Abstract
Like Alberto Giacometti’s “la Femme Couchée qui Rêve,” Wallace Stevens’s “So-and-So Reclining on her Couch” anticipates the anxiety that prevails in the post—World War II poetry of Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Adrienne Rich. With Ovid’s story of Pygmalion and Narcissus at their base, poem and sculpture offer an entry to the psychological, theoretical, and mythological themes that I take up in the ensuing chapters. Typifying the poet’s incestuous desire to make the woman into a version of the poet’s self and the poet’s appropriative reflex to internalize the woman’s generativity, both works question the divisive tendencies of the six-hundred-year-old Petrarchan poetic that exerted such a powerful influence on Western visual arts and poetry.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they became the bleached bones of a story….
Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much.
—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things1
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Notes
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: harper Collins, 1997), p. 33.
The handbook of heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow, collected by Robert Pinsky (New York: Morrow, 1998), p. xiii.
On Stevens as love poet, see, for example, Mary Arensberg, “‘A Curable Separation’: Stevens and the Mythology of Gender,” Wallace Stevens and the Feminine, ed. Melita Schaum (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), pp. 23–45; Jacqueline Brogan, “‘Sister of the Minotaur’: Sexism and Stevens,” Wallace Stevens and the Feminine, p. 3–22; rpt. from The Wallace Stevens Journal 12.2 (1988): 102–117; Barbara Fisher, The Intensest Rendezvous (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990); Mark Halliday, “Stevens and heterosexual Love,” Essays in Literature 13 (1986): 135–55 and Stevens and the Interpersonal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Frank Lentricchia, “Andiamo,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 407–13; and Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James and Wallace Stevens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Paul Morrison, “Fat Girl in Paradise: Stevens, Wordsworth, Milton and the Proper Name,” Wallace Stevens and the Feminine, pp. 80–114. Rosamond Rosenmeir, “Getting Wisdom: The Rabbis Devotion to Weisheit and its Implications for Feminists,” Wallace Stevens and the Feminine, pp. 140–54, rpt. from The Wallace Stevens Journal 12.2 (1988); Eric Murphy Selinger, What is It Then Between Us?: Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Mary Doyle Springer, “The Feminine Principle in Stevens’s Poetry: ‘Esthétique du Mal,’” Wallace Stevens Journal 12.2 (1988): 119–137; Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).
Lynn Enterline also connects Narcissus and Pygmalion in The Rhetoric of the Body: From Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 97. Similarly, J. Hillis Miller discusses the relationships among Ovidian stories: “Some residue of unassuaged guilt or responsibility leads to the next story, the next story literalizing yet another figure, then to the next and so on” See Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: harvard University Press, 1990), p. 2.
Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 289.
Lisa du Rose assesses Stevens’s sense of superiority in: “Racial Domain and the Imagination of Wallace Stevens,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 22.1 (1998): 3–22. Of Stevens’s habit of thought, Rachel Blau du Plessis similarly writes, “The African trope aggregates the diverse elements of a whole continent into one unhistorical mass and then absorbs African Americans into that bolus of materials” See “‘Hoo, Hoo, Hoo’: Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Whiteness,” American Literature 67.4 (1995): 669.
“Rotted Names,” What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 204.
“Petrarch’s Beloved Body: ‘Italia mia,’” Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 10.
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 158.
Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 59–60.
Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 6.
Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 268.
“Consolation,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Revised Second Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 272.
“Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartmann (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 121.
As explained and translated by Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 167.
Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 195. On the controversy over Lentricchia’s thesis, see “Patriarchy Against Itself: The Young Manhood of Wallace Stevens,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 742–86; Donald Pease “Patriarchy, Lentricchia and Male Feminization,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 378–85; and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “The Man on the Dump versus The United Dames of America; or What Does Frank Lentricchia Want?”, Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 386–40, as well as “Andiamo,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 407–13
Toni Stooss and Patrick Elliott, Alberto Giacometti, 1901–66 Exhibit Catalogue for the Royal Academy of Art (London, 1996), p. 154.
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 258.
Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, trans. Jean Stuart (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 239.
“Marginal Comments,” The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book VII, trans. with notes by Dennis Porter (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992), p. 136.
The Mestastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 91.
“Certain Functions of Introjection and Projection,” Developments in Psycho-Analysis: Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs and Joan Riviere, ed. Joan Riviere, with a preface by Ernest Jones (New York: De Capo Press, 1953), pp. 167–68.
The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 187.
“Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello,”Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 142.
Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 176.
“The Garden,” The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, Third Edition, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 52.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 175.
“The Survivor,” Toward the Post-Modern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Robert (Atlantic highlands, N.J.: humanities Press, 1995), p. 162.
King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 206.
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© 2001 Barbara L. Estrin
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Estrin, B.L. (2001). Theorizing the Lyric. In: The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06765-4_2
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