Nicholas Royle and Garrett Stewart
NR: I have just been reading your piece on ‘The Art of Critical Writing: A Literary Genre at Vanishing Point’, an essay that includes a longish excerpt of a dialogue with David LaRocca (from your recent book Closer Reading). You talk about the disappearance of the critical essay, even on the horizon of doctoral students, at least insofar as that is conceived as an ‘essaying’, ‘a gamble, a venture, a working wager’ (230). You discuss some of the factors behind this, such as the rise of the internet and decline in book-reading, lack of attention to form and of interest in close reading, and the rapid spread of AI. A good critical essay is, for you, ‘an exercise not just of creative reading but of creative writing in its own right’ (230). Strong examples in recent decades have dwindled, however, ‘leaving the literary academy farther than ever from the mainstream of innovation’ (231).
I would like to invite you to say a little more about creative reading and writing. I think Emerson was perhaps the first writer to invoke the term ‘creative reading’, in his essay ‘The American Scholar’ in 1837. No doubt the meaning has shifted in various ways in the almost two centuries since. Could you describe more clearly what you understand by creative reading? How does it relate to thinking about fiction and truth? How might it most effectively proceed in an era of supposed post-truth? And then with respect to the question of creative writing: have you ever written poetry or short fiction, plays or novels or memoir? If not, what has held you back?
GS: I can see why that question about ‘creative reading’ might come first to mind, in or beyond its Emersonian imprimatur, and I’ll come back to its distinction from creative writing—in my own case and beyond—once its blueprint has been more sharply drawn. As to some bullwork against the bull of post-Truth, it seems fair to say that, since political devilry is always in the details, an instinct for cutting through cliched assumptions in literary study—with their proliferating niche-marketed ‘approaches’ via ideological givens—offers some chance of enhanced interpretive traction. Enlisted in this way is an instinct for cutting slant (‘on the bias’) across the texture of language in diagonal slices of its linguistic life, rather than reverting to the well-worn threadwork of received assumptions (in the other sense of ‘bias’). In similar contemporary terms, probing the ‘deep state’ of language in action becomes more than immersive reading; call it participatory.
In any event, that diagnostic essay of mine on the vanishing twilight of the literary-critical essay at large is a belated pedagogic eulogy for a once-vital critical model, moribund for at least two (or maybe three) decades now, despite every local effort in my own graduate teaching to galvanize interest in the kind of lodestone writing that used to anchor, and animate, graduate literary study. I was thus mourning the polished, inspired analysis that many of us doctoral candidates would once have, to mix metaphors, killed to have written—written, not just thought of. Students since can, to be sure, still sporadically learn from these landmark ‘readings’ and position papers, and occasionally do, but mostly without any emulative yearning for the inventive scrutiny and inspired phrasing that had gone into them. ‘Inventive’ analysis, then: along with ‘participatory’, another stab at what I mean by ‘creative reading’: invested in the close-grained modes and means of innovative textual generation rather just in the take-away of argument, with its expected inventory of evidence. The former ‘inventive’ energy, by any name, is persuasive for me (never conclusive) only if and when coming to terms—and grips—with the medium in question.
Inventive, creative, medium-tuned. So, then, an initial caveat. Such terms are metonymies for the hermeneutic objects under investigation. Creative reading is not an honorific term, but a functionalist one. It doesn’t celebrate second-order commentary just for its freshness or verve; it locates its effort partly in the spirit of etymological derivation. From the Latin, create: in its original synonyms, produce, beget. The method of creative reading in question, which is more like a disposition than a mode, seeks to understand the production of meaning in texts (whether on page, canvas, or screen) rather than their aesthetically bracketed product as objets d’art. Such reading would intercept the labors of making as near to the ferment of their reimagined origin as possible, in whatever medium. I keep fetching for the synonym that will shed most light. Another latent paraphrase, then: originary reading. In literary verse or prose, the revivified force of origin is released by an effort to reverse engineer, from the tension of some rhetorical effect, its metalinguistic cause. The opposite of the recent call for ‘surface reading’, what is creationist or gestational here could be termed ‘deep reading’—if, alas, that term didn’t suggest profundity rather than stratigraphic attention.
