A Short Note On “Close Reading” Being Applicable To Fiction As Well As Lyric Poetry

Note to a friend:

Thanks for your thoughts. 

I'm far from a theorist, but I've always had the intuition that close reading, which I take as of a piece with the New Criticism, is applicable to fiction but differs in its means from its application to poetry. 

I've always thought that there are ways to examine fiction by discussing the techniques inhering in the genre. Fiction being what it is, the analysis will be wider in a sense then that of lyric poems, as for only one example, some characters will be the antithesis of each other or might present variations on a mode of behaviour or personality type that then will have a structural or formal part to play in the work's meaning. 

It would be sterile to talk only in these ways about great books to the exclusion of their sweep, depth and breadth. But as part of the way of coming to full critical terms with them, especially in teaching them and writing about them, I'd argue for the necessity of such close reading. 

That’s not to be put to the exclusion of broader cultural readings of the kind you mention at the foot of your email. 

Now, I may just be trapped in the ways of the New Criticism as that's how literature was taught to me. But in my own way, I've kept thinking about it. 

Lastly, I'm persuaded in this by the way I did my 125  page MA thesis on the novels of Mordecai Richler, even to the occasional point of taking bits of prose and examining them closely with a view to then building them up to fit within what thematically is going on in the book. In fact my essential point was to show how overall formal changes from novel to novel—-say from picaresque comedy to satire to black humour—match the changes in each book's world view.

One Approach To Lyric Poems: A Brief Note To Someone I Know

Here’s one way I think about and often respond to lyric poems. They’re soliloquies, a progression of consciousness, from first word to last. Their poetry in good poems—charged language, imagery, repetition, coupling, symbolism, metaphors, metre, rhythm and the like—works in unison with that progression as form becomes meaning. Simply paraphrasing poems is a start, perhaps a necessary but insufficient condition of understanding a poem, where understanding is a continuum of depth.

Incoherence In Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing?

 I just rewatched Do The Right Thing, 1989,  with my 2024 eyes. It’s provocative. 

From Wikipedia:

“Lee has remarked that only White viewers ask him if Mookie did the right thing; Black viewers do not ask him the question. Lee believes the key point is that Mookie was angry at the wrongful death of Radio Raheem, stating that viewers who question the riot are explicitly failing to see the difference between property damage and the death of a Black man.”

I wonder if the movie goes beyond what Lee intended. It seems he wants the right thing done and, if so, it raises the question, what is that? 

The movie famously ends with the two contrasting quotes:

MLK’s: a preachment against violence to get justice, and for the need for love and understanding; 

and Malcolm X’s, more wiggly: bad people in America hold the power and that violence might be justifiable if the issue is self defence. 

Lee seems to cite MX for the idea that for American Blacks in 1989, violence is self-defence against white racist power, and, therefore, is intelligence rather than violence.  

Isn’t it thematically notable that the movie begins with a lengthy sequence of Rosie Perez dancing aggressively including boxing sequences in the dancing, all to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power?

Wikipedia says:

“”Fight the Power’ is a song by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released as a single in the summer of 1989 on Motown Records. It was conceived at the request of film director Spike Lee, who sought a musical theme for his 1989 film Do the Right Thing.” 

I take all this arguably to suggest that  Lee had in mind the vindication of MX’s quote. 

Why else the opening sequence? 

Why else the thematic incorporation of Public Enemy’s lyrics? 

Why else in what Wikipedia reports Lee said, that Mookie‘s trashing of Sal’s window is an understandable reaction to Radio Raheem’s death? 

The whites in the movie in the persons of Sal and his sons are shown as propertied and hardworking, with Sal and his younger son not prejudiced and his older son, John Tuturro, an out and out racist. The white cop Long is racist, one homicidally so. Ponte, the other cop, not so much.

Lee shows the Blacks in a largely negative light. Many are unemployed. Mookie, the movie’s protagonist, is an irresponsible loser, unable to hold on to a job, living off his much more responsible sister. He’s quite indifferent to his son, and seems only to come around to see his baby son’s mother Rosie Perez when he wants sex, after which he’s gone for a week at a time.

His racist son aside, Sal is a benevolent man, proud of his business and accommodating to his customers so long as they are respectful to him and of business. 

His keeps harkening back to a past when he and his 25 year old business were accepted in the neighbourhood, welcome and trouble free.

So I say Buggin’ Out is wrong to demand Sal hang pictures of Blacks on his Wall of Fame rather than only pictures of Italians. 

He’s wrong to try to organize a boycott of Sal’s on that basis. 

And I say Sal is in his right to insist Radio Raheem turn off his boom box inside the pizzeria, to which Raheem takes unjustified exception. 

 In the result, Buggin’ and Raheem at night insist the Wall of Fame have Blacks. Sal again tells  Raheem to turn his radio off.  Raheem refuses. Buggin' insults Sal and says he’ll  shut his pizzeria down. 

Sal explodes. 

He demolishes Raheem's boombox with a bat. 

Raheem attacks Sal. 

And the violence worsens till the cops come and Long kills Raheem leading to Mookie trashing Sal’s window and sparking a riot that leads to the pizzeria being burnt to the ground. 

I argue that all this dramatizes hopelessness and tragic intractability, both exploding into meaningless destructive violence and loss, with a fair amount of sympathy going to Sal.  

This view of the movie supports MLK’s quote and cuts against MX’s. So why, again, the opening sequence of fighting the power? 

Why does Lee present the issue, at least according to Wiki, as the loss of property as against the death of a black man, when the movie shows them both as terrible occurrences in that intractable hopelessness? They ought not be pitted against each other.

Does not this tension point to incoherence?

Either, it seems to me, Lee’s film either works thematically against itself or Lee has, however explicitly, subtly dramatized the impossibility of doing the right thing.

My 1989 eyes saw the latter of those two possibilities. My 2024 eyes incline to the former of them.