The End of Criticism

In what follows I briefly outline a possible Gansian reading of Wallace Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” which many critics have identified as Stevens’ most mature formulation of his theory of poetry. Stevens is usually considered a modernist poet strongly influenced by romantic ideals, but his work can be more specifically classified in Gans’s schema as postromantic. Although much of his work displays a strikingly modernist “formal opacity” (189), Stevens’ work deviates from modernism proper on the level of content: he does not perform modernism’s replacement of “esthetic askesis” with “esthetic hedonism,” which followed from the belief that “all desiring experience is equally a reflection of the originary and therefore equally suitable for esthetic representation” (188). Instead, Stevens remains true to the postromantic dictum of seeking to “eliminate all vestiges of the empirical”—that is, all indications of the worldly desire that has its object in the material world—by exploring “transcendental modes of experience” (184), a project to which the formal difficulty of his work is integral.

Stevens is strongly influenced by Mallarmé, whom Gans identifies as “the most intellectually rigorous” exemplar of the postromantic aesthetic (185). Mallarme’s later work “was increasingly concentrated on the constitution of the (empty) scene of representation” (185): a purging of worldly desire through images of absence such as an empty room or the open sea. The Stevensian parallel to this is seen most clearly in “The Snow Man,” in which the ideal reader and creator of poetry is identified by the poem’s end as “The listener, who listens in the snow,/ And, nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (Stevens 54). Stevens’ particular mode of transcendental exploration begins to take a more unique shape in “Notes,” in which he configures the originary scene as “the first idea,” a non-empirical imaginative event. This scene-as-idea, which can also be thought of as the idea of the scene, is perhaps a more distanced intuition of the event than the immediate phenomenology of the empty scene achieved by Mallarmé. However, this heightened self-reflexivity and emphasis on the theoretical renders “Notes” an especially productive exemplar of the special place of the postromantic aesthetic in my anthropoetic literary-critical methodology, and of the type of dialogic interaction that literary experience and theorization should achieve in this methodology.

My reading will follow the three steps for Gansian criticism outlined above to show how the poem both performs (through its formal characteristics) and thematizes (through its content) the paradoxical nature of transcendence, and finally how it reveals the anthropological import of this subject through metapoetic theorization. The fact that the poem itself performs the temporal progression of the three stages of criticism, and initiates their enactment through the experience it incites in the reader, reinforces the primacy of the emic belief in literature which I have brought out as primary in the Gansian critical schema.

On a first reading, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” performs the paradoxical nature of transcendence by inducting the reader into a phenomenology of difficulty elicited by irrational, dreamlike images such as “At night an Arabian in my room,/ Inscribes a primitive astronomy/ Across the unscrawled fores the future casts/ And throws his stars around the floor” (Stevens 209). Stevens explores the notion of empiricism through his use of images, which, as visual representations of the physical, are directly linked with the empirical world perceived by the senses. Since empiricism is associated with rationality and the real, the irrational, surreal nature of the images achieves transcendence of the empirical through the empirical itself. The reader is left on the surface of language, with only an experience of difficulty as a “meaning” for Stevens’s imagery.

The sense of irrationality is reinforced by the intermingling of abstract ideas (“future,” “primitive,” “astronomy”) with the concrete images, which also points to a second way in which Stevens transcends the empirical through the empirical itself: the images do not root the reader in the visual world but rather propel us out of it into the realm of abstraction. While an image is a surface-level phenomenon and is thus primary in the temporal experience of the reader, in a more general sense the image and the interpretation of the image (that is, idea) are inseparable in that image automatically leads to idea: the incomprehensibility of the poem’s images pushes the reader’s attention towards its more comprehensible abstract phrases, such as “you must become an ignorant man again” (207). The latency of the idea in the image is analogous to the relationship between form and content which I have theorized earlier; in fact, this is the very reason that I have been discussing images in the emic (formal) stage of my reading. This latency manifests performatively in the reader’s automatic movement from images to abstract phrases in the experience of the poem as a whole, and also thematically in individual passages: “How clean the sun when seen in its idea,/ Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven/ That has expelled us and our images” (207). The image is temporally primary in this schema, since only after the sun’s image is acknowledged and expelled can we access the idea of the sun. The paradox here is that although they are opposites, idea depends upon image; we transcend the empiricism of images through images themselves. Passages such as the above which thematize the movement from image to idea move the reader to the etic position through the initial emic encounter with irrational images.

Only after we have experienced the process of transcendence that the poem performs can we take the etic position, which allows us to pinpoint the poem’s theorization of transcendence as a process. From the etic perspective, we can see that the poem thematizes the paradoxical nature of transcendence by making the relationship between opposites explicit: “Two things of opposite natures seem to depend/ On one another, as a man depends/ On a woman, day on night, the imagined/ On the real. This is the origin of change/ Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace/ And forth the particulars of rapture come” (218). Even though this passage does not deal with transcendence explicitly, it theorizes a general process of which transcendence is the epitomic example, as the emic experience of the poem has shown us: the generation of opposite from opposite and the paradoxical dependence of these opposites upon one another.

The intellectual theorization of “rapture,” a state of being carried away by overwhelming emotion, is analogous to and thus thematizes the paradoxical conscious suspension of consciousness which characterizes the “willing suspension of disbelief.” This thematization of emic experience moves the reader toward an apprehension of the metacritical stance which mediates between emic and etic, since being “carried away” is a transcendence of subjectivity which is necessary for the relationship between the subjectively experienced emic and etic perspectives to be thematized in the poem and conceptualized in the reader’s interpretive process.

Later in the poem, this thematization of the relationship between emic and etic is fully realized in a passage which brings the reader through emic experience, etic distance, and a final metapoetic synthesis of these two perspectives. Beginning with an irrational image, “the golden fingers picking the dark-blue air” (225), the speaker then thematizes the difficulty of the imagery as a property of interpreting the poem: “But the difficultest rigor is forthwith/ On the image of what we see,/ To catch from that/ Irrational moment its unreasoning” (225). Finally, the speaker gives examples of these irrational images—”As when the sun comes rising, when the sea/ Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall/ Of heaven” (225)—in order to thematize the relationship between direct reading experience and distanced analysis of content: “These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were./ We reason about them with a later reason” (225). “Later reason” refers to the lateness of the critic who adopts an analytical perspective after an initial aesthetic encounter, the perspective which transforms “things” (images) into ideas. But the fact that these images emotionally move the reader on a first reading as if they were already transformed reinforces the idea that content is already implicit in form and ideas are already implicit in images, with the additional insight that the affect generated by a first reading cannot be completely divorced from any cognitive implications. Catching “from that irrational moment its unreasoning” can be seen as a comment on the paradoxical nature of criticism: the critic must first experience the irrational aesthetic moment and at a later time—which is anticipated proleptically in emic experience—express this irrational experience within the systematic and rational framework of an academic essay.

This metapoetic progression pushes the reader’s analysis toward the metacritical level of generative anthropology. The persistent transformation of images into ideas, even within the emic encounter, gives idea priority over image in the world of the poem: Stevens not only foregrounds the process of transcending the immanent, but positions the transcendent realm as superior to the immanent. This overall privileging of the transcendent leads to the insight that what Stevens refers to as “the first idea” (209) is his particular configuration of the originary event. The reader, now aware of the significance of “the first idea,” is primed to recognize the anthropological implications of Stevens’s theory of poetry:

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural. ( 209)

The phrase “unconscious will” and the fact that the first idea is shared in a communal moment of insight recall the transcendence of subjectivity implied in the thematization of “rapture.” Here, the transcendence of subjectivity is explicitly tied to the creation and interpretation of poetry: the poet, like the linguistic sign, mediates between the reader and the content of the literary work, and as such must transcend subjectivity in order to be a transparent medium through which the first idea can be communicated and understood. The critic must also transcend subjectivity in order to move between the emic (“ever-early candor”) and the etic (“late plural”).

Stevens insists that poetry itself can bring us back to the originary experience, which he conceptualizes as a belief in the “immaculate [i.e., transcendent] beginning” of humanity. The apparently contradictory idea that a poem, itself a mediation of experience, can provide access to unmediated experience of the origin is clarified by Stevens’ earlier question, “Is there a poem that never reaches words/ And one that chaffers the time away?” (223). A poem that never reaches words is not a literal, material poem but the idea of a poem. The generation of idea from image that is fundamental to “Notes” suggests that this ideal poem has been generated from and thus made possible by “Notes” itself, although the interrogative form used to speak of it indicates that it is a possibility rather than a reality. Paradoxically, the mediatory nature of language can be transcended through language itself if used in an aesthetic capacity which remains conscious of its function as language.

This paradox clarifies the apparent contradiction of the postromantic artist’s elevation of literature and general suspicion of mediation. The postromantic ethical order “foregrounded the mediating function of exchange that had in fact existed since the origin,” causing “the market [to be] blamed for the ‘unnatural’ evil of mediation” (Originary Thinking 183); hence, the postromantic artist desires the unmediated experience afforded by poetry. A further anthropological insight afforded by this passage is the association of the transcendence of mediation with “chaffer[ing] the time away”: this is a desire to overcome our temporal alienation in an experiential return to the immediacy of the origin, a return that is a fundamentally temporal-linguistic enterprise, since originary lateness was inaugurated with the first linguistic sign.