The latter is certainly what my latest title, Closer Reading, is meant to imply across diverse objects and layers of scrutiny. Confronting any aesthetic venture by this route, writing, painting, or filming, the interpretative gesture is to penetrate to the fact of the medium manifest in its fictive effects, substrate becoming resonant in the play of response, delivery systems wholly alive in the kinetics of textual impact. In the case of prose fiction and film especially, this constitutes a defeat of a medium-blind narratology (‘science of’), directed at structural plot components in the abstract, by what I call a medial narratography (‘mapped terrain of’, as in cartography). Here materiality in whatever medium (script, stroke, strip) is not sieved through established categories but received in process. So creative reading is for me functionalist, productive, generative, or, as I dubbed it in The Deed of Reading, formative rather than formalist.
And so a second terminological caveat. Not honorific, neither should the descriptor in such attributions of creative reading come across as pejorative: a dubious license for that dreaded hyphenate ‘over-reading’. It is instead under-reading in some conceptualized vertical sense. Within the long shadow of Empsonsian ambiguity, such reading tests for the slipperiness of wording at the wellsprings of discourse, again the productive beneath the formally cadenced product. In just this regard, it doesn’t lay itself open to the familiar charge of ‘reading in’. It is, rather, a reading from the inside out. Where puns can go half said, participles cut two ways at once, verbs turn to nouns on a dime, homophony rear its resistant ear, and the onset of one word steal a second lexical dimension from the closing of another, a stray sibilant, a loosed syllable. And where, on screen, sound bridge and lap-dissolve, slow motion and freeze frame, can pass from image to textual imagery with an all but subliminal narrative charge. And where in the process, concerning either medium, critical attention, sufficiently keyed to resulting effects, may find itself leasing from mimesis a prose almost symbiotic in response. Since you asked (and I’ll give a fuller answer shortly), there lies one convergence, for me, of creative reading and writing.
Maybe I can best round out my initial response to your question by citing two notable works of your own, the satiric auto-dialogue in ‘Creative-Critical Practice’, in which you banter your own participation in that so-called endeavor and its unholy hyphenate, palpably bureaucratized, programmable, a marketable catch-all hybrid dear to curricular administration. If the harnessed credentials implied by the yoking hyphen ‘critical-creative’ (why not creative-critical, or ‘creaticritical’, or even, in your own wittily stuttering neologism, ‘creatitical’?), with its aura of forced departmental consolidations, are to be best understood as ‘practice’, then we’re all reduced not to the profession of a discipline but to its billable (with luck) practitioners. In the face of any such threat, I’d vote to get rid of the whole lot of such fussy and hedging hyphens and their instrumental luggage, beginning with the deserved and unimpeded fusion of an unpunctuated ‘literary[-]critical’ mission.
Apart from what sounds like our common cause in this, a perhaps clarifying comparison from within my own work. When my writing, divided almost equally between media, takes me to the narrative processes, not just ‘practices’, of cinematographic language, I have coined the term ‘apparatus reading’ (rather than the once dominant ‘apparatus theory’ and the psychoanalytics of ‘suture’) for an attempt to appreciate film narrative from the ground up, from transparent plastic substrate or digital scan to screen projection. I suppose one might call this another version of originary (‘creative’) reading, pursuing narrative implication back to the rudiments of film’s graphic increments, in all their overlaps and elisions. Or in optical terms deployed for another medium, there is the subtitle to Closer Reading, stressing Essays in Refraction—again, taking up process before cemented as ‘practice’. Engaged in that sense is not some passive ‘reflection’ about a text in ruminating its logic or structure, but rather an active tracking—essentially ad hoc and intuitive—of just those prismatic deflections and dispersals that bring its medial texture to light in the shaping of effect.
And then, by contrast, there’s your own categorically ‘creative’ wording in the novel Quilt. We cover what strikes me as a similar spectrum, if differently, you and I. No novel-writing for me, alas. Yet what has kept my interests bound up with analysis rather than literary production is exactly what you mention, in the afterword to your own fiction, as the goal of important creative writing in a reader’s native tongue: the rediscovery of English in our case (in the silent ventriloquizing, I would add, of the authorial script) as if it were a ‘foreign language’. Conrad, like Nabokov half a modernist century later, stretching the borders of an acquired English style, offers a perfect example. But the estranging linguistic encounter is more widespread than just with these two, or similar, masters. It entails an inevitable phonetic interface between English speaker and the silent phonotextual reading that alone ‘performs’ or executes a text (with a nod there again to the clause, not phrase, of my book title Reading Voices). Functioning as their own kind of tutorial, the phrasal alienations of creative reading are always a refresher course (in the double sense ‘re-medial’) where one is awed again by language in its unsettled potentialities.
So isn’t there a natural overflow of this passion for wording that would normally be channeled—you tacitly ask—into literary words of my own?
