Abstract
This paper aims to challenge a long-standing assumption among critics of modernist literature generally and those of Wallace Stevens in particular: the view that a firm line can be drawn between modernist “aestheticism” and politically committed “realism” — or, to put it more precisely, that an allegiance to a literature of “pleasure” precludes a commitment to “actuality.” As Alan Filreis has pointed out in a recent, ground-breaking study of Stevens, an assumption about an absolute incompatibility between an “aesthetic” modernism and a “committed” realism has persisted ever since the 1930s, when many leftist critics insisted there could be no bridging the two.1 Nowhere has this false assumption been more evident than in the case of Stevens — modernism’s great “confector” of “satisfying fictions” — whose enterprise has been widely regarded as utterly indifferent to the harsh realities of its times. What follows is an argument in support of Filreis’ revisionist view that Stevens was much more concerned with responding to the “actual world” than has been claimed. It is centred in a new reading of the third section of Stevens’ doctrinal poem of 1942, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”: the section called “It Must Give Pleasure.” Where most critics have taken the title’s imperative as evidence of Stevens’ commitment to an escapist aestheticism (the “it” of the title being his poetic ideal, the “supreme fiction”) I shall argue that the section presents an argument for the compatibility of the pursuit of pleasure and accountability to actuality, even at a time when actuality is painful.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left ( Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994 ).
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), p. 240. Subsequent references to the Collected Poems will appear in the text with the abbreviation CP.
William James, Pragmatism ( Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981 ), p. 30.
Bertrand Russell, “William James’s Conception of Truth,” Philosophical Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1910 ), pp. 127–149.
F. H. Bradley, “On the Ambiguity of Pragmatism,” Mind 17 (1908), pp. 226–237.
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982), p. cvi.
William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979), pp. 194, 159.
Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If,” trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924 ), p. 354.
James, The Meaning of Truth, p. 193.
James, Pragmatism, p. 101. My italics.
Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1960), p. 116.
Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate ( Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977 ), p. 215.
Joseph Riddel, “Metaphoric Staging: Stevens’ Beginning Again of the `End of the Book,’ ’ ” Wallace Stevens: A Celebration, ed. Frank Doggett and Robert Buttell (Princeton UP, 1980), pp. 308–338; see p. 323. My italics.
For Stevens’ discussion of the relative merits of the “denotative” and “connotative” uses of language — and his championing of the latter — see “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” The Necessary Angel (London: Faber, 1960), pp. 13–16.
James, Pragmatism, p. 101. My italics.
William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” Talks to Teachers and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1958 ), p. 133.
For the “confecting” of the hero, see Stevens’ portrait of the Chaplinesque figure in “It Must Be Abstract,” canto X (CP 389). The figure represents both the unprepossessing raw material with which the poet, or would-be hero-maker, is faced in the modern world, and, as I suggest below, the comedian-poet himself, who in his own way becomes a hero.
For Vendler’s pessimistic reading of this passage, see “The Qualified Assertions of Wallace Stevens,” The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965), pp. 168–169. Compare Frank Lentricchia’s reading of the passage, The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968), p. 165. For Vendler’s general characterization of Stevens as a poet in whom desire and reality are always at odds, see Words Chosen Out of Desire ( Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984 ), p. 31.
Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens ( New York: Knopf, 1966 ), p. 281.
Stevens, Letters, p. 469.
For critiques of Rorty’s use of James, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989); Robert F. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991); Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 355–370; Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986 ); and Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy ( Albany: SUNY Press, 1990 ).
