Stevens and Modernist Narrative

Abstract

TUDENTS OF NARRATIVE, whether they are anthropologists, bib- lical scholars, historians, or literary critics, agree that storytelling is fundamental to human culture. We tell stories about the origin of the world and the collective experience of our family, ethnic group, and na- tion. We understand ourselves as the product of a sequence of events and project a future that unfolds plausibly from that sequence. Narrative, in short, is one of the primary ways in which we discover or make meaning in our lives. Considering the importance of narrative and its central role in litera- ture, we might question the judgment of writers who try to dispense with it altogether. Traditional lyric poetry, though it relies less on narrative than other literary genres, usually implies a story. But in the pure of Mallarme, the collage-like structures of early Eliot, and the Imagist poetry of Pound and H.D., we encounter something new, the modernist flight from narrative sequence. In modernist fiction, Joseph Frank pointed out years ago, writers such as Joyce and Proust (Faulkner too, I would add) likewise suppressed the diachronic element in their stories so as to create the illusion of synchronicity—what Frank called spatial form. How about Wallace Stevens? It is a commonplace of Stevens criticism that he is not a narrative poet, that he prefers lyric utterance and musical structure to storytelling. 1 Daniel R. Schwarz departed from convention- al wisdom in Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, which teases out the narratives implicit in poems that seem not to tell stories. In 1994, a year after that book appeared, the Wallace Stevens Soci- ety sponsored a Modern Language Association special session on Stevens and narrative with Schwarz as respondent. Though one of the presenters subsequently published his paper in The Wallace Stevens Journal, there was apparently not enough material for a special issue on the subject. 2 Is there anything to be gained by picking up a thread that was dropped so long ago? I believe that there is, especially if we draw on the insights of narrative theory. Narratology offers a wide and ever-expanding array of strategies for analyzing plot, character, setting, point of view, and so forth. In this essay I make use of several that help us to relate Stevens' work to modernism. Along the way I consider a possible shortcoming in