"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

Issues of plurality tied to thought in the heart reach their height in "It Must Change" and anticipate the emergence of the self. The poet observes that "things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another" (Il.iv); man and woman, day and night, imagined and real, as pairs, are the origin of change. "Music falls on the silence like a sense, / A passion that we feel, not understand": again in these "cold copulars" is the plurality of heart and thought. Through language, the poet tries to unname, to find the sews world and throw off the poetic mantle "like a thing of another time" (I.ii) so that his reader can become maker, can usurp the poet's position as the ephebe must outgrow the pedant. Here the poet's understanding surpasses the pedant's as does his power, since

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak

The peculiar potency of the general, To compound the imagination's Latin with The lingua franca et jocundissima. (II.ix)

The potency is itself dual: formal, as Latin; public and light as lingua. The poet, like the pedant, understands that to succeed, to reach the reader, he must give himself up because of the construct of his relation to the reader. The "hot, dependent orator" relies on both the language and the reader: the "peculiar potency of the general" named in words is felt only by the individual. As the pedant cannot educate the ephebe-reader into ignorance, so the poet cannot enforce his epiphanies in the reader. Thus, the pedant and poet share a common problem: to succeed, both must get the reader to write the poetry of her own life, a feat accomplished through the poem but not by the poem.

"The reading of a poem should be an experience," writes Stevens (OP 170). The poet cannot realize this intensely personal experience because he cannot bridge the distance between the different experience of different people. He can only provide the opportunity. Two of the characters in Notes nicely illustrate the closer approximations of this ideal. Nanzia Nunzio cannot be what she is; rather, she defines herself through Ozymandias: "As I am, I am / The spouse" (II.viii); as in the President section, the enjambment here indicates a failing. She implores, even needs, Ozymandias to complete her:

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me In its own only precious ornament. Set on me the spirit's diamond coronal.

Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.

Nanzia envisions her completion only in surrender to Ozymandias's "fictive covering"; she feels the ornament of diamond crown and tenuous, thread-like body bestowed by Shelley's monolith to be her only source of perfection. Yet clearly such surrender can hold no efficacy. For one, the irony that Ozymandias's effigy, like "nerveless" General Du Puy's, presides over what was, not what is, cannot escape us; moreover, we have seen satisfaction in neither the ephebe's domination by the pedant nor in the President's attempt to impose order. In contrast to Nanzia, the blue woman desires no giant: