking Mrs Ramsay knits, or Mr Ramsay’s well-made boot. Unlike fascism’s tempting simplicities, these minor details serve as sites around which characters—and new and future publics—may gather to rebuild commonality, if not consensus. The proliferation of human knowledge that Auerbach describes also accounts for his own ‘method of textual interpretation’ which analyses excerpts from a select set of texts as ‘test cases’ for ‘every epoch’.36 As Auerbach explains, Mimesis was ‘written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies’.37 His lack of access to periodicals explains why his ‘book has no notes’; on the other hand, Auerbach says, ‘it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing’.38 Though scholars continue to research the material conditions under which Auerbach composed Mimesis, his ‘Epilogue’—like the preceding chapter on the modernist novel—opposes deep immersion to a ‘rich and specialized library’ to the close attention to a seemingly minor detail or excerpt.39 The latter arises, he suggests, as a solution to the growing impossibility of fully knowing or mastering the former. 35 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 549. 36  Ibid., 556. 37  Ibid., 557. 38  Ibid., 557. 39  For a material history of Auerbach’s research methods, see Kader Konuk, ‘Writing Mimesis in Istanbul’. East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) 133–66.

Poetry explication: the making of a method  83 For Auerbach, this close attention to minor details and passages represents one strategy modern readers—himself included—developed in response to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ proliferation of publication, both scholarly and literary. Alongside the strategy of close attention, we might also add a repertoire of related practices that John Guillory labels, following Rolf Engelsing, ‘extensive reading’.40 For Guillory, scholarship’s ongoing expansion— ‘an accumulation that defies mastery and necessitates increasing specialization as a way of reducing the volume of scholarship one needs to read in order to assert mastery in a given field’—has produced ‘the necessity of extensive reading’ or ‘skimming’ as well as ‘other longstanding non-linear techniques’.41 ‘Scholarly books are pulled apart like the Sunday paper’, Guillory writes; they are read ‘from the peripheral matter inward, from the table of contents, the index, the notes, the introduction and conclusion, then to the chapters themselves, some of which might be read closely, others scanned, others skipped altogether’.42 Scholarly reference tools like Kuntz and Arms’s indexical Checklist—as well as bibliographies, concordances, and, today, the Kindle’s ‘X-Ray function’, browsable metadata, and full-text databases—aid these extensive readers in their quest to scan a textual landscape too wide for human reading. Auerbach’s exegetical attention to excerpted passages as well as Guillory’s scholarly skimming both develop under the horizon of textual proliferation, of information overload. Indeed, we might even begin to think about our own continued devotion to Kuntz and Arms’s genealogy of formalist close reading—the false sense, dispelled by the Checklist’s sources, that past close readers were all New Critics—as another response to the proliferation of scholarship. Sociologist Andrew Abbott has described how scholars deal with information overload by developing, through a series of social practices, a consensus around ‘a somewhat arbitrary core of canonical works’—not canonical works of literature, that is, but canonical works of scholarship. Abbott gives the example of how, after World War II, ‘sociology began to treat Max Weber and Emile Durkheim as if they represented the entire corpus of European social theory’, and then slightly settled on the formation of ‘generational sub-canons’ going forward. Abbott’s sociologies of scholars explain how critical canons are formed, For a reading of Mimesis that connects Auerbach’s method with scholarly technology, see Sharon Marcus, ‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale’, Modern Language Quarterly, 77.3 (2016): 297–319. 40  John Guillory, ‘How Scholars Read’, ADE Bulletin, 146 (Fall 2008), 10. 41  Ibid., 13. 42  Ibid., 14.

84  Rachel sagner buurma and laura heffernan and then taken as representative of the much larger corpus of unreadable, uncitable, highly specialized scholarship in each generation. Abbott’s work helps to explain how a few select mid-century critical works (of the kind that Kuntz and Arms’s introduction resembles) continue to stand, in our minds, for the entirety of critical practice in that period; it also speaks to the conditions whereby a handful of methodological manifestos and crit­ic­al classics come to be disproportionately circulated and cited in any gen­er­ation. Think, for example, within the field of modernist studies, how Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986) or Peter Burger’s Theory of the AvantGarde (1984) shaped critical vocabularies through the 1990s. Think, as well, of well-circulated contemporary articles such as Eve Sedgwick’s ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (2002) or Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s ‘Surface Reading’. Such texts, because they seek to make discipline-wide interventions, must claim (or have claimed for them) a commanding view of a unified methodological field in which they seek to intervene. They represent our discipline to us, and in convening around them, we temporarily mute the wider range of methods that we read and practise daily. Like the characters of To the Lighthouse, and Woolf ’s readers ringed around them, and—Auerbach manages to suggest—a wider public ringed around them, we scholars gather, again and again, around ‘generational sub-canons’ in part so that we may have some basis of communality and conversation. This attempt to stave off scholarly atomization explains our continued devotion to certain stories about our discipline’s past and present, even as our daily work gives the lie to this representation of the state of a field or discipline. Over-simplified accounts of our discipline’s past are the price we pay for the coherence of a matched social and methodological life. As some contemporary critics announce yet another turn to ‘form’ and ‘close reading’, we feel a vertiginous sensation, as though we are helplessly along for the ride as the pendulum swings once more from contextualism to aestheticism, or from historicism to formalism. But the Checklist offers us a potential way out by showing us that the rise of close reading was not really a clean sweep, was never about the eclipse of one critical practice by another. Instead, as our reading shows, the Checklist’s wide-ranging index reveals the material, bibliographic, and critical means by which literary history generates this contrapuntal narrative. The ‘rise of close reading’ didn’t actually make the poem newly autonomous; rather, it made explications autonomous. Plucked from the contexts of their original publication, aligned alongside each other and organized by poem for easy searchability, explications were remade from one among many critical and scholarly modes to a singular practice designed,

Poetry explication: the making of a method  85 above all, for classroom use. In turn, close reading came to seem like a unified and unifying protocol that could be performed on any object of study, operating seamlessly across scholarly and pedagogical contexts. What we have shown here suggests a different approach to our past—one that depends not on narratives of eclipse or supersession that seem to operate outside the realm of human agency but rather upon an attention to attention—including a sense of how, and to what, and with whom we bestow it.

4 Slow Revelations James Joyce and the Rhetorics of Reading Joseph Brooker

Compared to some other ideas in literary criticism and theory, the idea of close reading is intuitive. If we are to look at a text, it seems to make sense to look closely. If we are serious about making an analysis, it appears appropriate to take the requisite time to do it, rather than hasten through a text and miss something important. (Close reading is clearly implicitly connected to time and speed: close reading might be slow reading, an idea that will be cor­rob­or­ated later.) All things being equal, close reading would usually seem to be a good idea. But all things might not quite be equal, in that different literary texts might have different relations to reading. They might implicitly ask to be read in different ways. The title of the present collection, Modernism and Close Reading, could carry an implication that certain texts respond differently to close reading from others. Perhaps close reading can never do any harm. But perhaps it is sometimes imperative, and other times less so. This essay examines the connection between modernism and close reading with reference to one major modernist writer, James Joyce. By looking closely at a small number of examples of the close reading of Joyce’s fiction, I will try to identify what happens at the level of interpretation, and also to describe what happens in the language of the critic. A premise of this chapter is that what we think of as close reading, when communicated to us, also implies a practice of writing. As Hugh Kenner, one of the readers under discussion, once remarked: ‘Criticism is nothing but explicit reading, reading articulating its themes and processes in the presence of more minds than one.’1 I will thus seek to discern how the writing of the critic, in making reading ‘explicit’, inflects our sense of the literary work.

1  Hugh Kenner, ‘The Pedagogue as Critic’, in The New Criticism and After, ed. Thomas Daniel Young (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1976), 45. Joseph Brooker, Slow Revelations: James Joyce and the Rhetorics of Reading In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Joseph Brooker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0005

Slow revelations  87 After a historical reflection on Joyce’s place in the history of modernism and close reading, the chapter will turn to a sustained consideration of perhaps the most influential close reader of Joyce’s work—and even modernism as a whole—the Canadian critic Hugh Kenner (1923–2002). Instances of Kenner’s work on Dubliners and Ulysses will be considered in turn. I then consider Fritz Senn, another exemplary close reader of Joyce, as both overlapping and diverging from Kenner. Finally, more briefly, I consider more recent alternatives to these models of close reading.

Lengthily Discussable A familiar historical narrative suggests that modernism and close reading are closely connected, via the literary criticism that developed after modernism: in particular New Criticism in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Thus Louis Menand and Lawrence Rainey could write in 2000 that it was ‘a commonplace to assimilate modernism and the New Criticism to one another, sometimes treating the latter as if it were merely a more systematic, more philosophical, or more academic articulation of formalist undercurrents within modernism’.2 While sceptically interrogating this assimilation of the two terms, they add that ‘a history of modernism and the New Criticism is inevitably a history of the rise of the modern university as well’, for ‘the New Criticism was, in America, the movement that successfully introduced literary criticism—the interpretation and evaluation of literary texts—into the university’.3 In principle anyone could be a close reader. But in modern historical practice, the idea of close reading as a distinct approach is associated with the academy. This is a pragmatic as well as theoretical matter. Close reading is associated with the classroom. In a 1976 retrospect on New Criticism entitled ‘The Pedagogue as Critic’, Hugh Kenner observes that ‘the New Critical thrust was toward facilitating classroom discussion, and [. . .] its procedures tended to move into prominence chiefly those poets whom they rendered lengthily discussable’. A benefit of New Critical doctrines, Kenner adds, ‘was supposed to be the quantity of contemporary work that they made accessible’: which is primarily to say what we would regard as modernism.4 The rationale for a connection between modernism and close reading could be that modernism seemed to require or merit such reading. Jeffrey 2  Louis Menand and Lawrence Rainey, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume VII: Modernism and the New Criticism, ed. Menand and Rainey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3. 3  Menand and Rainey, Cambridge History, 8. 4  Kenner, ‘The Pedagogue as Critic’, 43.

88  Joseph brooker Segall concurs with this case: ‘One of Pound’s cantos or Eliot’s poems taxed all of the critic’s exegetical skills, justifying [John Crowe] Ransom’s call for the professionalization of the trade.’5 One reason might be allusiveness. The kind of close reading required by these modernists might heavily involve an investigation of the earlier writers whose words they were redeploying or referring to. T.  S.  Eliot’s influence as a critic worked to produce an era and mode of criticism that could respond to his own work, and perhaps by extension that of his contemporaries. The continuity between Eliot’s 1919 doctrine of impersonality and the New Critical doctrine of the ‘intentional fallacy’, implying that criticism should not inquire after authors’ private thoughts, is a notable example. To a degree, close reading follows logically upon the refusal of extratextual contexts like authorial intention and biography. Yet James Joyce’s place in this account remains ambiguous. Jeffrey Segall’s critical history Joyce in America (1993) contains an entire chapter on Joyce and the New Criticism. But Segall admits that though the New Critics might have been ‘the ideal readers of Joyce’, they ‘did not give Joyce the attention they might have’: their major legacy in this context being the professionalized American criticism in which the Joyce Industry was able to grow.6 Joyce was of interest to mid-century American academics, but was often experienced as a strange and subversive new arrival in the Ivy League. Thus William York Tindall’s Finnegans Wake reading group, founded at Columbia in 1940, was notably early; A.  Walton Litz recalls studying Ulysses at Princeton as ‘an un­usual thing for the late 1940s’.7 In a memoir of Richard Ellmann, his former collaborator Ellsworth Mason recalls the novelty of twentieth-century literature at Yale in the early 1940s: Ellmann himself was forced to introduce it in a postgraduate group that borrowed the rooms of W. K. Wimsatt (founder of various New Critical doctrines) once a week. Ellmann’s own eventual position is indicatively ambiguous: his attitudes to literature were shaped by New Criticism, yet he became best known as a biographer, writing in a genre that New Criticism shunned out of principle. Joyce too seemed partly available to New Criticism, and partly foreign to it. His fiction could be shown to contain great artistic deliberation and formal design, especially by comparison to more naturalistic or journalistic writers 5  Jeffrey Segall, Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of ‘Ulysses’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 123. 6 Segall, Joyce in America, 135–6. 7 William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 24; A. Walton Litz, ‘Ulysses and its Audience’, in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja, Philip Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 220.

Slow revelations  89 (say, Arnold Bennett or George Orwell). His youthful formulations on e­ picleti, epiphanies and, via Stephen Dedalus, Thomistic aesthetics could appear sympathetic to a New Critical interest in the literary work as the autonomous well-wrought urn. Eliot himself had commended Joyce and offered one of the most influential ways of discussing him: 1923’s ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ managed to overlook the detail of Ulysses and present it as entirely a matter of overarching aesthetic framework. Yet Menand and Rainey also propose that Joyce was not truly assimilable to the Eliotic aesthetic, noting that ‘Joyce’s heady descent into the night-world of language’ was alien to Eliot’s temperament and roundly stating: One can read the entire corpus of major works by the principal New Critics and find not a single extended discussion of James Joyce. When Joyce became an object of interest for Anglo-American scholars, it was through the advocacy of critics firmly outside or opposed to the New Criticism—such as Harry Levin or Hugh Kenner, to cite only the most prominent examples.8

One can debate the details of these claims, citing for instance John Crowe Ransom’s 1939 essay ‘The Aesthetics of Finnegans Wake’ and Cleanth Brooks’s 1968 essay ‘Joyce’s Ulysses: Symbolic Poem, Biography or Novel?’—a sug­gest­ive title, with the primary New Critical genre listed first. One can also suggest that Levin and Kenner, like Ellmann, both partook of the milieu of New Criticism while differing from it. (Kenner’s 1950 PhD thesis, James Joyce: Critique in Progress, was supervised at Yale by Cleanth Brooks.) But Menand and Rainey’s point is essentially useful: that the most engaged and valuable readings of Joyce would emerge from sources that went beyond the mid-century conventions established by Ransom, Wimsatt, and Beardsley. We can follow this suggestion and turn to Hugh Kenner for a crucial encounter between Joyce and close reading, of a kind not reducible to New Critical doctrine.

Intersecting Fictions Among Kenner’s key critical strokes in Joyce criticism was his reading of ‘Eveline’, a story that Joyce wrote in 1904 about a young woman who con­siders leaving Dublin with her sailor beau Frank. Kenner offered his reading in more than one venue, but we can observe it in a section of ‘Space-Craft’, the second 8  Menand and Rainey, ‘Introduction’, 8.

90  Joseph brooker chapter of Kenner’s epic history of modernism The Pound Era (1971). The section commences: So at 22 Joyce published in the Irish Homestead (which gave him twenty shillings) some 1800 words about intersecting fictions.9

To call the short story ‘some 1800 words’ is a way of recalibrating it, quite characteristic of a critic who in a previous book notes that Ulysses contains 29,899 different words, of which 16,432 are used only once.10 To redescribe a text in this way also chimes somewhat with a statement about James six pages earlier: ‘The Ambassadors is a hundred cubic inches of wood pulp.’11 One of Kenner’s great traits is to describe literature in such estranging ways, often via the material properties of texts. Yet regarding ‘Eveline’, the 1800 words are perhaps less surprising than Kenner’s last phrase: ‘about intersecting fictions’, which takes the story’s subject to a fresh level of abstraction, and suggests recursiveness: this will be a reading of a fiction about fictions. Kenner tells the story, quoting three consecutive sentences from Joyce. In setting up facts he also builds his case about ‘fictions’, which Eveline, her colleagues, and her father are all said divergently to entertain about the situation depicted. Kenner’s words purposefully, indeed relentlessly (with the repetition of ‘fiction’ seven times in these three paragraphs) reframe what the story says. ‘Fictions in general define words’, Kenner goes on: a leap into epigrammatic declaration. ‘Definable’ is a mildly typical Kenner word itself, as def­in­ition can be part of his activity of defamiliarization, pausing the flow of argument to reset terms. Thus the characteristics that Eveline has applied to Frank are ‘definable’ only ‘by reference to the short story in which she im­agines herself and Frank playing leading parts, a story in which it is ne­ces­sary that Frank be named “Frank”, a daydream of escape’. Kenner makes the notion of a ‘short story’, within this story, more emphatic: ‘ “How well she remembered the first time she had seen him”: a quotation from the words of that story, cunningly spliced into Joyce’s story’.12 Here Kenner’s act of in­ter­pret­ation becomes more explicit and ambitious. The line that he dubs a ‘quotation’ is not very different from many other lines in ‘Eveline’. Kenner has moved here from a metaphorical sense of Eveline inhabiting a ‘fiction’ to something which in its precision seems more literal. Yet his point surely remains figurative. The act of 9 Kenner, The Pound Era, 34. 10  Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 32. 11 Kenner, The Pound Era, 28. 12  Ibid., 35.

Slow revelations  91 describing what Joyce does leads Kenner to posit an image (an alternative ‘story’ that can be ‘quoted’) which looks as though it must be a substantial object but is primarily a way of talking about narrative. The briskness of Kenner’s critical voice speeds us past this ambiguity. Kenner then detours in another direction, comparing Eveline’s image of Frank to the familiar (even by 1971) image of Joyce at 22 which has featured on numerous editions of his first novel. He does not say, with academic caution, that a resemblance might be discerned between one image of Joyce and this brief description of his character. Rather: Joyce may have amused himself with the notion that a few Irish Homestead readers would remember seeing ‘Frank’ around Dublin, in his yachting cap and tennis shoes. He had even been photographed, quizzical, self-contained, in the act of wondering if the man with the camera (young C.P.  Curran) would lend him five shillings.

Kenner comes at the point backwards, moving from fiction to fact: he envisages that ‘Frank’ may have been seen around Dublin, and only in subsequent sentences does he reveal this Frank as James Joyce. ‘ “Frank” ’, Kenner concludes the paragraph, ‘is Joyce’s first Portrait of the Artist, standing near the periphery of the canvas like the young Botticelli, in a cool exchange of gazes with the viewer’.13 That Joyce placed himself—in a carefully fictionalized, processed sense—in his first novel is a given. That he did so in ‘Eveline’ is a much more surprising claim. But Kenner presents it as a statement of fact. It is strictly Frank, not James Joyce, who Kenner says ‘had even been photographed’. And Frank, according to Kenner here, is Joyce’s first artistic self-portrait. The next page of the book consists entirely of the photograph of Joyce, subtitled: ‘ “?Frank”, i.e. James Joyce in 1904.’14 Kenner has been writing about fictions; in his conflation of Joyce and Frank he engages in a sort of fiction himself. In one sense, ‘close reading’ is implicated: Kenner’s conflation, after all, seems primarily spurred by noticing the detail of Frank’s yachting cap. But the flight of fancy that is spurred seems the reverse of what we associate with close reading. A critical practice that has seemed intently focused on the words on the page has swiftly soared away from them to paint its own suggestive, yet hardly proven vision. Kenner, after all, does not pause to mention that there is little

13  Ibid., 35.

14  Ibid., 36.

92  Joseph brooker reason to think that Joyce had Frank’s ‘face of bronze’, or indeed that his hair in photographs of the period rarely ‘tumbles forward’. Kenner’s text returns to paraphrase, this time more extensive and literal than before: He was persistent. He met her regularly to escort her home. He took her to The Bohemian Girl. After a while ‘she had begun to like him’. This may be explained by the next sentence, or it may merely precede the next sentence, which is, ‘He had tales of distant countries’. These consist of: his beginning as a deck boy at a pound a month; the names of ships; the names of the ­different services; the allegation that he has sailed through the Straits of Magellan; and ‘stories of the terrible Patagonians’.15

A literary critic could hardly be more straightforward in giving an account of a literary work. One can imagine the first four sentences here appearing consecutively in a teenager’s book report on ‘Eveline’. Yet surely something else is happening. The sheer plain factuality of Kenner’s discourse is so strong that it starts to foster scepticism. The simplicity of the account seeks to make the reader wonder if things can really be this simple. Paraphrase, while it may be pragmatic necessity, in Kenner’s hands turns out also to be implicit in­ter­ pret­ation. He can do much by quoting, reporting, and showing ostentatious restraint: ‘And the following sentence runs: “He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres [comma] he said [comma] and had come over to the old country just for a holiday”. Ah so.’16 Kenner does not quote Joyce’s commas as punctuation marks but replaces them with the parenthetical word ‘comma’. The prime effect is to highlight the material between the two commas: ‘he said’. The implication is that this is merely what Frank said, but does not correspond to reality. Kenner wants us to consider that Joyce has inserted the words ­specifically in relation to the most crucial of Frank’s claims: the one that offers Eveline a life elsewhere, on which her potential flight depends. Kenner at last makes his interpretive move more explicitly. He distrusts Frank’s phrase ‘fallen on his feet’, and proposes: ‘So cunningly have we been drawn into Eveline’s reverie’ that we fail to notice the mismatch between her world and the one ascribed to Frank. Kenner gives reasons, of a kind, not to trust Frank: the un-Joycean blandness of ‘fallen on his feet’, or the ‘realities outside literature’ that make Eveline’s future home in Buenos Ayres im­plaus­ible. Any Irish Homestead reader, he posits, knows ‘that no boat sails from Dublin 15  Ibid., 35, 37.

16  Ibid., 37 (Kenner’s square parentheses).

Slow revelations  93 to Buenos Aires’: the boat is bound for Liverpool. It is notable that Kenner’s close reading of the text finally makes reference to something outside it, though much less extensively than the historical material that later critics would adduce. Thus ‘facts’ are deemed pertinent to interpretation of the intersecting fictions: ‘Frank, it is clear, understands fiction too, but also certain facts, which may include Irish girls for hire in English seaports.’17 Kenner again stretches conjecture a long way here in adducing a ‘fact’ not mentioned in Joyce’s text. The same is true of the heightened rhetorical manoeuvre with which his reading concludes, stating that ‘we may write for ourselves unwritten additional sentences’ spelling out Frank’s deceit, and that ‘We are to imagine the rest of [Eveline’s] life’ as dominated by this incident.18 For this Joyce provides no warrant. Kenner’s mode of close reading here has taken him through the text, via a nod to real history, and beyond it, into an extra text that only he has imagined. He hypothesizes further the multiple versions of the tale that Joyce could have written, finding the one he did write to be ‘a chapter [implicitly, a breakthrough] in the history of fiction’ and exemplary of Joyce’s entire outlook, emphasizing ‘his earliest and most constant insight, that people live in stories that structure their worlds’.19 Let us review our observations about Kenner’s critical practice in this brief example. First, Kenner quotes the primary text, weaving it in and out of his own. Hardly anything could be more standard in a critic, but it bears remark that the practice authenticates Kenner: by his display of evidence and by the intimacy that is developed between his own discourse and that of Joyce. Second, Kenner paraphrases extensively. Paraphrase may be a necessary task, but in Kenner it can become pointed and sly in its very display of seeming neutrality. Third, Kenner’s paraphrases are framed by a dominant theme: ‘fictions’ in which people live. The facts of Joyce’s text are subtly remoulded by relentlessly being introduced in these terms. Fourth, Kenner slips readily between the literal and the figurative, as when he posits a ‘story’ from which Joyce’s story ‘splices’: the claim is metaphorical, but looks like a statement of fact, and the slippage is a rhetorical sleight of hand. Fifth, while practising a primarily textual reading, Kenner takes the licence to dip beyond the story at will, suddenly bringing extra-literary material to bear: most strikingly the sudden introduction of Joyce’s photograph. This leads us to a sixth point: Kenner’s willingness to write so speculatively that his criticism becomes, for a time, a fiction of its own. Two last points concern outlook and form respectively. Seventh: Kenner’s reading is sceptical. The entire movement of his attention to ‘Eveline’ is to 17  Ibid., 37.

18  Ibid., 38.

19  Ibid., 38–9.

94  Joseph brooker make us suspect Frank’s frankness (making his name newly pointed), view Eveline as credulous, and thus consider the whole story as depicting something different from its ostensible content: that is, a cynical and mendacious seduction that goes awry rather than a romance doomed by trepidation. We may give Kenner for a motto the title of one of Joyce’s earliest pieces of ju­ven­ ilia: ‘Trust Not Appearances.’20 In this regard his reading of ‘Eveline’ follows his influential 1947 essay which refused to take the Dedalus of the Portrait at face value, perceiving instead a critical distance on Joyce’s part. ‘Why I was so sure I can’t say’, Kenner would remember: ‘something false I’d divined, perhaps, in the talk I used to hear about the Portrait’s “sincerity”?’.21 Kenner at mid-century thus radically shifted the reading of Joyce’s first novel. He seems not to have seen ‘Eveline’ this way at that time: a brief discussion in Dublin’s Joyce states the story’s scenario, but without calling Frank’s version into question.22 But by 1971 he could present his sceptical view as certain, repeating it elsewhere too.23 Close reading is apparently needed to avoid the misreading that a more casual appraisal is primed by Joyce to produce. And eighth, Kenner is an unusual stylist. It is uncommon for a literary critic to write as briskly as this: ‘So runs a handbook summary, typical of dozens. In missing half Joyce’s point they still speak truth.’24 Stylistically, Kenner’s tendency for concision tends to make for quirkiness; his sentences are typ­ic­ al­ly angular constructions, surprising the reader with the amount of thought compressed into a single clause, and often demanding rereading fully to grasp their meaning. At the same time, it is also uncommon to write such sentences as ‘Ah so’ and ‘Now “fallen on his feet” is one more inscrutability’.25 Both these lines demonstrate a conversational quality in Kenner which guides the reader easily into his view of the case, even as his writing also breaks from habitual syntax and offers a semantic challenge. Both elements—intimate ease and styl­is­tic obstacle—coexist in the body of words generated by this critic.

Flickering Effects ‘Eveline’ is among Joyce’s shortest prose works. Indeed it is part of the effect of Kenner’s reading to discern such complexity in a text that seems one of Joyce’s 20  See James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 21 Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, xii. 22 Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, 54–5. 23  See Hugh Kenner, ‘Molly’s Masterstroke’, James Joyce Quarterly 10:1 (Fall 1972), 19–28 (20–1). 24 Kenner, The Pound Era, 38. 25  Ibid., 37.

Slow revelations  95 simplest. What happens when Kenner takes on a more evidently complex work? A consideration of one of his readings of Ulysses can develop our sense of his critical practice. The burden of the short book Joyce’s Voices (1978) is to articulate how the narrative of Ulysses works by looking closely at how it is written. I shall focus on one exemplary section. With a chapter entitled ‘The Uncle Charles Principle’ Kenner bequeathed an eccentric term to Joyce criticism. It derives from a character in Joyce’s Portrait who Kenner sees as being described in the language that he himself would have used. The principle is thus that ‘the narrative idiom need not be the narrator’s’.26 Implying that third-person narrative idiom varies from character to character, it appears akin to the well-established concept of free indirect discourse. It is symptomatic of Kenner’s aliveness to what words are doing that he describes the principle by unobtrusively borrowing a title from Joyce: ‘the normally neutral narrative vocabulary pervaded by a little cloud of ­idioms which a character might use’.27 But how, further, does this chapter work to secure Kenner’s reading? The chapter’s structure merits scrutiny. An academic essay might be expected to state a clear argument, then substantiate it through case studies, reaching a conclusion in which the case is restated and sealed. The partial trace of such a structure is discernible in Kenner’s 24-page chapter. But its presence is occluded, and somewhat displaced, by a different kind of movement: one that leads through examples with a kind of propulsive force, but without vouchsafing the reader an overview of argument. Thus Kenner first moves, at a clip of around two short pages per theme, across the following textual loci: Lily in ‘The Dead’ affecting the narrative voice that describes her; Uncle Charles himself; Gerty MacDowell in ‘Nausicaa’, supporting Kenner’s case about character and style. A pattern of exemplification seems solidly under way here, albeit not emphatically signalled. But Kenner then diverts to a discussion of two samples of bad writing from Joyce, into the insight that ‘Writing fiction, he played parts’, and hence to the development of Leopold Bloom—before three pages on Joyce’s play Exiles.28 For the remaining eleven pages—most of this chapter’s second half—Kenner finally sticks with Ulysses: from close scrutiny of the workings of the initial Bloom chapters to an account of ‘Eumaeus’ as the fulfilment of the Uncle Charles Principle.

26 Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 18. 27  Ibid., 17 (my italics). The reference is to the story ‘A Little Cloud’, in James Joyce, Dubliners ed. Margot Norris (New York: Norton, 2006), 57–70. 28  Ibid., 21.

96  Joseph brooker Standing back thus from the chapter, we can see that it does in fact have a certain structure of logical argument; but this is presented in an unconventional manner. The manner partly involves variations of speed. In certain paragraphs of this chapter, we can directly see Kenner at the patient work of close reading, as he follows a quotation from Joyce with his critical response: Here something has subtly happened. What commenced as Bloom’s list of mortuary variousness has insensibly become the narrator’s: ‘consumptive girls with little sparrow’s breasts’ seems too shapely a cadence to have sprung from Bloom’s mind. And sure enough, the tense has shifted from the monologue present to the narrative past: ‘All year round he prayed the same thing over them all’. . . . And: ‘Sleep. On Dignam now’.

A few lines later he is still at this work: And checking itself, this movement on reverting to irreverence is protected by our knowledge that Bloom is present, since what would be cynical coming from the author is commonsensical coming from Bloom. So Bloom and the narrator cooperate in rapidly flickering effects.29

Kenner’s practice here is more active than it was with ‘Eveline’. Where in that analysis he paraphrased and quoted with a sceptical air until his own reading emerged, here he can be seen intervening and describing the text’s work as he goes; identifying what he thinks are specific textual voices and drawing fine distinctions. ‘Here something has subtly happened’ is an indication that this is commentary rather than paraphrase: it offers explication, not reiteration. Yet the overall movement of the chapter is not slow. For one thing, the pace of turnover across materials is high. For another, the transitions between these materials are effected with minimum delay: it is difficult, in fact, to identify specific announcements of a shift to new material (as a sentence like ‘Let us now turn our attention to Ulysses’ would be). For a third, the movement within a given paragraph is typically rapid: Joyce plays two roles then, Bloom and the narrator. The narrator, who can put most things accurately in a word or two (cheerfully defying as he does so most normal canons of diction) affords an unobtrusive paradigm against which we gauge the resistance the same things present to Bloom’s mind. 29  Ibid., 28–9.

Slow revelations  97 Here the book appeals to a subliminal sense of ours, more powerful than our regard for canons of diction: that economy ought to be attainable, that somewhere, for everything that wants expressing, a single apt word exists like a name bestowed by Adam.30

This instance is intriguingly reflexive. Kenner is offering a potentially powerful insight into how much of Ulysses works, positing a dynamic contrast between the garrulousness of its prime character and the concision of its impersonal narrative voice. The claim could be stretched to thousands of words. Here it is made in under a hundred. Kenner may not have reflected that this paragraph says something about his own critical practice, which itself has a habit of seeking the leanest form of words available, even when that form mildly defies ‘normal canons of diction’. The tendency produces speed. Thus, in this chapter, these complete sentences: Translate that into any alien tongue you like. (15) Syntax maps a set of judgments about relatedness, and such judgments help define the people who make them. (18) Dreiser was never worse. (20) Syntax was a function of role: of character. (21) It is only plays that have no point of view within them. (24) In its very economy his monologue is verbose. (33) Kenner’s syntactical armoury has a place for the epigrammatic, whose ­compacted thought might be akin to the proposal of his greatest mentor Ezra Pound: that the ‘image’ was ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’.31 ‘Use no superfluous word’, Pound wrote, making an order from what Kenner in the passage above called a subliminal sense.32 The Imagist legacy is a relevant one for locating Kenner’s approach to style. Yet his shortest sentences coexist with longer ones, by whose slightly eccentric syntax the reader should be temporarily detained: ‘The illusion of dispassionate portrayal seems attended by an iridescence difficult to account for until we notice one person’s sense of things inconspicuously giving place to another’s.’33

30  Ibid., 33. 31  Quoted in Natan Zach, ‘Imagism and Vorticism’, in Malcolm Bradbury and James MacFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1976]), 234. 32  Quoted in Zach, ‘Imagism and Vorticism’, 231. 33 Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, 16.

98  Joseph brooker Kenner’s chapter thus moves with something of the economy that he identifies in Joyce himself, while dipping in and out of different sentence lengths and implying different speeds of reading. Analysis is going on, but the flow of thought from one instance to the next produces an effect as much akin to narrative as to criticism. Some of Kenner’s distinctiveness can be named this way: he is narrator as well as analyst. His practice of reading seems unusually close, but it also typically takes place as part of a movement of ideas across multiple objects of study and intellectual themes. He can dazzle with the speed of his sketches and transitions. Arguably, as with a conjurer, dazzling speed can conceal sleight of hand: some of his arguments would stand less firmly if presented with more plodding sobriety. Whatever the factual merit of Kenner’s numerous critical claims, he gained a uniquely influential place among ­readers of Joyce through the dynamism of his thought, and the dynamic writing that rendered it.

Cognitive Phases If any close reader of Joyce has been more celebrated than Kenner, it is the Swiss critic Fritz Senn (1928–). Senn’s work thus demands scrutiny as an alternative model, which partially echoes and partly diverges from Kenner’s. Senn and Kenner have repeatedly expressed admiration for each other’s work. They were contemporaries, who had much contact during the growth of the International Joyce Symposia that had been established by Senn and others in the late 1960s. In a 1987 retrospect Kenner would call Senn a model ‘for scrupulous awareness of what we do when we read, ideally in reenactment of what Joyce did when he wrote’.34 The reciprocity of author and critic indicated here will recur. Never an academic, Senn has proceeded via the local intervention of the seminar or essay rather than the full-length book. One essay of 1990, ‘Sequential Close-Ups in Joyce’s Ulysses’, gives a particularly strong impression of Senn’s mode of working.35 The essay’s premises are stated in its first lines: Events take place in a certain sequence, just as words are arranged in a sentence. In any narrative the sequence of words and that of corresponding events are sometimes congruent, but often are not.36 34 Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, xv. 35  The essay was first published in Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, ed. Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte (Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990), 252–64, but I refer here to its republication in Senn’s collection Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine O’Neill (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 97–110. 36 Senn, Inductive Scrutinies, 97.

Slow revelations  99 These statements are intelligent and carefully phrased, yet also in a sense basic. Senn himself immediately calls them ‘platitudes’. But their presence indicates something about his approach: a readiness to work earnestly from the ground up. This is in keeping with his self-descriptions elsewhere: as ‘too dumb [. . .] for theories’, a mere ‘provider of footnotes’ (xiv). With dry tautology Senn posits ‘basics’ as—if not more important then—‘more basic’ than intellectual superstructures, and expands: ‘Basics for me meant learning to read—continuing present tense’ (xv). The mood of his criticism involves never being too confident that one has transcended those ‘basics’. It is thus logical that he should commence an essay with statements of uncontroversial truth like ‘Events take place in a certain sequence’. One can only imagine Hugh Kenner doing this with a greater quotient of irony, presenting these statements not as necessary building blocks but as rather wearily self-evident. Kenner can sometimes start a discussion with an abstract declaration—thus for instance, in The Pound Era, ‘As language changes something happens to old poems, the range of whose words changes’—but that statement is hardly as self-evident as Senn’s: it is more a matter of riddle and intrigue.37 We see a simple difference between the two critics: Senn tends to abnegate knowledge while Kenner tends to assume and imply it. Senn’s essay examines the order in which Joyce places words, and the effect that this has on meaning and perception. He proposes to ‘subject a few word orders from Ulysses to elaborate commentary’, offering a ‘slow-motion reading’.38 Over a dozen pages he proceeds, as readers of Joyce often do, from an instance of early relative simplicity (a scene from ‘Dubliners’) upward through gradual greater complexity. His first sample sentence from Ulysses is from the first episode: ‘Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief.’39 Senn derives two pages of commentary from this. Three observations can be made in turn. First, translation is central to his critical practice here. To ‘pinpoint some of [the] oddity’ of Joyce’s sentence, Senn turns to the ways that translators have rendered it into French, Italian, and (two different versions of) German. If a prime oddity of the English sentence is the belated appearance of the handkerchief (‘at an uncommon remove [. . .] from its governing verbs’), the fact is highlighted by  the way the other languages are forced by their grammatical norms to place this noun differently. French, Senn shows, announces the handkerchief straight after the verb affecting it (‘le laissa tirer un mouchoir’). Reading the Italian, Senn notes that ‘Romance languages tend to put the noun before its 37  Ibid., 121.

38  Ibid., 98.

39  Ibid., 99.

100  Joseph brooker adjectives, so that the handkerchief is perceived before its properties’ (‘un fazzoletto sporco e gualcito’).40 A German translation, Senn finds, ‘splits the action up into two successive phases’ via a relative clause. In each case, though the translator’s work is ingenious, a small shift is perceptible from the effects of language that Joyce contrived. This comparative approach is deeply characteristic of Senn. One of his ­hallmarks is ‘reading as a foreigner’, or reading as translation: the heightened attention to words required by the translator provides a model for the properly attentive relation to Joyce’s language. In this case we can see that translation offers productive contrast: the difference between Joyce’s original and what a foreign translator has felt forced to make of it tells us something about the distinctiveness of the former. The specificity of Joyce’s decisions about syntax is, like the handkerchief, ‘held up on show’ more clearly by the sight of other writers making different decisions from precisely the same material. Senn’s ability to do this at all—to move between languages in this way—demonstrates an expertise not especially characteristic of Anglophone readers. It brings in train another body of expertise, in grammar, which makes up a significant part of Senn’s critical vocabulary here (‘The separation of a sub­or­din­ate clause from the main clause breaks the sentence into two distinct movements’).41 Senn’s prime aim in all this is to identify the mimetic work of style. If Joyce’s phrasings ‘go against the grain of English syntax’, the assumption is that this practice aims to communicate something more precisely. Thus, of the handkerchief sentence in English: ‘Joyce’s original sentence [. . .] is a slow revelation, a protracted, almost cruelly elongated, close-up of what an observer on the spot might have noticed, but mainly of what Stephen might have felt. The sentence, a psychograph, does not name, but re-enacts, and draws out his embarrassment and mortification’.42 Senn posits style as emulative: the delayed arrival of the word ‘handkerchief ’ represents the slight delay that an observer of the scene would experience before seeing it pulled from Stephen Dedalus’s pocket. Mimesis is thus of physical action, but also of psychological states: hence the coinage ‘psychograph’, offering an impromptu new name for the writing of the psychic. Neologism, like translation, is a signature of Senn’s critical idiom. His coinages—‘symphoric’, ‘provection’, ‘dislocution’—are often derived directly from classical etymology. They introduce at once a sense of fastidious precision (we need this new word because no extant word is quite

40  Ibid., 99.

41  Ibid., 99.

42  Ibid., 98, 99.

Slow revelations  101 the right one for the job) and mischief (the new word’s arrival has a slight comic effect, amid the seriousness of the regular idiom around it). In Senn’s treatment of the mimesis of the sentence we can see a secondary mimesis. His sequence ‘a slow revelation, a protracted, almost cruelly elong­ ated close-up’ is itself protracted. Critical discourse is following the lead of literary language, as again a page later: The protracted slow motion (the sentence almost automatically forces on us a slow reading pace) thus does more than scrupulously depict the act in motion: the sentence describes the curve of an affliction and humiliation; it brings out, almost painfully, Mulligan’s dumb-show action and malicious ostentation and Stephen’s helpless submission.43

Joyce’s writing is now ‘scrupulous’ (a Joycean word, as Senn knows, from the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of Dubliners, among other usages), specifically in its depiction of both outer and inner realities (‘the act in motion’ and ‘the curve of an affliction’).44 We may notice that what Senn said was his critical practice (‘slow-motion reading’) has here been transferred to the primary text itself: slow-motion reading has discerned ‘protracted slow motion’ in the sentence. Critical practice has found itself mirrored in its text, or perhaps more precisely the reverse: the Joycean text has driven Senn into a critical practice adequate to it, as it ‘forces’ a slow pace on the reader. Here is an unusually strong statement of a principle raised early in this essay: that while close reading might never be a bad thing, some texts, notably Joyce’s, might respond more fully to it or indeed demand it. Senn produces a reciprocity between text and reading, a sense that his own sentences are doing what he says Joyce’s does, ‘describing the curve’ of the primary text. In scrutinizing word order, Senn’s essay necessarily involves temporality. This case of close reading is one that unfolds in time, seeking to follow the equivalent unfolding of the primary text. One thing happens after another, as Senn’s first premise modestly insisted. Thus the handkerchief emerges at the end of the (English) sentence and hence the perception of the reader (and by mimetic extension, that of the character); hence Leopold Bloom’s perception of gulls in the Liffey is seen to emerge only after the initial description

43  Ibid., 100. 44 For ‘scrupulous meanness’ see James Joyce, Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1975), 83. See also Fritz Senn, ‘He Was Too Scrupulous Always: Joyce’s “The Sisters” ’, James Joyce Quarterly, 2.2 (Winter 1965), 66–72.

102  Joseph brooker ‘flapping strongly’ and then the location ‘between the gaunt quaywalls’. Senn again summarizes: The original [English] text makes Bloom pass through several cognitive phases from the perception of strong flapping to flapping and wheeling, then to something yet unclassified flapping and wheeling and finally to its identification as gulls – a gradual, groping recognition, a gradual act of apprehension.45

This is another virtuoso description of the ‘gradual, groping’ process of reading in time, as well as of Bloom’s perception of his surroundings. This element of temporality—of one thing after another—in Senn’s writing stands out as a feature of his brand of close reading. It would stand against, for instance, the totalizing perception implied by the theory of spatial form, for which the apprehension of the literary work’s unity predominates in value over the ‘gradual, groping’ encounter with its features in an act of comprehension that shifts over time, even the time of a single sentence.46 This temporal orientation Senn somewhat shares with Kenner, whose own version is articulated especially in a chapter of his book on Ulysses entitled ‘The Aesthetic of Delay’.47 Kenner shows here how the act of apprehension of Ulysses develops across the reading, and indeed rereading, of the novel: its ‘uncanny sense of reality’ emerges as ‘versions of the same event, versions different in wording and often in constituent facts—separated, moreover, by tens or hundreds of pages—reliably render one another substantial’.48 He provides examples—the lilacs in Mat Dillon’s garden, Bloom’s potato—of details which only become clear after the correlation of references hundreds of pages apart. Thus ‘no one comprehensive reading [of Ulysses] is thinkable’: the book’s complexity of interlocking details ‘mutat[es] each time it is reread, altering the very sense of early sentences as the import of later ones chances to come home’. In sum, ‘Joyce’s aesthetic of delay’ produces ‘one element now, one later’, and leaves ‘large orders of fact to be assembled late or another time or never’.49 Here Kenner directly concurs with Senn’s premise that words and events occur in sequence. His critical practice resembles Senn’s, but here at a macro level— considering echoes and connections across the whole book—rather than the

45 Senn, Inductive Scrutinies, 103. 46  For spatial form see Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 47  Hugh Kenner, Ulysses, revised edition (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 72–82. 48  Ibid., 75. 49  Ibid., 80, 81.

Slow revelations  103 micro level at which we have Senn’s ‘slow-motion’ reading working through an individual sentence. These two models of close reading thus share common ground. Their difference is in part one of tone and mood. Simply put, Kenner’s reading displays his critical powers while Senn’s enacts uncertainty. Senn’s self-declared state is one of ignorance or at least humility: ‘an autodidact—I still sometimes flaunt an amateur status’; ‘I simply avoid, like most animals, what I cannot cope with’; ‘I am scrutinizing minutiae, but I try to extrapolate and to generalize tentatively and with visible signals of reservation’. Readings could be mistaken, and communication is fallible: ‘Our points are always missed’. Senn’s tone is accordingly cautious and methodical—‘This essay’, he commences another piece, ‘is one of several attempts to present and characterize instances of postponed clarification: later passages throwing light on earlier ones’—where Kenner’s, we have seen, is boldly dynamic, an aesthetic of surprise.50 The distinction between the two could be likened to Samuel Beckett’s description of himself and James Joyce: ‘The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance’.51 But Senn’s brand of ignorance has been a unique source of enlightenment for Joyce’s readers.

