Wallace Stevens Among Others : Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture 9780773546028, 9780773597761, 9780773597778

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wa l l a c e s t e v e n s a m o n g o t h e r s

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Wallace Stevens among Others Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture

dav i d r . jar r away

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isb n 978-0-7735-4602-8 (cloth) isb n 978-0-7735-9776-1 (eP DF ) isb n 978-0-7735-9777-8 (eP UB) Legal deposit third quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Jarraway, David R., author Wallace Stevens among others: diva-dames, Deleuze, and American Culture / David R. Jarraway. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-4602-8 (bound). – is bn 978-0-7735-9776-1 (pdf). – isb n 978-0-7735-9777-8 (eP UB) 1. Stevens, Wallace, 1879–1955 – Criticism and interpretation.  2. Subjectivity in literature.  3. Dissenters in literature.  4. Deleuze, Gilles. I. Title. PS3537.T4753Z666 2015   811'.52   C2015-902340-8  C2015-902341-6

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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For Ian, again: primus inter omnes.

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Contents

Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3  1 “  The Theory of Life”: Wallace Stevens, Gilles Deleuze, and the Difference They Make  13   2 “The Novel That Took the Place of a Poem”: Stevens and Queer Discourse  37   3 “No Place like Home”: Stevens and Contemporary American Fiction  74   4 “Both Sides and Neither”: Stevens, Masculinity, and American Film   112   5 Stevens and New York School Poetry in the Distance  158   6 “The Play between the Spaces”: Stevens and Psychoanalysis  195 Conclusion: Diva-Dames in the Dark  229 Notes 247 Works Cited  265 Index 283

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Figures

1 Adam’s Rib (1949), dir. George Cukor. Reproduced by permission of Phototest Film Archive, New York.  140 2 Woman of the Year (1942), dir. George Stevens. Reproduced by permission of Phototest Film Archive, New York.  150 3  Shadow of a Doubt (1943), dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Reproduced by permission of Phototest Film Archive, New York.  239 4 Shadow of a Doubt (1943), dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Reproduced by permission of Phototest Film Archive, New York.  240

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Acknowledgments

Since the publication of my last book, Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity in Modernist American Literature (2003), the chapters assembled here are largely the result of several invitations to enlarge previous arguments among “other” contexts, but more fruitfully as I have come to discover, to depart from them in significant ways. I would therefore very much like to thank the following for their interest and engagement in the work that has happily come to result: the Wallace Stevens Society (“Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut” [2004]) and the Canadian Association of American Studies (“States of Emergency: Crisis, Panic, and the Nation” [2009]) for chapter 1; Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (“Interiors” [2004] and “Capital Connections: Nation, Terroir, Tertritoire” [2009]) and Brown University (“A Hole in the Nation: American Literature after Deleuze” [2009]) for chapter 3; the American Literature Association (“Stevens’ Erotic Poetics” [2005]) and Northeast Modern Language Association (“Golden Age ­Hollywood and Sub-Text” [2003]) for chapter 4; the Louisville C ­ onference on Literature and Culture since 1900 (“Stevens and the New York School” [2012]) and Trent University (“International Conference / Colloque International on / sur Gilles Deleuze” [2004]) for chapter 5; the Modern Language Association (“Psychological Approaches to Literature” [2005]) and the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia (“It Must Be Nova Scotia: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop” [2011]) for chapter 6; and finally the American Film and History League (“Hitchcock” [2004]) and King’s College at the ­University of Western Ontario (“Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze & Guattari and the Arts” [2012]) for the conclusion.

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xii acknowledgm e nt s

Once again, I am grateful to the Office of Research and Publications at the University of Ottawa for the generous support it has lent over several years to the presentation of my work both in Canada and abroad. My gratitude is further extended to the Research and Publications Committee at Ottawa for its generous assistance on the permissions, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for the three years of a Standard Research Award to help finance my work in its initial stages. Of a more personal nature, I extend thanks to my colleagues in the English Department at Ottawa for their continued interest in and support of this new project, and especially to that exemplary champion of “Miss Bishop” through the  years, Professor David Staines. I should also like to thank my Canadian editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Mark Abley, for his unstinting support of an essentially “Americanist” manuscript, and to a very capable team at the press – Ryan Van Huijstee, Ellie Barton, and Filomena Falocco – that has steered it seamlessly through the rigours of production the minor defects of which, if any,  redound entirely to me. Thanks also to Stephan Ullstrom for preparing the index. Finally, the fondest of accolades to my life partner, Ian McDonald, whose endless faith and good counsel through years of composing and presenting never falter, and without which, as ever, naught. permissions

Excerpts from The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest by Barbara Guest, copyright 2008, published by Wesleyan University Press, and used by permission. Excerpts from “Source” in Source by Mark Doty, copyright Mark Doty, and reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from “Nocturne in Black and Gold,” “Fog Argument,” and “Grosse Fugue” in Atlantis by Mark Doty. Copyright by Mark Doty, and reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from “The End of March” and “Sandpiper” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1979, 1983 by Alice Methfessel. Excerpts from “Master of the Golden Glow,” “The Morning of the Poem,” “Now and Then,” and “Voyage autour de mes cartes postales”

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acknowledg m e n t s

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from the Collected Poems by James Schuyler. Copyright 1993 by the Estate of James Schuyler, and reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, L L C . Excerpts from “Asides on the Oboe,” “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” “Prologues to What Is Possible,” “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” “A Primitive like an Orb,” “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” “Adult Epigram,” “Yellow Afternoon,” “Two Versions of the Same Poem,” “Montrachet-le-Jardin,” “Jumbo,” “Boquet of Belle Scavoir,” and “Contrary Theses [II]” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC . All rights reserved.

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wa l l a c e s t e v e n s a m o n g o t h e r s

The Theory of Poetry Is the Life of Poetry … The Theory of Poetry Is the Theory of Life. Wallace Stevens, Adagia (Collected Poetry and Prose)

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Introduction

To a certain extent, Wallace Stevens among Others: Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture is anticipated by my two previous books: the first devoted to a complete reading of the poet himself (1993), and the second to readings of a number of other poets implicated in Stevens’s work by means of what I refer to as a theory of  “dissident subjectivity” in American culture (2003). What is entirely new with the present monograph is my endeavour, over six separate chapters, to explore further the extraordinary achievement of American poet Wallace Stevens in the annals of modern American literature among other literary and artistic “contexts,” as I allude to them throughout, that are not usually thought about in connection with his work: the context of gay literature, for example, in chapter 2, or the context of the classic American film in chapter 4, or even the extra-literary disciplines of Freudian psychoanalysis and avantgarde American architecture in chapter 6, and so forth. Binding the focus on Stevens throughout all of these “other” contexts is my continuing preoccupation with the general discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity in American literature and culture – a thematic explored by means of the five American writers in my last book whose work was generally seen there to reflect their abiding concern for subjectivity as a dissident process constantly engaging the world in a distanciated space of difference. By returning to the work of Wallace Stevens, however, this new book seeks to refurbish that preoccupation by linking it specifically to the literary theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. “What are we,” he remarks in Empiricism and Subjectivity, “but the habits of saying ‘I’?” (85). Throughout his critical corpus he refers to a whole

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pantheon of American writers – from Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau at one end of the canon to cummings, Fitzgerald, and Bob Dylan at the other – to argue, as in Difference and Repetition, that the “thousands of habits” (73) forming the unconscious of our representations become the lethal domain of self-reflection in the modern era. One aim of this new work, therefore, is to document the precise extent to which Deleuze’s theorizing about identity and difference is so indebted to American as opposed to French literature – one that, according to A Thousand Plateaus, is too taken up with “measuring walls, even with building them,” rather than being about the more proactive work of “positive deterritorialization” (245), and never more so than in Stevens when viewed in “other” contexts. Forging the link between the literary theory of Deleuze and the poetic practice of Stevens among others, and thus fleshing out the second thematic strand of the monograph, is the considerable attention trained upon female subjectivity in each case. Since man, conventionally defined as Being, serves in Deleuze as the self-evident ground for a habit-forming identity or molar politics, the “divadame” of my subtitle thus offers herself as the opening to a molecular otherness, and carries readers of American literature toward a rethinking of its basic complexion complementary to the more static masculinist syntheses of Being in the form of a wide variety of feminist distanciations or becomings. Wallace Stevens, in an especially Deleuzian moment as I argue further in the next chapter, refers to the distanciated subjectivity in “Adult Epigram” (ca. 1947) as “the divadame,” that is, “the ever-never-changing same, / An appearance of Again” (Collected Poetry and Prose 308, c p p hereafter). And because Stevens bows in the direction of the Pragmatism of William James for this formulation – a debt that I attempted to make plain throughout my earlier Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief, and which Brian Massumi has more recently taken up in Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts – a third and final strand of this new book undertakes to elaborate Deleuze’s own considerable debt to the philosophy of American Pragmatism in his renovative approach to American modernism more generally. Announcing this debt initially in Difference and Repetition via the poetry of Benjamin Blood (excerpted in James’s writing), Deleuze glosses Stevens’s diva-dame as a modernist force for “chao-errancy” as opposed to a more maculinist coherence of representation (57). Hence, by analyzing the distance between these two notions of

