Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War in Wallace Stevens by Eleanor Cook (review)

HUMANITIES 185 Ishmael fail magnificently to grasp the elusive phantoms of their dreams and nightmares'; or, in another instance, we learn that Melville's 'passionate speculations upon heroic aspiration and youthful ideals do not blind him to the bleak truths of this world but lead to a courage that can gaze upon dreams and disillusionments with an equal eye.' To think in such a style effectively closes one off from the tragic. One needs a lighter touch. Finally, partly as a result of these other problems, Grenberg's thesis simply doesn't fit the most important works in the Melville canon. The earlier works cooperate with it - it works best with Mardi and Redburn but by the time we reach Moby-Dick the strain is beginning to show, as Melville is able to imagine the ground of 'attainable felicity/ a felicity that does not depend on metaphysical certainty and which resists the mystical. It is surely limited and elusive, but is nevertheless in this world. It involves an accommodation to Ishmael's discovery in Moby-Dick that 'There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness' - a dangerous process of adjustment that Melville's fiction from Moby-Dick on can be said to explore and at times affirm. (WILLIAM BARTLEY) Eleanor Cook. Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War in Wallace Stevens Princeton University Press. xvi, 325. us $35.00 By 'word-play' Eleanor Cook means not just puns, riddles, and echoes, but the poetic contest between dialectic and rhetoric, between 'semantic meaning' and 'schematic echoing.' This rivalry between the work of the mind and the play of the mind is at least as old as Aristotle, but current accounts of the contest usually draw on romantic theory as reworked by critics like Paul de Man. In Allegories of Reading, he balances the incompatible demands of episteme and doxa, truth and persuasion, performative and constative language. More enthusiasticdeconstructionists like J. Hillis Miller use this opposition to justify their belief in an a-logical process of thought, while more cautious critics like Harold Bloom are unwilling to abandon reason. I would place Cook in the latter camp - in my opinion the better place - although she too occasionally talks of 'logical and a-logical uses of language.' Nevertheless, her subtle analysis of how meanings are produced and disputed in poetry reveals that she does not abdicate reason for what Miller calls the 'aber-rational.' As testimony, I would cite her treatment of prepositions and kinds of 'againstness' in Stevens. Prepositions are relational words that fix and shift logical links. Tracing their ambiguities, as Cook does so skilfully, does not dislodge logic but plays within its regulation in a 'braided argument.' Poetry, Word-Play is a remarkable book in its scope and scrupulousness. 186 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 Cook tackles most ofStevens's poetry, often in close detail. She finds new things to say about familiar topics, such as Stevens's interior paramour, poems of place and climate, 'fluency' poems, and the conditions of belief as subject to metamorphosis. She sounds his peculiar diction (aspic, fan, turn, soil, uncrumple, normal, transport) for its resonance. She always strives to 'hear' poetry: the auditory sense dominates as she listens for music, echoes, and allusions. When studying a poem she discourages a pedestrian, 'mimetic' reading; quicklysurmountsa flat-footed, allegorical reading; and then soars into the stratosphere of criticism, where she examines topoi and intertextual allusions. Higher still are metalepsis and images of topoi. Criticism for Cook is a noble rider that soars through the lofty reaches of 'againstness,' where texts displace each other and dislocate themselves. Following the lead of Bloom and John Hollander, she traces the arguments ofthe poems as they swerve from trope to trope and echo to echo. There are dangers in this approach, as Cook acknowledges. If we take 'word-play' too broadly, the figure grows so diffuse that it refers to writing in general: everythingbecomes word-play. Similarly, her earis so acute that she can hear almost anything. In one section she hears Stevens echoing Milton through Wordsworth. She hears du Bellay, James, Hawthorne, Proust, Browning, Aristotle, Gcero, Quintilian, Curtius, and LarzerZiff, all within a page...