Surfacing (in the Heat of Reading): Is It Like Kissing or Some Other Sex Act?

Abstract

Surfacing (in the Heat of Reading):Is It Like Kissing or Some Other Sex Act? Kathryn Bond Stockton (bio) Note to Pleasure Readers: This brief piece is a fanciful engagement of the trend called “surface reading.” This phenomenon, to which I’m responding, calls for taking the surface of a text—almost at the level of one’s just describing it closely, carefully, fully attentively—as a destination in its own right. The aim for surface-readers is not to be swamped by seeking “deeper” meanings, “latent” meanings, such as psychoanalysis has sought. Against this backdrop, take my screed as its own embrace of surface—viva surface reading!—that would fondle depth. Since Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, who started this polemic, show themselves open to maneuvers such as mine, I believe I’m kissing the surface of their claims. Here’s the thing about kissing. It matters intensely. Or not at all. It is a prelude to throbbing tension and a companion to throbbing coming … or … a spreading sideways in the suspension and slowness of time, going fucking nowhere except toward a surface you’re aching to reach. You can do it after sex, and sometimes it feels like orgasm is the prelude to kissing, what we do to get to kiss, so profound is the contact just at the surface, at the lip of surface—catching your lover’s breath just so, making an intentional, intensive, intenerated (that is to say, tender) intercourse at the hint of skin. In Genet, male lovers, who plunge their tongues into the so-called tunnels of each other’s mouths, into their heads “hewn of granite,” cannot imagine kissing each other’s cheeks, their facial cheeks, because this tenderness would be untenable. Even if a surface is imbued with violence, as it is in masochism, it is still a telos (as is kissing) that can stand apart [End Page 7] from penetrative sex. Venus in Furs, ur-text of masochism, renders a fabulous journey to … the surface. Masochism here is a matter of fur, beautiful textures, a vaporous gown flashing through the woods. “I catch sight of a white gown,” says the narrator, “gleaming through the thick tangle of foliage”; “another fabulous outfit! Russian boots of mauve violet lined with ermine, a dress of.…” Here’s a man’s wish to be whipped by beauty, to carry its mark at the surface of his skin in the form of a bruise, even as he often heaps hot kisses on the whipper’s breast. So of course I’m wondering if “surface reading” is meant to feel like kissing or like the masochist’s devotion to a surface? Is “surface reading” somehow like “surfacing” from a location not “below” a text (at least, not exactly) but from a place where the text isn’t being felt as its specific skin? Call it what you will—close reading, surface reading—but it’s more fraught than what these words imply. Think of all that happens when you kiss a text (if I can use these terms). Penetration’s in the kiss. A dizzy array: kissing with your eyes (since you don’t lick a text) becomes in an instant a penetration of you; from this penetration, there’s immediate birth, upon which birth there’s partial death or at least decay; there’s certainly excretion. All this from a kiss? A kiss on a text? Such kissing renders a penetration-birth-death-decaying-excretion-type of experience? Yes, it does. Let me explain. What you know. To kiss a word—a single word—intently with your sight is to let a signifier penetrate your skin, to get inside your body through the vaginal (anal?) opening of the eye. You invaginate the word. In a microsecond, if you know the word, the signifier suddenly gives birth inside your body: it births signifieds that are other signifiers you will treat as signifieds. Some are denotative (some hazy, some precise). Some are connotative, even leaning into “myth,” as Roland Barthes explains it. Some, maybe most, have affective surrounds: feelings and memories sticking to them from other times of use. Are these signifier-signifieds stacked? Are they cubist...