Self-reference, Self-revision, and Self-containment in Stevens' "Domination of Black"

MEREDITH L. McGILL Self-reference, Self-revision, and Self-containment in Stevens' "Domination of Black" Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.1 In the selection from the Adagia I have used as my epigraph, Stevens identifies the poem as a structure of containment, specifically , the enclosure of a comprehensible mental construct within a framework of language which exists in a problematic relation to the concept it encloses. The difficulty of specifying this relation is itself both conceptual and linguistic. Intuitively, it is hard to construe two things as mutually constitutive as words and ideas in a relation of subordination and containment. Grammatically, while the use of the subordinating colon and the hierarchizing "within" would seem to enforce a strict division between inside and out (granting the "poem of the idea" a privileged interiority), the use of the word "poem" to describe the logical interior of the structure, the non-semantic exterior, and the overall structure, unseats the stable relation of frame to content and of part to whole. Where telling differences should be marked and boundaries defined, we are offered an undifferentiated sameness. Despite the statement's strong assertion ofhierarchy, this repetition enables reversal and transposition, so that the "poem of the word," the "poem of the idea," and "every poem" become interchangeable and inextricable. While presumably a definition and circumscription of the contents of Arizona Quarterly Volume 46 Number 4, Winter 1990 Copyright © 1990 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1610 ii8Meredith L. McGiIl poetry, this statement works to collapse the controlling opposition of container and contained, associating the poem with the condition of an uncertain doubleness—the unstable division of a structure against itself. In this adage, then, Stevens both sanctions and undoes the notion that his poems are containers and that ideas are what they hold. Yet the complex and self-cancelling nature of this statement notwithstanding, it seems to have served as a fairly straightforward directive for an influential tradition of Stevens criticism. Briefly, much formalist criticism of Stevens' poetry seems underwritten by a twofold assumption which can be traced back to the pressure such a statement exerts to regard the "poem of the idea" as both superior to and extricable from the "poem of the word." Not only do many Stevens critics seek to liberate the ideas of self, reality, and imagination which they see as trapped within an obfuscating poetic exterior, many also assume that these ideas can "stand in" for Stevens' poems in an adequate relation of parr to whole (implicitly reversing the status of container and contained).2 This excessive attention to the conceptual and confidence in its adequacy—the conviction that privileging the "poem of the idea" will stabilize and contain the repetitive, recessive action of the "poem within a poem"—is hardly accidental. Throughout his work, Stevens invites the simplifications that his poetry and prose ultimately resist. Through a tendency towards epigrammatic statement in the prose, through the short stanzas and the high propositional content of much of the poetry, and through the incessant self-framing gestures which pervade both the poetry and the prose, Stevens' work parcels itself out for selective representation. Self-framing gestures such as the reformulation of a proposition, the revisionary return of a refrain, or, most prominently , a retrospective, summarizing final stanza, sentence, or line, generate misreadings by asking the critic to take them for the whole, by teasing him or her with the promise ofthe poem's self-adequacy. Stevens' work is often flagrantly self-divisive—not ineffectually, but powerfully so. As such it is acutely susceptible to synecdochic misrepresentation. Deconstructive critics such as Joseph Riddel and J. Hillis Miller have provided a strong counterweight to this privileging of "the poem of the idea" in part by demonstrating how an abyssal structure such as the "poem within a poem" can undermine the relations between part and whole, inside and outside, and container and contained on which such "Domination of Black"1 19 criticism rests.5 Miller in particular has analyzed the displacements and deferrals of meaning produced by the infinitely receding series of the mise-en-abyme. In his analysis...