South Atlantic Modern Language Association Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext by B. J. Leggett Review by: Dean Rader South Atlantic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 176-179 Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3200821 . Accessed: 24/06/2014 22:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. . South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Atlantic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.25 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:01:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samla http://www.jstor.org/stable/3200821?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 176 Book Reviews Discourse at Havana" from a much earlier period (Collected Poems 145). Rosamond Rosenmeier's essay "Getting Wisdom" greets us later in "Contexts" as a serviceable corrective to the excesses of Jungianism. Rosenmeier patiently traces the extent to which Stevens owed a historical debt to the androgynous traditions of mystical Behmenism and German Pietism in his native Pennsylvania. Having exhausted the traditional limits of both romantic immanence and classic transcendence, Wallace Stevens and the Feminine carries us at last to a third possibility beyond anything which can be rightly named or properly identified. The feminine in Stevens exists for Paul Morrison less as a particular voice or a specific presence than as what gender theorists might call a cultural marker-the "Fat girl" found nameless "in difference" (qtd. on 114), say-whose otherness would resist determinate meaning, stable representation, or generic categorization. If this reality is feminine for Stevens, it is likely to be neither clean nor clear-nor ultimate in Weiss's terms-but rather, as William James once remarked, that which "exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it" (A Pluralistic Universe 218). It is surely no accident that two of the finest pieces in this volume require us to move beyond Stevens proper. They invite us instead to consider the feminine from the point of view of two quite different contemporary women writers: from that of Marianne Moore in Celeste Goodridge's "Aesthetics and Politics" and from that of Hilda Doolittle in Melita Schaum's own "Views of the Political." Both make Stevens's infamous interiority and reserve the focus of their arguments. Both succeed equally in revealing, through the lens of a finely honed feminine sensibility, how in issues as disparate as sexism and lyricism, the "assertion of individuality," "may well constitute political engagement at its most intrinsic level" (180). No one modernist, of course, ever fiully articulates the total extent of that engagement. In the sum of the parts, as Stevens might very well have said about the feminine, there are only the parts. David Jarraway, University of Ottawa 0 Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext. By B.J. Leggett. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.270 pp. $36.95. B. J. Leggett's complex book provides a successful "intertextual" read- ing of Nietzsche's philosophical writings and Wallace Stevens's early poems, specifically of Stevens's first collection Harmonium. The thrust of Leggett's multifaceted thesis is to uncover what he reads as Nietzschean elements hidden in Stevens's texts. I say "texts" and not "poems" because, for Leggett, Stevens's letters and later essays must also be examined as sites ofNietzschean intertexuality. Leggett is primarily interested in how This content downloaded from 194.29.185.25 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:01:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp South Atlantic Review 177 Stevens, like Nietzsche, engages in speculative discourse; or, more plainly put, how both authors refuse to read the world "as it is." Ultimately, argues Leggett, the texts of Nietzsche, the aphorist and the questioner, and Stevens, the modernist poet, rely not on fact but on interpretation. It is this Nietzschean notion of questioning the truth-or the "untruth," as Leggett calls it-that finally leads Stevens to develop his "supreme fiction," his speculative poetics of belief. Leggett goes to great lengths to define what the term "intertextual" signifies for him. In his deliberately provocative first chapter, "Nietzsche Reading Stevens," he sets up two different modes of comparisons by which he frames the remainder of his study. The first set of distinctions occurs between the more cutting-edge theoretical readers of texts, which Leggett calls "uncanny" or "Apollonian/Dionysian" critics (terms he borrows from J. Hillis Miller), and traditional practical critics to whom he refers as "canny" or "Socratic" readers. For critics of the "uncanny" school, Nietzschean intertextuality is less concerned with thematics or ideology and more interested in the recognition that Stevens's poetry enacts the "self-dismantling structures" of Nietzsche's philosophical dis- course. The "canny" critics, on the other hand, are those who seek to reveal formal elements of "influence" (that includes both "Bloomian" and traditional notions of influence) of Nietzsche on Stevens. This influence can be found in similar passages, thematic constructs, or as a source of thought and ideas. For this group, to read Stevens through a Nietzschean lens is to posit that Stevens appropriates or rewrites Nietzsche, whereas the task of the "uncanny" critics would be to "dis-close" how Stevens does with poetry what Nietzsche does with philosophy. Leggett claims to position himself between these two schools of methodology.Throughout the book, however, he most often wrestles with and embraces the un- canny methodology. Leggett, likewise, divides practitioners of intertextual criticism into opposing camps. At one end of the spectrum, Leggett locates the "mis- reading" of Harold Bloom. Because of the Freudian overtones of Bloom's anxiety of influence, Leggett asserts that Bloom's interpretations are "interpersonal" rather than intertextual in that Bloom assumes that Stevens writes in response to Nietzsche in order to kill his precursor, the Gnostic father. At the other end of the spectrum is Jonathan Culler, who calls into question any notions of conscious influence, and who Leggett represents as the "uncanny" intertextualist who defines intertextuality as a decipher- ing of originless codes and ever fading points of reference. And, as one might expect, Leggett aspires to place himself between what he reads as the marginal positions. Ultimately he adopts a centrist approach he likens to that of Michael Riffaterre. How Leggett reads or misreads Riffaterre is significant, because his theory on intertextuality This content downloaded from 194.29.185.25 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:01:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 178 Book Reviews must necessarily reveal his critical leanings. Indeed, what Leggett finds most viable in Riffaterre's contention is that the "intertextual need not be identified for the intertextual reading to occur" (25) or, more precisely, that the intertext transpires when the reader unveils patterns or modes in the text unexplainable within the context of the poem. Hence, the intertextual approach that is best able to speak to Stevens criticism is the approach that enables the reader to produce both text and intertext. In other words, as Riffaterre might say, it is up the reader to complete the incompleteness of the poem. For a book that examines the matrix of Stevens and Nietzsche, such a methodology seems appropriate. To search for meaning would be to misread Nietzsche's theories of genealogy, but to enact a rhetoric of perspective, not only echoes Nietzsche (a criterion for "influential" reading), but suggests a Nietzschean intertextuality in and of itself. Chapter 2, entitled "Stevens Reading Nietzsche," provides cogent biographical investigation into how Stevens read Nietzsche. Leggett examines several letters in which Stevens rather emphatically denies any leverage Nietzsche's theories might hold on his poems. Of course, such denials only whet the appetite of a critic, and Leggett is no exception- he seizes this opportunity to offer a solid source study of the influence Nietzsche had on poems such as "Esthetique du Mal" and "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit." Furthermore, despite the fact that Leggett proclaims his critical nonbias, he uses this information to aver an explicitly canny or Stoic reading of Stevens's texts. We should ask, then, as Leggett so often asks in his study, what can we make of this? To be sure, Leggett does strive to position himself as a centrist, but his strategy of reading in chapter 2 belies his testimony. He perpetually shifts back and forth from the uncanny to the canny, from Bloomian to Cullerian readings. While he claims no critical or theoretical allegiance save that of the untrampled, unclaimed neutral ground it becomes in- creasingly clear in the course of the book that Leggett is not comfortable in the center or anywhere else. What one discovers is that Leggett is not the centrist he claims to be, though he is neither a Bloomian nor a Stoic critic. In actual fact, Leggett is the most common of readers-simulta- neously canny, uncanny, and neither. The result is balanced scholarship. The remaining six chapters of Leggett's book focus on specific inter- textualities he uncovers in Stevens's major Harmonium poems. In chapter 3, which is devoted to "Peter Quince at the Clavier," he exploits the Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic he discovers in the poem. Similarly, he reads "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as Stevens's Nietzsche- like foregrounding of perspective over fact and "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," as Stevens's confrontation of feminine and virile poetry. Apart from chapter 1, the most convincing section may be the This content