Alternative Proximities This chapter has considered and compared two distinctive and influential models of the close reading of James Joyce’s work, as signal instances of the encounter between close reading and modernist literature. In both cases, we have seen that close reading also involves a mode of writing, with its own tone, character, and rhetoric. In conclusion, I wish to note more briefly two other possibilities for reading, which might indicate certain limits even to such important work as that of Kenner and Senn. The first involves history. For a large body of historicist criticism, close reading is not enough. The text cannot be understood just with reference to what is internal to it; it must be placed within informing historical contexts. In relation to the very story so influentially reframed by Kenner, a major instance is Katherine Mullin’s 2000 treatment of ‘Eveline’ in relation to emigration at the start of the twentieth century.52 Mullin’s substantial essay refers 50 Senn, Inductive Scrutinies, xiii, xviii, xvii, 75. 51  Samuel Beckett, quoted in New York Times, 5 May 1956; quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 772. 52 Katherine Mullin, ‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina: “Eveline” and the seductions of emigration propaganda’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172–200.

104  Joseph brooker to Kenner, but discusses ‘Eveline’ on quite different terms from his few pages. Mullin refers to other Irish Homestead stories for context; consults figures showing yearly Irish emigration to Argentina; cites nineteenth-century parliamentary papers on the topic; and relates the story to contemporary illustrated books warning of the ‘white slave trade’. Mullin’s departure from Kenner is made less on the basis of close reading than of additional information, producing a new thickness of historical texture. Kenner’s conclusion was that Frank was a mendacious opportunist; Mullin’s is more ambiguous, that Eveline is paralysed by competing forms of propaganda for and against emigration. Mullin is in turn taken up as a resource by Margot Norris, whose 2003 work on the ‘suspicious reading’ of Joyce in part follows Kenner’s example.53 In the present context, Norris’s reading is salient for involving no real dichotomy between the historical and the textual. She adduces the historical work of Mullin and others to offer a portrait of the kind of life limned by ‘Eveline’, the better to find its implication. Norris’s is a reading of Joyce enhanced by recent historical criticism. But it also relies fundamentally on close reading. Norris commences precisely with Kenner and the closeness of his reading practice— averring that his ‘brilliant’ work ‘turned [. . .] “Eveline” upside down by listening to a couple of commas’.54 Her own reading is thus respectful to Kenner’s, but not deferential. She follows him in her close attention to the primary text, but if anything her attention outdoes his. For instance, Kenner’s characterization of how Frank has charmed a naïve Eveline into romantic daydreams emerges as rather carelessly unsupported by Joyce’s text: a case, perhaps, of Kenner being led astray by his own rhetorical flair. As Norris shows, Eveline’s reflections on the matter in fact involve ‘thoughtful calculation and consideration’ rather than ‘infatuation’.55 Norris’s phrase here might describe her own work, which proceeds steadily and methodically, amassing quotations from the text, from other critics and from historical sources. Borrowing from Kenner’s claim that ‘Eveline’ holds a ‘hidden story’ (one visible only to his sceptical eye), Norris claims similarly to be seeking such a story, ‘hidden’ from the reader in that Joyce ‘[keeps] the reader in the dark [. . .] obliging the reader to draw inferences’. Yet her ‘suspicious reading’ outdoes Kenner’s in a surprising way: in effect by suspecting his suspicion, and emerging as less sceptical and readier to credit face value. 53  Norris’s reading of ‘Eveline’ is reproduced in her critical edition of Dubliners, which in its provision of contextual materials and recent criticism encourages a historicist approach to the work: see ‘The Perils of ‘Eveline’, in James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Margot Norris (New York: Norton, 2006), 283–98. 54  Ibid., 284. 55  Ibid., 292–3.

Slow revelations  105 The ‘hidden story’, she states, might actually correspond to the ‘overt narrative’: Frank might be a potential saviour after all.56 Norris’s reading closes with another surprising manoeuvre that again carries an echo of Kenner, while pointing in the opposite direction. She notes that ‘Eveline’ was written as Joyce himself was about to elope with Nora Barnacle, and thus hypothesizes that the story is empathetic with Nora’s own likely fears about her action. By extension, Joyce is once again cast as the original of Frank. But the implication of this is the reverse of Kenner’s: for Joyce, as Norris reminds us, did go through with his promise to Nora. Biography thus joins history and close reading to produce a new interpretive synthesis. If Joyce’s writing has been congenial to close reading, it has also proved congenial to the more recent development of genetic criticism. Joyce’s work has been a central site for the development of this major critical school which reconstructs the processes of authorship through drafts and notebooks. Michael Groden reminds us how many libraries and archives hold relevant material, including the National Library of Ireland as well as London’s British Library and numerous American universities.57 In 1978 Groden was one of the ­editorial team that produced the James Joyce Archive: a photographic record of Joyce’s manuscripts over sixty-three printed volumes, priced at $5,000. This publication, as Phillip  F.  Herring remarked in a 1981 review, potentially meant a radical shift in scholarly practice: Joyceans would no longer have to travel to snowbound libraries in Buffalo or Carbondale for a glimpse of one fragment of the development of Ulysses, but could review all extant material from their nearest university library. Yet Herring also remarked that the availability of the manuscript material had thus far had little effect on Joyce studies: whether due to the timidity of readers confronted with the sixty-three volumes, or the sense that such scholarship implied an investment in authorial intention to which theoretical trends in a post-structuralist age were uncongenial. The James Joyce Archive, Herring surmised, might have to wait for its time to come.58 Groden observed in 2007 that genetic criticism, as ‘an investigation of the processes through which a work came into being’, had in fact been ‘an active part of Joyce studies for over fifty years now’.59 A.  Walton Litz’s The Art of 56  Ibid., 284, 293. 57  Michael Groden, ‘Writing Ulysses’, in The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’, ed. Sean Latham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4–5. 58  Phillip Herring, Review of The James Archive, ed. Michael Groden, Hans Walter Gabler, David Hayman, A. Walton Litz, Danis Rose, James Joyce Quarterly, 19.1 (Fall 1981), 85–98. 59  Michael Groden, ‘Preface’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, ed. Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2007), viii.

106  Joseph brooker James Joyce (1961), Groden’s ‘Ulysses’ in Progress (1977), and David Hayman’s A First-Draft Version of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (1963) and The ‘Wake’ in Transit (1990) were major contributions to this enterprise. Yet it is true that genetic readings of Joyce have grown in prominence since the 1990s: a decade that Dirk Van Hulle cites as one of significant advance for this form of research.60 With Ulysses, one milestone is Luca Crispi’s extensive 2015 book on the construction of character.61 Genetic research has been still more prominent in the study of Finnegans Wake. In certain respects, such studies offer to supersede even such a reader as Kenner, who only scratched the surface of such work. The knowledge of how Joyce wrote may tell us more about what his writing means. For the last stage of the present enquiry, we can consider how this approach relates to the close reading of Joyce. Luca Crispi’s book consists primarily of case studies of incidents in the ­pre-history of Ulysses: events that happened to Leopold or Molly Bloom, in particular, prior to 16 June 1904. Crispi’s focus is on storytelling: how these background incidents that form our sense of character are narrated during Ulysses. Crispi’s quarry is the way that Joyce strategically formulated a sense, to be acquired by the reader, of extensive past history for his major characters. A given analysis may thus focus, for instance, on the Blooms’ first encounter at a party in 1887. Seeking out storytelling, Crispi notably becomes a storyteller himself. He necessarily proceeds by reciting the events of the incident in question: ‘The mention of Molly elicits Menton’s own memories of a flirtatious dance with her in Mat Dillon’s garden many years ago’, and so on. At the same time he is telling another parallel story, in which Joyce writes the book: thus ‘Joyce rewrote the whole scene on the facing (verso) page, even though he had heavily revised its basic facts several times’, and many similar descriptions of authorial activity.62 Crispi is aware that his study is working intricately with multiple storylines on different planes, and that one level of story (the Blooms’) is entirely determined by the twists and turns on another (Joyce’s shuffling of notes and rewriting of sentences). He indicates that another sequence is also involved: that of the reader of Ulysses, who encounters this material in a certain sequence and may forge connections. This was the temporal sequence that concerned Kenner and Senn.

60 Dirk Van Hulle, ‘Genetic Joyce criticism’, in James Joyce in Context, ed. John McCourt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 118. 61  Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in ‘Ulysses’: Becoming the Blooms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 62  Ibid., 149, 152.

Slow revelations  107 We may even observe that a further temporality is involved in Crispi’s work: the narration of his own research. His first sentence informs us that ‘Much like Ulysses, this book started off as something quite different from what it has become’: suggesting a mimetic relation between primary and secondary texts that echoes Fritz Senn’s but for new reasons. His first chapter talks of the process that brought it about: thus for instance ‘The breakthrough came when I started looking specifically at the various tales told of Leopold and Molly and how they evolved over the years and on many different extant documents.’63 Evidently the genetic criticism that Crispi practises, concerned with literary process over product, sometimes finds it logical to discourse on its own processes. Again like Senn and Kenner, but from a different basis, Crispi shows reading as occurring through time. That basis is new. Crispi’s corpus requires numerous auxiliary pages simply to list, and his appendices giving their chronology consume forty pages. The body of data under review here is quantitatively and qualitatively different from that used by other critics of Ulysses. It might well seem that genetic criticism returns us precisely to the road not taken by New Criticism sixty years earlier: ‘scholarship’. Yet in fact Crispi has not abjured the alternative path marked ‘interpretation’. He describes a ‘genetic critical approach’ as ‘an ef­fect­ive tool in the interpretation of [Joyce’s] works’, and explains that the new information made available allows ‘interpretative arguments about the larger context of the creative process’. In the present context it is notable how often Crispi describes his practice as ‘close critical readings’ or ‘close readings’.64 The practice of close reading has not been obliterated by the age of genetic criticism: in fact it appears to be renewed. Even since the publication of Crispi’s monograph, the prospects for genetic reading have shifted. In 2018 the James Joyce Digital Archive was published online. Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon assembled multiple drafts for each section of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and presented them in a format in which the reader could move rapidly from a given phase of composition to an earlier or later one.65 Thus for, say, the seventh episode of Ulysses, fifteen different texts are available, ten of which precede book publication and include multiple typescripts and proofs. The materials assembled by Rose and O’Hanlon are already familiar to expert genetic critics like Crispi, but the Digital Archive makes them more readily available to any reader in the world. It is now possible for almost any reader of Joyce to begin to make observations 63  Ibid., 1, 5. 64  Ibid., 24, 6, 8, 13, 15. 65  See http://www.jjda.ie/main/JJDA/JJDAhome.htm.

108  Joseph brooker and judgements about the details of the composition of his longest works. Once more, this means not the eclipse of close reading but more close reading than ever. This is partly because a greater number of texts are involved, so the sheer amount of reading matter is increased; partly because comparing drafts and stages of composition requires close attention. Generalization about, say, character, myth, allegory, or even politics has regularly featured in the history of Joyce studies, and has had its value; but observation at that level is simply not able to register the small differences that occur between levels of composition. Such analysis still requires articulation. A theme of this essay has been that to offer a reading also involves writing, and that Joyce’s critics have used diverse and distinctive rhetorics in undertaking this task and conveying their findings to readers. In Crispi’s case, we have seen, an interest in storytelling becomes multiple, as he alternately tells the story of the novel, the story of the novel’s composition, a version of the reader’s apprehension, and the tale of his own critical practice. The exorbitation of material in genetic criticism prompts an increase in narration on the part of the critic. The process can also be seen at work in genetic scholarship on Finnegans Wake. Such scholarship is still more transformative for the reading of the primary text because reference to an earlier level of the work—equivalent for instance to Hayman’s ‘first-draft version’ and now readily available on the Digital Archive—can clarify fundamental questions of content and syntax that more rarely arise with Ulysses. For a final example of how the close reading of Joyce’s texts is articulated, we can consider Finn Fordham’s critical study Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals (2007). Like Crispi’s, the book was produced before the systematic online publication of the developing text, but relies on an extensive body of printed drafts, which Fordham at the time of writing states are ‘relatively uncharted territory’.66 His presentation of the potential of genetic ana­lysis of Finnegans Wake proceeds primarily through four case studies from across the book, none of them taking more than five pages of the finished novel. The second of these studies concerns the origins of Anna Livia Plurabelle, a feminine figure identified with the river Liffey, across what amounts to two-thirds of a  page of the novel. This takes Fordham around twenty-one pages: a ratio of  primary to secondary text of around 1:30. By comparison, William York Tindall’s classic Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (1969) manages two glancing references to the same passage, and even Patrick  A.  McCarthy’s genetic treatment of the relevant chapter makes only the briefest of references 66  Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28.

Slow revelations  109 to it.67 This is to say that the scale of Fordham’s ana­lysis is at a level different from most critical discussion of prose: for this amount of primary material to prompt this much commentary is unusual. One reason for that is the density of Finnegans Wake itself. But a second is that the genetic approach expands the amount of material that bears remark, quantitatively multiplying the primary text, while also inviting commentary on the relations between different stages of textual production. Let us consider the nature of that commentary, as a final case study of genetic criticism as a form of the close reading of modernism. We can analyse Fordham’s commentary into a series of separate textual activities, which alternate and prompt one another. One is to tell the story told by Joyce’s book, simply explaining the events involved: a task that is ­generally rendered more imperative by the comparative obscurity of story in Finnegans Wake. Thus: ‘On the one hand here is a priest slaking his thirst at a stream, naturally enough; on the other here is a priest unable to restrain kissing a girl, partly because she is so “young” [...] the washerwoman refrains from taking sides, describing the priest as “bold” and the girl as “naughty”.’68 Noticeably, the nature of Finnegans Wake means that even such base storytelling becomes doubled: the elementary event cannot be boiled down to one, but must be registered as two parallel actions, both of which are suggested by the book’s polysemic language. Even so, such plain storytelling rarely lasts for long in Fordham’s analysis, as the critical method necessitates divergence into other modes. One kind of digression is into the history of the work’s publication, insofar as it affects the number of drafts produced and their timing. Thus: ‘A typescript was made, and sent to the printers around the end of July. A month or so later Joyce was sent a letter from the Calendar saying their printers were unwilling to prepare the piece for publication, and had stopped setting type for the galley proofs.’69 This is historical narrative: the consecutive statement of facts. It has a particular place in genetic criticism, as it explains the proliferation of text involved. We notice that this narrative is delivered in the past tense (as, for instance, similar events are relayed in Richard Ellmann’s standard biography), but a third mode takes the present tense: the narration of the process of writing. Thus: ‘Joyce introduces a parenthesis that makes the hermit seem hypocritical’; ‘Joyce also adds the parenthetical phrase’; ‘Generally Joyce tightens the mutual knowledge of the characters in Finnegans 67  William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Thames and Hudson), 143–4, 148; Patrick A. McCarthy, ‘Making Herself Tidal: Chapter 1.8’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’, ed. Crispi and Slote, 165, 171. 68 Fordham, Lots of Fun, 67–8. 69  Ibid., 75.

110  Joseph brooker Wake’; ‘Joyce also changes “thirst” to “thurst” ’, and so on.70 Much more such material could be quoted: a substantial proportion of Fordham’s text is devoted to stating and narrating Joyce’s activity as a writer, adding to and altering drafts. As with Crispi, therefore, the critic is relaying at least two narratives in alternation. This still does not quite take us to analysis of the primary text itself. In such analysis, paraphrase is notably central. At its extreme, this includes the ef­fect­ ive translation of a passage of Wake language back into a plain English that loses much of its richness. Thus Joyce’s ‘By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, the reignbeau’s heavenarches arranged oranged her’ becomes Fordham’s ‘By the spring of Vaucluse, light playing in arched rainbows round her’, and Joyce’s ‘But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes’ becomes Fordham’s ‘the watery net is a complex web’.71 Both these examples are only part of more extended paraphrases; referring to his production of the first, Fordham uses the verb ‘reduce’, and the second he calls ‘hardly adequate’ to convey the meaning of the original. It is evident that such substantial paraphrase is a functional method, a means to an end, performed with an open declaration of its in­ad­ equacy to the primary text. Yet paraphrase remains curiously in­dis­pens­able as a method of discussing this text. The Wake’s frequent distance from standard English means that to comment on a piece of it often starts by restating its meaning in other words. Thus a washerwoman’s utterance that ‘with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!’ is explained: ‘She recalls sighs of disapproving despair at the filth she finds’, and the news that Anna Livia ‘ruz two feet hire in her aisne aestumation’ prompts the critic’s explanation: ‘with pride she swells, like a soufflé goes through a growth spurt, rises as a river in flood, or as it rises at its estuary (in Latin “aesturarium”) when the tide turns. The waters are stirred up and begin to undulate (in Latin “aestus”)’.72 To comment on this particular text is typically to start by rephrasing it. Paraphrase is also closely linked to the explication of specific sources: information not present in the primary text and introduced by the critic. Fordham’s parenthetical cit­ation of Latin words is a small example here. A little more extensively, the single word ‘ruz’ as a verb for Anna Livia’s action (essentially ‘rose’) is glossed: ‘The val de Ruz is a beautiful valley amongst the Swiss alps: the humble Liffey proudly moving up from the Wicklow hills towards some Alpine sublimity.’73 Here the introduction of a fact suggests an interpretation. This method is integral to Fordham’s discussion. To introduce a fact sometimes means to tell, briefly, another story, as in Fordham’s explication of the conjoined references to 70  Ibid., 73, 74, 75.

71  Ibid., 81, 85.

72  Ibid., 74, 80.

73  Ibid., 80.

Slow revelations  111 Ninon de L’Enclos and Manon Lescaut in Joyce’s ‘Nanon L’Escaut’, or the way that Joyce’s ‘Nance the Nixie’ prompts the summary of a story from the brothers Grimm.74 These critical practices might take place in any discussion of Finnegans Wake: a discussion that we can already see tends to differ in kind from analysis of Joyce’s earlier works. What marks this particular critical instance out is that the practice of paraphrase and explication is made in response to the narrative of composition, so that each phrase mentioned here can be observed entering the text at a particular stage. This protracted schedule of com­pos­ ition adds a principle to the critical activity, in that each time a new element is added it stands out from its older surroundings and, from the critic’s point of view, asks for interpretation. Fordham explicitly articulates this: ‘The points of revision mark points of tension where the pressures of [the author’s] rereading produce fault-lines in the material, which then has to divide or be erased to receive new material. One important value for the study of revision is precisely to bring to the reader’s perception these points of tension in the text that become concealed in the printed form.’75 This is a significant ex­plan­ ation of what the genetic method can add to criticism. A new criterion for critical attention is involved: revision implies that something noteworthy is happening. Fordham’s discussion of Chapter 1.8 of Finnegans Wake is almost wholly founded on this criterion: the traces of revision and addition direct its attention. The analysis retains a desire to describe: ‘Through poeticized orality, Joyce is aiming at sensuality in content and form’; ‘Joyce’s “mature” style has evolved, where he is no longer writing clear language that is subsequently darkened, but laying it down obscurely at its first level.’76 It retains, too, an openness to metaphor, a readiness to be influenced by the primary text: not least its riverine theme. Thus ‘Nance and Escaut are, moreover, rivers, with which Joyce is now flooding his text’, or ‘The question is formed on a cross-current flowing in from thirty pages earlier’.77 Fordham’s last line—‘It was so beautiful, playful, sensual: he couldn’t help himself ’ describes the process of Joyce’s repeated return to the text, disclosed by the genetic approach.78 It also pointedly quotes the text itself, which in its final form says of the tempted priest ‘He cuddle not help himself ’.79 The findings of genetic criticism can be difficult to communicate, but in this example they are summarized by a blending of primary and secondary texts of a kind that Kenner would have recognized. * 74  Ibid., 77–8. 78  Ibid., 86.

75  Ibid., 81. 76  Ibid., 70, 80. 77  Ibid., 78, 83. 79  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1975), 203.

112  Joseph brooker It is likely that much of the most important and persuasive work in Joyce studies in the near future will work with materials like that surveyed by Crispi and Fordham. Yet, as they show, the work of understanding will still require reading as well as the gathering of data. The attention to detail represented by Fritz Senn will continue to be a model for that labour. The use of history to enhance understanding, demonstrated by Mullin, Norris, and many others, will also remain an important part of the work of interpretation. And the vividness with which Kenner was able to turn close critical reading into a kind of imaginative literature might help it not only to express insights dynamically but to retain the attention of, in Kenner’s words, ‘more minds than one’. The corpus of textual material with which Joyce’s critics reckon has swollen in the twenty-first century, making new kinds of reading and critical discourse ne­ces­sary. Close reading may seem the most intuitive and old-fashioned thing to do with a text. Yet in the era of renewed and expanded modernist textual scholarship, a form of close reading will necessarily be central all over again.

5 When Did Close Reading Acquire a Bad Name? Jean-Michel Rabaté

My title tries to grapple with a question I often found myself wondering about. I have realized that I do no longer practise the type of close reading I used to enjoy performing, often for a whole hour at a stretch, in my literature seminars when I taught in France, which was in another life and another century. When, then, did I begin to feel uneasy about this standard pedagogical practice? Can it be blamed on the nefarious influence of theory, as so many scholars have argued? When I was a professor of English literature in France (I was a full professor at the university of Dijon between 1980 and 1992), it was taken for granted then that the study of literary texts—at whatever level we chose— would have to be based on close readings. In fact, a huge percentage of our preparation for any book or author we were assigned (we could rarely choose!) would go into making a careful selection of about ten or twelve excerpts, each about two pages or so, next to more general themes. Once we had the list of passages selected from a given novel, play, or poetic corpus, we just needed to add titles for two or three synthetic classes, and the syllabus would be done. Discussing two pages in an hour and half was considered a good average. Students would master the technical vocabulary of rhetoric, semiotics, and narratology so as to comply with a request that was taken as an agreed-upon task: only after they could analyse in great detail those few well-chosen ­passages would they feel confident to tackle general or thematic questions. One has to note that this practice is commonly called ‘explication de texte’ and eschews any formalist presuppositions or ideology that have tainted the use of ‘close reading’ after it had been heralded as a new method by American New Critics in the 1940s. When I started teaching in the US, I was asked to teach theory foremost, which, to be fair, I truly enjoyed. However, my new focus indeed changed the way I would teach literature. I had the impression that American students tended to be bored or reluctant when asked to go through the motions of Jean-Michel Rabaté, When Did Close Reading Acquire a Bad Name? In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jean-Michel Rabaté. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0006

114  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ slow, careful, myopically respectful protocols of reading, all the stylistic know-how and the acquired mannerisms required by French ‘explication de textes’, and preferred to reach a statement quickly; from that vantage-point, they would then go back to textual details, but only if they saw that this would make a point or reinforce an argument. It was harder for them to take close reading as a technique of reading that we would have agreed upon from the beginning. The theoretical focus would often entail finding a question, the famous ‘handle’, to have students interested. When that did not appear, one might, by default, rehash the sanctified trinity of class, gender, and race; then, if one was lucky, some textual details would emerge and come into shape. As Jane Gallop has stated in ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading’1—an excellent paper that she read at the 2006 MLA convention in Philadelphia—there was a sense that to be accepted by American literature departments, deconstruction had to relay New Criticism in the US. High theory would add a new library containing new and arcane references, like Heidegger, Hegel, and Nietzsche, to the battery of Romantic poems sprinkled with Eliot quotes favoured by the New Critics, but did not  change the practice of close reading. Deconstruction continued New Criticism by other means, it was felt, and both would be a-historical. The return to history that marked the late 1980s implied a rejection of the model of close reading taken as a given. Theory cannot be taken to task as if it had been always a unified field. On the one hand, theory, in so far as it has been more philosophical in tone and methodology, insisted on providing justifications for the practice of close reading; and in fact, as we know from the history of philosophy, at least to Plato’s dialogues, we witness conflicted close readings of poems or other texts, as one sees in Protagoras.2

The Malin Génie of Close Reading Can one blame French theory for a reluctance to engage with the minute styl­ is­tic details of a text? The renewal of modernist studies was brought about by the combination of two factors: a wish to take into account contemporary theory, and a wish to historicize the corpus systematically. Was there a tension there? In fact, the clash between myopic close reading that postpones asking 1  Jane Gallop, ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading’, in Profession 2007 (New York: Publication of the MLA Association, 2007), 181–6. 2  I take this dialogue as showing Plato’s rejection of literary criticism in opposition to the Sophists’ embracing of it in The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 101–9.

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  115 broad questions and the ample sweep of philosophical investigations had already taken place within canonical French theory. It can be dated not so much from the inception of deconstruction, with Derrida and de Man multiplying apparently ‘close readings’ to then make important claims about the text and literature, as from 1972, the year when Michel Foucault finally responded to Jacques Derrida’s essay on The History of Madness. This is my first example, and as it is relatively well known, I will only sketch its essential features. Foucault had published his monumental dissertation as Madness and Unreason: The History of Madness in the Classical Age in 1961. Two years later, at the Collège philosophique, his colleague and successor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Jacques Derrida, gave a long lecture on the book, not hesitating to question its entire method and its theoretical presuppositions. Derrida’s 1963 lecture was published in 1964, then collected in Writing and Difference. Foucault was six years older, a senior, and a mentor for Derrida. Derrida started out as a student at the ENS in 1952, whereas Foucault had entered the school in 1946. Foucault at first had not seemed to object to Derrida’s reading. Slowly, he realized how critical the reading had been. He lashed back at Derrida when he republished his madness book in 1972; Foucault added a vitriolic postface, ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire’, in which he responded to Derrida by rejecting the entire gesture of deconstruction, accusing it of being a misguided exercise of close reading. It culminated with the denunciation of a perceived link between Derrida’s critique and a French institutional practice, the old tradition of detailed philosophical commentary: I will not say that it is a sort of metaphysics, that it is metaphysics itself or its closure that is hidden beneath this ‘textualization’ of discursive practices. I’ll go much further: I’ll say that what can be seen quite visibly here is a little pedagogy, historically quite determined. A pedagogy that teaches students that there is nothing outside the text, but that within it, in its interstices, in its blank spots and its unspoken spaces, the reserve of origin reigns; that it is therefore not necessary to search elsewhere, for exactly here, to be sure not in the words but in the words as erasures, in their grid, the ‘meaning of being’ will be stated. A pedagogy that conversely gives to the voice of the teachers this unlimited sovereignty that allows them to re-read the text indefinitely.3

If we reopen the tense debate, along with the numerous commentaries penned by excellent commentators such as, for instance, Edward Said, Hélène Cixous, 3  Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 602.

116  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ Shoshana Felman, John Frow, Ann Wordsworth, Hayden White, Bernard Flynn, and Dalia Judovitz, what stands out is how hurt and wounded Foucault sounds. Derrida had been rather sweeping in his questioning of the project of a philosophical history of madness, a notion that by definition would escape from philosophy. Moreover he had been most wounding when he hinted that Foucault had been too hasty in his reading of what remains the staple text of French philosophy, Descartes’s Metaphysical Meditations. Indeed, Foucault had made short shrift of the fact that Descartes seems to get rid of the hypothesis of madness early in his text. For Foucault, this was a symptom of the historical exclusion of a madness that all of a sudden would be defined in the classical age as the exact opposite of reason. Derrida slyly pointed out that Foucault appeared much more Cartesian than he believed: he had repeated the same gesture of exclusion redoubling as an inclusion. Against what he presented as a glib historicist move, he argued that the mute otherness figured by madness could not be evacuated so fast. Descartes could not ward it off like that, and madness would haunt the meditations, first via the theme of sleep and dreams, then with the hypothesis of an evil genie intent on deceiving all human subjects and the philosopher. Indeed, Derrida’s patient analysis looks like an exercise in philosophical close reading accusing Foucault of having missed important textual items, but it does not boil down to that aspect. In fact, Derrida brings to bear his entire philosophical thesis on Foucault; this is the thesis that had been honed in previous readings of Husserl, and that would not spare Emmanuel Levinas or Georges Bataille, as readers of Writing and Difference will verify. One central insight is that one cannot just choose to escape from the language of philosophy, even if the aim is to talk about unreason, about the Other’s face, or about Nietzschean sovereignty marked by excess beyond meaning and dialectics. However, in his response, Foucault chose to take Derrida’s thesis as a close reading that had not come close enough to Descartes’s text. In more than twelve pages, Foucault tries to show Derrida that one should proceed even slower, to come even closer to the text and be much more cautious. Thus he points out slight discrepancies in Derrida’s reading, which at times uses the French version and at times the Latin original; he notices that Derrida makes a minor mistake about the punctuation of a paragraph. In fact, Foucault adopts Arthur Schopenhauer’s useful advice in The Art of Being Right: ‘A Faulty Proof Refutes His Whole Position’. It goes like this: ‘Should your opponent be in the right, but, luckily for your contention, choose a faulty proof, you can easily manage to refute it, and then claim that you have thus refuted his whole position. This is a trick which ought to be one of the first; it

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  117 is at bottom, an expedient by which an argumentum ad hominem is put ­forward as an argumentum ad rem’.4 To find a faulty proof, Foucault pretends to believe that Derrida aims at proving that the argument of dreams is more powerful than the theme of madness in the Meditations. Foucault adds that Derrida misses subtle rhetorical nuances in Descartes’s text, like not seeing clearly enough the distinction between legal and medical analyses. On top of that, Derrida would not have paid attention to the various modes in which subjectivity is inscribed in the Meditations. It is only at the end of eighteen dense pages of his essay that Foucault introduces what was the key element in Derrida’s argument, the crucial function played by the malin génie. As Foucault argues, Derrida denies that madness be relevant just when it was explicitly named only to introduce it when it is not named (p. 600). For Foucault, above all, the malin génie cannot be presented as the acme or hyperbolic culmination of madness—the subject facing this weird metaphysical hypothesis is whole, rational, meditative. This subject will be made all the more powerful when he overcomes hyperbolic doubt. The main argument is thus found in one page and a half; the rest had been a painful lesson in close reading. Foucault wants to teach a younger scholar who has had the impudence of giving a lesson to a mentor that close reading is a much more complex operation than he thought. This pedagogical rebuke is then followed by the passage that I have quoted, in which the denunciation of a certain Heideggerianism (Foucault hints that Derrida is looking for a ‘meaning of Being’ concealed in pure language) is blamed on Derrida’s notorious statement that Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (‘there is no outside-the-text’). Whereas in Of Grammatology, Derrida had probed the impossibility of setting limits to textuality by wondering where text ends and non-text begins, here Foucault’s accusative synthesis asserts that, for Derrida, there is no reality outside texts. This textualist position would entail that there is no need to look at ‘real’ documents and ‘real’ history. Derrida’s mastery would remain enclosed in an empty textual play, relishing its purely academic power—reigning over texts in the deployment of scholastic and sterile exercises, empty wordplays divorced from any reality. For Foucault on the other hand, texts would have to be situated in the world as discursive events and practices that will be understood when connected with the systems of power, whether political, sexual, or technological, and dependent upon the numerous archives attendant to these networks. Any close reading that 4  Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Being Right, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (1896; London: Dodo Press, 2008), 45.

118  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ ignores these determinations will remain not only mystified or deluded but also impotent, divorced from real consequences in a world that, as Marx deemed it, we do not only want to interpret but also to change. What can we learn from this momentous debate for modernist studies today, as they stand poised between radical historicism and the new ‘handles’ imported from philosophy, from queer studies, from film studies, and from visual studies, to name but a few?5 A first implication might be that close reading is to be avoided because it is a little game in which one can always beat one’s opponent by paying more attention to apparently marginal features of a text. This had been Plato’s main lesson at the end of Protagoras. As he concluded, it was better to leave intricate or specious word-games to the Sophists (even if Socrates proved to be expert at these games), for a true thinker will boldly explore truth as an outside of closed textuality. In fact, to avoid any such imputations, a perfect close reading would have to resort to tautology, the mere reiteration of the text read. Such a position was known by both Derrida and Foucault, both quite fond of quoting Jorge Luis Borges. Borges had debunked the very programme of close reading in a famous short story, a parable of the postmodern moment. ‘Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quixote’ presents a biased narrator who lists the works written by the fictional French writer, among which is a literal copy of chapters of Don Quixote. He takes one textual example (‘Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future counselor . . .’,)6 only to disparage the original, which, he says offers ‘mere rhetorical praise of history’. However, he heaps praise on Pierre Ménard’s literally identical passage, which, he argues opens new vistas: in that sentence, one sees how a contemporary of William James can assert that history is the foundation of reality: ‘Historical truth, for Ménard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.’7 Thus, close reading is impossible because it always betrays the desire to prove a certain thesis. No reader can read a text without an axe to grind, that is without having a certain thesis to demonstrate. Any reading, no matter how close or distant, will tend to deploy an implied philosophy of the text considered. To show this, I will take an example from Derrida, who I will argue is a more classical philosopher than a close reader who would have made a fetish of textuality. 5 Kyoo Lee’s excellent Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy and Bad (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013) compares the two readings and tries to go beyond them (see especially 84–115). 6  Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), 94. 7  Ibid., 94.

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  119

Not Coming ‘Close’ Enough to the Drive When Derrida commented on Freud’s text in the Postcard, his central thesis was to argue that Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Heidegger’s Being and Time share a similar programme: When Freud speaks of Todestrieb, Todesziel, Umwege zum Tode, and even of an ‘eigenen Todesweg des Organismus’, he is indeed pronouncing the law of lifedeath as the law of the proper. Life and death are opposed only in order to serve it. Beyond all oppositions, without any possible identification or synthesis, it is indeed a question of an economy of death, of a law of the proper (oikos, oikonomia) which governs the detour and indefatigably seeks the proper event, its own, proper propriation (Ereignis) rather than life and death.8

Here, Derrida presupposes a convergence, a structural homology, a common programme uniting Heidegger and Freud. Derrida has been biding his time as he was progressing slowly through Beyond the Pleasure Principle. But suddenly, he feels the urge to go much faster. This different rhythm makes him bypass the fact that the pages he has quoted state a thesis that Freud rejects explicitly. Indeed, if we go back to Freud’s text, we’ll see that once Freud has reached this point in his argument, he turns around and exclaims: ‘It cannot be so.’9 This is how the movement leading from the end of Chapter V to Chapter VI makes Freud multiply detours, aporias, and counter-examples. In those pages, Freud is trying to introduce the tricky and excessive concept of the death drive, a concept that is presented first almost surreptitiously. Its first appearance is in a parenthesis of the original text: ‘The opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then cease to hold’ (BPP, 53) and: ‘Der Gegensatz von Ich(Todes-)trieben und Sexual(Lebens) trieben würde dann entfallen . . ..’10 The collapsing of the two sides, life versus death, cannot be allowed any longer, which leads to this surprising assertion: ‘Let us turn back, then, to one of the assumptions that we have already made, with the exception that we shall be able to give it a categorical denial’ (BPP, 53 and JL, 253). The assumption that Freud is attacking from now on is the idea 8  Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 359. Hereafter cited as P. 9  Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 47. Hereafter cited as BPP. 10 Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Studienausgabe III, Psychologie des Unbewussten (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 253. Hereafter cited as JL.

120  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ that human life and nature as a whole would be moving inexorably to death. We tend to think that we are all destined to die from internal causes and that there is nothing to do about it. Such a thought is debunked by Freud who reasons by saying that this idea, illustrated by countless poets, is in fact a simple comfort: ‘Perhaps we have adopted the belief because there is some comfort in it. If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature’ (BPP, 53). In an effort to test the validity of this widespread belief about the in­escap­ abil­ ity of death, Freud finally comes to another conclusion. Following Weissmann, he reopens the biological debate about immortalism and contrasts the dying cells of any organism with an undying germ-plasm. Death becomes less ‘natural’ if it is seen as a later acquisition of organisms. Freud quotes Woodruff who had shown that some infusorians can, if placed in a refreshed environment that nourishes them, reproduce themselves by fission for more than 30,000 generations (BPP, 57). The focus of the discussion becomes that of ‘senescence’ versus ‘rejuvenation’. Besides, in cases when the solution has not been renewed and degeneration can be observed, this process can be reversed when two animalculae blend together; then they achieve an instant regeneration and avoid the degeneration that leads to death. It is in the context of such speculations that Freud asserts forcibly that he believes in a dualism of the drives, a principle that is constructive (aufbauend) and a principle that is ‘de-structive’ or ‘deconstructive’ (abbauend) (BPP, 59 and JL, 258). Earlier, Derrida had objected to such a translation; he criticized the eagerness of those who imported retroactively deconstructive themes in their translations of Marx and Nietzsche. He then grudgingly accepts that one might do so with Freud: ‘If one were to translate abbauen as “to deconstruct” in Beyond . . . perhaps one would get a glimpse of a necessary place of articulation between what is involved in the form of an aesthetic writing and what has interested me up to now under the heading of deconstruction’ (P, 268). This sentence comes from the introductory pages leading to a detailed close reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud’s text consists of less than eighty pages, while Derrida’s commentary is more than 150 pages long. Derrida discusses Freud’s debts to philosophy, his denial of any debt, more precisely. In that discussion, he mentions two main influences on Freud, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He notes then that even when Freud seems to agree with Schopenhauer, he nevertheless takes a ‘bold step forward’. And Derrida even quotes the text in German (P, 268) to describe Freud’s strategy; for him, indeed, the movement of Freud’s text is not circular but spherical, it does not come back to itself in a Hegelian manner. Freud’s text refuses to

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  121 follow a hermeneutic circle because its progression is marked by a series of detours: ‘It constructs-deconstructs itself according to an interminable detour (Umweg): that it describes “itself,” writes and unwrites’ (P, 269). All of these remarks, well observed and closely read by Derrida should entail that theses such as ‘death is the result or end of life’—whether they come from Schopenhauer or not—should not be attributed to Freud so glibly. Neither should the Nietzschean tag of the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’ apply to Freudian metapsychology. In those brilliant pages, Derrida even presents Freud as the devil, at least as the ‘devil’s advocate’. His devilish turns account for constant shifts between theory and autobiographical writing (P, 271). A hundred pages later, Derrida seems to have forgotten his methodological prudence just when he returns to the same passage. Now, he quickly identifies Freud with Schopenhauer and with Heidegger. Derrida may have feared that the equation between a Freudian deconstruction (Abbau) and the death drive could carry negative connotations, or he just appears all too eager to superpose Freud and Heidegger. However, an equation between ‘deconstruction’ and death would not bother Freud: having reached this point in his ‘speculation’, he realizes that he has come too close to the theory of Schopenhauer, whose philosophy presents death as the purpose of human life. We must read Freud with care: ‘We have unwittingly (unversehens, which means both “unexpectedly” and “without being fully aware” ’) steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s philosophy’ (BPP, 59 and JL, 259). This ‘unwittingly’ should be read closely—at least to avoid that ‘unwittingly’ we follow Freud’s earlier drift. But no, he backtracks at this juncture and suggests that one should not want to remain in a safe place that is also a dead end: ‘Let us make a bold attempt at another step forward’ (BPP, 60). This ‘bold’ step leads him to assume that libido or love can ‘rejuvenate’ c­ ertain cells. He notes that too much narcissism, seen here as the opposite of love for another being, can lead to death as proved by the uncontrolled reduplication of cells we find in cancer: cancer offers the paradox of a disease brought about by a refusal to die of certain cells, a process which ends up destroying the whole organism. We now understand better why the ego drive can be equated with death, while the sexual drive can be equated with a life-giving force. This is clearer in the original: ‘Wir sind ja vielmehr von einer scharfen Scheidung zwischen Ichtrieben = Todestrieben und Sexualtrieben = Lebenstrieben ­ausgegangen’11 (JL, 261). In the analysis that follows, Freud almost suggests 11  ‘Our argument had as its point of departure a sharp distinction between ego-instincts, which we equated with death-instincts, and sexual instincts, which we equated with life-instincts’ (BPP, 63).

122  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ that love or libido can cure cancer. The couple opposing the ego drive and the death drive is paralleled at a higher level with sexual drive and life. If we can see here the seeds of the dualism of Eros versus Thanatos, we should be aware—as Lacan was—that here, it is the Ego that is placed on the side of Thanatos. Developing Lacan’s reworking of the death drive, Slavoj Žižek seemed more attuned to the paradoxical nature of Freud’s thought. Žižek alludes to Lacan’s apparently paradoxical idea that the death drive provides the general form for all drives, and provides the example of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman: ‘Where is the death drive here? It precisely does not lie in their longing to die, to find peace in death: the death drive, on the contrary, is the very opposite of dying, it is a name for the “undead” eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.’ Another Wagnerian hero, Tristan, appears to be caught in a similar structure. In Act III, Tristan does not despair because of his fear of dying but because of his fear of losing Isolde: ‘what makes him so desperate is the fact that, without Isolde, he cannot die and is condemned to eternal longing—he anxiously awaits her arrival so that he can die. The prospect he dreads is not that of dying without Isolde (the standard complaint of a lover) but, rather, that of endless life without her.’12 What was exactly on Freud’s mind when he speculated so ‘boldly’ about death in the last chapters of Beyond the Pleasure Principle? Perhaps that noone would die if one could refuse to die. Such thinking turns tentative and paradoxical, so much so that one cannot assume that he develops a linear ­thesis. Freud posits on top of his metapsychology geared to enhance the power of love another level in the dialectics by opposing ‘obsolescence’ and ‘juvenescence’. He trusts ‘juvenescence’ fully, even though he may still look to Derrida as a ‘granddaddy’, and in this sense refuses to admit that the fate of individuals is bounded by an absolute Death that has replaced an absolute God. This is a thesis that Derrida, in spite of all the efforts at close reading he has put in his reading, will not have seen. The main lesson that I would like to draw from this analysis is that no patient close reading can avoid rushing along at some point, at least to make a point and prove a thesis. There cannot be an in­def­in­ite deferral of meaning in the most stubborn resistance to allegorization or exemplarity. This idea would apply to our reading of modernist texts: we have to pace their speed by constructing protocols of reading that specify whether just a few texts will be tapped by combined close readings, whether 12  Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 352.

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  123 we will rather rely on lists of surveyed examples in a sort of distant reading, or whether we plan to combine both. As the best Joyce scholars have shown, from Fritz Senn to Jacques Derrida, one word is often all we need: for Derrida, it boiled down to two letters, transformation of ‘was’ as in ‘He was’ into ‘war’ in the sentence from Finnegans Wake ‘He war’. The choice of such protocol should avoid simple misreadings or overly strong readings aiming at proving an opinionated idea. I will develop this in my last example, Alain Badiou’s reading of Beckett, that should interest us now because the reading was based on principles that were at the very opposite of those of deconstruction.

Badiou’s Rejection of the Linguistic Turn In so far as close reading is concerned, Badiou often moves against Derrida’s patient and slow readings—generally, Badiou tends to go quickly, straight to the heart of a statement, to condense a text’s meaning in a few numbered ax­ioms, or to synthesizing a position in a short sentence. For him, there is no reason not to paraphrase a literary text. This leads him to paraphrase and comment not only literary texts but translations, as we can see in his discussion of Beckett. When Badiou approached Beckett’s Worstward Ho, it was to make a number of strong philosophical statements about the difficult text. He compared the last section of the second trilogy with Heraclitus’ poetic ­maxims, with Plato’s Sophist, or with Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés. The essay Badiou devotes to the second trilogy in the Handbook of Inaesthetics defines it momentously as a ‘short philosophical treatise, as a treatment in shorthand of the question of being’.13 Badiou’s reading is both intensely abstract and philosophical, while managing to use almost only words, concepts, and phrases that are in Beckett’s text. Badiou broke down Worstward Ho into a sequence of theoretical propositions: (1) ‘On’ marks the imperative of saying, which is the first and only law of the text. (2) There is a pure being, a ‘there is’ is equated with the ‘void’ or with ‘dim’ in a systematic exercise in disappearance. (3) We are all inscribed in being as ‘dim’, as are the few characters of this fiction: the one of an old woman, the two of an old man and a child, 13 Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 80. Hereafter cited as OB.

