Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure by Ronald Sukenick; Wallace Stevens; The Dome and theRock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens by James Baird; Wallace StevensReview by: Hyatt H. WaggonerModern Philology, Vol. 67, No. 4 (May, 1970), pp. 392-396Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/436441 .

Accessed: 17/12/2014 02:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toModern Philology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 02:53:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

392 BOOK REVIEWS

protagonist, runs from one room to another attempting to escape the stifling atmosphere, only to find an almost identical environment -indeed, one suspects that he traverses the same room more than once. By using the dream to reiterate the window imagery, the ventilator, and the monotonous repetition of strangely similar rooms, Gide effectively sup- ports the imagery, themes, and structure of Paludes. One might also wish that Holdheim had carried some of his arguments farther. In mentioning the appropriateness of the name Venitequa for a prostitute (p. 225), it seems equally important that the etymon of Carola means "man," thus giving "man come here." Equally pertinent is the multilingual pun on aqua be'nite, since the baptism of the knight, Fleurissoire, occurred thanks to the ministry of Baptistin and Carola Venitequa. Still, as I hope the relative unimportance of these ob- jections indicates, Holdheim's insights into the four works are provocative and helpful.

One can only regret that this fine study did not receive careful proofreading and thus avoid typographical errors. Although the book includes a bibliography, it lacks some of the works cited in the text-all those by Gide, Dostoevsky, and Holdheim. Finally, because of an overdependence on the third person singular present tense of the passive voice, the style lacks the vivacity one might expect.

Nonetheless, this book firmly establishes Holdheim's eminence not only as a Gide scholar but as a specialist in the novel genre. He has opened Gide's fiction to a much richer reading, and as he hopes in the last paragraph of his book, his analyses may well serve as prolegomena for a future theory of the novel.

A. H. PASCO University of Chicago

Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure. By RONALD SUKENICK. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Pp. xvii+ 234.

The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. By JAMES BAIRD. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968. Pp. xxxi + 334.

The two books on the poetry of Wallace Stevens before me differ greatly in aim, am- bition, scope, and, I believe, ultimate value, but they also have much in common. One can imagine their being published together as a two-part study under some such title as "Saving Stevens for Young Secularist, Anti- metaphysical Readers."

The traits they share seem to me more interesting, at least, and perhaps also more important, than their many differences. I say this as one who recently produced a rather forbiddingly large tome on the devel- opment of American poetry "from the Puritans to the present" which has been both praised and blamed for the way it seems to accept as its own standard Emerson's idea of the poet as the ideal responsive and articulate man, the friend and aider of those less responsive or less articulate, the poet as "Namer" and "Sayer" who, in his "artful thunder," speaks to us of transcendent meanings we need to know if we are to live our secular lives meaningfully, the poet as "Prophet" and "Visionary," in short.

Having, as I say, recently written a book of this sort, I am naturally interested in the larger questions of meaning in poetry, in what the poets have to say to us that is still relevant to our condition. The "thunder," of course, must be "artful," but to call a poet "artful" without finding in his work any "thunder" seems to me perhaps almost as much as it did to Emerson (in "The Poet") to categorize as a skillful artisan rather than a great-or, as Emerson put it, a "true"-poet.

This is the "bias" with which I start as I undertake to review these two books. Let the reader beware-and may those reviewed try to be tolerant toward my limitations, if such they are. I shall refrain from restating my own views of Stevens and his relation to the poets who preceded him, whose legatee he in some sense was. Rather, I shall treat what interests me most about these books first, the denial they share that Stevens should be treated as I-and others-have treated him, as a man saying something to us about the largest questions we are capable of formu- lating, as a "philosophic poet," in short.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 02:53:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS 393

Having discussed this matter I shall turn more briefly-not to be thought entirely derelict in my duties as a reviewer for a scholarly journal-to a more factual and objective description of what each book is like and what it seems to me to have to offer us.

So then, first the qualities they share. The two books are alike, first of all, in what appear to be the philosophic presuppositions of their authors, in those unexamined assump- tions about life and what may be called wisdom that precede and underlie, and so in some degree shape, the critical enterprise itself. Needless to say, neither critic thinks it his business to discuss Life or take a stand on what he considers wise, so I am only inferring that both writers would be willing to grant that the phrase "secularist humanism" would fairly describe his own position. This of course is only another way of saying that as far as I can see, while neither writer shares the early naturalist view of reality as wholly devoid of meaning and order, the view from which Stevens started his thinking about the relations of reality and imagination, both find themselves in sympathy with what they take to be Stevens's "solution," his world view, his "vision." (There is a difficulty here which I shall delay facing until later.)

If my inferences in this matter of the ulti- mate stance of each writer are correct, then we as readers, not of Stevens but of Stevens- as-here-presented and thus as critics of the critics, have at least a partial answer to one of the most important questions one asks oneself about any book of criticism he reads: what angle of vision must I adopt to see things this way, or, from what unmentioned convictions would these value judgments seem to me to be required? To those who might reply at this point that literary criti- cism is not philosophy nor was meant to be, I would say, true, but it is also true that there is a sense in which, if it dares to move beyond the merely informational to the largest ques- tions criticism asks and attempts to answer, including judgments of the ultimate meaning and value of a poet's whole body of work, it cannot avoid being to some extent philoso- phic. To say that a critic may avoid this em-

barrassing entanglement with metaphysics by working within a purely aesthetic set of conventions and convictions will not do, as I see it. For aestheticism itself is a "philosophy," implying the falsity or inadequacy of other philosophies.

What does all this matter? Well, for one thing the critic's examined or unexamined philosophic stance affects his relation to his subject. Criticism written from a point of view essentially the same as that of the sub- ject of the criticism is likely to excel in the critical virtues produced by sympathy- "feeling with"-but may lack the "perspec- tive" that only the ability to stand back from the subject can provide. For another thing, it affects his relation with his readers. Readers, for instance, who number Blake, Eliot, Roethke, and Robert Duncan among their favorite poets would be very likely to find themselves placing frequent question marks in the margins of both these books. This reader finds both books very impressive in just those critical virtues promoted by sym- pathetic identification but much less im- pressive when they attempt to relate Stevens to poetic tradition or to make sweeping normative judgments.

The second thing these two books have in common is even more important. In what at first may seem to be a paradoxical relation to what has just been said, both authors agree that Stevens should not be treated as a philo- sophic poet, despite the apparent evidence in the poems that they are intended to have philosophic meaning, despite too Stevens's own many prose statements of his philosophic intent. Sukenick puts it this way in the open- ing sentences of his book:

Excessive attention to Wallace Stevens' theory can obscure what his poetry is about. His subject might best be described at the outset, for the sake of simplicity, in terms of the question posed in the early poem, 'The American Sublime': 'How does one stand / To behold the sublime / ... how does one feel?' (CP, pp. 130-31). This is less an ideological question than it is one of stance or posture: with what tenable attitude may one con- front the difficult circumstances of contemporary American secular life and avail oneself of the good

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 02:53:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

394 BOOK REVIEWS

possible in it ? How, in short, does one get along ? ... These are discoveries not of the good but simply of good things.

Baird complicates the reviewer's job by nowhere stating his very similar assumption so baldly. (I ought to add: nor does he hold it so simplistically.) But he opens his intro- duction by setting his book in sharp contrast with what he describes as the present vogue of "philosophic" readings of Stevens, using recent studies by J. Hillis Miller and Joseph N. Riddel as examples of studies that take Stevens's philosophic claims, both in and out of his poetry, seriously, only to reach, at least in Miller's case, conclusions not wholly favorable to the common claim that Stevens is the great modern philosophic poet. (If my American Poets, from the Puritans to the Present had come out in time for Baird to read and react to, I can only suppose that he would have found my own approach and conclusions as unpalatable as he finds Miller's, and for many of the same reasons.)

The "philosophical approach" to Stevens, Baird believes, represents "more of an im- position of the critic's will than an exposition of the poet at hand." His own aim is to limit himself to "exposition and organization" (comparison). He states his modest ideal in a way hard to quarrel with:

Ideally, the critic of Stevens should seek to be- come a transparency. I so determine, knowing as I do that my ineptitudes will sometimes fail the design which I wish to study. I shall recognize Stevens' long association with formal philosophy as the progenitor of one theme-and only one- in his work. I wish to oppose a wide application of philosophy qua philosophy, however adroit and stimulating this has been, and to turn to the variety and the energy of the total poet.

