Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow by Brooks E. Hefner (review)

Abstract

443 tieri, himself a notable commentator on Stevens, turns again to the question of how Stevensian poetics enact aesthetic and existential models of non-reductive states of conscious intentionality and satisfaction, an issue he has more explicitly explored in his book Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity. Altieri’s chapter here is nonetheless valuable in that he offers a transitional model of Stevens’s poetry from the early Harmonium to the late The Rock, explaining in detail how Stevens moves towards a “commitment to dwelling” (197) in the minimal state of satisfaction and affirmation that poetry can provide as final aesthetic statement. The notion of finality (and of an ontological post-finality) forms the argumentative centerpiece of Tom Eyers’s chapter, “Constructive Disorderings,” which argues for a Stevens whose poetry abides in a singularity “far from critical modes that would rely, no matter how tacitly, on dichotomies of text and context” (207). A reader might struggle to reconcile Eyers’s overall argument that Stevens’s poetry disrupts comfortable notions of temporality and influence with the other essays in the collection which precisely historicize Stevens’s borrowings and relationship to his milieu. The divergence in emphasis then suggests that further work on Stevens and literary theory might enable additional insights into new intertextual conversations. A similar chord is struck in the mind of this reviewer after reading the final chapter of this book by Johanna Skibsrud. While her ostensible focus is on ethical criticism, Skibsrud is largely concerned with how Stevens “extend[s] perception beyond preconceived limits of selfhood and language” (227), bringing into play familiar theoretical moves associated with poststructuralist readings of Stevens. In stating that she is indebted to theories of ethical response in literature popularized by writers such as Derek Attridge (228), a critical opportunity is missed whereby to explore ethical subjectivity as it works in both poetry and novelistic prose (the critical touchpoint being Attridge’s seminal reading of literary ethics in J.M. Coetzee). That valuable comparisons between Stevens and the modernist novel (and across literary traditions) are relevant is attested to in Lisa Goldfarb’s chapter, which compares Stevens poetry and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. There are therefore, in my estimation, directions for further scholarly work that puts the modernist moment in Stevens in touch with contemporary interdisciplinary conversations in literary studies, topics which unfortunately exceed the scope of this admirable collection. What the essays do achieve in reassessing the state of Stevens scholarship is once again to reveal “the obscurity of an order, a whole, / A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous” between image and sense, language and hermeneutical re-ordering.2