On the Kindness of Readers

Abstract

On the Kindness of Readers Paul A. Bové (bio) The only thing a book can hope for is readers and in this symposium, Love's Shadow (2021) has been truly fortunate. Ten distinguished and busy scholar critics have taken the time to read and comment, to give the book place and value. They honor the book with time, attention, and care. Each response reveals facets of the book that provoke or inspire. Certain responses make Love's Shadow very much about the academy, academics, or their beliefs and practices. Others make it about poetry and imagination. Some take it as a performance of inevitable patterns or of planned agons. Love's Shadow's form invites responses to its elements, for example to its reservations about messianism, allegoresis, or utopian belief. Critics who accept those invitations illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of each section or each discussion of a major motif. These responses sometimes object, correct, or supplement. They make clear that Love's Shadow does not earn their consent to its evaluations of various theoretical notions or figures influential for a time within the disciplines. Of course, those who are unconvinced realize that the book predicts such responses and finds confirmation of its own judgments in the corrective disagreements it sometimes provokes. Other commentators see Love's Shadow as a late work justifying a career with judgments based on experience. In such a view, the book is not only critique but apologetics. Seeing the book this way gives it heft coming at the end of a career by its own testimony abandoned. Responses that register their disbelief in the book's accomplishments tell stories centered on academic debates, requiring scholastic method to settle or contest claims. In a way, such responses discredit Love's Shadow as academic work, present it as flawed, incomplete, biased, prejudiced, polemical, and mystified. Other responses set the book outside academia as well. While they may also disbelieve the book's claims about academic matters and figures, they read Love's Shadow for its autobiographical traces. They read it as the story of conversion, of abandonment, of a life-change. While this notion can coalesce with responses that grace the book as an apology for a life's claims and efforts, in the hands of even sympathetic academic readers it has a discrediting effect as well. The book's mistakes, in such responses, lie in its judgments about academic practices, beliefs, and investments. Its brilliance as critical writing on Stevens, Rembrandt, or Shakespeare aside, [End Page 631] its unsatisfying claims about the academy, its Leaders, and their ephebes puts it out of bounds as a schoolman's text. The autobiographical reading tells a story of finding value outside the academy and its figures. The book becomes a "turning the back" story. Such responses live in a binary world, where a book might succeed as criticism in such a way as to leave in place the academy the book abandons. Astute readers grasp that there is more than one voice in the book, that it is crafted as performance, and structured to enact many of its own claims. The book offers guides to its own reading, noting for example the poisonous possibility that imagination's work can repress and imprison itself. A response that sees the poison's potential in imagination's work also realizes that as the book opens, writing in the mode of high critique to double back upon the authority of mainstream practice and institutions, it makes use of exhausted devices to clear the ground for better things. Many readers note the differences in prose style among chapters and especially between earlier "theoretical" chapters—but what then of "The Socratic Interlude"?—and the later critical chapters. Those responses that take the structural movement of the text seriously, to understand and explain what the book is trying to do. An early reviewer noted that the book is not a book "about."1 This leaves it as writing, as something that invites responses that ask what it does or how it creates. Various readers notice how the book summons older figures in criticism and art to the present as figurations within its own project. The time...