124  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ the ‘three’ of a head or mind contemplating them. The universe is a ‘void’ peopled by ‘dim’ shades for ‘dimness’ is the condition of being. Whatever or whoever is inscribed in being is defined as that which can ‘worsen’. Existence is a constant ‘worsening’ brought about by language, since it is always possible to say ‘worse’ or ‘iller’ what has already been said rather badly. However, the worst that language is capable of can never let itself be captured by the absolutely nothing. (4) Thought is the recollection of (1) and (3), and is produced by a ‘head’ or a ‘skull’ in whose confines the old drama of the cogito is being replayed endlessly, for words ‘ooze’ all the time from them. (5) The exercises in ‘worsening’ are of three types, according to the three ‘shades’—they can bear on the one, they can bear on the two, and finally they can bear on the head or brain or skull. In all these exercises in worsening that all testify to the sovereignty of language, addition is equal to subtraction. (6) Worsening is a labour that demands courage, the courage of truth. Since there will be no termination of saying, this courage is founded upon a strong rapport between words and truth. (7) The ‘void’ is unworsenable as an absolute limit. The exercises in ­worsening aims at getting always closer to the void. The void can only be crossed in an event that remains unspeakable. (8) What has been gained by exercises in worsening is first a more rigorous definition of the two of love as the root of migration and change, and then a sense of joy and beauty that comes from the link posited between words and truth. Beauty surges when we understand that the path of words goes counter to the demand of thought. (9) Finally, at the end, on the last page, we go beyond the set-up linking being, existence, and thought and we witness something like the irruption of an event, which would be similar to the way a ‘constellation’ appears on the page and in the sky at the end of Un Coup de Dés. ‘Enough’ in the penultimate paragraph or stanza introduces a rupture with what precedes. The old woman has turned into a grave—but the imperative of language remains and all must begin again. Mallarmé, the French faun, has met halfway with Beckett the Irish insomniac (OB, 81–96). Here, the lesson is ethical: Beckett exemplifies the courage of a truth to which he testifies in his writings (OB, 96). Such courage derives from words themselves in so far as they keep an intimate link with truth. ‘The courage of

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  125 effort is always drawn out against its own destination. Let us call this the ­torsion of saying: the courage of the continuation of effort is drawn from words themselves, but from words taken against their genuine destination, which is to worsen’ (OB, 97). Badiou’s strategy is to remain as close as possible to the text and to quote the very terms provided by Beckett. Of course, they are then articulated and connected in a scheme developing consistent logical cat­egor­ies. His commentary’s length is the double of Beckett’s prose poem; it includes it almost entirely while incorporating it forcibly into his own philosophical system—a rare feat of close reading allied with a radical translation. Its conclusion is a beautiful, lyrical meditation on how the old woman turns into a tombstone with erased family names, and we then can splice Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés with Beckett’s strange text: a constellation has taken place because of the sudden death of the main character. The key concept for Badiou is that of an ‘event’ yet it is a most problematic idea when one wishes to identify its emergence in a text. Badiou assumes a progressive opening of Beckett’s text until it can accept the idea of an event rendered all but impossible in Watt: ‘Little by little—and not without hesitations and regrets—the work of Beckett will open itself up to chance, to accidents, to sudden modifications of the given, and thereby to the idea of happiness. The last words of Ill Seen Ill Said are indeed “Know Happiness” ’ (OB, 55). This leads him to see the emergence of the ‘event’ in the last page of Nohow On. There is a recapitulation of the parameters of existence followed by a sort of explosion. ‘But once the recapitulation is complete there brusquely occurs— in a moment introduced by “sudden”—a sort of distancing of this state to a limit position . . . there emerges, in a suddenness that amounts to a grace without concept, an overall configuration in which one will be able to say “nohow on”. Not an “on” ordained or prescribed to the shades, but simply “nohow on”—the “on” of saying reduced, or leastened, to the purity of its possible cessation’ (OB, 109–10). It is true that the penultimate paragraph seems to call up a sudden emergence of something: ‘Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dinmost din. Vasts apart. At bounds of doundless void. Whence no farther . . ..’14 But we can note that this is not the first time that Beckett uses ‘sudden’ (see ‘Next sudden gone the twain. Next sudden back’ (NO, 107). One could praise Badiou’s subtle rhetoric and his intertextual detour via Mallarmé to justify such a forced reading, no doubt brought about by his own 14  Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 128. Hereafter cited as NO.

126  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ philosophical problematic, and leave it at that, were it not that the followers of Badiou have taken very seriously his notion of such an extra-textual event that would somehow percolate into the text and leave a hole in it for the emergence of truth. This is what Andrew Gibson does when he identifies mod­ern­ ity with the event: ‘The event defines modernity.’15 Badiou insists on the paucity of events, like the French Revolution, Kant, Wordsworth. But why in a text like this one? Gibson first accepts Badiou’s reading of the last page of Worstward Ho but then retreats, hinting that Beckett might be evoking the ‘evenementiality of the event’. Beckett’s aporetics would correspond to producing and sustaining a consciousness of événementialité,16 as in Fizzles 3 in which Beckett would ‘hold the event at several removes’.17 Gibson talks of the Unnammable in those terms: ‘. . . the arduous fidelity of the Unnamable [. . .] is to événementialité, the event of the event’.18 This theme cannot be divorced from the fact that Badiou relied on the French translation by Edith Fournier to analyse Beckett’s text. Here is an example of the difficulties that she had to overcome: Worse less. By no stretch more. Worse for want of better less. Less best. No. Naught best. Best Worse. No. Not best worse. Naught not best worse. Less best worse. No. Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught. Never to naught brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unullable least. Say that best worse. With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.  (NO, 118) Pire moindre. Plus pas concevable. Pire à défaut d’un meilleur moindre. Le meilleur moindre. Non. Néant le meilleur. Le meilleur pire. Non. Pas le meilleur pire. Néant pas le meilleur pire. Moins meilleur pire. Non. Le moins. Le moins meilleur pire. Le moindre jamais ne peut être néant. Jamais au néant ne peut être ramené. Jamais par le néant annulé. Inannulable moindre. Dire ce meilleur pire. Avec des mots qui réduisent dire le moindre meilleur pire. A défaut du bien pis que pire. L’imminimisable moindre meilleur pire.19 (CAP, 41)

Badiou is in fact commenting on how Edith Fournier tried to solve problems brought about by differences between English and French syntax. The 15  Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 257. 16  Ibid., 287. 17  Ibid., 289. 18  Ibid., 197. 19  Samuel Beckett, Cap au Pire, trans. Edith Fournier (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991), 7. Hereafter cited as CAP.

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  127 progression of «bien/meilleur/mieux», or «mal/pire/le pis» is heavy in French. She is obliged to use ‘meilleur’ for the comparative and the superlative. There is no French equivalent for the couple of ‘aught’ and ‘naught’, a couple of terms that recurs in other texts by Beckett, as when he quotes Democritus stating: ‘Naught is more real than aught.’20 Thus it was inevitable that the translation of: ‘Never to naught brought. Never by naught be nulled’, as ‘Jamais au néant ne peut être ramené. Jamais par le néant annulé’, should call up Mallarmé’s conceptual vocabulary in A Throw of the Dice. In this sentence, the only way to avoid the Mallarmean suggestion would have been to render this as ‘Jamais à rien ramené. Jamais par rien annulé’ (which might still be a possibility). It is clear therefore that the references to Mallarmé that Badiou has picked up upon have been introduced by the translator. If Beckett has calculated it, he could have written ‘nothingness’ or used Mallarmean signifiers like «abolition» or «chance», words that never occur in Worstward Ho. The cultural grid generates a different sense of rhythm in the French ­version. The rhythm accelerates, suggesting a culmination or a sort of ending. Here is an example of translation that is close to the text but hinges around tricky equivalents for ‘stare’—always translated as ‘écarquillé’ and both ‘somehow’ and ‘nohow’ as ‘tant mal que pis’): ‘Somehow again and all in stare again. All at once as once. Better worse all. The three bowed down. The stare. The whole narrow void. No blurs’ (NO, 127). ‘Tant mal que pis encore et tout dans l’écarquillé encore. Tout d’un seul coup comme jadis. Mieux plus mal tout. Les trois courbés. L’écarquillé. Le vide étroit tout entier. Nulles taches brouillées’ (CAP, 60). The French meaning remains opaque, whereas the English is rather transparent. We have shifted from a phenomenology of perception— which on the whole analyses modes of appearance of dim objects to a seeing eye—to an ontology defining a whole universe peopled by distinct entities. The ontology can be called a negative ontology, for it evokes a negative sense of being. Here is another example: ‘Same stoop for all. Same vasts apart. Such last state. Latest state. Till somehow less in vain. Worse in vain. All gnawing to be naught. Never to be naught’ (NO, 127). ‘Même inclinaison pour tous. Mêmes vastitudes de distance. Même état dernier. Dernier en date. Jusqu’à tant mal que pis moindre en vain. Pire en vain. Dévore l’envie d’être néant. Néant jamais ne se peut dire’ (CAP, 61). Beckett plays poetically on the echoes or rhymes linking ‘naught’ and ‘gnawing’, which is almost impossible to translate into French: ‘Gnawing to be gone. Less no good. Worse no good. Only one good. Gone. Gone for good. Till 20  See Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (London: Calder, 1983), 113.

128  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ then gnaw on. All gnaw on. To be gone’ (NO, 125). The meaning seems to be that ‘gnaw’ is about eating and making disappear a corpse, for instance, while ‘good’ means both «for good» and a positive value. Fournier is forced to compensate and over-translate: ‘Dévore l’envie d’avoir disparu. Moins n’est nul remède. Plus mal n’est nul remède. Un seul remède. Disparaître. Disparaître pour de bon. Jusqu’alors dévore encore. Tout dévore encore. De l’envie d’avoir disparu’ (CAP, 55). The semantic drift has affected all subjects: ‘All gnawing to be naught. Never to be naught’ already quoted bears on the «three» of the «skull». When Fournier writes: ‘Néant jamais ne se peut dire’, her paraphrase already triggers the neo-Sartrian or Mallarmean idea that Nothingness is a limit imposed upon an imperative of saying. If one can show that the parallel with Mallarmé is a pure effect of the translation, can we say the same about the magical ‘event’ that would signal the ending? Here, Badiou’s forced reading does not depend upon the French translation. As we have seen, he chose to read «sudden» as an absolute and not as the consequence of serial variation. «Sudden» would herald the irruption of a brisk metamorphosis and testify to a deep rupture. Even if Badiou adds that «sudden» is «without any movement», he does not budge from his argument that the text ends as Mallarmé does, that is with fireworks in the night sky, in A Throw of the Dice . . . In fact, when we discover the word ‘sudden’ in the penultimate paragraph, it echoes a previous series of thirteen mentions of «sudden». In French, ‘Assez’ opens the fragment and it, too, functions as a self-quotation: ‘Raté le nul visage. Ratées les nulles mains. Le nul–. Assez. Peste soit du raté’ (CAP, 26). The ‘nul’, seemly coming from Mallarmé, in fact renders a simple ‘no’ here: ‘The no face bad. –The no –hands bad. The noenough–. A pox on bad’ (NO, 111). Once more, we verify that the echoes from Mallarmé have been added by the translator. What can we deduce about the ‘event’? In fact, the only event that can be ascertained is the end of the text. The ending evokes an old woman stooped on a tombstone and meditating on the skulls of the dead: ‘Same stoop for all’ (NO, 127). She can witness that these skulls have not disappeared: ‘So skull not go. What left of skull not go. Into its still the hole. Into what left of soft. From out what little left’ (NO, 128). This may be a more banal or trite image than Mallarmé’s constellation—it is a somewhat kitschy evocation of a memento mori, at any rate far from the evocation of an event, whether in Badiou’s meaning or in the current use. Our close reading of Badiou’s close reading concludes that the effects of the French translation have been decisive: they constitute a grid, a cultural grille, as Foucault would say, but other aspects nonetheless derive from the

When did close reading acquire a bad name?  129 im­port­ation of Badiou’s own preoccupations. The curious misreading at the end is produced by the combination of a Mallarmean style and an ontologizing problematics that has projected retroactively Badiou’s metaphysical categories on Beckett’s text. Beckett’s prose poem will have been translated twice, once as a French poem of the twentieth century in a literary landscape where René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Jacques Roubaud relay Mallarmé, and then as an exercise in testing and developing Badiou’s idioms. Have we read a text as closely as possible or have we translated it? If the ‘evenementiality of the event’ supposed by Badiou falls back into language, Worstward Ho means words, words, ever more words. Can we copy them at least if we wish to avoid translating them? As we saw earlier, Borges’s Pierre Ménard has a point when he stresses that history provides a foundation for reality, but he may be misguided when he concludes that the only thing remaining to be done is to copy Don Quixote literally. Even that gesture proves either excessive or insufficient. No reading can be close enough or distant enough. It is the positioning of the reader, which may well be called an ethical positioning, that determines the issue. Roland Barthes had perceived this well in his last seminars, particularly in How To Live Together, in which he calls for a new philology founded upon a Nietzschean ethics of distance: ‘Distance as value. [. . .] Nietzsche makes ­distance a strong value—a rare value. [. . .] Here we’d rediscover the value I’ve been gradually trying to define under the name of “tact” (a somewhat provocative word nowadays). Tact would mean: distance and respect.’21 One can thus remain close to the text by taking a huge distance, as Badiou does, but one should heed certain conditions of ethical respect for the text. These may not be respected if we decide to discuss a translated text. Is it truly ‘ethical’ or maybe ‘offhand’ to discuss a text in a translation? On the other hand, the extreme closeness evinced by Derrida’s readings can lead to severe omissions or selective distortions. One might conclude that any reading, whether close or distant, presupposes that one defines not only its ‘plane of immanence’, as Deleuze would argue, but also our proximity to it. A plane of immanence will determine not only what the substance of the text is but suggest ways of inhabiting it or relating to it. This plane of immanence is both a plane of consistency, in which a text appears as this singular text and not another, and a plane of proxemics or strategic positioning thanks to which we can engage as ‘boldly’ as we want 21  Roland Barthes, How To Live Together, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 132.

130  JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ with the senses of texts, letting them resound in so far as they address my body and my affects. What matters then is to define a network of forces in which ethical relations of distance and proximity are caught up. We will be reminded to think both ‘boldly’ and ‘with tact’ when we choose how closely or distantly to read.22

22 I have tried to develop this in The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).

6 Queer Surrealism Jesse Matz

Does the inaugural special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly include a close reading of The Waste Land? The special issue, ‘Postposttransexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies’, compiles short articles on keyword topics from ‘abjection’ to ‘X-jendā’, from ‘transgender’ itself to a whole array of topics—including ‘perfume’. Lucas Crawford’s inspired entry on this subject aims to make it the basis for a shift away from a  sight-centred approach to gender difference. Olfactory norms, too, are artificial, and so they are open to change, which we might pursue with a view toward (or rather, by sniffing out) alternative expressions of differential embodiment. We might ‘reclaim bodily decadence as a transing art of gender’ by rethinking the artifice of smell;1 for example, by rereading T.  S.  Eliot’s ‘forceful association of perfume with wasteful confusion’ in The Waste Land. Crawford quotes Eliot: In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours.

A reading follows, in which Crawford notes the ‘admonishment’ in Eliot’s observation of a wastefully open vial of perfume; Eliot’s apparent disapproval of the ‘genderqueer aesthetic’ of the vial itself; and his worry about the way perfume here ‘drown[s] the habits of others’ in diverse forms of trouble. Crawford does not reject Eliot’s olfactory vision, however, instead ‘reclaiming rather than refuting Eliot’s judgments’. This reclamation becomes the way for us to ‘acknowledge the artifice of olfactory norms and try to change them’. What kind of reading is this? Is it a close one? Crawford does engage with diction, tone, and other matters of formal detail and he reads deeply in order 1  Lucas Crawford, ‘Perfume’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1.1–2 (May 2014), 151. Jesse Matz, Queer Surrealism In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jesse Matz. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0007

134  Jesse matz to question Eliot’s surface meaning, perhaps to read against the grain. But he goes with the grain as well, recuperating Eliot’s imagery, and he comes to The Waste Land with a plan in mind—a specific objective. That is, the reading is not any total effort to give the passage full and close attention but rather is selective and partial. Then again there’s no interest in what the poem meant historically or how context might condition its terms. The act of reclamation suggests an alternative historical contingency, a linkage to the demands of our moment, and therefore not the kind of contextual elaboration often seen to counteract close reading. Diverse in its motives and approaches, Crawford’s reading of The Waste Land does not really fit any interpretive model. And yet it is not at all unusual in its interpretive approach. This reading’s heterodoxy is really the norm, despite appearances, because most actual criticism rightly ends up in this state of diversity. The modern history of schools and trends in literary criticism and theory has rarely been one of pure adherence. Although the major schools of criticism and theory have specified certain approaches to reading, actual readers have tended to do whatever it takes to reach goals rarely determined entirely by any one of these schools. Goals have rarely been purely programmatic (to deconstruct; to historicize) but rather more loosely her­men­eut­ic­al and more effectively pragmatic, with the result that readings have been heterogeneous in their methods. What has guided them, as in the case of Crawford’s use for The Waste Land, is a rhetorical relationship between critic, text, and audience, which has its own varying degrees of closeness and distance, surface and depth. But this pragmatic structure for the critical act is precisely what makes Crawford’s very political, purposively recuperative reading a close one. His distance from Eliot gives way to proximity not because Crawford wishes fully or truly to inhabit Eliot’s text but because he has a use for it. The successive critical schools of the last decades have typically been correctives, not replacing but supplementing each other and, thus, becoming options available to readers of all kinds. The options have floated free of their school origination, not because they have been vulgarized or debased but because the goals of these schools have been compatible with each other and with others. This corrective compatibility has been a wonderful benefit to criticism, if also a problem for purists, and something to elide in present-day efforts to reclaim some of the cultural capital enjoyed, however briefly, by the schools of the past. Although it has been years since anyone could believe that any school or theoretical program had total authority over the critical act, some theorists have recently tried for it, but with the inevitable need to gloss over the heterodoxy even they must allow. It doesn’t take much close reading

Queer surrealism  135 to find evidence, for example, of the need for closeness despite distance in Franco Moretti’s program (his ultimate admission that someone will have to do the closer reading necessary to typify texts and thereby prepare them for more distant grouping, his allowance for ‘trees’ as well as ‘waves’ and the ‘div­ision of labor’ between them), or the need for deeper contingency in the practice of surface reading promoted by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus.2 Near the end of ‘Surface Reading’, Best and Marcus admit that ‘undistorted, complete descriptions’ of literary texts may be undermined by the fact that ‘our responses are often unconscious and unknowable’.3 This problem of secret motives is indeed a major challenge to their argument that whatever we do when we read texts, we should not worry too much about ideological demystification, but Best and Marcus do not then go on to explain how this problem might be resolved. ‘Without fully answering that question, we believe that even if we cannot exhaustively explain what causes our responses, we can strive to describe them accurately’: not fully answering the question in this way is in fact raising again the question of ideological demystification, since to strive toward accurate description even minimally aware of what causes our responses is to reintroduce the very likely possibility that that cause has something to do with what has produced the text itself and is therefore un­avail­able to simple description. Once again, stress upon a particular approach to reading elides what makes it a part of a process that includes even its putative opposite—in this case, the ideological demystification that surface reading would disallow. More specifically, Best and Marcus gloss over what, if anything, actually does unify the interpretive act: its pragmatic objective. ‘What causes our responses’ is not only a question that needs a fuller answer but one that defines the practice of reading, insofar as that cause is, at least in the first instance, our cause—our motivation. A reading that attends to the surface or that tries for demystification is distant or close depending on what it aims to achieve. To say so is not to fall back upon a vulgar pragmatism but rather to recognize, again, the sheer impossibility of any critical engagement not determined by the circumstances of what Best and Marcus term ‘our subjectivity’.4 When they call for a ‘true openness to all the potentials made available by texts’ as a ‘prerequisite to an attentiveness that does not reduce them to an instrumental means to an end’, they imagine an unlikely kind of presence of 2  Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2000), 67–8. 3  Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108.1 (Fall 2009), 18. 4  Ibid., 18.

136  Jesse matz the text itself to a pure reader, something to be questioned not just in the usual way but because it takes a needlessly negative view of instrumentality.5 Why shouldn’t texts be means to ends? How could they not be? These are questions that come up as soon as anyone starts thinking about how ‘openness to all the potentials made available by texts’—the naïve form of close reading taught mainly to undergraduates—would actually work. Answers to these questions must always remind us that we come to any text with ob­ject­ives of some kind, and that these objectives instrumentalize the text at least in such a way as to make it part of some contingent project. And why not? Even if pure openness to texts themselves would be an interpretive good, it would rarely be the occasion for any actual reading. Or rather, it could only be the occasion for an actual reading by someone whose justification as a reader is a given, and this is a possibility that haunts the special issue of Representations in which Best, Marcus, and their contributors perform their authority in this regard. But Best and Marcus do allow for this kind of interpretive impurity and the possibility that the instrumental contingency of interpretive projects might justify something other than open attentiveness. Close reading of a less naïve kind—the kind that does allow for a use for texts, a reason for reading—is the focus for their introductory remarks about one special-issue contributor, Margaret Cohen, whose work proves that ‘placing a text in its discursive contexts can illuminate textual features that are obvious but which critics have overlooked’.6 Cohen fruitfully combines contextual and surface reading, it seems, because she understands that the surface of a text is largely a function of what surfaces surround it, ‘on the same plane or surface’ as the details of the text itself. Best and Marcus do not focus on the instrumentality involved in so placing a text—the fact that this placement would have to be motivated by something other than a wish for the truest possible openness to that text— but here they do acknowledge the better combination of practices that not only produce fruitful reading but must always be in play and therefore ought to be acknowledged. It is this combination, too, that is at work in Crawford’s reading of Eliot, which is all about choosing discursive contexts through which a text’s surface might at once be true to the text and useful to the interpreter. Surface reading becomes possible as a legitimate practice beyond the privilege of presence to the text itself when it has this contingent motive, this acknowledged con­text­ ual­ity, which does not block the text’s surface or prevent close reading but rather shows what is to be read and why. Something like this contextualized, 5  Ibid., 16.

6  Ibid., 7.

Queer surrealism  137 pragmatic mode of description has also been recognized by other theorists recently searching for some new way to pursue reading that is ‘close but not deep’ and that goes ‘with the grain’: for example, Heather Love in her celebration of Toni Morrison’s relocation of the authority of the ‘privileged messenger’— the authority of the traditional close reader—to Morrison’s own vital project; and Timothy Bewes’s interest in the ‘optical unconscious’ of the literary text that demands that we ‘reinsert the work into the moment of our reading of it’.7 These interventions both reject depth interpretation in favour of an agreeable kind of description conducted according to the instrumentality of present purposes. The present purposes motivating Lucas Crawford’s reading of The Waste Land are determined in part by the special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly and, in turn, by transgender reclamation. Reclamation might seem to disallow close reading, but in fact it justifies, energizes, and guides it, ensuring validity and clarifying what principles determine interpretation that would otherwise be at once suspect and aimless. The fantasy that close reading can and should be some purer and more total encounter with the text itself is usefully dispelled by a reading that achieves its closeness precisely because it has a specific need for proximity with this particular text. Of course, that need might make a reading blind to things that do not suit its purposes, but this blindness must always be a factor even in the purest of close readings. Moreover, a specific need that has been made explicit has the virtue of calling indirect attention to a reading’s blind spots. And so the transformation of Eliot’s text from a panicked early twentieth-century moment of non-specific disorientation to a proto-trans opportunity to celebrate bodily decadence— an act related to what Crawford elsewhere calls ‘aesthetic transgendering’—is not a violation of the text itself but a valid use for it, an insight into the text itself sharpened by a sense of discursive opportunity.8 Is it possible to read The Waste Land more generally in this way, as a prototrans record of a form of insight enabled perspectivally and seen pragmatically? For of course the central figure of the poem is Tiresias, whose complex and 7 Heather Love, ‘Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History, 41.2 (Spring 2010), 383, 387; Timothy Bewes, ‘Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism’, Differences, 21.3 (2010), 17, 24. 8  See Crawford’s work on the High Line Park in New York City, which argues that the reception of the park has positioned transgender as ‘the opposite of life itself ’, and, ‘motivated by the injustice of this juxtaposition, undertakes its own aesthetic transgendering of the High Line by mixing architectural analysis of several of the park’s key design elements, my own poetry, and autoethnographic material, each of which draw from my own time on the High Line . . . and from my transgender experience’ (‘A Transgender Poetics of the High Line Park’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1.4 [November 2014], 483).

138  Jesse matz questionable relation to trans experience might now encourage a new close perception of ‘the substance of the poem’.9 How should we read Tiresias now that we might reread them as a transgender figure—now that one present use for that figuration could enable a new reading of the poem’s ‘substance’?10 Is the reclaimed-trans Tiresias not an appropriate object of close reading, because this Tiresias would be reclaimed from the text, or must we not instead simply admit that any close reading must depend on the sort of contextual motive this Tiresias invites us to bring to bear on the poem thusly reclaimed? Such questions gain in complexity when it becomes clear that no historical incompatibility need invalidate this approach to reading The Waste Land— when we recognize the relevance here of Cohen’s belief that shifting discursive contexts should shape new close readings. For there was a relevant discourse available to Eliot’s contemporary readers, and it now enables a reading practice that could well have been in play then—that would have been in play, if the practice of reading deeply circa 1922 had not been guided solely by its own unacknowledged ideal of ‘true openness’. Eliot’s Tiresias had a direct contextual counterpart in the central figure of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les mamelles de Tirésias, the surrealist play first performed in 1917. The larger context created by surrealist sexuality throws into higher relief the complexity of Eliot’s figure, making legible what Eliot’s contemporaries would not have read into The Waste Land. This is the interpretive framework we might loosely call queer surrealism.11 Queer surrealism is the causal context that now en­ables us to read, as Tiresias does, the substance of The Waste Land, and to reclaim this figure in the process. * Queer surrealism is what asserts the originary queerness of the surrealist pursuit of the mind’s absolute freedom, what finds a sexual basis for surreality’s resolution of dream and reality. If surrealism rejected the prohibition against ‘truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices’, it had much in 9 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 78n218. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 10  The transgender Tiresias certainly seems at least in one way preferable to the ‘hermaphroditic’ or ‘freakish hybrid’ one, since Tiresias was expressly transformed in order to inhabit the different sexes’ different points of view (Tim Dean, ‘T. S. Eliot, Famous Clairvoyante’, in Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, ed. Cassandra Laity and Nancy K. Gish [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 59). But of course Tiresias has a decisively distant, figural relationship to the realities of transgender lives and bodies today, as well as an equally important relationship to bisexual and other forms of desire and identity (see my discussion of Garber below). 11  I say queer surrealism not to subsume within queerness the transgender implications of the figure of Tiresias but rather to identify a broader interpretive framework also able to include Tiresias’s historical non-transgender implications, as well as resistance to Eliot’s depiction of gender.

Queer surrealism  139 common with queer desires and identities and the ways they could free thought from conventional reason and morality.12 The aim ‘to explore and express systematically . . . the forbidden zones of the human mind’ in such a way as to do away with the ‘old antinomies’ is one shared in common by sur­real­ism and queerness, and, more than that, most powerfully enabled by the forms of desire these two categories aim to transform.13 Freedom in general but more specifically unbounded powers of perception and thought are what make surrealism queer (and vice versa) when the goal is ‘the perspective of several lives lived at once’, what Breton described (via Paul Reverdy) as mental creations ‘born . . . from a juxtaposition of two more or less distinct realities’.14 That is, if surrealism is a subversive mode that aims to free consciousness from the false constraints of reason, logic, and cultural norms; if it seeks a ‘total liberation of the mind’ through recourse to the unconscious and the automatic, to dreams, primitive urges, and fantasy which, transforming reality, create the possibilities of a super-reality, then queerness is essential to it because its versions of ­gender and desire are the proving ground for free perception.15 If ‘desire is the great force’, as Apollinaire claimed it was, and if unconventional desire was the starting point from which ‘the surrealists embarked upon their dream of a complete overhaul of human understanding’, the surrealists began in queerness, and queerness had an early revolutionary cultural expression in surrealist aesthetics.16 This reciprocity is a cultural context that emerges in hindsight but is no less valid as a framework for in­ter­pret­ation. Indeed, it suggests that such figures as the modernist Tiresias had to await a later historical moment in order to become legible to interpretation.17 This context is similar to but different from that which Marjorie Garber brought to bear on ‘the secret of Tiresias’s in her 1995 book on bisexuality.18 Garber explores the connection between the appearances of Tiresias in Eliot and Apollinaire as well as the implications (epistemological and erotic) of this 12  André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972),10, 26. 13 Suzanne Césaire, ‘Surrealism and Us’, in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 489. 14  Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 3, 20. 15  Louis Aragon et al., ‘Declaration of January 27, 1925’, in Manifesto, 450. 16  Annie Le Brun, ‘Desire – A Surrealist “Invention” ’, in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 300, 308. 17  In making this claim I am largely reframing what has long been known about the ‘omnipotence of desire’ for the surrealists as well as their interest in forms of desire disabling to hegemonic rationality (David Lomas, ‘The Omnipotence of Desire: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and Hysteria’, in Mundy, 55). See Mundy, ‘Letters of Desire’ (in Mundy, 11–53), as well as many of the essays in her Surrealism: Desire Unbound, for a useful overview. 18  Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 153.

140  Jesse matz shared figure more generally.19 Garber surveys the many versions of Tiresias that have claimed for this figure a special form of knowing. Writers and t­ hinkers from Ovid to Lacan have engaged with the ways Tiresias is ‘presumed to know’ due to a direct relation to sexual difference.20 Garber identifies the crucial question when she concludes, in reference to Lacan, that ‘what Tiresias knew was that bisexual knowledge is analytical knowledge’—that Tiresias across the ages has been a figure through whom to engage with the chance for reclamation of this kind of insight.21 As one ‘who knows about men’s and women’s pleasure’ and is therefore also ‘the wise old man who can see into the future’, Tiresias figures how we might understand ‘wisdom’ to be an experiential consequence of gender transition.22 Garber also notes that Tiresias is a ‘shape-shifter’ in cultural history, dependent upon the frames for sex, gender, and sexuality dominant in any given moment.23 And this observation becomes an invitation for us to ask what becomes of Tiresias if this figure’s gender solicits a wish to make its gender more definitive than its bisexuality. What comes into critical view, and what sort of reading is motivated, by pressing contemporary interests in theorizing trans phenomenology specifically? More specifically, how does the trans context lend new interpretive relevance to what Eliot and Apollinaire have in common with it, shaping new motives for close reading of what Eliot’s Tiresias had always been about? What does Tiresias’s trans experiential knowledge enable us to see? Eliot’s statement that ‘what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem’ may be read in two ways (78n218). It may mean that the object of Tiresias’s perception is central to The Waste Land, that the encounter between the ‘typist home at teatime’ and her ‘young man carbuncular’ is the poem’s central complication (222, 231). But it may also mean that Tiresias’s mode of seeing—how the blind Tiresias ‘sees’ things—is the poem’s most substantive form of insight. Either way, the centrality of Tiresias’s moment of the poem is just a negative problem unless Tiresias’s phenomenology is at issue: The Waste Land devolves into a minor reactionary lament about fallen sexual mores unless Tiresias’s seeing shows us something more than that. For many years, ‘what Tiresias sees’ has seemed relatively trivial, anxious, or ideological because interpretation has not sought the frameworks necessary to reclaim 19 Garber discusses modernist iterations of Tiresias in Eliot, Apollinaire, and Djuna Barnes (157–9). 20  Ibid., 167. 21 Ibid., 168. Although Garber reads Tiresias in the context of bisexuality, she notes that Apollinaire’s figure is ‘phantasmagorically a transsexual’, and she also moves toward that focus in distinguishing between Tiresias’s embodied ‘hermaphroditism’ and bisexuality (158). 22  Ibid., 165. 23  Ibid., 159.

Queer surrealism  141 the experience Tiresias embodies. Ed Madden’s comprehensively definitive account of ‘Tiresian poetics’ sees in this figure a failed effort to transcend the sexual—‘a prosthetic figure of a transcending voice, and a prophylactic structure by which Eliot would control and negotiate the contradictory impulses of the poem’—and therefore a failed hedge against what it might really mean to transcend gender distinctions, only ‘problematically’ embodying their bin­ar­ies.24 Although critics including Suzanne  W.  Churchill have noted that ‘Tiresias’s borderline sexuality “transgenders” The Waste Land, and although Eliot himself told us long ago that Tiresias is “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest”’, this view of Tiresias’s trans unity has not yet developed a context for reading Tiresias’s way of seeing.25 But our con­tem­por­ary sense of transgender phenomenology brings to light what Tiresias sees in such a way as to develop the a different interpretive framework: the queer surrealism through which a new close reading of Eliot’s Tiresias becomes possible. Trans phenomenology as a field of enquiry goes back to Henry Rubin’s groundbreaking 1998 article ‘Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies’, which argues that ‘a rehabilitated phenomenology can grasp the essence of being/becoming transsexual men and women’ because of ‘its willingness to theorize the material body and bodily consciousness, its ability to grasp the function of essences for some trans subjects, its sense of circumscribed agency, and its descriptive goals’, all of which refocus our attention on lived experience as a ‘legitimate source of knowledge’.26 Its ‘version of identity that is always unfolding and embodied’ helps prevent misappropriations of transgender experience (272). This sense of the knowledge to be found in a specifically phenomenological focus on lived experience has since been active in vital work by Sarah Ahmed, Ephraim Das Janssen, Gayle Salamon, Cael  M.  Keegan, and others, for whom, as Andrea Long Chu explains, ­phenomenology enables a vital ‘return’ to what is ‘just plain ordinary about 24  Drawing capaciously on the wealth of criticism on this subject. Madden concludes that ‘rather than transcending the binaries of sex and gender, Tiresias problematically and gynecomastically embodies them, in a seemingly hermaphroditic body marked by two genders and animated by diffused but nonetheless attendant sexualities’ (Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888–2001 [Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008], 127). Madden far exceeds the present argument in exploring all the possibilities in play here, and argues mainly that the ‘Tiresian Eliot’ found ‘his objective correlative for sexual and poetic anxiety in the utterly confused and confusing body of Tiresias’, attempting to use ‘the structures of the Tiresian voice’ as ‘the means by which to transcend— or at least transfigure—the sexual as something culturally (or “anthropologically”) meaningful’ (112). 25  Suzanne W. Churchill, ‘Outing T. S. Eliot’, Criticism, 47.1 (Winter 2005), 23. Churchill usefully argues against Patrick Query’s focus on Tiresias’s distaste for unproductive heterosexual sex. See Query, ‘ “They Called Me the Hyacinth Girl”: T. S. Eliot and the Revision of Masculinity’, Yeats Eliot Review, 18.3 (2002), 10–21. 26  Henry S. Rubin, ‘Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies’, GLQ, 4.2 (1998), 279. 272.

142  Jesse matz every­day being in the world’—ordinary but therefore revelatory, given broad cultural resistances to the experience of transgender embodiment.27 Keegan cites Crawford’s practice of ‘aesthetic transgendering’ to develop a method for explaining ‘how trans phenomenology lies, embedded and unacknowledged, in the architecture of culture itself ’, and it is this method that might enable us to reread and acknowledge the cultural architecture that built Eliot’s Tiresias.28 The point here is not that people now know experiences that bring a redeemed Tiresias to the surface of Eliot’s poem but rather that present pre­ occu­pa­tions intersect with the poem’s original frameworks in such a way as to guide a close reading not possible within those frameworks themselves. Although it ought to have been unavoidable to read Eliot’s Tiresias together with Apollinaire’s figure—indeed, obvious, given what we know about Eliot’s interest in Apollinaire at this moment—little criticism (in the 1920s or since) has made this connection.29 What could have been seen on the surface of the poem was hidden by a phobic blindness to Tiresias’s value. What we see in the poem can now be what Eliot put there: another version of the figure who, in Les mamelles de Tirésias, has the kind of experience necessary to enable the radical generativity essential at once to surrealism, queerness, and The Waste Land. The Tiresias in question—the relevant figure both for Eliot and for Apollinaire—is Ovid’s, the figure who in book three of Metamorphoses settles the dispute between Jove and Juno over who more greatly feels the joys of sex: ‘and so they agreed to ask Tiresias/ His opinion, familiar as he was with either sex’.30 He had struck a pair of entwined snakes with his walking stick and then ‘transformed amazingly from man to woman’ and ‘spent seven autumns in that state’ (353–4). When she ‘saw the same two snakes again’, Tiresias again struck them, and ‘his former form returned’ (355–9). Diverse sexual 27 Andrea Long Chu, ‘The Wrong Wrong Body: Notes on a Trans Phenomenology’, TSQ, 4.1 (February 2017), 150. I am indebted to Chu’s insightful survey of this field. For the relevant material in Janssen, see ‘Gender, Technology, and Style’, in Phenomenal Gender: What Transgender Experience Discloses (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 126–32. 28  Cael  M.  Keegan, ‘Revisitation: A Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image’, MedieKultur, 61 (2016), 30. It is important to note that phenomenology obtains at different levels in the present argument, but mainly as an object of inquiry—the phenomenology at work in the text—since the phenomenology of reading and interpretation itself would depend on the bearing, experience, and objectives of the reader in question. 29  Michael Levenson writes that ‘Eliot’s new work stands in revealing analogy to the experiments of Guillaume Apollinaire in Paris, which he had been recently reading’ (‘Form, Voice, and the AvantGarde’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, ed. Gabrielle McIntire [Cambridge University Press, 2015], 93). Eliot certainly would have been interested in, and unable to think of Tiresias apart from, the 1917 scandal of Les mamelles de Tirésias. 30  Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2010), 75, lines 349–50.

Queer surrealism  143 experience makes Tiresias a worthy judge in the divine dispute but when he sides with Jove (saying that women enjoy sex more than men do), Juno blinds Tiresias. In turn, however, Jove does something to recognize the insight that persists despite Tiresias’s blindness: ‘in recompense/ for his loss of sight’ Tiresias is given ‘the power/ to see the future’ (365–7). Thus does genderbased insight convert into visionary post-seeing, as changeability equates to better judgement. This better judgement and its phenomenological bases— the better judgement of a transcendent sense of appearances—are what queersurrealist versions of this figure tend to exploit. Les mamelles de Tirésias was first performed, as Daniel Albright has explained, at a moment in which wartime French culture demanded a certain collaboration of gender and civic duty: ‘women must bear many children, in order to repopulate France after the devastation of the Great War’.31 Apollinaire was in part inspired to stage the play by something he had sa­tir­ic­al­ly observed in a column he had written for the Mercure de France: ‘Many children are needed, for the happiness of the home and of the nation.’32 ‘The problem of repopulation’ is Apollinaire’s central target, as he notes in the play’s preface, which is now recognized as a first manifesto of surrealism itself. In his preface, Apollinaire writes, ‘I have used a neologism to describe my drama, something I hardly ever do, so I hope I will be forgiven: I have created the adjective “surrealist” ’.33 To take a surrealist view of the problem of repopulation and indeed to stress the term’s response to that problem is to put sur­real­ism in negative relation to the compulsion of procreative sexuality. This link justifies thinking in terms of queer surrealism. In its founding moment, surrealism was a queer response against the biological determinism that makes gendered sexuality a pathological response to death, defining it in terms of the repopulation requirement. The play’s protagonist Thérèse refuses this requirement and indeed em­bodies that refusal by becoming male: growing a beard, becoming a ­soldier, and abandoning all domestic responsibilities. ‘I want to make war and not make babies’, she declares, and disclaims her womanhood (169). ‘Let’s get

31 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 250. Apollinaire claimed he wrote the play in 1903, but few critics now believe it, since the play seems specific to the moment of World War I. Maya Slater says ‘it is thought that he made this claim because he feared accusations of plagiarism—his play appeared very soon after Cocteau’s Parade—and partly because he was afraid his play would seem naïve and immature’ (Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, trans. Slater [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997] 210). 32  Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963), 316. 33  Guillaume Apollinaire, The Mammaries of Tiresias, in Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, 153. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

144  Jesse matz rid of my mammaries’, she proposes, and, having done so, feels ‘devilish virile’ and ‘a stallion/ top to bottom’ (171–2). Once she has ‘become a handsome guy’, her husband is left to do the repopulating (174), and in the play’s second act, he does so with a fecundity that recalls (and clearly also influenced) that of the momentarily trans Leopold Bloom in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses. He bears ‘40,049 infants in a single day’ (188), and if he therefore seems to be proof that men can outdo women in every way, there is also much evidence that changing sex opens up new forms of experience. We are compelled, like the play’s audience, to ‘witness the ardour beyond belief/ Arising from a change of sex’, the prolific experience enabled by these transformations (186). The point may seem to be just that ‘it can be fun to switch’, but there is a serious effect to it as well (207). Transgender creativity is the substance of the play, as it becomes a basis for (and a suggestive parallel to) the kind of linguistic ingenuity essential to sur­ real­ism more generally, producing a play ‘about the delight of verbal creativity, which seems absolutely indistinguishable from sexual procreation’.34 But procreation here is utterly different to the bearing of children that would actually repopulate France, since it seems to equate this alternative radical generativity with trans opportunity. It is because he is a man that the husband can generate so many children with so many discursively playful names, just as it because she is a woman that Thérèse can better embody martial excellence. When she finally becomes Tirésias, this figure liberates the condition of her femininity out into the world, in the form of rubber breasts whose parodic prosthetics complete this play’s dissociation of gender and language—the dissociation that is also so critical to the surreal version of representational reality. This moment was the original core of the play, the image that had prompted Apollinaire to write it—the central surprise, which Apollinaire had at first conceived for laughs.35 As the central image for Apollinaire’s burlesque of the grim demand for children who could replace—or become—the war dead, ‘the woman with balloon breasts’ did indeed provoke carnivalesque merriment when she first appeared in Montmartre on 24 June 24 1917, because of the way she undid the deadly wartime pragmatics of sex and gender. Critics missing the point of this text’s surrealism have misunderstood Apollinaire to have intended an anti-feminist political message, a satire of 34 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 256. For an alternative reading of the influence of surrealist generativity as well as an account of Apollinaire’s specific influence on Ulysses, see Catherine Flynn, “ ‘Circe’ and Surrealism: Joyce and the Avant-Garde,” Journal of Modern Literature, 34.2 (Winter 2011): 121–138. 35 Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 315.

Queer surrealism  145 women pretending to status beyond domesticity and childbearing. But making the foundational connection between surrealism and queerness—using that method to reclaim the surrealist idea of gender experience—relieves us of the burden of this form of critique and allows us to look more closely at what would have been before the public and what it could have meant for any actual politics of procreation.36 This same undoing would become critical to The Waste Land as well, even if Eliot’s poem may seem to be but a ‘grumpy parody’ of Apollinaire’s surrealist exuberance.37 Adrianna E. Frick observed in 2011 that ‘Eliot’s use of Ovid’s Tiresias reveals a previously unexamined allusion’ to Apollinaire’s play—a remarkable omission, given the clear significance of this intertexual figuration once it has been observed.38 It is perhaps evidence of the contextual mo­tiv­ ation for any interpretation that no one has further pursued Garber’s insights into the affinities within modernist culture of these transgender figures. That is, this affinity is right on the surface, hidden from view only by the blindness that makes any faith in ‘critique’ seem misguided. We have only to look at Eliot and Apollinaire together, motivated by the interpretive interests of a transgender phenomenology, to see what they have in common. It may seem that these two texts mainly share a view of the failure to re­popu­late. When Eliot’s Tiresias watches the typist and the young man carbuncular having non-procreative sex, it might seem that ‘what Tiresias sees’ is a serious version of what Apollinaire regrets: the lack of essential cultural efforts to restore European populations diminished by death in wartime. And together with other references to this failure in The Waste Land—abortions, corpses failing to grow into living bodies—failed procreative sexuality may seem to be the substance of the poem in its relation to its surrealist intertext.39 This reading would note associations between the typist’s ‘drying combinations’ as well as the other undergarments piled upon her divan and the women’s clothing Apollinaire’s Tiresias discards, to suggest that the displacement of gender identifications figures an abandonment of sexual authenticity and responsibility (225–7). Whereas Tiresias might once have offered prophetic 36  Scott Bates, ‘Erotic Propaganda in Apollinaire’s Les mamelles de Tirésias’, in Eroticism in French Literature (New York: Rodopi, 1983), 36–8; I am indebted to Adrianna E. Frick for directing me to Bates’s work (‘The Dugs of Tiresias: Female Sexuality and Modernist Nationalism in The Waste Land and Les mamelles de Tirésias’, in The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective, ed. Joe Moffett [New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011], 15–34). 37 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 255. 38  Frick, 15. 39  The poem would then fit Andrew Ross’s interpretation of the way its ‘representations of sexual failure’ are ‘bound up with a textual impossibility’ and, in turn, the ‘fantasmatic’ nature of the poem’s interpretations (‘The Waste Land and the Fantasy of Interpretation’, Representations, 8 [Autumn 1984], 155).

