The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [83]
Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden.20
It’s worth doing a close reading of the last sentence, the topic of which is close reading. De Man’s elegant formulation is built on a series of negations and reversals: “in spite of itself”; “it cannot fail”; “the more or less secret aim … to keep hidden.” When it is coupled with “deeply subversive” in the previous sentence, we have what might be described as a critical language of reluctant but persistent uncovering. The concept of literary teaching here is explicated immediately above: the methods of “those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history.” Language, in all its waywardness, slows down and diverts the goal of identifying a “meaning”—meaning that the text will then be said to express. This is why close reading is “subversive”: what it subverts is a rush to a corresponding meaning outside the text. Reading in slow motion, frame by frame—does not allow for the “general impression,” which is so often an imprecise paraphrase of what the reader thinks the poem, or novel, or story, or play, ought to be saying. What it actually says may get in the way of that confident appropriation. Details emerge that may derail the express.
We might draw an analogy with what was known in my childhood as “look-say” reading as opposed to phonics or “sounding it out.” Confronted with the image of an equine quadruped and the letters H-O-R-S-E, the eager reader cried out “Pony!”
De Man’s essay was called “The Return to Philology,” and the quiet irony is evident. Philology, that supposedly old-fashioned discipline, was the most radical way of reading. Radical in the sense of word roots, and radical in the sense of destabilizing common sense when it conflicted with what the words on the page were saying and doing. Writing in the early 1980s, de Man saw the analogy between Brower’s course and what came to be called “theory.”
The personal experience of Reuben Brower’s Humanities 6 was not so different from the impact of theory on the teaching of literature over the past ten or fifteen years. The motives may have been more revolutionary and the terminology was certainly more intimidating. But, in practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.21
Had this essay been written a few years later, it might have observed not only the turn to theory (what, in other fields, like history and anthropology, became known as “the linguistic turn”) but also a kind of inevitable response (I hesitate to call it a backlash) in the turn—or return—to history. History, rather than theology or psychology, became, for many readers and teachers, the anterior “meaning” of literary texts.22
When historicism emerged as a central defining practice in English departments in the later twentieth century, one of its core practices was to do powerful close readings of historical texts in the context of the readings of works of literature. The elements of surprise, consternation, and arrest were introduced into the reading of what had previously been described as secondary texts for literary study: a treatise on witchcraft, say, or an instruction manual on swordsmanship or mathematics, or a conduct book for young ladies or young gentlemen. Work of this kind was invaluable in returning to prominence questions of historical reference in literary texts that had sometimes been ignored, or consigned to footnotes, by formalist practices of close reading.
The importance of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605