NR: That was indeed one facet of my question about other genres of writing to which your love of words—which I see as healthily at odds with what I call lingophobia – may have led you.
GS: Fair enough, but I’m afraid the passion consumes itself in the contours of analysis. I don’t write poetry, and the closest thing to a memoir I’ve conceived is in the first of LaRocca’s trilogy on my reading career, in Attention Spans: a multi-chapter, repeatedly self-critical, reminiscence of my interpretive work, my ‘writing life’ rather than so-called ‘life story’, as it has developed and revised itself over the decades. Memoir manqué? Okay, but I never felt I had a novel ‘in me’—no good at plot—nor a screenplay. There are, however, a couple of tangential exceptions that only go to prove the rule. In a scholarly book of mine on fictional language called Novel Violence, I inserted fantasized excerpts from a parody ‘backstory’ novel (on the model of Jane Eyre refaceted through the travails of Bertha Mason’s prehistory) concocted by an Oxbridge Victorianist—and had it marketed by a fictionalized literary agent hot to capitalize on the trend. This was a novel about the violence done to Arthur Clennam’s mother in the plot of Dickens’s Little Dorrit by suppressing the letters that would have expressed her accusatory rage and despair, as originally sketched in prospect by Dickens in his serial number plans for the book’s climax. But true to form—to my mode of formative reading—all this was entirely in the service of probing certain hidden (repressed) inferences of diction and syntax in the novel’s closing paragraphs.
And the second exception I mentioned is perhaps more immediately to the point. Another variant of such fictional fallout from the truncations of plot, taking creative reading almost to the point of travesty in poetic license, occurs in the closing essay of the La Rocca trilogy, a rather extreme case of ‘refraction’ in the impulse toward what I call ‘ghost reading’. Here untapped inferences of a novel’s closing passage—from Austen through Mary Shelley to Dickens, Poe to Stevenson and Wilde, then on to Conrad—get drawn on, and drawn out, in a spectral prose (‘Narrative Afterwording: Too Close for Closure’) meant to simulate the immersive co-creativity intoned by Conrad in famously saying (though falsely attributed by ChatGPT, I find, to critic Umberto Eco in his claims about the ‘open text’!) that the author ‘writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader’. And not just any reader, in any reading, but one ideally on the same wavelength (or say quite literally the same page, syntactic and vocabular alike) as that of any author thus taken on, in and up. Operating overtime as such, this extra dimension of verbal fade-out amounts to a sequel degree zero, not putting words in the mouths of narration but eliciting instead the hovering inferences worded into latency and internal reverb by the unruly medium still unconsciously at work in us. In my experimental last chapter, then, such vestigial paragraphs of explicit para-fiction, sedimented by the rhetoric they analyse even in protracting it by spectral fallout, may be thought to constitute, as ghost-reading, the outer limit of that textual habitation—you residing in it, it residually in you—involved in any ‘creative’ analysis haunted by the indeterminacies of closure.
NR: Given your repeated stress on the inward pressure of linguistic structure per se on the manifestations of literary phrasing, I suspect our views on ‘surface reading’ have much in common. Andrew Bennett and I briefly discuss Best and Marcus’s ‘Surface Reading’ in the ‘Readers and Reading’ chapter in the Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, and it’s also a point (or counterpoint) of reference in a recent issue of the Oxford Literary Review on ‘Reading and Its Discontents’; but would ‘Surface Reading’ qualify as ‘lodestone writing’ that offers ‘polished, inspiring analysis’?
GS: Not to quibble, but you can only polish a surface, not a depth. In contrast, the magnetic core I had in mind by the metaphor ‘lodestone’ emanates from such a depth. How ‘inspiring’ surface reading might be would be easier to judge if there were any definitive examples of it. The call by Best and Marcus was to reject suspicious ideological analysis in the Jamesonian mode (one of the triumphs, I’d object, in American literary theory). But what would be left instead was left mostly unexemplified, then and since. I used to be a mix of flattered and annoyed when my colleague Helen Vendler in my first job at Boston University, when she was still in the ascendant as Grand Dame of American letters (Harvard eventually, The New Yorker next) allowed that she and I were not theorists, but ‘surface people’. I always wanted my gravitation to the term ‘style’ to mean more than that.
NR: This is certainly something I’m curious about – whether, for you, style could be seen, in a positive light, as one of the ‘surface attractions’ of literary writing.
