The Deed of Reading

Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy

Garrett Stewart

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501701696
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Garrett Stewart begins The Deed of Reading with a memory of his first hesitant confrontation, as a teenager, with poetic density. In that early verbal challenge he finds one driving force of literature: to make language young again in its surprise, coming alive in each new event of reading. But what exactly happens in the textual encounter to make literary phrasing resonate so deeply with readers?

To take the measure of literary writing, The Deed of Reading convenes diverse philosophic commentary on the linguistics of literature, with stress on the complementary work of Stanley Cavell and Giorgio Agamben. Sympathetic to recent ventures in form-attentive analysis but resisting an emphasis on so-called surface reading, Stewart explores not some new formalism but the internal pressures of language in formation, registering the verbal infrastructure of literary prose as well as verse. In this mode of "contextual" reading, the context is language itself. Literary phrasing, tapping the speech act's own generative pulse, emerges as a latent philosophy of language in its own right, whereby human subjects, finding no secure place to situate themselves within language, settle for its taking place in, through, and between them.

Stewart watches and hears this dynamics of wording played out in dozens of poems and novels over two centuries of English literary production—from Wordsworth and Shelley to Browning and Hopkins, from Poe and Dickens through George Eliot, Conrad, James, and on to Toni Morrison. The Deed of Reading offers a revisionary contribution to the ethic of verbal attention in the grip of "deep reading."

PART I

TOWARD A FORMATIVE POETICS

1

INDUCTION

I go back in memory, then, to my hometown’s well-stocked and long-gone local bookshop, with its fuss-budget and anything but avuncular owner, at least as inquisitive as his patrons, who was always seeming to scope out your roving interests over his bifocals. It was the California of the Beach Boys, not yet the Beatles. And there in Laguna Beach, a newly transplanted and misfit high school student from the other coast, I began my first sustained bookstore romance, a few blocks walking distance from the family house—and continents away. A rather desperately compensatory romance? Sublimated teen solitude and angst? What else was literature for? Then as now, Laguna was a resort town never known for resorting overmuch to books, even beach reading; I was mostly alone there when I stopped at the bookstore; rarely saw anyone I knew; hardly anyone more than once. For me it was a zone apart—and twice over. Planning to be an architect from early in high school, I started looking to literature for something else—but something no less structured, no less a built environment, as I soon realized: a world of distant and shifting horizons, certainly, but also a crafted shelter.

Then, too, the wannabe designer in me loved the graphics of the covers, among them (as it happens) the giant 7 of that ambiguity book. And, a little later, the newly venturesome reader in me came to love ambiguity as a name for my own uncertainties and second thoughts. Who knew this poverty of confidence could be thought of as philosophically rich? I can still spottily document this first flush of serious reading with mental sales receipts, from Tolstoy to Faulkner to, among the philosophy books in the next alcove, E. M. Cioran and those heady answers of Sartre’s to “What is literature?,” including the first books of poetry I sparingly bought. If this last indulgence in particular felt, on a movie usher’s salary, almost like paying by the word, maybe that’s part of why they counted so much for me, those word-by-word productions.

Because will and wallet knew their limitations, the bookstore was more a guilty pleasure than edifying, all that browsing with so little uptake. Like overindulging, with no intention to shell out, in those record-shop listening booths a few doors away. Back down the block in the far less busy bookstore, it often seemed like snooping rather than perusing. So I felt obliged to buy at somewhat regular, if carefully spaced, intervals: stabs in the dark for the light. While, all the while, I kept on combing the seemingly endless shelves. Existentialism looked fiercely important whenever I looked into it, and I loved the big novels, not the small ones. But poetry had its special scent, and there I wanted the small books and, in them, the short poems. Challenges one might come up to—or wouldn’t have to fail at for long. Some purchases didn’t repay my arbitrary selection. I remember having a go at scaling the smallest (and cheapest) book of poems I could find, the diminutive format of Lord Weary’s Castle, and though I could tell Robert Lowell had something, I wasn’t sure what, and I further suspected, in my callowness, how the lord of that keep must have come by his name. My experiments were hit and miss, to be sure, and the misses not always near.

