The course of a particular: on the ethics of literary singularity

In Wallace Stevens's poem "The Course of a Particular," the cry of wintry leaves provokes a shift in mood from robust assurance that "one is part of everything" to a depleted sense of the world drained of meaning:

     The leaves cry.

     In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
     Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing
     Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all. (Palm 367)

These two dispositions--one expansive and gregarious, the other contracting to the vanishing point of consciousness--suggest two complementary responses to literature. I will be concerned with the latter, which tries to acknowledge the uniqueness of a literary work; but it must first be set against the "fantasia" whose absence it announces in order to trace a path of diminishing returns. My purpose is to explore the rhetoric of singularity in order to detect its "final finding," that is, its aesthetic and ethical limit. My hope is that artistry and ethics will converge: the course of a literary particular leads to ethical discovery.

According to Stevens, however, such a discovery "concerns no one at all." This hardly sounds like a strong moral position, (1) and defining that position in relation to the artistry that exposes it will be my subject. My own path, which runs from the numerous to the singular, requires some signposts. I intend, first, to mark the path's two limits by contrasting a criticism of plenitude with a criticism of austerity; then to inspect some rhetorical devices through which singularity is indicated; then to show how this rhetoric isolates the here-and-now in the instant of its inception and deception, its birth and death; and finally to examine how an aesthetic of singularity raises a comparable ethical challenge that sets moral generality against the dignity of the unique. Stevens will serve as one of my guides.

The shipwreck of the singular

When studying any literary work, we customarily nudge it in two directions, though not in equal measure. Usually we relate it to other texts in an expanding pattern of interdependence within larger contexts and communities. Whether the terms of explication are historical, cultural, biographical, national, generic, or religious, a work gains significance within a wider field to which it contributes, however modestly. No artist or artifact has its meaning alone, T. S. Eliot advises in a famous dictum, because it participates in an "ideal order," a totality that is temporarily complete yet continually altered as new works are added to it (38). A text is intelligible through its relation to other texts: as one elegy in an elegiac tradition, or as an American lyric, or as a novel by Virginia Woolf, or as an example of women's writing, and so on. At the imagined limit of this expansive view lies a glimpse of all literature conceived as one ongoing discourse--a grand intertextual poem, myth, or conversation forever in progress. Northrop Frye provides one of the most daring modern attempts to see literature steadily and to see it whole by fitting every work into a vast network of modes, myths, and genres, (2) all combining in a sublime vision of cultural totality corresponding to what Eliot calls "the mind of Europe" (39). A poem is like a single thought within that mind.

As the critic's field of vision expands, however, individual works become more and more significant, yet less and less discernible as they are engulfed by the whole. Ideal readers catch every allusion and influence, but at the cost of losing the shock of first discovery. As a countermeasure, they try to savor a literary work not in relation to other writing but in and for itself. It may be another eighteenth-century, middle-class novel written by a Protestant man for women readers, but it is this particular text and not another one, read here and now, not elsewhere. How are we to account for its specificity? Even an ardent advocate of intertextuality like Harold Bloom admits, "There can be no poem in itself, and yet something irreducible does abide in the aesthetic" (Western 23).

Although the specificity of a literary work may strike us forcefully on first reading, it is difficult to define because all the modes of definition at our disposal have the perverse effect of depriving a work of its particularity. Explanations inevitably generalize. Whether we explain a text by means of categorization, analogy, paradigm, function, influence, or genealogy, the process of understanding in each case is contextual and systematic. It is relational, whereas specificity is what precedes any relation and then enters into it. Do the primary units have any identifiable standing before they contribute to a larger structure of meaning, or are they created only by the act of being differentiated within it, just as left has no meaning until paired with right? Even analyzing a poem into its constituent parts fails to disclose its particularity, because analysis is possible only if we are already able to recognize those parts and their functions. To do so requires that we rely on general structural principles, which specify the parts as parts in the first place. In this case, to specify does not mean to isolate what is unique in a poem but to draw from a repertoire of established practices. To analyze a sonnet into quatrains and tercets is to recognize it as a sonnet, and so to relate it to a conventional lyrical category.