"This hot, dependent orator": shifting narrative stance and the collision of speaker and reader in 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1996 by Jonathan Ausubel

In Adagia, Wallace Stevens asserts that "the mind always proposes a solution" to an enigma (Opus Posthumous 168). Where the enigma is Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, readers' solutions usually involve discovering progress, finding meaning in a work that Robert Lowell, reviewing Transport to Summer in 1947, called "sloppy, idiosyncratic and repetitious" (286-87). Helen Vendler reads a progress of definition "by closer and closer approximations, with each slight shift . . . marking a further advance in precision" (175); Daniel Schwarz recognizes the reader's projection of narrative into the poem (3), reading Notes biographically, projecting Stevens's own life story.(1) Eleanor Cook sees in Notes a movement that parallels the Bible's progress from Genesis to Revelations, from separation to unification (215). Moreover, critics by and large search for narrative structures independent of voice, usually understanding the voice of Notes as that of Stevens himself: Gerald L. Bruns asserts an utter homogeneity of voice (37); Hugh Kenner calls Stevens's "a poetry for one voice . . . with little variety of feeling" (113-14); Marjorie Perloff says "the addressee [in Stevens] is always the poet himself" (21). But what strikes me about Notes toward a Supreme Fiction is its remarkable complexity of voice.

In Notes there are no actions independent of voice; indeed, the action of Notes is in the shifting of the narrative voice, the persona the reader projects as speaker of the words she reads, the writer she engages.(2) Stevens has written that "the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, [and] the voice is always that of someone else" (OP 168). I contend that in Notes the identity of the "someone else" does not remain constant. Through the course of the poem, the narrator shifts from pedant to poet to what I will call self. While the shifts do not represent advancements of plot per se, they enable the poem's latent story, the collision of the trajectories of the poem's first constructed reader and the "real" reader, the ephebe and you, achieved, if at all, in a leap much like the one Canon Aspirin faces, not in any sort of discernible, linear progression. In many respects, this collision resembles a collusion in which the reader comes to play the narrator's game - in fact, cannot but play it as she relates to the narrator-self, reading "I," speaking in the first person, reader and narrator-self at once. The collision/ collusion, I might note, preempts the unity perceived by Schwarz, Bruns, Kennet, and Perloff, shifting the site of action in the poem from the words produced by the narrator to the production itself, from artifact to activity.

The narrator initially speaks down to the reader, opening a gap in authority: the "ephebe" is told to "begin" the lesson almost chidingly: "You must become an ignorant man again"; "Never suppose an inventing mind . . . / . . . nor . . . / A voluminous master folded in his fire." The ephebe's fault, it seems, is not the simple naming of real objects but rather the gilding of those names with mythologies - hence the melodious Phoebus passage in which we learn that "Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named." Phoebus cannot be named because a name cannot encompass his mythology. In restating the lesson, the speaker is again the pedant: "The sun / Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be / In the difficulty of what it is to be."(3) Creating a supernatural sun god (Phoebus Apollo) only deflects the student from more basic ontological problems - "the sun . . . seen in its idea." The idea of "this invented world" is a difficult lesson to learn, but as the narrator begins to find, it is even more difficult to teach; the "first idea," the initial object of the lesson, "comes and goes and comes and goes all day" (I.ii) as mythologies proliferate and repeatedly obscure the fundamental idea of the sun. In part because the pedant-ephebe relationship is itself a mythology, the narrator of Notes finds himself occupying an untenable position as the subject of his poem is gradually revealed: his subject, he senses, resists because of the oracle from which it issues. Accordingly, in lecturing about the desire of priest and philosopher alike, the pedant foretells his own demise: to succeed, the pedant must release his ephebe, must enter a new relationship with the educated; the desire to educate "knows that what it has is what is not / And throws it away like a thing of another time, / As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep" (I.ii). Although the impossibility of expressing the first idea and the necessity of graduating the student will eventually overwhelm his pontifications, the pedant is practiced and does not easily relinquish his air of superiority, an air which allows the poet "to confer his identity on the reader" (OP 158) only counterproductively, since the student-teacher relationship exists only in the maintenance of authoritative difference and because of the reader-ephebe's distaste for being patronized.