146  Jesse matz visions of sexual knowledge, now this figure ‘perceives’ and ‘foretells’ only a fairly predictable scene of undesired caresses, offering a grim version of the more playfully epochal opportunities Apollinaire’s Tiresias encounters. But this contrastive reading overlooks what Eliot might make of Apollinaire’s sur­real­ism. Not just the thematic content (repopulation) but the formal dynamics generated in reaction against it are also important to Eliot’s poem, in which the dissociation of sex and language also becomes a surreal form of creativity. Eliot’s Tiresias may sadly see two young people failing to repopulate the nation, but this seeing is also the substance of a poem that develops around this central scene a larger fantasy of regeneration accomplished by other means. Focusing on Tiresias’s trans perceptivity—or the queer sur­real­ism that emerges when this figure is placed in the triangular context shaped by a contemporary trans reclamation—makes visible the ways the hope for regeneration in The Waste Land might be sustained by a revisionist phenomenology. A close reading motivated by intertextual interest in these two versions of Tiresias might once have led us to think that ‘Eliot creates a Tiresias with vestigial female genitalia who narrates more closely in sympathy with the typist, putting the reader’s emphasis and empathy with the feminine’.40 This Tiresias, in contrast with Apollinaire’s figure, involves a non-misogynist (if not fem­in­ ist) revision to modernist sexuality. A trans-phenomenological framework would not have us taking sides in this fashion, but seeing instead that for Eliot’s Tiresias, a long history of trans insight has enabled a perceptual range that links what Tiresias sees to the very subject of poetry. Frick passes over the possibility that Tiresias ‘is capable of relating to both genders’ because of this history, but this capacity, expanded to include phenomenological susceptibilities beyond that ‘relating’ might involve, is precisely what makes Tiresias central to what this poem hopes ultimately to accomplish: the regeneration of the waste land, the conversion of what had been fragmentary into a new ritually restorative poetics.41 In other words, what Tiresias sees is not just spe­cif­ ic­al­ly the typist (sympathetically) as she has dehumanizing sex with the (predatorial) clerk but rather what there is to know for someone who knows a lot, in a form of seeing that would relate the differences that put these two people violently at odds with each other to those that fragment the modern world into incompatible forms of experience.42 40  Frick, ‘The Dugs of Tiresias’, 31. 41  Ibid., 21. Frick claims that ‘Tiresias stands as a representation of hermaphroditism’, and notes that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (in their No Man’s Land) cast a similar view in terms of an ‘anxious transvestitism’ (24). 42  Emma Heaney argues that ‘for T. S. Eliot, the Tiresian trans feminine represents the capacity to understand the sad effect of modern gender anarchy on eros’, similarly stressing the understanding

Queer surrealism  147 This alternative first appears in a certain contrast at work in Tiresias’s first statement in ‘The Fire Sermon’: At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see . . . (215–19)

If Tiresias is an embodiment of sceptical regret over failed sexuality, this first description only puts the first moment of seeing in its debasing context—that of the violet hour at end of day when all of us turn from work and wait for nothing. But if Tiresias’s way of seeing is set apart, a contrast begins to develop here; Tiresias is actually to be distinguished from ‘the human engine’. While that engine of ordinary humanity merely throbs and waits, Tiresias throbs and sees because Tiresias throbs between two lives rather than in the manner of a mechanized being. Tiresias is not part of this dehumanized world but contrasted to it; when most human engines do one thing, Tiresias does—and sees—another. A similar difference would account for Tiresias’s way of seeing at once what ‘brings the sailor home from sea’ and ‘the typist home at teatime’ (221–2). This comparative view might be another sign of the irony by which Tiresias contrasts current failure with past vitality, especially given the parodic anticlimax of ‘sea’ and ‘tea’, but it is also a double form of seeing different lives at once. Tiresias always has a larger and more inclusive vision—a positive rather than a sceptical mythical method. The repeated stress on Tiresias’s body can be read as a more measured emphasis on the embodied transformation as a precursor to phenomenological insight. That is, prior lives may linger as traces of experiences enhancing wisdom in the present, and here they lend just such a pathos to Tiresias’s powers of prophecy. Saying ‘I too awaited the unexpected guest’, this Tiresias communicates forbearance: as the figure responsible for ‘uniting all the rest’, Tiresias stoops from ‘seeing’ to ‘waiting’ along with these rude mechanicals, but only on the way to the more reparative unity that will build as the poem proceeds (230). What ensues is the undeniably bleak encounter, but what then follows in turn is the peculiar through which Tiresias perceives larger cultural dynamics (The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine [Northwestern University Press, 2017], 10).

148  Jesse matz parenthetical aside in which Tiresias seems at once to contrast this scene of low comedy with the greater things Tiresias has ‘foresuffered’ across history: (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) (443–6)

Rather than darkly equating the lowest of the dead with the typist and the clerk, and rather than expressing any sense of long-suffering dismay, Tiresias here seems to say, ‘I have seen it all’. In other words, Tiresias’s vision seems to be one in which broader experience and insight empties this particular scene of any unique horror. What Tiresias sees is something of no rare violence, given what a longer history of diverse seeing has shown, so that foresuffering entails no surprises. Forbearance is again the reparative orientation to a scene that may well be endured on the way to something better. If we then return to the mechanical automatics of the ‘human engine’ as the typist ‘smoothes her hair with automatic hand,/ And puts a record on the gramophone’, there is still the contrast between the fruitless waiting of these people ‘like a taxi throbbing waiting’ and Tiresias throbbing otherwise (255–6). Tiresias endures, poised at a central point of failed regeneration in wait for what will figurally develop around the differences Tiresias embodies. This, then, is to offer a rejoinder to Calvin Bedient and Colleen Lamos, for whom Tiresias is only a voyeur, ‘a peeping Tom peering through the blinds at a seedy sexual skit’.43 The scene is not only one of ‘crass carnality’ that is ‘riveting in its mechanical vulgarity’, and Tiresias is not merely ‘endowed with a spurious androgyny and a dubious spectatorship’. For Lamos, Tiresias ‘is a trope for the drag-like metamorphoses of masculine women and effeminate men’, but we might reclaim this Tiresias, to account for this figure’s historical centrality or the contrast that positions Tiresias in relation to the scene.44 Then, a different relationship develops between this figure’s relation to the scene and the way Eliot conceives of his project more generally. In other words, this new justification for the regeneration enacted by The Waste Land—the redemptive restoration that has long been, for many readers, the optimistic aim of the poem—has the surprising capacity to reclaim what has 43  Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 111. 44  Ibid., 112.

Queer surrealism  149 long been dismissed as an ideological fantasy. ‘Traditional interpretations of the poem as a narrative of regeneration are certainly inadequate’, as Justin Evans has recently observed, but once this sort of reading is no longer so trad­ ition­al, it may achieve a new kind of adequacy.45 If regeneration is linked to aesthetic transgendering, and if it is a matter of the vision available to a trans phenomenology, it seems less like a reactionary fantasy of a return to some mythic unity and more like an ideal of perspectival inclusion. It ceases to be true that ‘the overriding tone of the poem seems to yearn to be rid of improper desires’, if Tiresias embodies a broader propriety, and a life-long habit of desires proper to changing bodies.46 And when Eliot writes that Tiresias is ‘the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest’, a very different version of unity emerges than that which has prompted reactions against Eliot’s method. Moreover, the mythical method itself transforms, becoming a framework for a style of reading different from that which Eliot himself expounded in talking about Joyce. Tiresias is a mythic figure who changes for the future, and the poem’s well-recognized stress on mutability no longer suggests reactionary admonishment alone. Tim Dean makes a similar argument in his watershed reconceptualization of Eliotic impersonality. Dean argues for a definition of impersonality, especially in The Waste Land, as a form of impersonation. It is not that Eliot sought a kind of mandarin transcendence of common personhood but rather that he allowed for his personhood to be appropriated. He permitted dispossession, in processes through which other personae would speak through him. ‘Far from a ruse of self-empowerment, aesthetic impersonality in The Waste Land is pictured as a virtually intolerable discipline of self-dispossession’: Dean argues that this poem shows Eliot renouncing mastery and thereby defining a poetics of sexual vulnerability. And Tiresias is the ‘figure for gender-switching and self-transformation’ that ‘embodies the medium’s entailments’. That is, Tiresias ‘achieves new significance’ when read as a figure for the way ‘aesthetic impersonality threatens masculinity as we know it’.47 Dean might have made the connection to the surrealist surrender of personal mastery, to argue that what unites everything in question here is the surrealism of queerness and the queer entailments of surreal gender figuration. Here again Lucas Crawford’s reading of the poem becomes important— essential, actually—to the trans point of view that turns the very link between

45  Justin Evans, ‘The Waste Land and Critique’, in The Waste Land at 90, 148. 46  Harriet Davidson, ‘Improper Desire: Reading The Waste Land’, in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 122. 47  Dean, ‘T. S. Eliot, Clairvoyante’, 62, 60, 59.

150  Jesse matz our two versions of Tiresias (the Eliotic and the surreal) into a crucial critical triangulation. For Crawford, scent in The Waste Land helps to encourage movement away from a sight-centred approach to gender difference. This shift is a neo-surrealist one, as well, since it corresponds to Apollinaire’s particular interest in a ‘protest against realism’ accomplished through sensuous variation.48 In his Prologue to Les mamelles de Tirésias, Apollinaire’s Director announces, I’m trying to bring a new spirit to the theatre A spirit of joy ecstasy virtue Instead of this pessimism aged at least a hundred [. . .] To display our modern art to the full As in life often linking unrelated Sounds gestures colours shouts noise Music dance acrobatics poetry painting . . . (165–6)

A new spirit that is ecstatic because it does not distinguish among the senses is at once surreal and queer, for Crawford but also for Apollinaire—and also for Eliot.49 When Crawford claims Eliot as a precursor and reads him for his multisensory insight, he reads closely for something this context newly en­ables us to interpret, but something that has always very much been in the poem itself. All over the poem, too—not just in this particular moment of sensory confusion. Queer surrealism is legible all across Eliot’s purposefully fragmentary confusion of the aesthetic of repopulation. Apollinaire suggests a certain attitude toward close reading in his reflections upon the symbolism at work in Les mamelles de Tirésias. ‘There are no symbols in my play, which is quite transparent,’ he wrote in his preface, ‘but people are free to see in it all the symbols they wish, and to tease out a thousand meanings, as though it were a Delphic oracle.’50 This is simply a statement of fact. We are free to tease out a thousand meanings, and only limited by our reasons for trying. We are not therefore free to say what we please because there is a real ethical limit imposed by our interpretive rationales; our 48  Apollinaire, Preface, Mammaries, 157. 49  Albright also explains Apollinaire’s surrealism in these terms, writing that it is about ‘the virtual reality created by an art that gives intensely discrepant versions of experience to several sense organs at the same time’ (247). 50  Apollinaire, Preface, Mammaries, 155.

Queer surrealism  151 motives shape our relations, and our responsibilities, to others. But this means we are not free to treat a text ‘as though it were a Delphic oracle’ because that mystification (as Apollinaire’s tone suggests) displaces our ideological motives into the text conceived as a subject of revelation. The text is instead ‘quite transparent’, and the close reading of it depends entirely on the array of reading strategies warranted by our objectives.

7 Nabokov and the Privilege of Style Vidyan Ravinthiran

Interviewed by Israel Shenker for The New York Times Book Review, Vladimir Nabokov is asked ‘what are the literary virtues you seek to attain—and how?’ A vague phrase; an open-ended question; and rather than provide a list of abstract desirables, he collapses his answer into a statement about style: ‘Mustering the best words, with every available lexical, associative, and rhythmic assistance, to express as closely as possible what one wants to express’.1 There is a hint here of Coleridge’s ‘homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;—poetry = the best words in their best order’.2 A poet in both English and Russian, Nabokov doesn’t believe in a strong distinction between these forms, telling Alvin Toffler in Playboy, in 1964, that poetry, of course, includes all creative writing; I have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation.3

Nabokov is therefore a strong believer in the neglected concept of prose-rhythm, and this chapter is partly a technical enquiry into the effects he achieves in that area. But it is also an investigation into what ‘style’ meant to him, and how that concept links the acoustic fabric of his prose with notions of social

1  This interview appeared in The New York Times Book Review on 9 January 1972; it is reprinted, as with the other interviews cited by this chapter, in Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 181. 2  The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 14: Table Talk (2 vols.), ed. C. Woodring (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), vol. 2, 68. 3  Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (London: Penguin, 2011), 44. Vidyan Ravinthiran, Nabokov and the Privilege of Style In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Vidyan Ravinthiran. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0008

Nabokov and the privilege of style  153 refinement related to his wealthy upbringing in Russia, and which survived his transformation, in the United States, into a phonically denatured exile. I use this awkward phrase, which he wouldn’t have approved of—disapproval is, as we shall see, crucial to Nabokov as stylist and snob—to capture the ­secondariness of his English, its aspirant quality. He tells us that he has never learned to speak English with the fluency of Russian, and so becoming an émigré writer meant turning into someone who appeared to speak prose—the interviews quoted above were, like all of his, written occasions which provided him with the questions beforehand and allowed him to script his answers. We hear in this interview passage features of Nabokov’s novelistic style, in ­particular a tendency towards alliterative doubling—‘full flavor’, ‘plain prose’, ‘idiom and intonation’—which evinces an intensification of consciousness always in danger of lapsing into a mere self-consciousness, tonally fusing ­aesthetic and social exquisiteness. He writes the way he does to insist—this utopian hope is absolutely crucial to him—on an aristocracy of the mind rather than class, but, like other modernist writers, struggles to articulate one separate from the other. His style asks, implicitly, to be admired and explicated by the same kind of scrupulously formalist analysis which he applies in his lectures to other authors. This means that considered in tandem, Nabokov’s creative and critical prose—and the mirage of an ideal close reading which haunts both—provides a unique perspective on the afterlife of modernist form. Victor Erlich writes of the ‘stock argument’ against formalism that it ‘is a form of escapism, a product of the decadent and spiritually sterile ruling class’.4 Nabokov claims that ‘great novels are great fairy tales’; he insists that literature is pleasurable, and his work insists in its body and pressure and its obvious self-delight that fiction can be both historical and transcendentally otherworldly; that the leap between these realms, between truth and imagination, is never predictable.5 He foregrounds his privileged upbringing, insists its tastes express not an arbitrary but a universal standard of excellence, and so exposes himself to (and does something mischievous with) the ­accusation of elitism. This provocativeness of authorial self-presentation is tied up  with his insistence (from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, ­narrative to narrative) that a prose coloured by modernist techniques becomes a literary form as complex as poetry.

4 Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 4th ed. (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1980), 106. 5 Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. F.  Bowers (San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest, 1982), 2.

154  Vidyan ravinthiran Nabokov’s autobiographical memoir Speak, Memory can’t help but connect, to apply W.  B.  Yeats in his own Memoirs, the ‘long-established life of the well-born and the artist’s life’. For that poet, ‘aristocracies have made beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them above the fear of life’, and in a touching passage which I will go on to analyse, Nabokov depicts his father as an artist of the social, rescued from his real-world death into a paradisal afterlife comparable with that poet’s Byzantium. Does Nabokov’s loss of his homeland and family wealth represent a deprivation which may repurpose his aestheticism as an underdog stance? He never outright asserts, with Yeats, that ‘intellectual freedom and social inequality are incompatible’.6 Yet his individualism does have its origin in the preferences, and the privileges, of a particular class—this stylishness which would redeem itself as a matter of pure heightened perception. His prose fulfils, to apply David James, ‘one of the hallmark aims of modernist fiction—to evoke interior subjectivity by simulating the effect of impressions, whether sustained or incoherent, to which subjects emotionally and intellectually respond’; it also has the peculiarly modernist character of simultaneously breaking with inherited forms and values, while also maintaining a nostalgia for their wholeness.7 This is how Nabokov understands, crucially, his flight from Russia into the US; the fall he experienced, from the fluent unanxious Russian he spoke as a child, to the fragmentary, self-referential, allusive, register-mixing English which gives his novels their modernist texture. His prose is purple, and looks to build itself into permanent structures—we see this in the tableau from Speak, Memory around which this chapter coheres—but its run-on riffs maintain a provisional quality, a sense of forms grasped for and experimental and seeking to be adequate to a fraught and cosmopolitan history. The experience of reading him (on such weighty matters as political and sexual tyranny, commercialism, nationhood, and exile) is therefore understood in this chapter through a form of biographical criticism attentive to history and how it conditions a prose style we live through from sentence to sentence. If there is much talk in ­modernist studies about a return to form, and a recovery of that term as an unembarrassed vital concept, as in Angela Leighton’s eponymous study, and the redefinition of ‘literature’s form’ (this phrasing is Lloyd Pratt’s) as ‘a product rather than a determinant of its place in space and time’, it remains the case 6  My quotations from Yeats are from Poetry and Tradition (1908); his Memoirs (1909, published 1972); and The Trembling of the Veil (1922). They can all be found in Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, ed. J. Pethica (New York and London: Norton, 2000), on 251, 281, and 223. 7 David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9.

Nabokov and the privilege of style  155 that actual readings, intimate with literature, which support these large claims, are thin on the ground.8 This chapter looks to test this changed view of literary style against what actually happens on the page. I am inspired in particular by Michael Wood’s attention to the vulnerability Nabokov disguises as arrogance, and, as I understand it, that critic’s suggestion that it is in the moments of such vulnerability that one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century becomes most available to not just the deconstructive but the cherishing reader.9 There is something haughty, patrician, about Nabokov’s instances of self-deprecation—‘my English is patball to Joyce’s champion game’—and though he describes as a ‘private tragedy’ his switch from intuitive Russian to stilted English, he actually seems to like talking about it.10 It is part of his mythos, his self-presentation, but we should take quite seriously his phrasing of the matter to Herbert Gold in the October 1967 issue of The Paris Review (alliterative prose swapped in, once again, for a face-to-face encounter). Here he laments his personal ‘absence of natural vocabulary’, the English he describes as ‘a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always pref­er­ able to a plain Jeep’.11 ‘Plain’ recurs, suggesting the utilitarian style of which Nabokov feels the lack. There is the long-standing metaphor of prose as a journey by land—William Hazlitt describes society ‘constructed into a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable prose style’—but John Sutherland tells us that Nabokov really was driven to school in a Rolls-Royce (Speak, Memory also mentions the choice of a Mercedes-Benz or Wolseley) and, juxtaposed with this glamorous vehicle, the word ‘poverty’ doesn’t function merely as a stylistic descriptor, or as a characteristic echo of ‘paucity’.12 Once we understand 8 Lloyd Pratt, ‘Introduction: The Nature of Form’, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 1.2 (Fall 2013), 428. 9  Touching the different aspects of Nabokov’s self-presentation, Wood mentions ‘a (real) person I guess at but who keeps himself pretty well hidden: he is not only tender and observant but also diffident, even scared, worried about almost everything the mandarin so airily dismisses’. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 22. 10 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 56, 15. The Joyce remark occurs in an interview of September 1965 with Robert Hughes, for the Television 13 Educational Program in New York; the not-so-‘private tragedy’ is mentioned in a Bookstand interview with Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall of the BBC, later published in The Listener (22 November 1962). Nabokov also relates his ‘private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern’ in his afterword to Lolita, dated 12 November 1956; repr. Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 298. 11 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 106. 12  John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 412; Vladimir Nabokov: Novels and Memoirs 1941–1951, ed. B.  Boyd

156  Vidyan ravinthiran Nabokov’s manner as not contradicting of honesty but complicatedly engaged with it, we realize that he really is telling us here about the kinds of writing he can do (and which he might, therefore, elsewhere overvalue as a critic) and those he can’t.13 That he complicates a distinction between what comes ­nat­ur­al­ly and what is ‘stiffish, artificial’ with a language of wealth reveals his understanding of art as entangled, perhaps troublingly so, with a mode of privileged connoisseurship specific to the time and place which created him. Brian Boyd contrasts Nabokov’s life in Russia with his first years as an émigré: ‘He was born into an old noble family and stupendous wealth . . . By the late 1930s Nabokov and his wife were living in poverty.’14 This shift from wealth to ‘poverty’ (and then back again, following his acceptance within American academia, and the publication of Lolita) is recorded in the language of his answer to Herbert Gold about the artificiality of his borrowed tongue. Andrew Field describes the Nabokov family as belonging ‘to the affluent portion of the lower nobility, the grand monde which consisted of a high bureaucracy and court circles . . . From the eighteenth to the twentieth cen­tur­ies the Nabokovs were distinguished and important with surprising frequency. They were snobs like the rest of the Russian nobility, but their snobbery was based for the most part upon intellectual ability and bureaucratic achievement rather than class’. Although the political beliefs of Nabokov’s father, which ultimately led to his accidental assassination, involved leaving ‘his class milieu’ to ‘ally himself with Jews and classless intellectuals . . . who had banded together to fight against great odds for the cause of constitutional democracy in Russia’, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov ul­tim­ate­ly ‘believed in a state of patrician democracy which allows for the existence of an intellectual, monied élite’; following their marriage and receipt of a considerable dowry, he and Elena Nabokov began ‘to live na bol’shuyu nogu, in high style. This life style of total luxury without (no easy feat) any affectation is beautifully and delicately rendered in Speak, Memory’.15 If style for Nabokov is both literary and social, (New York: Library of America), 515. For the Hazlitt quotation, see ‘On Poetry in General’, his introduction to Lectures on the English Poets (1818), repr. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in TwentyOne Volumes, ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons; centenary ed., 1931), vol. 5, 10. 13  Van Veen in Ada, or Ardor believes—my italics—that ‘originality or literary style . . . constitutes the only real honesty of a writer’. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969); repr. Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1969–1974, ed. B. Boyd (New York: The Library of America, 1996), 377. The other word we might use here is sincerity, were it not for the fact that Nabokov hated the term; Leland de la Durantaye collates a number of his withering remarks in Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 149n3. 14  Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), 3. 15  The biographical information in this paragraph is drawn from Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Part (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), 46, 69, 84, and 72.

Nabokov and the privilege of style  157 this feat—Field appears to suggest—is also a difficulty confronted by his autobiographical novel. A luxurious prose, so insistent on maintaining in its  very texture, as well as its content, the otherwise vanished, historically destroyed, values of its parentage: how to avoid slipping into affectation, especially when deep emotions are aroused, which border on the sentimental and risk obscuring the reality of power relations in Nabokov’s boyhood Russia? With these questions of prestige and power in mind, I’ll look closely at the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory; a bravura set-piece discussed by Brian Boyd, who begins his two-volume biography with this ‘quintessentially Nabokovian passage’ in which the death of the author’s father is ac­know­ ledged in prose of both delicacy and power, which affords him a momentary artistic immortalization without, however, erasing the tragic facts of the matter.16 Yet a few remarks on Nabokov’s style, and his thoughts on the matter, are necessary in preparation. It’s a word, observes Leland de la Durantaye, which ‘he used in a special sense: not merely smooth and elegant form, but a moral stance reflected in formal choice’.17 Indeed, it is the intellectual concept around which Nabokov organizes his critical remarks, and in discussing Jane Austen he insists that Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author’s personality. Thus when we speak of style we mean an individual artist’s peculiar nature, and the way it expresses itself in his artistic output. It is essential to remember that though every living person may have his or her style, it is the style peculiar to this or that individual writer of genius that is alone worth discussion.18

The trademark alliterative blur (at times it fudges rather than specifies; Nabokov captures and parodies this aspect of his lecturer-persona in Pnin) causes problems, for a component is different to a characteristic. Regardless, style is clearly for Nabokov deeply personal, and he approaches here the famous aphorism of Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon—‘le style est l’homme même’, the style is the man—connected to an eighteenth-century ideal of the gentleman.19 16  Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 12. 17  Leland de la Durantaye, Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, 191. 18  Lectures on Literature, 59–60. 19  For more on this subject, see Rémy G. Saisselin’s essay on ‘Buffon, Style, and Gentlemen’ in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 16.3 (March 1958): 357–61.

158  Vidyan ravinthiran ‘Genius’ provides Nabokov with an alternative standard of distinction, yet it is debatable to what extent the social content has really been expunged. His fiction is full of characters making dismissive taste judgements about both artistic works proper and such matters as dress and décor; and although levels of authorial irony vary, we do seem to hear Nabokov himself behind such remarks—their style, if not their content. Responding to Edmund Wilson’s critique of his translation of Eugene Onegin, he refuses to apologize for the habit of, in Wilson’s phrase, taking ‘digs at great reputations’. Why, he asks, ‘should I be forbidden to consider that Chaykovski’s hideous and insulting libretto is not saved by a music whose cloying banalities have pursued me ever since I was a curly-haired boy in a velvet box?’20 There isn’t space here to fully analyse Nabokov’s rhetoric of disapproval—the sense that, to be sure of his own value, he must excoriate—but this passage is telling in its linkage of his trademark scorn and his Russian childhood. He writes here with a selfexposing defensiveness, a sort of wounded privilege, an insistence on his right to his own impulses, even when they tread on others. Nabokov might therefore be considered one of the group of modernist writers analysed by Sean Latham, whose strained ‘conviction that aesthetic pleasure exists in a realm completely antithetical to the vulgar self-promotion of the marketplace’ leads to the development in their work of the ‘figure of the snob . . . as a mechanism for self-reflexive interrogation, always threatening to expose modernist hauteur as just another commodity’.21 In suggesting that ‘every living person may have his or her style’, Nabokov makes an equalitarian gesture, and moves the word beyond the aristocracy of literature, as Shelley does when talking about ‘poetry’; yet for Nabokov this yoking together of what the writer does with how people behave is tinged with snobbery. His definition of style also appears at the end of his lecture on Jane Austen, a writer whose techniques of ‘delicate irony’ and (Nabokov’s italics) ‘the epigrammatic intonation, a certain terse rhythm in the witty expression of a slightly paradoxical thought’, both service and critique the performance of nineteenth-century gentility.22 As Latham observes of this period, The decline of ancient aristocratic hierarchies and the consolidation of middle-class power helped to create a world ruled less by the laws of inheritance than by the rule of the fashionable signifier . . . social identity in the 20  Nabokov, ‘Reply to My Critics’, Strong Opinions, 266. 21  Sean Latham, Am I a Snob?: Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2, 3. 22  Lectures on Literature, 58, 59.

Nabokov and the privilege of style  159 nineteenth century became a matter of public performance and display, ­dependent on careful attentiveness to dress, manners and conversation.23

‘Austen’s style is at its best in this word injure, incidentally the one really ­ori­gin­al metaphor in the book’—Nabokov’s lecture on Mansfield Park picks out as an example of stylistic brilliance a passage to do with social relations, about ‘coarse and funny Mrs Norris whom we glimpse being “entirely taken up in fresh arranging and injuring the noble fire which the butler had ­prepared”  ’.24 In this instance, it is the butler’s doings that are ‘noble’, and Mrs Norris who is vulgar in her pretension; and surely the success of the verb ‘injuring’, though Nabokov doesn’t say so, relates to how Austen, beyond the skill of perhaps any author barring Nabokov himself, uses her style to turn snobbery back on itself in a form of subtle critique. Such is the paradox of Nabokov’s aesthetics produced by his displacement: that an unexamined insistence on values with an occluded social origin should operate alongside a commentary on self-fashioning. This argument is alive in the tissue of his prose and relevant to the complex pleasure, chal­len­ging of fixed notions of identity, which we experience in reading it. Given the lack of a poetics of prose in modern criticism, his critical remarks on its sound and rhythm deserve closer attention—they also illuminate his overlap between social and aesthetic style, for if le style est l’homme même, then close reading turns into cultural criticism. He was a lecturer pledged to individual touchstones rather than theoretical principles, but his local noticings do add up. Discussing Ulysses, he mentions the ‘coils’ of alliteration ‘dragging up sense after sense’; ‘at any moment, in switching his styles, or within a given category, Joyce may intensify a mood by introducing a musical lyrical strain, with alliterations and lilting devices, generally to render wistful emotions’.25 Alliteration is also among the ‘pretty verbal effects’ Nabokov admires in Robert Louis Stevenson, and here Fredson Bowers’s footnote provides a long quotation from that author’s Essays in the Art of Writing, which Nabokov stored in his folder: ‘It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a 23 Latham, Am I a Snob?: Modernism and the Novel, 11. 24  Lectures on Literature, 41. 25  Ibid., 297, 290.

160  Vidyan ravinthiran sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial ­melting away into another. And you will find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive “unheard melodies”; and the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase’. To this, VN adds the note, ‘and let me add as a reader, the internal eye visualizes its color and its meaning’.26

Nabokov’s note proceeds from the synaesthesia he evokes in such detail in Speak, Memory; also, prissily, from the need to take possession of a critical quotation which vividly prefigures his own style. Purple passages, which declare themselves to the ear as well as the eye, and slow reading down, are found throughout Nabokov’s work—he claims (my chapter, its method, agrees with him) that the reader may ‘observe the flash’ of the ‘bolt of inspiration’ in ‘this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy’.27 Such writing insists on being actively perceived, chal­len­ging the laziness of those whom Van Veen in Ada, or Ardor dismisses as ‘automatic readers’; but it might also be considered flattering to a particular sensibility which chimes with Nabokov’s, for these passages are presented as opportunities for discrimination, the performance of taste.28 This connection is made more explicit, repeatedly, in Ada than in any of Nabokov’s other books: A former viceroy of Estoty, Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, father of the children’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski (1755–1809), and a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue’. While happening to be immune to the sumptuous thrills of genealogic awareness, and indifferent to the fact that oafs attribute both the aloofness and the fervor to snobbishness, Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was  always able to distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky

26  Ibid., 191. 27  Nabokov, ‘Inspiration’, Saturday Review (20 November 1972); repr. Strong Opinions, 311–12. 28  Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1969–1974, 387.

Nabokov and the privilege of style  161 through the black foliage of the family tree. In later years he had never been able to read Proust (as he had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum of Turkish paste) without a roll-wave of surfeit and a rasp of gravelly heartburn; yet his favourite purple passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes’, with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s artistic vanity.29

In its drift—however ironized, as a text within a text—from aristocratic ­lin­eage to the experience of literature, this passage captures, like many in Ada, Nabokov’s anxious understanding of the artistic sense, and with it the ­aesthetic experience: caught awkwardly, and even disqualifyingly, between the poles of snobbery (false social judgement rather than true perceptiveness) and sex (brutal, because only physiological, impulse). ‘Van could not help feeling esthetically moved’: the adverb is apologetic, self-excusing, anxious to complicate what might be simply snobbery. The clever chiming of ‘Proust’ and ‘paste’ reveals the uncertain distance between Van’s position and Nabokov’s— perhaps the pleasures of reading really are so arbitrary and coarse, if they aren’t a display of over-refinement. Is it the aim of great prose to tease our ‘artistic vanity’—does it flatter, titivate, and confirm the social identity of its reader—or does its pleasure disturb us more profoundly? Turning reading into connoisseurship, writing paragraphs of prose which ask to be admired in a way which stresses the cleverness of both author and reader, Nabokov comes dangerously close to endorsing the first position, where, as Latham has it, ‘the pleasures we derive from literature are in­ex­tric­ably entangled in the profitdriven pursuit of economic and symbolic capital’.30 And yet his criticism, and his fiction itself, is vitally challenging of forms of study which value texts only for their politics, their supposedly subversive or deconstructive powers, while never coming to terms with, or developing a language for discussing, literary pleasure, and its overlap with the forms of thinking of which literature is uniquely capable. ‘Lips to Lips’ is a short story composed in the 1930s, about the woefully untalented author Ilya Borisovich Tal. He writes bad, vague, sentimental prose, all too obviously precipitated by his loneliness—his wife’s dead. Yet Nabokov’s irony is tender rather than scathing, and Tal, rather like Timofey Pnin, exaggerates some of the author’s own weaknesses—being ‘terribly impatient’, as a writer, ‘to plunge with his hero and heroine into that starry night. Still one had to get one’s coats, and that interfered with the glamour . . . His 29  Ibid., 12.

30 Latham, Am I a Snob?, 223.

162  Vidyan ravinthiran leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items, such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors’.31 Although Nabokov is famous for his precise description—he curates meticulously those moments where he does slide, like Tal, into a shimmering romantic vagueness—this resembles his aforementioned description to Herbert Gold of his English prose as ‘a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction’. Just as Tal is a version of Nabokov, so his own hero resembles himself in wealth, although the origins of his cash flow are snobbishly obscured: ‘Dolinin was “colossally wealthy,” without precise explanation of his source of income; Ilya Borisovich directed a company engaged in the installation of bathrooms.’ Inconsiderate of reality, he falls foul of it: a ‘pretty volume’ of prose poems ‘landed right in the middle of the civil war’. Writing becomes a craving for connection—but which author would deny this?—sonorously announced: ‘Let at least one word of my writings impregnate a reader’s heart.’ All the myths of creation are annexed to his fading self-esteem, for in his own mind, Tal is both a Flaubertian reviser, endlessly at work—‘I’m polishing my phrasing’, he insists, refusing a visit to a café—and a Romantic genius of uncontrollable spontaneity: ‘I penned the end in one spurt. He dies, yes, he dies.’ He is conned into submitting work to a magazine named Arion which only publishes him because he provides the money they need to survive in the style to which they’ve become accustomed: receiving his author copies, Tal notes they’ve misprinted his name and included only a fragment of his work, yet the ‘pink, plump, cool tomes’ are printed on ‘fancy paper’.32 In this way, Nabokov highlights the unstable connection between artistic aspiration and the crass ostentation of the marketplace. The story ends with Tal overhearing the editor insulting his work, and acknowledging its publication as a financial necessity. He storms out, but then realizes he has forgotten his cane: Cars sped by, tramcars rang their bells, the night was clear, dry, spruced up with lights. He began to walk slowly towards the theater. He reflected that he was old, lonely, that his joys were few, and that old people must pay for their joys. He reflected that perhaps even tonight, and in any case, tomorrow, Galatov would come with explanations, exhortations, justifications. He knew 31 Nabokov, Collected Stories (London: Penguin, 2001), 312.

32  Ibid., 313, 315, 320, 321.

Nabokov and the privilege of style  163 that he must forgive everything, otherwise the “To be continued” would never materialize. And he also told himself that he would be fully recognized after his death, and he recollected, he gathered up in a tiny heap, all the crumbs of praise he had received lately, and slowly walked to and fro, and after a while went back for his cane.33

The repeated word ‘joys’ is a bleak pun in this English translation by Nabokov and his son Dmitri, for one of the running jokes of this story is that the deceptive editor Galatov has been recommended to Tal as ‘the Russian Joyce’, a name he conspicuously fails to pronounce: ‘“Djoys,” meekly repeated Ilya Borisovich.’34 (A misguided would-be litterateur, he does in fact resemble Chandler, the protagonist of Joyce’s short story ‘A Little Cloud’.) That this important word comes up against the idea of payment, both figurative and cruelly literal, shows Nabokov once again acknowledging the economic real­ ities which underlie the performance of artistic distinction Tal haplessly craves. The cane is the symbol of the dandy; an elegant, expressive item, also a crutch; at the same time, returning for it becomes one of those pedestrian necessities, like the getting of one’s coat, that Tal struggles to include in his own writing. What so rends about this conclusion is how he isn’t disenchanted of his illusions, but recovers them, re-establishing with ‘crumbs of praise’ his ascension into the aristocracy of art. The little associative run of sound, through materialize, recognized, and praise, is essential to the translation—it captures Tal’s resurgent optimism, his stubborn and perhaps even genuinely heroic movement out of inertia. That he is closer in spirit to Nabokov than we might think is confirmed by a curious parallel with the end of Chapter 11 of Speak, Memory, where Nabokov writes his first (bad, sentimental) poem, is praised by his mother, and, seeing himself in her hand mirror, has ‘the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass’.35 Yet the difference between Tal and Nabokov is that Nabokov is genuinely talented. ‘Lips to Lips’ is a story written to insist that the connection between artistic prestige and the money world isn’t fatal to the writer’s good hopes, and that there do exist viable forms of untainted distinction. Perhaps, if Tal really could write, there might have been another way. The association between style and identity which we see in Tal, and also in Nabokov’s self-portrait of the artist as a young man, is one this chapter 33  Ibid., 324. 34  Ibid., 316. 35  Vladimir Nabokov: Novels and Memoirs 1941–1951, 553.

164  Vidyan ravinthiran considers in terms of ‘privilege’. This admittedly overused and perfervid term seems to me right (in its bridging of moneyed power and social entitlement) for what style, in both the personal and the artistic sense, means to Nabokov. What I speak of is a redemption, felt from sentence to sentence of the writer’s life, which pertains to an intellectual independence, and a surefooted extension of periods of linguistic confidence; a confidence Nabokov knows he owes to his background, his upbringing, to the shadow of a material wealth which became an imaginative wealth in exile, before being to some extent re­acquired. His prose describes privileged people, and evinces social privilege; it is also his way of refusing victimhood as an alternative authority for his writings. Nabokov details what has been taken away from him, but with a magnificence contrarily insistent on what has remained in his possession, the wealth which has migrated for its continuation into wonderful behaviours. If he can be accused, as a result, of elitism—like many modernist writers, and their project more generally—we might also locate a difficult generosity, towards himself and others, in his refusal of the depressive position; the victim position. To be exquisite is, for Nabokov, to insist, with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, that ‘the soul exceeds its circumstances’, or can do so occasionally, and periodically, with the aid of luck, and that intensity of attention shared by the prose stylist and the formalist critic.36 We should notice that this is not the same as saying that either an artwork or a person can be completely self-authored and ­unaccountable to social forces; it is also, however unpalatable this may be to politically-conscientious Anglo-American theorists, a claim necessary to the dignity, as Milosz demonstrates, of disenfranchised people all over the world. It isn’t only an assertion made by a moneyed elite who would reconfigure their leisured ratiocinations as a personal triumph rather than a privilege dependent on material security. Rather, it is a claim especially important to those of us on the outside, who may feel, with Nabokov, that we have lost a country, a language, and had to construct from sentence to sentence an alternatively expressive personality. It is a way of continuing (to live, to write); and Nabokov’s double-minded prose, both snobbish and tellingly sensitive to weakness and humiliation, is just one of the places this brave claim is made. * The author’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, ‘died a hero’s death, bravely defending his chief ideological opponent within his own liberal 36  This remark, widely attributed to Milosz in this form, is quoted by Seamus Heaney in ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’, published in District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006).

Nabokov and the privilege of style  165 Constitutional Democratic party from two right-wing thugs and being shot in the scuffle’; that opponent was Paul Milyukov, who wished to reject a nonclass ‘united front of all democratic Russian forces opposed to autocracy whether tsarist or Bolshevist’ in ‘favor of supporting the peasants. Milyukov and his followers were ready to dream the Social Revolutionary dream that the peasants might translate their hostility to Bolshevism into concerted rebellion’.37 This is Brian Boyd; a separate section to that in which he discusses the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory; yet I believe the historical facts of V. D. Nabokov’s death, and his own relationship to the peasantry, are inextricable from the marvellous prose the biographer considers briefly and abstractly. Nabokov begins with a grandiose, apparently politically summative, but perhaps merely purple, alliterative, sentence—continuous with the salubrious manor in which he, as a child, is safely and blissfully enclosed: The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century. Several times during a summer it might happen that in the middle of luncheon, in the bright, many-windowed, walnut-paneled dining room on the first floor of our Vyra manor, Aleksey, the butler, with an unhappy expression on his face, would bend over and inform my father in a low voice (especially low if we had company) that a group of villagers wanted to see the barin outside. Briskly my father would remove his napkin from his lap and ask my mother to excuse him. One of the windows at the west end of the dining room gave upon a portion of the drive near the main entrance. One could see the top of the honeysuckle bushes opposite the porch. From that direction the courteous buzz of a peasant welcome would reach us as the invisible group greeted my invisible father.38

‘Got fantastically interwoven’: this isn’t quite a state-of-Russia sentence about the ‘strange first decade’ of the twentieth century, for Nabokov is primarily concerned with the shimmering weave of his own individual experience as a child. That said, the following sentence provides a remarkable snapshot of class realities. Bright, rhyming with might, kicks off a triad of epithets stressing the grandeur of the dining room; the interaction between butler and barin is important, and the parenthesis, emulative of Aleksey’s whispered aside, 37  Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 8, 190, 189. 38 Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951, revised 1966); repr. Vladimir Nabokov: Novels and Memoirs 1941–1951, where the passage I block-quote gradually can be found on pages 378–9.

166  Vidyan ravinthiran touches on a delicacy of social manners important to the Russian upper middle class. The shift of briskly to the beginning of the following sentence—it alliterates with barin and butler, decisively—then captures the mixture, in Nabokov’s father, of domestic nuance (the napkin; the apology to his wife) with social commitment. I should stress at this point that I am not the sort of historicist critic who would seek to denigrate Nabokov’s artistic accomplishments, which really I see as not evasions of but a way of thinking about history. It is rather that both the father-inherited confidence and independence of his prose style, and its more vulnerable moments, do relate to a larger world, and can only be understood fully in these terms; the most remarkable stylistic effects don’t just underline but are generated by a profound, if sometimes camouflaged, or outright disavowed, interest in a more than personal history. Here, for example, we should notice how the aforementioned parenthesis, which brings into the writing the sotto voce communication between servant and master, is gently framed by two off-rhyming words: ‘Aleksey, the butler, with an unhappy expression on his face, would bend over and inform my father in a low voice.’ We hear this almost as a diminished couplet-rhyme, pause slightly, and are alerted, before the parenthesis, to the relationship between prose and voice; the necessity, following Nabokov’s quotation from Stevenson, of reading with not just the eye but the ear. ‘The courteous buzz of a peasant welcome’ also insists on the heard, rather than the seen, for at this point nothing can be seen out of the window: ‘the invisible group greeted my invisible father’. Nabokov as a child, an observer on the margin, about to receive a complex aesthetic experience; yet that ‘courteous buzz’ also leads into a picture of ideally harmonious class relations: The ensuing parley, conducted in ordinary tones, would not be heard, as the windows underneath which it took place were closed to keep out the heat. It presumably had to do with a plea for his mediation in some local feud, or with some special subsidy, or with the permission to harvest some bit of our land or cut down a coveted clump of our trees. If, as usually happened, the request was at once granted, there would be again that buzz, and then, in token of gratitude, the good barin would be put through the national ordeal of being rocked and tossed up and securely caught by a score or so of strong arms.

The ‘parley, conducted in ordinary tones’ is clearly civil, there’s no argument, and Nabokov seals a crisp sentence—he wishes to move, already, into the imagined rather than the apprehended—with the contact of heard and heat.

