(Roughly) Daily

Dan Sinykin with a plea for reading– really reading…

In Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend, a famous writer kills himself. Not long before, he complains to the narrator about readers: “People talking about a book as if it were just another thing, like a dish, or a product like an electronic device or a pair of shoes, to be rated for customer satisfaction—that was just the goddamn trouble.” Students submit papers that say, “I hate Joyce, he’s so full of himself.” Online reviewers imply, “if a book didn’t affirm what the reader already felt—what they could identify with, what they could relate to—the author had no business writing the book at all.” The famous author quits teaching, quits writing. The state of the novel, its place in the world, is too depressing.

“But hasn’t it always been this way?” asks the narrator.

“No doubt,” says the famous writer. “But in the past the writer didn’t have to know, the problem wasn’t right there in your face.”

We know it’s been this way—or something like it—for more than a century, because that’s how long it’s been since I. A. Richards conducted his experiment. A young Cambridge professor in the 1920s, Richards printed poems with their authors redacted, sent them home with his students, and asked them to produce commentary. They did, and their commentary, from these otherwise good students, was riddled with errors. Without the context of who wrote the poems or when, the students failed to make out the plain sense. They connected poems to irrelevant memories, offered stock responses, indulged in sentimentality, and allowed preconceptions about what poetry is to skew what they saw on the page. At a time when literature professors either lectured grandly or lingered over the minutiae of history, Richards set out a new path; he wanted to provide support for “those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry.”

Reading, a skill easily taken for granted, is difficult—all the more so when reading literature that wields language as a medium for art. In the wake of Richards’ revelations, scholars in Britain and the United States developed a technique to address our failures. Eventually that technique took the name “close reading,” and it remains the principal methodology of literary studies.

Close reading is untimely. It bristles against today’s universities, which treat students as customers to please and as future workers to train rather than as people in pursuit of human flourishing. Jeff Bezos’ empire—Amazon; Goodreads; Kindle Direct Publishing, which dominates the perfervid world of self-publishing—encourages readers to “talk about a book as if it were just another thing, like a dish, or a product like an electronic device.” Social media compels us to attend to what we’re seeing for as long as it takes to scroll by. Every day, AI produces more of the words we come across, making it hard—maybe impossible—to care about reading them. I’m sure there were college courses this semester where students completed their work with AI and professors graded it with AI, cutting humans from the loop. It’s easy to see why close reading, which demands patience, openness to others, and slow, careful thought, is having a moment among academics. 

In January, literary critic John Guillory, emeritus faculty at NYU, well known in the small world of literary studies, published a slim volume, On Close Reading, accompanied by an exhaustive annotated bibliography compiled by Rhodes College professor Scott Newstok that demonstrated that more people are writing about close reading now than ever. Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth has garnered disproportionate attention, occasioning roundtables, special sections of journals, and many reviews. Much more, including a volume I co-edited, is forthcoming. After a spell of taking it for granted, academics are rediscovering the quiet excitement of close reading, a relief from the overheated corporate pablum routinely suffocating us.

But close reading is not just for academics, and it deserves a bigger audience. Not because it’s virtuous. Not because it makes us better people. (I know some great close readers who are real assholes.) But because it’s a thrilling way to think with others, to claw back some of the time taken from us daily by tech oligarchs (I have looked at Twitter impulsively several times while writing this pointedly long, difficult sentence), and relearn some of our capacity, atrophied into passivity by algorithms, for aesthetics, a term that arose in modernity to name a storehouse of values in dialectical opposition to those of capitalism: above all, treating texts as ends in themselves rather than as means to productive ends—treating them, that is, as art…

Rediscovering literature in these distracted times: “Close Reading Is For Everyone,” from @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social‬ in the always illuminating @defector.com‬. Eminently worth reading in full.

* “To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the ‘words on the page’ rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focusing of concern – a limiting badly needed by literary talk which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson’s language to the length of his beard. [then, after a breath] But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, ‘close reading’ also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, ‘literary’ or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a ‘reification’ of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism.” – Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction [Your correspondent understands Sinykin’s plea as an altogether timely call, not to abandon context, but to the swing the pendulum back.]

###

As we pay close attention, we might send gritty birthday greetings to a man who was a master of prose the repays close reading– Samuel Dashiell Hammett; he was born on this date in 1894.  Hammett worked as an agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from 1915-1922, when– disillusioned by the organization’s role in strike-breaking– he left to become a writer, providing copy in an ad agency until his fiction earned enough to support him.  Hammett drew for his fiction on his experiences as a “Pinkerton Man,” and created an extraordinary series of characters– Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), The Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse)– on the way to becoming, as the New York Times called him, “the dean of the… ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction.”

In his book The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler, considered by many to be Hammett’s successor, observed,

Hammett was the ace performer… He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of The Glass Key is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before. 

source