"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

It was enough

For her that she remembered: the argentines Of spring come to their places in the grape leaves To cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds

Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy blooms Waste without puberty. . . . (III.ii)

Unlike Nanzia, she sees no need to adorn what is. She speaks in the present tense (unlike Nanzia, who speaks of the future), allowing the things of spring to be "real, / Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion." While the blue woman may write the poem of her own life, she cannot write the poem of the reader's life. The pun on eye/I makes this clear: there is still a distance words can never bridge between one person's experience and another's, between the poet's and the reader's epiphanies.

The problem is finally overcome by the self, in what Vendler has called "a complex reconciliation of tones" (197); in the penultimate section of Notes, we find the reality the narrator names uniquely his own - "Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night" (III.x; emphasis added). The narrator knows the reader may find no pleasure in the poet's epiphanies but must have experienced epiphanies of his own. Metaphors of self and place help to locate the self, induce its epiphanies, and close the gap between the poet's reader and the self-reader, the eye/I reading.

If Notes proceeds by closer approximations, the poem should (and does) begin with an estrangement of self from place. Unlike Adam and Eve, "we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves" (I.iv). This separation is inimical to the supreme fiction. "The MacCullough" established as major man is as inadequate as all the giants of Notes. Each must be destroyed to "be / In the difficulty of what it is to be" (I.i). To this end, we find "MacCullough himself . . . lounging by the sea" (I.viii). The poet asks that he "take habit" from any of the phenomena about him, that he put his place on. Although, as previously indicated, MacCullough is an insufficient metaphor, by his habit can the supreme fiction be attained. Many of the stories the pedant tells illustrate varying success in the marriage of self and place. The absurd General Du Puy has made his place "vestigial" because he put his habit on the landscape (II.iii). In contrast, the planter, like the blue woman, more closely approximates the poet's ideal of proper vision of his place. The orange and lime trees of his island "continued to bloom and to bear" long after the planter's death (II.v). He is dead and the past tense Stevens uses in this section takes on the force of simple fact: "These were the planter's turquoise / And his orange blotches/.... / These were his beaches;"

There was an island beyond him on which rested, An island to the South, on which rested like A mountain, a pineapple pungent as Cuban summer.

And la-bas, la-bas, the cool bananas grew, Hung heavily on the great banana tree, Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.

He thought often of the land from which he came, How that whole country was a melon, pink If seen rightly and yet a possible red.