Bathsheba's Stomach; or, Poiesis and Criticism in Paul A. Bové's Love's Shadow

Love's Shadow, by Paul A. Bové, is at once a monumental study and an enigma. In modeling the sort of criticism that Bové would like to see, Love's Shadow also becomes impossible to discuss in the sort of critical terms Bové wishes us to abjure or abandon. Love's Shadow in its entirety is an essay, but also one that is made up of essays, which makes it rather recursive (not to say repetitive). This in turn makes the experience of reading and rereading it a bit like wading into the ocean, fighting through, jumping atop, diving beneath, or body-surfing on wave after wave, each one different, yet each partaking of the same substance and spirit. I would characterize that experience as exhilarating, as the diversity of forms and subjects proliferate—cultural theory, philosophy, drama, poetry (including lengthy, detailed discussions of individual poems), visual art (the chapter on Rembrandt is a tour de force, not to mention, my favorite), and so forth—while the focus on poiesis and criticism remains constant throughout. In its own form, Love's Shadow is difficult to summarize, and even more difficult to subject to critique, since its arguments remain slightly ungraspable, like those waves at the beach. To speak of this book as if it were a treatise, for example, would be to deny its essential character, but to understand and to criticize it, a reader often falls back on old habits, which would mean eliding the poetic aspects of Love's Shadow while highlighting its putatively philosophical ones. Love's Shadow is not a philosophical work, but ultimately a poetic one.

This is not to say that Bové does not make an argument. Indeed, his is a provocative and at times polemical argument aimed at key figures in literary and cultural criticism, naming names, as well as at the field of criticism tout court. Bové argues that literary criticism has been under the pervasive sway of a fundamentally life-denying melancholy, which he associates primarily with the work and influence of Walter Benjamin. From that perspective, as Bové recounts, all human history is fundamentally a ruin: its "experiential mode is allegory, reduced especially in the American academy to the redundancy of allegoresis, the reading of all materials as allegories" (ix). Utopia, which Bové connects to messianism, as the secularized but still quite religious form of redemption, displaces salvation from the human world, and thus it too deals in death and destruction. Bové singles out Fredric Jameson, himself a Benjaminian critic who has long advocated for both allegory and utopia, as the chief antagonist to his argument, and uses Jameson's own success (based largely on his having won so many professional prizes in his lifetime) as evidence of the almost insuperable hegemony of allegoresis in contemporary literary and cultural studies. This characterization of the work of Benjamin and of Jameson will likely be controversial, and as I discuss below, I am not convinced, even as I recognize the urgency and value of Bové's critique of the institutionalized profession of academic criticism.

Love's Shadow strikes me as a sequel to Bové's 2008 book, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human.¹ Only, in Love's Shadow, melancholy, allegoresis, and perhaps even Fredric Jameson have taken the place of torture. As Bové had then said, "poesis is the counterpoint to torture" and "there are deep civilizational and species implications in the choice of power for torture over and against poesis as the unique human quality able to make history according to humanity's best potential for subject creation."² In arguing for poetry contra torture, Bové also decried the bad faith and poor practices of academic literary criticism, specifically the "quietism of certain kinds of professionalization and 'specialization,'" but there he rightly identified Stanley Fish, who, unlike Jameson, has unapologetically and indeed enthusiastically embraced the crassest vision of literary studies as merely one profession among others and who has gleefully celebrated the "free market" as a model for criticism. Jameson is certainly not Fish. Nevertheless...