Is close reading dated?

Nearly all of us talk about “close reading” ahistorically—that is, as if it was not dated. I "close read" that text there--and yet also by this I mean I use a technique that has particular affinities with an act that was performed by the New Critics, say, or, even better, I.A. Richards--that is, by those in my field and who interpret in a similar way. We might know more about what close reading is, then, as vague as this is----slow, patient and minute attention to a text--than when am I when I say I am close reading. Similar frustration with other terms of this sort has led people to want to give them up completely--that is, not just date them, return them to their specificity, but be done with them. Thankfully, few people seem weary in this way with close reading. Despite attacks over the years and even amidst the current pressures of the proliferation of media and the expanding canons and global literature (that is, despite such a large amount of text that close reading all of it becomes impossible), it seems safe to say that the sense that we have moved on—moved on much more than people are willing to admit or acknowledge, and need to be doing something else completely—has not taken over. But it is not clear whether this mode of talking prevents something like fatigue from occurring, or whether it does not. Indeed, there is a defensiveness (I might also call it an aggressiveness) in what D.A. Miller says about close reading in his lectures on Jane Austen, published recently as Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style, that seems to grasp this and try to protect close reading from it. Miller gives us two “exercises:”

Picture, if you can, a past moment of literary criticism when, institutionally empowered and rewarded, close reading was the critic’s chief tool of professional advancement; his command of a text, his capacity to tease from it a previously invisible nuance, or illuminate it under a fresh insight, would as good as light the pipe in his mouth and sew elbow patches on his jacket, so unfailingly did he thus distinguish himself as the compleat, the full professor of English literature. Now picture, if you need to, a future moment of literary criticism in which the same practice has fallen into total dereliction, and the esprit de finesse has ceded all its previous authority and prestige to the esprit de géométrie, more familiarly known as “theory” (all quotes from Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style, 56-58).

The defensiveness, in a way, has already formed itself—and not necessarily in the depiction of the rise of “theory” as impatient and deaf to close reading. But Miller continues:

I don’t mean to suggest by either exercise that, whether or not we ever lived in such a past, we should contemplate returning to it, or that, if such a future is indeed at hand, we should do our best to resist it. On the contrary, it is close reading in its humbled, futile, “minoritized” state that would win my preference in any contest. For only when close reading has lost its respectability, has ceased to be the slave of mere convenience, can it come out as a thing that, even under all the high-minded (but now somewhat kitschy-sounding) rationales of its former mission, it has always been: an almost infantile desire to be close, period, as close as one can get, without literal plagiarism, to merging with the mother-text.

I call Miller defensive here because his exercises and comments seek to secure a space and time for close reading—a setting in which it is, paradoxically, already the least secure. This setting is, as he says, that “minoritized” state which he prefers. But we do not understand what Miller means if we conceive of his preference as a type of choice or pleasure in apprehending a close reading performed in this state—that is, if we conceive it as similar to that like or dislike accompanying our exercise which, as Miller pictures a past and future, prompts us to choose a side. For the contest in which the “minoritized” state wins Miller’s preference is not of a kind that would produce this like or dislike. This is because it does not occur between the close reading of the future and that of the past that we are invited to picture. We can understand this if we ask ourselves whether, even if close reading lost its respectability in the future we saw and ceased to be a slave to convenience when it was performed—whether it would not also be this when in the past we pictured it was a tool for a professor to distinguish himself. Now, this is not to say that the practice of close reading as Miller thinks of it is the same in both of these situations: indeed in this future, it has lost the frequency with which it has been performed and fallen into dereliction. And neither is this to say that the use of close reading as a tool for advancement is really the same thing as performing it while it has ceded its authority (Miller shows our professor, in between the passages cited, transformed by close reading into an emeritus, seeming to ramble before impatient listeners). It is merely to say that in both of these situations we picture, we do not picture the close reading, the “minoritized” act itself that Miller prefers and that takes place in the contest: close reading’s loss of respectability and its lack of convenience are in fact simply different things here than either the authority it has or has not ceded. That is, if close reading cedes this authority in the future we pictured, this does not mean that in the past in which we saw it was not performed also in a “minoritized” state, beyond our capability of vision. Also, if it had this authority in the past, if it appeared as a mission with all sorts of rationales, these rationales exist in the past as well as in the future we pictured—appearing in the first as high-minded, in the second as kitchy—and only alongside the fact that close reading itself is what it has always been: that is to say, never reducible to this mission with its rationales. Secure, then, outside both this past and future, and yet alongside them both, as if it were their lining, we are never sure (almost like an infant, we are so insecure) whether the authority of our interpretation is a reflection of its humble, futile state. The “coming out” of which Miller speaks is therefore also, despite its importance and its very real occurrence, a non-phenomenon. The “minoritized” state of this emergence is precisely that which, if we look for it in the future we picture, appears fully and only as what is antiquated (the remarks of the poor emeritus before the impatient crowd). In the past, it appears only as a tool, as something done with convenience (the lecturing of the “compleat,” distinguished professor). Nowhere does it appear as humble or futile. Thus it also can be said to appear everywhere beyond our ability to picture it—and appear precisely as the insecurity, the registration of a danger that it could be always becoming less and less frequent. For in every non-appearance, close reading is as exposed to the danger that alongside what we picture it to be our actions are actually hurting it as a practice: though when it emerges it is what it has always been, Miller affirms that it has fallen into dereliction, that somehow it exists less often and is abandoned. Secure without being secure, then, it is in fact opposed to both our pictures via Miller’s “On the contrary,” which may and may not (it is as if there were an enjambment or a caesura between them) connect this humble, futile practice with the past and future in the sentence before it:

I don’t mean to suggest by either exercise that, whether or not we ever lived in such a past, we should contemplate returning to it, or that, if such a future is indeed at hand, we should do our best to resist it. [||] On the contrary, it is close reading in its humbled, futile, “minoritized” state that would win my preference in any contest.

Between two things that are not opposed but either occur or do not occur side by side, this contest for Miller’s preference is no contest—and is therefore also “any contest.” And the preference in the contest is precisely that—only a preference, a feeling for something of which we are not sure. We might therefore call it, as Miller does, a desire—a desire that “is” only a desire, for if it were to do more than desire, if it were to come into existence as desire, we would be able to apprehend it there before us. We see, then, that this desire is nothing like our liking or dislike for one or the other of the states of close reading that we picture, simply because when we close read there is no opposition between them:

But point of picturing these two extreme conditions is not to get us to choose sides, but to recognize that, if we retain any vital relation to close reading whatsoever, as we all do, we must always be on both.

If this setting of close reading that Miller specifies is both secure and not secure, we now begin to understand why what Miller says has a tinge of defensiveness, and (what is the same thing) aggressively anticipates a total attack upon what he is talking about. In other words, we understand why the articulation of close reading here is made up against that sense of a total weariness with close reading: always remaining in its humble, futile state, always possibly occurring there, right outside where we can be sure we have respected a text or interpreted well enough, close reading can never surely be killed off, made impossible, or kept from emerging again before us—it cannot be kept from coming out. Furthermore, this is precisely because it is its obsolescence that it is exposed to constantly: because anything that we apprehend about our interpretation cannot guarantee that we or some other force are not killing it off, close reading exists precisely as a defense against this weariness, as a desire that is more than non-existent but always existent enough to be continually asserting itself against non-existence. Now, while this definition is an outstanding achievement, we must wonder whether the protection it provides close reading is as strategic as it could be. For if it prevents us saying of close reading that it is over and done with, that its existence there is wearisome and should be left behind, it has little to say to those who do not, as of yet, use the phrase “close reading” with any sense of it being dated—and especially to those of this group who are either “incompetent” in it as a technique and who say they use it as well as those who, with other techniques, willingly or unwillingly would do damage to close reading. And while this looks like it is a plea for pragmatism in the face of Miller’s definition, it actually is not. It is (or tries to be) a plea for the radicalization of what Miller says by extending it back into this domain, the domain where close reading is not only performed but also pointed towards, classified, asserted to exist in some places but not others.
For what is so defensive and aggressive in Miller and can be more strategic is not that Miller defends against something too large or too total in an environment that has many smaller problems. It is that he lacks any way to respond to those problems than by making them into the largest one: the question of whether we are really being responsible to the text, whether close reading has indeed occurred, in short (and in a phrase I think Miller is, with his peculiar and outstanding exercise, trying to tease out of us) whether we are in fact as close as we picture ourselves to be. Miller’s singular achievement is to thereby restore to the word “close” in “close reading” the deepest and most vital sense in which it is operative. This is as a relation expressing being near and being far at the same time, as a process of becoming nearer but never being sure one is near—in sum, as a desire to be close instead of what we usually refer to it as: a demonstrable, apprehensible closeness, a general sense that we have spent time with a text, a familiarity, a fine form of attention to minute details on the page. But addressing the small problems by this massive act of restoration perhaps does not show as much faith in close reading’s ability to deal with them as it might seem. For what Miller is saying is that a certain class of acts that we normally call “close reading” and towards which we can point ultimately have the same status as the past and the future that we pictured in the exercise. In other words, in order to protect close reading, Miller has to assert that these examples of close reading have the same relation to historical existence as do the pictures itself—they remain, in fact, always in question beyond that point where we can apprehend or question them. If a reading that we call “close