Close Reading: The Basics

David Greenham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351356930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Close reading is the most essential skill that literature students continue to develop across the full length of their studies. This book is the ideal guide to the practice, providing a methodology that can be used for poetry, novels, drama, and beyond. Using classic works of literature, such as Hamlet and The Great Gatsby as case studies, David Greenham presents a unique, contextual approach to close reading, while addressing key questions such as:

• 
  
  

• What is close reading?

• 
  
  

• What is the importance of the relationships between words?

• 
  
  

• How can close reading enhance reading pleasure?

• 
  
  

• Is there a method of close reading that works for all literary genres?

• 
  
  

• How can close reading unlock complexity?

• 
  
  

• How does the practice of close reading relate to other theoretical and critical approaches?

Close Reading: The Basics is formulated to bring together reading pleasure and analytic techniques that will engage the student of literature and enhance their reading experience.

Seven Pleasures of Reading

Pleasure 1: beginnings

A well-known book begins as follows:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

(11)

Why have these words proven so consistently pleasurable to so many that, even as a child, they’ll take the trip into that unknown hole? Well, first, almost every word makes immediate sense, creates easily imagined pictures and associations and thus a recognisable space. It also appeals to the senses: sight, touch, smell. The phrasing is nicely balanced, more or less rhythmical (‘In a hole/in the ground’); and the gently iterated negations (‘not’, ‘nor’, ‘nothing’) take each of our simple familiar mental pictures and feelings and deny their relevance, leaving a wonderful blank space to fill. Enlivening it all is the allure of strangeness contained in that one provocative word, used twice, that in contrast to all the rest will resist instant understanding: ‘hobbit’. It’s a bit like ‘rabbit’ and rabbits live in holes, but they live in the holes which are counted out by the storyteller – either wet and filled with the ends of worms or, more likely, dry and bare. A ‘hobbit-hole’ is clearly something different from just a ‘hole’. A hobbit, then, is something new to our reading experience, and we want to go down into its hole to find out just what ‘it’ is. One further detail in the passage is crucial: when we get there we are told we’ll be somewhere comfortable. This brief journey of two sentences takes us away from our own space and delivers us to a safe place – a place of ‘comfort’ with seats and food. So, by the time we’ve got to the end of the second sentence, we’ve forgotten we are reading a book. Instead we are travelling into an environment that is new and yet, along with its strangeness, beguilingly promises safety.

The book carries on in this vein as it develops our picture of this world:

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots of pegs for hats and coats – the hobbit was fond of visitors.

(11)

We are stood at the door, then we are whisked inside and all but asked to take off our hat and coat, and then we look around the tiled and carpeted hall and admire the wood panelling. But there’s still some strangeness. The door is ‘round’; the hall ‘tube-shaped.’ This is not, then, a ‘human’ space – we humans, at least in the modern English-speaking world, tend to use rectangles for our homes. But it is also not made by an animal, as the door is not just round it is ‘perfectly’ round, with a knob in the ‘exact’ middle; likewise, the chairs are ‘polished.’ This is an eminently civilised kind of strangeness. In just a few lines there’s something familiar yet different enough to create the necessary frisson for a particular kind of pleasure. As we read we are gently unsettled: just off balance enough to topple into the unfolding story.

Now, most people who enjoy reading will have heard of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but the story the book tells will only become familiar through reading it. Not all stories are like that. Some are familiar even before we pick up the book that contains them. They are a part of our cultural store, so to speak. A story that is even more well-known than The Hobbit begins as follows:

Two households both alike in dignity,

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene)

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

(1.0.1–4)

While being taken into the strange comforts of Bilbo’s hobbit-hole can give us the delights of the new, going back to Verona and the setting of Romeo and Juliet takes us into an archetype: a story so recognisable to Western culture that its rediscovery takes some effort. But there are, from the beginning, pleasures to be found, even if they are more hard won. Here it’s in the wordplay. For example, in this Prologue the word ‘scene’ is used in two different ways – the scene of Verona as a setting and the scene of the play as a play. ‘Civil’ likewise fragments into the meanings of the ‘citizens’ whose blood will be spilt and the ‘politeness’ (civility) that will be rendered unclean. Romeo and Juliet is a play about division in a city and in a language. The Prologue to the play gives us a new pleasure – that of the play of language. Even so, this is hardly primary, and though we may enjoy it, such detail could just as easily pass us by. What really draws us to Romeo and Juliet is a sense of fatalism: we know – just as Shakespeare’s first audience did – that the ‘star-crossed lovers’ will ‘take their life’ (1.0.6); and even if we didn’t the Prologue tells us of ‘The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love.’ (1.0.9) The beginning of this play already contains its end. It is strange how the knowledge of what will happen in a literary work doesn’t necessarily detract from our enjoyment. Indeed, it can enhance it, allowing us to enjoy the unfolding tragedy without the shock that the loss of two young lives should create at the close of the play’s ‘two hours’ traffic’. (1.0.12) Re-reading, which enables you to return to a book with a better sense of it each time, is one of reading’s chief pleasures.