Nabokov and the privilege of style  167 What these rhymes, or almost-rhymes, create in this passage is the sense of a childhood world in which everything makes sense, in which the rules of the house and its idiosyncrasies are not challenged but happily reinforced by outsiders; which does touch on the class structure of pre-Revolution Russia. The special effect Nabokov is working towards, and which Boyd discusses in terms of a characteristic negotiation between life and art, develops out of a social ritual which dramatizes, however joyously, the hierarchical ascension of Vladimir Dmitrievich above those who visit asking for his ‘mediation in some local feud, or with some special subsidy, or with the permission to harvest some bit of our land or cut down a coveted clump of our trees’. This jaunty, almost devil-may-care listing of possible requests reveals Nabokov’s attitude towards the power relationship—he doesn’t dwell on the inequalities which underlie this event, and the alliteration of ‘special subsidy’ and ‘cut down a coveted clump’ is part of an assured vanishing act. ‘If, as usually happened, the request was at once granted’: again, potential disagreements are dissolved, and ‘the national ordeal’ is a wry way of describing the amiable ritual his father may have gone through to humour the peasants, Nabokov suggests, in a spirit of noblesse oblige. It’s an almost psychoanalytical image—about the child’s fear of being dropped, the fear played with, neutralized, by parents as they loft an infant in the air and swoop them down. ‘Securely’ is an important addition: we are inside the mind of Nabokov as a child, and are also being shown his father’s security within society, the weight of his belonging—abruptly cancelled, in reality, by his being shot through the spine at a political meeting. The domestic scene is summarized with lovely economy: In the dining room, my brother and I would be told to go on with our food. My mother, a tidbit between finger and thumb, would glance under the table to see if her nervous and gruff dachshund was there. “Un jour ils vont le ­laisser tomber,” would come from Mlle Golay, a primly pessimistic old lady who had been my mother’s governess and still dwelt with us (on awful terms with our own governesses).

Is it ungenerous, a stretch, to link Elena Nabokov, feeding tidbits to her dog, with Vladimir Dmitrievitch meeting with the peasants? Certainly, the dachshund’s possible presence ‘under the table’ is relevant, for it fits into the structure of high and low, and his father’s eventual ascension into the heavens of art, which Nabokov is setting up. That the dog is ‘nervous and gruff ’ relates to Mlle Golay warning, in French, that one day they, the peasants, are going to

168  Vidyan ravinthiran drop the barin. Nabokov displaces the anxiety of the occasion onto the animal, and the foreshadowing of his father’s eventual death is given to us in French, held at a stylistic remove which really enhances the matter instead of displacing it. ‘Primly pessimistic’ gives us in two alliterative words so much of the ­governess’s bearing—the tone of her disapproving remark takes the reader directly into the scene and Nabokov’s unease as a child, although I think this prose mastery is in fact contaminated by some of that unease, which remains alive in the occasion of writing, and unstable. I refer here to the architecture of woulds required by his presentation here of not a unique event but one that occurs ‘several times during a summer’— both semi-regular and wondrously disturbing. ‘My brother and I would be told’; ‘my mother would glance . . . under the table’; and, absurdly, ‘ “Un jour ils vont le laisser tomber,” would come from Mlle Golay’. She is made to appear especially ridiculous for remarking thus every time, fitting her disapproval so reliably and vacuously into the occasion; yet ‘would come’ is, to apply Nabokov’s phrasing in the Herbert Gold interview, a ‘stiffish, artificial’ way of presenting ‘domestic diction’. Nabokov is led, here, by the proliferating woulds he doesn’t quite keep under control—an apparently simple word that combines comforting regularity with a quality both ominous and, to return to Nabokov’s opening sentence, ‘fatalistic’. As we arrive at the wondrous prose illusion in which Boyd quite rightly discerns the very essence of Nabokov’s philosophy, would appears five more times: From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

There is also an important word in this passage. It takes a firm stress at the beginning of the second sentence, and sounds almost like an exclamation; we

Nabokov and the privilege of style  169 imagine Nabokov, told to continue eating, in fact pointing delightedly at the window, insisting that his family notice the ‘marvelous’ occurrence: there! Look! It also insists on a particular location—the Vyra manor; pre-Revolution Russia more generally—now lost to Nabokov, an irrecoverable ‘instant’ in both space and time. His father is ‘displayed’ in the window rather like a picture in its frame, and this initiates the movement from life into art, the assertion of a porous and ever-inventive connection between these realms, which is, as Boyd recognizes, typical of Nabokov and which climaxes with the im­agin­ing of his father as a figure painted on the ceiling of a church. The ‘instant’ is therefore underlined, and allowed to expand; there rhymes with midair, so the comma-pause after ‘gloriously sprawling in midair’ lengthens slightly, and the assonance of gloriously sprawling must be relished and lingered over, a version of slow-motion in prose. The desire to arrest that vision of his father in the midst of life is, however, held in balance by Nabokov’s intelligent acknowledgement of the ongoing, the in some sense vanishing, flow of prose—an understanding of literary form which is in tune with, and bespeaks, the impending crisis of the country he  describes. ‘Gloriously sprawling’ is intonationally mirrored by ‘curiously ­casual’, and this form of rhyming allows the sentence to proceed. In the final clauses, the assonance linking imperturbable and turned engineers a touching vision of Nabokov’s father floating unconcerned above possible danger, but also insists on the second meaning of ‘turned to the sky’; he isn’t just looking at the heavens but is in the process of turning into them, being assimilated by them. This is where Nabokov’s transformation of his father into a painting on a church ceiling must step in, to redeem what would otherwise be a terrifying loss of personal identity in an impersonal sky. ‘Thrice’ kicks off that final labyrinthine sentence with an echo of ‘There’ at  the start of the last one—again, there’s a vigorous stress bordering on exclamation. The long i sound dominates initially as the prose races forward, emotionally impulsive. We have to spurt through breathlessly: x    x    / and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there  x        x       / he would be Nabokov, an accomplished if idiosyncratic prosodist, has this clause hasten onward with childish excitement before controlling it with two anapaests, poetic feet which each contain two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. ‘There’, once again, takes the strongest emphasis; we come down hard on

170  Vidyan ravinthiran it, as a point of necessary focus in a sentence of such length. The emotional tension expressed in the little wishful addition, ‘as if for good’—Nabokov longs for his father to remain there, in the air, forever—is also present in rhythm and texture. ‘Against the cobalt blue of the summer noon’: these adjective–noun combinations, where the nouns are also sutured by sound, design a possible, a longed-for stasis. ‘Cobalt blue’ is a paint colour, and the prose associates here what it does sonically with what the artist achieves with paint: it will not simply describe Nabokov’s father as an artwork but also enacts that process of creative immortalization. There is another intonational mirroring in the next clause, as ‘paradisiac personages’ are said to ‘comfortably soar’; these phrases echo each other. ‘Comfortably’ recalls the barin ‘securely’ caught by his tossers, and is also a word we use to describe those of ‘wealth’, a word which appears discreetly at this point, smuggled in as painterly detail: ‘such a wealth of folds in their garments’. (Could there be an image of folded banknotes here?) Nabokov began this section with talk of ‘fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth’, and in such an alertly self-conscious prose writer, a recurrence of this kind must tell; it re­intro­duces into the artistic apotheosis of his father a recognition of the ­economic realities which made him seem, before his death, imperturbable and invulnerable. It also recognizes on some level, I would argue, the bridge between Nabokov’s upbringing amid such plenty, and the artistic bravado which allows him to write as he does here, to summon to the aid of his ­commemorative prose such a ‘wealth’ of attentiveness, taste, and literaryphilosophical alertness. The ‘hands’ holding candles down ‘below’ correspond to those of the ­peasants hoisting Vladimir Dmitrievich into the air, and a contrastive sound connection insists on the difference between his paradisiac eminence on the ‘vaulted’ ceiling and their ‘mortal hands’ making up a ‘swarm of minute flames’. ‘Swarm’ is a slightly unpleasant word, carrying associations of an insectoid underclass; has the ‘courteous buzz of a peasant welcome’ altered for the worse? As the prose manages its astonishing shift from the would-be painting of Nabokov’s father on the church ceiling to the reality of his dead, displaced body lying in its coffin, the ‘swimming lights’ are so, as Boyd notices, because there are tears in his son’s eyes; another slant-rhyme on ‘face’ (this time that of the barin, rather than his butler Aleksey) has that word emerge suddenly of ‘repose’, to craft a stylized yet deeply felt shock.39 Previously, the man’s features were ‘turned to the sky’; now we are confronted with the vividly 39  Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 8.

Nabokov and the privilege of style  171 actual dead face ‘in the open coffin’; the ‘wax tapers’ suggest Icarus, whose wings melted in the sun. The barin, who appeared to fly by the dining-room window, and to comfortably soar on the ceiling of the church, could equally not sustain his flight—revealed by this extraordinary passage as dependent not only on Nabokov’s miracle-working art but a position of ‘wealth’ bound up with the peasants who physically lofted him into the air, like a specialeffects team; also, the changing politics of revolutionary Russia, which would ultimately have their victory over a man accidentally assassinated in a moment of valiant self-sacrifice. This chapter has applied the word ‘modernist’ to Nabokov—to test if it will fit. He refused to be located within any movement or school; if his position resembles the nineteenth-century aestheticism which fed into the modernist project, he ultimately disdains ‘the slogan “art for art’s sake”—because unfortunately such promoters of it as, for instance, Oscar Wilde and other dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists and didacticists’.40 Arguing for one such figure, Walter Pater, as a ‘modernist before his time’—as Nabokov may be a modernist after his time—Angela Leighton describes ‘an aestheticism which builds its theories, not in an empty museum space removed from historical process, but on the shifting, moment-by-moment conditions of that process’.41 This is how I see the passage from Speak, Memory analysed above—and why I’ve used a kind of biographical criticism to shed new light on the enmeshing in this author of ‘style’ and ‘privilege’, key words I would test against the ­contrary energies of his writing rather than abstract from it. It was Nabokov’s gift, and his burden, to live through the very severance of material from mental wealth which the modernists argued for; exiled, he claimed the authority (his prose does this, as we read) of the aristocrat of culture rather than the victim of history. His spoken English stuttered and stammered; the way he writes it reimagines the stop-start as fluency, the necessary self-conscious ­patterning of the unidiomatic outsider as a gorgeously excessive scaffold of alliteration. He deliciously elongates and embroiders each perception with an intensity which I don’t see as escapist (or reader-excludingly elitist), so much continuously exposed to the pain of actual and possible loss. And so the style of close reading which Nabokov applies to others is a form of respectful deconstruction we owe to him. This is how we may understand his relevance to a reinterpreted modernism into which he’s never quite fitted; it’s also how 40 This remark from the 1964 interview with Alvin Toffler in Playboy can be found in Strong Opinions, p.33. 41  Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87.

172  Vidyan ravinthiran we should discern the double origin of his marvellous style in both a materially and mentally assured upbringing, and a subsequently bruised migrancy. Following his prose from sound to sound, identifying its duplicable rhythms, we see a man forced into a second unnatural language wonderfully redeem an enforced gracelessness. The close reader is able to witness how, as at the end of ‘Lips to Lips’, the writer picks himself up, dusts himself off, and puts together a workable identity out of scattered and dwindling yet recapturable fragments.

8 Bird Girls Modernism and Sexual Ethics in Contemporary Irish Fiction Paige Reynolds

Since its publication in 2013, Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing has been read as an inheritor of modernism.1 In the press and in academic scholarship, critics have noted that this contemporary novel blatantly re­cap­ itu­lates many of the distinctive traits found in modernist fiction: it contains alarming content, it represents experience as fragmented, it refuses certainty through its obfuscations and an occasionally unreliable narrator, it dislocates past and present. In these assessments, James Joyce has been cited as a par­ ticular influence on the novel, with McBride herself identifying him as her ‘hero’.2 These nods to Joyce suggest an important function that literary prede­ cessors provide contemporary writing, one identified by T. S. Eliot almost a century ago. In his 1923 essay ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, Eliot claimed Ulysses as ‘the most important expression which this present age has found’, commending Joyce’s use of ‘mythical modernism’ and in particular his invo­ cation of Homer’s Odyssey as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.3 For Eliot, a long-established and easily Portions of this paper originally appeared in Paige Reynolds, ‘Trauma, Intimacy, and Modernist Form’, rev. of Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing’ (Coffee House Press, 2013), Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies (September 2014). 1  Derek Attridge, ‘Foreword’, Joycean Legacies, ed. Martha C. Carpentier (Houndsmill Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), vii–xx; Ruth Gilligan, ‘Eimear McBride’s Ireland: A Case for Periodisation and the Dangers of Marketing Modernism’, English Studies 99.7 (2018): 775–92; Michael Gorra, ‘Eimear McBride’s Toolkit’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2016; Adam Mars-Jones, ‘All Your Walkmans Fizz in Tune’, London Review of Books 35.18, 8 August 2013; Jacqueline Rose, ‘From the Inside Out’, rev. of Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber, 2016), London Review of Books 38.18, 22 September 2016: 11–12; James Wood, ‘Useless Prayers: Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Halfformed Thing’, The New Yorker, 29 September 2014. 2  Eimear McBride, ‘My Hero: Eimear McBride on James Joyce’, The Guardian, 6 June 2014. 3  T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth (1923)’, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1975), 177.

Paige Reynolds, Bird Girls: Modernism and Sexual Ethics in Contemporary Irish Fiction In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Paige Reynolds. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0009

174  Paige reynolds recognized literary form might manage, and thus help readers contend with, the boggling complexities of the present day. Such familiar forms can award readers a measure of distance from troubling content—not the distance of Franco Moretti’s overview of massive amounts of information but rather a critical distance from contemporary writing akin to what Eric Hayot labels ‘leverage’.4 Read from the vantage of the present moment, a recognizable mod­ ernist form can provide a useful container to hold difficult and disturbing topics for further consideration. Even as these largely unaltered literary forms, through their stubborn persistence, underscore the tenacity of noxious sociocultural problems, they also can provide a well-wrought urn, one filled with cultural toxins for which the antidote might be sensitive readings that gener­ ate em­pathy and understanding. To support this lofty claim, and to demonstrate the conceptual pay-off of close reading through modernist afterlives, this chapter examines ‘bird girl’ scenes written across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, McBride reworks the modernist epiphany by adapting the ‘bird girl’ scene found in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). A designation introduced by Hugh Kenner in Dublin’s Joyce (1955), ‘bird girl’ refers to the young woman wading in the sea whom Joyce’s adoles­ cent protagonist Stephen Dedalus observes from Sandymount Strand. Stephen’s encounter with the ‘bird girl’ triggers in him an epiphany, a moment of enlightenment that Joyce famously described in Stephen Hero (1944), his autobiographical precursor to Portrait, as a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’ for the ‘man of letters to record . . . with great care’.5 In this moment, Stephen is inspired to become an artist rather than join the priesthood. A number of Irish authors have subsequently isolated and revised this celebrated scene, including Joyce himself in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter of Ulysses (1922) and Samuel Beckett in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), as well as Kate O’Brien in The Land of Spices (1941) and Edna O’Brien in Down by the River (1996). Like both O’Briens, McBride retools Joyce’s modernist epiphany to launch a feminist critique. No longer merely the instrument of another’s epiphany, the ‘bird girls’ crafted by these Irish women writers experience and manifest themselves the sudden interior revelations triggered by outside objects or events. Tracing the evolution of the ‘bird girl’ scene across these twentiethcentury texts reveals an aesthetic lineage for McBride’s novel that does not

4  See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), and Eric Hayot, ‘Critical Distance and the Crisis in Criticism (2007)’, Erichayot.org (blog), 11 November 2011. 5  James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1944), 211.

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  175 derive strictly from the trinity of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett; it opens up a larger system of influence for experimental contemporary literature that includes women writers. As well, a comparative close reading of the ‘bird girl’ scenes written by Irish women writers in the wake of Portrait exposes the continued socio-ethical value of modernist form. This attention to the ‘bird girl’ allows us deliberately to test if modernist afterlives—and the reading practices that they demand—can move us past the satisfactions of our own virtuosity, our ability to identify modernist allusions and tactics, and expose the social and political implications of using modernism after modernism. Considering the surfeit of contemporary fiction that has self-consciously invoked modernism, it seems apparent that this tactic provides a potent device for rigorously exploring the representation of profoundly complicated, and even deeply disturbing, cultural conditions that span the long twentieth century. McBride has explicitly confirmed the ongoing relevance of the mod­ ernist project, asserting, ‘there is more in this tradition than we have been led to believe. Everyone thinks modernism is dead and done, because there’s Finnegans Wake and Beckett and they’ve tied everything up neatly. I really don’t think they have tied everything up neatly’.6 McBride picks up one of those loose ends left hanging to weave a productively unsettling account of sexual abuse. Recent decades in Ireland have been marked by the exposure of widespread sexual abuse of children, a crisis represented, in one example, by the non-profit organization ‘One in Four’, which is named for the fact that one in four Irish citizens has suffered from childhood sexual abuse.7 Though the sexual abuse of children in Catholic institutions in Ireland such as industrial schools and orphanages has commanded a great deal of public notice, the fact remains that the majority of childhood sexual abuse occurs within the family—a problem not limited, obviously, to this small European country. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing reveals how an epiphanic moment inspired by Joyce’s classic modernist text might encourage readers to consider the subtle ma­chin­ ations that enable these abuses. The novel is told from the point of view of an unnamed female protagonist who recounts her life in the first person, beginning in the womb and ending with her suicide in her twenties. Set in rural Ireland in the recent past, the novel catalogues her life of ongoing 6  Susanna Rustin, ‘Eimear McBride: “I wanted to give the reader a very different experience” ’. Guardian, 16 May 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/16/eimear-mcbride-girl-is-ahalf-formed-thing-interview, 23 March 2016. 7 See One in Four, http://www.oneinfour.ie/. This figure derived from investigations into sexual abuse sponsored by the Irish government: the Sexual Abuse and Violence (SAVI) Report (2002), as well as three studies focused on clerical sex abuse in Ireland, the Ferns Report(2005), the Ryan Report (2009), and the Murphy Report (2009).

176  Paige reynolds trauma: her older brother has a chronic brain tumour, her father has abandoned the family, her mother’s attention is consumed by fundamental Catholicism. When she is thirteen, her uncle seduces her, propelling her into an affair with him that lasts her entire life, and this rape triggers a subsequent series of increasingly abject and violent sexual encounters with other men. McBride’s resuscitation of modernism produces a disruptive and disorienting novel that aptly represents the physical and psychological violations suffered by her ‘half-formed’ girl, as well as underscoring the important function of appropriate boundaries in adolescent development.8 The opening paragraph introduces the novel’s jagged prose style, as well as the defining circumstance of the protagonist’s early life—her brother’s surgery and his resultant brain damage. Recorded when she is just a ‘whirlabout’ in her mother’s womb, it reads: ‘For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her sin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.’9 These opening lines, and the other experimental elements of the novel’s form, have been attributed to McBride’s endeavour to reflect, through style, the protagonist’s inability to formulate and articulate a coherent identity, or to recount her various traumatic experiences. Literary form immediately conveys a concern with the lack of boundaries among characters, a theme sig­ nalled by the ambiguous pronouns—who’s you, who’s me, who’s they?—as well as by the lack of punctuation—who’s saying what? This small excerpt also makes clear why this novel offers a rich mine from which to unearth modernist style. Evident in these lines are the short sentences and repetition of Stein and Hemingway, the broken sentences of Joyce and Beckett, the interior monologue and representation of female consciousness of Richardson and Woolf. This first paragraph of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing suggests Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the most prominent and influential of its modernist progenitors. Both novels plunge readers into an unfamiliar world without the security of descriptive context, and both open with lan­ guage that reflects the undeveloped linguistic and analytic tools of a child. In Portrait, readers first encounter the perspective of the toddler Stephen as he listens to his father, a moment written from the third person in free indirect discourse. In Girl, McBride offers the first-person voice of the protagonist 8  For an account of ‘immersive’ adolescence in the novel, see Susan Cahill, ‘A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing?: Girlhood, Trauma, and Resistance in Post-Tiger Irish Literature’, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 28.2 (2017): 153–71. 9  Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (London: Galley Beggar Press, 2013), 3. Future references parenthetical.

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  177 recounting, in utero, her brother’s surgery (3–4). However, while the voice in Portrait matures over the novel’s five chapters, reflecting Stephen’s biological and intellectual development, the narrative voice in Girl remains virtually the same throughout the entire novel, even as the narrator ages. The prose remains fragmented throughout, perhaps reflecting the broken nature of this ‘halfformed’ girl and demonstrating the ways in which her upbringing and experi­ ences thwart her development. As such, the novel despite its linear narrative embodies the ‘unseasonable youth’ of the bildungsroman identified by Jed Esty, offering through its linguistic and stylistic stasis a contemporary version of the modernist protagonist who fails to mature.10 In Portrait, Stephen’s epiphany, which falls at the close of the novel’s fourth chapter, is discrete, intense, and exclusively positive. Described in this scene as ‘happy’ and ‘young’, Stephen considers from afar the girl wading in the sea who appears ‘like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird’.11 They share a glance, though both characters are described in this scene as ‘alone’ (185, 186). As he watches the girl, Stephen projects onto her a variety of functions and roles, and as his muse, she receives credit for his sudden awareness that he will reject a religious life and move instead into ‘some new world’ (187) organized by art. Filtered through his consciousness, the young woman is a symbol and this encounter a rite of pas­ sage that promises to move him forward in his development, one ostensibly securing, as the genre of the bildungsroman promises, his integration into society. This seems a straightforward epiphany in which the male protagonist obtains sudden awareness and deeper insight. Yet as critics have pointed out, the recognitions found in fiction and categorized as ‘Joycean epiphany’ are not always lucid moments of understanding for characters. Here, Stephen wraps his own desires, straight or gay, in the purple prose of a precocious teenager, understanding that something intense has unfolded, but not entirely certain in the moment of its full significance. This uncertainty is often more overt in the epiphanies of female characters imagined by Irish women writers. Anne Fogarty has emphasized that Joyce regarded epiphany, manifest for him in practices ranging from dramatic irony to lyrical outpouring, as ‘a means of signposting but not fully articulat­ ing masked psychological realities’.12 In the short fiction of the Irish writer 10  Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 11  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin, 2003) 185. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 12  See Anne Fogarty, ‘Discontinuities: Tales from Bective Bridge and the Modernist Short Story’, Mary Lavin, ed. Elke D’hoker (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013), 49–64; 54.

178  Paige reynolds Mary Lavin, Fogarty detects a reworking of Joycean epiphany, one that can be ascertained in moments when recognitions are followed by silence, or when apprehensions are negated or muffled over.13 The gendered nature of the Joycean epiphany, and its refashioning by Irish women writers in the after­ math of high modernism, also reveals itself in three novels that take up and revise the ‘bird girl’ scene from Portrait. Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River (1996), and McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing all stage an epiphany that signals a perceived rite of pas­ sage promising to move the protagonist into some new form of understand­ ing and experience—though importantly, these epiphanies and what unfolds in their wake are not necessarily characterized strictly by good feeling for female protagonists. In The Land of Spices, Kate O’Brien grants Portrait a valuable ‘afterlife’ that closely mimics her predecessor’s formal methods and thematic concerns. The novel follows the coming of age of a young Irish student, Anna Murphy, who is shepherded through Catholic convent school by the English Mother Superior, Helen Archer. Another modernist bildungsroman, The Land of Spices has been likened repeatedly to Portrait with Adele Dalsimer citing Anna and Stephen’s shared obsession with wordplay, Mary Breen identifying their mutual ‘awakening of aesthetic perception and the development of a sensitive artistic consciousness’, and Margot Backus and Joseph Valente citing their com­ mon embodiment of the ‘indefinite or enigmatic signifiers of the self-reflexive modernist novel’.14 Throughout the novel, O’Brien keeps the authority of her third-person narrator more firmly in view than Joyce does and maintains a commitment to the tenets of literary realism, even as she engages tactics drawn from modernism. Her thoughtful fusion of realism and modernism reflects the conditions under which Anna lives and invites the reader to share in them. That is, the benevolent supervision that Helen Archer offers Anna throughout the novel is reflected formally through an omniscient narrator who provides the reader steady narrative guidance. For instance, when Anna’s beloved younger brother Charlie accidentally drowns, the narrative slowly walks Anna towards the harrowing sight of his corpse, revealing only frag­ ments of what she perceives during this journey: a spell of afternoon quiet suggests Charlie’s absence, frightened townspeople rushing to the sea-wall 13 Ibid. 14  Adele Dalsimer, Kate O’Brien (Boston: Twayne, 1990) 67; Mary Breen, ‘Something Understood?: Kate O’Brien and The Land of Spices’, Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien, ed. Eibhear Walshe (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), 187; Margot Backus and Joseph Valente, ‘The Land of the Spices and the Stylistic Invention of Lesbian (In)Visibility’, Irish University Review 43.1 (2013): 57.

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  179 offer an ‘odd impression’, the hum of prayers suggests a death (219–20). These fragmented perceptions slowly unfurl, with partial information revealed only at the pace Anna can recognize and accommodate, a tactic found throughout Portrait as well as in the first-person stories of childhood that open Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). The bewilderment shared by Anna and the reader dissolves when she spies Charlie being carried by fishermen from the sea, and the sight of his ‘beautiful, dead face’ accompanied by a chorus of Hail Marys ends the chapter (220). In the subsequent chapter, O’Brien returns again to Joyce and explicitly reworks the ‘bird girl’ scene in an encounter between Anna and Pilar, a class­ mate struggling to parse Milton’s Lycidas for her exams. Following Charlie’s death, Anna considers ‘the escape into religion’ because it offers her ‘distraction from loneliness’ (269). As she looks at the ‘shining lake’ near her school, Pilar calls to her, asking her to ‘be a saint’ and explain Milton’s elegy (269). Here, literary form, not religious faith, consoles as the ‘elegiac composure of the lines’ (270) offers Anna comfort. As Anna reads the poem, she slips into a reverie and begins to see Pilar in a new light: She became aware of her and of the moment on a plane of perception which was strange to her, and which during its visitation she did not understand but could only receive—delightedly, but without surprise in fact, and as if she had been waiting for the lead it was to give. She saw her, it seemed, in isolation and in a new sphere, yet one made up of broken symbols from their common life and which took its light from the simplicity of shared associations. A foolish schoolgirl, smiling at poetic verbiage—yet herself a symbol as complicated as any imaginative struggle in verse; a common piece of creation, an exquisite challenge to creativeness; she saw Pilar as a glimpse, as if she were a line from a lost immortal; she saw her ironically, delightedly, as a motive in art.  (271–2)

Just as Stephen transformed, through imagination, the girl wading in the ocean into a stimulus for his art, so too does Anna transform Pilar into a regis­ter of her own artistic potential with the help of elegy. This ‘translation of the ordinary’ (272) causes Anna’s heart to leap ‘premonitorily’ (272), an af­fect­ive­ly driven physiological response akin to Stephen’s more externalized one at the strand, in which ‘His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling’ (186). O’Brien’s ‘bird girl’ scene gives us a direct encounter between two in­di­vid­ uals, one the young female artist struggling to identify her purpose and the

180  Paige reynolds other the object of her projection. A subtle eroticism, that may or may not be lesbian desire, elicits from Anna a powerful response, a bodily register of feel­ ing that culminates in release and relief—an emotional trajectory resembling that of Stephen. His epiphany inspires his soul to cry out ‘in an outburst of profane joy’ (186), and he elects to walk away from the wading girl ‘singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of life that had cried to him’ (186). In the aftermath of her epiphany, Anna, who has been mourning Charlie, has what appears to be a more muted and passive response. Pilar rushes off to a friend, and Anna continues to read Lycidas ‘slowly to the end’ after which she ‘felt peaceful, emptied of grief ’ (273). Both protagonists relinquish the ‘bird girl’ who inspired them, but in different ways: Stephen walks away in dialogue with ‘the advent of life’, and Anna is abandoned to commune with Milton. Their reactions following each encounter, with Stephen passionately pro­du­ cing words and Anna serenely consuming them, suggests the different gen­ dered manifestations of artistic epiphany. Nonetheless, at the conclusion of both novels, both adolescents appear productively to reject the constraints of family and religion. Roughly half a century later, Edna O’Brien would invoke the ‘bird girl’ scene in Down by the River, the second in her trilogy of novels responding to contemporary crises in Ireland.15 O’Brien opens her novel with a scene in which the fourteen-year-old protagonist Mary is raped by her father as they fish in a nearby river. Written, like the work of Joyce and Kate O’Brien, largely in indirect third person, with a brief shift into the first person, Mary perceives the rape as: . . . his figure falling through the air, an apotheosis descending down into a secrecy where there was only them, him and her. Darkness then, a weight of darkness except for one splotch of sunlight on his shoulder and all the differing motions, of water, of earth, of body, moving as one, on a windless day. Not a sound of a bird. An empty place, a place cut off from every place else and her body too, the knowing part of her body getting separated from what was happening down there. It does not hurt if you say it does not hurt. It does not hurt if you are not you. Criss-cross waxen sheath, uncrissing, uncrossing. Mush. Wet, different wets. His essence, hers, their two essences one. O quenched and empty

15  Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation (1994) examines the IRA; Down by the River (1997) considers abortion in the wake of the 1992 ‘X’ case; Wild Decembers (1999) is based on an actual rural conflict.

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  181 world. An eternity of time, then a shout, a chink of light, the ground easing back up, gorse prickles on her scalp and nothing ever the same again and a feeling as of having half-died.16

Throughout her career, Edna O’Brien has cited the enormous impact of Joyce on her fiction, even writing a critical study of his work.17 Her revision of the ‘bird girl’ scene offers evidence of a modernist afterlife that, despite depicting a brutal incestuous rape, does not shirk entirely the aestheticized language of Stephen’s epiphany. The obfuscations of O’Brien’s broken but poetic prose confuse readers, and in doing so, convey Mary’s bewilderment during this attack. Noting this scene’s replication of motifs from Joyce, Ann Norton astutely has claimed this moment as a feminist revision of the modernist epiphany, one in which Mary is entirely trapped by the sexual roles foisted on her by her father and society.18 Mary’s entrapment becomes further complicated with a reading of this scene that situates it among literary precursors. Both Stephen and Anna imaginatively transform real girls whom they encounter into symbols. In Down by the River, however, Mary is the ‘bird girl’. She is not a symbol but instead the object of her father’s desire and embodied victim of his abuse. Yet she temporarily renders herself a symbol, taking on the first person during the rape to imagine herself as ‘not you’ in order to provide herself a measure of protection from the ‘hurt’ of her father’s attack (4). O’Brien’s unindicated shift into the first person demonstrates Mary’s attempt to imagine some type of boundary that might protect her from her father, psychologically if not physically. The literary text envisaged by Stephen and consumed by Anna in those earlier ‘bird girl’ scenes is reduced here to ‘parchment’, to something fragile and transparent, a blank page onto which Mary’s father can script meaning. After the rape, she observes that her father ‘looked through her as  if  she were parchment’ and then asserted, ‘ “What would your mother say . . . Dirty little thing” ’ (5). Nonetheless, Mary has her own epiphany in which she comes to recognize the power of secrecy as well as its limitations.

16  Edna O’Brien, Down by the River (New York: Penguin, 1997), 4. Future references parenthetical. 17  Edna O’Brien, James Joyce (New York: Viking, 1999). See Ellen McWilliams, ‘James Joyce and the Lives of Edna O’Brien’, Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Paige Reynolds (London: Anthem Press, 2016): 49–60. Down by the River also takes one of its epigraphs from Joyce’s Ulysses. 18 Ann Norton, ‘From Eros to Agape: Edna O’Brien’s Epiphanies’, Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives, eds. Kathryn Laing, Sinéad Mooney, and Maureen O’Connor (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006), 83–103.

182  Paige reynolds As her father washes himself, she thinks: ‘Only they will know. No one else will ever know. Except that they will’ (5). Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien mimic Joyce’s poetic abstraction and his withholding of narrative direction, manoeuvres that force readers to labour to draw their own conclusions about these events and their repercussions. Both female characters in their novels are coping with family trauma: Anna, the death of her brother; Mary, her rape by her father. Both authors seek through the form of the modernist epiphany to demonstrate the rocky transformation of a suffering female character from innocent child to experienced young adult, and in doing so, reveal the uneven and unpredictable nature of the epiphany. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing pushes this epiphany in a new direction, melding the perceptive transformation of Anna with the physical transform­ ation of Mary. In this novel, the moment corresponding to the ‘bird girl’ scenes authored by McBride’s predecessors appears roughly a quarter of the way into the novel, when the protagonist is raped at thirteen by her uncle. In this chapter, her mother’s more affluent sister and husband arrive for a brief visit, and the protagonist, enraged by the aunt’s snobbery, lashes out at the family, then retreats to her room, where her uncle, seeking apparently to console her, enters her bedroom. The intimacy of this moment triggers in the protagonist sexual curiosity, and the uncle becomes the object of her fantasies. As she rides home the next day on the school bus, she thinks: ‘How much secret pleasure to stare at uncle in my mind’s eye’ (50). Adult and private, erotic fantasy allows her a feeling of individuation from her mother and brother, as well as a radical form of transgression and rebellion against the fundamental Catholicism her mother seeks to impose on the family. When her mother and aunt leave home that evening, her uncle kisses her and after a restless night, she escapes the house in the morning to swim in a local lake. There, she seeks to cleanse herself of her desire for her uncle with a symbolic baptism: ‘The thing I want I should not get. I’ll put my head in for discreet baptise. . . . I sink baptise me now oh lord and take this bloody itch away for what am I the wrong and wrong of it always far from thee. Ha. My nose fill with that bog water. . . . You are not here. . . . You are not here’ (55). As she concludes this ritual, she asserts, ‘I don’t think I will be clean now. Think instead I’ll have revenge for lots of all kinds of things. The start is. That is love’ (56). So the baptism here is not, in fact, a purifying ritual but instead a self-directed rite of passage, in which she transports herself—as she perceives it—from clean to dirty, from youth to adulthood, from victim to agent. In this scene, McBride initially conjures the ‘bird girl’ by calling attention to the geese, curlews, swans, ducks, and herons at the lake (54–6). Rather than

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  183 Joyce, Yeats is the initial modernist evocation, an antecedent more explicitly acknowledged in the novel’s final section entitled ‘The Stolen Child’, a refer­ ence to Yeats’s 1889 poem of the same name. While in the lake, the girl observes: ‘That flock of geese is rising. Rising to make all the noises. Honk like cars and wings beat hard on the air. Battering it. Cutting it down. They’re going up and up. Feathers and fat young breasts rise and rise above me. I see. I see clear’ (54). Here, she alludes not only to the generations of ‘wild geese’ who left Ireland to fight abroad but also to a mishmash of words and symbols pulled from the poetry of Yeats. In ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ (1917), for instance, Yeats observes the flight of the swans and grapples with feelings of isolation amid a significant life passage, in this case the transition into middle age. More obviously, these passages invoke ‘Leda and the Swan’ (1923), in which Yeats reinterprets the mythic tale of Zeus, who in the form of a swan rapes the young Leda. In this poem, Yeats depicts a personal transformation as well as a historical transition by suggesting that this violent act initiated modern history. McBride’s allusion to ‘Leda’ foreshadows the novel’s immi­ nent rape scene, a link heightened by the fact that the uncle is later described as having ‘Caught me’ as she stands in ‘my white drip shirt’ (57). It also sug­ gests that this sexual act might somehow empower the girl, as when Yeats asks of Leda, ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’.19 Like Matryoshka dolls, the allusions here are nested: McBride makes reference to a renowned modernist poem, but one that itself invoked the literary precedent of the Petrarchan sonnet and a scene drawn from classical mythology to convey the complexities and intensities of violence, sexual as well as political, in Yeats’s own contemporary moment. Like Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien, McBride revises Joyce’s epiphanic scene to allow readers to share in the perspective of a ‘bird girl’. Kate O’Brien awards Anna an aesthetic awakening similar to that of Stephen Dedalus and sends her into the wider world, thanks to an enlightenment fostered as much by Milton as by her imaginative reckoning of her ‘bird girl’ Pilar. But, as O’Brien noted in a 1963 lecture on writing, she believed literary epiphany had limited scope: it ‘corrects’ or ‘redirects’ without fundamentally altering its subject.20 Not only is Anna’s epiphany contained, it produces largely though not exclusively positive affect, muted good feelings. In contrast, the ‘bird girl’ of Edna O’Brien experiences an epiphany, or a radical transition from one 19  W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 218. 20  Cited in Aintzane Leggareta Mentxaka, Kate O’Brien and the Fiction of Identity: Sex, Art, and Politics in Mary Lavalle and Other Writings (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011), 240.

184  Paige reynolds state of being to another, inspired by sexual brutality. Mary’s epiphany is forced upon her by unwanted abuse, a corporeal violation that leaves ‘nothing ever the same again and a feeling as of having half-died’ (4). Unlike her prede­ cessors, McBride breaks the ‘bird girl’ epiphany in half. McBride’s protagonist experiences both types of these epiphanies, self-directed and imposed, psy­ chological and physical, and highlights their similarities and differences by juxtaposing them. She offers first this psychological epiphany at the lake, which her protagonist stimulates for herself through imagination. But McBride then immediately offers a second epiphany, this one engendered by the cor­ poreal violation of rape. When the girl returns from the lake, her uncle comes down the stairs to find her sopping wet, and she describes the rape that occurs in her ‘dry and creaky’ (56) home: Caught me. Went about me tooth and claw that I wanted. Felt within the time has come. No Christ here on the kitchen floor. Against the back of the kitchen chair. Pull my skirt down by ankles. Shed. And it was so quiet all around that I could hear him open me. Graze me opening my legs. Take me in. And that dark body unwashed night and thick pyjama’s smell of week worn. Someone else’s house and their daughter taken over. Under his hands. Full of sweat and passages of skin where he has touched his wife now over me. Her shreds of her. And hard he is I think. For what I know. That’s a thrill of me. That I am. Feeling running rivers over me. Running falls. I’m splashing falling into it.  (57)

Here, on the level of prose style, McBride seeks ‘direct treatment of the thing’, to invoke Pound’s famous definition of imagism, by refusing the florid style of Portrait and Down by the River. This account provides a testimony of trauma largely unmediated by abstraction. The epiphany provoked by the rape is twofold. First, she comes to recog­ nize and experience the power that comes from sex and secrecy, and unlike Edna O’Brien’s Mary, that secrecy affords her a measure of satisfaction, even joy. She observes: ‘But I am happy. Satisfied that I’ve done wrong and now and now. What now? Calm sliding down into my boat and pushing out to sin. He’s on the shoreline getting small’ (60). The chapter suggests that her greater transformation is the ability to establish a boundary separating her from her brother. Soon after when her brother asks to sit with her on the school bus, she refuses: ‘That inside world had caught alight and what I wanted. To be left alone. To look at it. To swing the torch into every corner of what he’d we’d

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  185 done. Know it and wonder what does it mean’ (61). The centrality of vision in Joyce’s bird-girl scene manifests in the final line of this chapter, when the pro­ tag­on­ist observes of her brother, ‘. . . somehow I’ve left you behind and you’re just looking on’ (61). Both her brother and uncle are temporarily forsaken in the wake of her sudden awareness. This scene demonstrates a key concern of the novel—boundaries, or rather the lack of them. Much of the protagonist’s life is spent seeking out ways to individuate, to separate herself from her brother and her mother, and later from her uncle. The novel’s formal tactics reflect the thematic lack of bound­ar­ ies: sentences rush into each other, dialogue merges with narration, the use of pronouns rather than proper names throughout means endless confusion for readers. For example, the word ‘father’ wavers in meaning throughout the novel, sometimes referring to her biological father, sometimes her grand­father, sometimes her uncle, sometimes God. The aggressive intertextuality of the novel conveys through form these very same problems. However, by splitting the ‘bird girl’ scene in two, McBride creates a formal boundary separating the familiar elements of plot and description drawn knowingly from previous invocations of this scene by other Irish writers. In the lake, her pro­tag­on­ist elects to pursue sexual defilement; in her home, she experiences her physical sexual initiation. By dividing this scene in half, McBride places a boundary between the psychological and physical epiphanies, even as they work in tan­ dem to produce an ‘awakening’ for her adolescent character. McBride shows readers something her character cannot see for herself: that these two modes of achieving self-knowledge are different, and not necessarily complementary. Throughout, McBride’s canny formal and structural manoeuvres undergird the larger themes of the novel, as well as recalibrating a renowned symbol of artistic self-awareness drawn from modernism for more contemporary times. But what’s the pay-off here? If close reading modernist afterlives seeks to demonstrate the ethical and political stakes of recapitulating the forms and tactics of a previous literary movement, then how is this rewarded in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing? Jesse Matz has looked closely at the legacy of literary impressionism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), a novel that reconstructs the life of Henry James during the late nineteenth century. Matz sees in The Master’s ‘pastiche’ of impressionism the triumph of style over critical abstraction, a mode of kitschy ‘pseudo-Impressionism’.21 To support this assertion, Matz details the 21  Jesse Matz, ‘Pseudo-impressionism?’, in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 114–32, 124. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

186  Paige reynolds unsatisfactory manner in which Tóibín represents James’s sexuality, claiming that the ‘Impressionism Tóibín inherits from James disallows frank sexuality’ (115). When Matz does award qualified praise to The Master, he commends the rendering of James sleeping nude in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes. This scene, he argues, ‘finds [the fictional James] thinking in a different style altogether’ (128), one truer to the real James who artfully ‘dramatised the fraught collusions of intuition, denial, discovery, regret and any other perceptual categories likely to disallow the prosaic unevenness of pseudo-Impressionist rendering’ (129). In A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which like Tóibín’s short story ‘Barcelona, 1975’ (2010) cannot be faulted for delicacy in its representa­ tions of sex, the ‘fraught collusions’ brought to bear by the sexual needs and thoughts of the protagonist are primal and urgent—less digested, less run through the mill of perception. As a contemporary writer, McBride can freely produce a modernist style that graphically depicts sexuality in a way previously unavailable to Irish writers and readers, who saw Joyce and  both O’Briens banned for tamer, more abstracted representations of sexuality.22 The novel is merciless in its depiction of sex, unrelenting in its exposure of this adolescent’s unmitigated interiority as she engages in increasingly violent and debased sexual acts. McBride refuses abstraction and insinuation, and seeks immediacy. It is as if Joyce had written a first-person detailed description of the masturbation and ejaculation of ‘the queer old josser’ in ‘An Encounter’ (1914) or as if Mary Lavin had provided the explicit details of Sarah’s erotic activities in her story ‘Sarah’ in Tales from Bective Bridge (1942). Nonetheless, it might be tempting to accuse McBride of ‘pseudo-Modernism’. For one, she has written yet another novel paying knowing homage to Joyce, positioning him as the sine qua non of modernism. And her novel trots out almost every trope of twentieth-century Irish literature: the rural poverty, the unhappy family, the sexual abuse, the oppressive Catholicism. But Girl does not categorically reduce modernism to a parlour trick, to a game of scholarly ‘I Spy’ in which informed readers simply perform their command of the movement’s intricacies. Instead, McBride cannily resurrects the legacy of modernism to enable a uniquely potent critique of childhood sexual abuse. Her direct account of adolescent sexuality is astonishingly intimate. Unlike 22  The 1929 Censorship of Publications Act in Ireland led, for example, to the banning of Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices for its allusion to homosexuality and Edna O’Brien’s first novel The Country Girls (1960), among other of her works, for explicit sexual content. Joyce’s Ulysses was famously banned in the United Kingdom and the United States, though Stephen Hero (1944) was his only work officially banned by the Irish state.

