I forgot to mention the crucial experience that really, for me, forms the essence of close reading and underlies my willingness to characterize it as a displacement of the text, as I remarked a few days ago. Or, perhaps to put it in a better way, there is a singular function that close reading can set to work which is of the utmost value and brings about what I call the displacement or the delay in communication that actually constitutes the text.This function is one of allowing an ever so slight, but extremely crucial shift in the tone of a sentence (say), such that this sentence can be read in more than one way. The easiest and most simple example I can give is sarcasm:
That's a really nice job you did there.
There are basically two widely different meanings here depending on whether I read the sentence as sarcastic or not. And it isn't so much that these meanings inhere in the sentence itself (in the language and in linguistic convention), although its phrasing contains their possibilities. It is really that reading actuates these possibilities and actually constitutes the sentence depending on how it proceeds: if I read it as sarcastic, the word "job" loses some of its ability to signify an actual job, and becomes more idiomatic, less referential, and (appropriately) wider in scope (it can weirdly refer to more things, in losing its referentiality). The word "there" changes in a similar way. You can see then--despite this being a poor example--the work of tone. I.A. Richards defines tone usefully as the way that one communicates a sentence to another: it is for him "the speaker's [or writer's] attitude towards his audience," as he says in Practical Criticism. Notice that this is very far from something line intention: it is closer to the sort of general directedness of the sentence itself, such that one would rather speak of the intention of the sentence.
The point though, is that the function of close reading is to show that there is never merely one intention to our sentence. Or, since the work of reading actually brings out more of these intentions as it proceeds to consider or discuss the sentence, we can say that the function of close reading is actually to make possible the multiple tones with which something might be understood. It both shows that there are multiple intentions, multiple ways something can be said, but it also makes possible, by accessing tone or the possibilities of tone (which perhaps would not then be reducible to the tonal possibilities inherent in the language itself) the existence of these different ways beside each other, ranged out as it were before us. The work of close reading would then be to fold them back into the sentence as more and more of these ways are proffered in discussion. This would be the work of delay and displacement which actually--in resisting totalizing the text--actually constitutes it, which I talked about before.
This all sounds complex, but it's actually what is going on in any good close reading of a text--or at least this is my claim. It is a function that has produced many great readings over the years.
De Man in particular saw this, I think, but he made a very big mistake in his formulation of it. For indeed, one could describe more rigorously and more broadly this tonal function that I am describing in de Man's incisive terms as language's capability for irony (it's no mistake we started with sarcasm): it is basically the introduction of a sentence's difference from itself in terms of meaning (it would be a difference, then, that itself is irreducible to meaning). But de Man thought that there could be an assured process by which the proliferation of irony could be directed or somewhat contained: he therefore made this irony, this tonal function, also coextensive with the role of figurative language (which operated allegorically), such that the shifts in tone that we are talking about here would be seen as the work of the specifically figurative work of language itself. While this isn't inaccurate, characterizing it as figurative restores the intentions here that reading brings out back into language itself--or at least I think it had this effect for those who approached literature in a de Manian way: they would not see what they were doing as the work of reading but rather as a work of language. And this makes a big difference, because it really does presuppose an assured amount of this proliferation. You start talking about (or citing theories of) figuration, and are concerned less with opening up more irony or more intentions of the sentence and negotiating the process of folding them back into where they came--i.e. delaying the formation of a totalizing meaning or anything like the same meaning that would thereby (just by virtue of being the same) account for all these differences. (It should be obvious that implied in all this is a critique of de Man's conception of allegory.)
Someone who knew this even better was Derrida: this is why he will call his reading, occasionally, a double reading (or writing), a reading with redoubled effort. Reading a sentence of Derrida, which can usually be read at least in two ways--not just with the puns (this is precisely a totalizing reading, which sees theses in what he says) but more significantly with two hugely different tones--will bring out more the experience that I hint at above with my example. Regardless, the point is that the real function of close reading is a work that proceeds when you read something more than one way--and try to account for this in reading it further (in, that is, another way, never totally the same). In other words, it is trying to account for what Derrida himself notes in a very revealing sentence from Of Grammatology (52; 34 in English): "L'accent compte," the tone counts.
I should note, as a footnote--but an important one--that it is significant that, though we employed it in our example, we don't have to use the sentence in saying that this is the function of reading. In short, it doesn't matter whether it is on the level of the sentence, the paragraph, or the chapter, even of the work or set of works that this operation can proceed: close reading, then, because it would find its essence in this experience which I describe here and not in any notion of establishing a total textual object, would not necessarily be "close" in the way that we think of it. It would rather be an effect of a type of communication which is reading, and could have this effect on multiple levels, so long as experienced this odd tonal shift, or multiple intention, that we are talking about here. This would need elaboration, but I'm actually pretty confident that this is the case if we based close reading rigorously on this function here.
Also, I should note that if this ironic or tonal function is the center of closer reading, then something like S/Z would not be a close reading. That work proceeds by multiplying connotations. Occasionally they produce this function. But most of the time they range themselves alongside the work and do not allow you to hear the sentence differently. So while it pays very very intense attention to the text, this would preclude it from being a close reading.
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