LOVE’S SHADOW by Paul A. Bové (Harvard University Press, 2021)
reviewed by Thomas Fink
In Love’s Shadow, Paul A. Bové denounces the deleterious effects of criticism that relentlessly trumpets doom and underscores the salubrious qualities of one that discloses “poetic possibilities, the evidence of imaginative intellect” (305) and offers “loving responses to all that which masterful works create and leave for us” (304-305). “To be a critic,” he asserts, “one must learn from the art one studies” (304) and should “serve as a docent to others” (335) rather than assuming primary status for criticism and secondary status for art.
According to Bové, the mainstream of cultural studies/critical theory tends to engage in theologically freighted “allegorization,” coercing a text into an allegory based on “an implied understanding among professional readers that allegorizing will ‘write into’ a consensus of agreed issues” (6). “Allegoresis” serves “extratextual programs,” which “displace critical study into debates on the terrain of nonliterary, often tribal agonistics” (7). Building on Edward W. Said’s advocacy of “secular criticism” (3) and Michel Foucault’s study of discourses and their social effects (163), Bové decries the pervasive influence of Fredric Jameson’s dogmatic linkage of “’utopia’ to allegory,” based on the claim that “history, especially the effects of capital, make allegory historically inescapable” (7). He finds parallels among Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” as an allegory of what might be called transcendent devastation (36-37), the phenomenon of “Elohism,” critiqued by Erich Auerbach as “a nihilism that “evacuates the world and empties history of all but the fulness of its own wisdom” (33), and Socrates’ authoritarian valorization of philosophy ((69-110). Bové insists “that not all is ruin, that the angel of history’s vatic view as it swept forward in time is wrong” (17). Instead, he sees a primary function of criticism as disclosing “the capacity of strong imagination to produce poetic” and other aesthetic “alternatives to the inherited” (18).
Bové asserts that “criticism depends on the fact that consciousness need not be or perhaps never is totally absorbed by and into culture” (142), and his most powerful example of a critic who promulgates this view is Theodor Adorno. In such essays as “Cultural Criticism and Society,” “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” and “The Essay as Form,” Adorno “imaginatively makes of the essay the named possibility of experience and work” that embodies “the doubled existence of effort within the limit rather than dismay at the limit and aspiration to or regret for its transcendence” (182). Lamenting the tendency of “quantification of articles and grants” (162) to induce academic critics to work too hastily, superficially, and uncreatively, Bové supports Adorno’s affirmation of creative thinking “in a diverse, rich, complex, and yet finite world” (183), the awareness of what resists illumination (168), and “independence from previous circumscriptions of thought” (163). For Adorno, the essay relies “on subjectivity of intellect,” as opposed to a false sense of objectivity, on contingency, and on the effort to “free the textured life of the particular from the abstraction of dogma and positivism” (169). Emphasis on the relationality of concepts in “the movement of thought” (173)—rather than a single concept governing interpretation and leading inevitably to a fixed telos—is what resists dogma.
For Bové, Wallace Stevens’ poetry, a site of “secular anagoges, in contrast to messianic or utopian allegoresis” (113), offers prime aesthetic instances of the intellectual criticality that Adorno champions. Stevens is one of the prime subjects of Bové’s first book, Destructive Poetics (Columbia UP, 1980), which comprised a Heideggerian interpretation of three U.S. poets. In the four-plus decades between that book and the current one, he did not write on Stevens and published almost nothing on poetry, as he focused mainly on critical theory and Foucaldian studies of the apparatus and circulation of power in critical institutions. Here, Bové departs markedly from emphases in his earlier reading on Stevens’ decentering of quest romance and exposure of the fictional status of the reality/imagination binary. Instead, discussing how Stevens consciously studied great predecessors such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Vico in order to fulfill his calling as a poet and to enter their company, he elucidates Stevens’ “material practice” of “organizing, analyzing, and displaying the interwoven resources of tradition, experience, and knowledge to sustain love, imagination, and so, the human” and make “the universe intelligible to life and life responsible to habitat” (195-96). Drawing intriguing parallels with James Baldwin’s conception of “the struggle to be fully human” (255), Bové defends Stevens’ insistence that “the poet owes no social obligation” by suggesting that this stance of autonomy serves the imperative to “survive what Stevens calls the pressures of the real” (201) in order to permit the poetic imagination to achieve goals of sustainment rather than sacrifice integrity because of the will to power.
