English, 2013, vol. 62 no. 237, pp. 127–144
doi:10.1093/english/eft004
M O N E Y TA L K S : C L A S S E S ,
C A P I TA L , A N D T H E C A S E O F
C LO S E R E A D I N G I N A
SEMINAR ON THE MERCHANT
OF VENICE 1
Susan Bruce*
Abstract
Embraced by the New Critics as the fundamental method of literary interpretation, later to be rejected as a fundamentally conservative one by theoretical critics of the 1980s, the politics of close reading have always been
contested in accounts of the discipline of English. Within the classroom,
its value has been championed more consistently, and recent interventions
in scholarly debate over its politics have claimed that its employment in
the teaching of English is democratizing and anti-authoritarian. This essay
situates that debate in the context of an actual university seminar on The
Merchant of Venice. I examine how students appropriate or reject the strategy
of close reading in that discussion and contextualize their choices not only
in the way that their respective associations between rhetoric and ethos arguably reflect differences in their individual self-conceptions or habitus but
also in the ethically charged debate between Launcelot Gobbo and Lorenzo
that associates ‘plain’ speech with the honest and straightforward and
‘tricksy words’ with the frustration of matter and meaning. The oppositions between the merits of cultural and liquid capital that circulate in the
students’ discussion of the play, I argue, betoken a wider contest over
whether ‘value’ inheres more deeply in subtle and undelimited meanings,
or in what is quantifiable and immediately transparent, a question as pertinent to Merchant itself, as it is to the world in which we teach it today.
It may be the case that pedagogy has consistently retained some attachment
to close reading, even through those darkest of historicist times when, to
1
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
* Correspondence to Susan Bruce, Keele University
# The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association;
all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
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some, as Russ McDonald remarked in 1994, ‘the empire of Context
[seemed] . . . as vast as the dominion of Exegesis ever was’.2 ‘How I teach
now is actually not terribly different from how I taught when I began teaching twenty-three years ago’, noted Michael Bérubé more recently, in 2009:
‘I still want [undergraduates] to read closely, to reflect on what it means to
read closely, and to compose coherent arguments about literary texts’.3 The
enduring appeal of close reading remains manifest in the attitudes of UK
practitioners as well as US ones. Before its untimely demise, the UK English
Subject Centre used annually to run training weekends for career-young teachers of English in British HE; at the penultimate one, participants, when
asked, unanimously declared close reading to be a skill crucial, perhaps even
central, not merely to the courses that they individually taught but more
generally to their conception of what was of core value in an English
Literature degree.
A straw poll of a small cohort of new English lecturers in one country is
not an extensive survey, certainly, but this is not the only instance where attachment to the value of this particular literary method has united critics of
otherwise very different theoretical persuasions.4 The unambiguous
2
3
4
Russ McDonald, Shakespeare ReRead: The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1994), p. 3. McDonald alludes to Hartman’s earlier attack on New Criticism.
Michael Bérubé, ‘Conventional Wisdom’, Profession (2009), 11 –18 (p. 11).
A similar course, run by the Council for College and University English in 2011, evidenced the same unanimous agreement among its participants that close reading was the
key contribution of English to modes of understanding, being a skill of unique importance
to literary criticism and the teaching of it. Such claims are commonplace in print, too:
Heather Murray, for example, holds it to be ‘integral’ to the discipline, and ‘basic to the
pedagogic practice we tend to value most highly’, so much so that it is almost ‘a synecdoche for the English essay’ in the UK, Canada, and the USA: Heather Murray, ‘Close
Reading, Closed Reading’, College English (1991), 195 –208 (p. 195). An English Subject
Centre [The Halcrow Group with Jane Gawthrope and Philip Martin], Survey of the English
Curriculum and Teaching published in 2003 (,http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/archive/
publications/reports/curr_teach_main_2010.pdf. ), found that ‘Practical Criticism’ was the
fifth most common compulsory element of single and dual honours undergraduate English
degree at Level 1 in 2002 (and might have been even more common than that finding suggests, if elements of it were also included the first and second most popular, ‘Introduction
to the Study of English’ and ‘Critical/ Literary Theory’ (pp. 48 –49). Fifty out of fifty-one
departments surveyed for that report indicated that they thought it important that their students graduate with a knowledge of ‘close reading’, indicating that close reading skills were
level-pegging in importance only with knowledge of the ‘historical, intellectual and cultural contexts’ of literature and held in marginally higher esteem than any other skill nurtured by a degree in English (p. 74). Close reading comes first on the list of subject-specific
skills detailed in the Benchmark Statement for English published by the Quality Assurance
Agency for Higher Education, Benchmark Statement for English (2007) ,http://www.qaa.ac.
uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Documents/English07.pdf..
