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CATHERINE BELSEY

Reading and critical practice

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Reading, we say in English departments, matters. Whatever critical practice we subscribe to, reading is surely to be found at the heart of it. In the shared project of specialists in English literature, whether as critics, historicists, editors, biographers, or historians of the book or performance, more attentive reading is commonly either the means or the end, and perhaps both. Cornered by agents of ‘quality’ and asked to defend in one sentence our expenditure of public money, most of us would reply that we teach our students to read. The aim is not so much, these days, to read this or that, still less this and that: coverage is no longer an option. Familiarity with particular texts has become less important as we attend more and more to a skill. Our pious hope is that, if we can teach people to read well, they will be able to implement this skill when we are no longer there to instruct them.

And yet this answer might not fully satisfy the guardians of the public purse. Can’t everyone read in the free West? Or, at least, the majority whose education has succeeded in inculcating the ability to recognise the capacity of alphabetic writing to signify? What is so special about the form of reading we teach? If I am ambivalent about our obligation to be answerable to the agents of ‘quality’, who show so little concern with quality, I do believe in the virtue of accountability to ourselves. What is so special about the work of English departments that entitles us to dignify it with the name of critical practice? Does knowing more about history, editions, biography or the history of reception automatically make us read better?

And why, after all, does it matter that we should? In the days of the canon, attention to the text represented an encounter with the best that had been thought and said in the world. But now that the syllabus includes works no longer chosen primarily on aesthetic or moral grounds, why is reading itself a value at all? A common recourse is to argue that reading

enhances imagination and creativity. But if these terms are synonyms for intellectual inventiveness, they surely characterise all disciplines at their best, and if they mean the ability to inhabit imaginary worlds, it is not obvious that the claim to encourage a wider range of fantasies entirely helps our case.

I do believe, however, that reading matters; at the same time, I also believe that the skill we inculcate in English departments is continuous with the skill available to all citizens of Western democracies, whether or not they have degrees in English; that English departments exercise an influence on the practice of reading beyond the education system; but that inside it we could engage more deeply than we sometimes do with the signifying process that constitutes the material of our discipline.

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Reading necessarily involves the reader in a measure of activity, even if the effort in question requires no more than joining the dots. Understanding a legal proclamation always meant linking the crime to the threatened punishment; to decipher an email message is to relate the beginning to the end, and both to the sender. We cannot make sense of the simplest story without establishing connections – between Cinderella in the hearth and the character of the same name who subsequently turns up at the ball, or between Harry Potter’s strange powers and the curriculum at Hogwarts. Following a narrative may depend on a number of intellectual processes: remembering, anticipating, deciding whose promises to trust and whose values to deplore, inferring a structure from the identification of a genre (if this is a detective story, there will be a mystery and a disclosure; a romance will concern misunderstandings and marriage). These skills are practised daily by a great many people who have never had any dealings with a department of literature, and whose English lessons at school were almost certainly too high-minded to take much account of knowledges acquired from children’s stories and pulp fiction.

The activity of the reader is set in motion by the text, which calls into operation these intertextual knowledges, acquired from culture itself. The figure who says ‘I’ in a song lyric with lines shorter than the width of the page will almost certainly give an account of a mood, an emotion, a state of mind. There must surely have been a time when, as individuals, we did not know this, but when? Meanwhile, popular fiction differentiates between characters not only by naming them consistently, but also by the vocabulary that defines them. Heroes stride; they feel intensely and act decisively. Villains skulk, sneer and gloat. Men who shuffle cannot be counted on; thin,

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wide-eyed children are pitiable. If cognition in popular fiction is above all a matter of recognition, the realist tradition in its entirety depends on such conventions, complicated, perhaps, by more esoteric intertextual allusions or more elaborate and contradictory sets of connections. Students who read nineteenth-century novels recognise the patterns, but may need help with the cultural references. We might have to expand their vocabulary and deepen their awareness of cultural history, but we build on abilities already established by culture itself. Realism communicates by adherence to identifiable conventions, or by minor deviations from them which have the paradoxical effect, as deviations, of bringing the conventions themselves to our attention. Modernism and postmodernism break and reinvent the rules with varying degrees of anxiety or celebration, but their defiance of convention can usually count on a familiarity with the norms they repudiate.

What motivates reading? The desire to know, to identify, to escape, or to master, perhaps. I might read Dickens in order to learn about life, to model myself on Florence Dombey, to revel in a world of ogres and fairy godparents wearing nineteenth-century dress, to define Victorian values, or to map the textual strategies of serial fiction. Each motivation generates different questions, some more likely to be academically prompted than others, some involving more extra-textual information than others, but the process of seeking answers is not qualitatively different in each case.