Contexts of close reading: beginnings

In this first chapter my aim is to relate the pleasures of reading to the contexts of close reading that were outlined in the Introduction. These boxes will make that relationship explicit and give you a sense of how the later chapters of this guide will unfold.

Pleasure in these first two examples is derived from the way we grasp the words on the page. The ‘Prologue’ to Romeo and Juliet takes two words, ‘scene’ and ‘civil’, and uses their semantic context to allow at least two meanings for each word to be at work. The semantic context is, basically, any plausible dictionary definition or relevant usage of a word. Shakespeare’s use of it here is deliberately, and enjoyably, ambiguous. Tolkien, on the other hand, has invented a word that has no dictionary definition. Therefore, its semantic context isn’t something we know in advance or can just look up. To begin to understand the word ‘hobbit’ we need to make use of the surrounding words, that is, its syntactic context. It is words like ‘hole’, ‘comfort’, ‘carpeted’, ‘polished chairs’, that, by association, will start to help us to anticipate what the word ‘hobbit’ may come to mean. That is, our pleasure relies on the determination of the semantic context of ‘hobbit’ in relation to its syntactic context (more on which in Chapters 2 and 3). Of course, there are other contexts that are important. If we think about the generic context, we can immediately see how important that is. If we know we are reading a tragedy, such as Romeo and Juliet, then an unhappy ending will hardly be a surprise – indeed, it’s part of the pleasure. If we know we are reading a fantasy novel, then beginning to think about what hobbits may be no stretch – indeed to meet something new is the whole point. If we came across a hobbit in Darwin’s Origin of Species, or if Dickens’ Tiny Tim turned out to be small with hairy feet, our credulity would be over-stretched and our enjoyment ruined. The generic context, as we’ll see in Chapter 7, will inevitably direct our attention and our attitude from the outset of our reading. In fact a work’s generic context more than anything else may guide our expectations of reading pleasure.

Pleasure 2: meeting people

So, what does live in such a strangely comfortable hole? We learn a few things about ‘the hobbit’ over its opening pages. His name is the satisfyingly rounded Bilbo Baggins; a name which, once more, mixes the familiar with the odd – Bill is a common name, and there are bags everywhere, so the sounds are everyday. Even so ‘Bilbo’ and ‘Baggins’ rather throws us off. This mixture of the straight forward and the unusual seems to be becoming a theme. Bilbo himself is strung across these poles. On the one hand, the storyteller tells us, ‘You could tell exactly what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him’ (12) and as such he is eminently respectable; but on the other hand, his mother is a Took, and the Tooks (including his mother, Belladonna) not only have ‘adventures’ they are also said to have ‘fairy’ blood in their veins. (13) The teller of the tale makes it very clear that what we are beginning to read ‘is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure’ (12); so we know that both elements of his character, shaped by his inheritance, will compete in what follows and we will enjoy watching them play off against each other. Alongside these personal details, we also learn that hobbits are small (about three feet in height), have curly hair on head and feet, like to laugh, eat and tend to be portly; but also that they are wary, have ‘long clever brown fingers’ (13), and can move silently and all but invisibly when the ‘large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along’ (12). So, this world isn’t so far removed from our own; though hobbits are rarely seen in it.

Almost incidentally, through the reference to fairies in Bilbo’s ancestry, we are introduced to the idea of magic; but also to the kind of ‘everyday’ magic that helps hobbits ‘disappear’ easily when people stumble upon them. In the subsequent pages we are presented with a ‘wizard’: Gandalf. His introduction is rather enigmatic: ‘If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard a very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale. Tales and adventures sprouted up all over the place wherever he went’ (14). In many ways nothing at all is said here – Gandalf is announced through tempting rumours. But we do get a short description to fill this out: ‘He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots’ (14). So, this catalyst for adventure, in a familiar wizard’s hat, and with a familiar wizard’s beard, stands outside Bilbo’s round green door in the exact spot that we, as a reader on the threshold, stood just a few minutes earlier (in reading time, anyway):

‘Good morning!’ said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?’

