"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

Contrary to the assertions of Bruns and Kenner (above), Notes expands, under the weight of this realization, to a chorus that includes the teacher and the student, the lyric poet and his reader and the self, an amalgam of pedant, poet, and I. In many places, precisely which stance the narrator assumes is difficult to tell. We find ourselves shadowing his thoughts, sharing his recognition of both the deistic Canon Aspirin and his sister (III.v-vii). The idiom of the poem works on the reader just as Stevens asserts in "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet": "Anyone who has read a long poem day after day . . . knows how the poem comes to possess the reader and how it naturalizes him in its own imagination and liberates him there" (NA 50). Yvor Winters cleverly objects: "The imagination would seem to be the power which gives order to the reality which has no order; but on the other hand this order is imaginary and not real; it is a kind of willed delusion" (34-35). My focus on the wilier of the delusion has simply replaced one site of unity or orderly discourse with another: rather than accepting that Notes has a central speaking voice and examining unity and order in plot, I have examined them in the struggles of voice, in the reader's collisions and collusions with voice. When Harold Bloom says of the overtly rhetorical nature of the self's questions (III.viii, above), "I am to believe in a fiction of the self, in a trope of myself" (212), he overstates the point; such a trope confers the same centrality I have been trying to overcome. Surely, what is said in Notes depends on exactly who the doubting, derisive, and, above all, urgent narrator is. Like the self's experience of his fat girl, the reader's experience of the poem is "the more than rational distortion" (III.x), a changing position within a maze of thought, feeling, and paradoxes.

In this most affirmative of Stevens's long poems, the narrator's three conditions for the supreme fiction (abstraction, changeability, and pleasurability) may be satisfied or they may not. One main trend in Stevens criticism has been to grant the speaker his supreme fiction and follow him, forward and backward, through Stevens's other poetry. To cite but one example, it is tempting to hear Notes and Auroras of Autumn speak in the voice of Stevens because we can then attribute growing pessimism to an increasingly pessimistic poet who stopped reaching for the supreme fiction. However, the decentralized narrative voice for which I have argued demands a new look at Stevens's narrators and a new consideration of how they are constituted, since any plot or plot thread we discern and any criticism we make are of their words. And we have seen that those words are not always "the bread of faithful speech" (epilogue).

NOTES

1 See, for example, page 6, where Schwarz views all of the characters of Notes as "exfoliations" of Stevens himself; and page 162, where characters are personae of Stevens.

2 Bruns writes of the drive to identify narrative voice (27), but as noted above, hears a single voice speaking Notes.