著者
Ogura Yuki
journal or
publication title
SHIRON(試論)
volume
50
page range
43-62
year
2015-09-30
URL
http://hdl.handle.net/10097/63892
Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of the 1930s
Yuki Ogura
Critics of the 1930s had argued assiduously about the cultural role of poetry and the place of the poets during the dark time of the Great Depression. Wallace Stevens, who had been in a long hiatus after the publication of his first volume,
Harmonium (1922), was no exception to this argument when he published a new
version of Harmonium (1931) and his second volume Ideas of Order (1936). Although his position as a business manager was secure in the 1930s (Stevens was named vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1934, and earned a high income compared to his contemporaries), as a poet he was in a much more difficult situation. Indeed, the ascendancy of social realism in literature at this time marginalized the work of Stevens, which had been considered as a part of the nonsocial high-modernism in the 1920s. It was inevitable for the poet like him to be embroiled in this wave of socialization and to seek a new poetic style in accordance with the times.
By locating Stevens within these sociopolitical contexts, New Historicists Alan Filreis and James Longenbach, through abundant documentation and close observation, interrelate Stevens and his poetry with the actual world. Filreis especially describes the cultural context of the 1930s and the figure of Stevens as a “middle-ground” writer whose flexibility as a poet enables him to move from the right of high-modernism to the left of social realism (30). Filreis also says that history and lyric poet marked each other because of their contemporary “complexity” (9). New Historicism, therefore, adds a new perspective to the Stevens’ study, releasing it from the former dominance of formalistic criticism such as New Criticism and Deconstruction.
Marxist critics like Cary Nelson would certainly sympathize with such a critical tendency to liberate poetry from the influence of high Modernism and dogmatic formalism, which resulted in making a limited poetic canon by a few masters. In his book Repression and Recovery, Nelson emphasizes the variety and diversity of marginalized twentieth-century poetry, such as the works of the Harlem Renaissance, which became “one of most dependable sources of
knowledge about society and one’s place and choices within it” (127). This view is reasonable, but his tendency to attach too much importance to the realistic poetry, and his somewhat teleological neglect of the social aspect of Modernism should be reconsidered.1 Because Stevens’ non-realistic lyric poetry also directly or indirectly
addressed the social situation of the 1930s, we must surely not dismiss its social aspects.2
Then, what is the proper method to tackle Stevens’ lyric poetry from a difficult time? Concentrating on the words and style, in Stevens’ case, is always a productive and reliable way to appreciate both his formal innovations and speculative aspects. Whereas critics often tend to confine Stevens into the restrictive framework of either the epistemological subject-object or the imagination-reality dichotomy, a sophisticated linguistic approach can bring out the richness of his poetic language more flexibly. Some powerful critics, though different in approach, demonstrate the validity of the systematizing linguistic structure and rhetorical function of Stevens’ poetry. Beverey Maeder and Chalres Altieri have brilliantly observed how a specific grammatical style marks Stevens’ poetry in the 1930s, as well as the wider cultural trend. Both critics interestingly agreed about the predominant force of copulative verbs in Harmonium in terms of ontology, and they testify how Stevens overcomes the copula’s power in the post-Depression poetry. According to Altieri, negation diminishes the authority of a copulative verb by limiting or altering the condition of the predicate that seems to depend on the subjective decision (Modernity 92). Certainly, these studies take a formalist approach to some degree, but their calling attention to a fundamental grammatical function in Stevens’ poetry can rectify the dogmatism of previous formalist criticism, because their new method of close reading foregrounds the practical aspect of poetic language that concerns how a poet engages with the social world. This paper will also examine how Stevens’ lyric poetry is capable of producing a referent both within and without the text, either through observing its frequent use of the incomprehensible deictic, or through eliciting a potential referent from non-referential rhetoric. In the end, these considerations of rhetoric might be effective in identifying the place of Stevens’ poetry among the power struggle between realism and modernism.
The purpose of this paper is to explore how Wallace Stevens responded to an era in his rhetoric of both poetry and prose in the 1930s by analyzing his usage of negation, copula, and the deictic. Although the attempt to illustrate Stevens’ mode of writing partly overlaps with Maeder’s and Altieri’s, this essay can distinguish itself from these studies by focusing on Stevens’ meaningful usage of tautology in “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” This neglected rhetoric will illustrate the specificity of Stevens’ poetry to the time of social predicament. Preparatory to the main topic, initially, we will survey the poetic growth of Stevens from the
1920s to 1930s glancing at his treatment of negation and copula in a set of poems. Subsequently, we describe both the actual situation of the 1930s in which Stevens and his opponent were intricately involved, and Stevens’ emergent mode of abstraction. Finally, it will be inferred that Stevens’ self-referential rhetoric was itself a political response to the social realism and social engagement pitted against high-modernism.
