by Derek Neal
What do swimming, running, bicycling, dancing, pole jumping, tying shoelaces, and reading all have in common? According to John Guillory’s new book On Close Reading, they are all cultural techniques; in other words, skills or arts involving the use of the body that are widespread throughout a society and can be improved through practice. The inclusion of reading (and perhaps, tying shoelaces) may come as a surprise, but it is Guillory’s goal in this slim volume to convince us that reading, and in particular, the practice of “close reading,” is a technique just like the others he mentions. This is his explanation for the questions he explores throughout the book—namely, why the practice of “close reading” has resisted precise definition, and why the term itself was so seldom used by the New Critics, the group of theorists most associated with it.
Guillory’s own proposal for a definition of close reading is “showing the work of reading.” If this definition seems slight and unsatisfactory, it should. Guillory wants to avoid endlessly theorizing close reading because like all techniques, he says, it is better understood via demonstration and imitation. I agree with Guillory. If one wants to learn how to dance, one does not read a book on dancing; instead, they watch others dance and then mimic the movements they see until they can do it on their own. Close reading is the same, writes Guillory—“cultural techniques…cannot be specified verbally in such a way as to permit their transmission by verbal means alone.” If we want to learn how to close read, we might watch a teacher model close reading—perhaps they project a poem or a paragraph from a novel onto a screen (the standard objects for a close reading), analyze the language in it by identifying various poetic devices, such as symbolism or imagery, reveal an interpretation of the text in this way, then write an essay explaining their reading of the text. This is “showing the work of reading,” and after students observe the teacher doing it, they can try it and refine their technique through repeated practice. One could, of course, attempt a close reading of a text from the example I’ve outlined here, but it would be a bit like showing up to a dance having read about dancing but never having seen it practiced: demonstration and imitation are much more effective than theorizing.
Most readers will have their own experiences of close reading; I have two that I remember well. The first was in a high school English class when the teacher led us through the passage where Nick walks into Daisy’s East Egg mansion for the first time in The Great Gatsby. Our teacher highlighted the use of color, the figurative language, and the symbolism in the passage; the way Daisy and Jordan are in white, representing purity or innocence (from Nick’s point of view), or perhaps, making them seem like sailors, as a breeze is blowing through the room and the curtains are “like pale flags” that “ripple over the wine-coloured rug.” The “wine-coloured rug,” my teacher said, was perhaps an allusion to the “wine dark sea” of Homer, and notice the way the flags are said to “mak[e] a shadow on it as wind does on the sea,” extending the maritime analogy further, and—look!—Daisy and Jordan are even “buoyed up”!1 “We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.” As the teacher continued his close reading, the passage transformed before my eyes, a new world being revealed. Who knew that so much meaning could be contained in a few lines of text?
The other memory I have comes from a literary theory course I took in college as an exchange student in France. The final exam, which accounted for 100% of our grade, consisted of a passage from Proust that we were meant to analyze. I can’t remember what the excerpt was about except that it dealt with birds, or perhaps the entire thing was an extended metaphor relating something, perhaps the outfits attendees wore at a Parisian salon, to birds. In any case, I used the lesson from my high school teacher, which was that the text had many layers of meaning and multiple possible interpretations, as long as you could justify your interpretation with the support of the text itself—and nothing outside the text—anything you wrote could be valid. The next week I went to the bulletin board outside the classroom, found our class list, and looked at the numbers out of 20 that were there for all to see. Somehow, I’d passed (10 is passing), while over half the class had failed. When I received my paper back, I saw that the professor had crossed out the second half of my answer—I guess I’d gone a little off the deep end with my close reading—but the first half was apparently sound.
So how does one get from swimming, running, and bicycling, to close reading? This is key, I think, to understanding Guillory’s argument, and is worth elucidating. We might note that swimming and running, in their simplest forms, instrumentalize only the body. Bicycling adds an object to the mix, allowing one to use their body to operate a tool, or a technology—the bicycle. We can also note that tools can be incorporated into swimming (goggles, wetsuits, hair caps, fins, and so on) as well as running (shoes, specialized clothing, fitness monitors, energy gels, among other things). First the body is turned into a tool to accomplish a certain end, then external tools are incorporated. In a footnote, Guillory notes other cultural techniques, such as agricultural techniques including irrigation and drainage, as well as artistic techniques, like painting and music. The inclusion of these techniques is crucial in making the link to close reading, as they are not focused on the body’s movement but on producing something outside of the body. They incorporate tools, just as close reading incorporates tools—paper, ink, word processing software—and combine it with the body. The category of cultural technique may then seem to be so large as to become meaningless, but that is part of the point. Guillory defines a cultural technique as “a set of methodical actions that accomplish specific ends, that alter something in our environment or in ourselves,” and cites André Leroi-Gourhain, who writes that “technics and society form but one subject.” If cultural techniques are everything that make up society, then they can be found anywhere and everywhere one looks—the idea becomes a lens through which to make sense of human activity.
To be further convinced of Guillory’s characterization of close reading as a cultural technique, it also helps to be convinced that reading is, in fact, something one does with a body. This is easy to forget, as most reading and writing today takes place in a digital environment, eliding its physical origins. In addition to this, once reading and writing become internalized to a high degree, once its efficiency as technique is improved, as Guillory terms it, “basic literacy seem[s] merely intuitive.” Yet this is a deception, in the same way that a highly skilled dancer makes their movements seem effortless. The mastery of technique leads to its appearance as natural and graceful, as if mind, body, and tool are one, even though in reality this is the result of extended practice. This deception is what makes defining close reading difficult, and is perhaps why we resort to clichés such as “elegant,” “subtle,” and “masterful” when describing a virtuosic performance of close reading. In Walter Ong’s classic study Orality and Literacy (1982), he notes the various historical materials used for writing surfaces (clay bricks, animal skins, tree bark, dried leaves, to name a few), writing utensils (goose quills, brushes) and various methods for preparing ink. Writing used to be a task in which “the whole body labors,” says Ong, citing a medieval Englishman quoted in M.T Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307. Guillory likewise notes that “all reading is methodical action; the more complex the method, the greater the energy cost to the body.”
One of the main conclusions of Ong’s book, with which Guillory would presumably agree, is that writing is a technology that humans have developed. It is in no way innate to humans, and if a human is not taught how to read or write, they will not develop this ability; this is, in fact, the state of the vast majority of humans who have ever lived. Similarly to Guillory’s connection of close reading to other cultural techniques, Ong uses the example of the violin to explain how technologies work:
The modern orchestra, for example, is the result of high technology. A violin is an instrument, which is to say a tool…a violinist or an organist can express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance. To achieve such expression of course the violinist or organist has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself. This calls for years of ‘practice’, learning how to make the tool do what it can do…The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life. Writing is an even more deeply interiorized technology than instrumental musical performance is.
Writing, reading, playing the violin: these are all techniques or technologies that lead to a richer, fuller existence. Close reading, then, may be seen as a heightened form of the technique of reading. This is hinted at by Ong, who mentions the New Critics in a section of Orality and Literacy. He notes that previous types of literary theory, such as historicism, were the result of a “residually oral, rhetorical tradition, and w[ere] in fact unskilled in treating autonomous, properly textual, discourse,” whereas New Criticism (and Formalism) were the result of a “textual mentality.” Ong’s main thesis in Orality and Literacy is that the invention of reading and writing led to changes in human consciousness, which then became widespread throughout the use of print. Seen in this way, New Criticism and its main strategy of close reading are the result of a fully textualized society in the early to mid-20th century, while the shift to New Historicism, ascendant in the 1980’s, could be theorized as the result of a society returning to more of an oral worldview characterized by the dominance of new media such as television and computers.
Guillory also comments on the connection between new forms of media and close reading, complicating Ong’s characterization. Instead of focusing on close reading as the logical conclusion of a print-based society, he posits it as a technique created in the face of the rise of other media, writing that “close reading was devised alongside the proliferation of film, radio, magazines, bestsellers—all the massified cultural forms provoking anxiety among the literary professoriate.” Close reading, with its focus on poetry and novels, then functions “as a means of producing rarity in response to the condition of superabundant writing,” as well as the widespread forms of audiovisual media. These two accounts can be made compatible, however; close reading can be the apotheosis of literary study, brought forth through a print-based academy, which at the same time responded to challenges from outside the academy in which audiovisual media began to supplant print. The return of (New) Historicism could then be a result of the academy deciding to incorporate these other forms of media—film or comic books, for example—which occasioned different types of analysis.
