“The critic whose formulations lean to the emotive and the critic whose formulations lean to the cognitive will in the long run produce a vastly different sort of criticism.”
—(Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy” 47).
This essay engages with the notion of critical distance in literary scholarship, which emerged from the New Criticism movement of the 1940s. This critical distance, to borrow a phrase from the epigraph, places an emphasis on the cognitive and objective, rather than the emotive and subjective. Within the context of broader literary criticism, the objectivity achieved by critical distance is often regarded as a gold standard. To put this assumption to the test, I analyse a key critical work in the literary scholarship of American literary critic D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (1998) that abandons this critical distance, which promises, as Wimsatt and Beardsley warn, a “vastly different sort of criticism” (47).
To begin, however, we might note the curiosity of Miller’s reference in his book’s title, Place for Us. While Miller’s exegesis focuses on Gypsy, the 1959 Broadway musical by Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, his title borrows instead from a number in Sondheim’s West Side Story (1957). In the musical’s climactic ballad, “Somewhere (There’s a Place For Us)”, West Side Story’s two leads Tony and Maria express their longing for a place where they can love one another freely and away from the rivalries between the teenage gangs to which they respectively belong (Sondheim was indeed inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet). Miller’s decision to preface his criticism with a song not from the subject of his study, Gypsy, is in fact a queer one. But in recognising the prominence of “Somewhere” to the queer community of the 1950s United States and beyond, we might begin to understand the queerness of Miller’s doubtlessly deliberate critical choice.
The queerness of Miller’s choice of title seems a strategic and poignant move to complement his arguments in Place for Us, whose critical stance marks a departure from the critic’s earlier methodologies. Miller, a prominent American literary critic, had long been a proponent of close reading, the literary school of criticism which sought to ‘uncover’ and ‘reveal’ hidden meanings, and whose methods he mobilised to reveal specifically queer meanings of texts as witnessed in his monographs The Novel and the Police (1988) and “Anal Rope” (1990). From 1998 and with Place for Us, Miller’s career would then shift towards what he would later term “too-close reading” (“Hitchcock’s Hidden Pictures” 126) with essays like Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (2003) and Hidden Hitchcock (2016) that adopted an altogether different style of reading.
My analysis of too-close reading as a method of literary criticism seeks to interrogate the supposed import of critical distance in literary scholarship. But more importantly I intend to explore the reasons for Miller’s departure from close reading and the objective critical distance the method entails in order to reveal some of the advantages of the too-close reading over its predecessor. In order to do so, the first section of this essay will look at a key piece of New Critical close reading rhetoric that has largely carried over into much of modern literary scholarship, namely the Affective Fallacy. I will then examine how Miller's Place for Us mobilises affect—or more specifically how he eschews the critical distance typical of close readings, defiantly committing the Affective Fallacy—to create a sense of place for minoritized groups. My last section will argue that Place for Us laid the early foundations for the method he would later term “too-close reading” and will characterise the method as a necessary one for marginalised groups, particularly the queer community. By allying Miller’s queer methodological shift with his continued emphasis on the marginalised gay male community, I finally propose that too-close reading becomes a simultaneously subversive and restitutional strategy for reclaiming the queer individual’s place in literary scholarship, against the “heteronormative” grain of conventional close reading, and thus also in the cultural consciousness.
Scrapbooks full of me in the background
To understand what Miller's deviation from the close reading practices of conventional literary scholarship accomplishes, it is necessary to understand the original rationale underlying such practices — practices that find their origins in the New Criticism movement of the 1940s. The “New Critics”, a group largely consisting of Anglo-American literature teachers, critics, and writers, sought to draw the focus of literary study away from more minor details surrounding the text, to instead focus on the text itself. Among the more influential works of the New Criticism was “The Affective Fallacy” authored by American scholars W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1949 that expounds on the relationship between what they termed ‘objects’ and ‘emotions’. [1] Drawing from the field of semiotics, the authors observed that the emotions produced in readers are not exclusive to any particular text, which Wimsatt and Beardsley called ‘objects’. They formulate three premises describing their position:
The reader may experience “different emotions [towards] similar objects or actions” because of the “different qualities or functions” the reader associates with the object. (Wimsatt and Beardsley 37)
Conversely, the reader may experience “emotions of similar quality” for “different objects in different cultures” (ibid. 37).
