Introduction “The Life of the World”

Abstract

Introduction “The Life of the World” Bart Eeckhout, Lisa Goldfarb, and Gül Bilge Han In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,The town, the weather, in a casual litter,Together, said words of the world are the life of the world. —Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” THIS IS THE SECOND HALF of the twelve contributions that—with one exception—came out of the symposium on “Wallace Stevens as World Literature” organized at the University of Stockholm in the spring of 2018. We prefaced the previous issue with a brief theoretical reflection on the concept of “world literature”—a term we will continue to spell without capitals in the essays that follow. Although, like last time, we’ve tried to put the essays in a sequence that has a certain editorial logic, what we appreciated most about the dozen essays we received is their diversity of perspectives—what we called the polyphony of critical voices in our previous introduction—and their felicitous complementarity. As at the symposium, no real thematic or methodological clusters imposed themselves and so we decided against subdividing the essays in a manner that would have seemed merely artificial. This second installment of our special issue, in other words, doesn’t open a single door onto another dimension of the topic; it basically continues where we left off by further multiplying possibilities of critical engagement. Two essays nevertheless gravitated naturally to first and last place. Gül Bilge Han’s opening contribution, “‘The World in a Verse’: Stevens, World History, and Global Modernisms,” has the sweep of a synthetic introduction that sets the theoretical stakes for the topic to which we’re returning. Han looks more closely into the emergence of a global collective consciousness in Stevens’s prose and poetry during the wartime years. While Stevens dreaded how “the consciousness of the world” might replace the “imagination,” as he put it in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (CPP 655), he was also given to envisaging the imagination as a source for a global vision of collectivity, or what he called a “civil fiction” in his poetry (CPP 586). As Han argues, “the idea of poetry as an aesthetic [End Page 127] source for exploring both connectivity and distance between different geographical, cultural, and political environments builds a recurrent trope at various stages of Stevens’s career.” After all, his attempts at proposing a common fiction that could embody the collective function of poetry and art is a well-established feature of his writings during especially the 1930s and 1940s. Before applying such ideas analytically to several poems, Han takes the time to situate Stevens’s preoccupation with a globally oriented poetics against the background of recent developments in the study of global modernisms and world literature. She pays special attention to the methodological and theoretical challenges that are posed by the stretching of “historical context” to unusual proportions. To illustrate the difference in scale that a global recontextualization may entail, Han turns to the 1945 poem “Two Tales of Liadoff,” where the reader is left to negotiate between local Fourth of July fireworks as associative backdrop to the poem’s imagery and the cataclysmic dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a more explicit poetic manifestation of a historically informed globalized consciousness, Han then studies “The Greenest Continent,” the third section of the 1935 poem “Owl’s Clover.” There, in Stevens’s own words, the question becomes whether the “imagination, extended beyond local consciousness, may be an idea to be held in common by South, West, North and East” (L 370). Like many others, from Langston Hughes to Nazim Hikmet, Stevens constructed his version of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—a classic instance of Western imperialism and colonialism—from a distance through the news media. In his poem, Han notes, Stevens appeared to be “interested less in celebrating interconnectedness than in staging the exigencies of art’s mobility and collectivizing power in the face of fascism, economic deprivation, and colonial rule.” She finishes by analyzing how Stevens also envisioned a global community of the poor in his more elegiac 1938 poem “Dry Loaf.” The latter...