Bové’s reading of Stevens’ late long poem “The Auroras of Autumn” is the most substantial portion of his interpretation of the poet’s work. He values how this poem “presents and tests the master tropes, the symbolic modalities made by poiesis into tradition and the world” (233) as its masterful “line of reading” is like Ariadne’s “thread through the mass of forms and images” (234-35). Bové’s analysis of the poem, which draws on connections with the work of masterful poetic precursors and engages in nuanced dialogue with prior critics, focuses on Stevens’ deployment of the notion of “farewell,” seasonal tropes, tropes of wind, light/dark, mother, father, and the function of apostrophe. “In the anagogic reduction to first explanatory principles” that characterizes canto 1, which begins memorably with the flashing of the “bodiless” serpentine auroras,” the critic finds an “essentially doubled movement of abstraction and intensification” (237). And in this intensification exists a “transformative renewal of materials,” poiesis as “transport” (262), and “remarkably textured language” (281). Bové observes that, like Dante in The Divine Comedy, Stevens concludes “The Auroras of Autumn” by linking “love and imagination” (278).
Rembrandt is another “figure of capable imagination” whom Bové studies. With special attention to insights of Marxist art historian John Berger, he stresses how “Rembrandt. . . turns against the language of his art” that threatens to “contain his imagination” (301) through his culture’s limitations, including theological ones, so that he can “draw all back to the body and to our need to see it,. . . as the recorded embodiment of experience, imagination, and intelligence” (307). Bové’s analysis of Bathsheba at Her Bath points to Rembrandt’s ability to represent “the full human presence” of Bathsheba’s “contemplation. . . and her weighing the full force of fate” regarding “the play of power, misogyny, and futurity that enmeshes her body and mind” yet also her agency “in the very moment of her victimage” (327), as David is about to rape her—long before she is able to ensure that her second son Solomon inherits the rapist’s throne. Thus, Rembrandt’s depiction of Bathsheba challenges the concept of the female nude in painting as an object of voyeurism. It would be useful for critics in the future to place this analysis in relation to what feminist art scholars have written about further imaginative challenges to patriarchal reification in 20th and 21st century women artists’ representations of nude women.
Bové’s final chapter contests the valorization of tragedy (exemplified by the reading of Hamlet as evidence of the “truth” of “ruin”) over comedy and other modes in the history of Shakespeare criticism. Contrasting Rosalind with the prosaic Duke Senior and the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, Bové reads “in [her] movement of mind, language, and desire. . . the imaginative intellect”—a poet figure—remaking the imitated world for humans with curiosity” (347) rather than ponderous dogma. He goes as far as to characterize Rosalind, “master of performance” in the grip of exigent circumstances, as “a metonym of imagination.” “Against the factual presence of violence threatening women and youth” and “power politics,” Rosalind poses “alternatives” depending on ”wit, magic, love, and the consequently serious promulgation of socio-sexual (re)arrangements” (348). Bové thus acknowledges Queer theorists’ sense of Shakespeare’s disruption of the “heteronormative myth” through Rosalind’s performances, especially as Ganymede (an allusion to Jove’s boy lover), but his major emphasis, unlike theirs, is not on this particular disruption but on Rosalind’s general identification with “uncrystallized imagination of human experience” (353), her “pure enactment of mimesis transforming and transformed into art” needed by “a secular society” (354). The claims made for Rosalind could not quite be made for The Merchant of Venice’s tremendously resourceful Portia in, whose imagination is simultaneously used for liberating and coercive ends.