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What then differentiates the work of English departments from the mode of reading fostered by the culture at large, if critical practice is not readily reducible to what we read or immediately distinguishable in terms of how we read it? Possibly, a certain self-consciousness about the process itself, a willingness to substitute new questions in each generation, or to theorise what we do to see if there is a case for doing it otherwise. ‘Theory’ in this sense became in the 1980s the bogey of those who were reluctant to subject their own modes of reading to self-conscious scrutiny – or, indeed, to change them – as well as of those who found it just too difficult. But in spite of objections, inertia and indifference, theory has acted in alliance with other imperatives to modify critical practice in identifiable ways.

In the first instance, theory challenged the always uneasy assumption that meaning was synonymous with intention, or that access to intention would guarantee correct reading. What motivates writing? Who can say? A desire, rage, an experience, a longing for fame or money, a compulsion to struggle with and against the language that defines the world we know?

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But whatever the motive might have been, the text takes the place of the intention, perhaps betrays or exceeds it, but decidedly supplants it, relegates to inaccessibility any idea that might be thought to have preceded the text itself. In that sense literature produces what cannot be made present in another form; fiction gives a local habitation and a name to what it also conjures in that very process out of existence. I cannot hope to locate a motive behind or beyond the text that could ensure the accuracy of my interpretation. As soon as the text itself comes into being, the signifier encircles no more than airy nothing. The materiality reading works on is not an intention, but a set of signifiers.

Second, if specific motives for reading generate specific questions, their different answers invoke distinct features of the text, joining the dots in alternative ways. No single reading is thus exhaustive, and reading itself plays a part in the construction of meaning. For a time it even seemed to some, among them the influential Stanley Fish, that if the author’s intention was no longer available, the reader’s must take its place, that the reading process was in consequence decisive, and that the determination of meaning belonged entirely to a reader located in an interpretive community. However, if the reader, or the reader’s community, was the sole source of meaning, interpretations of texts were in principle already available in advance. Followed to its logical conclusion, Fish’s account of interpretation would imply that there was no need to carry out the labour of reading at all. Empirically, of course, the presuppositions of the reader frame the questions, but the answers may well turn out to be surprising. The fairy- tale world of Dombey and Son might in practice bring me back to hard economic history sooner than I expected; the wicked queen, Edith Dombey, might turn out, however perversely, to offer more as a role model than her neglected stepdaughter. That we do not necessarily find exactly what we set out to uncover demonstrates the material part the text itself plays in the process of making meaning.

Reading is thus a transaction, a relationship between a practice of interpretation and a text, in which neither the intention of the author nor the design of the reader can be seen as determining. The meanings we find, however unexpected, depend on questions posed in the present, which in turn throw into relief different features of the text. We not only join the dots differently; we join different dots. It follows that meaning is not a dead thing, interred in the text at the moment of its composition, but generated by this transaction in the reading process itself.

In the light of some of these considerations, English departments have come a long way since they understood critical practice as aesthetic evaluation stiffened with moral prescription. We have learnt in recent

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decades to defend our place in the world by teaching our students a new kind of critical practice, where reading means unmasking a variety of assumptions, available to readers addressing their questions to the same text from a range of political perspectives – feminist, post-colonial, multicultural, queer. In this process, French theory in particular has been an ally, if not an origin. Roland Barthes’s reading of the black soldier saluting the French flag in Mythologies was ahead of its time in 1957, if not in 1972, when it first appeared in English.1 But it has made its mark, directly or indirectly, on generations of undergraduates since then, confirming the view that meaning is not a matter of intention, and that values are not given, but produced, and reaffirmed as the result, as well as the origin, of textual practices. English departments have in consequence become nurseries of pluralism, denaturalising historically specific assumptions and demoting prejudices from universal truths to cultural relativities.

In a world where the agencies claiming to speak on behalf of English as an academic discipline can find no better defence of our contribution than the fact that we educate personnel who will go on to serve the tourist trade in theatres and arts centres, this liberalising agenda is much. But is it enough? Or has it become, perhaps, just a little bit easy? Government ministers can now spot a sexist poster at a hundred paces; our students know before they come that everyone in Friends is white, heterosexual and rich. Reading has gobbled up what was once a new, esoteric critical practice, and made it everyday, habitual, ‘obvious’. In one sense, this represents a triumph for English departments, and for theory, but it implies a need for further advances to justify our continued existence in the future.

