Celeste-Marie Bernier , Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015, $39.95). Pp. 517. isbn 978 1439 9127 37 (original) (raw)

2017, Journal of American Studies

itself exponentially among 'other' contexts … with the philosophical ruminations of Deleuze often as the guide" (). Following Deleuze's wayward lead, Jarraway makes "forays into contexts where the impact of Stevens is obviously less than direct" (). Indeed, Jarraway concedes at the beginning of chapter  that "The collocation of Wallace Stevens and queer discourse, for some, is likely to be somewhat of a stretch," because "[q]ueer is hot" whereas "Stevens is not" (). Clearly, gay poet Doty is hotter than straight Stevens, "outdistancing" the latter, in the poem "Fish R Us," "on the matter of a noncategorical and nonreferential approach to identity" (). The "stretch," however, may have more to do with Jarraway's manipulation of the elastic quality of Stevensian discourse itself, the "sense of indeterminacy" and of repetition and change in which Jarraway identifies the "hallmark of reformative queer discourse" (). Jarraway is more convincing when correspondences between Stevens and his Others are less evanescent; for instance, in his illuminating reading of Stevens's camp correspondence with gay Cuban poet and editor José Rodriguez Feo, and in his extended and sensitive treatment of Stevens's late poetic return to his early mentor at Harvard, George Santayana. Even here, however, there is a clutching at semantic straws: at the "queer assertion of humanity" in the title poem of The Rock (), for instance, the late sequence in which Stevens's homage to Santayana, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," appears. Throughout, a Stevensian vocabulary of the provisional and the possible is in tension with Jarraway's own overdetermined latching on to "queer" keywords, to epigrams, and to epigraphs: an epigraph from Stevens's "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" forms too tenuous a link between the poet and the Updike of the Rabbit tetralogy, for instance, and one wonders why Ernest Hemingway, in place of the unlikely trio of Updike, Roth, and McCarthy, does not appear among Stevens's Others. Despite its considerable gender-and genre-bending promise, Jarraway's book doesn't quite prove the adage from Stevens that it takes as its own epigraph, that "The theory of poetry is the life of poetry." When Jarraway tells us that "if 'incompossibility' is now a means of communication (Deleuze, once again), it's only because 'the poem wants the impossible' (Doty, once again)" (), we may think twice about what Stevens called "The Pure Good of Theory." 