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  • Against Distant Reading:Retrieving Close Reading in The Interregnum
  • William V. Spanos (bio)

It is therefore, a great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transient things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.

—Hugo of St. Victor (Qtd. in Said 2000, 185)

One

In a recent essay I wrote for a volume of the on-line journal Wreck Park celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Edward W. Said's Culture and Imperial edited by my former students, Robert Ryan, Marcus Heiligenthal, and James FitzGerald, I noted, in passing, that my contribution would, "by way of a now unfashionable 'close reading' of a brief section of the terminal chapter of Said's text, focus my commentary on his account of the disclosive liminal point in the development of the narrative logic of the Western nation-state / imperial project" (Spanos 2016). Since then then, however, the phrase has taken on a charge that refuses to diminish, and that is no doubt because the question of "close reading" has been a troubling concern to me from the beginning of my career as a literary critic in the late 1950's and early1960's, when the New Criticism and Modernism were in the ascendency in the American academy.

Having been engaged by French existentialism after bearing traumatic witness to the fire-bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war in World War II, I found the New Critics' dominant thesis about the autotelic poem, derived from what they represented as the self-identical form of Modernist poetry, woefully inadequate to the urgent historical realities of that, to me, liminal [End Page 247] post-war occasion. I mean, above all, their deliberate anti-humanist indifference to the emergent existentialist ontology that radically reversed the dominant traditional Western interpretation of being, encapsulated by the formula "essence precedes existence," to read "existence precede essence," a revolutionary reversal that abandoned the priority of the transcendental realm in favor of "engagement" with the irreparable finite world, that is, the anti-humanism of the New Critics in favor of an existential humanism of the engagée.

In the characteristic language of New Critics such as John Crow Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and W.K. Wimsatt, this ontology, the consequence of thinking temporality meta ta physica (from after or above the finite phenomena of nature) identify the ideal poem as "auto-telic" (self-ended): "the poem," as the poet Archibald MacLeish famously put it, "must not mean but be." That is, this metaphysical ontology rendered the temporal words an "autonomous" (self-contained) and harmonious aesthetic whole independent of the imperfect finite historical world it was re-presenting. And it thus rendered the ideal reader an anti-humanist "formalist," whose vocation was to attend scrupulously to the details of the text and their indissoluble relationality, a vocation of "close reading" the strict authority of which was tellingly encapsulated by constant reference to the "vulgar" historicist mistake of adulterating the poem by calling the historical world outside its inclusive borders as "heresy" ("the intentional fallacy," "the affective fallacy," for example)." To put it alternatively, this autotelic New Critical frame called for an "objective" or "disinterested" reader, which, in fact, meant a reader who begins the actual reading process from the distanced end and, in so doing, privileges the eye (vision) over the other senses (particularly hearing) as the primary agent of knowledge production. That is, this autotelic frame spatializes the temporality of words—willfully transforms their unfathomable existential errancy into a free-floating, complete aesthetic structure that can be seen (and com-prehended: rendered graspable by the mind's eye) all-at-once.

In reading instances of this pervasive close New...

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