At a time when science, life-saving and world-changing, so overtly sets the pace in universities, defining not only the vocabulary by which we are judged but also the values our research should aspire to, it is not wise to be too modest about our own capabilities. And we can claim to do more than expose moral and political error at the level of thematic content. We have not yet made full use of the resources of theory to develop a critical practice that both vindicates and refines reading.

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For example – since a short essay is not the place for an exhaustive account of these resources – now that interdisciplinarity is the order of the day in science, perhaps we might reopen the question of the value to critical practice of psychoanalysis in particular. Psychoanalysis itself depends on a form of reading, and it too locates meaning in a signifying relationship. The ‘talking cure’ depends on what is said, and not by

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the analyst alone, nor by the analysand alone, but in the exchange of transferential speech.

A decade before Bertolt Brecht pondered the question how different dramatic forms might act on an audience in his project of enlisting the theatre-goer in contradiction, Sigmund Freud had taken for granted the power of writing to govern the emotions of the reader:

In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the story- teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material.2

The context is Freud’s essay on the ‘uncanny’, which devotes more attention to written texts than it does to ‘real experience’. The uncanny in fiction, Freud points out, depends on genre, or rather, on the effect of breaking the generic rules. We do not find tales of the supernatural uncanny, he argues: we simply suspend our disbelief for the duration. But the emergence of the supernatural in naturalism, unexpectedly betraying rational readers to their own unsurmounted superstitions, disturbs and unsettles them. Moreover, prolonging generic uncertainty to the end of the story, leaving it unresolved, defers indefinitely the closure that evokes a feeling of having been cheated or misled by a sudden switch from mimesis to magic.

If what Freud calls ‘the same material’, differently treated, can produce ‘a great variety of effects’, the directive power of fiction must be primarily formal or rhetorical, not thematic; it must be a trick, in other words, of the signifier. Of course, Freud the would-be scientist in an era of positivism reverts, in due course, to thematic reading and goes on to explain the uncanny, indeed, by reference to ‘an ultimate signified’, the fear of castration,3 but not before Freud the exceptionally skilled writer has glimpsed a parallel between reading fiction and psychoanalytic practice, which interprets in the first instance not a content, but a signifying process, a slip of the tongue, a forgotten word, an incoherent narrative. How, he had asked nearly twenty years earlier, can psychoanalysis rely so heavily on dreams, when everyone knows they are easily forgotten? What sense can the fledgeling science of the unconscious make of them if an analysand, asked to repeat the story of the dream, so commonly tells it differently? But that, Freud explains, is exactly the point: the modifications are a form of unconscious censorship, and for this reason they can be seen as the elements in the narration which most decisively point the way to a forbidden desire. Moreover, just as each trivial detail of the narrative

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signifies, ‘We have attached no less importance in interpreting dreams to every shade of the form of words in which they were laid before us’.4

Psychoanalysis presupposes that the analyst reads, and reads actively, probing ‘every shade of the form of words’, each nuance, as well as the contradictions, incoherences and moments of generic instability. Of course, psychoanalysis is not a formalism; its quest is for meaning; signifiers signify. But it looks at the signifier in the first instance, not through it to pin down a thematic content. Moreover, meaning is not fixed and given as a buried fact from the past. Instead, it is produced in the present, in the interaction between the partners in the transferential relationship that constitutes analysis. ‘What do you want from me?’, the analyst implicitly asks, leading the analysand towards the path of his or her own desire.5

All texts address us; wanting a specific response – gratified, puzzled, challenged, awed – they propel the reader towards a subject position, circumscribing this position to varying degrees. ‘What is it that you want from me?’, sophisticated readers implicitly ask of the text. Our best hope of eliciting a reply which advances the analysis depends on a close attention to the signifier, its efforts at closure, its evasions and incoherences, on resisting the temptation to take immediate possession of the thematic content in favour of a readiness to identify the textual features that confirm, persuade, seduce, unsettle, surprise, disturb. All texts offer their readers a place to read from. In the end, we can take it or leave it, but the meanings we find will be more subtle if we are prepared to begin by reckoning with it.