Supplementing this statement of his intended method, he compares Stevens first with Wordsworth ("Wordsworth's energy flows toward a Kantian noumenon. That of Stevens remains within the sense of the physical world."), then with Frost (Frost's poems work toward "wisdom" [here a synonym for "philosophy"] while Stevens's start with philosophic ideas and play with them for strictly aesthetic or imaginative purposes.

For Stevens, poetry does not aspire to philo- sophic wisdom; rather, it is independent of philosophy, "a companion art."). Stevens, Baird insists, was an "aesthete." If he obsessively restated certain philosophic di- lemmas without seeming to make any pro- gress toward resolving them, that fact, if it is one, has nothing to do with an evaluation of his poetry, for "wisdom" is simply not his aim. "The trouble with your poetry, Frost," he is quoted by Baird as saying, "is that it has subjects." By contrast, the only "subject" of Stevens's poetry, Baird believes, is the activity of the mind of the poet himself.

The foregoing attempt at a summary of Baird's highly qualified and sophisticated rejection of the type of criticism that asks philosophic questions about Stevens's appar- ently philosophic poetry, though as fair and accurate as I can make it without quoting at far greater length than the scope of this re- view would permit, is still no doubt an over- simplification. Yet, though I seldom find a sentence or even a passage in the extended discussion that I feel inclined to quarrel with, I still believe that it boils down finally to what Sukenick stated so baldly: that despite the fact that Stevens typically treated philosophic problems, or their metaphoric analogues, in his poetry; despite the fact that he admired and was influenced by Santayana and that he continued to read philosophers throughout his life and to copy out quotations from them; and despite the fact that he often made statements of intention that claimed, or seemed to claim, philosophic significance for his work-still, we should ignore both "technical" philosophy as philosophers prac- tice it and general meanings ("wisdom") when we read his poetry. This is the gambit shared by the two books.

I do not mean "gambit" in a necessarily derogatory sense. A gambit is an opening move that makes a sacrifice for the sake of ultimate victory. What this particular gambit sacrifices is one strand-in my view a very important strand, if not indeed the central one--of Stevens's total achievement, along with the evidence, for whatever it may be

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 02:53:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS 395

worth, of a great many typical Stevens state- ments of general intention. One is left, as Baird says, "with an uncommitted Stevens" who, though "interested" in philosophy as an aesthete might be, was interested in it only as "method and metaphor." Though this des- cription seems to me to trivialize Stevens's mind and to impoverish his work-or at least it tends to make me think I ought to be less interested in some of the poems than I am- it does not of course strike Baird that way. Presumably both he and Sukenick would argue that exactly the opposite is, or should be, the case.

What is gained by the gambit-the "vic- tory" for which the sacrifice was judged expedient-is the possibility of reclaiming for Stevens the position of the modern poet, the only one, both books imply, that the modern wholly secularized reader can read without making allowances for, without a suspension of disbelief. Thus Stevens is saved both from the strictures of philosophic critics who find him "hung up" on elemental and by now largely "outdated" philosophic problems and from the putative indifference of a younger generation impatient with philosophy and left unmoved by the disappearance of reli- gious myth, the problem that preoccupied Stevens so often (see "Sunday Morning" and "Esthetique du Mal") and informed so much of his verse. Stevens's interest in "good things" and his lack of interest in the Good, to refer to Sukenick once more, is certainly a point in his favor for a wholly secularized reader who has come to feel perfectly at home in the void and for whom only "things" are real. (Though I wonder at this point whether both authors are not selling the contemporary student generations somewhat short.)

One final comment on the results of this shared approach to Stevens, this gambit as I have called it, that will appear clearly a gain to some and a loss to others. Both authors are forced either to ignore (Sukenick) or to minimize (Baird) that very late development in Stevens which, as I see it, accounts for the final organization he gave his book-so that it would end with "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself"-and is also

reflected in such poems as "Metaphor as Degeneration" and in numerous prose comments collected in Opus Posthumous.

Sukenick relegates the last-named poem to a glossary containing brief descriptive com- ments and does not treat the first-named at all. Baird treats it as having no philosophic implications that contrast with Stevens's earlier contentment with a merely "fictive" music. Does the presumed gain in Stevens's attractiveness to contemporary (and, by assumption, future) readers justify not allow- ing Stevens in his last years to change his mind somewhat about some things ?

