Wallace Stevens, Imagination, and Desire

I suppose it's inevitable that all discussions of Wallace Stevens get down to the concept of imagination at some point, so I might as well end the suspense early and mention it at the outset: clearly Stevens is interested in the imagination. The point is not to discover this interest, but to discover what it might mean. I'll start with my favorite single image from his work, the ninth section of his well known "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

What intrigues me about this snippet is its representation of the mind's complex relationship to reality. In the simplest sense, there are no circles in the sky. The viewer simply imagines a growing set of concentric circles marking the blackbird's progress in space. It's as if the viewer adapts the concept of planetary orbits to the flight of the blackbird: over time, the bird moves away, and its progress can be mapped. Using the imagination, order is applied to something otherwise without it.

But that's not entirely true. Stevens seems interested in the possibility that the viewer has discovered the circles rather than created them. For him, the mind discovers relationships to more fully understand the world, not to disregard it in the creation of a world. In other words, the circles themselves may be the abstract conceptions of the viewer, but they function in relation to the world. It's that connection to the real that concretizes the imagination.

In "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch," Stevens spends the majority of the poem working in the abstract, playing with algebraic variables rather than concrete objects:

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

In the early-going, Stevens carefully avoids particulars, suggesting that the form and not the content of the image is the "mechanism" at work. The figure is assiduously not named in the title, instead given the place-marker "so-and-so." But Projection B, made up of the figure's gestures, is given many more details. Finally, Projection C is situated at the end of a dialectical shifting of perspectives:

To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection, C.

In other words, the concreteness of the object cannot be denied, as if everything is a creation of the mind. And yet the sensible object itself is not the total of its existence; there is a term that exceeds it: the idea. She, the "object" in this poem, is "half who made her." She exists, but partly through the imagination of the viewer.

But there are two further statements in the poem that require attention. First, the ending returns to the concrete, as if to award it some priority: "Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks." Stevens does what he refused to do throughout the poem on principled grounds: he names the figure in the final line. This nod toward the concrete, however, is undercut by its sudden and ironic appearance at the poem's close.

Second, and what particularly interests me most about this poem, is the reference to desire: "The arrangement contains the desire of / The artist." Here he explicitly refers to desire as an important aspect inhabiting the imagination. He seems to employ a psychoanalytic conception of the figure in the poem, calling her a mechanism, apparition, and projection. The figure is a mechanism that activates or transforms the subject's desiring energy. In particular, this figure is an apparition, a ghostly return of a past figure. The return of Mrs. Pappadopoulos is a condensation of that most fundamental and perpetual of psychoanalytic interactions: the interaction with the parents.

This might seem like a stretch -- and a stretch into an area that many critics of Freud find particularly unnecessary (and uncomfortable). But it seems like the return to the family drama is itself a condensation of an even more fundamental struggle: the development of subjectivity in which the family plays only a part (though an important one). While I haven't fully developed my ideas on this matter, it seems that individuation is at the heart of family relations, and concepts such as the oedipus complex can only be understood in this larger context.

I might be straying too far away from Stevens's poem, but I think individuation and desire plays a role in the poem. The poem stages an encounter not with the mirror image Lacan describes, but rather with the image of the Other. There's an interaction going on in which the subject projects desire onto the figure on the couch as an apparition of his own imago. In other words, imagination isn't the free interaction of object and all conceptual possibilities; it is bounded by the subject's experiences, marked most fundamentally by the process of individuation.