Love's Shadow, or Shadow-Boxing?

What in Paul Bové's Love's Shadow should one be most grateful for? For its attack on a practice of professionalism that he judges to be deadly for "English studies"; for its claim that allegorical thought and melancholy emotion in literary criticism have caused a disciplinary decadence; or for its defense of literature as the supreme exemplar of humanity's "grand capacity of imagination" (113)?

Bové's arraignment of professional practice identifies it as an academic version of "official culture," whereby leading lights of literary study are accorded canonical status, with scarcely an intellectual debate; and whereby their followers, borrowing prestige from their leaders, exhaustively (and exhaustingly) repeat what their leaders say. The result is not only an elevation of the authorized critics, but also an elevation of criticism itself, and of criticism's "official" themes; and a relegation of literature to a subordinate status.

My precis of Bové's formulations is inferior to his expressions; especially to those about rote repetition and about the intermediate agents of "official" exchange. "Variation on a concept, achieved by its application and repetition," he says bitingly, "adds nothing to thought, even as it adds to an index of illuminated familiarities" (171). Bite also informs "It is the nature of [academic] official culture that the mediating figure can get a false authority by screening the original from careful study. Most important, the heirs burdened by their reduced inheritance neither curate the significant effort of its creation nor match its originality and specificity" (4). Among the "indexed familiarities" Bové counts "the social contextualization of art as the defining method for its study" (52) and "the rhetoric of resistance" (335). Of the first he judges that "social contextualization" "can be inherently limiting and antagonistic to art's work" (52). Of the second he says that "official culture" rewards the rhetoric of resistance, but does "not come to works of art ready to be driven from approved positions" by those works (335). The rhetoric apparently operates only one way: the critics resist the art, the art does not resist the critics.

That Bové addresses a common mode of "doing" scholarship is undeniable. His tackling of the matter is, at the very least, appreciable as a bold grappling with a custom whose entrenchment is worth a shake-up. The shake-up targets no less a figure than Fredric Jameson, whom Bové arraigns as a model of what he opposes. In doing so, however, Bové crosses over from an attack on a professional structure ("Jameson's first struggle is for predominance in the academy" [9]; "the Jameson figure, once so popular in the MLA" [143]) to the structure's reliance on what Bové proposes is a totalizing critical ideology: an "official" theme inaugurated by Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1979). Jameson's theme—that critics should read texts as if they are unwittingly alienated emblems of historical conflicts—made the critic's job become, Bové complains, an obligatory allegoresis, a "machinery of explanation" (175), based on an assumption that real history matters more than fictive imaginations. But the history at issue is a shrunken version, Bové is at pains to point out: history characterized as a sequence of human failures that culminates in "a ruined and unjust present" (12), which the critic-allegorizer is made melancholy by, and feels a responsibility to redeem. The redemptive path is utopian speculation, of the kind Jameson has written about in Archeologies of the Future (2005) and elsewhere. The problem for Bové with this future-oriented aim, which he identifies as the allegorist's self-appointed messianic hope for human betterment, is that it ignores history for what history—and literature—rightly might claim to be "achievement rather than ruination" (23). As for the melancholy in the critic's ideological constitution, Bové judges it to be an intellectual and emotional debility bar none.

But where, readers might wonder, does Bové derive a charge against melancholy in a challenge to Jameson confined mainly to six pages (7-13) of an introductory chapter, and centered on Jameson's utopianism? Bové extrapolates melancholy from Jameson's conviction of the oppressive, irreversible thrust...