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selfhood, that is, between the essentializing concepts that determinately fix identity, and the Pragmatist excess that marks it as an existentially incomplete endeavour, ultimately my readings of Stevens among others aim to distance the poet as well from the more conventional reception of his work, and thereby recover the dissident American subject all over again in literary and extra-literary discourse, and with a renewed Deleuzian rigour to set it within a more robust and resonant cultural moment. At back of most writing implicated in American Pragmatism, of course, lies the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably its father, which is where I begin with my opening chapter, “‘The Theory of Life’: Wallace Stevens, Gilles Deleuze, and the Difference They Make.” “Of what use is genius,” Emerson famously remarks in his essay entitled “Experience” (1847), “if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?” (474). But closer to our own time, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, remarking on a plethora of American authors from Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville through to Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe (in Essays Critical and Clinical), makes clear that his own critical investment in American literature is profound and wide-ranging, and especially so on the matter of its safeguarding a rhetorical distance. For according to Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, “each ‘thing’ opens itself up to [an] infinity of predicates” only when “it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or self … [and instead] traverses the divergent series [of predicates] as divergent, and causes [things, therefore] to resonate through their distance, and in their distance” (178, emphasis added). The diva-dame figuration in Wallace Stevens’s “Adult Epigram” is a model instance of such infinite self-predication I argue here, and for the remainder of the book. The work of poet Mark Doty, a dedicated reader of Stevens, is thus subsequently offered as a model for the Deleuzian distanciation of subjectivity à la Stevens. In “Letter to Walt Whitman” from his collection of poetry entitled Source (2001), for instance, Doty corroborates both quite succinctly: “our theorists / question notions of identity: Are you who you love, or can you dwell in categorical ambiguity? Our numbers divide, merge and multiply … who’s to say just who anyone is?” By contrast, this chapter’s adumbration of the “difference” in play between Stevens and Deleuze concludes with a searching rumination about what’s at stake in the cancellation of America’s “categorical ambiguity” through a close

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reading of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) in anticipation of Stevens’s location in the “other” context of American fiction that immediately follows. The foray into this context begins in the second chapter entitled “‘The Novel That Took the Place of a Poem’: Stevens and Queer Discourse.” As recounted in the considerable correspondence between José Rodríguez Feo and Stevens in Secretaries of the Moon (1986), Stevens has always had a significant gay following over the years. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Cunningham is a more recent acolyte, and this chapter offers a quite detailed reading of Cunningham’s first novel, A Home at the End of the World (1990) – a fictional context that labours to plot itself quite specifically following the imagistic shifts in Stevens’s 1952 lyric entitled “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain.” By means of Stevens’s poem, Cunningham’s end-of-the-world novel corroborates Rosi Braidotti’s searching Deleuzian insight that “home is lived both at the material and the imaginary level [as] … something that is repeatedly deferred. It is not necessarily a place of ‘origin,’ but can also mean belonging in multiple locations” (Nomadic Theory 260), as only Stevens’s divadame knows too well. For reasons her own nomadism makes clear, then, the transposition from “gay fiction” to “queer discourse” allows us finally to return to a more thorough-going reading of gay poet Mark Doty (carried forward from the previous chapter) in order to conjugate the discourse of the “androgyne” in Stevens’s work, and map it onto both Doty’s later lyricism alongside his poignant and majestic A I D S memoir, Heaven’s Coast. In the following chapter, the novelistic nomadism of the diva-dame is offered some further reflection in “‘No Place like Home’: Stevens and Contemporary American Fiction.” If the last chapter presented the “other” context of fiction by which to measure the positive exemplification of the diva-dame, this one takes us into something considerably more negative – the distancing of American subjectivity in terms of “self-protection” as outlined in chapter 1. In such terms, identity finds itself staving off the alterity of experience by foundationalizing truth, viewing it in the terms that William James complains of – as so many embedded essences and sedimented concepts. But if playing it safe casts the notion of the distanciated identity in a somewhat negative light, Deleuze forges a clear link with American Pragmatism by countering this stratagem in his Logic of Sense with the notion of what he calls “positive distance”: “The idea of a