Continuing with the anthropological level of interpretation, it is possible to ascertain an intense disdain for the appetitive satisfaction that concludes the originary event and is thereafter associated with the marketplace. Appetitive satisfaction is clearly denoted by phrases such as “the easy passion, the ever-ready love” and “accessible bliss” (221), but significantly, these phrases are embedded in such a beautiful and initially appealing passage that the disparaging tone in which they are uttered would be easy to miss if it were not for the emic experience of difficulty in reading the poem:

We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe
. . .

The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known. (221)

Because accessibility is directly opposed to the difficulty that the reader now believes in through an originary encounter with the poem, the speaker’s negative tone toward accessibility in all of its manifestations can be grasped. Although the emic experience of difficulty forms the basis of this interpretation, the etic “hermeneutic of suspicion” also has a crucial role to play in allowing the reader to discern a negative tone in “accessible” and “ever-ready.” In order to ascertain the speaker’s ethical promotion of a spiritual/intellectual rather than appetitive basis to human relationships, the reader must resist the passage’s tempting impression of beauty and its indications that we are to identify with the speaker (“we” and “us”).

The opposition of difficulty to the marketplace is reinforced by Stevens’ association of difficulty with the pre-linguistic ground: “The sun/ Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be/ In the difficulty of what it is to be” (208). The use of “must bear” rather than “bears” shows that this desire is not fulfilled: in the world of the poem, the transcendence of mediation is infinitely deferred. But this deferral which is in fact a fundamental characteristic of the poem, signaled from the outset by the very title “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” can be more accurately identified as prolepsis: the poem’s title, along with its other intimations of unmediated experience, both perform and signal the absence/deferred presence of the paradoxical transcendence of mediation which they thematize.

The “supreme fiction,” which in anthropological terms is the narrative of human origin, is only gestured towards, and yet at the same time the poem itself is a supreme fiction, a means of access to “the first idea” through poetic language. The desire to access “a myth before myth began” (210), that is, the mythic origin that preceded the advent of “myth” as a discreet category, is fulfilled in the evolution of generative anthropology from the postmodern aesthetic. The inseparability of postmodern art from raw experience that makes this evolution possible gestures toward the inseparability that literature and criticism once shared in the originary scene, which can be recovered only in that forever-deferred proleptic space of the postmodern, literally “after now.”

In fact, Gans’s original statement about human self-reflexivity imbues his entire project with prolepticity. He states that “humans would not exist as self-understanding beings if such understanding were not necessary to their existence” (Originary Thinking 1), but if we already exist as self-understanding, why do we need studies such as Originary Thinking which are written in order to facilitate self-understanding? Our self-understanding, like the originary aesthetic experience, must have a proleptic temporality. The connection between the temporality of criticism and that of culture that is emerging here is clarified by noting that metacriticism operates from the principle of self-reflexivity, which Gans identifies as essential to the survival of the human community, and that prolepsis is implied in the futural orientation of every definition of the prefix “meta”: “occurring later than or in succession to,” “after,” “change, transformation,” and “more comprehensive: transcending” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

The final and fundamental prolepsis of the originary schema is found in Gans’s definition of the human: “the paradoxical generation of the transcendent from the immanent, the vertical from the horizontal” (Signs of Paradox 4). Although it could be argued that he is speaking here of a process that happens once and for all during the originary event, the present continuous verb “generation” suggests a constant becoming rather than a static achievement. The association of the transcendent with the vertical in this definition of the human, along with the verticality of language, which indicates its metaphoric character, points to a close link between metacriticism and transcendence. “Horizontal” consciousness, conceived in terms of literary criticism, would entail primarily basing arguments on the content ascertained by other critics rather than on the vertical relationship between the form and personally perceived content of literature. Earlier in the paper I touched on the fact that, given the huge and swiftly-growing corpus of literary criticism, the critical experience often relies more on the horizontal critic-critic relationship than the vertical critic-work relationship. This seems to be unavoidable, although it is quite problematic from a Gansian perspective because it bypasses the originary aesthetic experience and is alarmingly reminiscent of the mimetic rivalry that made the vertical sign-object relationship necessary in the first place.

Just as language can be paradoxically transcended through language itself, the problem of criticism can be transcended through the doubling or surpassing of criticism which is achieved in metacriticism. Metacriticism returns the critical enterprise to the vertical dimension by treating criticism itself—both the personal interpretive process and the critical work of others—as an aesthetic object worthy of oscillatory contemplation. This paradoxical doubling and surpassing is the “end” of criticism, which, like Gans’s “end of culture,” has a double meaning as both “terminus” and “purpose.” Although criticism’s prolepticity seems to foreclose any pronouncement of “the end of criticism,” criticism’s end is to be interminable. Its continual process of becoming, like becoming-human, necessitates a continual act of transcendence, and in transcending criticism, metacriticism brings us back to the originary aesthetic experience that is the guarantee of criticism’s primacy as a human institution.