1. Arrangement for the Mid-Thirties Poetics
One standard method to survey Stevens’ poetic development from a sociopolitical point of view is to trace the continuum from Harmonium to Ideas
of Order. The oft-quoted triad, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” in Harmonium and
“Sad Strain of Gay Waltz” and “Mozart, 1935” in Ideas of Order, formulates the dilemma of what Stevens clearly realized at that time as the “most inappropriate man / In a most unpropitious place.” (99)3 He simultaneously unfolds the
grammatical function of the negation and the copula in these poems to establish the relation between lyrical subject and society. The process of social engagement expands its range from an extremely private sphere to an incomplete public one. Firstly, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” in Harmonium typically exemplifies the social inappropriateness of the individual through its exotic title and the following soliloquy:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange. (10-12)
This stanza notoriously represents the solipsistic figure of Hoon who is often deemed to be Stevens’ alter-ego. That self-directive and exclusive situation is overtly concretized in four first-person pronouns, two reflective pronouns, and powerful negation of not but. Stevens subsequently tried to ameliorate this autotelic harmony of high-modernism, with the elegiac mourning of outdated order filled with the real voice of the outside world, in a sequel to the poem written in 1935. “Sad Strain of Gay Waltz” seemingly cannot relinquish the old form of the tercet which is identical to “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” but frees the poets from the monologue of Hoon:
There comes a time when the waltz Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.
Too many waltzes have ended. And then There’s that mountain-minded Hoon, For whom desire was never that of the waltz, Who found all form and order in solitude,
For whom the shapes were never the figures of men. Now, for him, his forms have vanished. (3-11)
It is a series of negations that repeatedly change the “mode of desire.” To begin with, the first quoted stanza foretells that the authenticity of the conventional waltz will no longer be capable of retaining a suitable form for desire. Following this negation, the next stanza illustrates the entrance and exit of the other outmoded form. The strange adjective “mountain-minded” could be identified with what Stevens called an “ivory tower” attitude toward society that many of the high-modernists would take (718). The form of Hoon, in the second, was never congruent with that of the antiquated waltz and the present figures of people, so that he should disappear with the announcing transition, “Now.” The present tense, then, introduces contemporary shapes and voices in the center of the poem:
There is order in neither sea nor sun. The shapes have lost their glistening. There are these sudden mobs of men, ……….... Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes For which the voices cry, these, too, may be
Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire. (12-14; 22-24)
This is not the dazzling subject matter of Harmonium, such as a glittering sea or sun. On behalf of these subjects, the dismal cries of masses would be another type of music with “motion and full of shadows” (30). This new mode of desire, consequently, seems to have a substance in a time of social chaos instead of the former waltz without shadow. Thus, Stevens carefully constitutes a step-by-step process of bringing a social condition into his lyric with the help of rhetoric. He revised his early poetry and its form elaborately for the mid-thirties, yet is this poem really a proof of his social engagement as the title ironically suggests? Restoring the substantial shadows would also metaphorically mean attaining a new poetic form, but still the poem would not exactly represent the social claim of “sudden mobs of men” because they remain an ambiguous figure like Hoon.
