Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Michael Beehler

Thomas C. Grey's The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry, Mark Halliday's Stevens and the Interpersonal, and James Longenbach's Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things all share a similar purpose: to advance our understanding of Stevens's work by exploring his poetry from perspectives that are not singularly aesthetic or literary. While Grey reads Stevens's poetry with a lawyer's eye, focusing on its connections to legal theory and to the law and literature movement, Halliday brings a certain moral perspective to his readings so he can take Stevens to task for ignoring or repressing the importance of the "interpersonal" in human affairs. And Longenbach's book - by far the most complete and satisfying of the three-reads Stevens's entire career, carefully teasing out the historical contexts for not only the poems themselves but also - and more significantly - for the silent times in which Stevens wrote no poetry at all. These silences provoke Longenbach's inquiry, and his explanations of them in terms of Stevens's development as a lawyer and of his subtle awareness of the historical events and the ideological and political debates of the day lead to a new and rich portrait of a writer and thinker for whom the problems of distinguishing between the poetic and the political, or between the private vacation of aesthetic pleasure and the public vocation of real work in the world, called forth a lifetime of effort. Thus each book, in its own way, is concerned not only with the vocational and aesthetic contexts out of which Stevens's work emerges, but also, and more importantly, with the social function of his poetry and with the ways in which it can be seen to intervene - or, in Halliday's case, to fail to intervene - in a world of legal, moral, and political issues.

For Grey, this social function is found in the pragmatism that connects Stevens's poetry to the practice of law and to legal theory. Situating Stevens with respect to the opposing understandings of the law either as the site of rhetorical and ideological justification or as the scientistic, coercive application of positive rules, Grey finds in the poetry the advocacy of a pragmatic middle way mediating between "positivistic and instrumentalist conceptions of law on the one hand, and, on the other, idealist legal theories that identify law with the aspiration to justice, and see legal ideas as partly constitutive of social reality." Stevens is for him a "unique spokesman for that philosophical middle way that in modern thought has come to be called pragmatism," and his poetry, "to the extent it speaks to central issues of legal theory ... is not irrelevant to social and political concerns." Thus Grey sees Stevens as a "kind of therapist for the habitual and institutional rigidities of binary thought," and for him nobody needs this kind of therapy more than practitioners of the law.

That there is a strong pragmatist streak in Stevens comes as no real surprise to readers of his poetry: as Grey himself notes, Richard Poirier and Frank Lentricchia, among others, have previously explored this Stevensian motif and its connections to the Deweyian and Jamesian tradition. Grey's emphasis on this one aspect of Stevens's poetry leads him at times to some fairly programmatic discussions of poems that he approaches only in order to show how they articulate a pragmatist vision. This single-mindedness allows him to range freely throughout Stevens's canon and to discuss pieces of various poems without being too concerned for historical or even literary-historical context. This marks the book's limitation, but it also signals its strength, for in seeing Stevens as a legal philosopher and by transforming the traditional reality/imagination dialectic of his poetry into legal terms, Grey is able to demonstrate convincingly that Stevens has something practical to say to readers who are not poets or literature professors. The qualified assertions we have come to associate with Stevens's poetry become, for Grey, pragmatic and perspectivist reactions to the incompleteness of either romantic idealism or positivistic realism, and thus to the limitations of the legal theories associated with these extreme positions. It is important for Grey that Stevens was both a poet and a lawyer, a writer who, by having a foot in both arenas, helps to "overcome unhappy stereotypes of soullessly philistine lawyers and socially marginal humanists." The social and legal function of Stevens's poetry resides for Grey in its pragmatist rejection of such conceptual oppositions, in its analysis of the situational and contextual basis of judgment, and in its cautious considerations of the unstable distinctions habitually used to separate idealism from positivism. Grey sees in this caution Stevens's profound engagement with questions of the law and of judgment, and his book shows us a way in which reading Stevens can shed a practical, helpful, and pragmatic light on those questions.

For Halliday, on the other hand, Stevens seems to embody the stereotype of the "socially marginal humanist," and he approaches the poet's work from a certain moral perspective lacking, he feels, in traditional Stevens scholarship. What provokes Halliday is what he sees as an "important puzzle" - "how can greatness coincide with such determined avoidance of interpersonal reality?" - and in his book he analyzes the ways in which Stevens avoids, distorts, and represses this aspect of human life, and seeks to account for this radical omission. Stevens's omission of the interpersonal shows up most clearly, for Halliday in his poems dealing - or not dealing - with the suffering of others, with women and heterosexual love, and with the solitary self, which, according to Halliday, Stevens wants to believe in as the sole site of "an ample, good life." This "profound concern for the intactness of his self" has, for Halliday, a morally pernicious corollary that manifests itself in Stevens's poetry by "a profound aversion to the demands of interpersonal relations" and by the implication that "the absence of distinct other persons is not only undetrimental to this good life but essentially unimportant, if not indeed beneficial." What Halliday finds both most seductive and most unsettling about Stevens's poetry is its "vacation spirit," its "implicit invitation [to the reader] to abandon interpersonal responsibility" in favor of the "insidious comfortableness" of the holiday. In his longest chapter, which comprises more than forty percent of the entire book, Halliday explores the only interpersonal relation that seems to matter to Stevens - the relation with the reader - and isolates seven features of the poetry that produce the "illusion" that "Stevens likes and cares about his reader not just as reader but as person." Each of these features, ranging from the way Stevens speaks for us to the ways in which, like a "favorite uncle," he encourages a "holiday from responsibility," turns out to be dangerously beguiling in eliding the demands of the interpersonal. Although Halliday admires Stevens's technical skills, he is quite put off by what he takes to be his irresponsible elisions and by the moral failure he discloses by comparing Stevens to more interpersonally alert and responsible poets like Hardy and Dickinson.