Week 2: Surface and Symptomatic Reading

“Surface Reading: An Introduction” by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus aims to sort out the different issues surrounding symptomatic and surface reading and the tensions that arise between the two modes in literary criticism. Symptomatic reading is essentially an interpretive method that looks at the latent meaning, or repression, within texts. It has a long history dating back to the Greeks and includes Marx and Freud. Building on this concept, Jameson in particular looked at the absence as the true meaning of a text and the critic becomes the heroic force who brings it forth. An intriguing offshoot of this notion is Leah Price’s interest in the literal texts themselves as books, known as “it-narratives,” a surprising contrast to the obsession with excavating hidden narratives.

The evidently exhausted field of symptomatic reading yearned for a fresh perspective, leading to surface reading, where the text is examined at face value and everything pertinent is found exclusively within. To validate the practice of critiquing texts in this way, patterns among a multitude of texts can be used by the critic or even computers. The use of technology to study literature brings up an interesting point. It struck me while reading that the overall goal of the methodologies we have been studying is to bring something new to the discipline. It makes sense – after all, there are only so many theories and critiques that can be applied to the same canon. Technology, then, is the perfect complement to the literary field as the humanities are losing popularity in a STEM-dominated educational system.

         Additionally, surface reading has a certain nostalgia as it steers away from the conception of literary studies which gains legitimacy through a complex analysis of metaphoric language and abtruse subjects, to a simpler approach. Yet, does this dumbing-down of the discipline deplete its desirously elitist distinction? Given the complex history of literary criticism, it would be impossible. Surface as literal meaning resonated with me as I am often anxious that I may be missing a key part of a text because it’s buried in symbols and metaphors. Of course, that’s also what makes it interesting. As a different way of looking at surface reading, Marcus discusses the potentially erotic female relationships in Victorian novels that invites queer readings. Her method described as "just reading" differs by doing an archaeological examination that looks at 19^th century social relationships. The text, then, demonstrates a “complex and ample reading rather than diminished by, or reduced to what it has to repress” (Cohen 60). Marcus’ technique does not exclude queer readings, instead, it uses the text in combination with historical context to determine the nature of the relationships.

         Foucault attempts to answer the question of determining relations by seeking not what is hidden but to “make visible what is invisible only because it’s too much on the surface of things” (Best 13). In other words, the critic should begin to look suspiciously and use symbols, but should be equally skeptical of “metaphors” as some things can be taken at face value. I thought of this in relationship to Bleak House: is Dickens really sitting there applying latent meaning to every line and character? Possibly, but he also could have been rushing through a plot line to get on to something more pertinent or interesting to him.

Balibar and Althusser’s “Reading Capital” depicts a different style of symptomatic reading. In one part, they describe the holes that lie within a statement (he uses Marx’s economic principle of labor analogy) which are caused by answering their own questions and therefore they don’t acknowledge any possible problems that might arise. He furthers this through a discussion of vision and invisibility, where vision is reflexive and relies on not only sight from the seer but from the object’s projection as well. With vision comes invisibility, which is defined by “the theoretical problematic’s non-vision of its non-objects…its non-problems” (26). This abstract concept is similar to Armstrong’s discussion of erasure as they both deal with aspects of understanding that are not readily apparent, yet are crucial to the formation of an idea, question or problem. Similar to the relationship between erasure and bifurcation, Althusser maintains that vision and invisibility require a connection to each other. However, he examines the structure that forms their reliance, leading to a complicated analysis and decoding of the invisible.