Veering: A Theory of Literature is a book written from love.

Only someone with the

breadth of knowledge and promiscuous reading habits of Nicholas Royle could have written

Veering, but the longing or opaque desire of which its early pages speak was no less necessary.

“This book is a twisted love story” (1), Veering begins, and from beginning to end its writing

betrays the patience, care and attention—but also the passion, mania and even obsession—of a

doting lover concerned with something at once close at hand and confoundingly elusive in the

word ‘veering.’ I said the patience of a lover, but I could just as easily have said lovers, for what

Veering teaches is above all the multiplicity of forces, and voices, at work in any literary work,

and Veering is nothing if not literary, an experiment at the frontier of the “critical” and “literary”

genres, an experiment in the turning from and to the literary and its others.

The love story Veering tells begins with the word ‘veering’ and with its etymological,

anagrammatical and conceptual twists and turns as found in the works of John Dryden, Stephen

King, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and everyone in between. It ends with something much broader in

scope, which promises new avenues for the reading and interpretation of literary works. Despite

its title, however, Veering: A Theory of Literature does not offer a theory, or even an approach or

a method for literary analysis. What the thought or trope of veering offers is rather a way of

thinking about the internal, vagrant and disseminatory movements of the literary, and the ways

that that movement will have already contaminated (and been contaminated by) readerly and

critical praxes. In this way Veering represents a risky and at times frustrating endeavor. One that

could be said to succeed precisely in failing to constitute anything more programmatic than a

series of aphorisms about its title-word (154).

Royle’s premise in writing Veering is that the semantic nexus of the titular term is a good

starting point from which to apprehend many prevalent literary phenomena such as digression,

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the materiality of the letter, narrative point of view, and even canonicity and the distinction of the

literary “classic.” ‘Veering’ can do all this because the sometimes antithetical meanings it has

accrued through its rich, but often wayward voyage through the English, American and French

literary traditions, makes it something of a model for the movement of literature itself. Returning

time and again to the always helpful resources of the OED, Royle explains that ‘veering’ is an

adjective, a verb and a noun. As an adjective it bears the literal sense of a changing of direction

or a turning round and the figurative sense of vacillating. As a noun it refers to the action of

changing course, and as a verb it is connected to the French virer, to turn or turn around. But the

meaning of ‘veering’ itself veers, Royle shows, from a term originally associated only with the

nautical and elemental, to one applicable also to people or thoughts. While this initial shift is first

attested during the course of the seventeenth century, it was only with Wordsworth’s Prelude

that the application of veering to the self, either in the form of one’s body, feelings, thoughts or

memories, ceases to be (explicitly) figurative, and begins to appear naturally suited to different

forms of interiority (6). From this point on, Royle explains, from “Tennyson to George Eliot to

Herman Melville to D.H. Lawrence…veering is picked up as a figure either to describe inner

states per se, or to describe the external world in a way that seems to mirror, indicate or enact

interior states” (7). But even the term ‘state’ is not quite right here, for what the vacillation that

veering names does is call into question the propriety of the state. The movement of veering, we

might say, is itself stateless, a nomadic turning that recognizes neither natural nor unnatural

borders, and that moves seamlessly between subject and object, self and other. Even then,

perhaps the demarcations and demarcatability of “literal” and “figurative” langauge, and the

stability of its very history as one of continuous progression from objective to subjective

associations.

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 To read with veering in mind means to attend to the swerve or clinamen at work both in

texts and in language in general. Just then as a certain veering is to be found at the center of

‘environment,’ so too, in a more playful—or perhaps more queer mode—does something veer in

the ‘scrivener’ of Melville’s “Bartelby,” whose recounted ‘perversions’ and ‘reveries,’ Royle

argues, are not to be restricted by strict semantic borders, but should be broadened to include

what he calls “wordlife” (162). Referring the thought of “wordlife” directly to Hélène Cixous’

essay “Writing Blind,” Royle explains in chapter 9, “Veerer: Reading Melville’s ‘Bartelby’,”

that: “Wordlife entails an attention to what is going on in ‘the mines of language,’ as Cixous

says, the ‘jokes’ and ‘gifts’ that words bring us ‘in secret’, the ‘couplings, matings,

hybridizations’. It is turning about, for example, in the very word ‘veer’” (165). And the impetus

for the anagrammatical can be seen to follow, in Royle’s work, directly from the word and

thought of veering, which when applied to physical movement, for example—as in the sentence

“the car veers”—traverses the border between the intentional and unintentional. The motion of

veering, when applied to humans and non-humans alike, suspends the distinction between

activity and passivity and therefore also gives to think something like the play of the letter that is

neither willed nor, exactly, unwilled, but follows from what we could call, following Royle, the

life of words.

The question of theory, finally, of literary theory and literature as theory as well as theory

as literature, is a constant occupation of Veering, and Royle is perhaps at his best when his

theoretical and philosophical arguments are made to encounter explicitly dramatic or “fictional”

inscriptions. One such encounter takes place when he treats of his title and the status of “theory”

in it in chapter four, “Drama: An Aside.” Like the literary, fictional and autobiographical

interludes that complement and interrupt critical discussions in chapters six, “On Critical and

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Creative Writing,” eight, “Veerers: Where Ghosts Live” and the wonderful, if perplexing,

appendage to chapter nine, “A Small Case of Civil Disobedience,” chapter four introduces the

questions of the title and of drama by way of a literary supplement: here a failed dialogue. It

fails, goes awry, or veers off course when Royle’s wary and resistant interlocutor can no longer

support the voice of veering and decides to exit prematurely, leaving this latter voice to explore

the 1599 invention of soliloquy in Hamlet all by himself. It is moments like these, reflective,

ironic and irrepressible in Royle’s writing, that give to Veering its distinctive signature and

reinforce the inextricability of so-called literary and critical genres. Here the veering voice—the

one who claims authorship over Veering—proposes a number of ways to understand its title:

“Am I offering a theory about veering? Or is it a theory called by that name, a title-word to be

heard, then, as a sort of neologism or nonce word?” (55) The subtitle itself, he goes on, must be

heard in two ways, for “veering” would be both the name for a theory of literature, treating of the

literary object as from an external vantage point, and a theory of literature, “a sort of analytical

entangling within the literary” (55). Indeed, part of the charm of ‘veering’ is that it presents us

with a figure for just this wavering or ambivalence. The theory of veering would not simply be

caught between literary and theoretical groundings, but would to some extent also account for

the very movement that constitutes this fluctuation. Veering gives new name—and figure—to

the undecidability marking the deconstructive endeavor to think from within and between

discourses, disciplines and institutions. As such, Veering: A Theory of Literature itself marks a

departure, turning or swerve, into unknown frontiers of reading.

If it is possible to sign a word, then Royle has done just that in writing Veering, leaving

his indelible mark on the vertiginous folds of this queer term. One wonders, however, in lending

his name to such a work, whether it is not countersigned thereby; whether the status of the proper

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name does not itself muddy, once it is implicated in veering’s web of desire. We could call this

the roiling, or Royl’ing effect.