The Use and Abuse of Literature (23 page)

After many years of being old-fashioned, close reading is again fashionable, although, like all revived fashions, it wears its retrospection with a difference. Suddenly—or not so suddenly—students, graduate and undergraduate, are alight with excitement about this category of analysis, for so long relegated to the supposedly naive past, the heyday of I. A. Richards and practical criticism, and of “new” critics like Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and William Empson, to name only a few of the literary luminaries of that era. While they continue to resist some of the basic tenets of New Criticism, like the Intentional Fallacy described by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and the Affective Fallacy proposed by Wimsatt, young scholars and critics, for so long immersed in historicism and context, are again intrigued by the idea of close reading a work of literature. Reading,
that is to say, not for what the work says about the time when it was produced, or about the author or the reading public, but about how its language functions.

Here it may be useful to say a word about those famous fallacies, and about the genealogy and lineage of close reading, to try to see how the practice (which I would prefer to call simply
reading
) has become both so controversial and so out of fashion that it is once again new.

The intentional fallacy says that the intention of the author has no ultimate control over the meaning of the work. If we were to discover, for example, a letter from William Shakespeare to one of his fellow actors, saying that in
Hamlet
he intended to express his dismay about the corrupt state of contemporary politics, or the parlous economic situation of actors, or his Christian faith, or his loss of faith in marriage, or his belief in providence, or his worry about political succession—this would have no definitive effect on our readings of
Hamlet
. It would be another piece of evidence, but it would not trump or sideline other readings of the play, even readings that run counter to whatever the author’s letter asserted. The author, in other words, is entitled to his opinion. But what he intends, even assuming that we could know what that is, is just one point of view among many. (Imagine another letter, written at the same time, to his wife, contradicting the assertions he made in the letter to his fellow actor: the play is about his idealization of love, his loss of Christian faith, his doubts about providence, his confidence in the political system.) The work of literature has a life of its own; it takes on meanings, in the plural, as it is read and performed and discussed.

Discounting intention does not suggest that all meanings are equally persuasive or valid. When Hamlet says in a letter to the king that he is “set naked on your kingdom” (4.2), he does not mean that he is wearing no clothes but that he has no weapon; when Mercutio and Romeo exchange witticisms about Romeo’s “pump,” they are talking about his shoe style, not about a mechanical device for retrieving water—although as their jesting continues, a wide range of other meanings may attach to this word. So some readings can be “wrong” because of what might be called underreading—not giving enough credit to the historical meanings
of modern words. But sometimes even the wrong reading can be right, if defended or presented in a convincing way. Baz Luhrmann’s film
Romeo + Juliet
makes much erotic sport of the idea of pumping, and even though this seems in part either a resistance to or a failure to understand, the idea of a pump as a kind of shoe (for men as well as for women, in Shakespeare’s time) the scene can be made to work.

The belief in intention belongs to a historicist moment, or to at least two historicist moments: the one against which the New Critics were actively reacting, and the one that inevitably came to react against them. Both historicisms (the second, called “new historicism,” and the other—rather unfairly—dubbed in a species of back-formation “old historicism”) put strong value in biography, context, “the archive,” and a kind of allegorical reading of historical events. But intention—as we will see in relation to questions of biography and truth—can get in the way of close reading, since it forecloses some interpretive options as inappropriate, untimely, unsuitable, not what the author could have meant.

The affective fallacy warned against feeling, or feeling too much, or being carried away by the rightness of a feeling. When W. K. Wimsatt wrote about it in the 1940s, it was a response to the excesses of belletrism and impressionistic criticism. The inevitable bounce-back against the too stringent enforcement of such a fallacy led to reader-response criticism, the idea of interpretive communities, and most recently, an explicitly affective criticism that is all about feelings, whether negative or positive, encompassing the poles of infatuation and disgust. Sometimes, in this era of fact and science, the affective emotions are tied to the hardwiring of the brain, which produces smells, colors, sounds, synesthesia (the blending of the senses), etc. Whatever we may think about affect, I think it is fair to say that it marks a
response
to the work, rather than a
reading
of it. However closely affective arguments are tied to language, there is always a hypothetical suture (a word, phrase, or image “makes me feel like” this or that or, less convincingly, “produces the effect of” this or that). As with polling data, there are outliers, responses that don’t seem
to fit the prevailing pattern as urged or detected by the critic. But rather than sparking an exciting argument based upon this divergence, such dissent seems to push against the very idea of a community, so that what is occasionally sought is an alternative community that does, or would, or might have, responded in the way that the minority or disaffected reading suggested. In any case, one object of affective criticism (“old” or “new,” impressionistic or scientific) would seem to be an explanation of why the feeling was right for the reader.

Although they have sometimes been dubbed critical fallacies, intention and affect (the intention of the author, the response of the reader) remain central to the curiosity and desire of many scholars, critics, and ordinary readers of literature. What did the author have in mind, and what led him or her to write? How does what I feel when I read a poem or a passage derive from the language and imagery on the page? Do other readers feel the same, and if not, is one of us right and another, wrong? Indeed, the provocation for calling such ideas fallacious was that they were so widespread. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that such questions were not literary, and that they led the reader instead into regions of historical research and individual psychology. One of the persistent goals of scholarship and criticism has been to try to reframe these desires (to know and to feel) within the language of literary investigation: to pose these questions, exactly, as
literary
questions.

Let’s consider one of the most anthologized and analyzed of all twentieth-century poems in English, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” The poem is very brief—two lines—which makes it ideal for close reading. But as will be immediately evident, not every reading is
close
in the sense of attention to form.

Take, for example, the question of the text of the poem, which you might think would be, if not an easy, then at least a resolvable question. But in fact that is not the case. In its earliest printing, in
Poetry
magazine on June 6, 1913, the poem was printed this way:

Shortly thereafter, in
T.P.’s Weekly
for June 1913, Pound published another version of the poem:

And in his collection of poetry called
Lustra
(1916), the poem appears in a similar form, except the colon at the end of the first line has been changed to a semicolon.

This is how the poem is almost always printed today. Pound commented extensively on its genesis and offered detailed (and changing) instructions for its proper punctuation.
¹²
The existence of these varied versions, each with its printing provenance and with the attached explanatory comments of the poet, constitute a good example of what is now known as genetic criticism, the history of drafts and versions or, as its proponents call them, avanttextes or pretexts.
¹³
Pretty clearly, the difference in spacing and punctuation will influence both the performative reading of the poem (how is it spoken aloud? with what pauses and emphases?) and also, potentially, its meaning. But we have begun with the problem of establishing the text, and the text here is already, even in a demonstrably modern era, one of many variants, each sanctioned by the author, with an explanation, in some cases, of his intentions and of the effect, or affect, he expects the poem to produce. The first version of the poem was thirty lines long; later the two-line text modeled on the Japanese haiku derived from it.

Almost every account of this short and brilliant poem alludes, at some point, to Pound’s evolutionary description of how he came to write it:

In these ruminations published in 1916, Pound went on to discuss the haiku (spelled
hokku
in his text):

Here is the author, front and center, naming his poem’s genre (
hokku
-like; “one-image poem”), explaining its moment of origin, its visual inspiration, its title, its poetic progress from thirty lines to fifteen to two.
To read the poem, must one read this account or know of it? And if so, do we have to believe it? What authority does the author have?

Many critics, contemplating “In a Station of the Metro,” have zeroed in on the word
apparition
, which stands out from all the others in that it is multisyllabic, Latinate, abstract, conceptual as well as visual. Several have detected a mythological substrate, indebted to classical literature’s descents to the underworld (“apparition” + “faces in the crowd” = shades of the dead, whether experienced by Orpheus, Odysseus, or Aeneas). Some recent commentators have singled out the poem’s ethnopoetics,
¹⁵
and at least one, close reading Pound’s account of the poem’s origin, has seen the “foundational cluster beauty / woman / child / lovely /[poetry]” as posing a feminist conundrum: “One idea is that beauty / the feminine matters in the construction of poetry; the other is that it does not.”
¹⁶

If one did not have in hand Pound’s autobiographical account, would it be tempting to imagine that the faces were flashing by on a moving train, rather than being glimpsed on the station platform, as he seems to describe them? And if one had never heard of haiku, would it matter? What if this were the first one-image poem the reader encountered? How much background or generic context is necessary to read a poem? And if we wanted, for any reason, to read
against
Pound’s authority rather than in obedience to it, what might that mean?

Pound calls it a one-image poem, but arguably, it is a
two
-image poem, if one counts the title. Suppose we did not have the title phrase—or if he had excised the title in a further editorial moment? Without that situational marker, which anchors the perception in modernity and in urban space, the two lines might be read quite differently. If we were to compare the poem to, for example, some fragments of ancient verse, recognized as fragmentary, unrecoverable as wholes, what would that do to the poem? Pound famously collaborated with T. S. Eliot in assembling
The Waste Land
, with its paradigmatic assertion that “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In his account of the genesis of the “Metro” poem, Pound claims that “the image is itself the speech”—that images are not “ornaments.” But is the title part of the image? Or is it an ornament?