downloaded from 194.29.185.25 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:01:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp South Atlantic Review 179 book's conclusion, "Art and Untruth." Here Leggett deftly unearths, in several of Stevens's key poems, the Nietzschean corollary that we, as thinkers, and as humans, are most at home when we are in the process of becoming. If we dwell in a world of stasis, as does the woman in "Sunday Morning," then we have already given our bounty to the dead. To live is to understand that "the truth must remain veiled in the riddles and enigmas of appearance" (251), that truth like the supreme poem is a fiction. In chapter 1, Leggett quotes a passage from an essay by Cornell West in which West argues that we find in Nietzsche the origins of the most important currents of recent thinking: the interrogational questioning of postmodern philosophy practiced by Wittgenstein, the deconstruction of Derrida, the genealogical approach of Foucault, and the desire to dismantle Western metaphysics found in Heidegger. Stevens, too, seems to sub- sume all of modern poetry. To many he is the transcendental heir of Emerson and Whitman who perpetually longs to rise above and embrace the "true" self or the "Oversoul." To others he stands as the representative modern poet challenging the romantic concept that poetry functions as self-location. To still others he is postmodern and anticipates such poets as John Ashberry and Susan Howe, who disassemble notions of the centered lyric "I." Indeed, at times Leggett seems to imply that the terms "Nietzschean" and "intertextual" are almost interchangeable. It is not hard to imagine extending the same courtesy to the term "Stevensian." With this in mind we are reminded that Leggett looks only at Harmonium. The possibility of uncovering "Neo-Nietzschean clatter" in the balance of Stevens's opus is as vast and indeterminate as the terms "intertextuality" or "Nietzschean" themselves. In his first book on Stevens, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, Leggett argued that Stevens's poetry comprised a sustaining theory of poetry. It is to his credit that his new endeavor opens up Stevens criticism to the possibility of a poetry of theory. Dean Rader, Georgia Institute of Technology El Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, Totalitarianism. By Robert H. Brinkmeyer,Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. xviii + 237 pp. $27.50. Robert Brinkmeyer deserves praise for this evenhanded study. He engages biographical and psychological considerations to identify three important sets of values to which Katherine Anne Porter reacted at different times in her career. Brinkmeyer's approach is useful in that the ideological part of Porter's artistic development has not received the same critical attention as her stylistic development. Brinkmeyer's task is a difficult one, however, since all the events he defines as "crucial"-"her This content downloaded from 194.29.185.25 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:01:54 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Article Contents p. 176 p. 177 p. 178 p. 179 Issue Table of Contents South Atlantic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 1-220 Front Matter [pp. 34-112] The Future of the Past: Teaching Older Texts in a Postmodern World [pp. 1-10] Making History: Early English Women Writers and the Conception of National Literary Histories [pp. 11-33] Christian Allusion, Comedic Structure, and the Metaphor of Baptism in "Great Expectations" [pp. 35-51] Transcendence and Return: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism [pp. 53-74] Warren's Wandering Son [pp. 75-93] Framing Southern Rhetoric: Lillian Smith's Narrative Persona in "Killers of the Dream" [pp. 95-111] The Mirror and the Halogen Bulb: A Review Essay [pp. 113-124] Book Reviews Review: untitled [pp. 125-130] Review: untitled [pp. 130-132] Review: untitled [pp. 132-135] Review: untitled [pp. 135-138] Review: untitled [pp. 138-140] Review: untitled [pp. 140-142] Review: untitled [pp. 142-144] Review: untitled [pp. 144-146] Review: untitled [pp. 146-148] Review: untitled [pp. 148-149] Review: untitled [pp. 150-152] Review: untitled [pp. 152-154] Review: untitled [pp. 154-156] Review: untitled [pp. 156-160] Review: untitled [pp. 161-164] Review: untitled [pp. 164-166] Review: untitled [pp. 166-168] Review: untitled [pp. 168-170] Review: untitled [pp. 170-173] Review: untitled [pp. 173-176] Review: untitled [pp. 176-179] Review: untitled [pp. 179-181] Review: untitled [pp. 181-184] Review: untitled [pp. 184-186] Review: untitled [pp. 186-189] Review: untitled [pp. 189-190] Review: untitled [pp. 190-192] Review: untitled [pp. 192-194] Review: untitled [pp. 194-196] Review: untitled [pp. 196-198] Report of the Executive Director 1992-93 [pp. 199-204] SAMLA Financial Report: 1992-93 [pp. 205-208] 1993 Business Meeting Minutes [pp. 209-211] Back Matter [pp. 212-220]