Critical Studies in a Post-Theoretical Age: Three Books Sort of about Wallace Stevens

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Beyers, Chris

Such an approach is indicative of the era we find ourselves in. Recognizing critical plurality, Santilli seems to want to marry critics in order to fashion some sort of comprehensive account of poetry and spirituality. However, there is a troubling aspect to her pursuit that she never addresses. I'll give just the most obvious example. In the preface, she asks, "what may be found in a poem?" Here is her answer: "Certainly not merely a play of signs. Certainly something distanced from us, but surely not nothing. Something" (2002, xiii). That is a plausible answer, but if you are going to commit yourself to that point of view, should you then be quoting, at length and approvingly, Derrida in the next two chapters? I do not mean to say critics who proceed from different assumptions can never agree. But I feel that it is the writer's job to negotiate these differences for me. That is to say, she never attempts to answer this question: Are all these theorists really saying similar things, or has the author just seized upon a verbal resemblance (the word, "gesture") and overlooked the greater contexts that render the ideas incompatible?

Another striking thing about the book is its attitude towards argumentation. Consider the opening to her extended analysis of Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West":

A woman walks alone by the sea singing. Like Iphimedeia, who loved Poseidon, she seems in love, perhaps with the genius of the sea, just as Keats was "half in love with easeful death." However, although her song requires the presence of the sea, song and sea never integrate, never unify and become one. (Santilli 2002, 139)

The first sentence and last two clauses are paraphrases. However, the poem offers nothing to indicate that the singer is in love, or that she might love the sea, or that she cannot sing the song except in the presence of the sea. These assertions are pure conjecture, unanchored by text. Santilli is very much like the singer who transforms a silly love song into a transcendent musical moment because she has decided that the song is about her own devotion to God. That is to say, Santilli does not interpret; she performs texts in a particularly rich way, abandoning any real attempt to persuade. Since this is very much her own performance, it seems beside the point to cavil that she spells Ramon Fernandez's name wrong, or misquotes a key passage (she writes "lights of the fishing boats" for Stevens's "lights in the fishing boats"). At its heart, her approach is profoundly aesthetic. It is not too much to say that the entire book is a poetic gesture.

Poetic Gesture is at its best in such extended readings, where Santilli mixes suggestive paraphrase, quotation, and theory, typically reaching for inspirational generalizations reminiscent of Percy Bysshe Shelley. We find, for instance, that poetic gestures "express the silent, unreadable, deeper and older messages that we find inherent in mythical narratives" (xiii), and that "[t]o lose the power to gesture is to lose the power to create a beyond, to point toward the invisible, to illuminate the possibility of the divine" (7). No doubt, Stevens could be mystical and Shelleyan when talking about the place of poetry in human life. However, her approach can be selective. Symptomatic of this are Santilli's several quotations from Stevens' letters to Sister M. Bernetta Quinn. Stevens does say what she says he says in those letters, all of which imply that Stevens had a strong though unorthodox faith in the divine. However, at the same time he was writing to Sister Bernetta, he was giving others a much different impression: He told Victor Hammer that the "point" of "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" was that "there must be in the world about us things that solace us quite as fully as any heavenly visitation could" (Letters 661) which sounds like a rejection of the spiritual realm; to Thomas McGreevy, he lamented that he did not have enough time "to make up my mind about God" (Letters 763). Santilli fastens on to one aspect of Stevens' thought and does not consider the ways that he conditions and undercuts that position.