Anatomy of a Shadow

Paul Bové's new critical tome, Love's Shadow, is comprised of nine chapters, each of which approaches the text's basic thesis through a different artistic lens. That basic thesis counters much contemporary criticism and reinvigorates theory by beginning with the counter-intuitive invocation of Freud's theory of melancholia. Bové's preface begins by framing his text with the following reminder; "First, melancholy persists when desire had lost its love object, even or especially when the object has perhaps only died to the consciousness of the desirer. Second, melancholy becomes an affliction when the subject unable to reproach the lost love object turns reproach upon itself to dwell in misery and abjection" (ix). As critics/theorists, the modern reader may not have lost the text, the object of her desire, but instead has lost the ability to love the text, or to express critical inquiry in a way that extols the virtues of literature, instead of only finding its flaws. As Bové shows, we have become quiet adept at pointing out the negatives, be they historical, socio-economic, structural or otherwise, but we have lost the courage to advocate for literature. That is not to say that Bové's text is a defense of liberal arts education, though there is a need for such defense and based on my reading of Bové, surmise that he would agree. That is not his project here. His project is deeper. It is to argue, albeit a little convolutedly at times, that readers of literature suffer from excruciating melancholia not because literature has died, but because we have started to hate ourselves for loving it. Literature has been cast in the role of the lover that left by those who love it, without just cause. Bové wants, for all intents and purposes, to reunite these couples. Love's Shadow is a deeply intellectual dating app for those who love writing and the writings that want to be loved. Given our current pandemic, this is probably anyone's best chance to make contact with our loved ones.

Bové, early in his first chapter, invokes the great spirit of Harold Bloom to indicate the relationship between the condition of the Modern poet and melancholy. Bové reminds us of Bloom's basic, theory changing assertion that all poets suffer the anxiety of influence of the greats who have written before them and "gained authority by misreading their predecessors" (2). He moves from Bloom, through the chapter, emphasizing theory as a pile-up of ideas. Moving from this idea of the endless stacking of ideas upon each other, we can think of the text itself as the pea, and theory the mattresses on which the critical princess sits. Each critic, each theorist is the proverbial princess sitting on top of the pile of critical texts that have come before her own. At the very bottom, is the poetic pea. As Bové points out, through Bloom, misprision is how each of us comes to the text and how each of us can learn to love the text. The accumulation of misreadings is the shadow that extends out from the text itself. Without directly stating this, Bové implies that the love each reader has for the original text is both enhanced and clouded by its shadow. The text under its own shadow still has the power to agitate. The friction created jars us out of the melancholy state the might result from the anxiety that conglomeration of critical work produces. That friction lets us feel, lets us dig in and through the muck, allows us to get back to being readers, in the most honest sense, reading not to criticize or theorize, but to love.

In significant and repeated ways throughout the book, Bové returns to the ideas of the Messianistic to demonstrate different meanings and functions of love. Bové's study of Auerbach's Mimesis reiterates the Homeric style of "the foreground" where all is immediate, "pure and without perspective," and the Eloist style of "the background." The foreground is the place of love itself, the place where the object of desire resides. The Homeric styles gives...