GS: Could, yes, but there’s another way to come at the issue. Toward the end of my dialogue with David LaRocca, in Closer Reading, I allude to a paper by Stephen Best that I had invited for a departmental lecture series on ‘The Fate of Professional Reading’, hoping to get a clearer fix on what the co-author of that rallying cry for ‘surface reading’ might want to demonstrate of its avowed critical results. But it turns out that, under pressure of scholarly debate, and second thoughts of his own, Best had backed away from the whole issue, if not disavowed it entirely—and wanted to do something quite different instead. In what we might think of as the least deconstructive gesture imaginable, Best was trying to recover the authentic Black Voice from the chameleon intonations of James Baldwin’s embodied public rhetoric. This was as much a reading of videotape performances as of literary surface, and in an email exchange over his paper I tried routing the question back at one point to the sound of Baldwin’s autobiographical prose when intoned—whether empathetically or not, but in the technical sense of sympathetic vibration—by the reader’s own vocal chords, where racial friction could be shown to invade the fricatives of an obsessively iterated ‘fear heard’ (things ‘feared’ audibly internalized) in Baldwin’s childhood racial environment. As complement to your powerful book on Telepathy in Literature, I’d file this stratum of transference as a kind of telephony, which will no doubt bring us round to the critique of phonocentrism in the work of Derrida.
NR: Derrida’s work is undoubtedly on the agenda here. And there are many further directions in which I could envisage pursuing our conversation – what you call under-reading and what interests me in relation to the mole (starting with the essay on that creature in The Uncanny) and the undermind (as that emerges out of an encounter with David Bowie and Enid Blyton in the Sun Machine); the question of Conrad and writing in a ‘foreign language’ (it’s Proust who says ‘great books are written in a kind of foreign language’ and Deleuze who makes that the epigraph to his Essays Critical and Clinical); the question of psychoanalysis (for example apropos your remark about ‘the unruly medium still unconsciously at work in us’, but also the idea of ‘inspired analysis’ as a way of reading Freud, Fanon and so on); and the workings of the phonotextual in your own prose (transegmental drifting and related effects: you may not be wedded to it, but I picked up a hymeneal note in your ‘awed [a-wed] again by language in its unsettled potentialities’!).
GS: I’ll get right back to that potential rewedding of syllabic borders—very much in the (visible) letter, so to say, if not the serviceable spirit, of my auditions. But thanks first for the reminder of Proust: a rather perfect match, that foreignness, for the theorized ‘estrangement’ in the contemporaneous thought of Russian formalism. Regarding sheer literacy rather than literature, I remember Derrida being lightly booed at a conference in bilingual Montreal once when claiming that no ‘one’ could really think or speak in two languages, the split subject thus voiding the notion of ‘oneself’. Leaving that debate to one side, the ‘alienation effect’ of literary language cannot be assessed at any surface level, only its disturbances and dislocations felt. Against what verbal infrastructure are we to audit any such illuminating discrepancies—or, the best term perhaps, displacements? The question arises with your silent ‘w’ in ‘wed’. I typically resist annotating such intriguing accidents in ‘reading’ (i.e., in performing the word sounds) of prose or poetry, even though, if your pun had occurred to me—and I wanted it for rhetorical reasons in my own discourse—I would try finding a graphic (via syntactic) means to indicate the doubleness. ‘Sufficiently awed by a phrasing, one is soon a(wed) to its allure’. That sort of thing. Otherwise, the claims of the ‘phonotext’ require for me, as a plausible response, stopping short on the near side of the auditory bar entailed in language generation. Double-ply interpretation of this sort gets summoned in process only by phrasing that activates a functional lexical and syntactic (not just thematic) association. I speak of the plausible when rooted in the palpable. This would, for instance, involve hearing in Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn the play on sensory ‘ear’ versus melodies more embedded and ‘endeared’ (an easy sell), or even, in the dental register of phonetics, the ‘slowed time’ implied in the urn as a survivor of ‘slow time’, or the monosyllable ‘tone’ audibly muted in the noteless ‘ditties of no tone’, but would rule out, aside from the near perfect graphic synonymy in evoking the urn’s circularity of decoration, any ‘ring’ triggered (hardly ringing out) in the pottery’s—or poetry’s—’leaf-fringed legend’. In prose, it’s also a matter of keeping one’s powder dry for the decisive coups of contrapuntal phonetics, as for instance with the revelatory spiritual peace of the death moment suffused across George Eliot’s perfect homophonic play in The Mill on the Floss—a mortally fleeting rhyme riche—on ‘the mysterious wondrous happiness that is one [as well as, through lateral phonic pressure, “won”] with pain’. An evident texduality by any name. Divergent words at one with each other, as if in cinematic terms superimposed, on the sounding board of the inner ear.