CLASSES, CAPITAL, AND THE CASE OF CLOSE READING
129
commitment of these early career professionals to the practice of close
reading – or at least, to the practice of teaching it – might be indicative of
something. Perhaps, in pedagogy if not in scholarly writing, close reading
has weathered the storms that beset it in the 1980s and 1990s, seeing off the
challenges from politically motivated attacks (well-intentioned if sometimes
misguided) on what was perceived as New Critical essentialism to enjoy a
new renaissance in the classrooms of today. Close reading, as the online
Purdue University writing lab observes, may, insofar as how we teach our
students is concerned, be ‘making something of a comeback’; other websites
aimed at students are even more unambiguously convinced of the high
status of the practice in undergraduate literary studies today, calling it ‘the
most important skill you need for any form of literary studies’ (commercial
UK website Mantex) or stating that ‘the process of writing an essay usually
begins with the close reading of a text’ (Harvard University crib on essay
writing).5
This loyalty to close reading, so apparent in discussions of the teaching of
English Literature, has not been as consistently obvious a feature of the
written scholarship issuing from English Lit academics, wherein, during the
later 1990s, close textual analysis became sometimes – perhaps even frequently – more noted in the breach than the observance. But a scholarly reiteration of its value to criticism as well as to pedagogy has been
rearticulated more recently in the writings of critics such as Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (2003) and Frank Lentricchia (2003) as well as in many
of the contributions to recent issues of the American trade journal,
Profession, wherein, for example, Peter Brooks and Jane Gallop have maintained, respectively, that ‘a lesson in how to read’ is what the interpretive
humanities ultimately have to offer the public sphere and that ‘the skill of
close reading is central to the value of English and fundamental to the originality of what it has to say about texts and cultural artefacts’.6 This
5
6
Purdue online Writing Lab ,http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/751/01/.; Mantex
,http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/09/14/what-is-close-reading-guidance-notes/.; Harvard
,http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/documents/CloseReading.html. (all accessed 13
October 2011).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003); Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois, Close Reading: The Reader (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003); Andrew Hoberek, ‘On Fish and Humanist Method’,
Profession (2009), 75– 83; Peter Brooks, ‘The Humanities as an Export Commodity’,
Profession (2008), 33 –39 (p. 35); Jane Gallop, ‘The Historicization of Literary Studies and
the Fate of Close Reading’, Profession (2007), 181– 86 (p. 184). As Don Bialostosky
remarks, the term ‘close reading’ is now invoked to cover a plethora of different reading
practices: Don Bialostosky, ‘Should College English Be Close Reading?’, College English
(2006), 111 –16 (p. 114). Spivak’s understanding of the term in particular is, many might
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reassessment of the value of close reading to scholarship as well as to pedagogy may signal a reaction to the mode of enquiry that came to dominate
literary criticism over the last two decades, especially insofar as subdisciplines
such as early modern studies are concerned. Itself a retreat from the political
criticism of the last decades of the 1980s and early 1990s, this (now hegemonic) method often eschews both close readings and political engagement
(which it sometimes characterizes as ‘presentist’ and therefore lacking in objectivity)7 in favour of a historicism more ‘scholarly’ and more archival than
the more heavily theoretical methods8 that preceded it (and, some might
say, more akin to an Old historicism than to the New). And since those
earlier political criticisms were in turn (if only in part) a reaction to the
New Critical precepts hegemonic in the discipline throughout the greater
part of the twentieth century, it may be the case that we are about to come
full circle, returning to the point from whence we began.
It is worthy of remark, and germane to what I’ll have to say later in this
essay, that since voice of ‘Eng. Lit.’ is for the most part a liberal one, it is a
liberal politics that has generated most of the attacks on New Criticism and
close reading, as well as a good many of the defences of it. ‘Liberal’, of
course, is a notoriously slippery term, which can denote a considerable
7
8
argue, somewhat idiosyncratic. As I use the term in this essay, I mean to indicate a selfconscious attention to ‘the words on the page’, as well as the way a reader might weave
those words into her own descriptions as she argues her case, a rhetorical strategy which, in
echoing the words of a text itself in an analysis of it, serves the purpose of implying a congruence between that text and the argument being made about it. I thus use the term in
contrast to a method that might depend more radically on content or plot alone in its
reading of a text. I should make it clear that my interest here is in which students use the
skills of close reading and which do not, and what that might tell us about the old arguments about the politics of the practice, not in how the practice is taught in British HEIs.
See, for example, Tom Healy, who complains in a state-of-the-discipline article that:
‘a new critical “presentism” is manifesting itself, rejecting the historical placing of texts and
insisting that they be experienced with the context of current critical preoccupations;. . .
pedagogically too’, he goes on, ‘in recent years there has been a shift in many British
schools from teaching English Literature as fundamentally a critical discipline training students’ in the close reading of texts to a creative discipline in which literary contexts present
opportunities for students own imaginative self-expression’. Tom Healy, ‘Mapping the
Current Critical Landscape: Returning to the Renaissance’, in The Renaissance Literature
Handbook, ed. by Susan Bruce and Rebecca Steinberger (London: Continuum, 2009),
pp. 175 –88 (p. 187).
I use ‘theoretical’ inclusively here, to denote the various methods of the 1980s and 1990s –
deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and new historicism – and as an indication that I am distinguishing all of these kinds of criticism from the kind of historicism
that now predominates in scholarly production today, especially but not exclusively in early
modern criticism.
CLASSES, CAPITAL, AND THE CASE OF CLOSE READING
131
range of the Western political spectrum: the centrism implied in its adoption
by parties such as the Liberal Democrats, for instance, but also a broadly
right-wing stance, libertarian insofar as attitudes to the market are concerned (as in neoliberalism, to which we’ll later return); right through to
the left-leaning politics implied, for instance, by its contrast in North
American political discourse with the term ‘conservative’ (in which context
it sometimes denotes a politics one step shy of the radical left). Here, I’m
using it in the sense of ‘left-leaning’ for the politics of the post-1970s
defences and attacks on the New Criticism generally took it as axiomatic
that English ought to avoid élitism and hierarchies of various kinds (of
value, for example, or class) and instead embrace or embody a measure of
political activism, and/or encourage that kind of engagement in its students.
For Paul Bové, for example, writing in the heyday of theoretically driven
academic reaction against New Critical method, practical criticism was ‘fundamentally conservative, even reactionary’. For him, practical criticism ‘takes
its values from the literacy of high culture and hopes to inscribe those values
within new students’; it also ‘makes a hierarchy of those individuals it helps
to form and judges their value in terms of how well these “students” have
internalized [its own] processes and values’.9 John Barrell also saw the practice as fundamentally conservative, linking its concerns with formal and intellectual questions of balance and resolution to an ideology attached to the
interests of the ‘middle class’.10 Even Russ McDonald (who is an adherent
of close reading, and who rejects claims of ‘necessary connection[s] between
formal analysis of a text and any particular political valence’) maintains that
in the 1950s and 1960s, the institutionalization of New Criticism ‘brought
with it a narrowing of critical vision and an increasingly formulaic application of a few principles of literary analysis; . . . [which] . . . coincided with
a general retreat among intellectuals and humanist academicians from the
perilous landscape of post-war politics’.11
Amongst its defenders, but from the same liberal perspective, Gallop
argues something rather different about the New Critical role in the
post-war academy. ‘New Criticism’ in the 1940s, she claims,
was, at least in the classroom, a great leveller of cultural capital and thus [it]
suited the moment, after World War Two, when American universities
greeted large numbers of students who were not from the traditional élite.
9
Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), pp. 53–54.
10
John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988),
pp. 2 –6.
11
McDonald, Shakespeare ReRead, p. 8.
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Where the old literary history favoured students with cultured family backgrounds, close reading in the classroom tended to level the playing field.12
Isobel Armstrong also situates New Criticism in the context of a reaction to
larger geopolitical developments, arguing that Richards’s and Empson’s theoretical interventions were responses to specific political crises wherein the
‘cultural importance of language and communications’ was thrown into
relief by the rise of Fascism.13 For her, as for Gallop, New Criticism manifests a kind of anti-totalitarian reappropriation of linguistic control in response to the politics of the extreme right. In Gallop’s account, close
reading is a democratic and democratizing skill, its insights as available to
the student from an under-privileged background as they are to those from
the élite, unlike historicist approaches which, necessitating the visit to the
archive in which only the relatively wealthy professor can indulge, thereby
preserve ‘an older, more authoritarian model of transmitting pre-processed
knowledge’. Close reading is, she claims, ‘our most effective anti-authoritarian
pedagogy’.14
It is apparent, then, that liberal critiques of close reading and liberal
defences of it adopt diametrically opposed views of its intrinsic élitism or
lack thereof: for Bové and Barrell, it is fundamentally hierarchical, whereas
for Gallop and Armstrong, it is fundamentally democratic. But how can we
really know whether close reading is ‘a great leveller of cultural capital’ as
Gallop suggests, or, on the contrary, ‘conservative, even reactionary’ in its
deployment in the academy as Bové maintains? What evidence do we have
to allow us to make such claims? Although discussions of close reading as an
interpretative method have addressed its pedagogical role and character in a
way that accounts of other theoretical methods (deconstruction, for
example, or psychoanalysis) have not, they have not looked closely at what
students actually say when they discuss a piece of literature with each other.
Assessments of the politics of close reading – its accessibility to students
from different backgrounds or with different degrees of access to the discourses of power, its reflection or refraction of the hegemonic ideologies
that produced it, or within which it operates, or against which it sets itself –
have traditionally, post-Richards, been conducted largely from the perspectives apparent in the attacks on, or defences of it that I have quoted thus far,
perspectives that are for the most part abstracted from actual examples of
classroom discussions of texts. Even Richards, who was absolutely
12
13
14
Gallop, ‘Historicization of Literary Studies’, p. 184.
Isobel Armstrong, ‘Textual Harassment: the Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close Is
Close?’, Textual Practice, 9.3 (1995), 401 –20 (p. 403).
Gallop, ‘Historicization of Literary Studies’, p. 184.
CLASSES, CAPITAL, AND THE CASE OF CLOSE READING
133
concerned with what students did with texts, confined his evidence mostly
to his students’ writing (rather than, for obvious reasons, to their speech).
What, though, might be added to these claims about the political valence of
close reading if we were to pay close attention to the discourses that students
adopt in their everyday discussions of texts in the university classroom
(which of course – unlike Richards – we can do now, thanks to the dual
benefits of research grants and modern technology)?15 What follows is an
attempt to do just that: to examine the videotaped interventions of two students engaged in an actual discussion in a real university class in a higher
education institution in England, and to assess their subsequent responses to
those interventions when they were later shown the tape of that discussion.
I am not interested here so much in the explicit teaching of close reading as
in the questions of how the skills it offers are utilized in the course of
regular seminar discussion and, for this reason, the seminar I’m going to
analyse here is not ‘about’ close reading. Absent an explicit attention to
close reading, or even encouragement to employ its methods, who adopts
the strategies of close reading, who doesn’t, and what (consciously or unconsciously) might motivate such predilections? Might the answers to these
questions suggest something about the politics of close reading that teachers
have not considered before, or prompt hypotheses different to those that
have emerged from the ‘purer’ theorizing of the critics I’ve mentioned thus
far?
In the interest of addressing these issues, I want to pursue what might be
termed a close reading of a close reading, and in so doing, to pose some
new questions about the potential accessibility of close reading as interpretative method to today’s students in particular, who read English at a time
when the value of studying the Humanities is arguably more contested than
it has ever been before and when the very grounds of valuation are subject
to considerable pressure and change. Much has been written, for example,
on the plight of the Humanities in the face of a new instrumentalism,
where the value of education is increasingly expressed in terms of how
much students are willing to pay for it, what it is likely to earn for them in
15
The project was originally funded by the UK English Subject Centre; we use camcorders.
I am extremely grateful to Ben Knights, Director of the English Subject Centre, for his
ongoing support of the project and, in particular, his advice on this essay. My
co-investigators are Ken Jones and Monica McLean, currently in Education departments
in Goldsmiths and Nottingham, respectively; their contributions to the initial isolation
and discussion of the moments I examine in this essay and their comments on a very early
draft of the essay were invaluable. I’d also, of course, like to thank ‘Barbara’ and her students for their generosity in allowing me to tape their class, and talk to me about it afterwards, and the two anonymous reviewers for English, for their helpful suggestions.
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the employment market post-graduation, and how much their subsequent
labours are likely to contribute to the gross domestic product.16 The most
contentious claim I will be making here is that the ideological forces driving
this shift in the conceptualization of value (of education, but also of much
else) are discernable in the ways that students appropriate or reject close
reading as a mode of interpretation. In examining one concrete instance of
the status of close reading in the discourses of two different individual students, I want to show how constructions of ‘value’ outside the discipline of
English can bear on the discussions that happen within it and to inflect old
debates about the élitism of close reading in a new way. I want also to
suggest that the associations between rhetoric and ethos apparent in the
interventions of these students, and generative of their respective attitudes to
close reading, have very long histories indeed. For underlying their respective choices of interpretative method is an argument over language that not
only has deep connections with the diverse notions of value that students
encounter in contemporary political debate but also, rooted in the past, is
rehearsed in the text that they were studying. In this text – The Merchant of
Venice – can be discerned a much earlier appeal to the very same dichotomy
that the students themselves invoke to justify their respective approaches to
the interpretation of the literary text, as well as an early indication of the
embeddedness of that dichotomy in social and economic, as well as in linguistic, registers.
The material I discuss in the remainder of this essay derives from a conversation that occurred in the course of a seminar on The Merchant of Venice,
which took place in a British university in the autumn of 2007. For ethical
reasons, I have anonymized this university and the students and staff member
who participated in this seminar. However, some information about the institution may be helpful in situating the following discussion. Located in a
rural location on the outskirts of a northern conurbation, this institution
appeared (at the time of taping) at the upper end of the middle quartile of
most aspects of most national league tables. Its entry requirements for
English fell into band 5 on The Guardian league table (that is, between 320
and 400) and almost all of its students were traditional A level entrants,
16
English is of course fond of declaring itself under attack and in crisis, as are the
Humanities more generally; it is unclear whether we really are more beleaguered today,
worldwide, than we have been over the last thirty years. But speaking parochially, we in
the UK can be forgiven for feeling particularly vulnerable at the present moment, in
which Higher Education faces its greatest uncertainty for a generation and Humanities,
rightly or wrongly, feels itself especially vulnerable to the prevailing instrumentalism.
CLASSES, CAPITAL, AND THE CASE OF CLOSE READING
135
reading their degrees on a full-time basis. Its dropout rate was very low, and
its English department included about thirty research-active staff.
This particular seminar was taped in the course of an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between Educationalists and English scholars, which
aims to uncover what is taught and learned in English Literature degrees by
the way of recording (and then together analysing the videos of) undergraduate seminars taking place in a wide range of different Higher
Educational Institutions across the UK.17 We begin our investigations from
the premise that what is communicated in a discussion is generally not confined only to the language in which interventions are articulated, but also
through a much larger variety of semiotic registers. Tones of voice, accents,
‘body language’, for example, may not be observable through a transcription
of dialogue alone, but they are apparent when one watches a film of a conversation, they can materially influence what is communicated in any given
conversation, and they have generated some of the suggestions offered in the
analysis presented below.
The students participating in this particular seminar were third-year students reading English, some in the context of an English only, Single
Honours degree, some in Joint Honours programmes (one was reading
English with History, one with Creative Writing, although we did not find
out what all of the participants were studying). Unusually, this seminar had
been set up by its teacher (Barbara) in the form of a debate: she had divided
her students into two teams and instructed them to ‘pick a Portia’ who
would then articulate the views of her team in prosecuting or defending the
play from the charge of anti-Semitism. The session was taped in its entirety,
after which the moment I will be discussing here was isolated for further exploration by all three participating researchers after we watched the entire
footage twice, first separately, and then together. Later, I returned alone to
the university in question to show the students some extracts from the tape
of their seminar (including the discussion in question here) and to try to ascertain from them whether our interpretations of what was going on in the
17
The Production of University English is more fully described in Susan Bruce, Ken Jones, and
Monica McLean, ‘Some Notes on a Project: Democracy and Authority in the Production
of a Discipline’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition
and Culture, 7.3 (2007), 481 – 500, but in brief: it brings together the expertise of
Educationalists and English Scholars to analyse the nature of what exactly is taught and
learned in English Literary Studies in a range of UK Higher Education Institutions, with
varying institutional cultures and access to resources. Amongst other things, it tries to
develop a novel methodology for the analysis of the interactions that occur in these different educational encounters, which involves extending the methods of analysis the discipline has developed or embraced to the analysis of that pedagogical practice itself. Hence,
here, a close reading of a close reading.
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conversations – the subtexts as well as their manifest content – matched
theirs. The following observations stem both from the seminar itself and
from what the students said about that debate when I returned to ask them
how they viewed it, with hindsight, some months later.
In the particular extract from the seminar which we are interested in here
Lisa begins by arguing that The Merchant of Venice establishes a critical difference between Antonio and Shylock, that this difference is value-laden, and
that that value is signalled to the audience by a poetics that aestheticizes
Antonio’s labour and debases Shylock’s. Her tone as she speaks is a mixture
of hesitance and conviction, the latter quality most pronounced in the final
clause of her first intervention:
Lisa: But though they are both merchants, what they are involved in and how
they are, um . . . Their work is described as very different, Um, like,
Antonio’s worries over his ships are described in very eloquent and s- ssublime language about spices, the . . . spreading out of/on [?] the waves, and
the waves enthroned . . . enthroned with his . . . uh . . . silks. But, uh, Shylock
is the/ a [?] rat sneaking in the dark and the, the . . . sort of, it’s the, . . . It’s
the difference between the sort of glory and beauty of ships and . . . the petty
trafficking that Shylock does: they’re not the same.
Rhianna counters this claim with an appeal to the prestige conferred on
Shylock by his ability immediately to access wealth when wealth is what’s
required. She speaks more forcefully than Lisa and appears to be impatient,
both with an argument that valorizes Antonio when all he is able to do is
‘wait around for a ship’ and – perhaps – with a discourse that tacitly privileges figurative language over the power of the event within the plot:
Rhianna: But at the end of the day the amount of money, as he says it
himself, as he says somewhere, um, would a, would a dog have 3000 ducats to
give you? obviously he’s proving it, the fact that the amount, fair enough,
Antonio has these ships full of spices and silks, but at the end of the day it’s,
it’s Shylock that can just grab 3000 ducats and give them- lend them [indistiguishable]. So obviously Shylock in some ways has, is of, of higher level of, I
can’t describe, commerce, that sort of thing because he has more, he has the
more money available to him.
[Lisa: Sh-]
Rhianna: [Talking over Lisa, not noticing – or not responding to – her
attempts to break in] Whereas Antonio is waiting . . . around for a ship. And
fair enough, if it comes back he’ll have a lot of money, but . . . whereas
Antonio, Antonio has no money at the minute so he can’t- he can’t lend
Bassiano [sic] the money and he has to go to Shylock in the first place. And
it’s Shylock that can just give this money away. . . .
CLASSES, CAPITAL, AND THE CASE OF CLOSE READING
137
[Lisa: Sh-]
Rhianna: . . . without really noticing, so ,trails off.
Rhianna had arguably drawn the short straw here, in having to defend the
case that the immediacy of Shylock’s access to money trumps the cachet
afforded to Antonio and his ships. And however artificial it is to extract a
clip from the fluid, porous space of the seminar (we all know how discussions in seminars circulate and return and are, almost by definition, inconclusive); Lisa seems to get the last word. With quiet conviction, she restates
and concludes her case, ending not just with a reiteration of her main
claims, but also, then, with what we understood (despite the ostensible affirmation with which it is introduced) to be a correction to the teacher’s
attempted gloss on what she is saying:
Lisa: Shylock is a necessary evil. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s at all
respected or gains anything other than the money, whereas Antonio has a lot
of respect for, um, his merchanting and his adventuring.
Barbara: Because it’s more extravagant . . .?
Alannah: And . . .
Lisa: Yeah, ,quieter, trailing to finish. It’s more beautiful.
Lisa never explains what she means here by the claim she finally, after two
successive attempts (‘[Lisa: Sh-]’), manages to utter: that ‘Shylock is a necessary evil’. Perhaps she means that capital presupposes usury; perhaps she
wants to suggest that one of the roles of Shylock’s enterprise is to throw into
relief the nobility of Antonio’s; perhaps she intends to imply that Christian
community in the play is underpinned or reinvigorated by the scapegoating
of ‘the Jew’. What she is clear about though is that Antonio’s cachet derives
not from the relative ostentation of his enterprise (its ‘extravagance’, in
Barbara’s terminology) but from its beauty.
There seems to be quite a lot at stake in this brief exchange. The ground
contested is essentially an argument over the relative merits and status of
liquid versus cultural capital: the two students don’t use these terms, but
those appear to be the concepts they are invoking. But what is not apparent
from the transcript alone – it is clearer in the tape, which picks up the
infinitely more complex range of registers always operative in spoken
discourse – was that the content of this argument seems to mirror something more fundamental about the individual students who were conducting
it: aspects of their respective social positionings, perhaps; their attitudes to
the world around them as well as their responses to the world of the text.
This group of students (like those of English Literature classes in most
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British universities) was in many respects homogeneous: all the students in
this seminar were white; all bar one was apparently British (the exception
being an American exchange student); about eighty percent of the class was
female. But despite this ostensible homogeneity, the nuances of the language
employed, respectively, by Lisa and by Rhianna may suggest a difference
between the two women more profound and more intrinsic to them than
simply a contest over the most compelling interpretation of an aspect of The
Merchant of Venice. Lisa, defending the notion that social standing may be generated by and communicated through a plethora of factors of which liquid capital
is only one, often uses two adjectives or examples where one might suffice and
is much more hesitant and exploratory in articulating her claims than Rhianna
is. Rhianna arguing that money not only talks, but also talks louder than any
other kind of capital does (social, for example, or cultural); and claiming also
that liquid capital is far more articulate and loquacious than invested capital
might be, employs a language that seems implicitly to reflect her confidence in
the material reality of the power that control of liquid wealth confers: ‘at the
end of the day’, she keeps repeating, it is Shylock who can produce the readies.
The phrase, ‘at the end of the day’, is one that accepts and validates one
factor as determining.18 Designed to cut through nuances and hesitations
and to foreclose on the possibility of multiple determinations, it is often, as
it is here, used in connection with an asseveration of financial motives or
contexts as ultimately determining and (tacitly but no less ‘obviously’) rational. It probably derives directly from accounting conventions, which
dictate the moment that a merchant should balance his books: at the end of
the day. Similar observations might be made of the phrase ‘fair enough’,
which Rhianna also uses, and whose employment often functions to close
off alternative explanations even as its speaker apparently admits them (and
which once again, albeit less directly, invokes faint echoes of market economies in its invocation of sufficiency and balance and of course the very
origin of the market place: ‘fayre’ enough). And again, insofar as the locution ‘at the end of the day’, as it is used here, acknowledges the rationality
of Antonio’s behaviour too, rationality is again conflated with the preeminent importance of immediate access to wealth: what seem to be otiose
actions on Antonio’s part may in the end (but only uncertainly) issue in
profit, and to the degree that they may, they are rational.
The differences between the two students’ lexical choices, then, might
signal more fundamental differences between them: their respective interpretations of the text appeared to overlap with their own social positionings,
18
‘“At the end of the day” the most common office cliché’, Daily Telegraph, 15 December
2009 ,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6818632/At-the-end-of-the-day-themost-common-office-cliche.html. (accessed 13 October 2011).
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and interested in what the students themselves would make of this possible
conjunction, I broached it with them when I returned to speak to them
some months later, raising with them the possibility that there might in
some cases be a relation between the ‘ideational’ aspects of a discussion (its
manifest content) and its ‘interpersonal’ qualities (the latent and sometimes
unspoken signifiers of affect and projections of the self). What, I asked
them, did they take to be the connections between what we might say
about a text (as students, or indeed as critics) and the beliefs we held about
ourselves, about one another, and about the world? I pointed out to the students that although this seminar, formulated as it was as a role-played debate,
raised special issues surrounding the relation of the students’ arguments to
their actual beliefs, both women nevertheless appeared to be personally
committed to the arguments they were making. Was, I wondered, the value
system each was attributing to the play one that also resonated with something they valued in themselves, or to wider beliefs they each held about
the world? In the context of this discussion, I asked the students what they
considered to be the most important ideas in the clip they had watched.
Rhianna replied:
Actually there’s quite a lot about it here, the role of, sort of, the value of
commerce and the value of what we class as more valuable sort of thing, like,
money-wise or even like person-wise as well: there’s quite a lot of question
about that sort of, that sort of, scale of things.
Here (‘what we class as more valuable sort of thing’), there may be echoed
the claim that ready money trumps the promise of future wealth, an assertion Rhianna then reiterates more explicitly:
Antonio has no money; Shylock has thousands and thousands of ducats that
he can hand out and not even notice, so therefore [emphasis hers] Shylock’s
kind of the one who has the value at the minute really: you know, it’s all very
well saying the ship’s going to come in: that’s like saying, ‘I’m going to win
the lottery one day, yes I’m going to be rich’ – but at the minute you’re on
two pounds fifty a day. . . . Not quite the same thing essentially.
In the end, the closest any of the students came to addressing the possible
correlation between their social orientations and the arguments they made
– or, at least, the terms in which they made them – was Rhianna’s affirmation that underlying both her argument and her self-perception was a valorization of what she characterized as the direct and unadorned: ‘as my
friends all know as well, that that’s what I’m like, I’m just a very very blunt
straightforward person’ she said.
Rhianna’s account of the convergence of interpretation and selfconception thus appeals to personality rather than to class or social
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positioning, or ideological affiliation. But, her mild impatience with the extravagant or over-interpretative, and her implicitly ethical valorization of the
‘blunt’ and ‘straightforward’, rehearses a contest over language and truth that
has been played out before, in the very text, in fact, that she’s been studying,
in the verbal jousting of Launcelot Gobbo and Lorenzo. Lorenzo’s similar
ethically charged conflation of the honest and the straightforward is encapsulated in his frustrated instruction to the clown to ‘understand a plain man
in his plain meaning: go to thy fellows; bid them cover the table, serve in
the meat, and we will come in to dinner’ (Merchant 3.5.52 –55). His deceptively simple appeal to the plain, to the obvious, and to the direct, has been
associated by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton with a class interest counter to that
embedded in the extravagant language to which he objects, which,
Tudeau-Clayton claims, is in Shakespeare:
self-consciously opposed . . . to the emergent, protestant, bourgeois linguistic
economy of ‘a plain man in his plain meaning’ . . . in which language is
instrumentalized, or, in Shakespeare’s lexicon, ‘propertied’, as a transparent
means to the end of proper meaning and exchange.19
The ‘extravagant’ diction of a Launcelot, she argues, ‘offers rather the
economy of the gift, which generates surplus energy even as it traverses and
undermines “proper” boundaries’. Certainly, for Lorenzo, his own plainness
operates as a salutary corrective to the suspicious rhetorical extravagance of
the Clown. ‘Oh dear discretion, how his words are suited!’ Lorenzo
remarks, exasperated, of Launcelot’s wit:
The fool hath planted in his memory
An army of good words, and I do know
A many fools that stand in better place,
Garnished like him, that for a tricksy word
Defy the matter (Merchant 3.5.60 – 65)
Of Lisa, we were unable to enquire what she thought about the relation
between what she argued and the more personal aspects of herself: she came
in late and missed the showing of the clips. But, if her lexis differed to that of
Rhianna, so too did her method: she pays more implicit attention than
Rhianna to the way in which the ‘tricksy words’ of the text may be employed
in it to ‘defy the matter’. Much of what Lisa says in ‘At the end of the day’ –
her references to the waves enthroned, to the silks, to rats sneaking in the
19
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’, Shakespeare, 1.1 –2 (2005), 136 –
53 (p. 136).
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dark, and to the petty trafficking – weaves into her own discourse close paraphrases of, or direct quotations from, the play itself. She is also aware that this
is her interpretative strategy of choice: while the others are explicit about
their preferences for reading for the plot, or for characterization, Lisa says that
she looks first at ‘the actual words the text is using, the choice of diction’.
Lisa is, in other words, a close reader, and close reading allows her here to
articulate something about the text that Rhianna’s account cannot encompass: that there is a correlation in it between the political and the aesthetic –
that the latter is not an innocent quality. ‘It’s more beautiful’ she finishes,
and she is arguably right that the representation of Antonio’s merchanting at
the opening of the play is not only more extravagant, but more beautiful,
than the representation of Shylock’s usury, hedged around as it is with metaphors of the base and the low, the flesh of muttons, beeves or goats, and the
acts of woolly breeders. But this observation leads us to a more tendentious
proposition. Maybe close reading is not a strategy that would come so naturally to someone wedded to the virtue of the speech of ‘a plain man in his
plain meaning’, for doesn’t close reading assume, on the contrary, that
meaning is anything but plain, even when it pretends to be so? Isn’t it the
case that close reading embraces values diametrically opposed to those embodied in the phrase ‘at the end of the day’ (for example), which insists on
the ultimate readability of action (and, specifically, action in the service of
material gain), presupposing a ‘last instance’ (indeed, a ‘bottom line’) by reference to which things will become intelligible and justifiable: not only
clear, but clearly accounted for? This latter ethos – the appeal to the plain
speech of a plain man in his plain meaning – still carries the force that
Lorenzo implicitly affords it when he juxtaposes reference to it with a series
of instructions that bespeak an instrumentalism that transparently organizes
and then issues in labour (‘bid them cover the table [and] serve in the meat’)
and that visibly results in material gain (quite literally, for Lorenzo, at the
end of the day, when ‘we will come in to dinner’).
The ethos of language presupposed in the method of close reading is very
different from that embraced in the appeals to the virtue of plain speech
articulated by Lorenzo and by Rhianna. With its implicit enjoyment of rhetoric (of the ‘armies of good words’ whose presence so comically frustrates
‘plain’ meaning), close reading presupposes a relation between language and
‘matter’ that is far less direct than that embedded in an appeal to plainness, as
Lorenzo laments when he bemoans the ‘tricksy words’ that ‘defy the matter’
and interfere with mealtimes. And if close reading sits uneasily with the instrumentalist ethos of this Lorenzian version of ‘plain’ speech, it may, by the
same token, be a strategy relatively alien to students who have ‘bought in’
(and I use this locution intentionally) to the equally instrumentalist ethos
prevalent in the discourses that surround them today. Antipathetic to the
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presumption of a singular and immediate legibility, the facility of close
reading may not come so easily to those enamoured of the conviction that it
is money, above all other capitals, which talks, and it may not be an interpretative strategy that sits comfortably with the prescriptions surrounding us today
(not least in Higher Education’s landscape), which valorize measurement,
quantification, particular kinds of transparency and above all, ‘matter’, in the
sense of an immediately visible economic ‘outcome’.
And yet paradoxically, although Lisa’s account of Merchant does encompass
something that Rhianna’s cannot, and although it is thereby the ‘better’ interpretation of the two in the sense that, because she utilizes the skills of
close reading, she is better able to rehearse – better able perhaps even to
inhabit – the emotional landscape of the text, it is also the case that
Rhianna’s view of the play’s ethos is one that better articulates the perspective hegemonic in the world we now live in, in which, according to David
Harvey’s account of neoliberalism, the ‘financialization of everything’ has
transformed old class structures and adjusted our sense of what we value,
shifting centres of gravity from industrial heartlands to financial capitals (in
both the monetary and the geographical senses of the word).20 Our world is
one in which the financial market reigns supreme in a way it has never done
before, within our institutions as well as outside them; a world in which (at
the end of the day) value is expressed most vehemently and confidently in
questions of cost, return, and capital accumulation and in which money
itself has become the supreme commodity, infinitely malleable, infinitely
protean, open to variations on the theme of usury whose implications were
only just becoming discernable in Shylock’s time.
But they were, even then, just discernable. Perhaps we could use the argument between Lisa and Rhianna to take both seriously and see more in the
play itself than we did before. Perhaps one could read the play, retrospectively,
as a parable of the (temporary) defeat of a proto-neoliberalism, embodied in a
Shylockian ethics of short-term contracts, speculation, and bets on failure.
Today’s short-seller, who hopes to profit from a decline in the price of shares
in a given company, is not a world away from Shylock, whose ‘bet’ assumes
that Antonio’s ship will not come in, and that in consequence the value of his
enterprise will fall. That Shylock’s wager fails is the text’s punishment for the
ruthlessness embodied (literally) in the return he demands on his investment,
and perhaps, it is also an unconscious condemnation of his archaic, already
virtually obsolete attachment to the intrinsic value of a literal pound (of flesh)
rather than to the fungible quality of the ducats he’s lent Antonio, or the
paper symbol of the bond he’s used to seal his contract, new currencies for a
20
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 62.
CLASSES, CAPITAL, AND THE CASE OF CLOSE READING
143
new world. In this respect, Shylock is in many ways, and as others have
remarked, a figure looking back to an earlier literary past, an older era of flesh
for flesh and familiar vices. But to the degree that Shylock’s end entails a punishment whose justice the play, like Portia, ultimately endorses, it is an overdetermined, even contradictory, kind of justice that we see in the play. Maybe
Shylock is thrice condemned: for his ruthlessness, for his archaism – but also
for the much more modern, anti-investment nature of his bet, where returns
issue not from growth, but from anticipated contraction. This seems a ‘presentist’ argument if ever there was one. But then again, perhaps it is not as anachronistic to suggest this as it might at first seem: a notorious example of a
similar practice was to occur some ten years after the publication of Merchant
when Isaac de Maire invested in the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
(VOC, or the Dutch East India Company), to catastrophic effect on his own
enterprise, Grote Compagnie. De Maire, who short-sold VOC shares he
didn’t own and then spread rumours to depress their prices once he’d sold
them, was, like Shylock, eventually bankrupted by the practice when shares
in the VOC unexpectedly rose;21 no wonder liberal justice steps in in
Renaissance Venice to attempt to regulate such practices, which were to lead
to such financial instability in future years.
What, then, might we begin to conclude from this one, fleeting exchange
from an otherwise inconsequential classroom discussion that took place a
few years ago? Perhaps, before I conclude anything at all, I should make
clear what I do not want to infer or to imply. I don’t want to align differences of individual lexis or method in any blunt, one-to-one relation to
particular ideological interests – to insist, for example, that an appeal to
‘plainness’ must be connected to non-élite class positions, or only ever characteristic of discourses that seek to legitimate particular forms of marketorientated behaviour. I don’t even want to suggest that there is a necessary
correlation between an appreciation of the aesthetic and a facility with
textual analysis; as Rita Felski remarks, ‘relations between political or philosophical world views and methods of reading are complex, contingent, . . .
[and un]predictable’,22 and the subtleties of those relations may be trampled
on in generalizations about the intrinsic politics of modes of interpretation.
But I do want to begin to ask some new questions of close reading, and
most importantly, of how we teach it; and differently to inflect some of the
21
22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Le_Maire, and see also Wikipedia’s http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Short_(finance) both consulted 10 October 2011; for a lucid print introduction to
short-selling and its early practices in the seventeenth century, see Kathryn Staley, The Art of
Short-Selling (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), pp. 3–7, and 235–37.
Rita Felski, ‘From Literary Theory to Critical Method’, Profession (2008), 108 –16
(p. 110).
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questions that have been asked before. If we find today that some of our students ‘don’t get’ close reading and are suspicious of the claim, we bring to
them that what lies beneath the surface of the text may surprise them, and
give them more and not less pleasure; if we find them inhospitable to claims
that language is not transparent or static, but, as Lisa puts it, ‘eloquent and
sublime’ in ways that will govern our reaction to it for good and for ill,
shouldn’t we pause to think more about where their resistance might come
from (in ways that don’t simply blame schools, or the students themselves, or
even, the method or the texts that we are teaching them)? To claim that one
possible explanation of some of that resistance to close reading may stem
from a collision between a hegemonic neoliberal conviction that value must
be immediate, measurable, and transparent, on the one hand, and a strategy
which, as Leavis did, rejects the purely utilitarian and Benthamite to
embrace instead a profound scepticism that there ever really does exist, a
final ‘bottom line’ does not thus bind us into the reactionary conviction that
‘it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of . . . literature depends’,23 nor commit us to the reiteration of some Leavisite sense
of necessary privilege. On the contrary, it may have the virtue of showing
us part of what we are dealing with. How can we nurture the capacity of
close reading to ‘level cultural capital’24 if it is less accessible a strategy to
those that don’t have cultural capital – or as much of it – in the first place,
unless we first take seriously the proposition that this may be the case?25 How
might we best communicate our sense of the value of subtlety to sets of students who may be wedded to the belief that ‘value’ inheres primarily in what
is quantifiable and immediately transparent (especially when many UK university discourses appear to bolster that belief in them throughout the span of
their university careers)? Perhaps, if we can recognize that respective attachments to ‘plain meanings’ and ‘armies of good words’ are, like the aesthetics
of The Merchant of Venice itself, not innocent but rather expressive of complex
attitudes to the world; perhaps if we can recognize also that our students may
come to us with very different conceptions of linguistic virtue to our own,
we may manage more to effectively communicate to them what we ourselves
find to be of value in our texts, and the ways that we read them.
23
24
25
Leavis, quoted by Joe Moran, ‘F. R. Leavis, English and the University’, English, 51
(2002), 1 –13 (p. 5).
Gallop, ‘Historicization of Literary Studies’, p. 184.
I have deliberately avoided the word ‘class’ in this essay, except in its title (where it appears
as a pun). Class is too blunt a category to denote what I am getting at, which might be
better expressed in terms of habitus, and/or of more conscious engagements or disaffections with the ethics of neoliberalism.