A Postcard from the Volcano: Reflexivity in Stevens and His Critics

Abstract

A Postcard from the Volcano:Reflexivity in Stevens and His Critics Christopher Patrick Miller What do human beings really know about themselves? . . . Does nature not remain silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated tremblings of the nerve-fibers? . . . Given this constellation, where on earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from? —Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" FOLLOWING UP on my epigraph, I would like to ask, "Where on earth do our critical concepts come from?" And how, in our critical responses, do we remain responsive to the ways thought and feeling emerge from the particular material conditions a literary object constructs and tests "in the act of finding / What will suffice" (CPP 218)? For a philosophical poet like Wallace Stevens, critics often find the concepts or tropes they are looking for in his poems. Reading his work amounts to proving how a line or a figure, say, displays features of Immanuel Kant's transcendental subject and, by an act of translation, validates Kant's conclusions about epistemology in another form of language. What goes unasked is whether Stevens mirrors Kant's premises or conceptual groundwork in the construction of his poems. The line of questioning I wish to pursue in Stevens's poetry parallels the sequence above in which Friedrich Nietzsche, addressing the false universality of moral truths, builds a "constellation" of nerves, natural processes, and rhetorical gestures in which a non-moral "truth" could be situated and subjected to dialogue. The conditions for what we might call a more emergent, reflexive truth are never given; rather, they are aspects of a persistently open question—perhaps the question of Nietzsche's philosophical method—precisely because his method makes the "subject" of thinking, what reflexivity is supposed to refer knowledge back to, a continuous object of scrutiny. A creator becomes a creature of what he or she creates: "In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, [End Page 207] fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast?" (Beyond Good and Evil 344). Nietzsche's method is aimed directly at calling the autonomy of any rational authority into doubt, precisely because exclusive claims to "reason" have historically led to static notions of "virtue," or knowledge for its own sake, instead of a reckoning with the lived differences of our social world. The signatures of Nietzsche's style—complex impersonations, rhetorical inversions, and moralistic satires—dramatize the ways in which "knowledge" and "self" are not transparent, expressive objects but non-identical processes that mediate each other. Though disparate in tone and content, Stevens's poems stage a similar doubt that neither the person capable of thinking about a shared reality—a "truth"—nor the material conditions in which particular truths emerge are categorical givens. Instead, Stevens tasks his poems with establishing the sufficient conditions in which reflexive thought can happen, such that sounds, images, or parts of speech appear as alive to each other as the flow of a river against its banks. In "Of Modern Poetry," his most frequently cited self-conscious dramatizing of how poetry works, he parallels the problem of describing a poetics with the question of how to make the particularity of a life visible or audible. To be "living," to "learn the speech of the place" from which lyrical utterances are spoken (CPP 218), the poem gathers a series of seemingly extrinsic conditions—that its speech "may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind" (CPP 219). Rather than resolve this drama within a single subjective reality, the multiplying preposition "of" provides a sort of syntactical pivot for a non-identical series of worldly orientations. Definitive or probing gestures—such as "the act of finding," "to think about war"—give rise to a series of conditional imperatives rendered through steep enjambments: "It has to face the...