Xs and Os: Chiasmus, Apostrophe, and the Lyric Subject in Stevens

Abstract

Xs and Os: Chiasmus, Apostrophe, and the Lyric Subject in Stevens David Ben-Merre X1 THE FLOWERY BEGINNING of “Anecdote of Canna” pits “thought” against and alongside “sleep” until it (thought), fighting the dots of its own ellipsis, wanders back into the reality of daybreak. The canna, coming alive not with the light of dawn but earlier in “the dreams of / X,” colors the white of the neoclassical columns and dome of the capital’s Capitol, where Wallace Stevens (waking) had been walking (CPP 44).1 A little wind, and the canes of the columnar canna bend, creating their own visual crossings, as does that mighty figure X whose mental architecture dominates the opening. The middle stanza of the poem—with its own crossings and repetitions—makes a quincunx of “thought . . . sleep . . . thought . . . sleep . . . thought.” But by the final stanza, the senatorial (or is it stentorian?) figure X has been moved outside, where he is left to cross the wet, settled stones and observe the canna: Now day-break comes. . . . X promenades the dewy stones,Observes the canna with a clinging eye,Observes and then continues to observe. (CPP 44) A walking daydream of sorts, the poem presumably turns from thought to reality, even if the final line, turned toward itself in obverse fashion, seems more invested in the act of observing than in what is ultimately observed. Reduced to the variable X, the figure of Stevens’s imagination seems caught between the materiality of the letter and the world’s unreality. If X is the detached lyric speaker, he is reflectively disembodied. If X is an object of observation, then the unnamed, unnoticed lyric speaker has been spending his time thinking about X’s thinking. Either way, the alphabetic X remains the scaffolding of thought, legislating how the mind, from without, turns in on itself, thereby constituting the self. [End Page 199] Hidden behind the unfurling leaves of the canna lies the grammatical ambiguity of the final lines. One typically reads the subject-object relationship as: X promenades the dewy stones. [X] observes the canna with a clinging eye. [X] observes and then continues to observe. But we might just as well understand the lines as: the canna [deferred subject] observes with a clinging eye [that] X promenades the dewy stones. [The canna] observes and then continues to observe. X is here because it is observing. X is here because it may be observed. Subjectivity—that other clinging I—is found in this crossing. But enough of that for now, before we get too lost in the dream. It is not the “I” so much that concerns me as yet in this poem but the alphabetic movements at the beginnings of the lines: O r thing . . .X promenades . . .O bserves . . .O bserves . . . (see CPP 44) Here, in the openings of these final lines, Stevens has us almost playing noughts and crosses, as if the movement between the mind and reality were calculated placings on a giant gameboard, one always blocking the possibilities of the other’s movement. I have been wandering around a bit lately in parts of what Philip Furia and Martin Roth years ago marvelously called Stevens’s “fusky alphabet.”2 I have been curious about his peculiar Xs and Os or, as we might begin to see them, his figures of chiasmus and apostrophe—two ways of returning home, yet by vastly different paths. I am interested in how these figures—the rhetorical figure of repetition and reversal and the turning away to address another, usually absent, person, inanimate object, or abstraction—intersect, and in doing so, show us how we, as subjects, are constituted from without. In Stevens, we often see this complexity in variable subject-predicate relationships. As in many of his poems, the titular “of” of “Anecdote of Canna” (the title already its own phonetic chiasmus of sorts: an-ec . . . ca-na) obscures the subject-predicate relationship between “anecdote” and “canna.” Is this the canna’s anecdote or is this an anecdote about the canna? Both apostrophe (as it is usually understood in a vocative way) and chiasmus (as it is usually understood in a spatialized way) provide the conceptual space...