Love’s Shadow, by Paul A. Bové, is at once a monumental study and an enigma.1 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 bodysurfing 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), 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.

This is not to say that Bové does not make an argument. Indeed, his is a provocative and at times polemical argument aimed at key figures in literary and cultural criticism, naming names and, at the same time, as speaking critically to the field of criticism tout court. Bové argues that literary criticism has been under the pervasive sway of a fundamentally life-denying melancholy, which he associates primarily with the work and influence of Walter Benjamin. From that perspective, as Bové recounts, all human history is fundamentally a ruin; its “experiential mode is allegory, reduced especially in the American academy to the redundancy of allegoresis, the reading of all materials as allegories” (ix).