But sometimes the earth moved. I must have been just the right age and temperament to be smitten. In any case, the next collection of poems I cottoned to and took home, very much despite its blandly designed paperback cover, had hooked me by its title alone—the first and interesting half of it, that is, but as contaminated grammatically by what followed: Richard Wilbur’s The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. Two plurals, I at first assumed: something about changes and then a batch of other poems. Much to explore. Skimming through it, I loved right away the sound of the bunched phrases, that tuneful diction and rhythmic pattern, its lucid music. A rapid caveat, though: if the once-celebrated Wilbur—mainstream, accessible, New Yorker-friendly, Pulitzer-Prized, and laureate-aureoled—is no longer to anyone’s exact taste, that shouldn’t deter the experiment in recovered literary memory I’ve embarked on. I don’t choose Wilbur now for any reason except that I chose him then, hoping to show here how writing like his, as with greater and more demanding poetry, can work its quiet magic on an unjaded imagination. It doesn’t have to be a triumphant poem, just a good-enough one, and certainly not necessarily an edgy one, to plough certain willing furrows in the topsoil of the teenage imagination (or say, the student sensibility). For our present use, the single poem lifted from memory, no matter how dated in its aesthetic, how overpolished, needs only to be demanding enough to sustain a rudimentary ethic of attention. Wilbur’s short poem certainly is—and does, especially in its difficult last moves.

Back then, the issue was simpler. I was just curious. Was the first half of the title the key to it all? The beautiful changes—as opposed to the other kind, the ugly or sad or defeating ones? Which particular transformations does the poet have in mind? Will each of the poems answer, one by one? These are the sort of questions those three words set going as I parted the volume, well before I looked for and found the title verses waiting at the end as capstone. So why not begin with that, even if Wilbur didn’t? Temporarily moored in my room for the foray, I hoped such a last but surely not least poem, given its status as volume title, would be an economical place to start in sating those first curiosities about the title. It did answer some of my questions, but only by undoing the very language that prompted them—only by in fact changing the title not once but twice at least in the self-adjusted lens of the poem’s unfolding grammar. Long before I would hear the prefix in a college literature class, and learn gingerly to deploy it, I was about to have my first rendezvous with the meta.

But every way I put this sounds too cerebral, I realize, even when I stress my tendency to be flummoxed at first with certain literary densities. In my routine teen alienation, taking up (with) poetry was neither a program nor a mission. I was just there for the duration, so to speak: the respite from pressures less appealing than abutted words and the time it took for their sorting out. The tugs and drags of dailiness weren’t, of course, shut out at the closing of my door, let alone by the opening of my poetry book—much as I might have liked them to be at times. But amid the idiocies and anguishes of a teenage commerce with the world, and most of all its gnawing uncertainties, here was some restorative “time out”: call it a way of doubting oneself productively, where missteps might feel like a circuitous progress. To put stress on the stresses and strains of reading, then, by way of generalization: whatever refuge it may be locally used for, the supposed escapism of literature can be just the opposite—given the demands it makes, the regimen it inflicts.

So here’s what, come upon under the title The Beautiful Changes, I bore down on as best I could:

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Amid this ongoing mesh of both rhyming echo and quieter chime, its patterns matched to sound and sense alike, even the first-eyed and only apparent parallelism would have braked my young progress, since the figurative floral (lake)bed does not so much slip and slide in response to the walker’s commotion as, in the turning of two adjacent lines, it “glides” so that it “turns” solid matter into liquid perception. Even seemingly equivalent verb forms thus turn out, in process, to be differently formatted, the indicated doing toppling at the hinge of its own monosyllable into a doing unto—and in precisely the undoing of hasty grammatical assumptions. Within such an ongoing syntactic lacework of unexpected verbal loops and joins, it is this intrinsic slipperiness in the poem’s first ad hoc grammar lesson, this early tutorial in the mutable, that sets the template for the balancing act to come in the next two stanzas.

Changes Wrung: A Mutability Canto

Though soon taken by grammatical surprise in the Wilbur poem, I was in some sense emotionally prepared for it. For it was indeed the quick-change artistry of literary writing that I was developing a hankering for. With such a fondness for instabilities, it’s a good thing I didn’t in fact become an architect. As The Beautiful Changes did its work on me, its relish for the kinetic and unsettled is what seemed epitomized at the smallest compass in the poem’s now phrasal, now clausal title (a distinction that came easily enough in junior high grammar class). And if those “nows” of mine, just now, are taken as sequential, rather than as marking copresent alternatives, they rehearse my own change of mind in first assuming that a nominal rather than verbal sense was the guiding one, the default option: something on the model of “the beautiful transitions,” well before “transition” was to anyone’s ear (lucky us back then) a verb.

The titular changes are to be divided, I find, across the three short stanzas, with one ear-catching moment in each, beginning when—at the end of the first, with a meadow described as undulating like a “lake”—the speaker compares this to the landscape of desire, whereby “the slightest shade of you / Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.” I may have known the term “alliteration” by then, probably not “assonance,” but certainly not a name for the “phonetic chiasm” that inverts “fabul” in that lulu of a sound pool spilling over into “blue Lucernes”—and then getting swirled up into “the beautiful” of the next stanza. Though without words for such an effect, something like that would have occurred to me—or better to say, have occurred in the words for me. Or maybe not. Maybe I just let all this wash over me as confirming the beautiful and its changes, its verbal as well as visual transformations, its wavelike rippling. Conscious recognition is certainly not the point in my looking back. And I wouldn’t have fretted then about a lack of descriptive vocabulary in my attempt to account for what I thought—or, better, felt—was going on. But I might have sensed, nonetheless, that the potential analogy marked by “as” could just as well be an adverb instead, indicating a prompting simultaneity—across the links of natural impulse—in the turn from perception to desire: “as” for both “like” and “while” the mind is contoured by the force (the “valleying” depth) of the lover’s image. This doubleness is so aptly grooved into the thematics of the poem that it dictates its split terms to the next “as,” too, at the start of the second stanza (“as a forest is changed”), the phrase hovering not just between simultaneity and similitude but between established principle and further instance.

What did I once make of the way it is the “slightest shade of you”—with the further overtone “shade of hue”—that irrigates the ensuing u-phony? Homophone as punning pleonasm? Hardly. Those words, too, came later. For now, I had only Wilbur’s. And of course I was still only a few lines in, the second stanza merely broached. So far, the changes in play have been primarily the shifts from passive perception to active transformation, then from observation into analogy, levitated and propelled by the onward rotation of phonetic echo. In the remaining two stanzas, the adjustments are to be bolder and more intrinsically linguistic, from anomalous spelling to bent and doubled-back syntax. To this point, at least, the first stanza would have sustained my sense of the title as a phrase. The pertinent changes are those tricks of the eye (captured by flickering glints of the ear) that turn reality itself into a kind of play on worlds. Soon enough, though, the title’s adjective submits to internal modification, changes its spots—like the adaptive coloration described in its next and central stanza.

I’ve been making no attempt, these many decades later, to retrace the exact trip-ups and impasses of my grammatical decoding in those curious days, a decipherment all too fumbling, partial, and hazy. Would if I could, for illustration’s sake, but can’t. I can only write this up, write it out, in the terms I have come to learn for it—or at least in the anticipation of such terms. And have learned not just for but from it—from it and its kind. So I mean first of all to keep discussion of this one poem in touch with a certain early stage of wonder, both awe and bafflement, that literary writing often recreates in us, any of us, in later years, making words themselves young again, tentative, searching, even awkward at times as they seek their surer direction. Holding true in commentary to the text’s way (and waywardness) with words, even a later analytic precision of the sort invading my paragraphs here can hardly help but summon up again that oscillatory shimmer, that veiled and spaced disclosure, so fetching to the linguistic libido of a novice reader whose urges for once were deliciously reciprocated by the page.

The complexities of our tongue may be new to us only once biographically. But literature can help renew such sensations each time out—and long before a philosophy of language like Giorgio Agamben’s, wed to his poetics, teaches us how that renewal reaches to the very depth of homo loquens. Such plumbed ontology is not unrelated to the renewal, as it turns out, that is also the explicit theme of Wilbur’s one poem, as we are still on the move toward recognizing. And retracing the stages of this process, I now see in categorical terms what I might then have sensed, at best, merely as the necessary agility of attention in gliding from one mode of surprise to another. For after the heavily phonetic climax of the first stanza, the crux of the second depends on a more exclusively graphic transformation, with the third combining lettering and phonetics at a thickened pivot point before breaking out into the full span of an ambiguous grammatical cascade.

Chameleon Turns

Even slips of the silent tongue can be part of this revived changeling force of language in process, with all its staged upendings of expectation. And so the second stanza, shifting from meadow to arboreal setting, launches forth in the continued evocation of a generalized bucolic perspective: “The beautiful changes as a forest is changed / By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it.” How could I have avoided mistaking the word “tuning” for the more immediate hook of “turning”—especially with that trick “turns” of the first stanza still in echoing earshot? I must have committed this slip first time through, since I still do now every other time I look back at these lines. Here, then, unsaid—or at least unwritten—is the chameleon turning green under the rubric of beauty’s very predication as change, while bringing with it the implied musical resonance of harmonic correlation as a metaphor for the complementary “tones” of insect and foliage in their chiming pigmentation. Synesthesia lay in wait for me as a term. But here I was tripping over it in action. And given the passive phrasing at line’s end (“is changed”), derived from some transitive form or impetus (I hadn’t then heard of “transformational grammar” either), I would have sensed (if not identified) the active chameleon work of enhancing further a summer’s ambient green. This forest metamorphosis is thereby singled out not just as one of the beautiful changes, plural, but one of the ways the beautiful—singular and categorical and engulfing—not only changes in itself but changes those aspects of the world to which it is attributed. So, then, have three entailed senses of the poet’s entitled word rung changes upon its own linguistic function.

To what extent one needed in high school to be good at grammar in order to register these waverings and undertows, I’ll never be sure. Years of teaching since do suggest that it is easier to get students to notice something out of the way if they have clearly in mind certain norms by which to c...