The feelings that an object produces in an individual are not the same as the qualities that stir up these feelings. (ibid. 38)
As a result, since a particular emotion is not exclusively tied to a particular object, we are unable to deduce the nature of a given object from emotions alone.
Applying these observations to literary criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley identify two aspects of “affective relativism” that may produce variations in emotive responses (39). The first is that of the ‘personal’—that the same emotions may be produced in a person by texts of ‘high’ literary value, like “an ode by Keats”, as that of one of ‘low’ literary value, like a limerick (ibid.). The actual qualities of the text have little bearing on the reader’s feelings, which are merely projections of one’s own self (45). The second area the authors identify is that of the cultural or historical, or the degree to which the text provokes an emotional response in readers of a given era and location (39). A given text may “have undergone a functional change from culture to culture” or may “have lost emotive value with loss of immediacy” (52), causing readers’ responses to the same text to differ. Due to these affective relativisms, literary criticism that is based on the emotions generated by the text should not be used by the objective critic who seeks to judge the qualities of the text itself (45). To do so, the authors argue, would be to commit the Affective Fallacy, “the outcome [of which] is that the poem itself”—or whatever form of text concerned—“as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear.” (31)
Yet, while the reader’s response may vary across persons, cultures and time, they argue that the text itself will not. For the critic to get at its objective meaning, therefore, he or she must spurn the subjective and relative. Critics must remove themselves from their criticism, maintaining a ‘critical distance’ between them and the text, to provide an objective account of the text. Only then is the literary critic able to perform their intended role: that of one who teaches or explicates the hidden meanings that are objectively present within the text, rather than a producer or reproducer of meanings subject to the readers’ own experiences (48).
“The Affective Fallacy” marked a turn in literary scholarship. It challenged the historical and aesthetic focus of prior scholarship by pioneering a form of close reading that focused solely on the text, detached entirely from its authorial and socio-historical contexts. While the practices of New Critical close reading promoted by Wimsatt and Beardsley have not been preserved in their entirety, the critical distance in literary scholarship appears to have been largely maintained. There persists the belief that the critic must remove from their criticism their reception of the text, and to focus on the text itself, lest the distinctiveness of the text be diminished.
This time for me, for me, for me, FOR ME
However, belief that critical distance must be sustained has since been challenged by alternative approaches to texts available to critics. One such approach is what Miller has termed ‘too-close reading’, tentatively ventured in Place for Us but which resurfaces, crystallises, and is finally named in the critic's reading of the film Strangers on a Train (1951) in the essay “Hitchcock's Hidden Pictures” (2010). In this reading, Miller states that too-close reading is “drawn to details that, though demonstrably meant, never strike us as deeply meaningful” (“Pictures” 126). As such, his objects of focus are minute details that have little to no bearing on the plot, such as Hitchcock’s cameo appearances (both in person and on the cover of a certain book) or the album for Carousel’s (1945) motion picture soundtrack hanging in a music shop window.
Not only does the critic analyse details that he himself admits “[add] absolutely nothing to our understanding of the story” (125), he analyses them through a personal lens. In one instance, upon noticing the appearance of a 1945 collection of short stories, Alfred Hitchcock’s Fireside Book of Suspense in the film, he writes at length about his “desire to possess it”, his eventual acquisition of it, and his handling of the book in his home, where he acknowledges that this is an exceedingly personal pleasure: “for who would possibly steal such a thing, a treasure whose value I was the only one to recognise?” (113) In another instance, he elucidates the personal circumstances in which he makes a key observation: while in a groggy state and mouthing the words to the 1958 song “Baby Face” playing in a scene (124), only to realise that the characters literally act out the lyrics of the song. Says Miller: “I did not believe my eyes.” (124)
However, a cynical reader—who is neither half awake nor as aware of “Baby Face”; who, in other words, is not Miller—certainly can. Indeed, the ‘New Critic’ might have seen “Hitchcock’s Hidden Pictures” as an overly personal, even self-indulgent, form of analysis that directs the reader’s attention away from the film itself where it ‘rightfully’ belongs . For if the text is read in terms of minute details only meaningful to the critic, then how will readers who are not the critic learn anything about the text, much less determine its value? It might be Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s worst fears realised, a blatant committing of the Affective Fallacy, risking the ‘disappearance’ of the reading.
