Abstract
The supreme fiction is the one that cannot be said or represented at all. Like a negative theologian; Stevens starts from a position of critical reflection that can no longer naively believe in the myths of the gods. They have become fiction rather than revelation. And yet this supreme fiction; now become nameless; nevertheless animates all his desire: “For what; except for you; do I feel love?” These myths or fictions bring him peace of mind in vivid transparence; even though he can assign them no definite reference in reality. What becomes transparent in this late age of critical reflection is that the world we see and talk about is an “invented world,” the product of our own imagination and language. This destroys our naive belief in the myths projected by our language. Our gods die. Yet precisely this realization can open us to that “heaven/That has expelled us and our images,” the heaven that we do not perceive and cannot conceive—since it is beyond the reach of language.
Highlights
The supreme fiction is the one that cannot be said or represented at all
Stevens starts from a position of critical reflection that can no longer naively believe in the myths of the gods
What becomes transparent in this late age of critical reflection is that the world we see and talk about is an “invented world,” the product of our own imagination and language
Summary
A voluminous master folded in his fire. How clean the sun when seen in its idea, Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven. All gods are dead, and supposed substances are exposed as merely constructions, but the very inventedness of all that is thereby exposed evokes what is not invented, what is not just form or idea This other with respect to all the forms and identities of the world, its source, which is unidentifiable and inconceivable, is figured as the sun, this is in effect to think in mythical terms equivalent to using names of the gods: “But Phoebus was/A name for something that never could be named.”. Perceiving form as form without attributing a grounding in being to it, perceiving it as pure invention (by no one) leaves being without any determinate form It is, what Stevens elsewhere calls “mere being,” and as such it is “inconceivable.” The inconceivable source of being, can be metaphorically represented, as we have seen, following Plato, for example, as the sun. Stevens’s way of evoking this otherness is to say that “The first idea was not our own.”
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