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.

Wallace Stevens and What the Imagination is Allowed to Do

It's a stale and obvious fact that Wallace Stevens places great faith in what the imagination could accomplish. He feels that the imagination helps shape the facts of the world as we perceive them. (This concept is probably borrowed from Coleridge's careful description of two levels of imagination, the first being that which pulls sensory input together into the ideas needed to conceive of the world).

At any rate, Stevens's faith in the inherent power of the imagination allows him to construct surprising scenes in his poetry. The most well-known examples of this transformative power are probably in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which shows scene after scene of blackbirds in varying relations to the observer and the world. But I want to focus on the closing section of "Farewell to Florida," which transforms the men in the streets of Stevens's Hartford, Connecticut into the waves of the ocean.

My North is leafless and lies in wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

I choose this image not because it is the most staggering allowance afforded the imagination in Stevens's work, but because it raises an important question about the ethics of imaginative power. The poet's imaginative metaphor changes the men (in the abstract) into dark water that is "cloven" by the ship. We're aware that Stevens was an elitist, but this act of imagination allows him to tear through the men of the masses in the poetic act. The world doesn't seem to dictate to him as often as it maybe should. That's a value judgment, of course, but one that his poetry asks us to either affirm or reject.

Wallace Stevens on Death

Wallace Stevens' poem "Flyer's Fall" contemplates the persistence of belief in a culture marked by the loss of doctrinal faith. It is brief enough to quote in full:

This man escaped the dirty fates,
Knowing that he died nobly, as he died.

Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,
Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space -

Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which
We believe without belief, beyond belief.

It is worth noting that Stevens' image of death is about as pure as one can get. The flyer is in the air, otherwise untouched by the world. In this purity, the flyer thinks of his impending death as "noble." He is protected from whatever "dirty fates" lie in store for those of us who die less spectacularly.

But the second and third couplets are from the viewer's perspective, the one who remains and reflects on the flyer's passing. And it is this perspective that seems most difficult, more difficult perhaps than it is to die. He must situate the fact of death in a framework that makes sense, but in the absence of a received orthodoxy. Rather than a Christian heaven, there is only "Darkness, nothingness of human after-death." The compound word "after-death" is particularly provocative because it suggests that to name this state with its own word would be to sanctify it with systemic meaning. Here, it is merely the unconceived thing that comes after death.

But Stevens is interested in how the mind always works to create these narratives that explain the otherwise unexplainable. Even after attempting to ensure the un-theorization of life after death (by using the compound word "after-death"), Stevens gives us a physical place for the dead: "the deepnesses of space." He activates this place by giving it a powerful dynamic presence: "physical thunder." The dead are surrounded by a profound and spiritual activity.

But he is not arguing for a factual understanding of death that escapes Christian (or other) doctrines. He does not make truth claims for the dark emptiness. Instead, the poem is about the human impulse while alive to understand the unintelligible. The organizing power of the mind is an indefatigable, insurmountable desire within human beings: "We believe without belief, beyond belief." Even if we refuse the notions of the afterlife offered by the world's religions, the impulse to believe something, to organize knowledge, to create meaning, nevertheless persists.

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.