The Maker's Rage: Narrative in Stevens' Poetry

Commonly considered among the most abstract of twentieth-century American poets, Wallace Stevens has rarely been read for his narrative qualities. After an early attempt at conventional narrative with the mock epic "The Comedian as the Letter C," Stevens largely abandoned sustained plotting in favor of a renewed commitment to the lyric and contemplative modes that would dominate his career. The few critics who have considered the narrative features of Stevens' works—Daniel R. Schwarz in Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and, more recently, Milton J. Bates in "Stevens and Modernist Narrative"—have emphasized his revisions of conventional narrative structures. The storytelling impulse, they argue, far from being absent from Stevens' poetry, is rather redirected into an overarching intellectual quest narrative that informs both individual poems and the Stevens canon as a whole: if there are few traditional plots in Stevens, there is nonetheless an ongoing investment in an extended Künstlerroman that rivals the journey of the novelistic hero. Citing Roman Jakobson's distinction between the metaphoric and metonymic poles, Bates adds that Stevens' long poems establish covert narrative sequences by replacing the metonymic figuration normally associated with realist prose with an equivalent metaphoric order, a gesture he identifies with prevailing trends in modernist narrative.¹ Yet, from the rewriting of the biblical story of Susanna in "Peter Quince at the Clavier" to the tropical voyage of canto XXIX of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," Stevens also constructs a number of narratives that follow more traditional patterns of plotting and characterization. In this article, I will discuss several such narrative poems, considering the reasons behind Stevens' decision periodically to utilize conventional plots and how that choice informs our understanding of his larger aesthetic journey.

The Case for Narrative

"Metaphors of a Magnifico" is not a narrative poem, but it does, perhaps better than any other in Stevens' corpus, encapsulate the poet's negotiation between competing literary modes. Its opening images are metaphors only in the most technical sense:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,Into a village,Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,Into twenty villages,Or one manCrossing a single bridge into a village.

(CPP 15)

Since one bridge is not twenty, and twenty men are not a single man, the statements satisfy—barely—the plain meaning of metaphor, equating two (or, in this case, three) different scenarios. But these are hardly the imaginative transformations of the poet; indeed, were it not for the title, we would not read them as metaphors at all, but as a philosophical formula about the nature of perception. Each of the twenty men has a distinct subjective experience of the crossing of the bridge: twenty men crossing en masse are twenty men having parallel but entirely separate experiences. The men, however, are not the only ones whose perceptions must be considered. The Magnifico, one of Stevens' many creator figures, presides over the poem, the maker of metaphors and manipulator of men. But if his metaphors are not the images of imaginative poetry, then what are they? Belonging entirely neither to lyric nor to philosophy, these opening statements suggest the varied possibilities of narrative, the way the mythmaker can inflate one village into twenty or the novelist can shrink epic experience into the drama of the individual consciousness. The unit of marching men becomes twenty potential stories to be told, which becomes the single story selected, by authorial fiat, out of all the others that might have been.

The Magnifico manipulates reality, taking an image and turning it into a more satisfying story. Stevens, however, seems frustrated by the result: "This is old song / That will not declare itself . . ." (CPP 15). The reference to "old song," rather than an old song, detaches his objection from the specific and moves it instead into the realm of genre: that which "will not declare itself" is the old song of the epic tradition of narrative poetry. Stevens' use of the verb "declare" suggests the disparity between the inherent reality of the scene and the Magnifico's magisterial impositions; he declares a fictive reality that does not otherwise "declare...