When I was teaching in graduate school and during a postdoc, I remember never being quite able to describe to literature undergrads who had heard the phrase bandied about what a “close reading” really was. It’s one of those things—like riding a bike, or rolling skating—that you think you know how to do until you have to explain it to someone younger than you.
This led to the predictable results: papers that were either too zoomed out—full of plot summary and character analysis that sounded like SparkNotes—or too zoomed in, as in they would look at a single passage and point out a few isolated, interesting things about it, but the “reading” part never came together.
One of the post-firing tasks I have appointed for myself is to memorize some of my favorite passages from various works, ranging from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall to the Declaration of Independence. There’s some Shakespeare and Dante in there, as well as some more idiosyncratic choices, like Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” because it cracks me up, especially now that I’ve had kids myself.
One of the side benefits of memorization is that, obviously, it makes you pay a kind of micro-focused attention to things that you already knew you liked, but maybe didn’t know why you liked them. It also makes you live with them in a way that you don’t when text is external to your mind. Today, while my stylist was finishing my haircut, I started running through some of the passages I’ve memorized, including this one from Mantel:
How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses; not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence; from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up by the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses; not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus. Not by the click and grate of the mechanism of the gun but from the scratch of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun, and the gunsmith, and the powder, and the shot.
This scene occurs at a moment of high tension during the book, when Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer, faces a real challenge: convincing the “him” (Henry Percy) in the passage above that he should retract his claim that he married Anne Boleyn secretly long before she knew that she was going to attract the attentions of the king, which would provide a pretty hefty impediment to her becoming queen of England. A lot rides on convincing the lordling, who is convinced that his ancient title and army of retainers will protect him against a mere lawyer and functionary like Cromwell, that he should disavow what he’s just said. What Cromwell’s internal monologue tries to chart here is a revolution in the world that now, improbably, puts him in a more powerful position than the Earl of Northumberland.
(One of the places from which the world is not run.)
I chose it in part because it is internal monologue, which none of my other chosen passages are. It’s a novelistic device that might owe something to the great Shakespearean monologues, but it’s never really clear to me where we “are” when we’re hearing Hamlet considering suicide or the future Henry V explaining how his “reformation” will “glitter…o’er [his] faults.” The novel makes head-dipping where you are sure of your location possible, and strongly marked out from dialogue.
This is an extraordinarily elegant piece of writing from Mantel, and I didn’t really understand how it was functioning—either on its own or as part of the larger plot of the novel—until I sat down to memorize it. When I memorize, I have to think about the structure of the argument, or what’s being said. Here, it was clear that there was a structure. It starts with the rhetorical question, which sets up a certain difficulty or impossibility in the task, or at least of accomplishing it logically, as well as a stupidity in one’s interlocutor. (This is a well-justified belief on Cromwell’s part, because the Earl, in addition to being an idiot, is a drunkard.) As it happens, it’s accomplished poetically, by means of the frequently recurring contrast “not this…but that.” But those thises and thats are not abstract philosophical or political concepts, but synecdoches. Synecdoches are figures of speech where a part is meant to represent the whole, frequently an abstract whole that is otherwise hard to conceptualize. Thus “border fortresses” come to stand in, then, for the Earl’s outdated way of thinking. The curious thing about these initial contrasts, though, is that they don’t contrast equally or in a balanced way. To “border fortresses” and “Whitehall,” we get “Antwerp, Florence, places he has never imagined, and Lisbon,” the last accompanied by a stirring description of colonial Atlantic exploration. The places he has never imagined is the ultimate abundance on Cromwell’s side: a bit of a rhetorical trick, really, weighing the scales in his favor by an indefinite and unspecified amount. It also points to the diffuseness of the answer to the question. Where is the world run? Everywhere and nowhere. From any possible quarter, even ones you don’t imagine or suspect.
From here, the symmetry becomes a bit, well, more symmetrical. Castle walls, counting houses. Initial Cs, two words, as if Cromwell is trying to rein in his earlier rhetorical abundance. Then the passage opens into another sense: hearing. Not the call of the bugle, but the click of the abacus. Then there’s the curious repetition of the “click” when it comes to the gun. I’m still puzzling a bit over what to do with that, but I’m wondering if the point is something like “it’s easy to confuse the kinds of clicks as one world and one word replaces another, but don’t do this.”
Then, rather masterfully, a passage that began in synecdoche, one more evocative thing standing in for another ends in great specificity, a series of steps that makes you think about all of the parts that are necessary for the assembly of a gun, itself a symbol of a new world that would have been foreign to the way that the Percies of Northumberland defended the borders of England against the Scots. The complicated chain begins with the scrape of a pen and ends with the powder and the shot that the soldier loads into it before firing, a chain of noises that you can viscerally hear. But all of this is occurring inside Cromwell’s head, admitting you into his confidence but not the Earl himself, who really can’t have it explained to him after all. The part that Cromwell says out loud is, “Let’s just say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.”
One of the startling effects of the book—one that exploits what the novel can do and other literary forms can’t—is to contrast what is going on inside Cromwell’s head with the image that he is expected to project, of the uncouth hard man who will enforce the parts of Henry’s will that the royal person is too delicate to mention himself. This passage is a prime example. What Cromwell says out loud is short, Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic. (It’s also slightly ungrammatical: he uses what remains of the dative case in English to himself an auxiliary object instead of the doer of the action, possibly in service of putting ‘me’ first, instead of ‘My banker friends and I.’) What’s going on in his head unspools a vast and complex world that extends from the abstract and large to the detailed and particular and back again. It betrays his well-traveled complexity—he can certainly imagine these places, because he’s been there—and his excellent understanding.
On the other hand, spoiler alert, it’s also a bit wrong. The limitations of Cromwell and his banker friends become clear in the final novel, when his head is chopped off by Whitehall at the behest of those border lords who have been talked down to by him too many times. The world is not quite yet run from where he thinks. And at moments like this, you wonder if it’s the difference between what’s going on in Cromwell’s head and what he thinks his hearers are capable of understanding that does for him in the end. His internal monologue is rhetorical perfection, an intricate web that is hard to dispute or break; his threat is just a threat. The books are a tragedy, which I think some people forget. A tragedy, as Shakespeare and other near contemporaries of Cromwell understood, and which Mantel certainly understands, is a story of a noble man who falls despite or ideally because of his best qualities. In Cromwell’s case, I think the tragedy is often revealed in these gaps between what he’s thinking and what he says. He understands on a level that others don’t, and sharing that understanding might have worked to bring about the world that he’s trying to will into existence through threatening people like Harry Percy. But something stops him—an inability or an unwillingness to translate his interior monologue into anything more than a thuggish threat. He has an opportunity to offer a poetic vision of a new world, but he keeps it inside, private, all to himself.