I might as well let the implied answer to this rhetorical question become explicit: personally, I think it does not. Again, is the "presumed gain" a real gain for Stevens? Again I think not. I think the mood of the younger generation, however opposed to or indifferent toward organized religion they may mostly be, is not a mood that pushes them toward either hedonism or aestheticism. Rather, it is I should say apocalyptic. The young people I know best, though they seem every year to grow more indifferent toward or impatient with the received answers to the big questions of the meaning and value of human lives, yet are still "seekers," and seekers for precisely those answers and satisfactions that the hedonist and the aesthete turn away from and that cannot come to the isolated mind in the alienated person (Baird's description of Stevens) con- tent to contemplate and enjoy "things." What the young seem to me to be looking for is meaning, which is just what these two books warn us we must not look for in Stevens's poetry.

I conclude, therefore, that in the short run these two books may well "save" Stevens's reputation, just because college English departments contain so many youngish and middle-aged teachers who will welcome the gambit both critics propose. But I also am inclined to believe that in the long run this gambit will come to seem to have required too great a sacrifice.

Despite the fact that I promised at the

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 02:53:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

396 BOOK REVIEWS

beginning not to be derelict in my reviewer's duty to the point of merely riding my hobby- horse, but rather to describe and evaluate the books before me in their uniqueness, I find myself approaching the limit of prescribed length for this review and well beyond the peak of my energy and interest. What follows then will be a brief and, so far as possible, wholly objective description of the two books, mingled with some final, I hope nonidiosyn- cratic, attempts at evaluation.

The nature of Sukenick's book is adequately indicated in its second subtitle: "Readings, an Interpretation, and a Guide to the Col- lected Poetry." Paradoxically, in view of the author's opening sentences, already quoted, many of the best and most perceptive read- ings draw upon Stevens's letters for their cue and their point. Indeed, I should say the book would not have had anything like its very real value if the author had attempted it before Stevens's daughter published The Letters in 1966. Always intelligent, sometimes originally perceptive, invariably modish, this book may well become and remain the vade mecum of graduate students and earnest seniors for the next few years.

Baird's book is something else again. Far from aspiring to be a guide for the uninitiated, it assumes a reader who is already familiar with Stevens's poetry and will be appreciated most by those who are also familiar with the chief critical studies that have preceded it. Often indeed its most impressive points come as reactions to and criticisms of those pre- vious studies. As a final contrast with the Sukenick work, it is never simplistic but everywhere complex, qualified, and subtle.

I can always respect it even when I differ with it, even indeed when I differ very fun- damentally. My already sufficiently implied "quarrel" with Baird is almost never directly with what he says, only with what he has chosen not to say, or with the final implica- tions of what he says. The most grudging praise one could give it would be to say that it clearly surplants Kermode's little book of a few years ago as the best book of its kind on its subject. I mean by this not at all that it is just larger, more complete, and more am-

bitious in scope; and that it benefits by the criticism of Stevens that followed Kermode's book and preceded this one, and by the Letters. I mean all these things, but also this: that it is more balanced and distanced, that it is more responsible in its judgments, and that, finally and most importantly, it succeeds in illuminating a very large part and probably the most typical part of Stevens's work, particularly his early and middle work, to a degree no other book on Stevens so far has done.

Baird has succeeded, in short, in achieving his announced ideal-that the critic should be selfless, a "transparency"-far better than most of us do or can hope to do. If in order to do this he had first to decide--or to have it decided for him by temperament-what was the central, the "real" Stevens, and then leave out or play down those aspects of Stevens's work that seemed to him not cen- tral, perhaps even misleading, that is no more than any critic has to do. He declares the limits of his intentions in his subtitle even before he explains himself in what I have referred to as his exceptionally intelligent and complexly qualified introduction: "Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens."

Even if, as in my case, one likes to see the ultimate meanings of "structure" carried farther than Baird chooses to carry them, one would have a hard time trying to show that this is not the best book on Stevens so far.

HYATT H. WAGGONER Brown University

Die Kindheitsproblematik bei Hermann Broch. By PETER BRUCE WALDECK. Munich: Wil- helm Fink Verlag, 1968. Pp. 150.

Peter Bruce Waldeck glaubt, mit seinem Buch eine ,,Liicke" in der Broch-Forschung geschlossen zu haben. Nach seiner Ansicht haben die bisherigen Arbeiten tiber Broch durchweg iObersehen, daB neben den disthe- tischen und philosophischen Fragen eine zweite ebenso wichtige Schicht steht: die

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 02:53:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions