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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Jon Kertzer

     Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when
     one speaks of the legs of the table or the face of the mountain,
     catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia [personification,
     literally "to give a face"], and one begins to perceive a world of
     potential ghosts and monsters. ("Epistemology" 19)

As Klein's Adamic poet illustrates, these metamorphoses quickly proliferate into a hallucinatory fantasia, but only after they have been invoked by an unnameable singularity that remains faceless and wordless. It is the power of speech that has not yet been spoken, the inhuman substratum of humanity to which de Man's analysis constantly leads him. In his wintry mood, Stevens annuls the creative fiat invoked by Klein by abjuring personification and relinquishing metaphor (even if he must do so metaphorically) in order to return to the instant before light emerges from the first sound:

     In this bleak air the broken stalks
     Have arms without hands. They have trunks

     Without legs or, for that, without heads.
     They have heads in which a captive cry

     Is merely the moving of a tongue.
     Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

     It is in this solitude, a syllable,
     Out of these gawky flitterings,

     Intones its single emptiness,
     The savagest hollow of winter-sound
     (Palm 247-48)

Here is a deed without a name, a form without a shape, a word without a meaning. The poem's imagery pinpoints singularity at the convergence of light, sight, and sound by evoking a temporality in which the present is isolated in the precision of its immediacy. It focuses not on a rich, contemplative moment as in Marvell's "The Garden" or Milton's "Il Penseroso," and not on Stein's bulky continuous present, but on the here-and-now, which is always singular, always transient, and always different.

The last Onset

Right here, right now, Stevens says in "Man Carrying Thing," "The bright obvious stand motionless in cold" (Palm 281), but the reality so brilliantly revealed stands only for an instant. In the rhetoric of the instantaneous, the bare present, which vanishes as we touch it, is more elusive than the past, which can be exhibited by memory, and more elusive than the future, which can be anticipated. Past and future join in the comfortable continuity of a "major reality"--an explanatory myth like Frye's--that poets entice us to enjoy but also warn us to resist whenever we retreat to the cold, solitary present. These rival dispositions again offer a rhythm of elevation and relapse in "As You Leave the Room":

     Now, here, the snow I had forgotten becomes

     Part of a major reality, part of
     An appreciation of a reality

     And thus an elevation, as if I left
     With something I could touch, touch every way.

     And yet nothing has been changed except what is
     Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all. (396)

A "major reality" seems fully tactile yet proves to be specious or "unreal." It is a lofty fantasy that appreciates in value under the aegis of imagination, but then must be depreciated imaginatively in its turn. In "The Sail of Ulysses" the "particular thought" is a "difficult inch," which is easily coaxed into "Plantagenet abstractions" and "stellar largenesses"; but Stevens warns that the poet must also resist the "law/that bends the particulars to the abstract" (392) in order to face the present in its strange momentariness. It is the barely imaginable reality that first provokes sensation and cognition. Time, sight, and thought converge in the image of light--one of Stevens's favorites--as in the common expression "to see things in a flash."