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Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings
- Wesleyan University Press
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37 steve benson Close Reading Leavings and Cleavings Steve Benson’s “Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings” was first given as a performance at San Francisco artspace 80 Langton Street (14 August 1980). In it, Benson took apart and exploded the scene of the reader’s interaction with the text as a temporal and performative event of meaning making. Drawing on the work of structuralist and reader-response critics like Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Iser,with Freud and Marx behind them,Benson overturns the dominant ideology of close reading as mandated by a universal, authoritative reader— the pedagogical scene of the academy. Benson’s intervention into the ideology of reading has as its point of departure the “reader makes meaning” theory of avant-garde texts, but moves beyond it in several directions: toward the physical properties of the text and its bibliographic codes; toward the embodied experience of multiple readers; and toward its performance in real time and space. Benson’s demonstration of a poetics of reading looks forward to projects such as Susan Howe’s“My Emily Dickinson”(PJ 4) and Johanna Drucker’s “Hypergraphy: A Note on Maurice Lemaître’s Roman Hypergraphique” (PJ 6), anticipating in turn the poetics of the material text in Jerome McGann’s criticism and the interest in the materiality of poetic texts, seen as socially produced, in the late 1980s. Reading is nearly constant—walking on the street, there are all the signs; at breakfast there’s the cereal box. I can posit a continuum, like that of sound from noise through talk and popular to high-art music, from that which is registered and measured inescapably to that which one responds to actively only in isolation. A signifier with immediate and crucial survival value like a stoplight or a yield sign is more easily read partly because its context is commonly presumed almost like rainclouds and white bird-droppings as indigenous to the social matrix of our ecology,whereas a novel,which you dip in and out of on the bus, takes more concentration, since it’s less essential and really develops the context of its own events within its text, albeit conventions of reading and genre contribute. Contemporary poetry that intentionally frustrates or coopts the conventional agents of contextualization would then be hardest to read,depending so overwhelmingly on the reader’s commitment to formulating an active relationship to the text in order to maintain an ongoing contact that might find some use-value (even if play, some gambit seems prerequisite, at virtually every moment). Such work, while discounting the 38 steve benson authority of training and custom, still finds use for the gamut of devices, but determined to constitute a poem, or a poetic agency in the manifest form of a text, relies with particular emphasis on its own concrete construction as a text and on the reader’s decisive apprehension of that in all its multivalent peculiarity and potential for association in order to bring an order to bear on the world. Our contemporary struggle and facility to contextualize our apprehensions in reading psychologically and economically, both abstractly and concretely, with Freud and Marx as the landmark initiators,lends further complexity and ambiguity to the process even as a sense of the urgency and ethical concentration in the activity is radically intensified. The relationship of the reader to the text (and implicitly to the writer, to the images and identities fantasized through the text’s suggestions) is existentially personal and individual in its focused laying bare of the reader’s imaginative commitment and response to experience. How it feels to read is no longer to be termed merely in the repertoire of stock emotions. The mode of production of the text and its manifest form are also increasingly subject to a reader’s interpretation and response, economics grounded in appeal to audience and in the concrete artifact; the poetry’s distribution becomes even more legible as a vital aspect of its actual meaning than the author’s intentions in inscribing it. Looking closely at the words on the page, does the mind try to get the eye to wrap around them, or to pierce them? Or does it only think it tries, anyway? The field of the whole page pulses there, jittering with the largely involuntary little movements of the eyeball pulsing with blood at each heartbeat— imaging the text, while the mind imagines what the text means further. The reader constantly asserts the frame of the page, holding...