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80 Thoughts on Wallace Stevens’s Contribution at Pontigny-en-Amérique Response to Cavell Jeffrey Mehlman “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” is a confusing text, but it does have a recognizable armature of sorts, pertaining to the three references to a muse said to be “a kind of sister of the Minotaur.” The mythographer immediately thinks of Ariadne and Phaedra, but because she first appears in relation to a “younger figure,” a “son still bearing the antique imagination of the father,” Phaedra-and-Hippolytus (rather than Ariadne-and-Theseus) seems the more apt allusion. This impression is reinforced by a number of additional elements . First, there is the somewhat jarring insistence on the “virility” of the poet-youth, for virility (which, in the Greek, went hand in hand with misogyny) was the signature hang-up of Hippolytus. Indeed, for anyone surprised by Stevens’s decision to come to the women’s college Mount Holyoke to announce (a bit offensively?) that “the centuries have a way of being male,” it is almost as though Stevens were entertaining an identification with the Euripidean hero. Pontigny, however, was a gala French occasion, and Stevens, as Christopher Benfey has noted, seems to have been particularly eager to lace his texts with French references (Bergson, Valéry, Mallarmé, Cézanne, etc.), so that there is a good chance that the subliminal reference was less to Euripides than to Racine. The suspicion is sustained by the fact that the initial reference to the sister of the Minotaur is directly preceded by two invocations of the seventeenth century (“When we think of the seventeenth century...,” “When we look back at the face of the seventeenth century...”). At this point it may be helpful to review the fundamental way in which Racine modified Euripides’ plot. In the Greek, the tragedy tells of the punishment of Hippolytus, devotee of the goddess of the hunt (and virility) Diana Artemis, for failing to make offering at the altar of Aphrodite. In contemporary parlance, Hippolytus doesn’t date: he has no interest in women, is proud of it, and is about to suffer for it. Racine, who may have suspected that a gay hero would have been laughed off the French stage, gives Hippolytus a girlfriend , Aricie, about whom he feels terribly conflicted, but to whom he declares his love (in a scene directly echoing Phèdre’s declaration of love to ThoughtsonWallaceStevens:ResponsetoCavell 81 Hippolyte). The subject of Racine’s play, in sum, is Hippolytus’ emergence from the closet as a straight male. Whereas Euripides posits a diametric opposition between Phaedra and Hippolytus (who are stand-ins for the warring goddesses Aphrodite and Diana Artemis), Racine serves up a Hippolytus who, in his guilty love for Aricie, is a pale reflection of Phaedra and whose struggle, ultimately unsuccessful , is to work his way free of her clutches. This is a quintessentially Racinian posture: Néron, in Racine’s Britannicus, spends a good part of the play fending off his incestuous mother, Agrippine. But this brings us back to the Stevens essay, for it recounts the unsuccessful struggle of the“virile”poet-youth to free himself from his muse, the sister-ofthe -Minotaur. At a key juncture he announces: “No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur. This is another of the monsters I had for nurse, whom I have wasted. I am myself a part of what is real, and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall.” May we say that poetry here is imagined as an exercise in de-mythologization, the “incandescence” of its “intelligence” marking a “triumph over the incredible ”? If so, it would be part and parcel of the Enlightenment project:“washing the imagination clean,”Hippolytus will have laid waste“monstrous”Phaedra. Yet whatever the validity of that project, it would appear that for Stevens, it is destined to fail, and that the success of poetry may lie in its failure. Whence the last lines of the essay, attributed to the virile poet-youth:“Inexplicable sister of the Minotaur, enigma and mask, although I am part of what is real, hear me and recognize me as part of the unreal. I am the truth but the truth of that imagination of life in which with unfamiliar motion and manner you guide me in those exchanges of speech in which your words are mine, mine yours.” In...

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