NR: I fully respect the self-policing limit you want to mark. Laughter surely does not justify wedding oneself. But I would like to say, by way of clarification, that I have never much liked the word ‘pun’. I recall that, in a little book bearing the implausible (though thankfully at least not self-imposed) title How to Read Shakespeare, I sought to make the point that Shakespeare was evidently unfamiliar with the word, and I argued for an approach to reading his work that might avoid a term too easily freighted with the unserious: pun-making as trivialising, self-indulgent, narcissistic and so on. I suppose this wariness of the pun is in part what Derrida is articulating in the preface (‘Proverb: “He that would pun…”’) to the Glassary volume that accompanied the first English translation of Glas. You’ll recall, perhaps, that he claims in ‘Proverb’ that ‘there is not one single pun’ in Glas. (Obviously this is not how Glas has usually been received.)
GS: I’m actually with you there, rather whole-heartedly—though you’d scarcely know it from a word count of my usages—so often as fallback for want of a better term. If you hear, as live audiences might, and if your attention is enlivened by it, Juliet half-saying “What sin a name” in her naïve ‘What’s in’, how should you identify the effect? For me much of this derives from Empson’s ‘double grammar’ (in Shakespeare’s sonnets pre-eminently) when laddered down to the scale of a single lexical conflation. Even the term ‘wordplay’ can seem too frivolous or diversionary, which is why I’ve taken to identifying it, whenever a cross-word d/rift is involved, as ‘word splay’. I think here, too, of what Empson so perfectly called, in its grammatical manifestation, ‘word play in the engineering sense’, a sustaining slack within a structuring brace, call it a self-equilibrating give-and-take. And this is why I’m drawn to the way his follower, Christopher Ricks, opens up the whole spectrum of linguistic tensility, density, intensity, with his liberating concept of the ‘anti-pun’: a phantom alternative haunting a phrase not functionally hospitable to it. Among his best examples, from Wordsworth’s apocalyptic dream in The Prelude, ‘the fleet waters of a drowning world’—where the first adjective does not succeed, except for a cognitive split second, in calling up its dictionary alternative in any imaginary armada that might arrive in rescue. Ricks’ concept gives new meaning to literary writing’s continual churn of words, in contra/pun/tal prose as well as verse. Who could be satisfied to think that the true power of George Eliot’s phrasing with the homophonic chime of ‘won[drous]’ and ‘one’ at the mortal climax of The Mill could be grasped by identifying a mere death-moment ‘pun’?
NR: Won dross indeed! With all due seriousness, then, I would like to zero in, just there, on something that seems to me to haunt your work – that is to say, the death sentence. Over the years I have often found myself coming back to your remarkable book Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction and I’d love to pursue some aspects of that project with you here. Perhaps we could turn to the death of Gerald Dawes at the beginning of Chapter 5 of E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey. You will readily recall the two sentences with which that chapter begins: ‘Gerald died that afternoon. He was broken up in the football match.’ Your discussion of this sporting moment (English football, of course, not American) and ‘last words’ is very fine, I think. Permit me to quote you here:
In the narrative’s combined burden of pitiless irony and spiritually bereft pathos, this is one of the truly shocking moments in modern fiction. The novelistic options of the revelatory death scene are meant to wither before our eyes, travestied and vetoed. Forster is out to censure the assumed epiphanic ripeness of such occasions by choking off every sardonically evoked opportunity for emotional clarity, let alone consolation, dragging out a death as wooden and hollow as the coffin to which dying delivers the corpse. Nearly the athlete’s last utterance is only a plea for the release from all speech: ‘I want—I don’t want to talk.’ Muttering, ‘I can’t see you,’ he ‘passed from her trembling with open eyes.’ Before the close of the twentieth century’s first decade, the time-honored rhetoric of the death scene seems in danger of losing its voice entirely. (Death Sentences, 182)
GS: That passage still gets to me, and in more ways now than I realized, but no doubt felt, at the time. ‘I want. . . not . . .’—as if clocked there were the move beyond all desire for this man of the flesh. And there’s the counter-mark of ‘double grammar’ again, in a ‘trembling’ either his or hers syntactically (participle versus gerund), or implausibly of both, given their lack of sympathetic vibration in a moment where ‘passed from’ has no euphemistic Victorian vector into ‘passed on’. (These last two points I had actually made at the time, but had to look back to make sure, so fresh is the shock value of this scene on every return reading, including ‘broken up’ as the literal manifestation, new to me here, of his figurative defeat.) Such latent expressive force shadowing a text with the less than fully said are what I would be eager to think included within Derrida’s concept of ‘writing in reserve’ (as you refer to it), phrasal latency, eliciting among other potentiated responses that ‘ghost reading’ after closure, mortal or textual, mentioned above.