This then brings us to the question of what place close reading has in the university and wider society today. In my two anecdotes of close reading, you might have noticed that neither of them took place in an American university—indeed, my experience as an English major at a public university from 2011-2015 included no memorable instances of close reading; instead, we did quite a bit of literary theorizing that rarely referenced the text at all, viewing the book not as an aesthetic object but as a cultural object that could be picked apart to reveal insights into the society that had produced it—sociological analysis rather than literary analysis. I was made aware of Guillory’s book in the first place as I’d left a somewhat disgruntled comment on Ross Barkan’s Substack post about Christian Lorentzen’s Granta article from over the summer—fittingly titled “Literature Without Literature”—an article that used a review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction as a springboard to articulate the aesthetic/sociological divide in the study of literature and to come down much in favor of the aesthetic. My comment, in which I claimed hyperbolically that “there’s barely any room left for close reading of the text,” led to a friendly email alerting me to the forthcoming On Close Reading, which makes the claim that there still is room for close reading; in fact, it’s at the center of literary study.
Has that much really changed since I graduated in 2015? Perhaps. Sinykin, the aforementioned author of Big Fiction who would seem to be a proponent of sociological analysis, is also the co-editor of a forthcoming book called Close Reading for the 21st Century. Guillory himself states multiple times that close reading has returned to the university, making this claim in a matter of fact way as it is apparently self-evident. The annotated bibliography, provided by Scott Newstok, further supports the return of close reading, as does his fascinating “Close Reading Archive,” which acts as an extension of the annotated bibliography, cataloguing all the mentions of “close reading” in scholarly work going back over a hundred years. It is clear from this that close reading is being talked and written about frequently, but we might also note that talking about close reading is different from performing close reading, as Guillory himself stresses throughout the book. Nevertheless, as I haven’t been in an English department since 2015, I will concede that close reading may have made a return to the university (Guillory places this change around “the second decade of the twenty-first century,” coinciding with my time in university). I hope close reading’s return is a reality, and if it is, one wonders why it’s occurred.
The conditions from the 2010s to the present are analogous, in a sense, to those that prevailed at close reading’s peak: there is once again a superabundance of text, brought about first through cellphones and text messages, and then through text based social media, like Facebook and Twitter, while there are also new forms of audiovisual media, such as videos on YouTube and TikTok. More recently, there is ChatGPT and its resultant “slop” of content. If we accept Guillory’s claim that the interwar period featured “all the massified cultural forms provoking anxiety among the literary professoriate,” that can only be truer now. It was also true, perhaps, between the 1980s and 2000s, but at the time it was still possible to consider literary novels as a form of media with a stable place in society. This is no longer the case. English departments are disappearing and students aren’t reading or simply can’t read at the level required to perform a close reading of a text (see this recent article in The Atlantic). A return of close reading, then, may be a last attempt by English professors and teachers to emphasize the importance of the distinct possibilities of reading and writing, something that close reading is uniquely placed to do in contrast to historical or sociological approaches.
If one is to defend the practice of close reading and insist on its continued importance, it is the special characteristics of literary text which must be emphasized. A novel or a poem is a different type of technology than a movie, a video game, or television. Guillory notes that “engagements with narrative in these two media [ video games and writing ] are essentially different cognitive experiences. One cannot be substituted for the other.” Here he is referring to form rather than content; even if one plays a video game adaptation or watches the movie adaptation of a book, they are different experiences and convey different information and knowledge, but this is only something that can be articulated through an appreciation of form, which close reading brings to the fore.
It is the formal qualities of literary text which are now under threat by LLMs like ChatGPT. The devalorization of literary text has been occurring for some time—just think of SparkNotes or No Fear Shakespeare, which imply that form is irrelevant—but LLMs accelerate this process by flooding the market with summaries of books and by codifying a smooth, frictionless, and vacuous language as “good” writing. Every year I read more and more supposed “student” writing that is utterly meaningless but grammatically sound, AI writing which, each time it is used, represents a sacrifice of one’s human capabilities and potential. Some may argue that AI is simply a tool in the way that a pen or a keyboard is a tool, but in practice this is not true: AI short circuits thinking and replaces the human struggle to craft meaning out of words with readymade, linguistic constructions pre-approved by tech companies. The language used by AI is not neutral but ideological, attempting to convince us that form can be divorced from content, a sleight of hand which can only be made visible, perhaps, through close reading. There may be other uses for AI that, like Ong’s example of the violin, “enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life,” but these must come in addition to human reading and writing, not at their expense. Of course, in the realm of technology this is rarely the case. Literacy itself replaced a pre-literacy orality, inaugurating the modern world but extinguishing other forms of life, ways of being so foreign to modern sensibilities that we would struggle to comprehend them. Close reading may suffer a similar fate, but like any cultural technique, there is meaning in the act itself for those who wish to pursue it.
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Footnotes
- 1“We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”