Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov by David Kleinberg-Levin (review)

The animating speculation of Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness is well marked by its title. As David Kleinberg-Levin, a professor emeritus of philosophy, announces on its second page, its effort is to argue, by means of readings in “the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov,” that language carries “a prophetic, utopian promise of happiness . . . not only in, or as, a conceptual content it communicates, but also by way of its form—endless variations in its sensuous, material physiognomy and its rhetorical constructions” (2). Kleinberg-Levin makes clear that his thinking is indebted to Frankfurt School adaptations of Stendhal’s claim that beauty “n’est que la promesse de bonheur” (qtd. at 6), and, behind these, to German romanticism’s transformations of the promise of the aesthetic articulated in Kant’s Third Critique. These prior speculations tended, of course, to be grounded in broader theoretical constructions—of modernity’s putative opening of a rift between subject and world, or of meaningful art’s capacity to repel false reconciliations and indict instrumental reason, or of a collective utopian unconscious manifested in many forms of cultural production. What seems at times to distinguish Kleinberg-Levin’s take from these is a tacking toward the possibility that the promise of happiness is inherent in the texture of words. Writing of Nabokov’s way of “turning our attention . . . towards the sensuous materiality of language,” for example, he refers to

the “promesse de bonheur,” the utopian promise, the promise of a resurrection or redemption right here in this world, that is carried, or say metaphored, by the nature of language as an awesome power to create and destroy. The promise of paradise on earth vouchsafed in this power is what all language forever silently murmurs, stutters, stammers; it is the very speaking of language itself, the speaking of language as such.

(136)

This is not to say that Kleinberg-Levin rejects non-essentialist accounts of language’s augury. On the contrary: he refers at various junctures to the broader paradigms just named, invoking Adorno on the non-identical as well as the romantics on the reconciliation of intellectual and sensuous; and he elsewhere suggests that language’s power may have something to do with its very status as a medium of communication (24) or with literary art’s capacity to renew vocabularies that have become degraded (3). This very profusion of rationales, however, makes it harder to be certain what most impels him to believe that a foregrounded sensuousness of words points us toward the utopia he envisions, “a redeemed world of justice, freedom, and peace, a world order in which the social, political, and cultural antagonisms and diremptions that now still prevail would be reconciled and resolved in mutual recognition and respect” (8). Further complicating the question is Kleinberg-Levin’s tendency to balance renderings of utopia as a distant condition with assertions that the happiness promised by literary language is one we already possess. He remarks, for example, that “just as the form of [Stevens’] poetry is . . . a process of reconciliation, . . . so the substantive content of his poetry argues for a happiness to be found right here, revealed in the very ordinariness of this world, with all its marvelous, sensuous richness, sadly overlooked” (5). In the end, Kleinberg-Levin’s foundational claim may simply be that by attuning us to the plenitude of this world, some literary language makes the case for a fully secular utopia, a “promise of paradise on earth” rather than in heaven.

Whatever the basis of Kleinberg-Levin’s faith in language, readers of this journal may find his energetic avowal thereof the most engaging feature of a book that otherwise offers them relatively little. For the individual analyses of Stevens here are less than revelatory. Kleinberg-Levin tells us, for example, that the stanzas of “Thirteen Ways of Looking...