Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic Mode

Introduction

Why has it been possible to read Stevens as both an apocalyptic and an antiapocalyptic poet? Why has it been possible to read Stevens as both a (belated) romantic/modernist and as a poststructuralist/ postmodernist? These two questions, I hope to show, are intimately related. To take a stance toward apocalyptic discourse is to take a stance toward the ends and beginnings of historical eras and, by implication, toward the ends and beginnings of cultural and aesthetic eras. For Stevens, confronting the immense sociopolitical upheaval and human suffering of the late s and early s also meant confronting the possible dissolution of the aesthetic principles that guided his creative projects. Stevens’s attitude toward the former offers a glimpse of his attitude toward the latter, toward the possibility that the dominant aesthetic modes of the first part of the twentieth century had been shaken to their foundations, were on the verge of collapse or invalidation, and were likely to be replaced by something that as yet had no name or discernible form. To make such claims is not to suggest that the “dividing line” (if there is such a thing) between modernism and postmodernism should be shifted back twenty or so years from its usual position in the mid to late s; it is, however, to suggest that the practitioners and proponents of an already changing and varied modernist aesthetic —born to a large extent out of a sense of cultural crisis and exhaustion in the early part of the century—were now facing a second crisis that seemed to threaten that same aesthetic. It is to suggest , furthermore, that in most cases these artists were developing strategies of resistance against that threat and were struggling to maintain the aesthetic values in which they had so heavily invested. Stevens’s engagement with apocalypse can be understood in relation to this cultural/historical context. His oeuvre, in other words, is in many ways characteristic of late modernism. Tyrus Miller’s description of the tensions that mark the cultural artifacts of that period provides some clarification of how my reading of Stevens will proceed : “At first glance, late modernist writing appears a distinctly selfconscious manifestation of the aging and decline of modernism, in Introduction both its institutional and ideological dimensions. More surprising, however, such writing also strongly anticipates future developments, so that without forcing, it might easily fit into a narrative of emergent postmodernism” (). My only disagreement with Miller is over the verb “anticipates,” which does not do justice to the subtlety of his study and, in fact, offers a historically displaced version of that early modernist privileging of the “new” that his work seems intended to question. (See, for example, his discussion of the modernist rhetoric of beginnings, on p.  of his introduction.) If, as Linda Hutcheon insists (Poetics , , ), postmodernism is both continuous and discontinuous with modernism, it would make more sense to say that postmodernism echoes certain aspects of late modernism, and that writers who appear to “anticipate” postmodernism are the bene- ficiaries of that discourse’s paradoxically retrospective tendency. In placing Stevens within this context, then, I do not wish to grant him any special anticipatory insight; from my point of view, it would be far more surprising to discover that a much-read, late modernist writer did not appear to anticipate some aspects of an emergent postmodernism. This is not the first critical work to consider the place of apocalypse in Stevens’s poetry. A brief summary of the major critics who have dealt with the issue should suffice to reveal the basic positions already taken and the nature of the particular contradiction I wish to explore—the contradiction, that is, between readings that locate an apocalyptic strain in Stevens’s poetry and those that find an antiapocalyptic one. Harold Bloom makes occasional comments on apocalypse throughout Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (), the most intriguing, perhaps, being the observation, in relation to “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” that “St. John is . . . the apocalyptic impulse that [Stevens] has dismissed for so long but that will begin to break in upon his reveries in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven and The Rock and then will dominate the poems composed from  through ” (). In contrast, Eleanor Cook, in Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens (), gives a very detailed reading of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” as “a purgatorial poem in the antiapocalyptic mode” (). And Charles Berger’s Forms of...