Post #2: Symptomatic and Surface Reading - Lauren Peterson

I’ll be focusing on two of our readings for this week’s blog post: Margaret Cohen’s “Narratology in the Archive of Literature” and Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s “Surface Reading: An Introduction” for the ways in which they analyze and use (especially in Cohen’s text) surface reading and symptomatic reading. Best and Marcus clarified for me that there are kinds or types of symptomatic reading, and that to define symptomatic reading is to explore the various forms of it. A more generalized understanding of symptomatic reading would include that it is an “interpretive method that argues that the most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses” (3). Yet, for Frederic Jameson (as we can get into more detail through our discussion of his text for this week, The Political Unconscious), because there is something repressed in the text, “interpretation should seek ‘a latent meaning behind a manifest one’” (3). Furthermore, what is not said in the text can be used to create a “code” for rewriting the text (3). Louis Althusser, I believe, has different goals when analyzing the absences in a text. From what I understand in this essay, Althusser sought out the repression in the text but then “relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first” (5). For Althusser, there does not seem to be some hidden truth he can get at in the text, but rather he aligns himself more with the Gnostic’s belief that the truth is “too complex to describe” (5). Whereas with Jameson, it seems, there’s an actual “unmasking” that occurs (5). Mary Crane’s reading further shows the complexity within symptomatic reading: while Jameson sees the absences and contradictions in a text as signaling repression, Crane sees contradictions in a text as showing “mental activities too rapid and too complex to be perceived” (6). What I think is important to note here is that Jameson suggests symptomatic reading is the work of the critic, that “the activist component of literature is a value added by the critic” (7).

This “activist component” of symptomatic reading connects to the critique of “surface reading”: “The surface is associated with the superficial and deceptive, with what can be perceived without close examination…” (4). The implication here is that surface reading does not take the kind of effort that symptomatic reading does. However, Best and Marcus suggest alternatives definitions for the surface of the text, what surface reading looks like, and what it can do. They see the surface as what is “evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding” and “what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (9). While there are a variety of ways to read the surface, I want to focus on two: one that addresses the critique of surface reading that I mentioned and one that is in conversation with Cohen’s essay. Seeing the surface as an “intricate verbal structure of literary language” shows the kind of work involved in surface reading and a rejection of the claim that the surface is superficial. The surface is not “too simple to merit notice” and though “navigation” is involved in surface reading, as suggested by I. A. Richards, it is difficult work that requires certain abilities (10).

In the section describing the taxonomical work sometimes involved in surface reading (“Surface as the location of patterns that exist within and across texts”), Best and Marcus name narratology as one of the forms surface reading takes. In her essay addressing literary critics’ return to the archive and what might set literary work apart from historical work (if that’s a fair summary for me to make), Cohen uses narratology to do a kind of taxonomy within her genre studies. Significantly, she describes why symptomatic reading cannot necessarily help her in her pattern-locating work within genres and subgenres. One reason is that Cohen is working outside of modernism, which was a productive space for Jameson to do symptomatic reading (58).  She also notes Marcus’s critique that symptomatic reading can miss some of the complexity of the text in its search for what the text is repressing (60).

To say that Cohen’s project is in opposition to symptomatic reading, however, would be a mischaracterization. I think in many ways that Cohen’s essay here troubles the clear distinction between symptomatic reading and surface reading that Best and Marcus create. She notes, “once we reconstruct the lost horizon of the poetics that have shaped different kinds of novels, we may discover that the ways in which a text is symptomatic help to endow them with singular appeal” (58). Furthermore, Cohen’s analysis after she has configured a pattern among certain works (here, “how sea adventure fictions addresses the historical conjuncture of its era”)  has the appearance of symptomatic reading: “This gesture resembles symptomatic reading, except that we look at what the text is performing rather than what it hides” (66). This move complicates surface reading and symptomatic reading since the surface can perform. The "surface" may be neither just itself nor hiding anything.