Thursday, June 6, 2013

The Priority of Solid Objects in Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens presents an interesting problem for critics.  On the one hand, he emphasizes the power of the human imagination, but he undercuts that power with subtle but remarkably persistent regularity.  A poem like "Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination," for example, seems to suggest the primacy of the imagination in the title. That is, reality is subject to the actions of the imagination. But the poem itself develops a contrary argument.

Stevens starts the poem with contextual particulars, naming specific time and place:

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.

With this beginning, the poem grants some concrete particulars to the reader. Reality seems quite normal and incontrovertible. The second couplet reinforces the logic of this argument by contrasting the real scene with an artistic abstraction of it:

It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.

Stevens suggests that the scene is real and unfolding (not gathering time and dust), and it cannot be reduced to an aesthetic representation, such as a miniaturized snowglobe.  In the third couplet, he extends his description of the hustle and bustle of reality as opposed to a quite abstraction:

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star.

Reality is powerful in its unfolding; it can crush; it has strength; it grinds; it moves round in perpetual (and unstoppable) motion.  But we also see Stevens starting to transform his argument. The car moves through Connecticut in a compellingly real way, but it does so "under the front of the westward evening star." Here, it is as if the car is guided by the star, like ancient mariners who used the stars to navigate the globe and find their way. The star takes on symbolic rather than literal value. In the next couplet, Stevens extends the symbolic (or "extra-ordinary," one might say) use of the star:

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved.

The guiding star is not just an object in the sky; instead, it engages the vigor of those driving through the night. Stevens is no longer just describing a drive through the night; the act of driving and noticing one's surroundings is a path to glory.  From this perspective, moving through the world is not the recognition of solid objects but the realization that objects emerge and then dissolve.  One can picture the car's headlights illuminating an object and then passing it, leaving it in darkness.  The metaphor suggests that life involves objects that come into being only while they are perceivable, and then they recede into some sort of non-being, which Stevens refers to as "denying itself away":

An agentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.

The poem has completely reversed itself.  The stable, mundane, and utterly real Friday night between Cornwall and Hartford has turned into an ephemeral abstraction that denies itself away.  Up to this point, I would consider this a fairly traditional reading of the poem, one that digs through the logical argument (almost syllogistic, especially in Stevens' later poetry) in order to find how the imagination prevails over reality.  But here's the weird part: Stevens reasserts the primacy of the object as he destabilizes it in the final couplet:

There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night's moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

Rather than asserting the "insolidity" of all things in the face of the mighty imagination, Stevens only argues that we can only operate with insolidity in response to solid things. The solid object is seen, driving through the night, as an insolid billowing, but it begins and ends as a solid object.  Likewise, the moonlight lake is neither water nor air for the poetic speaker, but for Stevens the poet, it must begin as a moonlight lake.  It is object first and last.  Though we cannot perceive them as such, or we perceive them as billowing, they are always real.  This perspective separates us from objects, leaving an unbridgeable gap, but it does not deconstruct the object itself.  This means that people do not wield a powerful imagination in creating the world; they are stuck with a wobbly, shifting imagination that can only approximate actual objects.  This changes our whole perspective on imagination: it is not the power to construct; it is only a power that suffices.

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