Public Desires, Private Desires: The Satisfactions of Stevens and Stanley Cavell

We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form.

—Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" VIII

Wallace Stevens first read "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet" at Mount Holyoke College in 1943 as a participant in "Pontigny en Amérique," a series of seminars held under the auspices of the French philosopher Jean Wahl. Stanley Cavell's only sustained engagement with Stevens to date commemorates these colloquia, which housed Jewish intellectuals in flight from Nazi-occupied Europe seeking refuge in America. Motifs of desire and satisfaction echo through the text of Cavell's "Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke." Meditating on what philosophy and literature might want from one another, Cavell defines the condition of being human as that of inhabiting "the maze of infinite desires in finite circumstances" (78), a phrase that also identifies the play of contingency and necessity at work in writing. The American pragmatist Richard Rorty famously argued that literature takes the part of contingency, providing exemplary private perfections, whereas philosophy, in privileging necessity, strives to establish the grounds of community. Rorty considered the attempt to reconcile the private with the public erroneous. But an examination of the relationship between Stevens and Cavell, the most innovative American inheritor of ordinary language philosophy, allows for a more nuanced disciplinary comparison than Rorty's division of labor suggests. Cavell proposes a philosophy that incorporates desire, and finds in this possibility the basis of a non-instrumental vision of community. While Stevens, too, finds something common in contingency, their communities may not be entirely the same.

Critics of poetry have begun to notice affinities between Stevens and Cavell. In what follows, I hope to show the two authors have much in common: a remarkable convergence of intellectual and cultural influences, the sense of an epistemological crisis that involves, or equals, an aesthetic one, and powerful reverberations of the American liberal public discourse of Stevens' time. I will suggest, however, that their profound similarities are, in some ways, misleading. The differences between Cavell and Stevens may seem at first like mere differences of stress—the pressure each puts on two halves of the same equation. But these stresses might very well turn out to be definitive. They bear on the question of where poetry and philosophy stand in relation to desire and community.

The terminology of the ordinary and experiential plays an important role in contemporary critical discourse. In this discourse, an interest in the ordinary conditioned by an American rhetoric from the 1930s and 1940s and by liberal ideals, on the one hand, seems to meet with a resurgence of interest in the affective dimension of art and philosophy, on the other. I would suggest that this happens through an investment in a liberal ideal of community that sometimes converges, at other times conflicts with a vision of community derived from the aesthetic. Two questions I would like to raise here, though perhaps not fully answer, are how much of a resource for the idea of liberal community Stevens can be, and relatedly, whether what Cavell wants from the aesthetic is always compatible with the implicit political aims of his project.

In recent years, Stevens critics have begun to combine a philosophically oriented, phenomenological understanding of the ordinary with the historically inflected "democratic" uses to which it has been put, often routing their arguments through a discussion of American pragmatism. Thus, the emergent criticism seems to find common ground between phenomenological and American liberal indices of value. To this end, it mobilizes ideas of the diurnal or everyday, and an emphasis on experience, alongside a focus on the common, humble, and shared. While valuable, I believe that this approach sometimes entails an invisible investment, one that might extend to existing discussions of Stevens and Cavell. In general, Stevens has been viewed mostly either as an American poet of his time or as legitimately philosophical. Where recent commentators have addressed both, the two elements seem to be brought together unproblematically. But the phenomenological and American sides of Stevens might have a more convoluted relationship than this suggests.¹

American and...