Subway Reading
Let’s consider one of the most anthologized and analyzed of all twentieth-century poems in English, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” The poem is very brief—two lines—which makes it ideal for close reading. But as will be immediately evident, not every reading is close in the sense of attention to form.
Take, for example, the question of the text of the poem, which you might think would be, if not an easy, then at least a resolvable question. But in fact that is not the case. In its earliest printing, in Poetry magazine on June 6, 1913, the poem was printed this way:
Shortly thereafter, in T.P.’s Weekly for June 1913, Pound published another version of the poem:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
And in his collection of poetry called Lustra (1916), the poem appears in a similar form, except the colon at the end of the first line has been changed to a semicolon.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
This is how the poem is almost always printed today. Pound commented extensively on its genesis and offered detailed (and changing) instructions for its proper punctuation.12 The existence of these varied versions, each with its printing provenance and with the attached explanatory comments of the poet, constitute a good example of what is now known as genetic criticism, the history of drafts and versions or, as its proponents call them, avanttextes or pretexts.13 Pretty clearly, the difference in spacing and punctuation will influence both the performative reading of the poem (how is it spoken aloud? with what pauses and emphases?) and also, potentially, its meaning. But we have begun with the problem of establishing the text, and the text here is already, even in a demonstrably modern era, one of many variants, each sanctioned by the author, with an explanation, in some cases, of his intentions and of the effect, or affect, he expects the poem to produce. The first version of the poem was thirty lines long; later the two-line text modeled on the Japanese haiku derived from it.
Almost every account of this short and brilliant poem alludes, at some point, to Pound’s evolutionary description of how he came to write it:
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation … not in speech, but in little splotches of color …
Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colors.
Perhaps this is enough to explain the words in my “Vortex”:—
“Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form.”
In these ruminations published in 1916, Pound went on to discuss the haiku (spelled hokku in his text):
The “one-image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:—
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.”
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.14
Here is the author, front and center, naming his poem’s genre (hokku-like; “one-image poem”), explaining its moment of origin, its visual inspiration, its title, its poetic progress from thirty lines to fifteen to two. To read the poem, must one read this account or know of it? And if so, do we have to believe it? What authority does the author have?
Many critics, contemplating “In a Station of the Metro,” have zeroed in on the word apparition, which stands out from all the others in that it is multisyllabic, Latinate, abstract, conceptual as well as visual. Several have detected a mythological substrate, indebted to classical literature’s descents to the underworld (“apparition” + “faces in the crowd” = shades of the dead, whether experienced by Orpheus, Odysseus, or Aeneas). Some recent commentators have singled out the poem’s ethnopoetics,15 and at least one, close reading Pound’s account of the poem’s origin, has seen the “foundational cluster beauty / woman / child / lovely /[poetry]” as posing a feminist conundrum: “One idea is that beauty / the feminine matters in the construction of poetry; the other is that it does not.”16
If one did not have in hand Pound’s autobiographical account, would it be tempting to imagine that the faces were flashing by on a moving train, rather than being glimpsed on the station platform, as he seems to describe them? And if one had never heard of haiku, would it matter? What if this were the first one-image poem the reader encountered? How much background or generic context is necessary to read a poem? And if we wanted, for any reason, to read against Pound’s authority rather than in obedience to it, what might that mean?
Pound calls it a one-image poem, but arguably, it is a two-image poem, if one counts the title. Suppose we did not have the title phrase—or if he had excised the title in a further editorial moment? Without that situational marker, which anchors the perception in modernity and in urban space, the two lines might be read quite differently. If we were to compare the poem to, for example, some fragments of ancient verse, recognized as fragmentary, unrecoverable as wholes, what would that do to the poem? Pound famously collaborated with T. S. Eliot in assembling The Waste Land, with its paradigmatic assertion that “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In his account of the genesis of the “Metro” poem, Pound claims that “the image is itself the speech”—that images are not “ornaments.” But is the title part of the image? Or is it an ornament?