More disturbingly, “Mozart, 1935” intensifies the reader’s confusion of how the poet reacts against his surroundings. As Filreis pointed out, the separation made
by a comma between “Mozart” and “1935” implies the awareness of the speaker as well as that of Stevens who distinguishes himself from the addressed anachronistic figure of the poet in front of the piano (212). The repeated imperative sarcastically orders the poet to perform the present noisy sound of the Great Depression within the private space of the apartment:
Poet, be seated at the piano. Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof While you practice arpeggios, It is because they carry down the stairs A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano. (1-9)
The situation is distinctively divided between interior and exterior movement, in other words, the chord of practicing arpeggios in the static room and the discord of throwing stones from the bustling street outside. In this case, a way of performing, the arpeggios, by the ascending notes of a cord, might be in contradiction to the descending of the dead body. The stance of the poet on this occasion deserves censure not only because of his tonal disharmony but because of his quasi-aesthetic solitude away from the threatening event. It is certain that the poet notices the environmental turbulence, yet the speaker strictly instructs him not to move. Instead of taking radical action, the speaker gives voice to the human grief with the help of the invocation:
Be thou the voice, Not you. Be thou, be thou The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain. (16-19)
The series of copulas “Be” are used not as an intransitive verb for creating an autotelic self like Hoon but as a transitive verb for transforming the poet into the social objects. By negating the designation “you,” the archaic “thou” paradoxically finds out the awful contemporary object. The ambiguous oscillation of the voice between past and present therefore incorporates the social voice into the lyric without solipsistic exclusion. Finally, the speaker says that “We may return to Mozart. / He was young, and we, we are old” (25-6). It seems that the
plural “we” suggests the collectivity acquired through this poem but the caesura made by the comma between the repetitive “we” leaves doubts as to whether the speaker’s historical awareness is convincing or not. Indeed, this resolution would not placate the angry laborers and his contemporary Leftist critics. For Stevens, perhaps, returning to Mozart means less about regaining the past art than about foregrounding the gap between society and lyric poetry. The ambiguity made by this gap helps the reader to recognize Stevens’ neutral position, and it characterizes Stevens’ mid-thirties poetics, as we will now see.
2. Middle Ground Abstraction and the Unwritten Rhetoric
Of the criticism of Stevens’ mid-thirties poetry, the most well-known and important is Stanley Burnshaw’s “Turmoil in the Middle Ground” (1935) published in the Leftist magazine New Masses. Treating Stevens as a “middle-ground” writer who wanders between a high modernist right and social realist left, Burnshaw ruthlessly pointed out the confusion and the obscurity of Ideas of Order comparing it with Harmonium. He says “it [Harmonium] is verse that Stevens can no longer write. His harmonious cosmos is suddenly screeching with confusion. Ideas of
Order is the record of a man who, having lost his footing, now scrambles to stand
up and keep his balance” (355). Burnshaw also condemned Stevens’ quasi-realistic tendency by quoting his line; “For realists, what is is what should be” (355). Indeed during the time when he issued the second volume, in terms of his lyric style, Stevens was in transition from composing the shorter poetry of Harmonium and
Ideas of Order to longer poems like “Owl’s Clover” (1936) and “The Man with the
Blue Guitar” (1937), but the unsettled social situation of the mid-thirties gave him an creative impetus to counterattack Burnshaw’s harsh review.
“Owl’s Clover,” for instance, was so direct and political an answer to the Burnshaw’s review that it led to a failure in the emergence of Stevens’ realistic mode, but it did suggest the germ of his new style.4 It is easy to search out the
skirmish represented in the poem; the first time this poem was published in five sections, the second section’s title was “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” that began with Stevens’ counter argument; “Everything is dead / Except future. Always everything / That is is dead except what ought to be.” (95-97). The Canto III of the same section also implies Burnshaw’s Leftist matter-of-fact imperative where the statue, a symbol of art, is inscribed as “The Mass / Appoints These Marbles Of
Itself To Be / itself.” (144-146). In this way, Stevens challengingly incorporated the
contemporaneous discourse into his long poem in a somewhat realistic way, yet what is a more interesting but neglected point of “Owl’s Clover” is the embryo of the “abstraction” which is a crucial element of Stevens’ later poetry. Canto VI of
the fourth section, titled “A Duck for Dinner,” is a perfect example of such a new direction:
The civil fiction, the calico idea,
The Johnsonian composition, abstract man, All are evasions like a repeated phrase, Which, by its repetition, comes to bear A meaning without meaning. . . . (662-666)
The juxtaposition of the enigmatic nouns empties a concrete meaning “by its repetition.” The copula ceases to have any function of predication because these appositive subjects are “evasions” that would not confine themselves into a single definition. Though “a repeated phrase” seems to imply propaganda or a slogan-like catch phrase such as “itself to be itself,” Stevens adroitly releases the word from containing any specific referent by obscuring particular political contexts. When the poem comes to the last section titled “Sombre Figuration,” moreover, the final development is to produce “[t]he medium man among other medium men” (965) by its repetition. That man is tantamount to the “abstract man” because he is also in the middle of apposition, and he serves as a vehicle for translating his meaning into another. In the end, the neutral figure of “the medium man” could be the one solution to evade the oversimplified realistic view of the Leftist critic. Even if that middle-ground abstraction was not merely an aesthetic withdrawal from the society, then, why did Stevens keep remaining in the position denounced by his opponent?
In the jacket statement from The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other
Poems (1937), though issued later, Stevens explained the explicit aim of “Owl’s
Clover”: “The effect of Owl’s Clover is to emphasize the things as they are and things imagined; in short to isolate poetry” (OP 233). This dualism, which means reality and imagination, lay in the mere emphasized opposition between art and society at that point. What Stevens was willing to indicate in his poetry was not the superficial antithesis but the constraint itself that enforces such structure upon the poet. It is now worth quoting at length from a record of his lecture at Harvard University in 1936 titled “The Irrational Element in Poetry”:
The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion […]. We are preoccupied with events, even when we do not observe them closely. We have a sense of upheaval. We feel threatened. We look from an uncertain present toward a more uncertain future. One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in
poetry as well as in politics. If politics is nearer to each of us because of the pressure of the contemporaneous, poetry, in its way, is no less so and for the same reason. (788)
Stevens, to be sure, assertively refers to everyone’s awareness of “the pressure of the contemporaneous” with an iterated “we,” involving not only the present audience but also his contemporaries. Uncertainty was the crucial determinant of action both for politics and poetry as long as it pressed on decision-making. What he envisaged in his mind by emphasizing this pressure then was the matter of social realism that was the main problem of art during the decade, as Filreis pointedly suggests (252).5 Preceding these statements, Stevens explained
what he means by the “irrational element” as “the transaction between reality and the sensibility of the poet from which poetry springs” (781). In addition, he exhorts that “The poet is able to give it [expression] the form of poetry because poetry is the medium of his personal sensibility” (782). Stevens did not intend to set lyric against politics or claim a priority of poetic form here. The main point of his argument was to persuade the audience to become aware of the framework of reductive force (in this case, “the pressure of the contemporaneous” from social realism) that could not reckon with an elusive element such as “personal sensibility.” Probably, Stevens is less interested in assuming and maintaining a solid binary opposition than in feigning them for the purpose of grasping what makes aesthetic expression possible. For Stevens, poetry as a “medium” would be a suitable measure to deal with such in-between situation. Stevens’ tantalizing rhetoric, however, may not permit the reader to accept the easy explanation about the “irrational element.”
It is necessary to pay more attention to Stevens’ stratagem of how he circumvents the either-or situation through his evasive rhetoric. Stevens obviously casts doubt upon the notion of “objective reality” (781) that is the main subject matter of social realism. Needless to say, it is impossible for all language to represent objective reality without transforming or bracketing it; as Stevens says in Adagia: “Realism is a corruption of reality” (906). In addition, all mimetic expression cannot escape the belatedness because actual experience always precedes the representation of it. Stevens sufficiently understands these paradoxes of realism and the capacity of subjective imagination; thus, he says in response to this obvious yet seemingly inarticulate postulate:
The poet is able to give it the form of poetry because poetry is the medium of personal sensibility. This is not the same thing as saying that a poet writes poetry because he writes poetry, although it sounds much like it. A poet writes poetry because he is a poet; and he is not a poet because he is a
poet but because of his personal sensibility. What gives a man his personal sensibility I don’t know and it does not matter because no one knows. Poets continue to be born not made and cannot, I am afraid, be predetermined. (782)
In this case the repetition of the words makes things difficult. The raison
d’etre of a poet explained in the passage is a little bit confusing because of its
redundant rhetoric. Although speaking hesitantly, Stevens locates the poet in the constantly recursive state where a poet turns back on himself as a new-made poet with the help of his personal sensibility. By refusing logical argument and bringing antithesis into the realm of the poetry, Stevens employs the same rhetoric in another place: “In poetry, to that extent, the subject is not the contemporaneous, because that is only the nominal subject, but the poetry of the contemporaneous.” (789) These intended confusions might irritate the reader who tries to grasp the logical meaning of the passage. Stevens, presumably, would not seek the matter-of-fact meaning or fixed idea through his writing, instead he pursues “an unwritten rhetoric that is always changing and to which the poet must always be turning” (790). Such rhetoric can ostentatiously elude the predetermined condition, like a binary opposition, due to its performative quality that depends solely on its assertion such as “a poet writes poetry because he is a poet.” One familiar example of this might be tautology; that it has no meaning when it’s read as a constative statement but implies something like a strong negation or general truth when it’s regarded as a performative statement. To put it simply, the proposition such as “A is A” excludes any definition of the subject except “A” from the predicate so that it can demonstratively suggests that “A” is the only truth, or it also means “A” is insignificant in another context. In this manner, a performative statement like tautology inevitably invokes the several practical situations in which it is used, and it may reveal how social action can take place in language. Besides that, as tautology contains in its structure both the function of copula and negation (as we will see later), the integrated statement would delimit Stevens’ accomplishment of these two modes. Although critics have paid little attention to the validity of tautology in Stevens’ poetry, Stevens ingeniously introduces it into his break-through poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” By containing social implication, the demonstrative verbal act in this poem would be a more successful counter-statement against “the pressure of contemporaneous” than any other works we have mentioned.6
3. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and the Mode of Tautology
“The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937) was written in the year after “The Irrational Element in Poetry” and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Unlike “Owl’s Clover,” which makes direct reference to the current events, this poem leaves a detractor’s demands of writing reality “as they are” in suspense. As Hillis Miller rightly suggested, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” has no “neat closure” but has an arbitrary ending and plays with “open-ended improvisations” that “marks his turning to [a] new style” (147). Such tentativeness and openness may thwart any reductive reading confining Stevens’ poetry into limited sociopolitical contexts, even if “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is pervaded with allusions to historical fact. But by eliciting the implications from the poem, we can offer a definite answer both to Stevens’ experiment and to “the pressure of the contemporaneous” without keeping them incomplete. Copula and negation afford a clue to think about the leitmotif in “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” For instance, tautological expressions composed of these two modes will characterize the theme and the structure of the poem. In addition, the indeterminate status of the speaker may perplex the audience’s relationship to the poem. Therefore when we consider the place of the speaker as well as the poetry, it is helpful to focus on the function of the deictic. Through observing the role of the rhetoric, it will be concluded that the self-referentiality or non-referentiality of this poetry paradoxically finds a putative reference outside of the text.
To begin thinking of the topic, we needed to identify the setting of the poem. Canto I is an exposition where the several voices presents the thematic material of the poem; that is, “tune up” for the prevailing movement between the guitarist and audience:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.” The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.” And they said then, “But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.” (1-10)
The guitarist with the blue instrument, who is like a skilled tailor, is unwilling to depict mimetic reality. He refuses its green color with his blue guitar and reverses the designated rhyme order of the audience. In response to the guitarist’s rejection, the audience gives the more severe order to play “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,” and “things exactly as they are.” What seems strange about their appeal is the transcendental but identical status of the former tune that would be incompatible with the latter exact one. The guitarist / speaker keeps this demand unresolved until the penultimate canto of the poem, and so his performance will not adopt a narrative sequence or continual dialogism.
In the beginning of Canto II, the speaker declares; “I cannot bring a world quite round, / Although I patch it as I can” (12). He, as a poet-shearsman, persistently rejects the mimesis of “things as they are” while boasting of his mending skill. Nevertheless, his subsequent musical composition for man does not reach completion only to remain “almost to man” (16). In the same way, the speaker avoids presenting any perfect forms throughout the poem. Although the speaker’s voice changes its tone into violent effusion, Canto III shows how this attempt will get entangled into unsettled subordinate clauses:
Ah, but to play man number one, To drive the dagger in his heart, To lay his brain upon the board And pick the acrid colors out, To nail his thought across the door, Its wings spread wide to rain and snow, To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true, To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings. . . (21-30)
There is no main clause to fix the dissected “man number one” on “the board;” instead the banging and jangling of metal sounds linger discordantly. It seems that the poet-guitarist’s position loses its authority displaced by the mixture of fierce description and the lively “t” sound. At the same time, “blue” is no longer
a subsidiary modifier for the guitar; on the contrary, it is transformed into a “true” noun with an accompanying “savage” attribute. The savagery depicted here, as is always the case with Stevens’ poetry, upsets the balance of the formal structure of the poem in the form of discordant sound.7 It should also be noticed that this
canto lacks a copula that sets up any causality or dependency between subject and predicate, and therefore the logical meaning recedes, concealed by “jangling.” In this manner, the audience’s expectancy of regular grammatical construction is always threatened by the abrupt transformation of the speaker’s voice and by his unstable position in the poem.