reading” is there, if we can point to it and say “there, that is a close reading, that is what they are like,” its particular closeness is always susceptible to being questioned again by another close reading; always able to be subjected to the standard, so to speak, of a new degree of intimacy, a new desire. A new desire that, indeed, is the same old desire: so in fact the reading that we point to, the example, can never really be said to just be a function of an older desire, for the closeness only can be said to be operative in the desire that is functioning. The example is then, in fact, questioned already as we point to it, as we try to close read with it in mind. Always already taken up into the newer reading and its closeness, we lose any ability to account for why we thought that reading, there, was indeed close and should guide our reading in the future: we can only say that it bears on our new reading, that our new reading questions its closeness as much as the old one questions the new by being an example or guide. Defensive of close reading and aggressive against anyone who would deny a close reading its new existence, its ability to recur, this definition—precisely when we accept it—seems not to extend itself to what is operative in what makes us consider a thing close at a particular time, and because this continual process of calling into question seems to be the only way Miller here is envisioning history. To put it bluntly, here Miller does not seem interested in accounting for close readings that we thought existed in the past except as they bear upon a close reading that cannot be sure if it is going on. While this secures close reading—and, as we said, does so precisely by restoring what makes it close—it also limits our ability to build up a set or class of objects that could be considered close readings as opposed to, say, Austen’s commentary on her novels in her letters. Now, the absence of this class is not important because it allows our powers of apprehension to distinguish close reading from something that is not (and this is why this is not a plea for pragmatism). It is important because it allows us to distinguish different degrees of closeness as what we pointed to (or did not point to) in the past: we can tell that a reading somewhere, even if we cannot totally justify why it is classed as close, is more or less close than another. Similarly, Austen’s comments may not be a form we would normally consider close reading, but we can suppose that if they were, they would be more or less close than something else. In the end, without this class the way Miller approaches things makes it possible for someone with a more dogmatic allegiance to close reading (that is, much less faith or with faith of a totally different type than him, like Paul de Man) look like he has more (of the same) faith than Miller.
And it is here that the problem of dating close reading, as I have been calling it, comes in. While considering close reading as dated does not seek to directly prevent the weariness we talked about, it seeks to build up—precisely out of that definition of close reading as desire that Miller gives us—a historical sense, so as to be able to consider close reading as more stratified in its operation, as providing different ways of referring or not referring to its closeness as “close” (even including referring to it as “distant”). The problem then is not one of how best to keep insisting to all the people we referred to earlier that, whatever they apprehend about their efforts to read, as a close reading it is not close enough; that however they read, it will only be close if it is the desire to be close, if it needs to be read again even closer (as Derrida says: “Un autre conseil, solution de désespoir: tout lire et au besoin relire!”). The problem is to try and provide a way of indicating how the closeness in close reading can gauge itself against itself—that is, stratify itself, distribute itself—beyond our apprehension of it; how, aided by the clues that are our acts of calling something a close reading (rather than something else), we can better acquire a sense of the general area in which things become able to be close—without having as our only way of doing so the injunction that we are constantly not close enough, and that close reading is totally threatened thereby. This allows us to respond to some basic questions that, astonishingly, seem still have not been answered, and without answers still keep us from using close reading as a dated word: What, in the end, distinguishes what we now call close reading from formalism? And from deconstruction? And from traditional hermeneutics and commentary? I have heard the words “close reading” used to designate all of these. And perhaps it is correct to do so. But the way to find out whether this is the case is not to look at whether they are close, but whether they have a relationship to that set of objects we think qualifies as close reading, and to do so (like Miller excellently does with respect to how close reading is close) beyond the level where we currently apprehend these qualifications, where they apply but where we cannot directly picture them.