Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic Mode

Chapter 2: An Ever-Enlarging Inchoherence

Stevens’s responses to the war in his poetry, essays, and letters bear witness to a remarkable complex of anxieties: anxieties about the near-apocalyptic scale of physical destruction; anxieties about the concomitant emergence of a new cultural and imaginative dispensation , one that threatened Stevens’s strongest beliefs about the imagination and its works; and, finally, anxieties about the possibility of constructing or reconstructing a masculine subject-position that would facilitate a certain poetic resistance to both of these disruptions . The need for such resistance is made clear in the following three samples from Stevens’s letters; they give a sense of just how the war sometimes impinged upon the inner space the poet attempted to reserve for his creative activity. I make no reference in this letter to the war. It goes without saying that our minds are full of it. (LWS , May , ) I am afraid that what is going on now may be nothing to what will be going on three or four months from now, and that the situation that will then exist may even involve us all, at least in the sense of occupying our thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of anything except the actual and the necessary. (LWS , August , ) At the moment, the war is shifting from Europe to Asia, and why one should be writing about poetry at all is hard to understand. (LWS , May , ) This configuration of creative and political anxieties appears with particular force and clarity in the  essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in which Stevens uses an apocalyptic rhetoric to describe not just the physical violence and sociopolitical disorder of the war years, but also the profound anomie and upheaval being chapter two An Ever-Enlarging Incoherence War, Modernisms, and Masculinities experienced in the imaginative and cultural realms. More particularly , the essay’s apocalyptic rhetoric—and especially the way Stevens applies it to the cultural realm—often sounds like a ghostly pre-echo of the language of postmodernism that was to emerge after the war in the writings of practitioners of this discourse and of more “detached” observers. As I indicated in my introduction, my purpose here is not to claim that Stevens’s writing is in any sense postmodern or even that it offers premonitions of the postmodern that render it unique among the aesthetic products of that time. I hope to demonstrate instead that Stevens’s simultaneous use of and resistance to an apocalyptic rhetoric functions, at the same time, as a resistance to this emergent cultural dispensation, a dispensation which Stevens can register only as a threat to his most cherished poetic values. Stevens’s resistance to apocalypse, in other words, also figures a profound discomfort with the disintegration and delegitimation of modernism and modernist aesthetics. Stevens’s response to this situation is irreducibly gendered: his twofold resistance to the “more or less universal disaster” (LWS ) involves a search for a masculine subject-position that might offer a locus of stability in the midst of such political and cultural upheaval. This search provides Stevens with the starting point for his essay: a historical survey of different equestrian heroes as figures of “nobility .” I will defer a discussion of Stevens’s survey to the end of this chapter, since its status as a strategy of resistance demands a prior articulation of the object or force that it resists. Here I wish only to note the specific complications I will introduce in relation to previous work on gender and masculinity in Stevens, most particularly that of James Longenbach and, more recently, Lee M. Jenkins. Two chapters (“It Must Be Masculine,” –, and “The Heart of the Debacle,” –) of Longenbach’s excellent study focus on this issue, and investigate both Stevens’s development of a “masculine” aesthetic during the war years, and his fascination with the figure of the hero as a poetic subject. Longenbach’s account, for all its historical particularity in detailing the construction of military heroism as the hegemonic form of wartime masculinity, nevertheless places Stevens’s concerns about gender within a polar opposition between a monolithic masculinity and monolithic femininity, so that, for example , when “Stevens’s idea of masculinity tends to unravel,” it does so by “reincorporating the idea of femininity he has rejected” (). An Ever-Enlarging Incoherence  Rather than following Longenbach’s suggestion that for Stevens “the hero must be masculine” (), I will suggest that Stevens explores and questions...