The location of the speaker becomes increasingly obscure after undergoing the additional imperative and the strict demand by the audience in Canto V and VI. To epitomize the audience’s assertion in these sections: they ask the speaker not to tell “the greatness of poetry”(41), but their earthly world has “no shadows” (44) so that “Our selves in poetry must take their place” (51) even in the song of the adversary’s guitar, yet returning to the initial requirement of “A tune beyond us as we are,” (53) they too claim that “nothing changed by the blue guitar,” (54); then they consequently define that “The tune is space”(64) and “The blue guitar / Becomes the place of things as they are” (65). If “nothing” as a noun object is the only changeable thing in the poem, the variation of this negation would integrate the antithesis between imagination and reality, as we will see in the central part. At any rate, the spatial notion created here thereafter provides the speaker with a springboard to appear in unexpected places and at unexpected moments in the poem. Faced with the parade of demagogy, for example, the speaker in Canto X suddenly comes out among the crowd by crying “Here am I, my adversary. . .”(115). No sooner has the audience captures the speaker’s figure in the specific contemporary situation indicated by the deictic “Here,” than he instantly drops out of the historical context and reappears with the audible self-assertion of Canto XII:
Tom-tom, c’est moi. The blue guitar And I are one. The orchestra Fills the high hall with shuffling men High as the hall. The whirling noise Of a multitude dwindles, all said, To his breath that lies awake at night. I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else. (131-142)
The implication of the enigmatic transition “Tom-tom, c’est moi” has attracted the attention of critics: Maeder regards it as an “attention-getter” that awakens temporal expectation, (176) while Edward Ragg superbly hears the echo of “Poor Tom” in the King Lear, as “a figure without context.”8 They are plausible,
and it might also be noticed that “tom-tom” is a native East Indian drum according to OED. This meaning reminds us of the precedent parade scene of Canto X where the audience orders to “Roll a drum upon the blue guitar” (113), but the nativeness of the instrument has no connection with contemporary political events in America. The speaker identifies himself with both the native drum and the blue guitar by using copula, that is to say, being both simultaneously a steady native and a catalyst of change. The transformation of the speaker corresponds with the subsequent bewildering shifts of the sound, from expansive orchestra to reductive breath, and he finally loses his foothold as “Where / Do I begin and end?” Just as the speaker becomes missing in the line, the reader may be perplexed by the irregular enjambment of “where” and an excessive use of the pronoun in the last two couplets. After all, these wanderings of the speaker settle down in the last line where “nothing” puts an end to further movement. Allowing his speaker to move freely, Stevens risks turning Canto XII into a solipsistic meditation like Hoon’s soliloquy. We should put aside the issue of the speaker for a while, and see the central part of the poem in the next place.
Despite the fact that Canto XXII is perhaps the most famous and quoted section of the poem, there remains much to be examined because of its overlooked “unwritten rhetoric.” The guitar sound recedes momentarily in the “poetry about poetry” section:
Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality,
But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires Its true appearances there, sun’s green, Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks? From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, In the universal intercourse. (243-254)
As is often the case with the aphoristic sentences of Stevens’ poetry, the force of the statement, as well as that of copula, does not last for long. “Poetry is the subject of the poem” is neither the aesthete’s credo nor the defense of pure poetry. The subject of the singular “poem” shifts from general “poetry” to “universal intercourse” with reality. The stability of the imagination-reality opposition promptly dissolves into a series of rhetorical questions and the tentativeness of adverbial expressions like “say” or “perhaps.” It is worth noticing that there are a lot of spatial prepositions: “between,” “in,” and “from.” Especially, the repeated “from” reveals how the subject-matter of the poem is transformed from “poetry” to “reality” along with the demonstrative pronoun “this” and “these.” By pointing out where poetry derives from and heads for, this Canto displays how imagination makes poetry available for engagement with the real world. But we should make more attempt to elicit the potency of Stevens’ rhetoric. Stevens himself gave an explanation of this section to Hi Simons in 1940 as follows:
Poetry is a passion, not a habit. This passion nourishes itself on reality. Imagination has no source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it departs from reality. Here is a fundamental principle about the imagination: It does not create except as it transforms. There is nothing that exercises exclusively by reason of the imagination, or that does not exist in some form in reality. Thus, reality = the imagination, and the imagination = reality. Imagination gives, but gives in relation. (Lettters 364)
Some critics also quote this passage in order to explain Stevens’ formula of inter-relationships between reality and imagination, regarding it as a paraphrase of Canto XXII (Vendler 136-137). If that view is not a straightforward intentional fallacy, however, we must not ignore the linking power that creates the reciprocity. It may therefore be worthwhile to attempt to read the rhetoric of this letter carefully, observing the usage of negation which is latent in setting up an equation as “It does not create,” “There is nothing that exercises exclusively,” and “that
of the negative, and one necessarily entails the other “in the universal intercourse.” To be more precise, imagination must always be conditioned by imagination; at the same time, imagination must also be transfigured by reality as represented in the series of qualified tropes; sun’s green, cloud’s red, earth feeling, and sky that thinks.