Grey’s Stevens is, like Rorty’s ironist, a fictionist, an atheist, and a poet committed to leaving public issues alone. See Thomas C. Grey, The Wallace Stevens Case (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991), pp. 31–34, 76, 84. For La Guardia’s dependence on Rorty for his definition of pragmatism see David M. La Guardia, Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying Imagination of Wallace Stevens (Hanover: UP of New England, 1983), pp. x—xi. Ihab Hassan has also discussed the question of the similarity between Stevens and James and Stevens and Rorty. While he correctly distinguishes between James and Rorty on the matter of religious belief, and acknowledges an element of religious hope in Stevens that makes a complete equation of Stevens and Rorty inadvisable, he nonetheless sees Stevens as a champion of “aesthetic fictions,” rather than tough, Jamesian truths, accountable to “ `Real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes… ” (“Imagination and Belief: Wallace Stevens and William James in Our Clime,” Wallace Stevens Journal 10 (1986), pp. 3–8: see pp. 6–7). Hassan quotes James, The Will to Believe (New York: Dover, 1956, p. ix). This is, in effect, to equate Stevens with Rorty’s private ironist. For further evidence of Stevens’ and James’ assimilation into Nietzschean and Rortyan postmodernism, see Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism Reading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), pp. 11, 16, 20, 35. An article that refers to Rorty’s pragmatism, but that rightly distinguishes between Nietzsche and James and supports the view that Stevens’ writing reflects a Jamesian optimism, is Lyall Bush’s “ `Satisfactions of Belief’: Stevens’ Poetry in a Pragmatic World,” Wallace Stevens Journal 14 (Spring, 1990): 3–20. Bush’s mistake is in assimilating Rorty to James — that is, in making Rorty more optimistic about the possibilities of pragmatic truth-making than he in fact is. Finally, Richard Poirier’s reading of pragmatism is predicated on the recognition that Rorty undervalues the pragmatism of James and Emerson. See Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992), 8, 41. Poirier’s own conception of pragmatism, however, fails to acknowledge any respect for empirical testing in James or the pragmatist poets he discusses, and in this sense reinforces the Rortyan conception of pragmatism.
For the terms “avant-garde” and “moderate” in this context see Cornet West, “Theory, Pragmatisms, and Politics,” Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), pp. 22–37; note especially p. 24.
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 61, 45.
Ibid., p. 20. He “gives up on the idea that there can be reasons for using languages as well as reasons within languages for believing statements” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 48). This renunciation forms part of his rejection of logical positivism. See West, American Evasion of Philosophy, pp. 183f.
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 167.
For critiques of the enthocentrism in Rorty’s pragmatism, see West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 205–207, and Clifford Geertz, “The Uses of Diversity,” Michigan Quarterly Review 25 (1986), pp. 105–123. See also Rorty’s response to Geertz’s criticisms in “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,” Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 ( Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991 ), pp. 203–210.
William James, `The Philippines Again,“ Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987). The piece was a March 8, 1899, letter to the editor of The Evening Post. The theme of the frequent ”falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals,“ and the necessity of not being ”forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own“ was something James had developed at length in Talks to Teachers; see pp. 149 and 169.
James, “The Philippines Again,” Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 161.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 88.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 133–134. See also Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 254: “There is about every poet a vast world of other people from which he derives himself and through himself his poetry.”
These alternatives are a self-annihilating “peopled” world and a solitary “unpeopled” world.
The view that it is important to transcend personal pain and appreciate the pain of others is articulated throughout “Esthétique du Mal,” but the poem’s critique of epistemological pessimism and fictionalism and their consequences have frequently been ignored. Headings of canto VII - the sentimental war poem beginning “How red the rose that is the soldier’s wound” - are particularly prone to this error. Helen Vendler and Mark Halliday both describe it as a “repellent” example of Stevens’ indifference to the suffering of others, because of the way it generalizes and aestheticizes the pain and suffering of war (Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969), p. 209; Mark Halliday, Stevens and the Interpersonal (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 41). In fact, the poem is Stevens’ satirical example of the kind of poetry that ensues from a complacent attitude; its “rose” is inspired by the roses on the table in the “cool café” where the young poet writes, his personal pain making him “indifferent” to the pain in the world around him (CP 314–315).
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 87. For the use of the mock-heroic in “The Greenest Continent,” see Robert Emmett Monroe, “Figuration and Society in Owl’s Clover,” Wallace Stevens Journal 13 (Fall 1989), pp. 127–149; especially pp. 134–135.
For arguments that Stevens’ poetry is thoroughly monological, see Gerald Bruns, “Stevens without Epistemology,” Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), pp. 24–40; and Majorie Perloff, “Revolving in Crystal: The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of Modernist Lyric,” in the same volume, 41–64. Mark Halliday catalogues the ways in which Stevens’ efforts at empathy fail, but does not deny that the effort is made (Stevens and the Interpersonal 22). Bruns’ and Halliday’s arguments both make the mistake of taking Stevens’ dramatization of a phenomenon as an endorsement of the phenomenon. For example, Bruns view the portrait of the imperialist consciousness of Hoon as uncritical (28), and Halliday does the same with the war poem in “Esthétique du Mal” (see note 32).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rae, P. (1998). Cannon Aspirin: Wallace Stevens’ Defense of Pleasure. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Enjoyment. Analecta Husserliana, vol 56. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1425-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1425-9_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4889-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-1425-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive