The Poetics of Close Reading

Close reading has gone out of style. To be sure, the collective professional effort of literary studies on both sides of the Atlantic still hinges on minute attention to texts, their arguments, their constitution. But the faith in those texts and what will happen if we write out the process of reading them, engaging them, meditating on them, has noticeably gone from the exposition and message of much published work today. This is not so much a shift in method or theory, something we might have collectively if fractionally intended, and then polemicized about, as a kind of stylistic drift that seems to reflect that loss of faith. To paraphrase Stanley Fish, we might ask, is there a text in this interpretation, and be the less certain of our own answer. Gabriel Trop’s Poetry as a Way of Life performs a stinging rebuke to this situation. I think it’s not too much to say that Trop’s book renews hope in the capillary vicissitudes of reading by a kind of salto mortale. Tying his readings to philosophical and science-historical contemporary debates, Trop invites us to reimagine German Studies without any conflict between text and context. That would be a common goal – what follows is meant to convince the reader that Trop achieves it.

Trop aims his passionate close readings at any number of orthodoxies about German literary history. Among the fallen: any substantial separation between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the sense that the avant-garde began with the Historical Avant-Garde at the beginning of the twentieth century, and perhaps most provocatively, the exclusion of pedagogy from aesthetics. The latter orthodoxy, like the others, has often been worried by books like Paul Fleming’s Exemplarity and Mediocrity. Trop’s lens doesn’t allow this exclusion to appear, because he approaches poetry as practice, as what he calls »aesthetic exercise« in a kind of profane version of the ascetic variant. Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Pierre Hadot, and others, Trop strips the avant-garde of its characteristic claim to be first in treating aesthetics as a regime for disintegrating and reconfiguring the order of the senses. He reverses the chronology of his treatment of eighteenth-century sources, in sections on Hölderlin, Novalis, and the short-lived Anacreontic poetry movement, with readings of Gleim and Brockes. If we have long doubted the Romantic claim to radical novelty (parallel to the avant-garde’s), Trop implicitly undermines it by beginning with Baumgarten’s aesthetics (rather than Kant’s), moving forward to well-known Romantic poets, and then backward to authors and genres that are usually left out of the story. But the biggest claim the readings and the frame allow is a blurring of the line, usually taken to be quite bright indeed, between pedagogy and beauty in poetry. The poem as exercise gives a vector to the reading, just as an Enlightenment Erziehung might prescribe. But the poem in the exercise allows us to see the aesthetic game even in the telos. This means – as we shall see – that nonsense might be salutary and that the normative might have its own claim to beauty.

The section that opens the book, on Baumgarten, stakes a claim to this mixed territory by reading Baumgarten as a phenomenologist of aesethetic attention. A breakdown of his various states of attention and the potential transformations of consciousness that emerge in aesthetic experience take the burden of having invented that term from Baumgarten. On this reading, he is neither a predecessor to Kant nor a rationalist with an expanded sense of sense – both things are true, but Trop sidesteps them to open a wider view of the author, one that succeeds in placing an expanded framework at the center of an aesthetics that remains open to both norm and grace. Baumgarten, one is delightfully surprised to learn, stands at the origin of a truly close reading practice. And indeed, perhaps the greatest achievement of this fine book is to allow us not only to read Novalis and Hölderlin closely – an ongoing project – but also the apparent vapor of joke-poems, not to say junk-poems, from an earlier period by authors that hardly seem invested in any aesthetics pretending to that grand name.

Hölderlin

The Hölderlin section remarks continuously on a curious feature that falls into the gap between Hölderlin’s aesthetic and philosophical writings and his poetry itself, namely, that a kind of dialectical movement between fragmentary self-limiting and even failure alternates with a pantheism rooted in intellectual intuition. I think this is the extraordinary achievement of Trop’s reading of Hölderlin. Since Lawrence Ryan’s study of Hölderlin’s genre-theory (Hölderlins Lehre vom Wechsel der Töne) we have paid great attention to the aesthetic writings, and Eric Santner (Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination) and others have shown the fragmenting that occurs in Hölderlin’s late poetry, pace Heidegger. Trop teases out the contradiction between program and performance in individual moments of the poems, so that the »exercise« of the poems is condensed into individual moments, where the Danube and the Rhein flow momentarily apart, where the high drama of the broken lines reveals not only the images of its own narrative but indicates the opposite to the reader. In this respect, Trop’s analyses do deep justice to the poet who also invented the dialectic, if we follow the thesis of Panajotis Kondylis (Die Entstehung der Dialektik). The figure of »disjunctive synthesis« (e.g. S. 77–78), the »oder auch« that reoccurs in Hölderlin’s poetry, stands in for this plane of attention, for a kind of quality that is achieved between the notion of a dialectical opposition – say, between Judgment and Being – and the modal flow of the poems themselves. Since Dieter Henrich’s massive efforts to elucidate the short fragment »Judgment, Being, Modality«. it has been clear that Hölderlin belongs on both sides of the Romantic/Idealist divide. What Trop manages to show is that Hölderlin’s poetry belongs on the philosophical side, and in this respect, he does justice to the seriousness with which Heidegger treated the poet. The caesura, Trop tells us, concentrates the mind or prepares it for retention »semantically and sonically« (S. 85–86), presenting the plane in which intellectual intuition bifurcates into judgment. That is the plane on which poetry exercises and exercises us, according to the »principle of bifurcation«:

»Rather than poetics of unification subsumed under an aesthetics of the beautiful, an unfurling of the order of nature along the lines of a teleologically guaranteed organization of sensuous matter, one sees in Hölderlin’s later hymns a poetics of bifurcation: a movement from the promise of unity — having proved abortive — back into the dispersal of differentiation, a dispersal that in turn renders the desire for the order of the beautiful, precisely as that which refuses to show itself poetically, all the more palpable« (S. 101).

The concentration of philosophical and poetic thought here will be both instruction and delight to Hölderlin readers. By insisting that philosophical conviction and expression, political history, and form are condensed in the very experience of reading Hölderlin, Trop defends the poet in a way that even the most laudatory canonizing accounts often cannot reproduce.

Novalis

The register shifts in the Novalis chapter, from spiritual to physiological exercise. Novalis’ poetry is shot through with physiological ambition, based in the theory of the Scottish doctor John Brown and inflected by the reading of Fichte. Trop continues his synthetic work, tying all three together through close readings of each type of text. When he brings Novalis’ poetry under the figure of a »physiological absolute«, one might expect him to retreat from his close reading, contextualizing rather than remaining trained on the poems themselves. But Trop shrugs off the usual drift, and zeroes in on a complex blend of science and philosophy embedded in the writings themselves: »acts of poetry« mix the two irrevocably (S. 138). Trop engages the early Fichte Studies (1794), reviewing and affirming the reversed-order thesis of Manfred Frank, in which the inversion of epistemic categories makes the world always appear in contradiction. This order itself becomes absolute, Trop goes on to suggest (S. 140), and is inscribed in the Brunonian point about the medical body, which therefore becomes at the same time a real body, a metaphysical object, and the point of perturbation that poetry consistently offers as exercise to the reader of Novalis. Trop writes: »The absolute provides an impetus for a poetic exercise – an exercise that does not use poetry as a means of representing the unrepresentable, nor intuiting undifferentiated identity or primordial givenness, but rather, uses the very fictionality of the absolute as feeling as an attempt to undo the stranglehold of reflective knowledge‘s grip on reality from within its own domain« (S. 138). The absolute, in other words, becomes a place of »co-presence of differences that communicate, come into contact, influence one another, and oscillate between separation and unity« (S. 169). On the example of the Hymns to the Night, Trop argues that night and day are not opposed but signify simultaneously, meaning that poetry has to be read beyond the contradictions that discursive thought would make of it. And yet that discursive thought is not alien to the poetry: the distinction has re-entered the plane of the physiological absolute. The texts themselves do the work here, and Trop handles the surrounding philosophy elegantly and informatively. The Hymns reveal the absolute as Reiz, and their cherished object (death) is presented »in its own literary manifestation, that is, a desire for the potentializing and heterocosmic capacity of death that stimulates and urges onward the formal dynamic of the poem itself« (S. 174). The lines speak for themselves as they restore the affective space of the poem to explicit status in the constellation of science and philosophy in which they signify.