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  187 Joyce, Kate O’Brien, and Edna O’Brien, McBride never allows a narrator to observe the ‘bird girl’ from a remove. The narrator is always the bird girl. When she is raped—and each of the many times after this that she has an alarming and appalling sexual encounter with a schoolmate, her uncle, or a stranger—we read the concrete, sensory details of those incidents and share her fractured perspective of them. Readers are thus granted astounding insights into some of the affective and intellectual responses activated by childhood sexual abuse thanks to McBride’s refusal in these scenes to slip into modernist impressionism or abstraction, the tactics for which Matz condemns Tóibín. In the novel’s sex scenes, McBride adamantly rejects both the realist detachment of Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices as well as the florid poetic style of Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River, which Hilary Mantel faulted as ‘orgy prose’ so ‘dripping and rich and fantastic’ that it flattened the character of Mary and obscured her suffering.23 The static perspective and crystalline detail in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing produce a sense of intimacy with the narrator that invites us into her ex­peri­ ences—to share affectively in the erotics of this encounter, to understand the real pleasure characterizing her exercise of subjection and submission, this ‘knowledge she puts on’. This is perhaps the signal contribution of this novel: it showcases the genuine complexity of sexual abuse as experienced by some­ one in his or her teens. It acknowledges the fact that sexual abuse can feel good physically or psychologically, that it is biologically if not psychologically or socially appropriate, that it is a perceived exercise of power, that such a transgression might allow for a meaningful and radical break from family, that it appears to give immediate access to the coveted world of adulthood, that the secrecy demanded by abuse becomes something that belongs to the victim and sutures him or her to the adult abuser, even as it enables more harmful abuse. The novel depicts the convoluted nature of sexual abuse, even as its distressing conclusion confirms that this abuse is fundamentally harm­ ful and can have deadly consequences. This knowledge imparted about abuse and suffering comes at a price. In discussing her relationship to modernism, McBride has stated, ‘I’m not inter­ ested in irony and I’m not interested in clever’.24 The lurid details accompany­ ing the many disturbing sexual encounters recounted throughout the novel

23  Hilary Mantel, ‘Saved from Drowning’, rev. of Edna O’Brien, Down by the River, New York Times 25 May 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/25/reviews/970525.25mantelt.html, 23 March 2016. 24  Rustin, ‘Eimear McBride’.

188  Paige reynolds confirm that McBride is not seeking in this novel to perform modernist impersonality. Nonetheless, by adeptly employing elements of modernist form, she does offer a possible buffer for her readers. Modernism provides a measure of artful distance—not to the protagonist but to us as readers. Readers of this novel are likely fluent, or least conversant, in the modernist bildungsroman and the Joycean epiphany, among the other modernist allusions and formal tactics that pervade the novel. As we gain access to the ex­peri­ences of the ‘half-formed’ protagonist, we can find ourselves in a position similar to that of the fictional characters Stephen or Anna, processing a distant girl through our aesthetic sensibilities, using her as a means to understand better our own conditions. We become voyeurs, observing from a distance the novel’s graphic and intimate accounts of sexual experience, alive with sympathetic feel­ ing but ultimately cosseted from both the protagonist’s sensuality and suffering by our status as readers. Like the observers of a modernist ‘bird girl’, as readers of this novel we can place aesthetics between us and our own complicated, troubling responses to what we imagine and interpret. The potential of a familiar literary form to prompt or enable an aestheticiz­ ing of the experience of others, particularly of those suffering from trauma, provides an important cautionary tale about modernism itself. In the chapter immediately following the rape scene, the protagonist details her fifteenth and sixteenth years, citing the pleasures of reading with her best female friend: ‘She and me. Like to lurk here in the day. Those gossips we have are the very best and we read and read. Quote quotes back forth. That’s good for sharing books of this and that. Word perfect’ (63). Reading allows her to travel in imagination and triggers a different form of desire: ‘Great worlds to our minds, like interrail from here to there. . . . We don’t know the world but want and want and on the very tip of tongue I’d fly away if I could. With her. It is our love affair. How we’d be’ (63). As in The Land of Spices, reading facilitates human connection and offers a measure of relief and pleasure to the pro­tag­ on­ist. Different from O’Brien’s depiction of her bookish Anna, however, McBride offers a critique of the gratifications offered to her characters by readerly absorption. When McBride’s young female protagonist, reading in rural Ireland, thinks of the pleasures of New York, she observes: ‘We know here is not like there. And I am reading Scott Fitzgerald know that I must drop the F. Think American twenties just divine and I’d be Zelda if I could. Think suffering’s worth it. To be mad a fine exciting thing to be for those short times in those mad years’ (66). Here, the girl becomes captivated by the glam­ orous fictional accounts of the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, who suffered from debilitating mental illness; inspired by Scott Fitzgerald’s modernist classics,

MODERNISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS  189 she idealizes and rationalizes Zelda’s real-life distress. McBride deliberately refuses readers that same luxury in her novel. At no point is her protagonist’s tale so romanticized that it invites readers to desire its replication, though the narrative is emotionally affecting, and even sexually titillating. Modernism, and the intellectual gymnastics it requires, could serve as a prophylactic from the intense absorption the girl’s interior monologue invites. The formal difficulty of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, evident not least in its audacious descriptions of transgressive sex, stems largely from its redeployment of modernism and might keep readers at bay with its difficulty, its obfusca­ tions, its knowing invocations of literary tradition. But in this novel, form fails to protect the careful reader. Instead, the challenges presented by modernism, familiar though they might be, demand that the reader look attentively at the fragmented prose to piece together the assaults the girl endures and to understand their consequences. We as readers must pay atten­ tion to the girl, no matter how trying, even as the caregivers in the narrative neglect or abuse her. Once produced as an appeal to elite and educated ­readers, modernist difficulty serves—in the contemporary moment, in this book—to render the epidemic of childhood sexual abuse palpable to an audi­ ence well versed in its existence but seemingly unable to prevent it. As well, McBride’s use of modernist form reflects the nature of sexual abuse, a violence that is persistent and recognizable but often hard to identify because it is con­ cealed by institutions and individuals. Such abuse is a too familiar societal scourge (that readers can see as they work through familiar modernist tactics and decipher the plot), but one that often goes undiagnosed (as it might for a reader frustrated by those tactics that withhold or obscure meaning). And thus the utopian promise of close reading. Literary close reading, as practised in scholarship and taught in classrooms since the mid-twentieth century, demands sustained attention to selected passages of text, as critics at all stages of their academic training and intellectual development seek pat­ terns of meaning evident in literary form, content, and diction, among other clues found in the words on the page. Of late, the value of this exercise has been placed into doubt with the celebration of distant reading, and surface reading, and other attempts to negotiate the surfeit of literary texts available with the rise of digital media. And as any undergraduate instructor knows, the challenge of teaching students how to read closely has been exacerbated by a world in which so many read condensed content on screens and who, thanks to an informal training in aggregation, can adeptly amass information, and even synthesize it, but often without having the tools to sit mindfully with the material, to digest and metabolize it. Because of the fast and facile nature

190  Paige reynolds of much contemporary reading, now seems an ideal moment to revivify modernist forms and themes, and the reading practices modernism demands. Learning how to slowly and intelligently sift through the inventive content and form of difficult texts—books with unfamiliar content, oblique allusions and vocabulary, unfamiliar historical or global contexts, challenging formal techniques—is crucial for developing critical thinking skills and intellectual patience. It is also vitally important for contemporary readers to encounter through literature the difficulties inherent in thorny and daunting social problems, especially those to which they may have become desensitized thanks to modernity’s onslaught of information. As colleges and universities more aggressively champion ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’, the literature classroom becomes a radical collective space that demands students thought­ fully engage with controversial and complicated social problems. Slowly reading difficult texts like McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing trains readers to sit patiently not only with the discomfort generated by the intellectual challenges posed by modernist innovation but also with the suffering generated by human failing. In puzzling out those intellectual and ethical difficulties, which demand thinking and feeling in concert, readers can inhabit and enact the full promise of close reading.

9 Tom McCarthy’s Modernism Close Encounters of a Pleasurable Kind Derek Attridge

Tom McCarthy’s fiction is a gift to academic critics. His four novels, Men in Space, Remainder, C, and Satin Island,1 abound in allusions, more or less overt, to other works of literature, to the visual arts and music, and to the theories of Continental—mostly French—philosophers. They engage with a number of the issues that we literary critics and theorists like to talk about, such as the impossibility of authenticity, the aftermath of trauma, the omnipresence of signification, the ubiquity of communication networks, and the corporate capture of progressive thought. They are structured by means of complex relays of repetition and cross-reference. And they further challenge the norms of the conventional novel by presenting characters without depth and plots without narrative tension or personal development. In all these ways, they provide a seductive invitation to today’s professional critics to deploy the latest instruments of academic interpretation, including allusion tracking, influence detection, theoretical extrapolation, cultural analysis, and cryptographic decoding, and they allow us to enlist McCarthy as a heroic partisan under the flag of fiction that, keeping alive the radicalism of the modernists of the early twentieth century, resists the mainstream of ‘humanist’ or ‘lyrical’ or ‘liberal’ realism. McCarthy, moreover, unlike those writers who shy away from commenting on their own work, has no hesitation in talking about his novels, and has given numerous interviews in which he suggests interpretations, identifies allusions, adduces influences, and explains his assault on the ubiquitous ‘middlebrow’

1  Tom McCarthy, Men in Space (London: Alma Books, 2007); Remainder (rev. ed., London: Alma Books, 2006); C (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010); Satin Island (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015). I list Men in Space first because, as McCarthy has explained in a number of interviews, it was his first novel, turned down by publishers until the success of Remainder made it a commercially more attractive option. He did, however, revise and shorten it before publication. Derek Attridge, Tom McCarthy’s Modernism: Close Encounters of a Pleasurable Kind In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Derek Attridge. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.00010

192  Derek attridge novel and the publishers who solicit and promote it.2 His collection of essays, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, entertainingly sets out some of the founding principles of his fiction: the first essay, for instance, titled ‘Get Real’, skewers unexamined views of ‘realism’ and the ‘real’.3 His review of two novels by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, reprinted in the same collection, identifies the avantgarde Belgian writer and film-maker as one of his literary touchstones.4 McCarthy has also written an e-book in which he expounds his view of the writer as a transmitter rather than an originator of verbal material and a study of Hergé’s Tintin that uncovers many of his favourite thematic webs in the amazing adventures of that young hero, and a piece on anthropology and writing in the Guardian that sets out some of the underpinning of Satin Island.5 An essay in a collection of documents from the International Necronautical Society—a ‘semi-fake’ organization of which he is the ‘General Secretary’6— explores the major sources of C.7 All this has provided the material for a number of valuable essays on McCarthy’s fiction, demonstrating its importance and timeliness, examining its place in contemporary culture, and relating it to current theoretical work. There will doubtless be many more excellent critical studies along these lines; this is a vein that is far from having been fully mined.8 In this chapter, 2  A few online examples: with Lee Rourke, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2010/sep/18/tom-mccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation; Believer Magazine, http://www.believermag. com/issues/200806/?read=interview_mccarthy; with Andrew Gallix, 3 A.M.  magazine, http:// www.3ammagazine.com/3am/illicit-frequencies-or-all-literature-is-pirated-an-interview-withtom-mccarthy/; with Dan Wagstaff, Raincoast Books, http://www.raincoast.com/blog/details/inconversation-with-tom-mccarthy-part-one/; with Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine, http:// www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/tom-mccarthy; with Mark Thwaite, ReadySteadyBook, http:// www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?permalink=20070917072530; with James Corby and Ivan Callus, Countertext, http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/count.2015.0014. 3  ‘Get Real: Or What Jellyfish Have to Tell Us about Literature’, in Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), 57–76. 4  ‘Stabbing the Olive: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’, in Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, 183–202. 5  Transmission and the Individual Remix (Vintage Digital, 2012); Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London: Granta Books, 2006); ‘The Death of Writing’, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/mar/07/tom-mccarthy-death-writing-james-joyce-working-google. 6  See http://www.necronauts.org/. 7  ‘Calling All Agents’, The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society, ed. Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al., 162–202. Though McCarthy asserts that ‘[a] writer, once the work is written (if not long before), becomes just another reader of the work—not necessarily a good one, and certainly not a reliable one’ (Foreword to Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays, ed. Dennis Duncan [Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016] 1), it would be hard to deny the effective authority his comments carry in practice. 8 Among the most interesting essays to have appeared are those by C.  Namwali Serpell (‘ “Synchronicity”: Metareading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder’, chapter 6 of Seven Modes of Uncertainty [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014]), Pieter Vermeulen (‘The Critique of Trauma and the Afterlife of the Novel in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder’, Modern Fiction Studies, 58.3 [Fall 2012]: 549–68), Justus Nieland (‘Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modernism’, Modern Fiction Studies, 58.3 [Fall 2012]: 569–99), Mark McGurl (‘The Novel’s Forking Path’, Public Books, 1 April 2015; http://www.publicbooks.org/fiction/the-novels-forking-path), and Sydney Miller (‘Intentional Fallacies:

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  193 however, I want to do something a little different: I want to ask what it’s like to read McCarthy’s fiction, what are its peculiar pleasures, and whether the crit­ ic­al instruments associated with the tradition of ‘close reading’ are of any use in describing and explaining these responses. In doing so, two large questions will be in the back of my mind, provoked by the aims of this volume: In what sense can McCarthy be said to be continuing the project of modernism and the rewards and demands it offers its readers? And is there an ethical dimension to reading, and writing about reading, in this way? I want to acknowledge immediately that what the chapter reflects is my own response to these novels, a response that, for all I know, is idiosyncratic rather than widely shared. However, the reading subject that I am—what I’ve called elsewhere my idioculture—is constituted by assumptions, predilections, bits of knowledge, and habits of thought and feeling that I have absorbed in a host of cultural and interpersonal experiences (including, of course, my reading of McCarthy’s non-fiction writing and many of the authors he cites as well as critical studies of his work). It’s likely, then, that I share a great deal of what I bring to McCarthy’s fiction with many other readers, and that my responses will be more than merely subjective. As in all criticism which proceeds from a singular response, though, the test of its worth lies in the dialogue, or polylogue, it initiates with other readers.9 To justify this privileging of the singular response, I appeal to the notion of the literary work as an event, taking place in the reading process and living on in memorial revisitings of that process. Critical accounts that treat the work as an object existing independently of acts of reading, though they can provide valuable information about a text as cultural entity, moral example, philo­logic­al object, autobiographical revelation, or historical trace tend to miss what is peculiarly literary about it, and often fail to do justice to what Wordsworth called the ‘grand elementary principle of pleasure’ that must animate all artistic endeavour and motivate all our engagements with works of art as art. Although the literary event takes place, in the first instance, in an individual reading, in its multiple repetition it becomes not only something that happens to a single idioculture but one that happens to the broader culture within which it is situated. (To quote McCarthy himself: ‘One of the real structural (Re)-Enacting the Accidental in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder’, Contemporary Literature, 56.4 [Winter 2015]: 634–59). Duncan’s collection of essays mentioned in the previous note is a valuable addition to McCarthy criticism. 9  For a critical study premised on the value of this kind of dialogue, see Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation (Routledge: London, 2015).

194  Derek attridge understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event’ (Believer interview).) I start, therefore, with the fact that I have enjoyed reading and re-reading McCarthy’s novels—including the fact that my pleasure in them has, at many points, arisen from their humour, a property that not all critical accounts acknowledge. This is not, then, a search for the ‘meaning’ of the works, except in so far as this word may be understood as a verb referring to the continuous play of semantic traces.10 As I’ve already suggested, one of the pleasures in reading a McCarthy novel is identifying the allusions and making sense of them in the context of the work. To give some quick examples, the name ‘Anton Markov’ in Men in Space may trigger a memory that the ‘Markov chain’ has something to do with a random series, an allusion that fits nicely with the sequence of events in the novel; the building selected for re-enactment in Remainder is called Madlyn Mansions, recalling Proust’s madeleine and underscoring the importance of recovered memory in the story; in C, a novel in which insects play a major part, it’s pleasing that the deaf children recite from Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and there’s an appropriateness in the way the vaguely described ‘Koob-Sassen project’ in Satin Island shares a name with Saskia and Hilary Koob-Sassen, sociologist and artist mother and son with an interest in global­ ization and urban environments. Recognizing these allusions, of which there are a multitude, is fun, and having Google at hand allows the reader to venture into the far reaches of allusive territory. I didn’t know, until I looked him up, that Alexander Graham Bell, like Serge Carrefax, the hero (antihero?) of C, had a deaf mother and a father who ran a school for the deaf at which he practised his own method of speech teaching. Google is also invaluable in authenticating many of the specific historical references, especially in C, which makes great use of the actual history of early twentieth-century communications technology, First World War bombing techniques, and Egyptian archaeology.11 To someone who knows Prague well, the plethora of specific locations in Men in Space will summon up a map of the city, and Google Earth is always available to help the rest of us.

10  Jenny Turner, in an insightful review of C, recognizes that ‘easy hermeneuticising’ isn’t the point (‘Seeing Things Flat’, London Review of Books, 32.17, 9 September 2010: 7–8). 11  Google also allows one to catch inaccuracies: for example, the ace German pilot Fritz Kempf ’s motto, Kennscht mi noch?, which haunts Serge in C, was painted on his Fokker triplane, not on an Albatros biplane. Furthermore, Martin Eve points out that there is no record of Kempf downing an RE8 such as the one in which Serge flies (‘Structures, Signposts and Plays: Modernist Anxieties and Postmodern Influences in Tom McCarthy’s C’, in Duncan, ed., Tom McCarthy, 181–200; reference on 189). But it’s not clear what one should do with such nit-picking discoveries; perhaps they are simply reminders that we are reading fiction, not history.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  195 The effect of these repeated invitations to investigate the textual surface for allusions and echoes produces a puncturing of the illusion that the words are reflections of ongoing events independent of the literary work, and they remind the reader that he or she is engaging with a carefully-chosen, often overdetermined, sequence of words and sentences. Joyce was, of course, the first major writer to complicate the reading experience in this way (with Sterne as a possible precursor). McCarthy is only too happy to acknowledge his debt to his modernist precursors: ‘Modernism is a legacy we have whether we want it or not. It’s like Darwin: you can either go beyond it and think through its implications, or you can ignore it, and if you do that you're a Creationist.’12 Asked by another interviewer if he feels ‘a particular affinity with the Modernist “project” ’, he answers: My god yes. That’s where we’re at—or at least the legacy we have to deal with. Modernism (which in reality isn’t a single project but rather a whole wave of interlinked events—wave upon wave, a giant tsunami) is as seminal an event as the Renaissance was, and the shock-waves of something that big take centuries to play themselves out. In the ‘geological’ time of the arts, Finnegans Wake happened a few seconds ago: we’ve hardly even realised that it’s happened, let alone set up a coordinated response.13 

The experience of reading a McCarthy novel, then, may well include a certain welcoming of distraction, as the fictional world one is temporarily inhabiting is put on hold while one chases up, mentally or with the aid of research tools, a proper name that seems to hold out some additional significance, or a scene that echoes something one has read before. Jenny Turner describes her way of engaging with the novel as follows: As will, I think, be obvious, I had a whale of a time with this book, propped on my laptop, Wikipedia open in one window and in another, the OED. It was like being a guest at the dream-party of an extremely well-read host: things read a long time ago and more or less forgotten, things never read that I always meant to, things I certainly will read now, having seen how McCarthy can make them work. 

Close reading, as developed by Richards and Leavis, Wimsatt and Brooks, is  not well equipped to deal with this diversion from the imaginative 12  Guardian interview; see note 2.

13  Raincoast Books interview; see note 2.

196  Derek attridge involvement with the represented world; indeed, Leavis’s strictures on Joyce make it clear that he would have hated McCarthy’s fiction. Reviewing some of the advance publications of sections of Finnegans Wake, Leavis asserts that ‘[a] certain vicious bent manifested itself very disturbingly in Ulysses, in the inorganic elaborations and pedantries’, and these he finds taken further in the ‘self-stultifying’, ‘offensively spurious’ later work, with its ‘deliberate, calculating contrivance’ and ‘mechanical manipulation’. He adds, ‘[T]he kind of attention demanded by each one of the closely packed “effects” is incompatible with an inclusive, coordinating apprehension.’14 McCarthy’s fiction is equally designed to block the unified, organic, absorption of the text that Leavis, and at least one version of the practice of close reading, demands.15 This, we may feel, is one of McCarthy’s significant achievements. And yet: to sew the fabric of your fictional text with a host of clever spangles is not necessarily to write a great novel. Deciphering McCarthy’s sly allusions and coded references, uncovering the fakes and masks, tracing the networks and grids, are certainly part of what is entertaining, and often funny, in the experience of reading his fiction, and if one shares at least some of his impatience with the ubiquity of novels written as if Modernism hadn’t happened there is the added pleasure of seeing the legacy of Joyce and Kafka given fresh life. There is an ethico-political dimension to this assault on the conventional novel, too, undermining as it does the governing idea of the autonomous, freely-choosing subject; as McCarthy puts it in one of his interviews, the common notion of the novel is that it is ‘the rational expression of a self-sufficient subject—as though we weren’t constantly made and unmade within language, desire, history, symbolic networks and so on’.16 For all his meticulous use of sources and his crafting of cross-references, McCarthy frequently points to something else in the creation of his novels, something he labels, more than once, an ‘intuitive’ dimension.17 And he says, with who knows how much of his tongue in his cheek, ‘But it’s not like I set out to write an anti-humanist manifesto. All I set out to do is make good art. It’s really simple.’18 I will spend the rest of this chapter considering short passages from his novels, asking why I find the writing affectively as well as intellectually 14  F. R. Leavis, ‘Joyce and “The Revolution of the Word” ’, Scrutiny, 2 (September 1933): 193–200, passim. 15  American New Criticism was more fully allied to the innovations of modernism, whose difficult texts demanded a new degree of close textual attention; however, the Romantic notion of organic form remained powerful. 16  3 a.m. Magazine interview; see note 2. 17  3 a.m. Magazine interview; The Believer interview; see note 2. 18  Guardian interview; see note 2.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  197 rewarding, and whether this approach to literature has any ethical implications.19 In doing so, I will attempt to follow the precepts of ‘close reading’ as it was defined in Reuben Brower’s famous HUM 6 course at Harvard in the 1950s, a pedagogic practice described by Paul de Man, who was Brower’s teaching assistant, as follows: Students, as they began to write on the writings of others, were not to say anything that was not derived from the text they were considering. They were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge.20

Although some of the assumptions behind this approach may be ques­tion­ able, its recommendations still have considerable force in the classroom and, I would suggest, as a productive starting place for critical analysis. * A subject that tends to demand a pulling out of all the emotional stops is death. Dying, approaches to death, and death itself feature in all McCarthy’s novels, and these topics often come up in his interviews and his non-fiction writing. Blanchot’s ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ and Cocteau’s L’Orphée are among his constant references, and the name of the Necronautical Society speaks for itself. All three main characters in Men in Space die, though in two  cases—the aforementioned Anton Markov and the Englishman Nick Boardaman—we are privy, through the use of Joycean interior monologue, to

19  I began this project by re-reading all four novels and keeping a diary, part of which appeared as ‘Reading Tom McCarthy’s Novels: A Diary’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 50 (2016), http://ebc. revues.org/3015. 20  Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23. Andrew DuBois cites this passage in his useful introduction to Close Reading: The Reader, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–40; citation on pp. 2–3. For a historically important discussion of the extension to prose fiction of close reading techniques honed in the analysis of poetry, see David Lodge, Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

198  Derek attridge the moments before violent death.21 (This statement is not strictly true, since these two deaths are not actually registered in the text; what is registered is the sense of impending death.) These sequences are among the most immediately affecting in the book, and reveal that ingenious play with intertextual references and thematic interconnections need not render the text desiccated or distanced: the language attains a vividness and emotional power that in some ways is quite traditional.22 There is space to look at only the first of these pre-death passages. Towards the end of the novel, Anton, who provides one of the central consciousnesses of the novel, is picked up near the Prague Summer Palace by a group of fellow Bulgarians, members of a criminal group introduced at the very start of the work. Hoping to get his wife’s children out of Bulgaria where they are stranded, he has become involved in this group’s activities; now, thanks to their contacts in the secret service, they have discovered that he came close to betraying them when in prison. He, however, is not aware of their dark purposes and is puzzled by their frosty mien, so unlike the cama­rad­erie evident in the novel’s opening pages. Even on a first reading, it’s clear that this journey will not end well: although the interior monologue provides only Anton’s perceptions, the signs of an impending catastrophe are unmistakable. Throughout these gripping pages (243–54), Anton’s free as­so­ci­ations—including thoughts of his wife and her children—contrast chillingly with his colleagues’ awkward attempts to disguise their nefarious designs with casualness. They reach a high plain—‘Must be the highest point around Prague: top of the white mountain’ (249), thinks Anton—and get out of the car. The intensity of Anton’s experience as they walk on signals his awareness at some level that this is no ordinary expedition (he’s been told, unconvincingly, that they are to clinch a deal) and at the same time contributes to the reader’s involvement. Here is part of the passage: The hidden sun’s making a patch of cloud grow brighter—a sphere that seems to buzz or hum: what’s making that . . . It’s an aeroplane, circling above 21  The third death, that of the artist Ivan Maňásek, is only reported, his last words being a name he has been trying to remember—a name associated with a particularly idyllic period of his life—that puzzles his hearers but not the astute reader. Another resonant death is that of a relatively minor character, Joost van Straten, who is known largely through letters, the last of which is written from Tallinn just before he walks out on the ice to find the ‘horizonless horizon’ (216). 22  The capacity for a poetic evocativeness in McCarthy’s prose is brilliantly brought out in the short film made by Johan Grimonprez, ‘from Satin Island’, in which the author reads a passage from the novel over a series of haunting images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr7i6lB84Hc.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  199 the plain: must be held in a queue, waiting to land, in which case why’s it smaller than the raven it’s just passed beneath? Is this some kind of optical illusion only Kepler or Toitov would understand? It’s turning now, outlined against some trees that rise behind a wall on the plain’s far side. What on . . . Now he sees them, standing on the grass: two kids holding a radio controller with a pointy aerial, guiding their model’s twists and loops. (249–50)

The passage, like so many in the novel, is full of reminders of the painting at the heart of the story, in which a floating saintly figure seems to be disappearing into a golden elliptical halo; these reminders include the bright patch of cloud, the circling aeroplane, and the illusory perspective. Kepler is in Anton’s mind because he has recently seen the astronomer’s statue, which reminded him of his Sofia physics teacher, Toitov; but it’s also clearly relevant that Kepler’s major contribution to cosmology was his deduction that planetary orbits are ellipses, like the one in the painting, and not circles. Radio communications, too, have coursed through the text, as have buzzings or hummings. The sense of impending catastrophe is augmented by the bird Anton notices: ravens are symbols of death in many mythologies, and in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung they fly overhead just before Siegfried is murdered by those he took to be his allies. But leaving all these allusions aside, the passage is also powerful as descriptive writing suggestive of Anton’s physical sensations and mental responses: the sound of the buzzing model plane, the confusion about its height, the sight of the children completely wrapped up in their own activities— in their very unconnectedness with what is happening to him they speak of the ordinary life he is about to lose. The group walks on towards a star-shaped hunting lodge with red-andwhite striped shutters, whose name, Hvězda, Anton realizes, means ‘star’: another allusion to cosmography. But the novel’s almost obsessive concern for accurate topographical detail is also evident here: Google Earth enables one to home in on this hunting lodge and see both its situation at the end of a long avenue in a wooded plain and its striped shutters. Anton, in this high place, a man in space, is about to be sucked into the elliptical vortex of non-being. Nevertheless, the text remains resolutely as well as literally down-to-earth as Anton kneels on the ground, and at no point does he consciously reflect on what might be about to happen. A chain of ominous but indistinct events is coming to a climax: a strange bumping in the boot of the car as they drove (we know there is a spade in there, but Anton doesn’t), one of the group’s going back for ‘the thing in the car’ and his reappearance in the distance

200  Derek attridge carrying something that looks like a surveyor’s pole, and then what feels like a twig prodding Anton in the back. Then, in the final words of the section: Anton, still kneeling, turns round. Behind Janachkov, who’s holding some kind of black thing, a calculator on which he’s working out figures, exchange rates—or perhaps a toy, some kind of toy like kids were playing with somewhere, his and Helena’s kids or the ones she’s got already or perhaps himself when he was small, Anton can see the star’s face, winking one of its eyes at him, then winking another, red and white eyes on a white face, closing.  (254)

Re-reading this passage, I find I am as uncertain as Anton is about the ‘black thing’ being operated by one of the others—he associates it with the deal they are supposed to be clinching, and then with the children he had planned to have and the ones he was hoping to retrieve from Bulgaria—but we know that it spells his death. * Deaths punctuate the end of Remainder, too. The nameless narrator has been  awarded eight-and-a-half million pounds after an accident involving something falling onto him from the sky, and he uses the money to stage ­re-enactments of three different events that possessed a profound meaningfulness when they occurred. He then organizes his most ambitious event, the robbing of a bank in which all the non-actors at the scene will be unaware that the crime is not a real one. McCarthy’s prose in this novel is very different from the writing in Men in Space: now reflecting only one consciousness instead of several, it is hard-edged and economical, more Ballard than Joyce. Here is the moment that precipitates the final disaster, when the narrator carries one of the bags of money to the door behind ‘Robber Four’ and ‘Robber Five’: I glided across the floor with it towards the door. Four and Five glided in front of me. Two was still standing static, moving his gun from one corner of the bank towards the other and then back again, slow and regular as a lawnsprinkler. I raised my bag slightly as it and I cleared the airlock’s stump, then lowered it again and let it glide above the carpet like a crop-spraying aircraft gliding over fields of wheat. I let my eyes follow the carpet’s surface as we glided, let them run along its perfectly reproduced gold on red, its turns and cut-backs, the way these repeated themselves regularly for several yards then quickened, shortening as the carpet crinkled in the rise up to the kink on which Five, gliding two feet in front of me, was about to re-enact his halftrip. My eyes moved forward to his foot and lingered there, watching it

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  201 anticipate the kink; I saw the foot surge forwards, its toes pointing downwards, backwards, turning over like a ballet dancer’s toes . . . But there was no kink in this carpet.  (268–9)

In this case the power of the writing stems from the absence of affect; at a moment of high excitement, the climax of the narrator’s experiments, shocking happenings are described as if they were everyday. The similes are in­appro­pri­ate­ly remote from the action: a lawn-sprinkler, a crop-spraying aircraft, a ballet-dancer. (The crop-spraying aircraft may not have entirely benign associations if it recalls Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.) Although events are unfolding at great speed, the narrator has the time and mental calmness to examine the pattern on the carpet (whose ‘perfect reproduction’ is an allusion to his re-enactment attempts), and to watch the movements of Robber Five’s foot as if it were in slow motion. The narrator’s desire to overcome the drag of matter that has been a constant motif in the book seems fulfilled in the way he and the other re-enactors are repeatedly said to ‘glide’, but in the end it is matter that defeats him—or, rather, more complicatedly, the non-presence of expected matter.23 Robber Four, his foot not striking the kink his rehearsals had led him to expect, topples into Two, who involuntarily pulls his gun’s trigger, killing Four. The narrator, far from being dismayed at this turn of events, however, is delighted; the thin line between re-enactment and reality has been abolished in the most absolute way possible. The reader’s engagement with this prose, I want to suggest, is that of appalled involvement. Earlier examples of the narrator’s heartlessness—for example, his acceptance that large numbers of cats must die in order to satisfy his desire to replicate a particular moment (or imagined moment) in his past—have a kind of black humour about them, and by this point we have become engrossed in his mad project of creating an impossible experience of authenticity. But the bank heist puts an end to any amusement: the cold sentences bespeak a mind to be marvelled at rather than empathized with. * In C, McCarthy’s writing is different again: its model is the nineteenth-century realist novel, with a young hero, Serge Carrefax, who we first meet as a child

23 Gill Partington and Same Slote, in their contributions to Duncan’s collection of essays on McCarthy, both draw attention to the role of matter in Remainder (Partington, ‘Dummy Chambers and Ur-Houses: How to Find Your Way Around in Remainder’, 47–68; Slote, ‘The Recidual Remainder’, 121–36). McGurl points out that the nausea-inducing materiality of the chestnut tree roots in Sartre’s La Nausée is an antecedent of this motif, one which is continued in the narrator’s (and McCarthy’s) fascination with oil spills in Satin Ireland.

202  Derek attridge and then follow through a succession of adventures involving a mysterious illness, wartime experience, the unmasking of a fake medium, and incidents in Egyptian tombs (Tintin’s adventures are not far away), until he meets his untimely death from an insect bite. The third section of C, ‘Chute’, which relates Serge’s experiences as an observer in a First World War reconnaissance biplane, includes a number of passages that work brilliantly as vividly described responses seen from the hero’s perspective. What is missing, and what makes the novel a challenge to the realist tradition even when it seems most conventional, is any insight into Serge’s feelings; it’s no accident that his air force role is that of observer, as he is strangely uninvolved in the scenes he witnesses. In the following passage, Serge and the pilot, Gibbs, are flying over a battle­ field strewn with parts of machines and men. Gibbs flies above them for a while, then pulls the plane up and takes them back for a peep above the smoke. No sooner have they cleared it than Serge hears a rhythmic tapping: it’s as though a mechanic were standing beside the machine rapping on the fuselage to get their attention. The taps make the canvas on the plane’s back section tauten and jump; little holes appear in a straight line along it. They look like a row of popper-buttons springing open, starting at the tail and advancing towards his cabin, which they then move across as well, pocking its floor. A mass of shadow runs behind them, bringing with it a loud sound he doesn’t recognise. As the sound climaxes and falls off, Serge looks up and sees, coming from where the sun should be, a wave of brightly-coloured metal hurtling downwards. It sinks beneath them; he swivels his head to follow it, and watches the mass resolve itself into the shape of an Albatros. It’s turning below them, getting ready to come back; then it’s climbing behind them, just out of range, amassing altitude so it can dive again. Colours radiate from its underbelly—the central part of which, the lower wing, has words painted across it. He can’t make the words out, but he can see some of the letters: there’s a K, an m, a c . . .  (172)

Although death could well be imminent, there is no sense here that Serge is experiencing extreme tension or fear; on the contrary, the raking of their aero­plane by bullets summons up the most innocuous of similes, the rapping of a mechanic to get attention and the springing open of popper-buttons. The ostensible reason for his detachment is that he is high on diacetylmorphine, or heroin, used as a painkiller at this time. I have found no evidence that drug-taking was common among First World War flyers, but as a narrative device it works brilliantly to transform what would be Biggles-like airborne

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  203 thrills into Serge’s affectless observations—or, to be more precise, to replace excitement and terror by curiosity and puzzlement. The effect is akin to what Victor Shklovsky termed ostranenie, or defamiliarization, using the example of Natasha Rostova’s first visit to the opera in War and Peace, although in this case the experience of having one’s aircraft riddled with bullets is hardly a familiar one in the first place. If there is tension in the passage, it’s produced by the reader’s awareness of what is really happening: the ‘mass of shadow’, the ‘wave of brightly-coloured metal hurtling downwards’ is not an aes­thet­ic­ al­ly pleasing object but a potentially lethal enemy aircraft whose pilot, a human enemy whose existence is never acknowledged by Serge, is intent on destroying him. The culmination of the paragraph is even more out of place than the earlier similes: Serge becomes fascinated with the lettering on the German plane, and, as he does throughout his life in numerous different situations, attempts to decode the symbols he can see. They turn out to be the words Kennscht mi noch?, a sentence in a German dialect that Serge translates as ‘Do you still recognise me?’ A little research reveals that the German flying ace Fritz Kempf had these words painted on the middle wing of his triplane (see note 11); he is not mentioned in the text, however. Instead, it is the enemy aircraft that is given agency as it dives and climbs, and that provides one more puzzle for Serge to solve. * McCarthy’s most recent work, Satin Island, turns its back on the Victorian novel, the genre with which C had made such play. The text is given in numbered paragraphs, and the novel proceeds not so much by way of plot, of which there is little, but as a sequence of mini-essays or descriptive pieces. The narrator, who invites us, Ishmael-like, to call him ‘U’, is an anthropologist deploying his expertise in the service of a large corporation. Like the narrator of Remainder, he seems to lack normal affective and ethical responses, not because he is in search of authenticity but because he is fascinated by the inauthentic world of which he knows he is part. (Staten Island, which figures in a dream of U’s, appears to stand for some kind of transcendence, but it’s one that is ultimately rejected.) A number of narrative strands are repeatedly picked up and dropped24— including U’s recording of stories of failed parachutes (men in space again!), 24  One of the many single-star reviews on Amazon called it, with greater aptness than the writer knew, a ‘bazaar’ novel.

204  Derek attridge his physical relationship with a woman named Madison (reminding us of a certain Avenue), and his curiosity about, and imagined speech in praise of, oil spills. Among these strands is the story of his friend Petr’s cancerous goitre and the various unsuccessful attempts to treat it, ending with Petr’s death and funeral. The following paragraph occurs about three-quarters of the way through the novel: 12.17 Petr died two days later. I learnt of his death by text. His wife, whom most of his friends didn’t really know (they’d been estranged for several years), must, as his official next of kin, have been handed his mobile phone, and sent the announcement out to everybody in the contacts file—taxi firms and takeaway restaurants and all. Petr passed away peacefully 11.25 a.m. today, it read. My first thoughts on receiving it—the thoughts you’re meant to think in such a situation (How sad; At least he’s at rest; I’ll miss him; And so forth)—seemed so crass that I didn’t even bother to think them. Instead, I  thought about the message itself, its provenance. It had, as I said, come from Petr’s estranged wife; but my phone, of course like those of all the other ­people who would have received it, listed the sender as Petr. The network provider, logging every last transaction, would have marked the sender down as Petr too; if anybody cared to look it up in years to come, the record would affirm the same thing. To almost all intents and purposes, the sender was Petr. His existence, at that moment, was impressing itself on me, and on hundreds of others, with as much force as—if not more than—at any other time. All we need to do to guarantee indefinite existence for ourselves is to keep our network contracts running, and make sure a missive goes out every now and then. We could have factories of Chinese workers do it; pre-pay five or ten years by bequest-subscription; give them a bunch of messages to send out in rotation or on shuffle; or default to generic or random ones; I don’t know. It would work, though. Key to immortality: text messaging.  (137)

U’s tone, diction, and patterns of thought, like those of McCarthy’s other firstperson narrator in Remainder, are distinctive and sustained with impressive consistency throughout the novel. U is very different from the narrator of Remainder, though; he is intelligent, articulate, well read, well travelled, and well informed about global issues. In this passage, his not entirely convincing belief in his own sophistication emerges when he thinks the commonplace thoughts on hearing of a friend’s death only to say that he has not thought them. That he devotes his mental energy not to mourning Petr but to speculating on the implications of the text message he has received is typical of his

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  205 lack of the expected emotions; that those speculations have the veneer of rationality but end up as far-fetched is in keeping with his other flights of fancy; that the tone is never entirely serious is part of his veneer of ironic detachment. The joke about ‘Chinese factory workers’ is in bad taste, but so is much of his mental world. His rejection of the platitudes of grief—whose platitudinousness need not, of course, imply lack of genuine feeling—is on a par with his dismissal of bourgeois values. The language is unbuttoned, almost conversational (‘taxi firms and takeaway restaurants and all’; ‘I didn’t even bother’; ‘I don’t know’). The unpoetic, instrumental relation of the narrator to the English language is conveyed by the slight woodenness of the style in sequences like ‘with as much force as—if not more than—at any other time’ and ‘It had, as I said’. And the reduction of the idea of an existence after death— once manifested in bequests to chantry priests to say requiem masses—to regular SMS messages is resonant with the entire book’s representation of contemporary culture’s evacuation of the spiritual and emotional in favour of the textual and mediatized. Although this prose is stylistically far from the conventional prose of realistic fiction, its purpose is not untraditional: it marks a step in the plot, it further enriches the portrayal of the central character, it adds to the picture of the context in which he exists, and it provides entertainment for the reader. What defeats expectations derived from traditional novels is that the plot is min­imal, the central character lacks psychological and affective depth, the context is one of signs and messages rather than substantive and permanent entities, and the entertainment is tainted by a certain queasiness. It is writing that may be truer to the world we live in than the colourful, affect-heavy fictions it is seeking to displace.25 * Here, then, are four passages that engage, in one way or another, with that most hallowed of literary topics, death. (None of them, of course, can be used as watertight evidence for the nature of the entire novel; I present them only as specimens whose representativeness remains to be judged by those who know the works.) The reader who expects the topic of death to provide an experience of deep emotional involvement—fear of the unknown, horror at the end of everything, grief at the loss of a human existence—will be disappointed; 25  There is one section of the novel which stands out as a mini-narrative of a more traditional sort: Madison’s account of her experiences during the protests at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, which takes up all of chapter 13. Her story of bizarre abuse makes a direct affective impact on the reader in a manner eschewed by most of the novel; as one would expect, it seems to mean very little to U.

206  Derek attridge McCarthy is clearly suspicious of literature that goes for the affective jugular. Only the first of these examples invites an affective response to death of a relatively traditional sort: we feel and fear the impending close of Anton’s life even though, or perhaps especially because, he remains unaware of it. What we do experience in all of them—and, for some readers at least, experience with great pleasure—is the game being played with generic expectations, the undermining of the clichés around ‘great art’, the revelation of the discursive construction of venerated ideals and principles. This is McCarthy’s debt to modernism, or rather to that strand of modernism that achieved lasting art by purging the literary work of its attachment to the values championed by Leavis and often reflected in the tradition of close reading: the conception of individual human being as organic, continuous, and forever striving towards wholeness, and the conception of society as an intimately interrelated cluster of such beings. The passages above make little attempt to represent characters and communities in this light, but they do typify many of the considerable qualities of these works. The subtlety of the writing, the consistency of each novel’s stylistic and generic world, and the freshness with which the elements of fiction are handled, to name a few of these qualities, make for pleasurable and satisfying reading when approached in the right spirit of openness. It is true that we often feel unsure about how to take the words and behaviour of McCarthy’s characters, and ethical questions will not go away. Where is the moral centre of Men in Space? Is Serge’s lack of affective engagement an ethical weakness? How far can we excuse the selfish and finally deadly actions of the narrator of Remainder? Does Satin Island buy into the depthlessness of global corporate culture too readily? Close reading, in Brower’s eyes, should begin with the ‘bafflement’ produced by ‘singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure’, and bafflement at the ethical dimension of McCarthy’s fiction is part of its peculiar power. What passes for the ‘ethics of literature’ in many places—especially, it seems, among certain philosophers who see in literary works lessons for living—can gain little purchase on these novels: they present no paradigmatic characters who can teach us what is evil and what is good, no wrestlings with ethical choices that mirror our own conflicts, no delicately drawn human relationships that serve as models for our treatment of others. Yes, the blithely committed mass murder at the end of Remainder is a moral crime of huge extent; yes, Sophie’s suicide in C is an extremely regrettable index of male sexual power; yes, the ‘Company’ in Satin Island is a vast waste of human talent and energy. But we already knew about the evils of murder and enforced sex and corporate capitalism; the novels aren’t making any kind of contribution to ethical discourse about such

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A PLEASURABLE KIND  207 matters, though they may induce readerly discomfort or satisfaction with the way they stage moral issues. Where, then, does the ethical lie in our reading of Men in Space, Remainder, C, and Satin Island? I’ve argued elsewhere that it is in the reader’s engagement with the literary work as an event that the question of ethics arises.26 Modernist writing makes more evident what is true of all literature: it requires an active reader, creatively engaging with the inventiveness of the work.27 And this involves a kind of responsibility: an openness to the work’s challenges to ingrained habits and familiar knowledge, and a willingness to be changed by the experience of reading. Sometimes reading McCarthy’s fiction can be frustrating: the complex web of characters and places in Men in Space, the increasingly unsympathetic narrator of Remainder, the at times mystifying allusions in C; the plotlessness of Satin Island—these and many other features of the novels, as the reviews on Amazon testify, can be a barrier to enjoyment. But they can also encourage an ethical recalibration: not of what it is to lead a good life but of what it means to live in a world permeated by words and other signifying systems, where the ability to employ and respond to those systems with skill, judgement, passion, self-reflectiveness, and humour is an important part of what it is to be human, and where an acceptance that there is no final answer, no inner core, no absolute authenticity and no ultimate transcendence is not an admission of imperfection or cause of grief but part of the joy of living. I have found that re-reading these novels not only increases my admiration for them and for McCarthy as a writer but reveals more and more of their particular kinds of richness. If ‘close reading’ names a way of engaging with the text as an event experienced by an open-minded reader rather than a certain kind of academic and pedagogic exercise, it’s what these novels require in order to reveal their full complexity—intellectual, affective, and ethical—and to do this in greatly pleasurable ways.

26 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004, 2017); The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 27  For a valuable discussion of ‘high modernism’ in these terms, see Vicki Mahaffey, Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

10 Experiencing the Modernist Storymind A Cognitive Reading of Narrative Space Melba Cuddy-Keane

In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ Virginia Woolf offers advice for the first stage of reading: ‘Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.’1 Rather than gravitating immediately to character or theme, Woolf urges her readers to begin with a broader perspective, one that she terms the ‘author’ but that I will rephrase as ‘the storymind’. Pursuing a cognitive understanding of aesthetics, neuroscientist Russell Epstein identifies a similar approach in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: Proust’s belief that ‘the function of art is to permit the observer/reader to partake of the consciousness of the artist’ by  indirectly representing the network of unconscious associative pathways ‘that guides our thought and shapes our experience’.2 Not all fictional narratives reflect autobiographical experience as directly as Proust’s, and the self, as  Proust well knew, goes deeper than mere personal experience. We can, however, usefully extend Epstein’s concept beyond the flesh and blood author to locate the storymind in the cognitive processes and pathways that, from numerous sources, constitute the shaping forces behind a fictional world. I use the term storymind rather than implied author to shift attention from the beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies expressed by a text to the more fundamental question of how a text thinks. Similarly, I choose storymind over the related terms storyworld or worldmaking, to focus on cognitive processes rather than created products.3 Finally, my term emphasizes the distinction I am drawing between storymind and readingmind, highlighting the way reading entails a transaction with a mind distinct from the reader’s own. Although readers

1  Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ in The Common Reader: Second Series, edited by Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1986), 259. 2  Russell Epstein, ‘Consciousness, Art, and the Brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust’, Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004): 225, 224. 3  For a complementary approach that focuses on the content of storyworlds, see David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Melba Cuddy-Keane, Experiencing the Modernist Storymind: A Cognitive Reading of Narrative Space In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Melba Cuddy-Keane. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.00011

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  209 actively participate in the creation of storyworlds, building on inferences, filling in gaps in ways that involve their own sense-making strategies, ethical reading, I argue, includes the experience of alterity—the experience, even if briefly and incompletely, of inhabiting a different body and brain.4 Again to quote Woolf: ‘if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness . . . will bring you into the presence of another human being unlike any other’.5 The modernist storymind has long been associated with discontinuous and multidirectional time: mind time layered over clock time. My argument here is that, just as temporal experience in modernist narrative is mobile and plur­al­ist, so too the reader’s spatial imagination is led through dynamic and mobile shifts. Seeing in modernist narrative is not a fixed gaze on a static object; instead, description produces what I call storied space: not only do different forms of scene construction articulate differently modelled stories but the accumulative space is multi-storied—a palimpsest of spatial models. In its multiplicity, storied space might seem to resemble Joseph Frank’s ana­ lysis of narrative simultaneity as spatial form or Michel Foucault’s designation of ideologically-layered places as heterotopias.6 But there are crucial differences. Rather than metaphoric (Frank) or political-philosophical (Foucault), my focus on space is corporeal and I approach the bodily experience of space as cognitive modelling. As David Herman argues, narrative ‘is one of the chief means by which people go about building spatial representations of a world’, ‘modeling, and enabling others to model, an emergent constellation of spatially related entities’.7 I build here on Herman’s own approach to such modelling, arguing that the modernist novel’s shifting through multiple spaces both exercises and extends the reader’s flexibility of mind. Most readers, I think, will accept that we can construct a mental representation of a scene from reading the description of it, but the further question is whether we can bodily experience the effects of being in a narrative’s im­agined space. Current neuroscientific research on spatial cognition indicates that we 4 Mieke Bal’s use of worldmaking, for example, includes the work of the reader, drawing on C. S. Pierce’s concept of the interpretant. See Mieke Bal, ‘Over-writing as Un-writing’, in A Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 96–145. I agree that ultimately interpretation is jointly produced by texts and readers but concentrate here on that part of the collaborative dialectic that involves our recognition of the storymind’s alterity. 5  Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, 259. 6  Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, Sewanee Review, 53 (1945): 221–46; 433–56; 643–53.; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeaology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). 7  David Herman, ‘Spatialization’, in Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 298, 296.

210  Melba cuddy-keane can. When patients supposedly in a ‘vegetative state’, for example, were asked to imagine specific movements, fMRI scanning showed different patterns of brain activity depending on the kind of movement involved; being asked to imagine walking through one’s home activated areas known to be implicated in topographic navigational tasks; being asked to imagine playing tennis triggered robust activity in the supplementary motor area instead. The brain activations in imagining movement—while of lesser strength—were indistinguishable from the activations triggered by performing the actions in real life.8 Imagined movement can impart the experience of making that movement; additionally, since our brains can distinguish between different imagined movements, descriptions of changing movements can lead us to experience fluid and mobile cognitive events. A second line of empirical research indicates further that spatial experience can expand from perceptions to concepts. In numerous psychological experiments, participating subjects, with no conscious awareness of the connections they were making, used patterns articulated in their physical movements to solve logistical problems in an unrelated realm.9 Physical movements, sometimes called bodily or image schemas, can translate into conceptual schemas. A pointing movement brings attentional focus; a circular path takes thinking on an excursion and back to its start. Bodies, that is, can think, in a form increasingly known as embodied cognition. And since imagining space can be experiencing space, narrative descriptions that take us through different physical movements and differently constituted spaces can activate different ways of both perceiving and conceptualizing the world. In themselves, these descriptive shifts call upon, and potentially develop, the reader’s cognitive flexibility; they can also, as I explain at the end of this essay, initiate new and more complex understandings of ‘the real’. By linking description to cognitive change, the approach I’m proposing challenges long-standing contrasts between narrative and description. Most narratological theory defines narrative as the communication of a meaningful progression of events, with the result, as Ruth Ronen points out, that description, considered a ‘mode of pure reference’ to an object world, is regarded as static and non-purposeful with regard to the central developing action.10 8  Adrian  M.  Owen and Martin  R.  Coleman, ‘Functional Neuroimaging of the Vegetative State’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (March, 2008): 235–43. See also the work of Neil Burgess and colleagues on spatial cognition. 9  For detail on experimental examples, see Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Movement, Space, and Embodied Cognition in To the Lighthouse’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, ed. Allison Pease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61–2. 10  Ruth Ronen, ‘Description, Narrative and Representations’, Narrative, 5.3 (October 1997): 274–86.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  211 Description, through the logic of binary opposition, is non-narrative. Yet this distinction has also been subject to notable qualification. While the nar­ ratological theorist Gerard Genette influentially identified description with narrative pause, he added the often overlooked proviso that such character­ ization does not apply to all description. Indeed, in a significant passage that has been virtually ignored, he wrote, ‘If the narrator insisted on the perceptual activity of the spectator, and on its duration, [we would have] narratization by focalization’.11 Now Genette was focusing on ‘variations in tempo’ in the process of narrating, and his ‘narratization by focalization’ refers to the way description can speed up or slow down the progress of events. My own approach to focalization has likewise a temporal dimension, but I am locating the change in forms of perception. Description, I argue, is a distinct type of narration: complementing the narrative of plot, or progression of external events, description, I propose, can ‘tell’ a narrative of process in which the unfolding events are cognitive; furthermore, through the work of mental simulation, readers can enact the cognitive narrative in their own minds.12 In what follows, I present a range of spatial dynamics in narrative, outlining three possibilities for narrated space: (1) opening descriptions that narrow or widen the view with corresponding alterations in scale; (2) powerful middles sustained through memory as spatial juxtapositions; and (3) spatial configur­ ations accumulating throughout a narrative and generating a layered composite map.13 By isolating these forms, however, I am not suggesting a simple typology: the effect of each description depends on the kind of visualized detail and the words in which the scene is conveyed. Following Meir Sternberg’s Proteus Principle, which argues that specific forms, depending on context, perform differing functions, I emphasize that any mode of visualization is capable of different effects.14 Spatial description works much along the lines of James Gibson’s theory of affordances, in which physical forms afford 11 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane  E.  Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 36. 12  A variety of emerging approaches in literary studies argue against static, passive constructions of description, but there is wide variation in what description is taken to mean. Cannon Schmitt defends description as a critical methodology but while he highlights, as I do, the importance of close attentive reading, critical description’s aim of accurate correspondence to the text differs significantly in purpose from imaginative description as modelling for the mind. David James offers a telling analysis of descriptive uses of affective language, but whereas I limit description to imagined physical space, his stylistic approach could apply to the telling of progressive events in narrative too. See Cannon Schmitt, ‘Interpret or Describe?’ Description Across Disciplines, ed. by Stephen Best, Heather Love, and Sharon Marcus, special issue of Representations 135. 1 (2016): 102–18, and David James, ‘Critical Solace’, New Literary History, 47.4 (Autumn 2016): 481–504. 13  A fourth possibility, deictic shifts, must for reasons of space be omitted here. 14  Meir Sternberg, ‘Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse’, Poetics Today, 3.2 (Spring 1982): 107–56.

212  Melba cuddy-keane different, though not infinite, possibilities, and in which use alters the form.15 A river affords specific possibilities for an animal’s creation of habitat, but a beaver’s built habitat shapes the meaning of the river at that point. In narrative, a mode of visualization affords a range of cognitive possibilities but, as we shall see, the details of execution (scenes, settings, and circumstances) can trigger distinct effects. In all instances, however, the reader’s apprehension of spatial significance depends on attentive perception of detail—that is, on close reading. Descriptive close reading, however, is not in the first instance an analytic task. Just as Gibson posited that our visual perception of affordances is immediate, sensory, and direct, rather than proceeding from prior analysis of characteristics and qualities, so our apprehension of literary space occurs bodily on an experiential level. As readers, we will most likely absorb the experience subliminally; as critics, we can examine the details for insight into how the cognitive functioning works.

Shifting Scale Explaining the effect of putting down one novel and taking up another, Woolf goes beyond the explanation that ‘we are in the presence of a different person’ to assert that ‘we are living in a different world’. Citing the works of Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, and Thomas Hardy, she imagines each storyworld as a physical place: Defoe’s is ‘a plain high road’; Austen’s is a ‘drawing room and people talking’ while Hardy’s is ‘the moors’ and ‘the stars over our heads’. These places, however, are not merely characteristic settings; each physical world, in Woolf ’s view, articulates a different epistemological versioning of reality, or a different storymind: Defoe’s operates through logical linearity; Austen’s, through conversational dialogism; Hardy’s, through a metaphysical probing beyond the surface reality of the knowable world. These are not merely different subjects but different modes of thought and, in moving from one novelist to another, our minds assume different shapes. Such mindblending with the text is not, for Woolf, the ultimate goal of reading; she insists on a complementary stage when we pull back, analyse, and judge. But getting inside the mentality of each text—experiencing its storymind—is, she 15 James  J.  Gibson, ‘The Theory of Affordances’, in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 127–43. Gibson’s theory has been widely adapted today from the ecological context in which it was first proposed to design theory, human–computer interaction, and beyond. In narrative studies, its application tends to be the way a specific work affords different possibilities for reading; my focus here is on the way a narrative technique affords different possibilities for writing.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  213 urges, the first crucial stage of knowledge, and that knowledge manifests as visualized space: literature is architecture for the brain. In differentiating her novelists, Woolf simplifies their cognitive landscapes as stable and unitary, focusing on the way readers can acquire mental dexterity from a succession of different texts. But in many novels, and especially Woolf ’s own, movements within the text prompt changes in cognitive frames. My first examples concern a technique that has become almost second nature to us in platforms like Google Maps today: zooming in and zooming out, with consequent shifts between close and distant views. Narratological analysis commonly describes such effects as shifts in focalization and perspective, but here I push further to ask how cognitive activity changes when we widen or narrow our views. Used in the first pages of a novel, such shifts are crucial introductions to the text’s storymind, as evidenced in the opening sections of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). The Old Wives’ Tale begins with a panoramic aerial view of England, then zooms in, shot by shot, until we focus on two characters gazing through a window. From the broad mapping of England’s rivers, we close in on the county of Staffordshire, then on the district of the Five Towns, then to one of these towns, then to the square in that town, then to a shop in that square, and finally to a window in that shop. Our eye movements shift from initially stretching to increasingly narrowing visual perception, from initially seeing through an impersonal topographical map to seeing a particularized, individualized view. In contrast, A Passage to India opens with a close-up focus on the lower level of Chandrapore, with its houses, bazaars, and mud, tilts upward to the oval maiden, hospital, Civil Station, gardens, and the English Club, and then zooms out to the sky, the stars, and finally the distance beyond the stars. We shift from the detail of near perception, in which we note, for example, that the Club is built of red bricks, to the intangibility of distance, moving beyond the blue of the sky to a realm where colour, since we are now imaginatively beyond eyesight, no longer exists. At the end of the passage, our eyes lower to traverse the distant land’s seemingly limitless flatness, where the only forms on the horizon—the Marabar Caves—seem as equally inaccessible and unknowable as the sky. Although in reverse formation, the scalar shifts in both novels call upon the reader’s cognitive flexibility as eye movements alter conceptual frames. Close-up detailed views ground us in the predominantly naturalistic perception that obtains throughout these narratives, in which we observe behaviour, feel sympathy or dislike, analyse character, and reflect on social relationships,

214  Melba cuddy-keane employing the ordinary day-to-day cognitive interactions that we tend to use  in our own lives. Conversely, the distanced views set such perceptions in counterpoint against perspectives imagined from a non-human position. In Bennett’s opening, the mental insularity of the English living in the Midlands is set against an imagined scene that expands beyond human vision, projecting the mind’s eye not only to England’s coastline but to the oceans beyond. Forster’s distanced view likewise transgresses realistic human eyesight: beginning with an aerial shot that looks downward on Chadrapore, the view expands into outer space, focalized from an uninhabited position in an in­access­ible sky. In both works, distanced views remove us from the comfort zone of a human-centred world proportioned to our bodily scale. Furthermore, since both openings have an ABA structure, offering a brief glimpse at the beginning of the view we return to at the end, no one view supplants the other: both novels invite readers to inhabit a double positioning, toggling between emotional involvement in the human story and a perception of the fragility and indeed inconsequence of human stories in relation to the larger elemental forces beyond individual life. In Bennett’s and Forster’s novels, zooming in and out thus enacts shifts between views that, in the language of spatial cognition, are ego-centric, or ‘locations . . . represented with respect to the particular perspective of a perceiver’, or allocentric, literally ‘other’ centred, engaging a perceptual frame that is ‘external to the holder of the representation and independent of his or her position’.16 According to Adam Glaz, the approach known as Vantage Theory aligns each spatial perception with a corresponding cognitive frame: close-up views are specific, concrete, engaged, and ego-reflective, while distanced perspectives are general, abstract, detached, recessive, and ego-distanced.17 Yet when Glaz turns to analyse the effects of zooming in and out in Bruce Springsteen’s lyric ‘My Father’s House’, we find these categorical alignments do not hold true. In the song’s opening, the speaker’s distant view of his father’s house is expressive of longing and desire (a dream world of imagined safe 16 Roberta  L.  Klatzky, ‘Allocentric and Egocentric Spatial Representations: Definitions, Distinctions, and Interconnections’, in Spatial Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Representation and Processing Spatial Knowledge, ed. by Christian Freksa, Christopher Habel, and Karl F. Wender (Berlin; New York: Springer, 1998), 2. I use egocentric and allocentric rather than the narratological terms projective and topographical to locate the difference clearly in focalization and to avoid the implication that topographical is a purely objective mode. 17  Vantage Theory, first proposed by American anthropologist and linguist Robert  E.  MacLaury. argues that conceptual categories derive from physical viewpoints or vantages: up/down, right/left, warm and cold colours. See Adam Glaz, ‘The Father and the Son: Vantages in Brice Springsteen’s Lyrics’, Studies in Language and Cognition, ed. by Jordan Zlatev, Mats Andrén, and Marlene Johansson Falck (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 348–60.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  215 refuge), while the return to a distant view at the end is infused with the realization of lost opportunity and self-recrimination (a self-reflective, contemplative mode). Despite the changes in cognitive mood, both spatially and cognitively, the song stays within an egocentric map. As the Proteus Principle argues, the cognitive meaning of space relies on the details in individual passages rather than universal meanings assigned to specific forms. In a different way, attention to detail reveals significant differences in Bennett’s and Forster’s ‘long-shot’ perspectives. Bennett’s distant perspective stretches our minds to geographical expanse, leading us from the topography of England through its flowing rivers to the seas beyond. Yet we remain within the frame of a knowable world. Even his distanced description includes detail about particular geographic features—such as a hill infamous in the history of Primitive Methodism. Taking such narrative licence—normally increased distance would mean less detailed perception—Bennett keeps our eyes on a realist, social world, making his readers aware of the broader geographical, historical, and cultural environments that his characters, who might be described today as Brexit Little Englanders, ignore. Forster’s allocentric goes epistemologically further, taking us into regions of the mind where there are  no anchors, where there is only space and no place, where we literally become lost in thought. In contrast to Bennett’s detail, Forster’s descriptions reduce clarity and lessen specificity: the eye is bathed in the subtly changing colours of the sky, then drawn out to its limitless underlying core of blue, and finally lost in an undifferentiated expanse ‘beyond colour’.18 The generalized language further detaches envisioned space from clear sight: ‘overarching’, ‘immense vault’, ‘horizon to horizon’, ‘enormous’, ‘[l]eague after league’, and ‘endless expanse’.19 Whereas Bennett’s focus remains sociological, Forster expands from the sociological to the epistemological and metaphysical. Moving beyond rational conscious perception, Forster takes the mind into cognitively unknowable realms.

Juxtaposing Space In Bennett’s and Forster’s novels, opening descriptions enact dynamic cognitive shifts that prompt us to read the subsequent narrative with alternating experiences of scale. In another manifestation of spatial cognition, descriptions 18 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, ed. by Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin 2005), 6. 19  Ibid., 8–9.

216  Melba cuddy-keane in narrative middles create interruptions that invoke an alternate storymind. Modernism again offers striking examples: Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925). Each of these novels has a tripartite form and in each, the middle section solicits us to think in a different way. Both the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse and the Outland section of The Professor’s House interrupt a primary plot concerning a family story.20 External events occur in these middle sections, but the more powerful impact comes from spatial description and its cognitive effects. In both, we experience time slowing down and space expanding and in both, human activity is reduced in scale against the larger scale of the natural world. However, while the individual ego is quietened, the intensity of descriptive detail heightens perception. Like holistic mindfulness training, the sections cultivate what in psychology is called ‘openness to experience’, responsiveness to the whole. But the state of mind invoked is not transcendent; instead, heightened perception attunes us to the complexity of existence: we will go on to produce thematic readings, but these middle sections remain suspended in our minds as spatial manifolds, stretching always beyond the grasp of our individual efforts to explain. My analysis here focuses on Cather’s novel, in part because its tripartite structure is more challenging to articulate than Woolf ’s, in which the cognitive contrasts are clearly demarcated (awake/asleep/awake) or (realis/hypnagogic/ realis). But I also want to respond to Lee Mitchell’s provocative essay on The Professor’s House, in which he both offers an excellent close reading of Cather’s description, yet slips, I think wrongly, into the equation of description with the non-narrative and the static.21 Mitchell connects Tom Outland’s view of the mesa in the middle section with the well-recognized trope, in American literature, of states of wonder. Cather’s description, he argues, encodes a longing for such hypostatized moments, but such longing suffers defeat by the inevitable return of dailiness—that is, the resurgence of narrative. Mitchell’s reading thus locates the final significance of the novel in the Professor’s ultimate fate (and the end of the plot). A cognitive reading of description, however, approaches the middle section as a radical shift in the storymind, 20  For a fascinating account of the similarities in these two novels, see Louise A. Poresky, ‘Cather and Woolf in Dialogue: The Professor’s House and To  the Lighthouse’, Papers on Language and Literature, 44.1 (2008): 348–60. 21 Lee Mitchell, ‘Strangely Static: Wonder and Possession in The Professor’s House’, Literary Imagination, 16.3 (2014): 289–308.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  217 engaging a cognitive mode that is more expansive and encompassing than the minds of the two main character-focalizers. Tom Outland and the Professor move toward cognitive simplicity, although of different kinds; the textual mind, in contrast, moves toward cognitive complexity. Despite its separation, as a flashback, from present-time events, the middle section in Cather’s novel does not completely break with the other two sections’ teleological mode: the middle similarly possesses a linear plot. The narrator, Tom Outland, describes his journey to what he calls the Blue Mesa and his sight there of what he names ‘Cliff City’, the ruins of an ancient pueblo, constructed over 400 years before. Tom is lured by the mystery of the mesa to explore it, inspired by a passion to give it a place in American history, and devastated when his partner sells the artefacts, which are transported beyond American soil. We have a standard pattern of desire, crisis, defeat. Thematically as well, the Blue Mesa develops the antithesis, introduced in the first section set in Michigan, between the house and the lake: the debilitating effects of acquisition culture versus the freedom of natural space, embodied in the blue lake that the Professor so longingly sees from his window. The initial framing of the natural world with a view through a window is taken, however, to a different level in the middle section which, in her frequently cited gloss on the novel, Cather indicated was inspired by the square open window characteristically depicted in Dutch paintings of domestic interiors, and giving us a view of the sea.22 Leading us beyond the perceptual processes sketched in the Professor’s mind, adumbrating not just something seen but also a mode of seeing, Cather’s middle section creates an open perceptual window that exceeds both the linear events and the characters’ fates. The seed of Cather’s cognitive narrative is indeed planted in the first section. The Professor’s description of the lake captures its changing colours, but his responsiveness to such detail, seen when he was a boy, is a later phenomenon in his adult mind. Perceptively receptive in childhood, only in adulthood is he consciously aware of the specific aspects that make up the scene: ‘They had made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were merely open wide.’23 But this two-stage process means that the outer world is held in the mind, becoming ineluctably part of it: ‘not a thing thought about but a part of consciousness itself ’ (20). In one sense, the view is 22  Willa Cather, ‘On the Professor’s House’, in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art with a foreword by Stephen Tennant (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 31. 23  Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Vintage, 1990), 21. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

218  Melba cuddy-keane perpetually available, but it becomes accessible only through memory, a process not merely of recollection but of reconstruction in the present time.24 While the free indirect discourse of this passage reveals the mind of a character-focalizer, the language it uses pulls in the readingmind too. The pronouns shift from ‘he’ to ‘you’ and ‘one’: ‘You had only to look at the lake’; ‘the first thing one saw in the morning’ (20). The ambiguity of ‘you’ merges the Professor’s internalized speech to himself with direct address to the reader; ‘one’ occupies a middle ground. The narrative distance between minds is destabilized, so that the way the Professor sees the lake implies a method for visualizing Cather’s text. As our reading continues, our minds absorb details, which we unconsciously hold in memory. While the plot progresses on its slow devolution to outcome, the descriptive narrative is accumulative and accretive, building stores of information for later use. The middle section then offers a more powerful and extended image, and more fully and explicitly models the way Cather’s text thinks. The cognitive drama in this novel—which on one level is about the writing and reading of history—might be expressed as the tension between positivist observation and imaginative comprehension. Much of Tom’s description is exacting in detail; as a burgeoning scientist, his approach is, not surprisingly, in the analytic mode: he itemizes the artefacts in his diary and their locations; adding to his initial sight of the mesa, he records precise mathematical measurements, ascertained later, of its size. But Tom’s factual details compete with the rhet­ oric­al narrative of his attempt to convey what he saw to his listener and, in the communicative process, Tom realizes how detail falls short. ‘I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it’ (179), he exclaims, and ‘I can’t describe it’ (180). In the homogenetic narrative Tom’s listener is the silent Professor, who is presumably recollecting what Tom told him. But again the direct address to ‘you’ extends its implications to the reader, urging a participatory seeing empathetic with Tom’s attempts. Tom is struggling to describe both physical matter and its effect, and so to his positivist descriptions, Tom adds simile, attempting to convey experience through association. But even likeness is not conclusive since similes involve both closeness and slippage: ‘the mesa is still as sculpture and something like that’ (179) and ‘more like sculpture than anything else’ (180) [my emphasis]. Tom both draws on the suggestive language of art, while indicating that his

24 See Yadin Dudai, ‘The Engram Revisited: On the Elusive Performance of Memory’, in The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives, ed. by Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews, and James L. McClelland (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 29–40.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  219 experience eludes even art’s grasp. Like the powerfully imagistic ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse—and, I would add, like the ‘Caves’ section in A Passage to India as well—Cather’s middle gestures to a reality that exceeds our descriptive efforts, whether in words or in paint: the reality Lily Briscoe describes as ‘that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it had been made anything’.25 In their different ways, these descriptive middles push beyond our ordinary imaginings as well as our assumptions, if we harbour them, of a readily transparent world. In Cather’s novel, the interpretative significance of resonating, unresolvable space is then encapsulated in an ekphrastic scene: Tom’s reading of Virgil’s Aeneid on the mesa’s top. Like the Professor’s view of the lake unconsciously sustained in his mind, the mesa becomes for Tom ‘part of consciousness itself ’, but with the additional effect of superimposed, simultaneous seeing. In his subsequent readings of Virgil, Tom explains, ‘I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that’ (228): the view of the mesa, where he sat reading. If Tom’s way of reading is also a way of reading Cather’s novel, then the reader will return to the Professor’s thoughts in the final section while simultaneously seeing the powerfully imagistic middle behind the immediate page. By cognitively framing its visualizations, the novel thus affords possibilities for the reader’s own mental activity: being perceptively open, if unconsciously, to all details, sensing beyond words the reality to which words merely gesture, and sustaining powerful mental images in memory in an accumulative apprehension of the whole. And such simultaneous rather than linear reading works against taking the chronological end as the one resolution the novel supports. While both Tom and the Professor show themselves open to holistic perception, both men move toward simplification, though in reverse forms. Comparing his experience to scientific experiment, Tom explains how he comes ‘to co-ordinate and simplify’ (126), to fit everything in; contrastingly, the Professor is driven by loss toward increasing separation—from material culture, from his family, from his youth, ultimately from life itself. Relinquishing all desire, he gravitates toward the simplification of leaving everything out. Both resolutions construct a necessary bulwark against the materialist accumulation that characterizes their contemporary American society, but both ignore the cognitive accumulation that the memory of the mesa implies. 25  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 158.

220  Melba cuddy-keane The mesa, as a vibrant and haunting image, resists resolution—its immense size at the boundaries of our imaginative capacities, the inscrutability of the cliff-dwellers and their disappearance, the ambiguity of whether their civilization stands as a doomed relic of the past or, as Father Duchene speculates, a life ‘far too advanced’ (198) and thus a possible future. Furthermore, while both Tom and the Professor retreat from life’s problems to high isolated places—the Professor’s attic study paralleling Tom’s dwelling on the mesa on his own—Cliff City itself recalls a dynamic community, leaving traces of both peace and violence that show its character to be mixed. Rather than static isolation, the mesa is an imagistic exercise in mental expansion, making a cognitive parallel, in fictive imagination, to Professor Crane’s work in experimental physics bent on ‘determining the extent of space’ (122). While many interpretations of the novel, like Mitchell’s, take the Professor’s profound resignation as reliably reflecting the views of the implied author, the continuing hold of the middle reveals the storymind as balancing the two narratives, not urging either one as a definitive comment on life. Rather than a romantic image of transcendence, the mesa is a modernist site of complexity-seeing, juxtaposing its infinite mystery against the narrative’s finite last page.

Building Cognitive Maps From shifting scale and remembering space, I turn in my last example to the accumulative construction, throughout a narrative, of a cognitive map. In neuroscience, a cognitive map is the physical representation of space in the mind; in narratology, ‘a mental model of narrative space’.26 Both definitions ground the map securely in the physical world, differing from Fredric Jameson’s term cognitive mapping—more accurately conceptual mapping— to refer to the significances we, either as individuals or institutions, give to the places and spaces around us, creating social relations and imposing ideo­ logic­al formations. My own approach to cognitive mapping takes both words at a more literal level. I focus on physical diagrams of space and the cognitive functions involved in constructing such diagrams.27 Since image schemas are also conceptual schemas, there is undoubtedly a level of ideational content 26 Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space’, in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. by David Herman (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003), 214–42. 27  In a close companion to my present essay, Ryan offers a detailed analysis of the maps students draw based on their spatial memory of a literary text. While she demonstrates that different readers construct different possible worlds, however, her discussion focuses on the object world of the map rather than the nature of thought in constructing it.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  221 here as well, but we reach it by analysing not what is thought but how thought is functioning. As I illustrate elsewhere, mapping has become an increasingly complex activity, expanding far beyond two-dimensional representations drawn from an aerial view.28 The dramatic evolution in mapping strategies coincided with the advent of digital technologies, but modernist narratives, I argue, were already advancing spatial models encoding the cognitive capacities for creating digital worlds. In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf employed multi-level techniques for diagramming the modern city, proleptically modelling the complex system it is increasingly understood to be. Like contemporary designs for ‘smart cities’, Woolf ’s urban mapping is too dense for illustration in black and white print publication; for visualization, readers can consult my companion online essay, which uses GIS software to depict the networked layering described below.29 Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) shadows a group of people through the course of one day, with excursions into the lives of numerous, sometimes anonymous, Londoners as well. Although traditionally hailed for its in­nov­ations in inter­ iorized subjectivity, the novel is equally innovative in its descriptions of space. The composite map of the city accrues from different places and different angles, and through numerous bodily senses (visual, aural, and haptic). And, like the retention, in memory, of the middle section of Cather’s novel, imagining Woolf ’s London involves imagistically sustaining what we have read. Additionally, like the shifting scales in Bennett’s and Forster’s novels, Woolf ’s mapping encompasses cognitively disparate views. In Woolf ’s novel, however, spatial descriptions are not juxtaposed but networked. When we receive new information, we recall previous constructions, but our models are altered and complicated by additional, often incongruent, layers. Remembering, as I have indicated, is a cognitively reconstructive process, and Woolf ’s novel exercises that process to a high degree. Given the novel’s abundant reference to an actual city, we can use, as a baseline. a pictorial map of London from 1923, which illustrates what most of Woolf ’s contemporary readers, either as Londoners or travellers, would know.30 Yet even an ostensibly neutral informational map reveals the multiple 28  Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Imaging/Imagining Globalization: Maps and Models’, Society for Critical Exchange, December 2002, http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~mcuddy/mapping.htm. 29  Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Mapping Mrs. Dalloway: London as a Networked City’, On-line Essay, PowerPoint, and PDF, University of Toronto, 2019: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/97406, Tspace Research Repository 30  The Pictorial Plan of London (London: Geographia Ltd., 1923), http://www.geographicus.com/ mm5/cartographers/geographia.txt.

222  Melba cuddy-keane dynamics of lived urban space. As an ancient site evolved from small villages and the paths connecting them, often following now subterranean rivers, London evidences not a modernized grid plan, but an organic and rhizomatic network of roads. Superimposed on such bottom-up patterning, a contrasting dynamic lurks in the interspersion of monuments, statues, and buildings that both map and novel encode as top-down reminders of governmental and militarist powers. A third pattern emerges in the map’s contrast between built-up areas (shaded brown) and green spaces, similarly reflected in the novel’s own references to the shops on Bond Street and the various public parks (Green, St. James’s, and Regent’s), and indicative of the complex inter­actions between nature-oriented and society-oriented frames. The two-dimensional topographical map itself diagrams multiple layers. The physical features of London are then overlaid with the various paths the characters take.31 The two main characters—doubles who never meet— are connected by a continuous trajectory from south to north: Clarissa’s walk from Dean’s Yard to Bond St. is extended by Septimus’s (and Rezia’s) walk from Bond St. to Regent’s Park. Doubling the doubles, Clarissa and Septimus’s combined trajectory is paralleled by Peter’s route from Dean’s Yard to Regent’s Park. To continuity and parallel, the routes then add convergence. The paths of Peter and Septimus collide in Regent’s Park, where, in a reverse shot, each man sees the other. Finally, minor characters introduce a pattern of nonsimultaneous overlap.32 Richard Dalloway follows some of his wife’s footsteps on his subsequent walk from Bond St. home and their daughter Elizabeth follows Peter up Victoria Street and Whitehall toward the Strand, but by bus, and later in the day. Varying intentions imply different motions and tempos of walking too: purposeful to get something (Clarissa); purposeful to avoid something (Rezia); idling and wasting time (Peter); adventuring across boundaries (Elizabeth)—complexities that would require video mapping to show. As conceptual schema, movements create a palimpsest of continuity, parallelism, convergence, overlap, and distinctive paths. 31  Most routes are pedestrian, but Peter takes a taxi from Regent’s Park to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Elizabeth travels mostly by bus. The paths are traceable using multiple markers along the way and connecting the dots. Clarissa’s delight in the ducks and pelicans in St. James’s Park, likely close to Duck Island on the park’s east side, and her sight of Hugh Whitbread with his back against government buildings, presumably the Foreign Office and the Treasury on Horse Guards Road, suggest she enters the Park in the south east corner. Her later reference to reaching the Park gates and watching the buses on Piccadilly implies she has walked from St. James’s Park west through Green Park up to the Devonshire Gates before exiting to the east. The exact paths she takes through the parks are unspecified but more important than her precise route are the green/urban dynamics: Clarissa and Hugh chat between ducks and empire/finance, and Clarissa goes out of her way to stay in the green. 32  Numerous brief encounters add further layers of interaction: in addition to Clarissa’s bumping in to Hugh, Peter’s disturbing shadowing of an unknown woman, and Maisie Johnson’s asking Rezia for direction.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  223 In addition to geographical terrain and character movement, soundwaves inscribe networked patterns as well. On the micro-level, local, small scale sounds bring people imaginatively together despite the literal separation of their lives. Although they never meet, Clarissa and Septimus are both riveted by the sound of a car tyre’s explosion in Bond St; the song of an old woman at the Regent’s Park Tube station affects both Peter and Rezia; and the ambulance bell connects Peter, although unknowingly, to the death of the man whose anguish he encountered earlier that day. On the macro-level, Big Ben is a loudly reverberating soundmark; its chimes are heard by numerous characters dispersed throughout London and the soundwaves radiate out over the city, eventually dissipating into the sky. Finally, technology leaves its mark as well. The path of the official car aligns observers along its route from Bond St. to the Palace, while a sky-writing plane more freely encircles London with its looping wavy lines before soaring out over Greenwich to the distant fields beyond.33 As both soundwaves and airwaves stretch vision beyond the chartable map, Woolf ’s storymind, like Forster’s and Cather’s, expands to cognitively unknowable realms. As we mentally accumulate these features in Woolf ’s urban diagram, two complicating factors emerge. First, the density of information becomes too great for legible, transparent representation in two-dimensional car­tog­raphy.34 To accurately convey such complexity, we require three-dimensional, inter­ active, digital techniques. Secondly, it is hard to imagine a reader who, in the normal course of reading, would notice and remember so many interconnected details. The embodied nature of perception, however, helps to explain the effects: as experiments in embodied cognition suggest, we can subconsciously grasp conceptual implications without consciously observing and analysing details in the way I am doing here. Imagining space can give us the bodily experience of being in it, activating the neural networks that we use when inhabiting space in our lives. Just as, in Cather’s novel, the Professor’s memory of the lake depends on unconscious absorption, so too the close reader of Woolf ’s novel can intuitively grasp the implied modelling of its space. Finally, completing the map is much less important than activating the cognitive processes supporting it; sensing Woolf ’s modelling triggers our brains to process information in multi-layered and complex ways.

33  The visible flight of the plane appears to begin and end with Big Ben’s striking of 11 o’clock, producing the effect, in its written description, of expansion of space and suspension of time. 34  A complete mapping would include the messages Clarissa imagines passing on the airwaves between London offices and, perhaps most important, the expanding and dissolving letters left by the plane in the sky.

224  Melba cuddy-keane As I’ve suggested, such cognitive activity does have ideational content. In modelling urban space, Woolf counters the coercive authority of patriarchal empire with a multi-centric, interactive, networked, and distributed complex system. Her schematics, however, go far beyond the two-dimensional dynamics, influentially argued by Michel de Certeau, between the regulated and hegemonic forces of city planners and the transgressive activity of ped­ es­ trians.35 Woolf ’s London is a place of multiple encounters on multiple levels, organicism evidenced in its patterns of streets; learned ideology, in the movements of some of its inhabitants. It is a site of numerous interactions between the cohesive and the divisive, between the regulated and the random, between the chartable and what eludes the chart’s grasp. We hear the city’s constantly shifting rhythms, grasping the way movements and sounds add layers of dens­ity, turning a flat plane into a multi-grid. And the ubiquity of complex networked patterns breaks down the putative divide between external realm and the interiorized self. Contrasting the discrete individuated character of traditional fiction, Clarissa Dalloway feels herself to be ‘part . . . of the trees at home; of the house there, . . . part of people she had never met’.36 Both self and the city are envisioned as extended networks, prompting us to rethink the novel’s title: beyond the customary reference of a name to a central character, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ becomes a substitute name for a city, itself an interwoven sim­ul­tan­eity of multiple experiences. Inner and outer worlds form one continuous loop, so that Clarissa’s entrance at the novel’s end encapsulates the summative effect of both a particular character and an entire narrative. But to think such complexity requires the reader to build composite models that are layered, overlapping, and interactive. Written long before the advent of the digital, Woolf ’s cartographic novel prefigures the complex networked models that are on the cusp of city planning today: bottom-up in addition to top-down processes; movements em­an­at­ing from multiple centres; change at the local level impacting the whole in more than simply additive ways—all in all, a multi-level interactive network, requiring a mind that works on multiple planes.37 And if the readingmind can participate in such modelling, the novel may now play an unanticipated pedagogical role. Educators confronting the difficulty of teaching new 35  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 91–110. 36  Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8. 37  See for example Roger White, Guy Engelen, and Inge Uljee, Modeling Cities and Regions as Complex Systems: From Theory to Planning Applications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  225 the­or­et­ic­al concepts have argued that students need the embodied experience of complex systems to counter their training in linear thinking with its assumptions of single causes and expectations of singular solutions.38 Mrs. Dalloway affords the experience of multi-dimensional interactive space; reading it activates the brain as a complex system at work.

Space, the Storymind, and Close Reading In detailing the way we can access a storymind through the close reading of spatial description, I am not suggesting a process of passive immersion. The cognitive demands on the reader are challenging, requiring the ability to think in ways beyond the habitual and familiar and to shift in and out of ­different cognitive modes. Close readings of space require and promote cognitive flexibility, developing and enhancing our receptivity to other minds. The dynamic of changing cognitive states shows too why we need to move description away from non-narrative categorizations and consider it instead a narrative of process. Going well beyond static observation, description can be active and dynamic, yielding an experience of movement and development on a different level from that of the plot. As I suggested earlier, the descriptive level of narrative can also prompt us to develop more complex understandings of what constitutes a realist world. While the temporality of reading is inevitably linear, the examples I’ve been discussing ask us to sustain multiple, even contrary, imagined states. Rather than rejecting and replacing earlier modellings, readers are solicited to toggle between cognitive frames (Bennett and Forster), to juxtapose past perception to new (Cather), or to build accumulative and layered networked constructions (Woolf). While similarly recognizing the ‘heterogeneity of descriptive discourse’ and its disruptive effect on ‘smooth read[ing]’, Mieke Bal locates all such disruption within a postmodernist paradigm that denaturalizes the realist illusion of a transparent relation between signifier (in this case, description) and signified (an assumed objective reality that is being described).39 For Bal, the sole function of instabilities in description is to un-write or de-script the false implications, in plotted narrative, of a coherently-ordered, knowable world. 38  See Michael Jacobson and Working Group 2 Collaborators, ‘Complex Systems and Education: Cognitive, Learning, and Pedagogical Perspectives’, New England Complex System Institute, 2001, http://www.necsi.edu/events/cxedk16/cxedk16_2.html. 39  Bal, ‘Over-writing as Un-writing’, 98.

226  Melba cuddy-keane But the descriptions I have been analysing are less about exposing the illusory nature of perceived subject–object relations than about acknowledging the differing perceptual, epistemological, and ideo­logic­al affordances in a reality whose nature, or even existence, is contingent on neither its manifest consistency nor its human accessibility. Rather than unending uncertainty, the cognitive realism I am tracking models an epis­temo­logic­al pluralism.40 Like the affordances of narrative form, reality affords different possibilities for its perception, and different cognitive modes will access different ontological implications of a heterogeneous real. So Woolf ’s James Ramsay both sees through contrasting cognitive frames and grasps the lighthouse’s pluralist affordances: ‘For nothing was simply one thing.’41 Depicting the way objects comprise multiple facets, and multiple facets allow for multiple ontologies, modernist pluralist description thus mediates between unending relativity on the one hand and, on the other, binary convictions of the rightness and wrongness of views.42 To conclude, I offer a cognitive reading of narrative space as a model for close reading in general. The specific processes I have been describing can easily be transposed into formulations for good readerly practice: shifting between close-up detail and large global views; sustaining in memory what we have read as a cumulative, though not necessarily unified, experience; and, at least temporarily, suspending our own cognitive and ideological pro­pen­ sities and allowing ourselves to be guided by the associative pathways of a different mind. But beyond improving interpretative skills and cognitive flexi­ bility, openness to a narrative’s storymind offers the ground for more ethical readings. In our final interpretation, we will draw on our own experiences and perceptions and, as Virginia Woolf urges, make our own aesthetic, ideological, even moral judgements, but these judgements will be made more responsible through our efforts to understand a text from inside. Furthermore, 40  In a discussion relevant to the subtle shift I am making in traditional approaches to modernism, Anjan Chakravartty distinguishes between ontological perspectivism, in which any view of reality is context-dependent and relative to the observer, and ontological pluralism, which holds that the seeming contradictions in our observations reflect the inherent capability in the object world of being selected, organized, and activated in different ways. Anjan Chakravartty, Scientific Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 41 Woolf, Lighthouse, 152. 42  As a modernist correlate, R. G. Collingwood rejected subjective idealism in favour of a pluralist historiography, arguing that history manifests differently as retold in different eras and by different historians, in the way that ‘a hundred people looking at the same tree all see different aspects of it, each seeing something hidden from the rest’. R. G. Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy of History, edited by William Debbins (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 138–9. That Chakravartty’s related argument addresses such contemporary questions as ‘what is the nature of an electron?’ indicates that, far from being superseded by postmodernist deconstructions, modernist ontological pluralism anticipates modellings at the conceptual forefront today.

A COGNITIVE READING OF NARRATIVE SPACE  227 when we approach the text as an other we learn to be with, we exercise the same capacities for empathy and respect that make for ethical relations with other persons. Ultimately, we may find that the skills for cognitively astute, open, and flexible reading are fundamentally skills we rely upon, but could learn to use better, in our lives.