‘All of them at once,’ said Bilbo.

(14–15)

Gandalf’s role seems to be to unsettle things – that has been made clear by the attractive way that tales and adventures ‘sprout up’ wherever he goes. But he begins by doing nothing more adventurous than unsettling language (though that may turn out to prove the greatest adventure of all). Saying ‘Good morning!’ is not meant to elicit any other response than an equally banal echo – even when, as here, it somehow reflects the qualities of the day. Gandalf interrogates it, offering four different interpretations of Bilbo’s bland greeting; meanwhile staring, with just a touch of threat, from under his remarkably extensive eyebrows. This challenges Bilbo’s conventionality, just as it is meant to do. However, Bilbo is quite equal to it, and disarms Gandalf with his pleasant ‘All of them at once.’ He’s not going to let a little ambiguity unsettle him on such a fine morning. Gandalf, though, is also not ready to be put off his stride. He has seen in Bilbo’s ‘clever’ fingers, his ability to become almost invisible and to move silently, the characteristics of a ‘burglar’; add to that the adventurous qualities of Bilbo’s Tookish blood and he has found just what he’s looking for: ‘someone to share in an adventure that [he’s] arranging’ (15). And so it begins: ‘something Tookish woke up inside him’ (28) and Gandalf has found his burglar; he will also have stirred something Tookish inside the reader and our own desire for adventure will have awoken from its Bagginsish slumber. The marks on the page will have quite disappeared from view, and the vistas of Middle-Earth will open before us.

A great deal of Bilbo’s character could be inferred from his home, especially its comforts and familiarities; even more from his physical description. In reading a Shakespeare play we really don’t get any of this. Instead we gain knowledge of character solely through people talking. Such as when Romeo’s father, Montague, says of him:

Away from light steals home my heavy son

And private in his chamber pens himself,

Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out

And makes himself an artificial night.

(1.1.135–138)

We get a pretty clear picture of a depressed teenager – one familiar to many parents and one that can be recollected by many more young readers. But again, there is something playful, even in the description of Romeo’s melancholy, which offers itself to our enjoyment. Take the way ‘light’, which in this context can only mean illumination, is set against ‘heavy’ to bring out another latent meaning. And ‘heavy’, of course, does not refer to weight, but rather to gloom – it is being used metaphorically. In this play words are often pointing away from their ordinary meanings, being enlivened and animated, so even when ambiguity is not to the purpose, Shakespeare’s characters wake us up to its possibilities and draw attention to ideas, such as light and dark, that will echo throughout the play.

Contexts of close reading: meeting people

In reading plays or novels character emerges, again, only from language. The semantic context is crucial as it is the potential meanings of particular words that will shape our characters. As we have seen at first a word like ‘hobbit’ doesn’t have a semantic context, but after a few pages it begins to. We are, indeed, given a general description that could be a dictionary definition: short, hairy-footed, curly-haired, portly, quick-fingered, quick to laugh, and wary. From eight or ten words we are able to create a picture of something that doesn’t exist. This works because of our intuitive understanding of what it often considered quite a complex example of figurative language called synecdoche, where parts of things stand for wholes. Our experience with how stories work makes us assume, for example, that there is a face beneath the curly hair and a mouth that laughs even though they are not mentioned, and that the feet are attached to the portly body by legs which, again, though unmentioned are imagined to be short. Words like ‘wary’ work in a similar way to suggest a kind of nervous energy which we set in juxtaposition to portliness. Out of the semantic contexts of more familiar words we can create things that are new. Romeo’s description also emerges through figurative language. Here it is the semantic context of metaphor. Romeo, we assume, is not ‘heavy’, but rather depressed. Heavy is used metaphorically. But his character emerges, in contrast to this weight, through light word-play (a feature of the play as a whole). What also emerges in these extracts are two of the stories’ thematic contexts. In The Hobbit this is the conflict between the Baggins and the Took, the settled and the unsettled. In Romeo and Juliet it’s the theme of light and dark which will transform into love and death. As you’ll see in Chapter 3, the thematic context becomes more and more important. In most cases it is the thematic context that helps us to judge which aspects of any text are most likely to have value for our close reading.

Pleasure 3: creating a world of words

What we are starting to see emerge here is one of the key tensions to be explored in this book: the tension between what we can intuitively enjoy and w...