“Write to Privacy”: Reading Poe and Stevens

cite one example, in a note on miscegenation [203 n. 251, Lemire mentions the work of J. M. Bloch (1958),Sidney Kaplan (1949),and her own writings, while failing to note Martha Hodes’s recent and influential white Women,Black Men:Illicit Sex in theNineteenth -Century South [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 19971.Another minor annoyance: the quirk of italicizingone ’s own coinages [77,90,93]. However,these small tics in no way detract from the overall significance of the volume.A s Kennedy and Weissberg put it, the scholars represented in Romancing the Shadow, beyond their immediate interest in Poe,more broadly “engageissues of critical responsibilityand implicitly question the aims of contemporary critical practice” [xvi].In other words, no, they don’t hate Poe. By reengagingPoe ’swork in light of one of the most pressing issues of his place and time, the essaysin Romancing the Shadow demonstrate the continuing significance of Poe for present and future generations. Lesley Ginsberg University o f ColoradeColorado Springs “Write to Privacy”: Reading Poe and Stevens Louis A. Renza. Edgar Allan Poe, WallaceStevens, and the Poetics o f Amen’can Privacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2002. xix, 267 pp. $44.95cloth. In the United States,LouisA. Renza writes, the “public -private binary” has “usuallymeant the obeisance of the private to the public life” [2]; “today,”however , privacy is in total eclipse, as new technologies enable a “panoptic invasion”of all conventional privacy , “from physical solitude, domestic life, intimate relations, and conversations, to control over access to our bodies,work, and data-recordableprofiles” [5]. But what really dismays him is the thorough “POliticization ” of literary studies [11, for this “critical zeitgeist” is in the “mainstream of American social practices”and reinforcesthe “technologicalconstructions of the public realm” by regarding “privacy as no more than a social-political construction” [2, 5, 61. Current “academic-culturalcriticism”fails to address the matter of “moresubjectiveaffairslike thinking or feeling,” to which literature gives public form [6, 51. Renza acknowledges that “a host of mediations -linguistic, cultural, political, gendered, familial , geographical, even architectural-continually qualifies [the] notion of privacy. Upon reflection, that is, whatever I feel, perceive, think, imagine, or do is never, strictlyspeaking, private at all” [6]. In “imaginative literature,” however, there emerges a “postpublic ” privacy, which “remains beyond its public codifications.” This is a “surplus” privacy, “inaugurated by but irreducible to cultural scripts” [7, xii]. In Renza’s view, Edgar Allan Poe’s prose and Wallace Stevens’sHarmonium poems generate such a surplus privacy.Renza is aware of the oddness of coupling Poe and Stevens,for mid-nineteenth-and earlytwentieth -century publics differ significantly, as do their conceptions of privacy. He justifies his choice by arguing that, unlike a host of other writers who engage the issue and defend the “right to privacy,” Poe and Stevenspractice a “radical‘writeto privacy”’: they “ply private codes that exceed the perquisites for anysociallyrepresentative defense of privacy”and aim to “produce the unreadable text or, to be more precise,a radicallyprivate position in writingit” [111. Their privacy is not defined or co-optableby the public ; it “occursonlyin the act of writing, and so cannot secure a private self beyond it” [21]. Yet, if their writerly privacy has nothing to do with privacy as understood in cultural discourse, why situate it in that context and why call it privacy at all? Renza’s introduction also argues that Poe and Stevens share a strategy: they “internally stage their culture’s extant reading conventions at once to isolate ‘thepublic’and to imagineprivate countermoves in relation to it” [20].Poe “emplots”his “massreaders in his tales” and “mocks” them for their misreadings , while Stevens cultivates an “esoteric style” that frames his poems as “‘private’in apparent reaction and resistance to utilitarian-,moral-,and/or consumerist -oriented reading conventions” [81. Their privacy, then, appears to depend on their textualfiguration of the public. Whereas Renza starts out by challenging the politically motivated attacks on notions of privacy, his argument loops away from the politicized public-private binary and ends up duplicating the same hierarchical binary on a depoliticized textual register. The surplus privacy that is not to be confused with any “covertdefense of liberal individualismor bourgeois 74 privacy...