11 Thinking Small Ecologies of Close Reading Hannah Freed-Thall

[E]ven such a small book could go beyond merely finding and identifying to suggest, albeit subtly, such things as what life may be like in terms of a fiddler crab’s existence, or a barnacle’s. Rachel Carson1

This chapter understands modernist close reading in an expanded sense, as an open-ended practice of attention to the look and feel of things. This practice is not exclusively directed at literary texts. Rather, it is a way of seeing that takes a wide variety of phenomena—from a poem to a fiddler crab—as lifeworlds to be read. Close reading, understood in this manner, is less a specific strategy than an ethical relation: it names a willingness to suspend what Roland Barthes calls the ‘will to possess’ (‘le vouloir-saisir’) in order to recognize the indeterminacy and variability of the world around us.2 Sensitive to valences of difference, alert to elisions and silences, the close reader cultivates patience as she learns to listen for the intermittent and the unexpected. Her attention is oriented toward the small—toward minute objects and ephemeral patterns of existence. What is life like for a barnacle?, the close reader may ask. My wager is that this intense but everyday observational mode draws on two forms of thought that might not ordinarily appear to be connected. Modernist close reading is where the aesthetic and the ecological meet. My guides to modernist closeness in this chapter will be marine biologist Rachel Carson and literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes. I’ll focus in particular on two works that exemplify close reading’s imaginative openendedness—what we might call, following Barthes, its cognitive or affective 1  Letter from Carson to Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin, 28 July, 1950. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2  Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. Rosalind Krauss (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14. Hannah Freed-Thall, Thinking Small: Ecologies of Close Reading In: Modernism and Close Reading. Edited by: David James, Oxford University Press (2020). © Hannah Freed-Thall. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.00012

Thinking small: ecologies of close reading  229 ‘drift’. My case studies are Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, and Barthes’s 1977–78 seminar at the Collège de France, The Neutral. What might reading Carson with Barthes make visible? This is an unlikely pairing, to be sure. Carson is a scientist most famous for Silent Spring, her 1962 exposé of the devastating effects of the pesticide DDT. Barthes, by contrast, is best known for his deconstruction of ‘Nature’ as a normative fantasy that functions to shore up bourgeois ideology.3 While Carson, often credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement, is required reading for anyone interested in ecological thought, Barthes is rarely invoked by ­environmentalists or ecocritics. Yet Barthes and Carson may have more in common than one would expect. This is especially true when we focus on The Neutral and The Edge of the Sea—texts that are more descriptive or affirmative than overtly polemical. Both works date from before or after their authors’ more combative phases: Carson composed The Edge of the Sea before turning to the project that would incite the wrath of the chemical industry; Barthes lectured on the non-violent structure of feeling he called ‘the Neutral’ after abandoning more patently transgressive (Marxist or psychoanalytic) styles of thought. Born only seven years apart, Barthes and Carson are queer, offbeat ­thinkers. Despite their seemingly divergent sensibilities and fields of expertise, they share a love of the small: details, glimmers, textural and textual subtleties. Both cultivate a reading gaze that is not just ‘close’ but also light. Attentive to ambiguous, qualitative differences, both seek to read and describe transience itself, to bear witness to minute and passing forms—from the scarcely perceptible movements of a ghost crab to the momentary intensity of a line of verse. Both practice styles of observation that bring out the nuances of the object at hand. Here it may be helpful to address the broader stakes of this chapter, as it may strike some readers as counterintuitive to link the aesthetic energies of close reading to ecological thought. Aesthetic discourse is non-instrumental or impractical by design; environmental discourse is practical and activist in orientation. Yet these modalities of thought share a concern with strategies of non-domination, techniques for freeing objects or life forms from the hubristic concepts and categories we habitually impose on them. Within aesthetic thought, Kantian aesthetic philosophy, and notably its key concept, ‘reflective 3  Barthes most famously attacks the naturalization of the bourgeois norm—which he calls the “essential enemy”—in his 1957 Mythologies. As he put it, he was motivated by his “resentment” at seeing “Nature and History confused at every turn.” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), 9.

230  Hannah freed-thall judgement’, is especially relevant to a certain strain of environmentalist phil­oso­phy because it names a non-acquisitive way of seeing things. To ­perceive the world in all its particularity—to see it aesthetically, according to Kant—is to set aside (however briefly) both conventional taxonomies and one’s own possessive desires. ‘Reflective judgement’ indicates an attempt to enjoy without doing harm, to allow things to shine with their own light, to vibrate with their own peculiar life. Modernist close reading can be understood as an offshoot or variant of reflective judgement: when stabilizing concepts of identity, biography, and genius are set aside, the strangeness of things comes newly into view. Admittedly, ecocriticism is not always friendly to such explicitly pleas­ur­ able and non-end-oriented practices of reading and perception. Close reading is a luxury that environmental criticism, with its justifiable urgency, can rarely afford. As an example of ecocriticism’s anti-close-reading bent, consider Rob Nixon’s influential Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Slow Violence presents climate change as a pervasive, often unacknowledged, un­equal­ly distributed form of harm. Implicit in Nixon’s argument is the notion that the drawn out, insidious tempo of toxic drift, rising tides, warming temperatures, species loss, and so on, requires an eye-catching, big aesthetic response. ‘Glacial’ modes of ecological damage must be recast as ‘rousing’ and ‘urgently visible’.4 There is no time for close reading in Nixon’s account: literature that would hope to disrupt cycles of environmental violence must make visible and immediate a devastation that would otherwise remain largely hidden. Activist art must capture attentions that are increasingly distracted and spectacle-addicted. From this perspective, to linger on aesthetic surfaces and textures would only be an indulgence, further distracting us from the suffering we don’t want to see. This is a persuasive argument, but I want to take a somewhat different approach to questions of speed and scale here. I contend that close reading, too, can be an ecological practice. In an age characterized by a nonstop onslaught of information and by 24/7 circuits of consumption and production, it is an act of resistance to attend to networks of slight difference—to elucidate what Barthes, in The Neutral, terms ‘le prix du peu’ (the worth of the ‘bit’).5 I  am particularly interested in texts that require readers that get as close as  possible to the objects described, to tarry with small life forms, with

4 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 13. 5 Barthes, The Neutral, 130.

Thinking small: ecologies of close reading  231 phenomena that are incalculable, unmasterable (though not sublime).6 Insofar as it challenges us to attend to minute alterations in the surface of things, modernism denies the reader or observer the privilege of epistemological domination. If Nixon’s theory of ‘slow violence’ has no time to linger on such details, we might look to the work of critic Anne-Lise François for guidance. François models a slower, closer form of ecological and literary attention. Side-stepping the heavy-handed rhetoric of what Lawrence Buell terms ‘environmental apocalypticism’, she hones in instead on the poetics and politics of ­minimalism, quietness, and non-instrumentality, or what she calls ‘ecologically minded nonintervention’.7 She also approaches literature and ecology from a capaciously queer point of view, focusing on various alternatives to heteroreproductive futurism.8 In her 2011 article, ‘Flower Fisting’, François defends both poetry and a flexible, multiply differentiated vision of habitats against the homogenizing force of industrial agriculture. In this essay, instead of focusing on one-to-one relations between organisms and environments, François explores the botanical concept of the ‘landscape pattern’, which ecologist Stephen Buchmann and ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhan define as ‘the entire interplay of floral resources and pollinators in a habitat’.9 François demonstrates that landscape patterns are implicitly queer: in their ‘stretchable’ yet ‘finite’ range of possibilities, and in the ‘loose, diffuse, and shifting attachments’ they foster, they offer a compelling alternative to (heteronormative) 6  My focus on Barthes’s intriguingly ‘weak’ concept of nuance, with its unaccented beats, its intervals and empty spaces, contrasts with other recent ecocritical approaches to modernist aesthetics, which tend to figure the subject–environment relation in stronger, bigger, and more explicitly phenomenological terms. See Stacy Alaimo on ‘trans-corporeal subjectivity’ as the ‘enmeshment of flesh with place’ (Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 2016)); Kelly Elizabeth Sultzbach on eco-phenomenological ‘entwinement’ (Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Foster, Woolf, and Auden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)); Louise Westling on ecological connection as the (Merleau-Pontian) ‘flesh’ of the world (The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)); and Timothy Morton on the somewhat more abject concept of the ecological ‘mesh’, a trope for interconnection that includes the strange and filthy (The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)). 7  Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), 36. 8  The phrase ‘heteroreproductive futurism’ is Lee Edelman’s; see his No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). For excellent examples of queer ecocriticism that effectively dodge Edelman’s polemic by embracing non-heteronormative models of stewardship and care, see Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies’, in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 331–58, and Sarah Ensor, ‘Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewitt, and Nonreproductive Futurity’, American Literature, 84.2 (June 2012): 409–35. 9  Stephen Buhmann and Gary Paul Nabhan, The Forgotten Pollinators (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), 78.

232  Hannah freed-thall ‘mutualist assumptions’—assumptions, that is, that habitats must be comprised of fixed, predetermined animal–plant pairs.10 François’s essay is implicitly a love letter to close reading, understood as a practice that requires the reader to dwell in uncertainty and indecision, to embrace varieties of difference. For François, both landscape patterns and poems are allied with marginal, playful temporalities. These small, unofficial temporal modes allow for ‘breathing space[s]’ of all sorts, from rests and elisions (‘downtime’) to ‘context-specific variation’. Ecocriticism has sometimes presented capital-N ‘Nature’ or ‘wilderness’ as an idealized, hypostasized whole untouched by the manipulations of culture, but François never relies on this mythology.11 For her, both poems and landscape patterns are spaces of nuance—a concept that we might define, with Barthes, as a shimmer or slight alteration in the texture of things. Nuance can be understood not as the marker of a sophisticated style of perception but simply as minor, everyday variation. Barthes glosses nuance as a kind of ‘minimal shine’: etymologically linked to the French word for ‘cloud’, nuance is ‘that which irradiates, diffuses, streaks (as a beautiful cloud streaks the sky)’.12 Barthes develops his theory of nuance in The Neutral, a work that explores alternatives to the binary oppositions and dialectics so fundamental to mid-century French thought. The Neutral, by contrast, designates a ‘field of nonparadigmatic intensities’.13 In its mildness and quietness of tone and approach, this figure gathers together a set of tactics for swerving or dodging the schematic, decisive mode of being that Barthes calls ‘arrogance’. Barthes, who discourses at length on Racine and Proust, the Eiffel Tower and Greta Garbo, but has little to say about flowers or tidal pools, might not seem like an obviously ecological thinker. But his late meditations on nonarrogant thought and pedagogy offer resources for the development of a non-essentialist, non-homophobic relation to ecology, which I understand 10 Anne-Lise François, ‘Flower Fisting’, Postmodern Culture, 22.1 (2011). Non-paginated. doi:10.1353/pnc.2012.0004 11  If ‘nature’ is anything for François, it’s a figure for intermittency, uncertainty, and the possibility of what she calls ‘a differently lived relation to contingency’ (‘Flower Fisting’, NP). For a critique of  ecocriticism’s erstwhile fetishization of ‘Nature’, see Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). For a critical history of the ‘wilderness’ concept in the US, see Ramachandra Guha, ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Protection: A Third World Critique’, Environmental Ethics, 11 (Spring 1989): 71–83, and William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69–90. 12  The Neutral, 99; Preparation of the Novel, 46, Barthes’s emphasis. I develop this discussion at greater length in Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 3. 13  Ibid., 199.

Thinking small: ecologies of close reading  233 here in the broadest sense, not in terms of ‘Nature’, but as the study of ‘the interrelation between any system and its environment’.14 I contend that Barthes’s late work is both aesthetic and ecological in its sensitivity to the interplay of minor forms and temporalities, and in its valorization of non-arrogant practices of perception. The Neutral consists of an experimental and wide-ranging set of lecture notes that Barthes never intended to publish. (‘The Neutral is the unmarketable’, he claims.)15 The project could even be described as a set of variations on the idea of the unmarketable, or invendable—what cannot be bought or sold, what evades masterful appropriation, what ‘outplays the paradigm’ (‘ce qui déjoue le paradigme’).16 An intensity or mood allied with affirmation rather than revelation and with satiety rather than lack, the Neutral is what Barthes calls a ‘not-so-much mode’. Utterly non-dialectical, it is subversive only in the gentlest way, indicating as it does a non choice (or ‘lateral choice’).17 Still, the Neutral is not indifferent or flat, Barthes insists, but intense, vital. He notes that since language produces meaning via the activation of binary oppositions, it necessarily fails to capture a structure of feeling defined by its evasion of conflict. Yet Barthes nonetheless invites us to imagine what he calls a ‘writing of the Neutral’.18 As the second half of this chapter will demonstrate, Carson practises precisely such a nuanced, non-dominating mode of writing in The Edge of the Sea. The Neutral is an exercise in reading subtly, and an experiment in what Barthes calls a ‘refined practice of difference’. (It is an ‘art’, he suggests, to ‘treat what appears to be the same as though different’.19) Devoted as it is to derealizations, cancelled happenings, and other varieties of minimal action, this seminar is flagrantly out of step with its times, which Barthes describes as an era of ‘political maximalism’. Barthes resists relating the Neutral to the New York School of Minimalism, however, which, he argues, valorizes ‘plain obviousness’ and ‘depersonalized and even mechanized facture’.20 Instead, he explores what he terms ‘ethical minimalism’, or ‘pure minimalism’. The Neutral is minimalist insofar as it designates a ‘style of behavior that tends to min­im­ ize the subject’s interface with the world’s arrogance [. . .] but not with the world, not with affects, with love, etc’.21 The style of attention that allows the Neutral to shine—that ‘make[s] the nuances come out’—is what Barthes calls a ‘skimming gaze’ (‘regard frisant’).22 14 O.E.D. 15 Barthes, The Neutral, 13. 16 Barthes, The Neutral, 6; Le Neutre (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 31. 18  Ibid., 66. 19  Ibid., 30. 20  Ibid., 199. 21 Ibid. 22 Barthes, The Neutral, 11; Le Neutre, 36.

17 Barthes, The Neutral, 8.

234  Hannah freed-thall This is not the distracted glance of the overstimulated eye but a particularly light and flexible modality of close reading: the look of an observer who seeks to ‘unthread’ (‘défiler’) a set of figures rather than exhaustively analyse them. In The Neutral, Barthes cites texts (from Tolstoy to John Cage) in an aleatory fashion, sampling from here and there. In contrast to the neat tripartite structure of Carson’s book (each section engaging a different geological type of seashore), Barthes embraces contingency in the organization of his lectures. But he shares Carson’s attempt to think retreat and withdrawal in affirmative terms. Like her, he attends to small, unexpected rhythms of reading and perception. The Neutral is less a book than a notebook, a set of often elliptical lecture notes spaced by weekly breaks in the seminar. Its twenty-three ‘figures’ or ‘traits’ (‘benevolence’, ‘weariness’, ‘tact’, and so on) are presented in arbitrary order. This is therefore a work that lends itself to fragmentary, non-sequential reading. One might dip in at random: its constellation of figures do not develop sequentially or build to a single argument. Instead, Barthes imagines each fragment linking to the next in several interrelated ways. Especially important to his ethos of suspended development is the idea of ‘drift’. Offering an alternative to the mythology of balance as well as to ideas of progress, to drift is to ‘dismiss opposition’ or ‘gently to take leave of . . .’ .23 Hence, noting the ‘world’s inability to accept the suspension of one’s answer to a demand’, Barthes imagines ‘drifting away from the antagonistic binarism’.24 Closely linked to drift is the figure of ‘oscillation’, with its connotations of hesitation and indecision. The Neutral is less about the logic of ‘neither one nor the other’, Barthes suggests, and more allied with ‘hétéroklitos’—‘he who leans on one side and the other’.25 Such oscillation indicates a relation to time that is ‘unforeseeable’, unaccountable—a temporal mode that Barthes qualifies as ‘vibratory’.26 A third modality of Barthesian non-development is encapsulated by the figure of ‘intensity’ or the ‘gradient’. Intensity might be understood as another variant of the intermittent: it designates what the binary logic of the yes/no or marked/unmarked cannot account for. Intensities are instead linked for Barthes with a ‘stretching’—the yes that shifts to a no, the no that stretches to a yes. What is most striking about Barthes’s thinking here is the strangely ­ordinary idea of ‘slight difference’—the ‘onset’ of or ‘effort toward’ difference that Barthes imagines as a substitute for oppositional thinking.27 The entire sem­inar examines the possibility of detaching such subtlety from its elite 23 Barthes, The Neutral., 202. Barthes’s ellipses. 26  Ibid., 130, 133. 27  Ibid., 51.

24  Ibid., 204.

25  Ibid., 130.

Thinking small: ecologies of close reading  235 as­so­ci­ations. What if subtlety were a fine-grained but perfectly unremarkable quality of things, available to anyone with the time and patience to look closely? Barthes suggests as much when he imagines ‘a great pedagogy of “nuance” in the classroom’. Instead of memorizing the usual lists of definitions, synonyms, and antonyms, children would be given ‘nuance exercises’: they would study webs of near synonyms, learning to attend to the slightest differences.28 Nuance, understood in this manner, has nothing to do with ‘intellectual sophistication’, Barthes insists. Instead, reading for and treasuring minute shades and tonalities of meaning is for Barthes an ethos, a way of being. ‘I want to live according to the nuances that literature teaches me’, he declares.29 As a retreat from or suspension of hierarchy and antagonism, the precarious Neutral— and the imagined classroom that fosters it—could be likened to the biological concept of the ‘refugium’, a zone of ‘reworlding’ in which diverse cultural or biological groupings might reassemble and thrive.30 Although her subject is marine biology, not literature, Carson, too, is a close reader. Attentive to minor variations and graduated distinctions, she practises a form of description that one critic terms ‘radical observation’: she has a knack for shining a light on the ‘smallest elements of the ecosystem’.31 Smallness particularly sets the tone in The Edge of the Sea, which explores the styles of existence of a myriad of miniature life forms. The book was originally conceived by Houghton Mifflin as an Atlantic shore guide—a user’s manual of sorts—but Carson, captivated not only by the ecology of the seashore but by the temporal and sensory perspectives of its tiny inhabitants, transformed the familiar guidebook genre into something stranger.32 It is as if Carson is trying to read smallness itself in this volume, inviting a gaze capable of recognizing 28  Ibid., 130. 29 Ibid., 11. This egalitarian pedagogical strategy likens Barthes—surprisingly, perhaps—to I. A. Richards, for whom close reading constitutes a form of ‘practical criticism’ that activates the aesthetic capabilities of readers. On Richards’s materialist and instrumental model of close reading, see Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), chapter 1. 30 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 100. As Haraway points out, refugia play an important role in biodiversity’s survival. One of the most devastating effects of climate change, she notes, is to eradicate such zones of refuge, such spaces in which imperiled beings might rest and replenish themselves. See Jonathan Crary’s compelling 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013), for another perspective on a world in which refuge—in all senses—is under threat today. 31  Joni Seager, ‘Radical Observation’, WSQ, 45.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2017): 269–77, 272. Seager notes that the effect of Carson’s radical observation is to ‘put humans in their place—mere latecomers on a planet that has been worn by time and physical processes playing out over hundreds of millions of years’ (ibid). 32  Linda Leer notes that Houghton Mifflin invited Carson to write a guidebook ‘that would teach the general public about the life cycle of common shore creatures’. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 173.

236  Hannah freed-thall the most seemingly inconsequential forms of life. She asks us to examine the margins, the delicate edges, and the minute underground spaces of the seaside world. In contrast to the character-driven structure of her earlier book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), and the epic sweep of her bestselling The Sea Around Us (1951), the narrator-guide of The Edge of the Sea is attentive to details that would be passed over by those in search of a bigger picture.33 Indeed, the adjective ‘small’ and its synonyms crop up everywhere in this book, qualifying all sorts of objects—from ‘microscopic lights’ and ‘miniature’ tide pools to ‘small creature[s]’ and ‘small beings’. These entities are not simply diminutive but range from the ‘nearly invisible’ to the ‘inconceivably minute’ and the ‘infinitely small’.34 Carson is honing in here on degrees of minutia that we are ill equipped to perceive. We are invited to imagine ‘a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the micro-droplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea’.35 Susan Stewart has written of human-made miniatures that their function is  to erase history, such that the observer can get ‘lost within [the object’s] presentness’. The ‘perfect stasis’, the ‘arrested life’ of the miniature offers the fantasy of erased labour, annulled cause and effect.36 But this is not true of Carson’s miniature tidal worlds, which are anything but static and selfcontained. Unlike the enclosed theatricality of the constructed miniature or ‘model’, which, according to Stewart, invokes nostalgia for a fantasmatic or vanished original, the tiny objects and beings that inhabit Carson’s seashore exist in a state of precarity. Implicit here is the threat of rising sea tem­per­at­ ures on the ‘sensitive’ life forms the book details—a point Carson makes gently.37 Exposed to the ebb and flow of the tides, surviving in relation to a network of other exposed beings, these creatures are small but tenacious. They are marked by their delicacy and their toughness. In contrast to the 33  The Edge of the Sea is the only of Carson’s books narrated in the first person. In adopting this point of view, Carson takes inspiration from her friend Henry Beston’s The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1928), a first-person account of the Massachusetts shore in all its seasons. In contrast to Beston’s ever-present narrator, however, Carson’s ‘I’ periodically appears and vanishes. When it is present, it’s always in a humble and nonobtrusive manner: one of the narrator’s characteristic poses is to lie prone beside a tidal pool, examining its pellucid depths. 34 Carson, The Edge of the Sea (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998), 115, 130. 35  Ibid., 130–1. 36  Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984), 60. 37  Carson references early on the ‘widespread change of climate’ responsible for warming seas since at least the beginning of the twentieth century (23). This insight frames all of the reflections that follow, but Carson does not insist on its consequences (nor could she fully fathom them in 1955).

Thinking small: ecologies of close reading  237 shoreline’s coarse and craggy surfaces—its ‘bristles’, ‘stems and stubble’, ‘felty roughening’, and ‘frayed’, leathery fronds—small creatures like the ghost crab appear at once ‘delicate’ and ‘vital’. The ‘delicately sculptured shells of mollusks called angel wings’ appear as ‘fragile as china’, but are ‘able to bore into clay or rock’. The large-clawed snapping shrimp stands out against the ‘intricate passageways’ in which it resides, and the rocky shore abuts ‘lacy cascades of foam’.38 In a reef, one finds both ‘fragile, delicately branching hydroids’ and a ‘curious shrubby form of moss animal’ with ‘tough and gelatinous’ branches. Even as Carson insists on the adaptation of these creatures and life forms to their rugged environment, she also makes us aware of their vulnerability, noting that she has often wondered, listening by night to the surf ‘trampling’ with ‘heavy tread’, about the ‘baby starfish, the urchins, the brittle stars, the tube-dwelling amphipods, the nudibranches, and all the other small and delicate fauna of the moss’.39 The effect of this continuous tension between delicacy and roughness is to pull the reader in close—but not too close. As Eve Sedgwick has argued, textural descriptions draw us away from the realm of aesthetic untouchability, instead inciting questions about the object’s history (‘how did it get that way?’) and potential interactivity (‘what could I do with it?’).40 Textural perception, in other words, invites us to fondle and grasp, to engage in a different kind of ‘free play’. The small creatures of Carson’s intertidal zone present constellations of textural particularity, each shaped by a unique set of elemental forces and connections. We make speculative contact with the sensory-rich textures of these objects in our minds, softly running imaginary fingertips across their felty, frayed, bristled surfaces. And yet Carson’s emphasis on the fragility and elusiveness of the seaside environment prevents us from caressing too insistently, or holding on too tightly. The marine biologist’s description of her own light touch indicates the manner in which we are asked to enter this delicate world. On ‘meeting’ her first sea hare as it ‘brows[es] peacefully’ among the seaweed, Carson writes: ‘I slipped my hand under it and gently brought it toward me, then, its identity confirmed, I returned the little creature carefully to the algae, where it resumed its grazing.’41 One way to describe Carson’s project in this book is to say that she is exploring the precarious relations among miniature worlds. She investigates not only how these humble creatures inter-exist but how to interpret their 38 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 93, 64, 47, 5, 18, 39, 217. 39  Ibid., 174, 95. 40 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 13. 41 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 219–20.

238  Hannah freed-thall microscopic existence. She asks, for example, ‘what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us’?42 Her project is not just to document but to read the minute biotic communities present in the intertidal zone. The shore for Carson is a space of signs, a ‘riddle’, often ‘obscure, elusive’.43 Here microplants have ‘written their dark inscription’ and hordes of diatoms signal their message, ‘flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea’. For Carson, even sand suggests a kind of writing: it is scored with ‘peculiar markings . . . seemingly irregular scribblings . . . strange insignia’.44 Close reading in Carson is not only a matter of deciphering traces but of sensory exploration: her beach is at once a text to be read and a materiality to be felt. Her descriptions of seaside worlds are stylized by a sensibility as aesthetic as it is ecological. Her attention is oriented, in other words, not just to sign systems but to the interplay of colours and textures, of temporal and spatial patterns. The intertidal zone as she describes it is textural even in the acoustic sense. A listener lying at the entrance to a sea cave perceives ‘the small sounds’ of water dripping from mussels and seaweed. The coral beach, by contrast, emits ‘sizzling and crackling’, ‘murmurings and whisperings’— noises that suffuse the air but seem to issue from no identifiable source.45 The beach is an aesthetic phenomenon, and yet Carson is also concerned with describing the appearance and disappearance of life forms that are only partially or occasionally available to the human sensorium. Attentive not only to remnants, traces, and inscriptions but to minor temporal modes, Carson explores the interplay of what François has called ‘vanished and emergent potentialities’.46 She draws our attention to the fragile styles of existence that make up the ‘landscape patterns’ of the shore. The book thus maps out a number of unconventional ways of marking time. Critic Stephanie Kaza has 42 Ibid., 250. 43  Ibid., 7, 47. 44  Ibid., 132–3. Carson had become involved in an epistolary love affair with Dorothy Freeman, her married neighbour in Maine, during the years in which she was researching and revising The Edge of the Sea. This ambiguously chaste but ardent queer liaison was carried out almost entirely in letters, and it provided an affective framework for Carson’s writing from 1953 until the end of her life. Carson dedicated The Edge of the Sea to the Freemans; she considered Dorothy her ‘ideal reader’. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964—The Story of a Remarkable Friendship (Concord, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), 12 March 1954, p. 33. Of particular interest here is the way that the epistolary mode, with its play of presence and absence, its distanced intimacy, and its inevitable delays, shaped Carson’s ecological and aesthetic imagination during these years. In her love for Freeman and for the ‘marginal world’ of the seashore, Carson embraced ephemeral modes of presence and expressed gratitude for the existence of what she knew she could never fully possess. On the expansive, non-exclusive quality of this relationship and its connection to the ‘environmental politics of desire’ that Carson develops in Silent Spring, see Lida Maxwell, ‘Queer/Bird/Love Extinction: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a Work of Love’, Political Theory, 45.5 (2017): 682–704, 685. 45 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 121, 219, 207. 46  François, ‘Flower Fisting’, non-paginated.

Thinking small: ecologies of close reading  239 identified four distinct temporalities that structure Carson’s conception of sea and shore: tidal, seasonal, geological, and evolutionary.47 But one might add other temporal regimes to this list, as each type of shore Carson examines (rocky, sandy, coral)—and perhaps even each creature that she describes— possesses or expresses its own particular timing.48 The Edge of the Sea does not attempt to translate the ephemeral into the monumental but simply to describe the traces and remainders left by a variety of ‘transient inhabitants’ of the shore.49 Carson’s style is fine-tuned to convey the variegated tempos of these tiny life forms. Although The Edge of the Sea evades the rhetoric of polemic, its meditation on the vulnerability and complexity of small marine habitats offers a subtle corrective to the attitude toward the oceans prevalent in post-war America— the assumption, that is, ‘that the sea was a virtually unlimited resource, as well as a readily available dumping ground, for the growth of American industries’.50 By contrast, Carson’s objective in The Edge of the Sea is to explore the extraordinary variety and ‘abundance of life’ at the shoreline, and to examine what she calls the ‘sensitive adjustment’ of these beings to the small worlds they inhabit.51 Fascinated by ‘intermediate, transitional qualit[ies]’, Carson highlights the irregular rhythms that mark life in the intertidal zone, a  space that ‘belongs alternately to sea and land’.52 Her shore is an elusive boundary, existing in a state of continuous permutation. Sand, for example, is a ‘yielding, shifting substratum of unstable nature, its particles incessantly stirred by the waves’.53 Carson employs a language of variation, not binary difference—a rhetoric marked by formulations such as ‘some . . . others’; ‘or others . . . or here . . . or again’; ‘here and there . . . here and there’.54 Carson’s speculative tone is also notable, her prose speckled with ‘perhaps’ and ‘sometimes’. Underscoring this sense of possibility, her descriptions lay emphasis on 47  Stephanie Kaza, ‘Rachel Carson’s Sense of Time: Experiencing Maine’, ISLE, 17. 2 (March 2010): 291–315. 48  Thanks to Ada Smailbegović for conversations that first drew my attention to the idea of small zoological temporalities. 49 Carson, The Edge of the Sea,157. 50  Amanda Hagood, ‘Wonders With the Sea: Rachel Carson’s Ecological Aesthetic and the MidCentury Reader’, Environmental Humanities, 2 (2013): 57–77, 60. As Hagood notes, Carson’s books were surprisingly popular. Her 1951 The Sea Around Us, in particular, was selected as an alternate for the Book of the Month Club, and even made it onto the Sunday Review’s ‘What Businessmen Read’ column. Carson was invited to write liner notes for a new NBC Symphony recording of Debussy’s La Mer and sea-themed merchandise, capitalizing on the popularity of her work, cropped up everywhere. On such ‘Carsonalia’, see Hagood (‘Wonders With the Sea’, 67–71). 51 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 82, 95–6. 52  Ibid., 157, 28. 53  Ibid., 12. 54  Ibid., 110, 132, 148. See Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) for a reflection on the queer ethos of a non-binary rhetoric of plurality and contingency.

240  Hannah freed-thall the rhythmic back-and-forth of revelation and concealment. Carson devotes pages to discussing varieties of camouflage: she considers the particular concealment strategies of the sea horse, the ‘grass-green’ spider crabs and small shrimp, and the baby cowfish, among others.55 And she underscores the contrast between the mostly lifeless upper layers of sand and the unseen lifeworld beneath: ‘all have gone below, and in burrows, tubes, and underground chambers the hidden life of the sands is lived’.56 Carson’s observer must therefore be attentive to forms of existence that are not evident to the eye, and to all the various ways in which ‘life [comes] out of hiding’.57 The would-be perceiver of such apparitions learns patience as she waits for the ‘intervals’ at which creatures show themselves, the occasions on which virtual doors to minute worlds open or close. The giant sponge, for example, conceals many life forms within it, but ‘there is no sign of life for the casual passer-by to read, although if he waited and watched long enough he might sometimes see the deliberate closing of some of the round openings, large enough to admit an exploring finger’.58 Here and throughout The Edge of the Sea, Carson, like Barthes, is captivated by the hesitant and the unforeseen—minor rhythms, unexpected intervals, what ‘shines by bursts’.59 This penchant for the unpredictable brings Carson into the orbit of modernists like Proust and Woolf, whose novels are patterned by surprise. Invoking Walter Benjamin, we might say that the true reader of Carson’s seashore, like the true reader of Proust, is ‘constantly jarred by small shocks’.60 Carson’s shore sometimes presents a mirage-like quality, replete as it is with nearly invisible or vanishing life forms. Consider the following passage, which depicts the peculiar temporality at play in the animation of sand by crabs: It is an extraordinary thing to watch the sand come to life if one happens to be wading where there is a large colony of the crabs. One moment it may seem uninhabited. Then, in that fleeting instant when the water of a receding wave flows seaward like a thin stream of liquid glass, there are suddenly hundreds of little gnome-like faces peering through the sandy floor— beady-eyed, long-whiskered faces set in bodies so nearly the color of their background that they can barely be seen.61

55 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 234–6. 56  Ibid., 12. 57  Ibid., 147. 58  Ibid., 158, 216. 59 Barthes, The Neutral, 30. 60  Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Press, 1968), 208. 61  Ibid., 154–5.

Thinking small: ecologies of close reading  241 Carson’s observational style here emphasizes contingency. As she examines these nearly imperceptible apparitions, she insists that the sighting is due to chance: the crabs show themselves only ‘if one happens to be wading’. The rhetoric of this passage draws our attention to figurations of transience and intermittency; note the language of the ‘fleeting instant’, and the episodic quality conveyed by the syntax of ‘one moment . . . then . . .’. Above all one is struck by Carson’s capacity to convey the everyday enchantment of a happening that can scarcely even be called an event: the emergence of a life form that just as quickly vanishes. ‘Almost immediately’, she writes, ‘the faces fade back into invisibility.’ In its exploration of how life forms accommodate themselves to the small worlds that both hold and expose them, The Edge of the Sea offers a meditation on vulnerability. Although in 1955 Carson had not yet been diagnosed with the cancer that would end her life less than a decade later, this book invites us to consider how finitude gives particular force and purpose to close reading. And here we find another point of connection to Barthes, who wrote his last works in a state of mourning, under the shadow of his mother’s recent death. For Carson, as for Barthes, close reading is an exercise in recognizing impermanence. It requires us to think in non-monumental terms, making us aware of slight or fleeting modes of presence. It offers a lesson in the ethics of thinking small. If Carson and Barthes remain compelling today, it is because they understand close reading not only as a practice but also as a sensibility. Like Barthes, Carson is fascinated by subtly shifting forms of life and tempos of interexistence. She too is attuned to what Barthes calls ‘vibratory time’.62 Offering up a series of ‘nuance exercises’, these authors elaborate democratic, non-elitist pedagogies of interpretation. They help us to think the ecological and the aesthetic together, and to locate modernist close reading in the space of this encounter. Both the intertidal zone and the literary text draw our attention to boundaries and limits. Yet these are also sites of refuge and renewal, in which it is possible to think and imagine otherwise.

62 Barthes, The Neutral, 133.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abbott, Andrew  83–4 aesthetic autonomy  3, 5–6, 37, 47, 52–3, 55, 57–8, 60–1, 65–6, 68, 73, 84–5, 88–9, 171–2, 196–7 aesthetic response  11–13, 45–6, 49, 74–5, 84–5, 103, 158, 161, 166, 178–9, 181, 187–9, 226–30, 232–3, 237–9, 241 affect  6, 8–15, 8n16, 11n23, 67, 176, 183–4, 186–7, 201, 205–7, 211n12, 228–9, 238n44 see also aesthetic response, immersion Albright, Daniel  143, 150n49 Apollinaire, Guillaume  143–5, 149–51 Arms, George Warren  76–7, 77n19 and Joseph Kuntz, Poetry Explication  69–81, 84–5 Armstrong, Paul B.  67–8 attachment  205–6, 231–2 attention  2–4, 6–8, 16, 19–20, 24, 41–2, 65–6, 72, 74n13, 76–7, 82–5, 100, 104, 107–8, 111–12, 118, 133–4, 141–2, 163–4, 195–6, 210, 215, 228, 230–4, 238, 241 Attridge, Derek  10–11 Aubry, Timothy  1n1, 4 Auerbach, Erich  81–4 Badiou, Alain  123–9 Bal, Mieke  225–6 Barthes, Roland  129, 228–9 The Neutral  230–5, 241 Basler, Roy P.  80 Beardsley, Monroe C.  42–3 Beckett, Samuel  103, 124–8 Bedient, Calvin  148–9 Benjamin, Walter  240 Bennett, Arnold  213, 215 The Old Wives’ Tale 213–15

Best, Stephen  8, 16, 41, 135 Bewes, Timothy  136–7 Borges, Jorge Luis  118 Boyd, Brian  155–7, 164–5 Breton, André  138–9 Brooker, Joseph  14–15 Brooks, Cleanth  45–7, 68 The Well-Wrought Urn 58–60 Brown, Angus  4–5 Buchmann, Stephen  231–2 Burke, Kenneth  60 Burrow, Colin  43 Buurma, Rachel Sagner  7 Carson, Rachel  228–9, 241 The Edge of the Sea 235–41 Cather, Willa  215–16 The Professor’s House 216–20 Césaire, Suzanne  138–9 Childs, Donald  50 Chu, Andrea Long  141–2 Churchill, Suzanne W.  140–1 cognition  209–11, 214–16, 223 cognitive reading  101–3, 208–21, 224–9 Cohen, Margaret  136 Collingwood, R. G.  226n42 Crawford, Lucas  133–4, 149–50, 137n8 Crispi, Luca  106–8 critique  7–10, 8n16, 12–13, 15–16, 38, 41–3, 144–5, 159, 174–5, 186–9 Cuddy-Keane, Melba  9 Culler, Jonathan  15–16 Dean, Tim  149 de Certeau, Michel  224 de Man, Paul  38–40, 197 Deleuze, Gilles  129 demystification  8–9, 43, 135–6

244 Index Derrida, Jacques  116–22 description  8–9, 136–7, 161–2, 185–6, 189, 209–19, 221, 223n33, 225–6, 233, 235–40 descriptive reading  7–8, 41–2, 71, 101–2, 135–6, 211–12, 211n12 distant reading  40, 43, 48, 69, 173–4, 189–90 Dobrée, Bonamy  36n20 Duvall, John  76 Eagleton, Terry  47 Eliot, T. S.  24, 74–5, 87–8, 142–3, 173–4 The Waste Land  133–4, 137–8, 140–1, 145–50 Ellmann, Richard  88 Empson, William  38–40, 51 Ender, Evelyn  7–8, 10 Epstein, Russell  208–9 Erlich, Victor  153 Esty, Jed  179 ethical aspects of reading  11–12, 45–6, 65–6, 124–5, 129–30, 174–5, 185–90, 192–3, 196–7, 203, 206–7 see also aesthetic response, judgement, interpretation explanation  31, 52, 80, 110–12, 135 Federico, Annette  65–6 Felski, Rita  7–8, 8n16 Field, Andrew  156–7 Fogarty, Anne  177–8 Ford, Ford Madox  24–9, 36 Fordham, Finn  108–11 formalism  2–6, 2nn2–3, 38, 43, 68–73, 75, 80–1, 83–5, 87, 153, 163–4 Forster, E. M.  213, 215 A Passage to India  213–15, 218–19 Foster, Hal  43–4 Foucault, Michel  114–17, 209 François, Anne-Lise  231–2, 232n11, 238–9 Frank, Joseph  209 Freed-Thall, Hannah  11–12 Freud, Sigmund  119–20, 122–3 Frick, Adrianna E.  146 Furr, Derek  64 Gallop, Jane  14, 114 Gang, Joshua  5 Garber, Marjorie  139–40 Gaskill, Nicholas  2n3, 13

gender  12–13, 133–46, 149–50 genetic criticism  105–11 Genette, Gerard  210–12 genre  52, 88, 177, 203, 235–6 Gibson, Andrew  125–6 Gibson, James  211–12 Glaz, Adam  214–15 Goble, Mark  3 Graves, Robert  29–33, 51, 64–5 A Survey of Modernist Poetry 31–2, 48–50, 52–5 Greenblatt, Stephen  67 Groden, Michael  105–6 Guillory, John  10–11, 65–6, 83 Hardy, Thomas  20 ‘The Convergence of the Twain’  23–4 ‘The Darkling Thrush’  20–3 Heaney, Emma  146n42 Heffernan, Laura  7 Herman, David  209 Herring, Philip  105 Howarth, Peter  6 Hulle, Dirk Van  105–6 Ibbett, Katherine  2n2 immersion  6, 10–11, 82, 176, 225 interpretation  1, 37–42, 53, 67–8, 81–2, 86–7, 90–3, 107, 110–12, 136–41, 145, 191, 209n4, 219, 226–7, 241 instrumentality and  135–7, 229–30 see also genetic criticism, translation, descriptive reading James, David  154, 211n12 Jameson, Fredric  220 Jancovich, Mark  63–4 Joyce, James  88–9 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  174–5, 177–9 ‘Eveline’ 89–93 Stephen Hero 174–5 judgement  11–12, 14–15, 142–3, 207, 229–30 see also translation Kaza, Stephanie  238–9 Keegan, Cael M.  141–2 Kenner, Hugh  86–7, 89–98 Khan, Idris  15

Index  245 Lamos, Colleen  148–9 Latham, Sean  158, 161 Leavis, F. R.  195–6 Leer, Linda  235n32 Leighton, Angela  154–5, 171–2 Love, Heather  7–8, 41–2, 71, 136–7 Lynch, Deidre Shauna  7–8, 10 Madden, Ed  140–1 Mao, Douglas  5–6, 46, 64–5 Marcus, Sharon  8, 41, 135 Matthiessen, F. O.  78–9 Matz, Jesse  9–10, 185–6 McBride, Eimear  175–6, 186–7 A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing 173–7, 182–5, 187–9 McCarthy, Tom  191–3, 195–207 C 201–3 Men in Space  194, 197–200 Remainder  194, 200–1 Satin Island  194, 203–5 Menand, Louis  87, 89 Milosz, Czeslaw  163–4 Mitchell, Lee  216–17 modernism, passim institutions of  1–2, 1n1, 5–6, 9–10, 14, 46, 66–7, 87 and pedagogy  1n1, 2–4, 6–8, 10–13, 84–5, 87, 113, 115, 197, 224–6, 234–5, 235n29, 241 politics of  2–3, 5–6, 8–9, 12–13, 66–7, 117–18, 134, 144–5, 154–5, 163–5, 174–5, 182–3, 185–90, 196–7, 231–2 see also New Criticism, New Modernist Studies, aesthetic autonomy Moretti, Franco  40, 134–5 Mullin, Katherine  103–4 Nabhan, Gary Paul  231–2 Nabokov, Vladimir  152–72 Speak, Memory 163–72 Neill, Kerby  79–80 New Criticism  4–6, 13–14, 19–20, 37–9, 42–3, 45–53, 55–8, 61, 63–6, 69–70, 72–4, 76, 83–4, 87–9, 107, 113–14, 1n1, 2n3 New Modernist Studies  2–4, 12–13, 45–6, 64–5 Nixon, Rob  230

Norris, Margot  104–5 Norton, Ann  181 O’Brien, Edna  180 Down by the River 180–2 O’Brien, Kate  177–8 The Land of the Spices 178–80 Ogden, C. K.  33–5 Ovid, Metamorphoses 142–3 Picard, Zachariah  71 Pound, Ezra  24 Pratt, Lloyd  154–5 Pressman, Jessica  5–6, 14n28 Proust, Marcel  208–9 Rabaté, Jean-Michel  14–15 Rabinowitz, Peter  47–8 race  12–13, 12n25, 37 Ransom, John Crowe  45–6, 57–8 Rainey, Lawrence  87, 89 Rassmussen, Mark David  71 Ravinthiran, Vidyan  8–9 Reynolds, Paige  11 rhetoric  93, 103–4, 108, 134, 158, 239–41 Richards, I. A.  19–20, 37, 61–4, 68 Practical Criticism  33–4, 49, 61 Principles of Literary Criticism 51–2 Ricoeur, Paul  41 Riding, Laura  29–30, 32–3, 64–5 A Survey of Modernist Poetry 31–2, 48–9, 50, 52, 52–5 Contemporaries and Snobs 55–6 ‘The Failure of Poetry’  56–7 Rivers, W. H. R.  50 Ronen, Ruth  210–11 Rose, Nikolas  66–7 Rowe, John Carlos  12–13 Rubin, Henry  141–2 Ruskin, John  20–1, 27–8 Russo, John Paul  61 Saunders, Max  6 Schneider, Elisabeth  81 Scholes, Robert  48 Scott, Laurence  43 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  71, 237 Segall, Jeffrey  87–8 Senn, Fritz  98–103

246 Index sexuality  138–41, 143, 145–7, 185–7 Stallknech, Newton Phelps  79–80 Sternberg, Meir  211–12 Stewart, Susan  236 surface reading  7–8, 41, 43, 84, 134–6, 189–90 Sutherland, John  155 Thaventhiran, Helen  6n13, 72–3 Tindall, William York  108–9 translation  27, 99–101, 120, 123, 125–9, 163 close reading as  26–7, 100, 110–11, 128–9 trauma  11, 173–6, 182, 184–5, 188–9

Vadde, Aarthi  12n25 value  13–14, 14n28, 45–6, 48, 75–7, 102, 129, 161, 174–5 Walkowitz, Rebecca L.  12n25, 46 weak theory  71 Wimsatt, W. K.  42–3 Wood, Michael  155–6 Woolf, Virginia  208–9, 212–13, 215–16, 221, 226–7 Mrs Dalloway 221–5 To the Lighthouse  218–19, 225–6 Wormhoudt, Arthur  80 Yeats, W. B.  25, 182–3