Returning to the aphorism of the Canto, then, it is necessary to follow the statement that persuades the reader to reconsider the “subject” of the poem. To be sure, the subject “poetry” corresponds with the predicate “poem,” so that the tautological sentence could be deduced as “Poetry is the poem.” In tautology, there is literally nothing between subject and predicate. In other words, hidden negation, nothing, could be the potential grammatical subject in this case. We may also notice the other lines made by copula that seem to visualize the concept of nothing; “There is / An absence in reality” and “Is it / An absence for the poem.” The capitalized article is meticulously produced by the intended enjambment, and therefore we can guess the importance of an insubstantial notion that was already announced by the audience as “nothing changed by blue guitar” (54): in the world there is no shadow. Tautology represents nothing, but nothing attunes itself to be an altering condition. In these ways, the rhetoric of this section ostentatiously attracts the reader’s attention to a complex treatment of how copula and negation makes
nothing visible. Having understood the formal structure of the poem, at last, we
can develop an argument beyond the linguistic level.
Seemingly, Canto XII has no subject matter except its formulation of the interchange of imagination and reality, but we should turn back to a precondition of this poem, and seek a potential adversary outside the text. Originally, one reason which drove Stevens to write “The Man with the Blue Guitar” was to make a stand against “the pressure of the contemporaneous” with his lyric poetry. During the 1930s, there were two slogan-like principles for what the poet might inevitably envisage in his mind, as partly mentioned before: the “itself to be itself” of social realism and the “art for art’s sake” of high-modernism. Both could be termed as a tautological project: the former was impossible either because of the unavoidable delay in mimetic representation or transformation by the interpreter, and the latter autotelism is infamous for its intimacy with escapism. Reviewing Adorno’s theory of aesthetics, moreover, Terry Eagleton illustrates how “the aporia of modernist culture” can be found in an unfruitful conflict between autonomy (“the free-standing nature of the aesthetic work”) versus autonomy (“its functionless status as commodity on the market”); that is, the self-directed movement of modernism was already conditioned by its internal complicity with its opponent (349). If we consider these schematized sociocultural contexts, it can be said that Stevens’ tautology not only upsets grammar but also directs a reader’s attention to the impasse of two predominant styles by foregrounding their closed structure. After
all, “Poetry is the subject of the poem” is meaningless insofar as it remains a constative statement, yet it can reflect and organize the paralyzed social situation performatively in its symmetrical rhetoric. Confronting a social crisis, poetry cannot evade the tautological representation, but thrives on it. This might be a right process for making autonomous poetry available for yielding its general value to the society in “the universal intercourse.”
Once the system of binary opposition lapsed away, the poem restores the speaker to a stage. We have to return back to the pending topic of the speakers’ monologue discussed in Canto XII. It is noteworthy that the speaker undergoes a salient change after the precedent improvisational Cantos. Canto XXVIII exhibits how the speaker inhabits the abstract space renouncing the former wandering figure:
I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks, Gesu, not native of a mind
Thinking the thoughts I call my own, Native, a native in the world And like a native think in it. ………. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar. (318-323; 328-331)
Whereas the speaker boldly declares himself as “a native,” it is uncertain where “this world” is. Besides, the obsessive self-assertion of the speaker is marked by his frequent employment of the deictic, which raises another question: what does he refer to? We can guess at least two immediate sources of “a native.” On the one hand, we already heard the sound of a native American drum in the previous Canto. On the other, disapproving of the feasting custom of the Denmark, Prince Hamlet told Horatio that “I am native here” (1.4.14).9 But both intra- and
inter- textual reference, tom-tom or Denmark, ought not to be an adequate answer to “a native” described here, because the speaker can “speak and move” at will. Namely, he acts performatively free from any established definition of “a native.” Altieri rightly suggests that “The desire to be a native seems then to stem from
a strong sense of being alienated from substance” (Paticuculars 149). By being native, furthermore, the speaker rejects the identification with any external referent. Probably, this is more than a matter of realistic representation. It would seem that the speaker is “a native” in the sense that he originally exists in the place where the discourse happens preceding any actual event and mimetic representation. For this reason, he demonstrates point by point the very condition that makes an utterance possible by using “this,” “it,” and “here.” The speaker is thus linked to the detemporalized state that Jonathan Culler would call “a now of discourse, of writing” (152), but equally he proceeds to enlarge, reaffirm, and rearrange the place for his ongoing identification as “a native” by means of his demonstrative gesture.10
Consequently, “things as they are” are still unattainable, but the speaker succeeds in locating himself in the middle of reality as “things are as I think they are.”
