The Course of a Particular: On the Ethics of Literary Singularity

Abstract

In Wallace Stevens's poem Course of a Particular, cry of wintry leaves provokes a shift in mood from robust assurance that is part of everything to a depleted sense of world drained of meaning: The leaves cry. In absence of fantasia, without meaning more Than they are in finding of ear, in thing Itself, until, at last, cry no one at (Palm 367) These two dispositions--one expansive and gregarious, other contracting to vanishing point of consciousness--suggest two complementary responses to literature. I will be concerned with latter, which tries to acknowledge uniqueness of a literary work; but it must first be set against fantasia whose absence it announces in order to trace a path of diminishing returns. My purpose is to explore rhetoric of singularity in order to detect its final finding, that is, its and ethical limit. My hope is that artistry and ethics will converge: course of a literary particular leads to ethical discovery. According to Stevens, however, such a discovery concerns no one at all. This hardly sounds like a strong moral position, (1) and defining that position in relation to artistry that exposes it will be my subject. My own path, which runs from numerous to singular, requires some signposts. I intend, first, to mark path's two limits by contrasting a criticism of plenitude with a criticism of austerity; then to inspect some rhetorical devices through which singularity is indicated; then to show how this rhetoric isolates here-and-now in instant of its inception and deception, its birth and death; and finally to examine how an of singularity raises a comparable ethical challenge that sets moral generality against dignity of unique. Stevens will serve as one of my guides. The shipwreck of singular When studying any literary work, we customarily nudge it in two directions, though not in equal measure. Usually we relate it to other texts in an expanding pattern of interdependence within larger contexts and communities. Whether terms of explication are historical, cultural, biographical, national, generic, or religious, a work gains significance within a wider field to which it contributes, however modestly. No artist or artifact has its meaning alone, T. S. Eliot advises in a famous dictum, because it participates in an ideal order, a totality that is temporarily complete yet continually altered as new works are added to it (38). A text is intelligible through its relation to other texts: as one elegy in an elegiac tradition, or as an American lyric, or as a novel by Virginia Woolf, or as an example of women's writing, and so on. At imagined limit of this expansive view lies a glimpse of all literature conceived as one ongoing discourse--a grand intertextual poem, myth, or conversation forever in progress. Northrop Frye provides one of most daring modern attempts to see literature steadily and to see it whole by fitting every work into a vast network of modes, myths, and genres, (2) all combining in a sublime vision of cultural totality corresponding to what Eliot calls the mind of Europe (39). A poem is like a single thought within that mind. As critic's field of vision expands, however, individual works become more and more significant, yet less and less discernible as they are engulfed by whole. Ideal readers catch every allusion and influence, but at cost of losing shock of first discovery. As a countermeasure, they try to savor a literary work not in relation to other writing but in and for itself. It may be another eighteenth-century, middle-class novel written by a Protestant man for women readers, but it is this particular text and not another one, read here and now, not elsewhere. How are we to account for its specificity? Even an ardent advocate of intertextuality like Harold Bloom admits, There can be no poem in itself, and yet something irreducible does abide in aesthetic (Western 23). …