NR: What is already evident in your book of 1984 is a concern with the question of style (styles of dying) – a concern also explicit in your much more recent book, The Value of Style in Fiction (2018). You just alluded to my essay ‘On Literary Criticism: Writing in Reserve’. This essay is primarily about Geoffrey Hartman and deconstruction, but it is also (as far as I can recall!) my first ‘writerly’ encounter with your work. It is apropos also, I think, with regard to the question of puns, as Hartman is one of the critics who characterized Glas as an ‘endlessly punning’ work. How important was Hartman’s work in shaping your own writing? And then how do you see your work in relation to Derrida?
GS: Hartman’s class on Romanticism was my first graduate seminar at Yale, just before deconstruction had arrived—along with Derrida for many a visiting appointment—to consolidate the touted Yale School. Hartman was, in his early work, the deepest influence on my sense of a surface tension in language that cannot be explained without recourse to subterranean linguistic forces. In fact, his renowned essay, ‘The Voice of the Shuttle’ (beginning with Ovid’s phrase for rendering expressive the tongueless Philomela by the lateral texturing strokes of her loom), an essay aptly included in a collection entitled Beyond Formalism, remains one radiant apogee of what I meant by creative criticism. It was Hartman’s superlative instinct for linguistic play in its philosophical implications that made him eventually one of the preeminent readers of Derrida himself. In fact, his masterly glossing of the latter’s Glas (with its entitling ‘death knell’ in full resonance) served to confirm many of my own rudimentary deconstructive instincts in the reading of technically illegible metaphysical transitions in the death moments of fiction, where only figurative language can make the turn, the trope, to a zone beyond reference. As if openly signalling the fate of the signified in the tolling of any signifier, death became for me the epitomizing fictive moment—or what de Man’s wing of Yale deconstruction would call catachresis, figurative designator for which there is no literal alternative: face of a mountain, leg of a chair, death-rattle beyond the reach of speech. Such mortal flashpoints regularly arrive in fiction as a referential limit case of documented transition apart from evidence, subjective or objective. The very rhythm of passing, on or just away, is displaced into the flux and ebb of the rhetorical passage shaped to conjure it.
NR: I’d like to invite you to say a little more about the Yale legacy, as well as Derrida’s work beyond that orbit. Closer Reading includes a fascinating essay on ‘the avoidance of Stanley Cavell’. As you’ve just hinted, there are innumerable ways in which your work seems indebted to or inspired by or in cahoots with Derrida (perhaps you’d be wary of all these ways of phrasing it?). To take a single but compelling example: your notion of originary reading seems to me indissociably linked to Derrida’s concerns with a deconstructive thinking of origins, with originary mourning, and the originary yes. But then in other ways I wonder, would it be fair to suggest that you practise something like an art of avoidance?
That essay about writing in reserve (in After Derrida) explores the proposition that Derrida draws from Jean Genet: ‘the signature is a wound and there is no other origin of the work of art’ (Glas 184). While Derrida seems wary of the idea of style – of its incisive, decisive, phallocentric character (see ‘On Style’, in The Portable Cixous, 201) – his explorations of the signature and countersignature, the idiom and so on, seem to me illuminating for thinking about it. Elsewhere, for example in Signéponge (translated by Richard Rand as Signsponge), ‘style’ is readily associated with what he calls the ‘second modality’ (54) of the signature. I’m intrigued by your thoughts in this context. At the start of your book Style in Fiction you declare that style is to be understood ‘not as a “signature effect”’ (1). While you affirm the idea of ‘a diction and cadence of one’s own’ (33), there seems to be a Bartleby-like preference not to consider style in relation to signature: ‘we begin’, you reiterate at the start of your second chapter, ‘not with signature stylistic features’ (34). I wonder if this tension or paradox might allow for some more detailed reflections on the stable (the unstable stable!) out of which your own writing has emerged.
