The following is the essential meditation of I.A. Richards upon closeness, and thus shows us something of what it originally meant to call literary critical reading "close reading," as he famously did. It is taken from Interpretation in Teaching, which was both an extension of the empirical tests in Practical Criticism to the reading of prose composition (and with students not in Cambridge but in New York), together with a more wide-ranging set of recommendations for the restructuring of humanities education around an updated trivium. Thus, Richards is talking about closeness as it relates to the methods of education in general:
The way in from remoteness to closeness is certainly the secret and Royal Road to intelligence, understanding, sagacity, insight, and all the useful and creditable modes of learning. What the difference is, or rather upon what it depends in a given case, and why it should vary from one minute to the next, and how ability to approach can be increased, are the key-problems of all education.
The best way to help our pupils is to make them more aware of and more reflective about this difference between closeness and remoteness. I have insisted already--and may again--that it is not any mere correction of their mistakes which releives them, but an understanding of how they came into error. Methods to facilitate such understanding work through heightening this sense of the difference between being close to a question and being at a distance from it. Their virtue will be in the cunning by which they provide suitable opportunities for the mind to ask itself "What have I been doing?" "Am I near or far from the real problem?" An excellent way is to show them other minds at work from different distances, and the results--leaving them to draw their own morals in act rather than in words.
-Interpretation in Teaching, 106
You will notice two things: first, closeness is not a pure term, a quality, but rather is defined by degree, and thus is placed on a continuum the other pole of which is distance--a sense of closeness that I have recommended resurrecting. Second, closeness has a primarily functional sense, which makes it not only a matter of degree, but negative when indeed taken by itself. Extrapolating from the quote above and applying it to reading, closeness denotes the level at which one’s approach to the text could, not make meanings appear more clearly, but eliminate other less relevant levels which might bear upon the act of construing a meaning.
We see then that only subsequently (in America) would the term carry the ethical significance it now has, and which shapes the character of the practice itself--a significance Richards never could really bring himself to charge it with: the sense that if one read closely, one read slowly, with skill, with effort, bringing out the difficult and latent (that is, fully present but hidden) meanings with care. While Richards does charge closeness with an intensely moral role--in that from it one can judge the intelligence of the practicioner and, by modifying reading, alter this intelligence--the connection here between reading and morals is extremely dubious (inferring intelligence from reading, as Richards does, is a lot like practicing phrenology) and extremely utopian (reading and composition would and should be the most ideal test of competence).
Thus closeness has to become a positive, nonfunctional quality of reading in order to become so intertwined with notions of rigor and responsibility--to the extent that it could become synonymous, for Derrida and Derridians in particular, with reading itself, and make possible the oft-repeated, highly moralistic charge, "you simply have not read me." Of course, an entire conceptualization of textuality is also implied in this (quite melodramatic, no?) accusation, but in America (though I can imagine how one can, with some modifications, apply this to France) it also cashes in on this nonfunctional extension of closeness to become a gross overgeneralization. Or, to perhaps put it in a better way, the conception of reading becomes powerless to address the actual case where reading did not occur--as no doubt the people who make the charge can feel--except by heightening the invective, and being even more vague about what reading or reading closely might have actually produced.
2 comments:
I'm afraid I disagree with you. Or rather, it seems to me that you are conflating two related, but distinct things.
One is the notion of "close reading", which you are quite correct to point out is a matter of degree. Personally, I prefer Derrida's term of "micrology", but that's just me.
The other is what you term 'the oft-repeated, highly moralistic charge, "you simply have not read me."' I don't think this has much to do with "close reading" per se; it's worth point out that when Derrida often (and moralistically) points out that certain others have "not read him", he does not generally mean that they have failed to read him micrologically-- rather, he means (usually) that they have simply not read him, full stop. And, indeed, in the cases he points out (often, and moralistically) they have not.
A good example of this is his take-down of Tony Judt, in "History of the Lie" (pp52-58 in "Without Alibi"). He's not claiming that Judt didn't read him closely; Judt simply didn't read him.
I would say there is a slippage between these two things, especially for the American reader (and which Derrida picks up on), that I am trying to retrace. And I would use this slippage to explain why the Judt take-down--or any take-down by Derrida, for that matter--is actually quite weak in a certain sense. I agree, the cases are different, but I would make sense of them via this slippage. Calling it "micrological" reading doesn't do anything different, in fact it reinforces my point (which is why I didn't bring the distinction up--it is, really, a non-distinction in this instance). For when reading is only micrological, it has a tendency to not happen more often, in the sense that the case of Judt can also be grouped together with the case of someone who just didn't read closely. I wouldn't say that Derrida is really precise in distinguishing between the two, because he knows the nature of the texts he is writing (you do have to do micrology to read them). But maybe you would.
Maybe you can make the objection from another angle, though (and I think on some level you are), and say that for Derrida, reading is fundamentally philosophical, or has its pertinence mostly there. Thus to claim micrology is close reading in the first place is a bit odd. But the consequence of this (which I don't think you draw) is that it would reverse everything we always hear about Derrida: that he reads philosophy like literature. Rather, he reads literature like philosophy, and philosophy like... philosophy. That's a bit crude (dealing as it does with the old generalizations, which I nevertheless take to be somewhat right), and overlooks the essential point--which I want to hold in suspension in order to get at the general contours of this procedure--which is that one can't distinguish between these texts, since they are texts.
But perhaps that point isn't, now, as essential: frankly, I'm tired of insisting upon it--it presupposes that once one is immanent to the theory or grasps it correctly, everything is fine, and I think that is extremely dubious (I'm going to write a post on that soon). De Man, for one, doesn't insist upon textuality correctly, and he is taken as a Derridian--and your perspective can't explain why this is so, except by saying that there is misreading (or non-reading), while mine can. Thus, I take the opposite route and say that literary reading becomes philosophical.
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