The question, then, is why Miller, an established name in queer literary criticism, saw fit to adopt such an approach. The question becomes especially pertinent when we consider that his rise to prominence came from more traditional close readings that were concerned with uncovering the latent meaning of a text from its manifest one. In The Novel and the Police (1989), Miller intended to “reveal the ways in which literature serves the interests of certain social institutions and authorities” (Thomas 319). “Anal Rope” (1990) likewise sought to lay out the complex presentation of male homosexuality covertly suggested by the techniques of the film Rope (“Anal Rope” 117). To account for this stylistic shift between the critically distant close reading of such essays and the ‘too-close reading’ of “Pictures”, it may be fruitful to analyse the transitionary period between these two of Miller’s works.
Why did I do it? What did it get me?
Miller’s Place for Us, published in 1998, is an examination of the appeal of the postwar Broadway musical to gay men, in which he traces their attitudes to the musical in three distinct sections. The first section, “In The Basement”, explores the early, secret delights of listening to Broadway albums in parents’ basements, while the second, “At The Bar”, probes the popularity of the piano bar among gay men. The final section, which will be the main object of this essay’s analysis, “On Broadway”, offers a reading of the musical Gypsy. In the 1959 musical about Rose’s attempts to get her two daughters, Louise and June, into show business, Miller argues that its relation to gay men lies in the femininity it both encourages men to indulge in and holds tantalisingly out of their reach. To deliver this message, Miller employs a reading methodology unlike his prior close readings of Rope or the Victorian novel, choosing to engage in areas of affective relativism.
The first section of Place for Us contemplates ‘personal’ affect; the critic discusses Gypsy in terms of how certain elements of the musical make him, Miller, feel. A key observation Miller makes in his reading is that the “most important and widespread [...] cherished and enduring effects” come as the result of it being “privatized, [such that] not even the greatest performer has talent sufficient to keep us from identifying with her” (Place 87). It is Miller’s identification with the likes of the famed lead actress of the musical, Ethel Merman, that validate Miller’s findings in his analysis on the musical. This identification continues in his description of the effect of the Broadway musical’s allure of femininity to the “male spectator”, where he slyly writes himself into the characterisation of said spectator, who is said to “[leap] for joy in the orbit of his Mame, his Mabel, his Mayoress [and who has] taken calls as Ella, Mella, or Mom” (Place 90). We begin to suspect that it is not just any male spectator he is describing, but that of a particular critic whose name contains a distinct ‘M’ and an ‘L’ sound: ‘Miller’.
While such self-insertions are scattered throughout Miller’s essay, we find a more sustained example in his analysis of the song “All I Need is The Girl” and the significance of the character of Tulsa, “the oldest, brightest, and best-looking boy in the act” (Place 92). In Tulsa’s arc—his adherence to “heterosexual formality” (Place 95) in pretending to need ‘the Girl’, the allowance it offers for him to act out his homosexual desires, and the false hope he offers to Louise (a representation of a ‘boy’)—Miller identifies a parallel with his own experience with a college roommate named Vince whom he had feelings for . As much as he writes about ‘Boy’ Louise’s relationship with Tulsa, he inserts personal anecdotes involving Vince, including a series of (one-sided) intimate encounters, a mutual confession of romantic feelings, and an eventual denial of said feelings. The entire analysis is written in the form of a direct address to Vince/Tulsa, proceeding in an almost ode-like manner (or, as Miller calls it, “simple worship” [Place 93]) where nearly every sentence contains a “you”, as though Miller cannot stop speaking of, and to, Tulsa/Vince. In the process, he never distinguishes between the “you” that is Tulsa and the “you” that is Vince; the feelings they produce in him are one and the same. Evidently, Tulsa’s narrative significance to the musical is deeply intertwined with Tulsa’s personal significance to Miller.
Give them love and what does it get you?
Notably, Miller extends the scope of his argument beyond his personal reception of Gypsy by engaging with the reception of the gay male community, a group he himself is a part of. In doing so, he contends with the second area of affective relativism: the cultural reception of a text by “readers of a given era” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 39). As much as it is himself whom Miller inserts into the argument, he appears nevertheless to speak on behalf of the gay audience as a whole, rigorously using personal pronouns like “we” and “our”. His anger at Rose in the finale, “Rose’s Turn”, he implies is not singularly his: “We’re no boy scouts; we could strangle her!” (Place 116, emphases added). Indeed, he measures the effectiveness of the musical’s rage-inducing climax by noting that “so long as a single piano bar is left standing, every already raging queen who intones the ‘Turn’ there can be counted on to become... manic” (Place 119). Such references to the culturally iconic locale, popular among gay men, and their proclivity for thesinging of Broadway songs, renders his measurement of Gypsy’s effectiveness dependent on how well it is received by the gay community.
As a result, Miller's reading is undeniably rooted in the areas of affective relativism Wimsatt & Beardsley warn about. Does the musical Gypsy, then, accordingly ‘disappear’ in Miller’s Place for Us? Based on the framework Wimsatt & Beardsley set out, the musical would have to become indistinguishable from any other text in order for it to ‘disappear’. Put otherwise, if a different text can produce the same emotion, or the same musical can produce a different emotion from the personal affects Miller describes, then his reading would be more telling of the audience receiving the musical than the musical itself.
Starting now, it’s gonna be my turn
However, I would argue that while Place for Us certainly tells us far more about the audience, this is not to the detriment of the text. Miller himself acknowledges the risk of such an endeavour by prefacing his reading with a series of admissions about his personal relationship with the musical: that it was “the first musical [he] ever saw”; that he had “seen it in the sole company of [his] mother”; that these had been amplified by “an incomparably vociferous star: Merman”—elements without which he admits he would “not now be in a state either of desire or ability to read the fortune that, on the road during the summer of 1961, this Gypsy first told [him]” (Place 69). In other words, he does not pretend to be writing an objective account. Rather, he writes in a way that is knowingly, unabashedly subjective, prioritising the emotions invoked in him and the gay community by the musical. Ultimately, it is this embrace of the subjective experiences of his community that enables him to write in a way that encourages his readers to identify with them, to journey alongside them, to see what they see and feel what they feel.
Miller’s embrace of subjectivity becomes increasingly evident in the essay’s novel use of subheadings. The subheadings rigorously applied to every paragraph in his reading of Gypsy are taken from lyrics from the musical that have some relevance to the content of the paragraph but which have also struck Miller in some way or another. These references range from the fairly obvious (song titles like “Everything’s coming up roses” [Place 78], “Little lamb” [Place 98]) to the relatively more obscure (individual lines like “Strings come in” [Place 100] and “You can sacrifice your sacro” [Place 79]).
When discussing the final number, in which he illustrates Rose’s deterioration from being the ‘Star Mother’ who dominates the stage into being ‘the Boy’ whom she has never permitted to hold the stage, w, Miller quotes a line from “Rose's Turn”: “Momma's got to move, Momma’s got to go” (Place 118). The relation here is fairly obvious: in the paragraph, he describes how the musical ends with Momma Rose “[vanishing] into the Boy” (Place 119) whom she has never permitted to hold the stage. As such, she has got to move out of the way of Louise who has discovered her femininity; she has to go offstage. However, this association is more than just a passing reference (or as Gypsy’s burlesque performers may label it, a ‘gimmick’). The insertion of the lyric evokes the memory of a tableau: Rose standing on the stage alone, suddenly hesitant and stuttering, where she had been formerly loud and brash, inspiring a sense of distress and pity for the woman. As a result, Miller’s argument elicits a similar emotional response from his readers as that of the gay audience upon witnessing Rose’s onstage meltdown, and registering the musical’s message that “the same place...the Star Mother has just put us [is] no place” (Place 119). The readers are not simply drawn into Miller’s argument but can register his argument on an emotional level; they feel, in some sense, what Miller and the gay community feels. The intentions of his style exemplified here would later be crystallised by Miller in “Broken Art” (2003): that close reading ought to be “an almost infantile desire to be close, period, as close as one can get, without literal plagiarism, to merging with the mother-text [...] to write in this language, to identify and combine with it”. Here, Miller literally attempts to merge his writing with that of the mother-text, Gypsy (ironically, a text literally about mothers), by not merely teaching or explicating what it says but reproducing its effects.