Another well-known modern instance of an author severely cutting a poem for a similar tightening effect is Marianne Moore’s decision to reduce her poem “Poetry” from five stanzas to three lines—a distilled version of the three lines that began the original poem.
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
These revisions were accepted as canonical—i.e., as the author’s version of the poem—when Moore’s collected poetry was published in 1967, but when facsimiles of the (out-of-print) 1924 volume Observations came under review by scholars, debates ensued about whether the editorial changes Moore introduced should be regarded as improvements. In any case, the two poems called “Poetry” are formally and textually quite different, and the shorter of the two does not contain one of Moore’s most famous and most quoted phrases, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
It is not uncommon for works of literature, whether in verse or in prose, to exist in more than one version. I mention it here because the question of reading may be thought, naturally enough, to involve reading a particular something, and that something (usually called the work or the text) is increasingly, in these sophisticated editorial days, a plural something—like, for example, the two different, “authentic” versions of King Lear that are now regularly printed by editors of that play, or what used to be called the “Bad” Quarto of Hamlet.
The First Quarto of Hamlet included this version of a speech that would become celebrated in a very different form:
To be, or not to be,
I, there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,
The vndiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d. (7.114–121)
Will any non-academic reader claim that this is the “real” (since apparently “original”) “To be or not to be,” or ask whether it has been effectively superseded by the more familiar text? For an increasing number of Shakespeare scholars, the First Quarto (no longer dubbed “the Bad Quarto,” as if it had a moral flaw) has a legitimacy all its own, regardless of the wider admiration accorded the Second Quarto and Folio. Actors have performed the first version with considerable success, unhampered by the overfamiliarity that breeds not contempt but its affectively positive equivalent, stultifying adoration. The total effect is often that of an aria performed, applauded, and experienced as a whole. The experience of the First Quarto is both disorienting and refreshing—the pleasure of encountering the energies of this astonishing play anew. If it sends us back to the more familiar version, all the better—but this passage seems to suggest a set of rhythms, and an acting style, that show us something powerful and strong.
Coleridge described prose as “words in their best order” and poetry as “the best words in their best order.”17 Close readers in the middle of the twentieth century tended to use poem in an extended sense—to refer, for example, to plays in verse, especially the plays of Shakespeare, and by extension, other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. “Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem” was the title of an essay by the critic C. S. Lewis,18 and the use of poem here is indicative. Teachers of fiction, and especially of long novels, used close reading to direct attention, for example, to the opening sentences or first paragraphs of these works. This pedagogical technique had a strategic as well as an aesthetic and intellectual payoff, since even those students who had not read the work in question—or had not read far into it—could be brought into a conversation about artistry, word choice, tone, voice, irony, and foreshadowing. A classic instance is the beginning of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
A skilled teacher can elicit discussion of this single sentence for an extended period before turning to the second sentence, which not only superbly undercuts the first but makes the reader reread and reconsider it:
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Again, a whole discussion might well be devoted to the single word property, which has major resonances throughout the novel and through Austen’s work more generally. Bear in mind that the single man with the good (not great) fortune alluded to in this first sentence is the amiable and pliable Mr. Bingley, not the far wealthier and more complex Mr. Darcy. The novel sidles into the narrative of its central love affair through this delectably wicked glance at local customs, town gossip, and the neat slide from high-toned philosophical bromide (“it is a truth universally acknowledged”) to the bathetically domestic, or the domestically bathetic, “must be in want of a wife.” Think for a second about how else the sentence might have concluded: “should put his money in a safe place”; “should consider the welfare of others before his own comfort”; “should be grateful for the prudence of his forebears and the providence of a beneficent deity,” etc.
The reading tactic deployed here is, as I’ve noted, what has been variously called close reading or slow reading or reading in slow motion. The latter phrase is that of Reuben Brower, a professor of English at Harvard in the fifties and sixties and, before that, professor of Greek and English at Amherst College.19 Brower was the legendary teacher of an equally legendary Harvard course, Humanities 6, almost always referred to as Hum 6.