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Psychoanalysis also puts forward a hypothesis about why reading matters. Jacques Lacan’s account of Antigone begins with the moment in the play that generations of readers from Goethe to Judith Butler have found unpalatable. It starts, in other words, with a problem, for some the problem, of the text. Antigone has twice performed the funeral rites over her brother, in spite of Creon’s express edict that the traitor Polynices is to remain unburied. She has done so, she says, because she must; out of piety; for glory; to show reverence for reverence. Refusing to deny her crime, Antigone is on her way to the tomb where it will be her punishment to be walled up alive, lamenting that she will die before due time, without a husband, without children, when she adds a more specific reason for her action. She would not have done it for a child or a husband, since either could be replaced in due course, but because her father and mother are both dead, she can never have another brother. This motive, unacceptable to an Enlightenment culture that officially attributes equal rights to all human

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beings, while insisting that we should allot specific value to our partners and children, is the irresistible, unalterable ‘law’ by which Antigone claims to have acted (lines 908–14).6

Her brother, born of the same womb to the same father, is thereby unique. A man must be buried; this distinguishes human beings from the animals. But it is because he was her brother, and irreplaceable, that Antigone had to be the one to break the law of the land to do it. And why does Polynices have this unique value, Lacan asks. Because language names him, and thereby makes him human. ‘What is, is,’ Lacan affirms, and this fact is ‘ineffaceable y from the moment when the emergent signifier freezes it like a fixed object’.7 The organic bond between a sister and an irreplaceable brother becomes absolute when the signifier fixes it as knowable. And this is so regardless of anything Polynices may have done to deserve Creon’s penalty.

Antigone, Lacan insists, wants to live. Desire, the Chorus tells us, in accordance with the Greek idea, comes from the eyes of a beautiful woman and inflames Haemon, who follows her into the tomb. But she is driven to die, nevertheless, by an ‘unwritten and unfailing’ law (lines 450–57), which in Lacan’s account is ‘not developed in any signifying chain’.8 This imperative, the compulsion of the drive, survives in the human being as the representative in the psyche of an instinct, or what Freud calls a stimulus ‘originating from within the organism and reaching the mind’. The drive operates ‘on the frontier between the mental and the somatic’,9 and it is towards an overt encounter with this frontier that, Lacan argues, Creon’s prohibition propels Antigone.

Prior to any ultimate signified, to the theme of the Oedipus complex and its consequences, psychoanalysis perceives human life as lived on that frontier between the organism that we inextricably are and the signifying subject, consciousness redoubled with the unconscious, that language makes us. From the earliest writings on hysteria, the symptoms of psychical disturbance are marked on the body as unexplained coughs, or paralyses that have no organic cause, while the ‘cure’ takes place at the level of speech. We may perceive ourselves as minds or bodies, or as minds and bodies, but psychoanalysis insists on the incursion of the one into the other to form a speaking being, which is never at peace with itself, never a homogeneous ‘whole’, and therefore always potentially tragic. The extremity, the liminal character, of Antigone’s situation, fatally isolating the drive in its unconditionality, throws that incursion into relief, and she thus appears, Lacan argues, ‘as a pure and simple relationship of the human being with that of which he or she miraculously turns out to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut’.

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The effect, however, he continues, is not only tragic but also heroic, since it is exactly this paradox of human life that confers on us the insurmountable power of remaining, in the face of everything that may oppose us, what we are.10 The implication of Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone and, indeed, the inference from Lacanian psychoanalysis in general, is that the signifying cut, introducing into the little human animal the language that always pre-exists us, makes us what we are, the organism and the signifier inextricably woven together in the drive that endows us with the capacity for heroism (and its alternatives). Language, in this account, the material of critical practice, which makes possible thought, speech, writing, subjectivity, is as much a part of our existence as flesh and blood. Not many disciplines know this y

If psychoanalysis is right, the signifier is a good deal more than the instrument of a thematic content. Instead, it can wrench, seduce and unnerve us, make us cry, or motivate action, in short, get under our skin, since that is where it is to be found already. Texts form relationships with us: they construct positions for readers to occupy; and they are able to constitute us for the duration, and perhaps longer, as gratified, desiring, dissatisfied or restless. In this account, reading can entail more than deciphering, and more than unmasking, though it may include both. If we are prepared to be sufficiently ambitious, reading as critical practice could come to represent an encounter with the limits of the human condition.

Notes

1 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Cape, 1972), 116. 2 Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson,

Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 375. 3 See Sarah Kofman’s brilliant essay, ‘The Double is/and the Devil: The

Uncanniness of The Sandman (Der Sandmann), Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 119–62 (p. 159).

4 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 658.

5 See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 312.

6 Sophocles, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

7 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar 7, 1959–60), trans. Dennis Porter (London: Tavistock: Routledge, 1992), 279.

8 Lacan, Ethics, 278.

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9 Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans., James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmonds- worth: Penguin Books, 1984), 118.

10 Lacan, Ethics, p. 282.

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