Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext by B. J. Leggett (review)

226 Canadian Review of American Studies Soviet Union was warranted by realistic assessments of Stalin's policies shared by American and Western European leadership groups, both left and right, in the postwar decade. If he is not persuaded by opposing arguments, Morris should show, more that he has here, that he has seriously wrestled with their conclusions. In giving due credit to this fonnidable book, however, one should note Morris's likely reply to my strictures: Nixon's party nominated him three times for the residency, and the American people showed the equally poor judgement to elect him twice. The reader may now decide whether Morris's profound disillusionment and settled despair over Nixon's rise and American's political culture is justified by these and subsequent events. Garin Burbank University of Winnipeg B. J. Leggett. Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Pp. 270. In Early Stevens, B. J. Leggett gives a sophisticated account of Wallace Stevens's early poetry by drawing on complementary theories of intertextuality (Barthes and Riffaterre) and ideology (Macherey). In the midst of much theoretical ferment, he is careful to establish his own purpose, tools, and territory. As a result, his study is generous in its interpretive latitude (some may think, generous to a fault), yet ascetic in its refusal to stray beyond its self-imposed limits. The writing is elegant. The argument is always impressive and often compelling, but sometimes perplexing when its generosity and asceticism collide. Leggett analyses selected poems-but only a few in detail-in concert with specific passages from Nietzsche. He stresses that Stevens may or may not have read these passages, but it hardly matters, since their value lies in the explanatory power they afford to the reader, not in the light they cast on Stevens's beliefs or intentions. Leggett renounces "the banality of source studies" (22) in favour of a complex theory of intertextuality by which Nietzsche "inhabits Stevens' texts" only as a discursive ghost: "It is this knowledge that continually haunts the margins of the discourse and occasionally almost declares itself' (49). Leggett welcomes these rare occasions, but refuses to fall back on a biographical justification for them. Instead, he uses Nietzsche as a heuristic device to explicate the "strange," "uncanny," and "bizarre" aspects of Stevens's poetry that hint at some textual imbroglio-the more embroiled BookReviews 227 the better. Through scrupulous analysis, he shows how the poems endorse Nietzsche 's Dionysian affinnation of life as process. This bald statement does little justiceto the intricacy of the argument or the subtlety with which Stevens deploys the ideas. More correctly, Stevens does not deploy the ideas; they are deployed by the text, with or without their author's knowledge. But why, then, specify early Stevens,a designation that only makes sense biographically or historically? Leggett devotes some time to rejecting the psychological/rhetorical approach of Harold Bloom,but we might give Leggett a dose of his own medicine. Following Freud's theory of negation, he claims that Stevens's repeated denials of Nietzsche's importance testify to a repressed reliance on the philosopher, whose work Stevens certainly did read (as Leggett documents at length). Similarly,Leggett denies the utilityof Bloom's theory of influence, with the result that Bloom haunts Leggett's argument, drawing him back to Steven.s'smind, or encouraging him to treat texts as ifthey "occupied together a consciousness" (81) in some mysterious manner proper to texts. At another level, Leggett draws on Macherey's theory ofthe radical instability ofdiscourse,whose contradictions "unmask and criticizethe ideologie-son which they are based" (120). Even Stevens's Dionysian affinnations, so patiently teased out of thepoems, are exposed as futile attempts to escape from ideologythrough art, which isitself "always already" ideological. The ideologies disclosed are various forms of aesthetic idealism, essentialism, poetic truth, or poetic virility-all manifestations of Nietzsche's ''will to truth," which must be corrected by his pluralism and perspectivism .There is no "Truth," no "facts," only interpretation. While this approach does indeed "open Stevens' Nietzschean texts to new readings" (153),the readings begin to sound much the same, since they always yield the same insight. Since perspectivism is...