Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens: A Quotidian Ecstasy

Michael Snediker began the first installment of this survey review by observing that “This past year’s articles on Wallace Stevens complicate what sometimes seems an agon in earlier Stevens criticism between abstraction and materiality” (291). A related agon emerged in 2012 between what can be styled variously as extraordinary and ordinary, singular and everyday, or ecstatic and quotidian readings of Stevens. The set of latter terms (ordinary, everyday, quotidian) describes a surging curiosity about “Stevens and the Everyday,” which was chosen as the title for a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal in Spring 2012. The former terms (extraordinary, singular, ecstatic) label a substantial body of criticism from the past year that evaluates Stevens for what is seemingly not everyday in his poems: metaphysical forces, spiritual inspirations, theological encounters.

The least obvious of these pairings, ecstatic and quotidian, is also the one on which I would like to focus here, because it brings out with greatest subtlety and complexity both the expected and the unexpected aspects of the past year’s work on Stevens. Though “ecstatic” evokes Helen Vendler’s timeless identification of an “ecstatic idiom” as one of three “large manners” in Stevens’ poetry (13), I use the word here in the sense that Johanna Skibsrud does in her essay “An ‘Impossible Science’: Wallace Stevens and the Ecstatic Mind.” She, in turn, borrows it from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Skibsrud reads the wartime Stevens (think Parts of a World) as navigating “a space of representation where the signified remains purposefully in excess of the signifier” (72). To theorize what occurs in this space, Skibsrud imports the concept of “a Barthesian ‘ecstasy’” (79), which is a word Barthes used originally to describe the mind’s reaction to the gap between a “present” photographic signifier and the “absent” object of its signification. Skibsrud’s primary examples of this gap concern how Stevens handles the immoderate violence of wartime signifieds using “merely” poetic signifiers. Her reading of “Landscape with Boat” is her most compelling engagement in this effort; in that poem, she claims Stevens introduces a “split” between what Barthes might call “the abstract ‘this will be’ and the particular ‘this has been’” (77). It is this split that provides an absent-present home for “the ecstatic mind” of Skibsrud’s title. This mind rejoices in mastering its own faculties and, through its power over itself, derives a sense of independence from the world. Thus, in “Landscape with Boat,” the “anti-master-man” (CPP 220) “would not be master of any thing, but would become instead the un-masterable sense of sight itself” (76). The point would not be seeing something, but the faculty of seeing itself, emanating from the vantage point of a mind tucked ecstatically between “has been” and “will be,” which it paradoxically both knits together and keeps apart.

In Skibsrud’s reading, the “anti-master-man” typifies ecstasy, by making the “spaciousness” between signifier and signified his own (78), and by pursuing “ultimate, autonomous control over his vision,” channeled through “the desire to assume ultimate responsibility” (76). However, if we return to Barthes’s original definition of ecstasy, which Skibsrud quotes only partially, it becomes clear that the term was intended also to index a less “control”- centric account of ecstasy, premised on consciousness’ “return to the very letter of Time: a strictly revulsive movement which reverses the course of the thing” (Barthes 119). When we imagine consciousness engaged in this “revulsive” movement through time, control and responsibility are not necessarily the first or only descriptors to suggest themselves. Certainly we must bear in mind, as Skibsrud does, point “B” from “Connoisseur of Chaos,” which is that “A great disorder is an order” (CPP 194). However, Skibsrud’s essay leads us to question whether there might be a way of bearing that point in mind without committing ourselves to an image of Stevensian consciousness that, having achieved a kind of ascetic serenity (à la anti-master-man), assumes a static vantage point between past and present, from whence it can rejoice peacefully in its sheer mastery. Even as a...