Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode (review)

In Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, Malcolm Woodland puts forward a reading of Stevens's later poetry which resists what he sees as the overly schematic tendency among Stevens's critics to identify his work as either modernist or (proto-) postmodernist. To do this, Woodland focuses primarily on the role of and perspectives on apocalypse and eschatology in Stevens's wartime and immediately postwar poetry and secondarily on the place of the apocalyptic mode within the work of three contemporary poets who themselves engage more or less overtly with Stevens's work. In addition, Woodland seeks to complicate the critical approach to gender in Stevens, placing the emphasis on contrary models of masculinity within Stevens's poetry and prose rather than on the alternation between masculine and feminine in his figurations of poetry itself.

Woodland's critical stance depends upon maintaining very carefully his own complex relation with postmodernism and in particular with poststructuralist criticism. On the one hand, he wants to distance himself from poststructuralist critics such as Angus Cleghorn and David R. Jarraway who, he suggests, co-opt Stevens too readily into their own camp and identify him too closely with the postmodern thinking of Derrida and Lyotard. On the other hand, he cannot accept what he sees as the naïve emphasis on romantic modernism in Stevens on the part of Harold Bloom, Joseph Carroll, and others. Woodland resolves this conflict by assuming a critical position that is effectively postmoderner than thou. Like a Pyrrhonian rather than a mere academic skeptic, he turns the unflinching gaze of a poststructuralist critic on the postmodern interpretation of Stevens itself and finds it unduly resolved. At the same time, his tone is one of modesty and caution, as he has to be careful not to overreach himself and leave his own arguments vulnerable to the same forensic scrutiny.

Woodland's overall argument is that both romantic and postmodern readings gloss over tensions within Stevens's work that are especially acute in his use of the apocalyptic mode to reflect upon the collapse of both the modernist aesthetic paradigm and the relative stability of pre-war politics. Stevens, Woodland argues, both registers the collapse of modernism and seeks for spaces in which to preserve it, or to preserve himself from it. These contrary impulses are registered in a skepticism toward teleology which in turn re-inscribes teleology and returns to the idea of an end which cannot help but ask what comes next. For Woodland, the tension between these positions is always unresolved. Stevens's use of the apocalyptic mode, as he argues at the outset and persuasively demonstrates through meticulous and scrupulous close readings, is neither wholly apocalyptic nor wholly anti-apocalyptic, nor each in turn, but both at the same time and throughout.

Woodland's book is structured in three parts. The first part, “Stevens and the End of War,” is systematically argued and consistently convincing. In the opening chapter, Woodland sets out his critical stall, adopting and refining Alastair Fowler's definition of a literary mode, recording briefly the uses of that mode in scripture, and—drawing on Derrida and Frank Kermode—suggesting that the postmodern assertion of the end of apocalypse is itself structurally apocalyptic. In Chapters two and three, Woodland explores these ideas in the essays “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” and the poems “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” “Girl in a Nightgown,” “Martial Cadenza,” and “Dutch Graves in Bucks County.” Between them, these texts cover the years from 1938 to 1944, from the onset to the depths of the war in Europe and the Pacific. In reading these texts, Woodland links Stevens's use of the apocalyptic mode to a sense of the failure of modernism's investment in the past. He also links it, crucially, to Stevens's reflections on different models of masculinity, in particular to his turn toward a homosocial heroic model of masculinity in place of the...