Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature (24 page)
Another well-known modern instance of an author severely cutting a poem for a similar tightening effect is Marianne Moore’s decision to reduce her poem “Poetry” from five stanzas to three lines—a distilled version of the three lines that began the original poem.
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
These revisions were accepted as canonical—i.e., as the author’s version of the poem—when Moore’s collected poetry was published in 1967, but when facsimiles of the (out-of-print) 1924 volume
Observations
came under review by scholars, debates ensued about whether the editorial changes Moore introduced should be regarded as improvements. In any case, the two poems called “Poetry” are formally and textually quite different, and the shorter of the two does not contain one of Moore’s most famous and most quoted phrases, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
It is not uncommon for works of literature, whether in verse or in prose, to exist in more than one version. I mention it here because the question of reading may be thought, naturally enough, to involve reading a particular something, and that something (usually called the
work
or the
text
) is increasingly, in these sophisticated editorial days, a
plural
something—like, for example, the two different, “authentic” versions of
King Lear
that are now regularly printed by editors of that play, or what used to be called the “Bad” Quarto of
Hamlet
.
The First Quarto of
Hamlet
included this version of a speech that would become celebrated in a very different form:
To be, or not to be, I, there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,
The vndiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d. (7.114–121)
Will any non-academic reader claim that this is the “real” (since apparently “original”) “To be or not to be,” or ask whether it has been effectively superseded by the more familiar text? For an increasing number of Shakespeare scholars, the First Quarto (no longer dubbed “the Bad Quarto,” as if it had a moral flaw) has a legitimacy all its own, regardless of the wider admiration accorded the Second Quarto and Folio. Actors have performed the first version with considerable success, unhampered by the overfamiliarity that breeds not contempt but its affectively positive equivalent, stultifying adoration. The total effect is often that of an aria performed, applauded, and experienced as a whole. The experience of the First Quarto is both disorienting and refreshing—the pleasure of encountering the energies of this astonishing play anew. If it sends us back to the more familiar version, all the better—but this passage seems to suggest a set of rhythms, and an acting style, that show us something powerful and strong.
Coleridge described prose as “words in their best order” and poetry as “the best words in their best order.”
17
Close readers in the middle of the twentieth century tended to use
poem
in an extended sense—to refer, for example, to plays in verse, especially the plays of Shakespeare, and by extension, other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. “Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem” was the title of an essay by the critic C. S. Lewis,
18
and the use of
poem
here is indicative. Teachers of fiction, and especially of long novels, used close reading to direct attention, for example, to the opening sentences or first paragraphs of these works. This pedagogical technique had a strategic as well as an aesthetic and intellectual payoff, since even those students who had not read the work in question—or had not read far into it—could be brought into a conversation about artistry, word choice, tone, voice, irony, and foreshadowing. A classic instance is the beginning of Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
A skilled teacher can elicit discussion of this single sentence for an extended period before turning to the second sentence, which not only superbly undercuts the first but makes the reader reread and reconsider it:
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Again, a whole discussion might well be devoted to the single word
property
, which has major resonances throughout the novel and through Austen’s work more generally. Bear in mind that the single man with the good (not great) fortune alluded to in this first sentence is the amiable and pliable Mr. Bingley, not the far wealthier and more complex Mr. Darcy. The novel sidles into the narrative of its central love affair through this delectably wicked glance at local customs, town gossip, and the neat slide from high-toned philosophical bromide (“it is a truth universally acknowledged”) to the bathetically domestic, or the domestically bathetic, “must be in want of a wife.” Think for a second about how else the sentence might have concluded: “should put his money in a safe place”; “should consider the welfare of others before his own comfort”; “should be grateful for the prudence of his forebears and the providence of a beneficent deity,” etc.
The reading tactic deployed here is, as I’ve noted, what has been variously called close reading or slow reading or reading in slow motion. The latter phrase is that of Reuben Brower, a professor of English at Harvard in the fifties and sixties and, before that, professor of Greek and English at Amherst College.
19
Brower was the legendary teacher of an equally
legendary Harvard course, Humanities 6, almost always referred to as Hum 6.
Perhaps the clearest and most eloquent demonstration of how close reading works was offered by one of Brower’s former assistants in the course, Paul de Man, who would become one of the most admired literary exponents of deconstruction, and whose own pedagogy produced a roster of critics as accomplished as Brower’s. Here is de Man’s account, from an essay first published in
The Times Literary Supplement
in 1982. In its clarity and descriptive analysis, it is well worth quoting at length.
My own awareness of the critical, even subversive, power of literary instruction does not stem from philosophical allegiances but from a very specific teaching experience. In the 1950s, [Walter Jackson] Bate’s colleague at Harvard, Reuben Brower, taught an undergraduate course in General Education entitled “The Interpretation of Literature” (better known on the Harvard campus and in the profession at large as HUM 6) in which many graduate students in English and Comparative Literature served as teaching assistants. No one could be more remote from high-powered French theory than Reuben Brower. He wrote books on Shakespeare and on Pope that are models of sensitive scholarship but not exactly manifestos for critical terrorism. He was much more interested in Greek and Latin literature than in literary theory. The critics he felt closest to, besides Eliot, were Richards and Leavis, and in both of them he was in sympathy with their emphasis on ethics.
Brower, however, believed in and effectively conveyed what appears to be an entirely innocuous and pragmatic precept, founded on Richards’s “practical criticism.” 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.
This very simple rule, surprisingly enough, had far-reaching didactic consequences. I have never known a course by which students were so transformed. Some never saw the point of thus restricting their attention to the matter at hand and of concentrating on the way meaning is conveyed rather than on the meaning itself. Others, however, caught on very quickly and, henceforth, they would never be the same. The papers they handed in at the end of the course bore little resemblance to what they produced at the beginning. What they lost in generality, they more than made up for in precision and in the closer proximity of their writing to the original mode. It did not make writing easier for them for they no longer felt free to indulge in any thought that came into their head or to paraphrase any idea they happened to encounter.
At the end of this account of the surprising effects of Reuben Brower’s pedagogical method, de Man offers an analysis that may seem even more surprising.
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 as a reference for Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, or the changes in domestic fiction brought about by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, or the observations of the early modern astronomer, ethnographer, and translator Thomas Harriot when he traveled to the Americas with Walter Raleigh in 1585–86—all of these became focal points for important scholarship in English and American literature and culture. But every practice is prone to its own excesses, and over time it has occasionally been the case that the historical fact took preeminence over the literary work. When history is regarded as the “real” of which the poem, play, or novel is (merely or largely) a reflection, something crucial is lost, and that something is
literature
.
