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Manner and Manners 225 Stevens, Wallace Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-83329-5 — The New Wallace Stevens Studies Edited by Bart Eeckhout , Gül Bilge Han Index More Information Manner and Manners 225 Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Edited by Holly Stevens, U of California P, 1996. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Library of America, 1997. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Macmillan, 1950. Vasari, Giorgio. “Preface to the Third Part.” Readings in Italian Mannerism, edited by Liana De Girolami Cheney, Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 27–34. von Hallberg, Robert. Lyric Powers. U of Chicago P, 2008. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-83329-5 — The New Wallace Stevens Studies Edited by Bart Eeckhout , Gül Bilge Han Index More Information chapter 17 Lyrical Ethics Johanna Skibsrud “The eye’s plain version is a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience,” writes Wallace Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (CPP 397) – a late poem included in his penultimate collection, The Auroras of Autumn (1950). Here, as in many instances throughout his career, Stevens celebrates the disjunction between language and experience by establishing both the affordances and restrictions of the individual subject’s point of view. What we see “plainly,” he posits, is not the world – or even an image of the world – but our own particular version, or invention, of that world: “a thing apart.” The inherent solipsism of this perspective forms the basis of our experience. It provides a seemingly natural and inevitable language for our understanding and expression of what we feel and see at the same time that it delimits that understanding and the possibilities of expression. The poem as a whole radiates from this seeming paradox, the limits of perspective serving, on the one hand, as an exemption from and, on the other, as the foundation for, reality. Of this paradox, Stevens says, “A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet –”(CPP 397). The poem, Stevens suggests, offers a way of deferring definition. It extends itself as a slow unraveling of rational thought, a series of articulations that move away from the central paradox of being – certainly from the possibility of “getting to the bottom of it.” Neither question nor answer, and resisting both summary and conclusive response, a poem can only be furthered by the reader “As part of the never-ending meditation, / Part of the question that is a giant himself” (CPP 397). In this concluding chapter, I offer my own “and yet” to the “never- ending meditation” Stevens initiates. I argue that Stevens’s intricate poetic “evasions” and “endless” elaborations (CPP 415) demonstrate the capacity for lyric poetry to express the immanent relation between subjectivity and objectivity, knowledge and truth, self and other. Although committed to expressing the complexities and paradoxes within moments of being, Stevens successfully “evades” a fundamentalist approach to ontology – 226 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-83329-5 — The New Wallace Stevens Studies Edited by Bart Eeckhout , Gül Bilge Han Index More Information Lyrical Ethics 227 one that, like Heidegger’s, cannot progress or is deemed invalid if the thinker has not “previously clarified the meaning of Being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task” (10). Stevens is far too interested in, and faithful to, fleeting sensations and plays of light – and far too pragmatic – tospendmuchtimeponderingthefundamental “meaning of Being.” The goal for Stevens is, as he suggests in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” to elaborate a space in which the necessarily limited and illusory aspects of experience are united with a larger reality he conceives of beyond the circumscribed framework of a subjective perspective. His poetry moves – haltingly, uncertainly – toward the representation neither of the “dream” of existence nor of a conception of a fixed, material “reality” from which the dream is drawn but instead toward “A dream no longer a dream, a thing”–toward an expression “Of things as they are” (CPP 143). For Stevens, despite his reputation for abstraction, the ideal expression of “things as they are” is found in the interface between subjectivity and objectivity. He is wary of dwelling within the circuitries of an endlessly refractive “inner” space, but he is also too aware of the pervasive role of the imagination – even in establishing the distinction between “inside” and “out”–to trust in any description of the physical world as final or absolute. Alain Badiou’s “radical thesis” that “ontology ... is nothing other than mathematics itself” (xiii) – that certain patterns and properties exist regard- less if there is someone to perceive them – would have been suspect, and ultimately not very interesting, to Stevens. What he finds compelling is the movement and relation between different perspectives and supposedly disparate modes of interpreting the world. His poetry is committed neither to a metaphysical nor to a physical expression of reality; it strives to be neither subjective nor objective, neither abstract nor concrete. By exposing the limits of the subject as an open border with what is unseen, unspoken, and unknown, he stages a lyric encounter that hinges not on the possibility of response (either imagined or real) from a projected “other”–whether that be a narrative “you” or the reader of the poem – but on the play between the known parameters of selfhood and what exceeds those param- eters. Lyric poetry, for Stevens, is this play: the performance of “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves” (CPP 135) that invites lived moments of encoun- ter with the immanent relation between “inside” and “out.”1 The ethics implicit within Stevens’s poetry is thus an ethics of sensual discontinuity and rupture rather than of abstract, projected contact. Stevens encourages us to feel into the gaps he presents between self and other, language and meaning, idea and thing, to arrive at a felt rather than rational awareness of © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-83329-5 — The New Wallace Stevens Studies Edited by Bart Eeckhout , Gül Bilge Han Index More Information 228 johanna skibsrud the way this gap is never quite bridged due precisely to the fact that we – our very subject positions – are blocking the way. I am indebted to Derek Attridge, William Waters, Rachel Cole, Mara Scanlon, and others who have argued persuasively that rather than a demonstration of “solipsistic exclusivity” (Cole 383), the lyric is instead an invitation toward participation and ethical response. Here I want to push this thinking further and suggest that if we take this ethical possibility afforded by the lyric as a starting point and at the same time seriously confronting the impasse of subjective perception, we may find ourselves in a position to read the lyric as an actual extension of selfhood beyond a linear, narrative frame. Rather than reading Stevens’s poems as poetic resources to be mined for meaning, my aim is to activate them as generative sites of meaning-making. The following pages are therefore a performance of sorts, the aim of which is to demonstrate both the limits and possibilities of my own language and imagination. But this performance will also, I hope, act as both testament to and argument for the capacity of lyric poetry to access and express what is ultimately beyond language and individual perspective (both Stevens’s and my own). From the memorable moment in Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, in which from the perspective of “The Snow Man”–“nothing himself” (CPP 8) – we encounter two different kinds of nothing, to Stevens’s final collection, The Rock, where we are reminded that “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined” (CPP 428), Stevens creates vantage points from which to perceive the partial and constructed nature of perception.2 Clarified through this process is the unavoidable limit of the human imagination. Stevens writes both in celebration of the imagin- ation’s power to extend subjective experience beyond selfhood and in passionate resistance to a reduction of the world to its subjective interpret- ation. What results is a sometimes disorienting movement between mul- tiple perspectives and shifting points of contact and relation between subjects and objects, as well as between the “peculiar and general” (CPP 343).3 “The greenhouse never so badly needed paint,” he writes, for example, in “The Plain Sense of Things,” a late poem included in The Rock. “The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. / A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition / In a repetitiousness of men and flies” (CPP 428). Here, we’re propelled swiftly from a close-up view of a crumbling garden to a panned-out vision of the cyclical nature of life and death. By the time we reach the “repetitiousness of men and flies,” we are no longer in a position to distinguish between the “fantastic effort” (think both “immense” and © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-83329-5 — The New Wallace Stevens Studies Edited by Bart Eeckhout , Gül Bilge Han Index More Information Lyrical Ethics 229 “fantastical/illusory”) of constructing a chimney and the “fantastic effort” it takes just to live. Within this dizzying juxtaposition we sense the intrinsic relation between birth and death, between creative intention and its eventual, necessary disintegration. From the specific and the time-bound, we are spun out toward a sweepingly inclusive perspective that seems to take in “the whole.” But before we can rest too comfortably within the seeming inclusivity or “holism” of this perspective, we are reminded that even it is produced through the finite imagination and depends upon a version of reality that remains inaccessible.
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