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positive distance as distance … appears to us essential since it permits the measuring of contraries through their infinite difference instead of equating difference with a measureless contrariety, and contrariety with an identity” (172–3). Like Michael Cunningham previously, John Updike resorts to Stevens’s poetry – in the case of his famous “Rabbit Tetralogy,” Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (1937) – in order to explore the dumbing-down of Deleuzian difference. The third novel in the set, Rabbit Is Rich, deploys Stevens’s poem as a leading epigraph. The switch from the “future anterior tense” underwriting the diva-dame in her endless shape-shifting possibilities to the “future interior” scandalously embodied by Updike’s ultra-conservative hero “Rabbit” Angstrom reveals just how perilous the strict interiority of domestic space can be in American literature, as played ironically through that famous mantra from Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz: “no place like home.” Transposing Wallace Stevens’s own ironization of domestic space (via Deleuze) to novelists contemporary with Updike, this third chapter concludes with readings of the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates’s Missing Mom and Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound to corroborate Deleuze’s (along with Félix Guattari’s) insight into American culture in general: “Everything begins with houses” (What Is Philosophy? 188). In the fourth chapter, “‘Both Sides and Neither’: Stevens, Masculinity, and American Film,” the figure of the “androgyne” extrapolated from Stevens’s correspondence in the second chapter is taken up once again. Here, however, readers are offered a thorough exploration of that notion embedded in the late Victorian culture surrounding Stevens’s years as an undergraduate at Harvard where he first came in contact with his teacher and mentor at the time, philosopher George Santayana. But Santayana is a personality who intrigues Stevens throughout his writing life, featuring the philosopher as ­Stevens does in one of the longer poems from his last collection, The Rock (in c p p ) entitled “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” (1952). Although Santayana was often labelled “gay” as a matter of historical record, it was the “both sides and neither” aspect of his identity that insistently won Stevens’s attention – another Deleuzian “categorical ambiguity” that this chapter explores in several other of Stevens’s later poems. With films like Adam’s Rib (1949) featuring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the famous American film director George Cukor

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is arguably well established by the time Stevens comes to compose his  Santayana tribute, and thus might seem the perfect match for Stevens’s “Old Philosopher.” Yet it would not be because Cukor was a gay director necessarily. As this chapter rounds out, it’s more Cukor’s “collaborative” approach to Hollywood film production that resonates with Santayana’s “both sides and neither” ethic, and indeed with Deleuze and Guattari’s own creative “collaborative” partnership as well. By contrast, George Stevens’s anti-collaborative “auteurism” sharply foregrounded in an earlier Hepburn-Tracy vehicle, Woman of the Year from 1942, can threaten to halt the divaof-the-year in her tracks, if not eliminate her entirely. As a poet “after hours” in the high-rolling insurance business and with a reputation for reclusion besides, Stevens is seldom thought about in the context of the poetic “school” that is flagged in the fifth chapter, “Stevens and New York School Poetry in the Distance.” But with the rise of the New York coterie of writers contemporaneous with Stevens’s later work dealt with in the previous chapter, his influence would seem inevitable, particularly among others in the case of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara – gay poets, once again – as Andrew Epstein makes the case (Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry). This chapter seeks to enlarge this “other” location for Stevens, but shifting the focus via the diva-dame to the work of Barbara Guest in her dedication both to Stevens and to the New York aesthetic particularly through the Cold War years in American culture. At a time when the lives of both women and gay men were especially embattled given the conservative temper of the 1950s, Stevens’s own argument for the “irrational element” in poetry (outlined in an important essay from 1936) could be thought to provide artistic sustenance if not self-legitimation, as the Deleuzian discourse of difference is enlisted in this chapter to reveal. The work of New York confederate James Schuyler provides an instructive parallel with which to conclude. The peculiarly a-rational “affective stutterance” (after Deleuze) in Schuyler’s very long Pulitzer Prize–winning poem The Morning of the Poem (1981) – “this grunt of words,” as Schuyler himself refers to it – reveals just how far Stevens, when read in this “other” context, might succeed in curtailing if not dismantling altogether the claustrophobic closetry of so-called Cold War containment culture in America. With the considerable attention paid to Stevens’s “irrational element in poetry” in the previous chapter, this sixth one, “‘The Play

