Wallace Stevens among Others: Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture by David R. Jarraway (review)

David Jarraway, a professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, has devoted much of his scholarly life to Wallace Stevens. His first book, Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark covered Stevens directly, whereas Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity in Modernist American Literature used Stevens as a means to discuss other American poets according to the "general discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity in American literature and culture."¹ This preoccupation is consistently maintained throughout Wallace Stevens among Others, a matter of some importance when reading a miscellany. With Stevens already richly theorized and contextualized by Jarraway, his challenge is to bring new ways to levy his preoccupation. The author accomplishes this through two strategies. The first is a content strategy, signalling the "others" in the title; Mark Doty, Michael Cunningham, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, John Ashbery, and Frank O'Hara fill out the literary others; film others include George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock; psychoanalysis others are Freud, but, in the book overall, William James and George Santayana are more prevalent ideational figures. A theoretical strategy providing the book's connective tissue (as well as the expansion of investigational terrain) is the work of Gilles Deleuze. This makes for quite a lot to manage.

Jarraway connects American writers, philosophers, and filmmakers with Stevens either through direct evidence, where such exists, or through thematic and rhetorical homologies. He then conducts virtuoso readings of the connected texts, always contesting – as billed – the limitations of heteronormative subjectivity, primarily by invoking "distance" and "distancing" as a theoretical touchstone. Much happens besides this limited summary, but not all of the author's intentions are realized – for example, Jarraway claims the book is "not intended to be a book about literary influence … its intention is to reveal on the basis of Stevens sometimes direct impact on American authorship how Stevens' stature as a writer magnifies itself exponentially among 'other contexts' – different discourses and different fields in American culture … with the philosophical ruminations of Deleuze often as the guide." In other words, the author drew a red circle around that which he wished to include and employed a theory to cage his pets in. This becomes a problem when the book's connective strategies are stretched too thin. For example, Deleuze rarely alights in chapter two "The Novel That Took the Place of A Poem," and sometimes the close readings of Stevens's others require effortful justification for their inclusion. Yet the latter point is anticipated by Jarraway when he writes: "[A]s the opening chapter will attempt to make plain at the outset, these excursions are all quite hypothetical." Thus, what seems to be a flaw might instead be a strength; Jarraway takes a complex path to understanding the effect of Stevens upon American culture, using biocriticism, close reading, historical analysis, queer theory, subjectivity studies, and psychoanalysis to create an unusual work. Another problem/strength is inherent to the interpretive nature of poetry itself, which gives Jarraway great leeway, permitting him some broad purpose applications of Stevens work. (An "Adult Epigram" comes in for heavy use to contest relatively monolithic concepts of self.)

Overall, the book is more of a series of chapters, the product of a centrifugal impulse that, true to its Deleuzian spirit, demonstrates a way of bringing to bear heterogeneous theoretical and aesthetic sources in order to make a larger argument about what a poet means to a public and their culture. Jarraway's argument ranges far, and some fronts are too briefly (and vertiginously) explored, but the manifestations of Stevens are demonstrated to refract the many materials brought to bear. In what may be the most significant achievement in the book, and despite the resistance to fixity and certainty maintained throughout the text, the presentation of the poet in Wallace Stevens among Others strikes me as the closest I have ever...