Apocalypse without Apocalypse

Abstract

Few attendees of Linda Hutcheon’s plenary address at the Modernist Studies Association two years ago in Vancouver are likely to forget her rather startling opening apology. The well-known author of works like A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) confessed that she had done serious injury to modernist studies by claiming that all the good stuff was supposed to come after modernism, as no true student of that historical period could possibly believe. Genuflecting to the conference theme, “Other Modern­ isms, Modernisms Others,” the former president of the MLA was abjecdy remorseful: “Mea culpe, mea culpe, mea maxima culpe!” she beseechingly declared. Not surprisingly, Malcolm Woodland, a colleague of Hutcheon’s at the University of Toronto whose help he tallies in the acknowledg­ ments, strikes a similar note in Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode. In the final pages of this book, Charles Altieri, Daniel O ’Hara, and Fredric Jameson (along with Hutcheon) are all enlisted to corroborate the current contention that “‘postmodernism’ is no longer a vital concept for the arts” (216). More to the point, “categorizations of Stevens as either modern or postmodern so often seem part of the project to divide the literary goats from the literary sheep” (217). Woodland’s tripartite analysis of Stevens’s apocalyptic poetics, therefore, aims definitively to suture this critical and theoretical impasse. In one of his most famous critical pronouncements in prose (from The Necessary Angel collection of essays), Stevens contends that “It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era” (qtd. on 34). For Woodland, this assertion raises several important questions con­ cerning the poet’s response to apocalyptic desire, among them Stevens’s own relation “to apocalypse’s figuration of supreme discursive power” and how poetry might “deal with apocalypse’s excessive desire . . . that exceeds all possibility of fulfillment” (18). But answers to these are only useful to the