Close reading or silting up the river?

“Close reading of visual images is a constant ideal in art history and criticism: it is virtually never questioned, and in general terms seems to be a good idea in any field, for any purpose, and for any critical regimen.”

Andre Kertesz, Fourth Avenue, New York City, June 4, 1959

Well, it is hard to disagree with this, is it not? Close reading must be valuable. However, the quoted lines form the first sentence of chapter 3 of Professor James Elkin’s Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts [Routledge. 2000]—and the chapter heading is: On the Impossibility of Close Reading. And, a little further down, he writes, “...whatever a close reading may be in practice, the concept of close reading remains nearly intangible.” In relation to what Elkins says, it is worth looking at what we expect to get from a close reading, and the relationship we imagine it to have to the generality of our reading, which—if it was all ‘close’—would bring us to a virtual standstill. I find it impossible to imagine, for example, that a scholar such as Leon Edel made a close study of all of Henry James’ novels, plays, letters, and secondary material. I imagine rather, a keenly applied intelligence, a fairly rapid absorption of his materials. He had no need, in other words, to put every paragraph on the analyst’s couch. Novels, after all, are not the equivalent of crime scenes, requiring weeks, months, and sometimes years of painstaking scrutiny of minutiae—most of which will be discarded as of no value. With regard to literature, such might be labelled the Forensic School of Analysis. But see Aaracombe Wood, by Charlotte Mew: a study

However, for the student—and for the scholar—close reading does still seem to be a valuable tool. I think it undoubtedly true, for example, that a student of French who subjects a single short story of Maupassant’s to a very thorough study—dictionary and grammar constantly at hand—will gain infinitely more than a student who cursorily reads through the entire collection of stories. True, I have here used the words ‘thorough study’ rather than ‘close reading’. And in a sense I feel as though I am getting close to what I think is misleading—and potentially stifling—about close reading. Elkins suggests that we may, in effect, partially blind ourselves in the process. At least it would seem that we are in danger of coming up against the law of diminishing returns: the more closely we peer, the more we restrict our vision. The poet, Ann Carson illustrates this with lively force:

... I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgements—but I go blind out there. So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery. (Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan). Princeton. 1999)

And so it would seem that, oblivious of the sunset, we apply a magnifying glass to a blade of grass. We are in want of vision, and the minutiae of life should be strictly subordinated to this end. There is no loss to our delight in subtleties implied in this. And is it not true that close reading is like an alien weight placed on one end of a see–saw, resulting in a lack of balance, the only remedy to which seems further close readings—each one leading us into an ever deeper morass of misunderstanding? Thorough study, on the other hand, never loses sight of its end: it is part of a structured programme, a gradual broadening of understanding, and it forms—by degrees—that pleasure we get from any subject which holds our deep interest. To quote Ann Carson again: “Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling.”

I began this piece with the first sentence of chapter 3 of James Elkin’s Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts. Here is that last sentence of that chapter:

“... stiflingly close reading is an imperative of humanist scholarship and of literacy more generally: it has to be possible in order for there to be such a thing as a text or an image, to understand; but it also has to be impossible, in order to let us get on with the vaguer meanings we all prefer.”

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André Kertész's photograph, below, may represent some scholar’s idea of a nightmare: the mess and squalor of the world rudely breaking into the pristine world of academe. “One must maintain a distance from the insistent and odious facts of the world...” Well, tough! Such are the realities of the world—in every century. 

What is especially striking about this photograph is the boy’s total absorption in what he is reading. As adults, we should envy that, because most of us have lost this ability. Our minds are so crammed with experience, associations, memories, and theories that we have—effectively—lost our innocence.

André Kertész, New York City, Sept. 23, 1962