Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic Mode

Chapter 1: Past Apocalypse

It seems reasonable enough, given my subject, to begin with the End, or at least with Wallace Stevens’s attitudes toward the End. Quoted below are three passages that provide some sense of the specific lexical meanings Stevens attached to the words “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic.” In each instance, these meanings are anything but fixed and final; Stevens seems to rethink the term and its implications each time he comes to it. The passages quoted below thus register a complex stance or a shifting succession of stances toward these words and their meanings. These stances will be the subject of most of this study. Each of the passages deals in a different way with the immensely troubled political and economic scene of the late s and early s—the depression, the spread of fascism and of communism , World War II; the passages come, respectively, from canto iii of “A Duck for Dinner” (the fourth poem in Owl’s Clover, ), canto vii of “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” (), and canto iv of “Description without Place” (): “Is each man thinking his separate thoughts or, for once, Are all men thinking together as one, thinking Each other’s thoughts, thinking a single thought, Disclosed in everything, transcended, poised For the syllable, poised for the touch? But that Apocalypse was not contrived for parks, Geranium budgets, pay-roll water-falls, The clank of the carrousel and, under the trees, The sheep-like falling-in of distances, Converging on the statue, white and high.” (OP ) To have satisfied the mind and turn to see, (That being as much belief as we may have,) And turn to look and say there is no more chapter one Past Apocalypse Stevens, History, Theory Than this, in this alone I may believe, Whatever it may be; then one’s belief Resists each past apocalypse, rejects Ceylon, wants nothing from the sea, la belle Aux crinolines, smears out mad mountains. (CP ) The eye of Lenin kept the far-off shapes. His mind raised up, down-drowned, the chariots. And reaches, beaches, tomorrow’s regions became One thinking of apocalyptic legions. (CP ) The third passage could initially be written off as an intellectual commonplace , since it recognizes a straightforward homology between the teleologisms of marxism and of Judaic and Christian apocalypse. Such a reading would be concordant with some of Stevens’s other comments on communism—for instance, the statement that communism promises “a practicable earthly paradise” (NA ), or the failed socialist apocalypse of the passage from “A Duck for Dinner,” both of which suggest that he understood communism to offer a secularized version of the millennium mentioned in Rev. :. More importantly , Stevens’s use of “apocalyptic” in “Description without Place” attests in several different ways to the power of apocalypse. There is, no doubt, a certain irony in the suggestion that Lenin, in contemplating the planned communist state that would also supplant the Christian faith in Russia, is nevertheless engaging in the “apocalyptic ” thinking so central to that faith; here, apocalypse gets the last word. But Stevens’s purpose may involve more than an ironic critique of Lenin’s failings: the passage also underscores the sheer longevity and inescapability of apocalypse as a way of thinking about history. The form and force of the apocalyptic narrative is capable of surviving its specific theological contents; those who have most rigorously dismissed such contents may already be burdened with the most intense apocalyptic desires. Above all, Stevens points to a relationship between apocalypse and power: apocalyptic discourse facilitates the creation of powerful narratives of history, and offers a certain discursive mastery over history’s complexities. In “Description,” it is a discourse mastered by one who desires the highest degree of political power, and it thus has a role in the actualization of that desire. Stevens and the End of War  This combination of apocalyptic motifs in “Description” is entirely consonant with a thematics central to Stevens criticism, one identified by Joseph Riddel when, in The Clairvoyant Eye, he finds Stevens “rejecting the illusion of a fixed and final order, either Christ’s or Marx’s” () in canto ii of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.” Stevens, writes Riddel, “embraces change and thus chaos, and hesitates to prophesy” (). Some more recent readings of Stevens, such as Robert Emmett Monroe’s “Figuration and Society in ‘Owl’s Clover,’” Harvey Teres’s “Notes toward the Supreme Soviet: Stevens and Doctrinaire Marxism...