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between the Spaces’: Stevens and Psychoanalysis,” inevitably invites some final speculation about the poet’s relation to the discourse of psychoanalysis, and in particular, the place of Freudian psychoanalysis in Stevens’s writing. As in the case of Deleuze in works like AntiOedipus, Stevens’s relation to Freud was an entirely skeptical one. Nonetheless, in a late lyric by Stevens entitled “Mountains Covered with Cats” (1946), which provides readers with the only nominal reference to Freud in the entire Collected Poetry, the shift from an “invalid personality … outcast, without the will to power / And impotent” to its powerfully imagined opposite – “spirits … seen clear … without their flesh” would uncannily appear to chart rather closely the one from ego-analysis to schizo-analysis in Deleuze’s own work, indeed right down to the liquidation of the hoary body-andsoul binary so vehemently championed by Deleuze. But if “Freud’s eye [as] the microscope of potency” accounts for this shift in psychoanalytic paradigms in Stevens’s poem, it’s only because that “eye” has placed human personality beyond form, beyond comprehension, and beyond expression in that “more than reality” just as Deleuze himself describes. Such a bodily deterritorialization of “spirits of all the impotent dead, seen clear, / And quickly under[stood], without their flesh” in Stevens’s poem (c p p 319) forges a vital link to Elizabeth Bishop’s own “spectral poetics,” I argue, and allows the book the opportunity to revisit the diva-dame figuration in a final context quite “other” to both: namely, contemporary architecture for which Bishop herself claimed to have some artistic aspirations. Bishop’s complex relationship to Stevens, examined two decades ago in a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal (see Brogan), is afforded a completely new purchase when considered in the light of the architectural theory of Frank Gehry. Gehry’s own deterritorialized identity, part Canadian and part American like Bishop’s, thus forms itself to “the play between the spaces” (the phrase is Gehry’s) that very much resonates in that Stevensian ­psychic space-of-becoming – ultimately a diva-dame “intermezzo” somewhere between Freud and Deleuze, so this chapter concludes. With its tentative “Conclusion: Diva-Dames in the Dark,” the book terminally revisits that “other” Canadian context signalled by Elizabeth Bishop previously. In attempting to gauge the extraordinary achievement of Wallace Stevens among others throughout the century now past, the renowned Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye could only draw attention to what he called the “anti-‘poetic’

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quality” of Stevens in contrast, say, to T.S. Eliot who had “pre-­ eminently,” as Frye put it, “the sense of a creative tradition at back of his work,” which made Eliot’s poetry “so uniquely penetrating, [and] so easy to memorize unconsciously” (“The Realistic Oriole” 253). Though somewhat dated by its formalist provenance, nonetheless Frye’s remarking upon the counter-traditional in Stevens provides yet another justification for pursuing Stevens’s artistic accomplishment among the other contexts designated in this study. To make good that claim, therefore, and to enlarge it even more, I return to American film taken up in the fourth chapter, with a view to teasing out a further resonance for Stevens’s diva-dame as a figuration for Deleuzian difference within the context of that “other” counter-tradition to classic Hollywood movie making: namely, film noir. In American culture, Stevens’s diva-dame or femme fatale in the much darker setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt from 1943 thus allows this study a final opportunity to revisit its Pragmatist underpinnings so expertly refurbished by Deleuze (and Guattari) in works like A Thousand Plateaus. By once again situating Stevens himself within a certain largess of human experience noted at the outset of this introduction – experience often taken to the point of incomprehensibility in the case of Hitchcock’s divas in the dark – the conclusion reinforces by way of American Pragmatism Stevens’s unique link to Deleuze whose own special work, according to Claire Colebrook, represents the very “contamination of tradition” itself. “[With] its non-identity and infidelity to itself,” so Colebrook argues, such counter-traditional waywardness under the sign of difference promises “to do away with the subject [and] any ground or home for thought” (11). With Stevens in this and among all his “other” contexts, the book speculatively concludes that there truly is “no place like home.” But before proceeding to the study itself, perhaps a final caveat. With a number of the author-pairings throughout the monograph, undeniably the intention behind it has been to reveal the extraordinary impact that Stevens’s poetry has had upon other American writers throughout the twentieth century: on the novels of Michael Cunningham and John Updike, on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Barbara Guest, and on the prose artistry of Mark Doty and George Santayana. But Wallace Stevens among Others, in the very first instance, is not intended to be a book about literary influence. Rather, with the aid of the critical theory of Gilles Deleuze (and its

