Proximity

This post is a sequel to an earlier discussion of close reading, though it should be self-contained, if closely read.

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Let’s begin with points of convergence. Like Jonathan Kramnick, John Guillory posits close reading as a skill or technê, a form of acquired know-how or expertise.¹

Like Kramnick, Guillory emphasizes that close reading is not just reading closely. It’s a distinctive form of intellectual work whose product is verbal or textual: an account of an ur-text whose words it explicates.

They agree that close reading is central, perhaps essential, to literary studies—and that it resists definition.

• Kramnick: “Unlike regression analysis or Bayesian inference, close reading just doesn’t afford general characterization. The method is too sticky with respect to its materials to allow much in the way of abstraction across individual examples.”

• Guillory: “the difficulty of defining close reading is an entailment of its nature as technique … cultural techniques cannot be specified verbally in such as way as to permit their transmission by verbal means alone.”

Beyond that, they diverge. Kramnick engages in close reading of close reading—with case studies of quote incorporation, critical free indirect discourse, and plot synopsis. Guillory maps the intellectual history of close reading, though in defiance of his own edict, he attempts a definition.

The argument that we can’t define close reading because it is a cultural technique equivocates: it conflates the difficulty of capturing the content of know-how in propositional form with the difficulty of stating its object. I can’t “specify verbally” what a cryptographer knows “in such a way as to permit [the] transmission [of the skill] by verbal means alone”—but I can define cryptography by its product, as the art of making and breaking codes. Why not close reading, too?

If the nature of close reading has gone undefined, that’s not because defining it is impossible but because it is unnecessary: you don’t need a theory of a cultural technique in order to practice it well. Guillory himself defines close reading as the work of “showing the work of reading” or what William Wimsatt called “explicitation”: making explicit what is implicit in a text so that it can be used as evidence for literary interpretation.

Which is plausible enough. But the most interesting argument in Guillory’s book is genealogical.

In a nutshell—cue plot synopsis!—explicitation as a literary technique comes to self-consciousness in I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1929). “All respectable poetry invites close reading” Richards insists, and yet “the technique of the approach to poetry has not yet received half so much serious systematic study as the technique of pole-jumping.”

The practice of close reading reaches “the zenith of its dominance in the period from the 1940s to the later 1960s” but the phrase itself does not catch on until the end of this wave, just in time for close reading be demonized as naïve, ahistorical, or apolitical in the turn to “theory” of the 1970s-80s.

Meanwhile, according to Guillory, there was a trans-Atlantic divide. For Richards, practical criticism combined teachable skills with aesthetic sensitivity or appreciation, to which it was ultimately in service. The American New Critics seized on the idea of expertise and specialized knowledge, with its credentialing authority, but sidelined aesthetic judgment—a fateful parting of the ways whose legacy looms over late twentieth century literary studies.

Guillory tells this story with dispassion. He doesn’t examine whether the New Critical position is cogent—whether we can make sense of close reading as a “value-neutral” expertise. But we can read between the lines. For Guillory, “close reading does not guarantee validity in interpretation; rather, it opens interpretation to inspection and contestation by other readers.” In other words, it provides the data for interpretive hypotheses that go beyond it, a source of objective evidence at the interpreter’s disposal.

Kramnick hails close reading as an aesthetically creative endeavour. Guillory argues, by contrast, that the essay was an “early curricular casualty” of the New Criticism, now regarded as a “propositional form of writing, not easily assimilated to the aesthetic ontology of the literary work.” This disagreement is not the same as, but may be related to, the one between T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and I. A. Richards, on one side, and Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, on the other—not whether the critical essay is an aesthetic object, worthy of close reading, but whether “being worthy of close reading” is even a thing.

The suspicion is that close reading remains entangled, at least covertly, with forms of appreciation the New Critics and their successors allegedly disdained. Neither Kramnick nor Guillory takes a definite stance on this. But when one reads in Kramnick that “the collective appraisal of critical writing is … an aesthetic judgment,” since it “examines how carefully the writing has worked with its materials,” one may detect a movement of transference—a suggestion, open to explicitation, that aesthetic judgement must inform the work, as well as the assessment, of close reading.

1. Many thanks to Scott Newstok for getting me a copy of Guillory’s book, to which he provides an exceptionally useful bibliography.