As for the equally inventive Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, she “embodies poiesis freeing itself from its own threatening effects” (356). Citing Stanley Cavell’s contrast between The Winter’s Tale and Hamlet, Bové notes that her “mastery of the final staged scenes” of the play, in which the “deceased” Hermione reappears to her now repentant husband Leontes, “claims the imagination’s power to reclaim itself from the dearth it imposes on itself” (356-57). He aptly views Paulina as “the device by which art voices as one of its motives and deepest concerns that life itself,” affirming “love, could stand in the face of finitude to achieve beauty and joy” (372). Hermeneuts of suspicion discount this insight at their own peril. While I concur with Bové that Shakespearean tragedy should not be considered more significant than comedy and romance—and I would add that the concept of “problem play” complicates distinctions among sub-genres—I question his contention that “Hamlet ends with the literalization of tragic-centric logic, as piled corpses represent a fully destroyed polity, with no promise of vision, leadership or renewal and visions of cosmic meaninglessness” (363). If there is no promise of renewal, the possibility is supplied by Fortinbras’s closing speech, which shows respect for Hamlet, for the work of mourning, and for Denmark’s need to heal, even if governed for a time by Norway. The play’s tragic ethos does not necessarily point to “cosmic meaninglessness” and enduring ruin but the inclusion of great suffering within overall human experience and cycles of destruction and restoration.
While Bové intimates that widely deployed aspects of critical theory contribute nothing substantial to the reading of cultural texts (3, 4, 90, 143, 147, 249), I would insist on the possibility that a well-worn theoretical construct will be recontextualized and perhaps combined with other constructs to illuminate the dynamics of a text in a new way. Also, I find that African American and other critics of color, as well as feminist, ecological, and Queer theorists have often turned away from the melancholic attachment to ruin and sometimes achieve what he finds in Claudia Rankine’s hybrid text Citizen: An American Lyric: not only “materializ[ing] the deadly weight of a repressively uniform cultural imaginary within and on populations, which suffer unequally from a naturalized violence” (206), but “aspir[ing]” to constitute “a new world, summoned through and against the residues and traces of violence. . .” (206-207).
Just as “the possible poet must break. . . the normalization of an abnormal reality” (207), these critics attempt to break and displace the narrative by elucidating strengths of imagination that they find in literary and other art. I surmise that Bové could make a similar case for scholars such as William Spanos, Joseph Buttagieg, Hortense Spillers, Jonathan Arac, and Donald Pease who have been associated with boundary 2, the journal founded by Spanos that Bové has edited for many years. For those critics of the aesthetically and ideologically divided terrain of current poetry who are open to dialogue with Bové’s insights, an important task will be to investigate how texts of recent authors contribute to transformative poiesis, capitulate to the ethos of wreckage and ruination, or vacillate between the two.
According to Bové, the mainstream of cultural studies/critical theory tends to engage in theologically freighted “allegorization,” coercing a text into an allegory based on “an implied understanding among professional readers that allegorizing will ‘write into’ a consensus of agreed issues” (6). “Allegoresis” serves “extratextual programs,” which “displace critical study into debates on the terrain of nonliterary, often tribal agonistics” (7). Building on Edward W. Said’s advocacy of “secular criticism” (3) and Michel Foucault’s study of discourses and their social effects (163), Bové decries the pervasive influence of Fredric Jameson’s dogmatic linkage of “’utopia’ to allegory,” based on the claim that “history, especially the effects of capital, make allegory historically inescapable” (7). He finds parallels among Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” as an allegory of what might be called transcendent devastation (36-37), the phenomenon of “Elohism,” critiqued by Erich Auerbach as “a nihilism that “evacuates the world and empties history of all but the fulness of its own wisdom” (33), and Socrates’ authoritarian valorization of philosophy ((69-110). Bové insists “that not all is ruin, that the angel of history’s vatic view as it swept forward in time is wrong” (17). Instead, he sees a primary function of criticism as disclosing “the capacity of strong imagination to produce poetic” and other aesthetic “alternatives to the inherited” (18).
