[발췌] about Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order, ...

※ 발췌 (excerpts):

출처 1: Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (Bart Eeckhout. University of Missouri Press, 2002). 구글도서


One of Stevens's most classic meditations on the delimiting quality of representation, specifically as it affects the production of art, is "The Idea of Order at Key West" (CP 128-30). ( ... ... )

( ... ... ) [Stevens] summarized this poem as "designed to show how man gives his own order to the world about him." This sounds almost trite in its generality, especially when compared with Harold Bloom's remarks on what he calls  "the most powerful poem in what was to be the ^Ideas of Order^ volume but also surpassing any single poem in either edition of ^Harmonium^."  ( ... ... ) Indeed who would be willing to deny there is already an aspect of "equivocation"--"desperate" or not--in the poem's opening stanza, with its accumulation of qualifications, its pendular swing and prismatic variations?

^She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.^

A "ginius," Frank Lentricchia reminds us, "in the classical tradition signifies the ordering, tutelary, presiding god or spirit of a place." Hence, "if reality [for which the sea may provisionally be taken to stand as a ^pars pro toto^] has a genius, then reality has an inherent order." But that order, which "preceded the place and generated it, speaks in it and through it," is not available to the singing woman along the shore.[주]14  Her song exists "beyond" any possible ordering and generating power of the sea. The poem opens by establishing a yawning gap between the human and the natural--the gap where poetry can begin to be written and music to be composed.

"There will never be an end / To this droning of the surf," Stevens had written earlier of the same Key West locale, but the endlessness now prompts a new question: Could the droning ever turn to articulated music? Does not the seeming limitlessness of the sea preempt "the human power of controlling and ordering," as Miller suggests?[주]15  "The water never formed to mind or voice." The intransitive usage of the verb is meticulous: to say that the sea never formed ^itself^ would suggest some underlying agency; to talk intransitively of a forming pure and simple is to surrender the sea to arbitrary, uncontrollable, organic metamorphoses unable to acquire (as well as adapt to) human features like "mind or voice." The division between (wo)man and nature appears as solid and radical as the equally time-worn Cartesian dualism of body and soul, or body and spirit. "The water" is merely "a body wholly body, fluttering / Its empty sleeves" like a scarecrow or a fairy-tale ghost.[주]16  Its self is a mere void that can be filled or inflated only by a spirit coming from outside. Already, however, the strength of the dissociation between the natural/physical and the human/spiritual begins to tell on the poet's language. Since the sea is entirely body, its "motion" can only be a second-best "mimic" or simulation of human gestures. We are quickly made aware of the seductiveness of personification and the much-maligned pathetic fallay. The water cannot "mimic" without a mimetic disposition. This explains the hesitation in the fifth line and why its first hemistich is subsequently corrected: the sea's motion "Made constant cry, cause constantly a cry." We need to feel the difficulty of the words. The sea cannot utter any cries, cannot "make" a "cry"--intentionally, that is. At most, it can "cause" a sound that we interpret as a cry while knowing full well that this cry "Was not ours although we understood, / Inhuman, of the veritable ocean." This is the paradox of our human relationship with nature: the sensuous effects we record are "not ours" and yet it is only "we" who can claim to "understand" them; but this understanding itself must in some respect ^remain^ ours, for it can never be an understanding of the deep alterity of the "inhuman," of "the veritable ocean," ^an sich^. Stevens repeats the classic epistemological dilemma that fundamentally affects our drive for mimetic representation. If the human habit of mimetic thinking and speaking belongs to those Kantian categories we cannot (and should not try to) dispense with, we nevertheless need to be aware that it does not bring us any closer to the ghost of an objective reality ^an sich^, "fluttering / Its empty sleeves."

Because there emerges, toward the end of the poem, at least one second person who appears to accompany the poet on his walk along the sea, "The Idea of Order at Key West" has been contrasted more than once with Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintem Abbey." Yet ( ... ... )


^For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.^

The claim that the sea is "merely a place by which she waled to sing" is another way of evoking how the art of singing grazes reality only tengentially, how singer and poet alike are walking the liminal lines and edges or representation. ( ... ... )

Unsurprisingly, then, Stevens turns to address the question of what to do with the "spirit" Wordsworth found "roll[ing] through all things." "Whose spirit is this?" he asks, unable to rest contented with merely and passively riding the figurative waves of the song he hears ( ... ... )

( ... ... )

^Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.^

Clearly, there is more to these lines that the move toward mysticism and visionary experience that Anthony Libby detects in them. We should notice in them rather a tug between forces. A conscious modernist dissonance speaks from the oxymoronic phrase "Blessed rage for order," which reminds us, among other things of the fact that "[a] 'rage' for order is not an achievement of order." The phrase, as Filreis shows, collapses romantic and classicist language.[주]35  Similary, if the metaphor of the "portals," following so closely upon the word, "Blessed," at first seems religious in inspiration, we should notice not only that it is qualified by the this-worldly and sensuous adjective "fragrant," which points back to an attractively concrete Floridian locale, but also that it suggests an image of thresholds. ( ... ... ) We are left with an index only of the irrationally raging strength of Stevens's poetic desire "to order words of the sea."  ( ... ... )

( ... ... ) The irreductibility of language to its contexts and occasions brings us round, finally, to the "Idea of Order" announced in the title and to the poem's "dimly-starred" historical context. The poem was first published in 1934, and its call for order must have sounded particularly loud and shrill in the political climate of that year.[주]38  Across he Atlantic, Hitler was already in power, and in the United States the devastating effects of the Depression were rampant. The rhetoric of order was everywhere, and the poem should not be extracted from its zeitgeist. Stevens was at pains to get across, even on a philosophical level, that his "rage for order" was anything but totalitarian: "It may be that every man introduces his own order about him and that the idea of order in general is simply what Bishop Berkely might have called a fortuitous concourse of personal orders. But still there is order. ... But then, I never thought that it was a fixed philosophic proposition that life was a mass of irrelevancies any more than I now think that it is a fixed philosophic proposition that every man introduces his own order as part of a general order. These are tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry" (L 293).  They are, it should be added, not only tentative ideas, but also unusual words to write at a time when most American artists were at each other's throats over questions of loyaltry to the proletariat, to Marxism, capitalism, southern agrarianism, fascism, and other political and ideological subjects on which firm stands had to be taken. It was in such a belligerent context that Stevens wrote his own jacket statement for ^Ideas of Order^, the volume that parades "The Idea of Oder at Key West" as its nearly eponymous ^pièce de résistance^.  The full text of that statement reads as follows:

We think of changes occurring today as economic changes, involving political and social changes. Such changes raise questions of political and social order.

While it is inevitable that a poet should be concerned with such questions, this book, although it reflects them, is primarily concerned with ideas of order of a different nature, as, for example, the dependence of the individual, confronting the elimination of established ideas, on the general sense of order; the idea of order created by individual concepts, as of poet, in "The Idea of Order at Key West"; the idea of order arising from the practice of any art, as of poetry in "Sailing after Lunch."

The book is essentially a book of pure poetry. I believe that, in any society, the poet should be the exponent of the imagination of that society. ^Ideas of Order^ attempts to illustrate the role of the imagination in life, and particularly in life at present: The more realistic life may be, the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination. (OP 222-23)

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