For this week's readings, I want to focus on sections of Margaret Cohen's argument, particularly those sections that reference Sharon Marcus and her notion of "just reading" because it feels like an intersection that is relevant, quite specifically, to the concerns and questions I'm wrestling with in my own work on Victorian literature.
In Cohen's piece, she includes a whole section of methodologies she uses in her "narratology in the archival of literature," which I honestly appreciated as someone who likes to understand the process of how various scholars conduct their research. More importantly though, she has a subsection dedicated to Marcus and how "just reading" fits with her distant reading that's closer to home than Moretti's, but not "too" close. Cohen says of Marcu's argument about 19th century female friendships that she "does not dismiss the intimate, often erotic representations of female friendship...but rather seeks 'to account more fully for what texts present on their surface but critics have failed to notice'" (60). Best says something similar in "Surface Reading" about Marcus's argument: "Taking friendship in novels to signify friendship is thus not mere tautology; it highlights something true and visible on the text's surface that symptomatic reading had ironically rendered invisible" (12). I'm doing my best to stay away from dismissal and critique and actually put pressure on what's being said and see what Marcus is actually upholding. So if a symptomatic reading is about manifesting that which is latent/repressed in a text and surface reading is about taking things as they are and as they present themselves, where does queerness actually fit in? Queerness by default of what it identifies (which is not metaphoric or symbolic) cannot be "on the surface" in the literal way these articles seem to imply. Queerness in and of itself is an unstable and ambiguous mode/frame of seeing and reading. In this way, reading queerness is always symptomatic reading (looking beyond the physical) in ways that heterosexuality does not have to be.
Marcus's piece on female friendship is the perfect example for what I mean by my above statements. Her piece, to iterate again, is about taking female friendship at face value--meaning that it's not really homoerotic. She suggests (as does Cohen) that this is a surface reading. However, I want to ask: aren't readings in and of themselves coded with certain types of value? To take female friendship at face value as friendship, and not potentially queer, codes surface reading as inherently heterosexual and never symptomatic. It never has to be discerned, but rather is presumed to be quite on the surface. Eve Sedgwick infamously says in her article, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" that "the homo/hetero question is problematic for its anachronism: homosexual identities, and certainly female ones, are supposed to not have had a broad discursive circulation until later in the nineteenth century, so in what sense could heterosexual identities as against them?" (823). I bring Sedgwick's point up not to derail the conversation around Marcus and Cohen, but instead to suggest the underlying presumption of symptomatic and surface reading that seems in their arguments to only be invisible and latent: heterosexuality is the overarching framework for both--queerness only needs to be deemed repressed because it's functioning in a hetero-frame.
And furthermore, I would want to suggest that perhaps Marcus does not really follow the "rules" of surface reading outlined in Best's and Cohen's pieces. Let's for example, take a surface reading of romantic affection and suggest that the superficial or "literal"/physical clues are, in the 19th century: kissing hands/face/mouth, hand-holding, blushing at physical touch, etc. Let's say these are our units of measurement for romantic affection. Then, on the surface, if we are to "see" two characters interact in this way, we would acknowledge the romantic affection they are sharing (not an in-depth reading, just stating a fact). So then doesn't Marcus's reading actually repress and/or do the opposite of a surface reading of female friendship, if those friendships involve affection between two women? I wonder if surface reading cannot (as it is outlined) account for queerness in the way I have described because Marcus appears to conflate queer female affection with queer identity rather than seeing them as discrete and separate units. In The Woman in White Laura and Marian, who are half-sisters, share many, many, kisses and I would argue that is representative of queer sororal love rather than incestuous sexual desire (since we cannot discern that from simply reading on the surface). If a surface reading cannot account for discrete parts, which it should do as a potential mode of proto-distant reading (looking for a pattern among discrete parts), then is the way we read now, just really, really straight?
Margaret,
ReplyDeleteI was hoping someone would write a post on the "just reading" section. It was a bit puzzling for me. There’s another section of Cohen’s essay that I wrote about this week that, I think, troubles the distinction between symptomatic and surface reading, and I wonder if it’s applicable to think about here. Here’s Cohen on her process working with maritime fiction: “Once we understand the specificity of such a pattern, we can pinpoint how sea adventure fiction addresses the historical conjuncture of its era. The gesture resembles symptomatic reading, except that we look at what the text is performing rather than what it hides” (66). I want to highlight here, concerning Marcus’s “just reading,” the “historical conjuncture” of a period (especially with your point/Sedgwick’s point about the anachronism) and the performance of a text. The question I’m working through with the texts this week is if we need to choose between the text hiding or repressing something and surface reading. Perhaps taking into account the text’s historical situation and “what the text is performing” complicates these modes of reading.
Lauren
I was also looking at Cohen's text, and I think you make an excellent point about the erasure of queerness, seeing as it's often relegated to subtext. It hadn't occurred to me while I was reading, but you're right. Since queerness tends to happen between the lines and beneath the surface, only examining the surface of the text could effectively strip it from the narrative.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that Marcus's argument does hold with surface reading if she's taking the women's stated motive at face value. If they claim to be nothing more than friends, it would make sense for her to read their mutual affection as homosocial rather than homoerotic. So I don't think that she's inconsistent in her reading, but I do see how this example raises some questions about what constitutes the surface of the text and whether a competent reading of the text can be absolutely uncritical of what it asserts. It also makes me wonder how such a reading would deal with other forms of implication, subtext, and unreliable narrators.
That's the exact thing I want to put pressure on about Marcus's reading though. I've read a lot of 19th century texts and the thing about female friendship (19th century and beyond) is it almost always exclusively "looks" a little queer and I think her surface reading ultimately dismisses the complexity of female friendship which is a constant oscillating slippage between homosocial attachment and homoerotic affection. It's that very slippage that is unique to female friendship and complicates it in any century. So I wonder about the heterosexual coding that seems to frame both surface reading and symptomatic reading and if that's actually the limitation and a limitation the critic brings in because of his/hers/their lens. And if so, why not simply acknowledge this implication, as some of the other types of surface reading suggest critics do? And as Sedgwick shows us, that very hetero-coding/frame is something brought in by the critic, so the framing things in hetero-terms is just as much of an anachronism as putting things in queer-terms, but only one of us has to call out and explicitly acknowledge the lens we're bringing from the outside.
DeleteYes! It seems to me that a commitment to only acknowledge the surface presupposes an intentional ignorance of issues that are on the surface but point to deeper, latent, or hidden complexity. And what about the fact that these complexities are often subversive and rebellious as well? Doesn't strict surface reading propose a compliance with dominant discourse? I know that Best and Marcus tried to suggest this wasn't the case in the end of their article,
ReplyDelete"Surface reading, which strives to describe texts accurately, might easily be dismissed as politically quietist, too willing to accept things as they are. We want to reclaim from this tradition the accent on immersion in texts (without paranoia or suspicion about their merit of value), for we understand that attentiveness to the artwork as itself a kind of freedom...To some ears this might sound like a desire to be free from having a political agenda that determines in advance how we interpret texts, and in some respects it is exactly that. We think however, that a true openness to all the potentials made available by texts is also prerequisite to an attentiveness that does not reduce them to instrumental means to an end and is the best way to say anything accurate and true about them...We want to suggest that, in relinquishing the freedom dream that accompanies the work of demystification, we might be groping toward something equally valuable, if less glamorous, states of mind." (15-16)
What is left unanswered for me, is where this leaves any sort of political or social (sub)text. I'm not sure I feel satisfied by their response.
Thanks for this, Margaret! You've got a valid point: reading queerly requires the very depth that surface reading practices seem so ready to ignore. Is surface reading, as you gesture towards, *always* then a heteronormalizing act? Surface reading fails to recognize that various strategies queer desires and identities employ to render themselves legible in texts. Michael Bibler released a book a few years back called _Cotton's Queer Relations_ that tackles this very issue. If we're going to be looking for queer people in the 19th century, we've got to learn to read between the lines in some sense. Bibler's book looks at the history of homo-erotic desire in the fiction of Southern plantation. Though these relationships most definitely existed (between slaves, between mistresses and female slaves, between masters and male slaves), they are not explicitly recorded, they existed as a sort of "open secret" that both confirmed and threatened the power structure of the plantation, reorganizing the hierarchy through transgressive intimate/erotic encounters between same-sex partners. Bibler's observations would be impossible without reading deeply. So, it seems to me that if we're going to be reading for queer people in the 19th century, we can't really afford to be surface readers. We'd never find anything interesting! And, I think, at this point, it would be impossible to engage in any sort of sincere surface reading. We know too much at this point, ha.
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