Bové asserts that “criticism depends on the fact that consciousness need not be or perhaps never is totally absorbed by and into culture” (142), and his most powerful example of a critic who promulgates this view is Theodor Adorno. In such essays as “Cultural Criticism and Society,” “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” and “The Essay as Form,” Adorno “imaginatively makes of the essay the named possibility of experience and work” that embodies “the doubled existence of effort within the limit rather than dismay at the limit and aspiration to or regret for its transcendence” (182). Lamenting the tendency of “quantification of articles and grants” (162) to induce academic critics to work too hastily, superficially, and uncreatively, Bové supports Adorno’s affirmation of creative thinking “in a diverse, rich, complex, and yet finite world” (183), the awareness of what resists illumination (168), and “independence from previous circumscriptions of thought” (163). For Adorno, the essay relies “on subjectivity of intellect,” as opposed to a false sense of objectivity, on contingency, and on the effort to “free the textured life of the particular from the abstraction of dogma and positivism” (169). Emphasis on the relationality of concepts in “the movement of thought” (173)—rather than a single concept governing interpretation and leading inevitably to a fixed telos—is what resists dogma.
For Bové, Wallace Stevens’ poetry, a site of “secular anagoges, in contrast to messianic or utopian allegoresis” (113), offers prime aesthetic instances of the intellectual criticality that Adorno champions. Stevens is one of the prime subjects of Bové’s first book, Destructive Poetics (Columbia UP, 1980), which comprised a Heideggerian interpretation of three U.S. poets. In the four-plus decades between that book and the current one, he did not write on Stevens and published almost nothing on poetry, as he focused mainly on critical theory and Foucaldian studies of the apparatus and circulation of power in critical institutions. Here, Bové departs markedly from emphases in his earlier reading on Stevens’ decentering of quest romance and exposure of the fictional status of the reality/imagination binary. Instead, discussing how Stevens consciously studied great predecessors such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Vico in order to fulfill his calling as a poet and to enter their company, he elucidates Stevens’ “material practice” of “organizing, analyzing, and displaying the interwoven resources of tradition, experience, and knowledge to sustain love, imagination, and so, the human” and make “the universe intelligible to life and life responsible to habitat” (195-96). Drawing intriguing parallels with James Baldwin’s conception of “the struggle to be fully human” (255), Bové defends Stevens’ insistence that “the poet owes no social obligation” by suggesting that this stance of autonomy serves the imperative to “survive what Stevens calls the pressures of the real” (201) in order to permit the poetic imagination to achieve goals of sustainment rather than sacrifice integrity because of the will to power.
Bové’s reading of Stevens’ late long poem “The Auroras of Autumn” is the most substantial portion of his interpretation of the poet’s work. He values how this poem “presents and tests the master tropes, the symbolic modalities made by poiesis into tradition and the world” (233) as its masterful “line of reading” is like Ariadne’s “thread through the mass of forms and images” (234-35). Bové’s analysis of the poem, which draws on connections with the work of masterful poetic precursors and engages in nuanced dialogue with prior critics, focuses on Stevens’ deployment of the notion of “farewell,” seasonal tropes, tropes of wind, light/dark, mother, father, and the function of apostrophe. “In the anagogic reduction to first explanatory principles” that characterizes canto 1, which begins memorably with the flashing of the “bodiless” serpentine auroras,” the critic finds an “essentially doubled movement of abstraction and intensification” (237). And in this intensification exists a “transformative renewal of materials,” poiesis as “transport” (262), and “remarkably textured language” (281). Bové observes that, like Dante in The Divine Comedy, Stevens concludes “The Auroras of Autumn” by linking “love and imagination” (278).
Rembrandt is another “figure of capable imagination” whom Bové studies. With special attention to insights of Marxist art historian John Berger, he stresses how “Rembrandt. . . turns against the language of his art” that threatens to “contain his imagination” (301) through his culture’s limitations, including theological ones, so that he can “draw all back to the body and to our need to see it,. . . as the recorded embodiment of experience, imagination, and intelligence” (307). Bové’s analysis of Bathsheba at Her Bath points to Rembrandt’s ability to represent “the full human presence” of Bathsheba’s “contemplation. . . and her weighing the full force of fate” regarding “the play of power, misogyny, and futurity that enmeshes her body and mind” yet also her agency “in the very moment of her victimage” (327), as David is about to rape her—long before she is able to ensure that her second son Solomon inherits the rapist’s throne. Thus, Rembrandt’s depiction of Bathsheba challenges the concept of the female nude in painting as an object of voyeurism. It would be useful for critics in the future to place this analysis in relation to what feminist art scholars have written about further imaginative challenges to patriarchal reification in 20th and 21st century women artists’ representations of nude women.