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American Pragmatist underpinnings), its intention is to reveal on the basis of Stevens’s sometimes direct impact on American authorship how Stevens’s stature as a writer magnifies itself exponentially among “other” contexts – different discourses and different fields in American culture (to go with my broad-ranging title) oftentimes quite unrelated to it – with the philosophical ruminations of Deleuze often as the guide. With the occasional forays into contexts where the impact of Stevens is obviously less than direct – in the contexts of  film and architecture and the discourse of psychoanalysis, for instance – as the opening chapter will attempt to make plain at the outset, these excursions are all quite hypothetical. One clear way to tackle this thorny issue of “influence” (as one anonymous reader of the manuscript has suggested) might lie in reconfiguring the book’s overall chapter arrangement, that is, placing all the figures directly influenced by or connected to Stevens on one side of the study, and situating the more speculative corresponding readings of writers and artists on the other. Such a recommendation, however, would not only distort the study’s original intention, but would considerably lessen the impact of Stevens’s work among others that the study seeks considerably (and continuously) to enlarge. Hence, the importance of the title: not Wallace Stevens’s “Others,” but rather Wallace Stevens a mong Others and their important placement, via that signal preposition, more broadly within American culture so hypnotically synthesized by the diva-dame and so compellingly theorized by Deleuze. As I was revising the manuscript once again in light of this whole issue, quite fortuitously Mark C. Taylor’s most recent book on theology and contemporary American culture came to hand: Rewriting the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo. Taylor’s own speculating about the impact of four of the most demanding postmodern novelists writing in America today within the interplay of digital technology and contemporary belief and their corporate reimagining of the transition from human to posthuman states – such broad and daring speculation surely ups the ante on reading “among others” considerably. Yet the overarching presence throughout Taylor’s remarkable study is none other than Wallace Stevens himself: according to Taylor, “in my judgment, the most important modern poet” (284) who both opens the study (in a leading epigraph) and closes it with the very citation I myself use for my own book’s epigraph: “that the theory / 

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Of poetry is the theory of life” (qtd in Taylor on 285). Although Stevens makes several more appearances throughout Rewriting the Real in earnest of hypothetically forging the links among Taylor’s four chosen writers and their seminal relationship to the brave new a/theology of digital culture and public life, nowhere does the author claim that Stevens could conceivably have had a “direct influence” on any one of these novelists (in contrast to some of my own assertions). Taylor’s deployment of Stevens is speculative precisely in the way that my own can tend to be, and licensed by the poet’s very own rumination about “the theory of life” just noted. And so it is precisely to that very theory we now turn in order to establish the interpretive parameters for reading a quite “other” Stevens in the chapters to follow.

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1 “The Theory of Life”: Wallace Stevens, Gilles Deleuze, and the Difference They Make As the individual affirms the distance, she follows and joins it, passing through all the other individuals implied [therein] … and extracts from it a unique Event which is once again herself, or rather, the universal freedom. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

In the following collection of readings largely inspired by the work of Wallace Stevens, I endeavour to situate his poetry, sometimes directly and in other cases quite speculatively, among contexts not often associated with its extraordinary achievement in the annals of modern American culture: the gay alongside the straight fictional narrative (as in chapters 2 and 3), the classic American film (chapter 4), the postwar poetic “school” (chapter 5), and even contemporary architecture (chapter 6). Among these “other” contexts thanks to Stevens, I continue further to advance the claim elaborated previously (in Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity and Modernist American Literature) that American literature has historically tended to harbour a necessary distancing in its continuous reflection on the self, and that with the general discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity, its literary practitioners have inevitably tended to foreground subjectivity as a dissident process constantly engaging the world in a distanciated space of difference. Key to this further amplification in the context of Stevens unfolded in the chapters that follow stands the literary theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. “What are we,” he remarks in Empiricism and Subjectivity, “but the habits of saying ‘I’” (85) and tirelessly refers

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throughout his critical corpus to a whole pantheon of American writers – from Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson at one end of the canon to cummings, Fitzgerald, and Bob Dylan at the other – to argue, as in Difference and Repetition, that the “thousands of habits” forming the unconscious of our representations become the lethal domain of self-reflection in the modern era. One strand of this project, therefore, purposes to document the precise extent to which Deleuze’s theorizing about identity and difference is so indebted to American as opposed to French literature – one that according to A Thousand Plateaus is too taken up with “measuring walls, even with building them,” rather than being about the more proactive work of “positive deterritorialization” (245) as in the American writers just enumerated, though I would venture also to include Stevens himself. But why Stevens and Deleuze necessarily? By this point some twenty years after his death, Deleuze’s championing of the modern era’s “schizoid universe” pitted against all forms of sociocultural totalization and unification is perhaps well known – a capitalist schizophrenia whereby at the end of Proust and Signs, for instance, “contiguity itself is a distance” (175). Elaborating on the latter phrase, Deleuze remarks: “As the individual affirms the distance, she follows and joins it, passing through all the other individuals implied [therein] … and extracts from it a unique Event which is once again herself, or rather, the universal freedom” (Logic of Sense 178). The gendering of the individual through a changeful or eventful series of alterations is important here. Since man, conventionally defined as Being, serves in Deleuze as the self-evident ground for a habit-forming identity or molar politics, woman, or more precisely “becoming-woman” as we shall see a bit later, thus offers herself as the opening to a molecular otherness, and carries us toward a rethinking of modern American culture complementary to the more static masculinist syntheses of Being precisely in the form of a wide variety of feminist distanciations or differentiations. Yet such an eventfulness for the individual is ventured by Wallace Stevens, I would argue, in an especially Deleuzian moment he refers to as the “romance of the precise” in a late poem (ca. 1947) entitled “Adult Epigram”: The romance of the precise is not the elision Of the tired romance of imprecision. It is the ever-never-changing same,

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An appearance of Again, the diva-dame. (Collected Poetry and Prose 308, c p p hereafter) The quintessentially Deleuzian state of continuous self-transformation – “the ever-never-changing same” – will thus become synonymous throughout this study as flagged in its title with the “diva-dame,” so named by Stevens in his own “romantic” version of a precisely metamorphosizing individual. The “precise” romanticism of Stevens’s diva thus carves out a trajectory that Deleuze (along with Félix Guattari) conceives as purely verbal by “shifting away from the reassuring platitudes of the past to the openings hinted at by the future perfect.” Continues Deleuze, This is the tense of a virtual sense of potential. Memories need the imagination to empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject. They allow the subject to differ from oneself as much as possible while remaining faithful to oneself, or in other words: enduring. (qtd in Braidotti, Nomadic Theory 154) Hence “the ever-never-changing same,” as Stevens himself is pleased to say. But perhaps the most compelling link between Stevens and Deleuze in the context of modern American culture and transformative subjectivity is arguably the philosophical Pragmatism of William James for this formulation – a debt that I attempt to make plain throughout my earlier Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief, and one that Deleuze himself makes plain in Difference and Repetition via the poetry of Benjamin Blood (excerpted in James’s writing as we shall see) where arguably Deleuze glosses the diva-lady as a modernist force for “chao-errancy” to oppose to a more masculinist coherence of representation (57). As Brian Massumi in his masterful remapping the “activist philosophy” of Deleuze onto the radical empiricism of James is given to remark only recently (in Semblance and Event),“Rather than arriving at end-objects, or fulfilling objective ends, we are carried by wavelike tendencies, in a rollover of experiences perpetually substituting for each other … [so that] What we experience is less our objects’ confirmed definitions, or our own subjectivity, than their going-on together – their shared momentum,” thus concuding in the words of James himself: “Definitely felt

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transitions … are all that knowing can possibly contain or signify” (32–3, James qtd on 33). Hence, by analyzing the distance between two quite discrete notions of selfhood, that is, between the essentializing concepts that determinately fix identity, and the Pragmatist excess that marks it as an existentially incomplete endeavour, ultimately this project aims to refurbish an important rhetorical space shared between Stevens and Deleuze and the difference it makes to our reading of them despite their separation in years. But as Emerson, the father of American Pragmatism some would contend, was given to remark in the essay on “Experience” (1847), “Of what use is genius if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?” (474). Focalizing even further, Deleuze would contend that “each ‘thing’ opens itself up to [an] infinity of predicates” only when “it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or self … [and instead] traverses the divergent series [of predicates] as divergent, and causes [things, therefore] to resonate through their distance, and in their distance” (Logic of Sense 174, emphasis added). And it is to Wallace Stevens, by means of the more recent poetry of gay poet Mark Doty, that we might now turn for a more specific corroboration of that arresting Americanist insight.

•• As remarked earlier, this study continues the argument elaborated at greater length elsewhere that American literature has been historically constituted by and around and through what so often can become effaced in foundational appropriations of human experience, and of human subjectivity in particular: namely, a constitutive space, at once dark, mysterious, unspeakable, that Joyce Carol Oates, for one, in a recent novel characterizes as that “black hole in the firmament where God used to be,” and that given their “yearnings for infinitude,” “Americans are likely to feel … [they] never grow out of” (Broke Heart Blues 92, emphasis retained). In a literature as self-­ referential as America’s, I view this lettered space, moreover, as a radical locus of misrecognition – a space inveterately and omnivorously and indefatigably about the cultural work of distancing texts as various as novels, poems, stories, memoirs, even people themselves, from essences, origins, ends, and ultimate truths. In response to the age-old demand to describe what is life and what is death, the ancient female sage in Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize address over