Perhaps the clearest and most eloquent demonstration of how close reading works was offered by one of Brower’s former assistants in the course, Paul de Man, who would become one of the most admired literary exponents of deconstruction, and whose own pedagogy produced a roster of critics as accomplished as Brower’s. Here is de Man’s account, from an essay first published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1982. In its clarity and descriptive analysis, it is well worth quoting at length.
My own awareness of the critical, even subversive, power of literary instruction does not stem from philosophical allegiances but from a very specific teaching experience. In the 1950s, [Walter Jackson] Bate’s colleague at Harvard, Reuben Brower, taught an undergraduate course in General Education entitled “The Interpretation of Literature” (better known on the Harvard campus and in the profession at large as HUM 6) in which many graduate students in English and Comparative Literature served as teaching assistants. No one could be more remote from high-powered French theory than Reuben Brower. He wrote books on Shakespeare and on Pope that are models of sensitive scholarship but not exactly manifestos for critical terrorism. He was much more interested in Greek and Latin literature than in literary theory. The critics he felt closest to, besides Eliot, were Richards and Leavis, and in both of them he was in sympathy with their emphasis on ethics.
Brower, however, believed in and effectively conveyed what appears to be an entirely innocuous and pragmatic precept, founded on Richards’s “practical criticism.” Students, as they began to write on the writings of others, were not to say anything that was not derived from the text they were considering. They were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge.
This very simple rule, surprisingly enough, had far-reaching didactic consequences. I have never known a course by which students were so transformed. Some never saw the point of thus restricting their attention to the matter at hand and of concentrating on the way meaning is conveyed rather than on the meaning itself. Others, however, caught on very quickly and, henceforth, they would never be the same. The papers they handed in at the end of the course bore little resemblance to what they produced at the beginning. What they lost in generality, they more than made up for in precision and in the closer proximity of their writing to the original mode. It did not make writing easier for them for they no longer felt free to indulge in any thought that came into their head or to paraphrase any idea they happened to encounter.
At the end of this account of the surprising effects of Reuben Brower’s pedagogical method, de Man offers an analysis that may seem even more surprising.
Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden.20
It’s worth doing a close reading of the last sentence, the topic of which is close reading. De Man’s elegant formulation is built on a series of negations and reversals: “in spite of itself”; “it cannot fail”; “the more or less secret aim … to keep hidden.” When it is coupled with “de
eply subversive” in the previous sentence, we have what might be described as a critical language of reluctant but persistent uncovering. The concept of literary teaching here is explicated immediately above: the methods of “those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history.” Language, in all its waywardness, slows down and diverts the goal of identifying a “meaning”—meaning that the text will then be said to express. This is why close reading is “subversive”: what it subverts is a rush to a corresponding meaning outside the text. Reading in slow motion, frame by frame—does not allow for the “general impression,” which is so often an imprecise paraphrase of what the reader thinks the poem, or novel, or story, or play, ought to be saying. What it actually says may get in the way of that confident appropriation. Details emerge that may derail the express.
We might draw an analogy with what was known in my childhood as “look-say” reading as opposed to phonics or “sounding it out.” Confronted with the image of an equine quadruped and the letters H-O-R-S-E, the eager reader cried out “Pony!”
De Man’s essay was called “The Return to Philology,” and the quiet irony is evident. Philology, that supposedly old-fashioned discipline, was the most radical way of reading. Radical in the sense of word roots, and radical in the sense of destabilizing common sense when it conflicted with what the words on the page were saying and doing. Writing in the early 1980s, de Man saw the analogy between Brower’s course and what came to be called “theory.”
The personal experience of Reuben Brower’s Humanities 6 was not so different from the impact of theory on the teaching of literature over the past ten or fifteen years. The motives may have been more revolutionary and the terminology was certainly more intimidating. But, in practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.21
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 18