Bové’s final chapter contests the valorization of tragedy (exemplified by the reading of Hamlet as evidence of the “truth” of “ruin”) over comedy and other modes in the history of Shakespeare criticism. Contrasting Rosalind with the prosaic Duke Senior and the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, Bové reads “in [her] movement of mind, language, and desire. . . the imaginative intellect”—a poet figure—remaking the imitated world for humans with curiosity” (347) rather than ponderous dogma. He goes as far as to characterize Rosalind, “master of performance” in the grip of exigent circumstances, as “a metonym of imagination.” “Against the factual presence of violence threatening women and youth” and “power politics,” Rosalind poses “alternatives” depending on ”wit, magic, love, and the consequently serious promulgation of socio-sexual (re)arrangements” (348). Bové thus acknowledges Queer theorists’ sense of Shakespeare’s disruption of the “heteronormative myth” through Rosalind’s performances, especially as Ganymede (an allusion to Jove’s boy lover), but his major emphasis, unlike theirs, is not on this particular disruption but on Rosalind’s general identification with “uncrystallized imagination of human experience” (353), her “pure enactment of mimesis transforming and transformed into art” needed by “a secular society” (354). The claims made for Rosalind could not quite be made for The Merchant of Venice’s tremendously resourceful Portia in, whose imagination is simultaneously used for liberating and coercive ends.
As for the equally inventive Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, she “embodies poiesis freeing itself from its own threatening effects” (356). Citing Stanley Cavell’s contrast between The Winter’s Tale and Hamlet, Bové notes that her “mastery of the final staged scenes” of the play, in which the “deceased” Hermione reappears to her now repentant husband Leontes, “claims the imagination’s power to reclaim itself from the dearth it imposes on itself” (356-57). He aptly views Paulina as “the device by which art voices as one of its motives and deepest concerns that life itself,” affirming “love, could stand in the face of finitude to achieve beauty and joy” (372). Hermeneuts of suspicion discount this insight at their own peril. While I concur with Bové that Shakespearean tragedy should not be considered more significant than comedy and romance—and I would add that the concept of “problem play” complicates distinctions among sub-genres—I question his contention that “Hamlet ends with the literalization of tragic-centric logic, as piled corpses represent a fully destroyed polity, with no promise of vision, leadership or renewal and visions of cosmic meaninglessness” (363). If there is no promise of renewal, the possibility is supplied by Fortinbras’s closing speech, which shows respect for Hamlet, for the work of mourning, and for Denmark’s need to heal, even if governed for a time by Norway. The play’s tragic ethos does not necessarily point to “cosmic meaninglessness” and enduring ruin but the inclusion of great suffering within overall human experience and cycles of destruction and restoration.
While Bové intimates that widely deployed aspects of critical theory contribute nothing substantial to the reading of cultural texts (3, 4, 90, 143, 147, 249), I would insist on the possibility that a well-worn theoretical construct will be recontextualized and perhaps combined with other constructs to illuminate the dynamics of a text in a new way. Also, I find that African American and other critics of color, as well as feminist, ecological, and Queer theorists have often turned away from the melancholic attachment to ruin and sometimes achieve what he finds in Claudia Rankine’s hybrid text Citizen: An American Lyric: not only “materializ[ing] the deadly weight of a repressively uniform cultural imaginary within and on populations, which suffer unequally from a naturalized violence” (206), but “aspir[ing]” to constitute “a new world, summoned through and against the residues and traces of violence. . .” (206-207).
Just as “the possible poet must break. . . the normalization of an abnormal reality” (207), these critics attempt to break and displace the narrative by elucidating strengths of imagination that they find in literary and other art. I surmise that Bové could make a similar case for scholars such as William Spanos, Joseph Buttagieg, Hortense Spillers, Jonathan Arac, and Donald Pease who have been associated with boundary 2, the journal founded by Spanos that Bové has edited for many years. For those critics of the aesthetically and ideologically divided terrain of current poetry who are open to dialogue with Bové’s insights, an important task will be to investigate how texts of recent authors contribute to transformative poiesis, capitulate to the ethos of wreckage and ruination, or vacillate between the two.