With this understanding, much of Miller’s approach to the musical in Place for Us becomes clear. Where Wimsatt & Beardsley’s New Critical practice seeks to erase the reader/audience so that the text itself is preserved, what can one do when the text itself offers “no place” for the reader? In challenging the long-standing tradition of critical distance to support a ‘place-less’ community, Miller here realises the potential of a reading style that is able to create a place for his own. He embraces subjectivity in criticism because subjectivity prioritises the reader. Or, as the odd choice of an extraneous title seems to suggest, the place that Gypsy cannot offer the marginalised reader, Miller himself will create.
Finished? We’re just getting started
What Miller begins to discover in Place for Us he develops even further in his method of too-close reading. While his analysis of Gypsy still comprised of moments of theatrical import—theatrical devices like the “irony” in Sondheim’s lyrics (83), the skewed gender dynamics in character pairings, the relationship between characters’ onstage presence and their closeness to the Stage Mother—in order to present an overall reading, he abandons this project in Hidden Hitchcock. He no longer strives to find moments of narrative significance that might give a sense of the text’s ‘unity’. Instead, he looks for small details that illustrate the “text’s drive to futility” (“Pictures” 127): the text itself, he seems to suggest, is meaningless—or, at least, it yields no useful meaning for him. This abandonment of the text as a unified whole may be what Wimsatt and Beardsley constitute as a ‘disappearance’.
It is a trade-off, between the disappearance of the audience and the disappearance of the text, that Miller is willing to make: Hidden Hitchcock takes Place for Us’s prioritisation of the gay audience to its fullest extreme by refusing to take texts on their own terms, but rather purely on Miller’s own. As other queer critics like Bonnie Ruberg would later note, since the ‘disappeared’ critic is assumed to conform to heteronormative standards, “too-close reading is a political act [that] insists on the rights of [readers] to engage in their own queer embrace.” (Ruberg 82)
Too-close reading, then, as a queer methodology that deliberately eschews heteronormative standards of reading, becomes of great import to the marginalised gay community, and to the gypsies who have no place yet to call home. By closing the critical distance between the (queer) individual and the cultural artefact that is the text, Miller’s too-close reading serves, for members of the cultural peripheries, as a critical method for re-inserting themselves into history and its zeitgeists. Further still, the queer reader discovers, in his or her identification with the relative particulars and the subjective in the performance of criticism, not only a means of forging alliances between the decidedly marginalised. Rather, queer readers can in this way identify so intimately with the products of cultural commentary positivistically towards the affirmation of the self; a method of insisting on the materiality and presentness of details that, like him or herself, run the risk of disappearance.
Timothy is a second year undergraduate at NUS, majoring in English Literature and in the University Scholars Programme. He is keen on exploring the possibilities that lie within the world of digital humanities as well as in examining the claims and valences of his Christian faith. He also dreams of one day having his name featured in the end credits of a movie.
[1] Complementing Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument on the Affective Fallacy are the prominent ‘New Critics’ Cleanth Brooks and William Empson, whose formulations on ambiguity, irony and paradox shaped the belief that the critic must provide a unified reading of the text from the text itself.
Works Cited
Miller, D. A. “Anal Rope.” Representations, no. 32, 1990, pp. 114-133.
——. Excerpt from “Broken Art.” Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style. Princeton University Press,
2003, pp. 57-58.
——. “Hitchcock’s Hidden Pictures.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 106-130.
——. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Ruberg, Bonnie. “Getting Too Close: Portal, ‘Anal Rope,’ and the Perils of Queer Interpretation.” Video
Games Have Always Been Queer. New York University Press, 2019, pp. 56-83.
Thomas, Ronald R. Modern Philology, vol. 87, no. 3, 1990, pp. 319–324.
Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. “The Affective Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 57, no. 1, 1949, pp.
31–55.