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

What is it about?

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.

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Photo by Jernej Graj on Unsplash

Photo by Jernej Graj on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Bové’s language often amounts to poetry itself, as if the critic here has been transported by the powers of love—“Imagination as love,” to be more precise—into an almost ecstatic state. “Where is love, then? It is in the immediate creation, which poiesis dwelling in the master of the imagination puts on offer as a mystery of the human, shadowed by the darkness of its own complex emergence, the burden of its own imagination and its remains” (326). But lest the reader imagine that such lofty sentiments incline us toward the divine, Bové will also insist that this power is “something human that lives in the species,” and he observes that “the human can create the world as the dream of its own desires, fully aware that the secular finitude precludes perfection or escape from its own limited but loving nature” (326). For Bové, poiesis and criticism are transformative powers that celebrate the human existence, without denigrating it through nostalgia (which elegiacally demeans the present by elevating the past) or messianism (which degrades the present by positing a future as salvation from it). Nor do these powers merely reinforce the status quo, however, since creativity and the imagination are the very core of poiesis and criticism.

Perspectives