If the speaker consequently abides in an indeterminate position, where should the poem end? The conclusion must be provided by the penultimate Canto that constitutes a part of the answer to the audience’s demand in the first Canto:
Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. . . . . Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed. You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you. (381-384; 387-391)
Rejecting “the definitions” and naming, the strong imperative destroys a referent, and presents “Nothing” probably as a subjective noun that is paradoxically visible “in the dark.” Once again, tautology draws an answer to our wandering for the closure. By way of a reconciliation between imagination and reality in Canto XXII, the audience must be surprised by the fact that they encounter nothing but their own self in this Canto as represented in the identical status of grammatical subject and predicate in tautology. To be exact, the question “You as you are?” and its ready answer “You are yourself” unexpectedly give us the moment to realize that an alien element nothing must emerge after the destruction of the referent
and meaning by tautology. This internal absence in the structure of tautology may direct an audience’s attention from the content to the form of the proposition that inevitably reflects the social condition in which they are unconsciously entangled as mentioned above. By producing additional implications in its structure, the rhetoric of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” thus become an amazing “tune beyond us, yet ourselves.” During the 1930s, retaining a fixed position and reproducing “things exactly as they are” seemed difficult for many artists and intellectuals; we can ultimately find out a discursive place in Stevens’ poetry where the very act of imagination is about to take place for our fruitful engagement with society.
This paper has attempted to examine the Stevens’ response to the current of the times in the 1930s through observing the rhetoric of his poetry and prose. It has suggested that Stevens accomplished the mode of negation and copula in his mid-thirties poetry especially as represented by tautology. In addition, despite its frequent use of the deictic the poem does not faithfully refer to external reality as it is but reflects its condition upon a rhetorical structure. Perhaps, hostile critics might claim that Stevens’ self-referential poetry is still separated from any contamination by society and could not represent the empirical world after all. But the abstraction made by the strategic rhetoric in Stevens’ poetry was itself a social and political reply to the contemporary, and by positing itself in the singularity of its literary history, presents a new mode of thinking in and of the 1930s.
Notes
1 Frederic Jameson is a more flexible Marxist who renounces the restrictive
view of radical critics to retain the “historical effectivity” of Stevens in the 30s and 40s (“Wallace Stevens” 177). 2
To think about an intricate relationship between lyric poetry and society, it is useful to recall Theodor Adorno’s famous statement on the lyric. According to Adorno, the demand that lyric poetry should be something purely individual outside of the oppressive society is itself the innate social claim, and the more severe the condition becomes, the more firmly lyric resists it by refusing the heteronomous principle and making itself solely in concord with an autonomous law (“Lyric” 213). This observation on the autonomy of the lyric seems to be suggestive when we consider mid-thirties poetry, especially when we think about the peculiar rhetoric of Stevens’ poetry.3
Except the letters, all further reference to Steven’s Poetry and Prose are to
Collected Poetry and Prose, Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York:
Library of America, 1997.4
Many of the critics consider “Owl’s Clover” as a poetic failure of Stevens. For instance, Harold Bloom regards it as “his largest failure” (113). In fact, this poem was omitted from the Collected Poems published in 1954. 5
Marxist term. He expounds the aim of Stevens schematically: “Stevens meant only to remind his audience that aesthetic ideology, even that which was founded on resistance and dissent, has a discernible way of marking the work of artist, especially when those artists are not conscious of how such pressure tends to exclude other cultural forms.” (255)6
Some critics slightly refer to an apparent tautological line (Maeder 190), but would not advance discussion on this matter. 7
The seventh stanza of “Sunday Morning” is a good example.
8 Ragg is a rare critic who finds persuasive evidence in the poem of an
inter-textual relationship with King Lear. See his Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of
Abstraction.67-8.9
The motif of Hamlet can be identified in other Stevens’ poem. Canto IX of “The Auroras of Autumn,” which consciously use the theatre trope, takes Denmark as an example of native community.10
See “Apostrophe.” Apostrophe can be considered as a type of deictic because it necessarily entails pronoun like “thou” or “you.” Culler’s argument, though it is restricted to lyric poetry, appears useful for illustrating general effect of deictic. For criticism of Culler’s discussion, see also “Deictics and the Status of Poetic Texts” by Balz Engler.
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