GS: If this had in any way been a hostile interview, you’d have nailed me there. And on two counts: Derrida’s sense of authorial re-signing (rather than fully disappearing) in the throes of the writerly, as well as the slant I gave in my little book you mention for Cambridge’s short-lived ‘The Value-of’ series, whose commission I accepted in order to bring back, as economically as possible, a sample battery of verbal attention (structuring process), not just authorial recognition (style), to the study of fiction. Its actual lumpy title, The Value of Style in Fiction, was shorthand for the interpretive currency of textual byplay in readerly encounters, rather than for comparative evaluation of one recognized authorial manner or another. Identifying the telltale signs of a rhetorical style was minimized, even there, by my abiding sense of verbal energy non-identical with itself, in Derrida’s sense ‘disseminated’ at its source. In my excerpts and commentary, Melville is still distinct from Dickens at a glance, Jonathan Franzen from D.H. Lawrence, but the glance doesn’t, I trust, remain ‘superficial’ for long. Still, the volume was meant for that fantasized swath of the public known as the ‘general reader’, and I was therefore off the hook in regard to any robust theorization of style or the subjectivity of signage. Excuses, excuses, I know.
Certainly you do put your finger on a broader issue. Years back I had indeed felt cornered into an initially targeted ‘avoidance’ (or more like strategic dodge) of Derrida that no doubt lasted too long—even while the curious reader in me always kept up sporadically with his profusion. This isn’t just to say that I didn’t master his ongoing work in the way your publications have done—and helped others to do. More narrowly, I had as sparring partner, first time out, the magisterial and daunting Grammatology when I started down my own linguistic path toward the phonotext and its place in narratography. Hartman used to say that ‘criticism is like a football game—you find an opening and go through.’ And another influence on my early work, Christopher Ricks, has said of critics that they are simply ‘good at noticing things’ that others don’t. I had begun to notice a pattern of sound play in literary writing, verse and prose, from Shakespeare through and beyond Virginia Woolf, that I was poised finally to write about when, in terms of football, the defensive line was especially muscular and determined. Early conference presentations showed me what I was up against. Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism—as derived from the Word-based spiritual order of phallic dominance under the sign of the Logos—rallied the feminists and leftists alike, otherwise my assumed cohort, not to mention the metalinguists.
NR: Criticism as a football game in which you look for an opening: that’s a nice image. I suppose this is about American rather than British football. The language of opening is intriguing. I’ve noticed that American soccer players exclaim ‘I’m open!’ when asking for the ball to be passed to them. This always sounds a bit funny to my ear, as if players were shops (or stores), or even perhaps as if they were trying to say something about their candor and honesty. But to get back to Derrida: his thought was perceived in those days as a kind of theoretical juggernaut and you were intent on manoeuvering around it?
GS: I turned instead to the feminine figuration of deep ‘semiosis’ (versus the surface of standardized symbolic language) in Kristeva’s terminology, as well as to Foucault on the phonetic punning of Raymond Roussel, whose modernist anarchies of the syllable marked a definitive break from traditional linguistics as one of Foucault’s ‘sciences of man’ institutionalized in the preceding century. Such further consultation with textual theory was begun in the attempt at a narrow end-run around Derrida. Already, in siding with him on the quasi-transcendental myth of authorial voice, I lost the creative writing crowd right away (all but the experimental poets) in my public presentations. To scholars of literary history and theory, then, my only audience left, I needed to speak about a phonotext always and already decentered by definition. As such, as marked by my title (again, Reading Voices), there is no voice stored in text to be uncorked, only the voicing—confirmed in neuroscience as a muscular latency, tapped but ‘inhibited’—that produces silent literacy in the first place: that, in other words—a wording often other to its own inscription—elicits under silent enunciation (through the mediatory phonemic work of Saussurian ‘sound images’) the shaping of language into meaning. Put otherwise, this is the elemental, incremental process that transitively voices language as text. What I was later to call reading’s anagrammed ‘silent listen’ was another variant of the claim. As were so many of my coinages over the years, all loosely encouraged by Derrida’s verbal acrobatics.
NR: So, only a partial ‘avoidance’ of Derrida then?
GS: Yes, but I’ll readily admit I turned aside too soon. Having solidified, at least to my own satisfaction, the difference between the ideology of phonocentrism and my own claims for phonemic reading, I was probably over-anxious about having to relitigate the case each time out—and rarely called Derrida back to the witness stand. And one result is that I stuck with ‘style’ for too long, with its conservative auteurist associations, partly out of solidarity with my contemporary film writing, where the notion of camera stylo was a more radical figuration of the mechanical (later digital) ‘stylus’ that makes for meaning in imprint media. Or am I only making excuses again? What I’m sure of is that I had by then, spurred by my transmedial work in part, quietly (perhaps too quietly) subsumed thinking about style to theorizing about ‘text’ instead. By the time, in this later work, I was deploying such portmanteau terms as cinécriture, ‘techtual’ and ‘cinemachines’, I felt myself in a full if belated Derridean mode, stressing always the differentials that propel semiotic formation by way of the elisions and diacritical inflections that mark his own coinages. And this in the kind of dovetailed homophonics never outlawed under the strictures of anti-phonocentrism—but instead recruited precisely to expose language’s endemic ‘texduality’. Across the media of painting, sculpture, conceptual art, film and literature, emphasis increasingly fell for me on the generation of text rather the stylistics of technique, and I should have worked harder—you’re quite right in triggering this mea culpa—to extricate, by explaining, my evolving approach from the dated overtones of ‘style’. After the too-rushed brush with Derrida, my leading theoretical interlocutors in subsequent books included Deleuze (Between Film and Screen, Framed Time), Lukács (Novel Violence), Cavell (The Deed of Reading), Kittler and Agamben (Book, Text, Medium) and Jean Epstein (Cinemachines)—but always with Derrida’s self-instancing mantra of différance in mind.
Evidence in this vein is in some sense clearest when I ‘deconstruct’ (or, better here, phonetically ‘decenter’) the proverbial ‘song stylist’ Barbra Streisand in my last monograph (Streisand: The Mirror of Difference) in order to hear enacted, by her nuanced voice production, the emergent lingering vocables, syllabic overlaps and iterative wordplay to which her legato delivery is so prone, with new channels of meaning and affect released within a putative single note—or, in the fuller textual sense, a distended ‘phrasing’. Disbanded within her branded high D, for instance, hear the ‘peace and quiet and open air’, literal as well as figurative, that ‘waits for us’—maximally opened up and out—in the titular reach of her huge climactic ‘suhuhumewherererere’. Narratography in a single syllable. Nonetheless, you’ve helpfully reminded me of what, before this, I had often sidelined in my work when trying to deploy ‘style’ without fully discounting its lazy sense of some ‘trademark’ stamp—an issue about which other readers than you may have regretted the lack of a more strenuous discussion. Which at least we’ve begun here. And you have certainly given me a newly annotated reading list in this line. On the score of signature effects alone, the subjectivity that the poet Francis Ponge, sponged up (épongé) by dried ink in Derrida’s conflation Signéponge, is one among other titles to which I’d be eager to return amid your own signature bibliography and, if I may, the ‘roiling’ cross-currents it has brought back into play for this challenging—and welcome—conversation.
References
Works by Nicholas Royle
Royle, Nicholas. ‘Creative-Critical Practice’, in English Now, ed. Richard Adelman, The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 55 (2025), 115-26. doi:10.1353/yes.00020
Royle, Nicholas. Quilt. (With critical afterword ‘Reality Literature’.) (Brighton, Myriad Editions, 2010).
Royle, Nicholas. ‘Creative Critical’, in Minnesota Review, vol. 99 (2022): 80-93.
Royle, Nicholas. ‘Lingophobia’, in French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK, ed. Irving Goh (London, Routledge, 2020), 32-45.
Royle, Nicholas, and Andrew Bennett. ‘Readers and Reading’, in Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, sixth edition (London and New York, Routledge, 2023), 21-32.
Royle, Nicholas, ed. Reading and Its Discontents, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 44, no.2 (2022).
Royle, Nicholas. Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., Basil Blackwell, 1991).
Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny (New York, Routledge and Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003).
Royle, Nicholas. David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (Manchester and New York, 2023).
Royle, Nicholas. How to Read Shakespeare. (London, Granta and New York, Norton, 2005). Reissued, with new Preface, ‘Creative Reading’, 2014.
Royle, Nicholas. ‘On Literary Criticism: Writing in Reserve’, in After Derrida (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 39-60.
Works by Garrett Stewart
Garrett Stewart, ‘The Art of Critical Writing: A Literary Genre at Vanishing Point’, Philological Quarterly 103.3 (2024), 229-244.
Garrett Stewart, Closer Reading: Garrett Stewart’s Essays in Reflection, edited by David La Rocca (New York, Bloomsbury, 2026).
Garrett Stewart, The Deed of Reading: Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015).
Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990).
Garrett Stewart, Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1984).
Garrett Stewart, The Value of Style in Fiction (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Garrett Stewart Book, Text, Medium: Cross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Garrett Stewart, Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Garrett Stewart, Streisand: The Mirror of Difference (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2023).
