Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2010)

The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 34 Number 2 Fall 2010 Special Issue Stevens, Freud, and Psychoanalytic Theory Edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan Contents Introduction —Jacqueline Vaught Brogan 123 Freud, Modernity, and the “Father Nucleus” in Wallace Stevens —Bethany Hicok 125 Death and Pleasure in Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” —Thomas Dilworth 144 “Ancestor of Narcissus”: Stevens and Psychoanalysis Between Freud and Deleuze —David R. Jarraway 161 Wallace Stevens and the Lacanian Ethics of Desire —Axel Nesme 181 The Lion and the Girl: Wallace Stevens, Sublimation, and the Problem of Being Ordinary —Thomas Sowders 191 Ambivalent Posthumanism: A Few of Stevens’ Animals —Brian Brodhead Glaser 209 The Dangerous Voice of the Realist: Wallace Stevens’ Extended Critique of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion —Raina Kostova 222 Beyond Romance: Wallace Stevens with D. W. Winnicott on the Objects of Insight —Gina Masucci MacKenzie and Daniel T. O’Hara 241 Farewell —John N. Serio 247 Poems 250 Reviews 254 News and Comments 266 Cover Faye A. Serio “The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture” from “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch” Silver gelatin print The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR James Finnegan Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORI A L ASSIST A NTS EDITORI A L BO A RD Richard Cole Milton J. Bates George S. Lensing David Howlett Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Maureen Kravec Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eric Leuschner Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff Kristina Martino Bart Eeckhout Joan Richardson Stephen Rive Alan Filreis Melita Schaum James Santa-Mo B. J. Leggett Lisa M. Steinman Mark H. Smith John Steen The Wallace Stevens Society PRESIDENT ADVISORY BO A RD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Owen E. Brady Robert Buttel David M. Craig Lisa Goldfarb Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing Glen MacLeod The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wal- lace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam, NY 13699. Phone: (315) 268-3987; Fax: (315) 268-3983; E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $30 for one year or $50 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $40 per year domestic and $50 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Also available are volumes 1–25 on text-searchable CD-ROM. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be submitted in duplicate and in Works Cited format. Word-processed manuscripts will not be returned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish an electronic file of the article as well as photocopies of all secondary quotations. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, Hu- manities International Complete, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature), MHRA Annual Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 2010 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Introduction JACQUELINE VAUGHT BROGAN HIS ISSUE HAD AS ITS genesis a remarkable panel on Wallace Ste- vens and Sigmund Freud organized by Charles Berger at the Lou- Tisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900 in February 2009, which featured papers by Berger, Bethany Hicok, Thomas Sowders, and me (two of which appear here in expanded form). At the time, I thought the four papers brought such a new perspective on Stevens that they might form a special section of an issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal. John N. Serio thought the interplay of these two important figures might be worthy of an entire issue, and he was right. Although most of the special issues of the journal have pitted Stevens with another poet or writer, such as Elizabeth Bishop or Henry James, or with a given topic, such as “place” or “France,” this issue called for readers of Stevens to consider him in relation to a dominant thinker of his own time, a curious but fruit- ful conjunction that had been largely unexplored. The results of this chal- lenge have yielded a variety of new insights into Stevens. In Bethany Hicok’s reading of the “crucial intersection between the cultural Freud and the cultural Stevens”—she observes that Freud’s The Future of an Illusion “provided an essential framework for Stevens’ thinking about both the search for belief and the dangers of totalitarianism.” Although this subject allows Hicok to give us entirely new readings of several of Stevens’ poems, it also expands our understanding of Stevens not only as a political poet but also as a political thinker, deeply invested in the consequences of what Freud’s late privileging of the scientific over the imaginative or poetic might have in the modern, increasingly techno- logical world. As Hicok argues, Stevens’ concerns were quite prescient, anticipating for him and other contemporaneous writers the kinds of ex- cesses that would allow for the rise of Hitler and other extreme forms of dominance. Raina Kostova, in “The Dangerous Voice of the Realist,” mines a similar field, though with slightly different nuances. According to Kostova, Stevens exaggerated Freud’s commitment to scientific rational- ism in The Future of an Illusion, which even Freud himself said was one of his weakest works. Despite their slightly different approaches to the same text, both Hicok and Kostova make a convincing case that Freud had a direct influence on Stevens’ thinking in both his essays and major poems. THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 34.2 (FALL 2010): 123–124. 123 © 2010 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. Other critics are concerned less with matters of influence than with the kind of interpretations a Freudian reading might give to Stevens’ poems. Thomas Sowders, in his essay “The Lion and the Girl,” gives us an interpretation of Stevens’ consistent sublimation of sexual desire (aligned with the “ordinary,” the figure of “the girl,” and basic “lust”) in order to transcend to the “extraordinary Poet.” Consequently, Sowders argues, there are “two kinds of ‘girl’ poems” in Stevens—one “angry and anguished,” the other “meditatively purging him of sexual desire.” In a different, though related vein, Thomas Dilworth, in “Death and Pleasure in Stevens’ ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream,’ ” offers an intriguing, if not disturbing, interpretation of the poem as containing “daring implications of erotic perversion.” Although not arguing for direct influence, Dilworth makes a convincing case that the major tenets of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle would have had common currency when Stevens wrote the poem and that the speaker of Stevens’ poem fully understands the “truth” that pleasure includes plea- sures that “most of us would consider immoral or perverse.” Brian Glaser also aligns Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle with Ste- vens, only this time offering a survey of several categories of Stevens’ use of animals in his poetry in order to defend a particular reading of Stevens’ work that, when aligned with that text, is arguably “posthumanist.” In so doing, Glaser considers Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s critique of Freud, as does David Jarraway, in his essay “ ‘Ancestor of Narcissus’: Ste- vens and Psychoanalysis Between Freud and Deleuze.” Jarraway’s interest in this shared subject is arguably more theoretical and includes the insights of the later Jacques Derrida’s work on narcissism, allowing Jarraway to argue for a “poetics of androgyny” in several of Stevens’ key poems. Finally, the subject of Stevens and Freud inevitably leads some theo- rists to consider Stevens and psychoanalysis more generally, as does Axel Nesme, in “Wallace Stevens and the Lacanian Ethics of Desire.” Nesme argues that Stevens’ “connection to Kantian ethics lies in his treatment of the Thing, not as the noumenon beyond the reach of perceptual knowledge, but as the kernel of bodily enjoyment . which is Lacan’s version of the Freudian das Ding.” In an entirely different manner, Gina MacKenzie and Daniel O’Hara consider Stevens’ poetry in relationship to D. W. Winni- cott’s theory of “personhood” in his Playing and Reality. Their conclusion is that “in Stevens’ world, play occurs on the precipice of nothingness,” thereby underscoring “the terrifying reality underlying Winnicott’s theory and therapy.” There is, then, much new and varied to enjoy in this special issue. It is one of the more intriguing volumes I have had the pleasure to oversee as guest editor. But, in the end, I must once again thank Serio, not only for suggesting that I edit this issue, but also for (as always) doing the really hard and meticulous work of preparing this issue for publication. University of Notre Dame 124 THE wallace STEVENS JOURNAL Freud, Modernity, and the “Father Nucleus” in Wallace Stevens BETHANY HICOK T IS NOW A FAMILIAR narrative of Wallace Stevens scholarship that in the 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens, like many modernists of his gen- Ieration, turned more directly, in his writing and in a series of university talks, to the dire political situation. As Stevens told his audience in a 1936 talk he gave at Harvard, “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 obliv- ion. 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” (CPP 788).

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