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

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Beyers, Chris

Secondly, consider Eeckhout's phrase, the poetry "has lent itself."This literally states the text has volition. This intentionality ascribed to the text is clearly a response to critical pluralism. "It is not I but the verse," Eeckhout is saying, "that decides my critical method." Now, I have exaggerated his argument for effect, since he readily concedes the "enormous importance of readers in the interpretive process" (2002,18) and merely examines how the text's contours help direct that process. But even this reasonable position assumes that there are features that can be asserted to be objectively (or, as Eeckhout would have it, intrinsically), there. Certain features of poetry likely do have claim to objective existence-say, that a Shakespearean sonnet has fourteen lines or that Stevens uses words like "blue" and "center" often. However, most of the features that Eeckhout focuses on, such as times when Stevens' "most visionary, solemn, and ecstatic tone is accompanied by a burlesque, frivolous, mannered, or tinkling overtone" (40) seem to be the result of methods bent on finding such subtleties, readings about which competent readers may disagree.

Surely, Eeckhout uses textual intentionality and passive voice as a way of saying that readers have found that the poetry seems to lend itself to their purposes. Still, in the first chapter, Stevens's verse is consistently portrayed as a living thing that makes choices: It "exerts its own enabling and disabling forces on the interpretive process" (18); later, Stevens's poems "compel the reader to develop a more than usual degree of self-consciousness about the act of reading" (22). While few of my readers would disagree that a text is living in the sense that it is constantly being read and reinterpreted, that is not tantamount to saying the poem forces a certain interpretation. Tracing Eeckhout's rhetoric, the text that merely lends itself to interpretation at the beginning of the chapter ends up compelling readers in the conclusion. It is like a surreal horror film: The more he discusses it, the more powerful the text becomes.

Having said this, I cannot but admit that I agree with Eeckhout that certain aspects of Stevens' work seem to be there, that it is worth talking about them, and that a work's salient features help shape its criticism. Still, in Eeckhout's book and others, too often passive voice is used as a way of implying an absolute or normative interpretation or affect, eliding the problem of reader and institution. Whenever we assert a volitional text, we had better be aware that we are really just using shorthand for saying "Well, it seems to me (and other readers who think as I do) that the text is directing me to do this."We had better be aware that we are employing an eighteenth-century standard of truth-that something is so because a group of reasonable people say it is-and that such a standard is greatly influenced by culture. Finally, it is probably better to jettison the rhetoric of compulsion. I personally know many readers of Stevens who, despite reading him closely, have not become more self-conscious.