Reading about Stein, A Rant

It's not Murphy himself I'm ranting at -- it's a whole way of reading that went on in the 90's that I pretty much never could stand. A whole bunch of really smart work happened back then that just never quite gelled for me. I never wanted to throw everything out in order to make new. I always wanted to see what we had already that would serve the new and make up the rest. And so here's the rant: click &c.OK, so the article connects Stein's poetics to some kinds of French Feminist thinking, loosely, and mostly through Kristeva, and talks about how that poetics activates the desire of the reader (meaning, I think, the reader's imagination by leaving it to the reader to "fill" or play in the text), and frustrates any passivity, and refuses to cooperate with New Critical colonizations of the text through close reading and coming to conclusions about what it means (a sin the writer thinks is also committed by all subsequent reading protocols). OK. Now here's my problem. Murphy quotes and "reads" one line from Ida. That's it. The rest is gloss and discussion, heavy on the Lacan and the Zizek. Here's a taste from:

"Ida did not go directly anywhere": Symbolic peregrinations, desire, and linearity in Gertrude Stein's Ida
Sean P Murphy . Literature and Psychology . Providence: 2001. Vol.47 ,Iss.1/2; pg.1 ,11pgs

Texts that challenge conservative linear narrative paradigms create spaces for the projection of reading subjects' desire.6 Such anti-linear "spaces" within Ida facilitate an understanding of the idea that the texts/images strengthening the ego ideal (the statue of self articulated in symbols) and the ideal ego (the ideal body image) are neither wholly stable, linear, logical, or complete; nor can they fully materialize truth, centers, or knowledge systems (S2). In recognizing projections on Stein's subversive linguistic artifact/"screen," readers apprehend the relative nature of texts, egos, systems, time, semantics, syntax, grammars, identities, realities, hallucinations, and so forth. [MFSR1] Because Ida enables readers to project, to explore, and ultimately to assume their desire within alternative narrative structures and alternative ways of making meanings within these structures, the possibilities for exploring the object a increase exponentially. After all, the text has meaning only insofar as readers' desire, which circulates around an object a, transcends restrictions imposed by linearity and allows readers to re-present identity and subjectivity in more fluid and contingent ways. By transgressing the law of linearity, if you will, Stein opens up possibilities for reading to become a performative act, allowing subjects to enact their own desire rather than the author(ity)'s. Readers move from a passive position, one marked by a process of waiting for the meaning encoded in the text to leap out at them, to an active position, one characterized by the projection and assumption of desire

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[MFSR1]fine, now how is desire set free by this, and what do you find in yours?

Now, ok. Here's the thing. In my little project, I want to stick with close reading, to the extent the text allows. Why? Because in my epistemological matrix the text is an other to which I owe some attention. I don't see Stein as simply allowing my desire to play in language, my readerly jouissance, total freedom to project itself on the text. The text, if not the real, needs to be there, acting back. Resisting, for instance, my desire to say anything I want. Murphy's right that the reader's desire is freed, in fact called upon, in these texts, but I differ in the degree to which I should be so freed, and in my sense of the value of reading closely. Close reading does NOT HAVE to arrive at some Authoritative Law of the Father pronouncement as to meaning and the real. Those are all partial anyway, which is fine. You proceed to read closely Knowing that your reading is one, not the one. You can talk about what the text Does and trace How it Does it without shutting the text down, without shutting down other readings. This is not to say that Murphy is wrong. One can read Stein this way, with one's focus on how one's readerly jouissance gets off, but does that mean one is reading Stein, or that one is reading oneself, WHICH is what The FFs accuse the Patri's of always doing anyway because they ignore the subjectivity of the other, the supplement, the hidden... Wierdly, as much as I was liking this article, I think Murphy's argument leaves too much room for the very "accepted epistemology" he wants to get out of. It's always a pain to see that happen. Yes, Stein is writing out of one way of seeing/being, but not into one in which we are to run about projecting ourselves on the screens of others. That's what Jackdom has been doing all along. I feel a step missing in Murphy's article, which is a smart article, and the step is this: getting more specific about this unconscious that can count past three that he seems to want to find in Stein. Some close reading might have provided that.