Anacreon

It is perhaps the final section of the book that is the most daring. Trop has by this point defeated some of the clichés about a teleology of aesthetic formalism, but restores an interesting point to the advantage of his Enlightenment poets, namely that the work of art’s originality was ontological only after the Romantics. Before that, it was not merely a matter of tradition, but a instead of sparking novelty in the reader. Originality, on this account, was epistemological foremost (S. 217). Reviewing the Literaturstreit and the work on the fantastic by Bodmer and Breitinger, Trop makes use of the »disjunctive synthesis« to interpret the space of norms established by this stripe of literary theory: »by widening the gap between the fantastic and the probable, [this gesture] simultaneously expands the realm of the possible in order to permit the appearance of a complete negation of the laws that govern physical reality and ethical normativity« (S. 219). On the basis of this prying apart of categories, rococo poetry is able to detranscendentalize the assumptions that allow it to take form in the first place, thereby questioning the bourgeois norms of its milieu. In this respect, Trop sees capacity in the failure to bind the sensuous and the transcendent – the binding that makes up the typical ambition of poetry after Hölderlin and Novalis (S. 243–44). The playful poetry that tried to imitate the ancient »Anacreon« (a corpus that does not, as we now know, belong to its eponymous author) operationalizes this alternate space to undermine norms and make not so much a great deal as to embrace the nothingness of its jokes. A sustained engagement with Johann Gleim’s verse shows that his poetic practice is »an act of non-judgment« (S. 285): »The Anacreontic poet does not seek to create novelty or even beauty, but merely to reproduce and multiply objects of desire. Novelty is generated not in the poem, but by the exercise of the poem, by the difference that it introduces between its own de-transcedentalizing poetics and the cultural framework of intelligibility of its readership« (S. 288). These poems, Trop allows, are not novel, not exciting, do not seem worthy of close reading. But Trop reads them that way anyway, according to the faith that the engagement is novel, that the exercise is primary, and it is only by doing this that he can claim that the Anacreontic fad »created an imaginary space that permitted, if only for a brief amount of time, not only respite from the forces that were attempting to organize the world according to the dictates of truth, morality, God, productivity—but, as if in an aesthetic state of perennial carnival, the pleasure of seeing these forces imaginatively overturned« (S. 320). We will see how the scholarship responds to this claim. For now, it is enough to say that Trop’s efforts have re-opened underappreciated texts to real reading.

Not last but also not least is the analysis of Johann Heinrich Brockes’ poetry, which, according to Trop, »did not so much emancipate the senses as much as bind them to the operations of a mind seeking the immanence of the transcendent« (S. 244), building an »elaborate, empiricist theodicy« (S. 245). The monumental physico-theological Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (1721–48) glorifies not so much God’s creation as the observation of it, making the world itself into an aesthetic exercise. Trop writes that, in Brockes’ poetry, »the boundary between techne and physis is rendered permeable« (S. 250). This means that there is, after all, an ontological point to the epistemic novelty of Enlightenment aesthetics. This aesthetics cannot be recruited into the later regime of the ontological novelty of the work of art – instead, the exercise gains the upper hand and instrumentalizes the world, and not only the poem. But instrumentalization without telos opens onto a de-categorialized plane in which reading will often surprise us. That is the reason why scholars should and will have to read this book.