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two decades ago, we notice, is guardedly silent: “she does not [answer]; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space” (n.p.). Let me suggest even further that the “sophisticated privileged space,” in Morrison’s own words here, that opens up between the self and the perennial social demands placed upon that self is a space that has been kept and guarded in American literature for a very long time if Emerson’s essay on “Experience” invoked previously is any indication. But much closer to our own time, listen to American Lambda Award–winning poet Mark Doty ruminating upon Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto’s View of the Grand Canal (ca. 1740), currently housed in the J. Paul Getty Museum. First, from the meditation entitled “Boats” from Doty’s essay Seeing Venice: The infinity of them, in the distance, clustered in the Bacino di San Marco, off along the Riva degli Schiavoni. A welter of vessels, a dense web of rigging … At first a meaningless jumble – and then it never quite seems to stop revealing more and more. So much to be known! Praise for the instrument of the eye. (n.p.) Then, this excerpt from the following meditation entitled “Masts”: [Bellotto] shows off; he renders a distance so intricate as to seem inexhaustible. So complicated, visually, that finally we simply have to give up and admire him – our eyes can’t possibly match his, can barely follow these intricate distances in their overlaps and complexities … we’re stunned. There’s more here than we thought, and more than we’ll ever see. (n.p.) In the American tradition of thought that provides the historical context within which to situate Mark Doty, and Wallace Stevens before him as we shall see, I am emboldened to draw upon the philosophical Pragmatism of William James. For as with Doty’s iteration of the “more and more” of worldly experience befalling the human eye, it is William James who is awed by a similar intricacy and complexity in A Pluralistic Universe, and thus finds himself “compelled to give up [on] logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably.” James’s complete aversion to logic lies in its exclusionary curtailment of reality,

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parcelling it out, as the logic of exclusion does, to “real essence” and “full truth.” Such a tyrannous methodology could only “defeat the end it was used for” – that end, of course, being to come to terms with “reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy,” which we should always find “exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it” (qtd in Ronald Martin 86). Gilles Deleuze, whose own critical investment in American literature is profound and wide-ranging, is vexed by exclusionary thinking to a similar degree. And I enlist his theory on behalf of James, and modern American literature more generally, for the very reason intuited by Doty previously: the safeguarding of rhetorical distance. Massumi, mindful of passages like the one drawn from The Logic of Sense cited above – “each ‘thing’ opens itself up to [an] infinity of predicates … caus[ing] [things, therefore] to resonate through their distance, and in their distance” – further observes, In his writings on art, Deleuze often says that to really perceive, to fully perceive, which is to say to perceive artfully, you have to “cleave things asunder,” you have to open them back up. You have to make their semblance appear as forcefully as possible. You have to give the thing its distances back. [Deleuze] quotes Francis Bacon: you have to make a Sahara of it … Not in accordance with purely logical categories, progressions, and relations. Not to represent. Not to reflect. Instead, as an event … that has a style all its own … and is as really appearing as it is infinitely expansive. (51)1 With respect to the undermining of categorical representation just noted – the loss of “identity as concept or as self” according to Deleuze’s Logic (174) – divergance thus becomes an important aspect of the predication of experience, underwriting as it does the “pluralism” of James’s universe previously, or at least the perspectivism with which he views it, and thus leads us back, once again, to all those boats and masts in Doty’s response to Bellotti’s painting, or in this next passage from Deleuze, to the superabundance of towns: Towns are linked only by their distance and resonate only through the divergence of their series, their houses and their streets. There is always another town within the town. Each term becomes the means of going all the way to the end of another, [and] by following the entire distance – perspectivism – …

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divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, and disjunction no longer a means of separation. Incompossibility is now a means of communication. (Logic of Sense 174) On this account, then, contrary to received wisdom, great minds are likely to be “great” not because they think alike, but because they don’t. Ultimately, their going the distance allows for the fashioning of perspectives for experience – those that can “displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (Adorno 247). Our insistence, nonetheless, upon forging likenesses between great minds perhaps suggests that another kind of distance may be at work in our response to worldly experience – the kind of distance, in Theodor Adorno’s own meditation on that term, that can function as a “safety-zone” (127), a sort of self-protective mechanism that would stave off the alterity of experience by foundationalizing truth, viewing truth in the terms that James had complained of, as so many logical categories and essentializing representations. If playing it safe casts the notion of distance in a somewhat negative light, Deleuze would counter this stratagem in his indispensable Logic of Sense with the notion of what he calls “positive distance”: “The idea of a positive distance as distance … appears to us essential since it permits the measuring of contraries through their infinite difference instead of equating difference with a measureless contrariety, and contrariety with an identity” (172–3). In “Letter to Walt Whitman” from his most recent collection of poetry entitled Source, Mark Doty corroborates the point succinctly: “our theorists / question notions of identity: Are you who you love, or can you dwell in categorical ambiguity? Our numbers divide, merge and multiply … who’s to say just who anyone is?” (30–1). Subjectivity, in other words, plays it safe when it holds off otherness – the “chaosmos” or “aleatory point” as Deleuze refers to it in The Logic (176) – and makes truth entirely coincident with itself. Divergence, disjunction, differentiation – distance, in a word – for which nothing less than the image of “the Grand Canyon of the world, the ‘crack’ of the self, and the dismembering of God” seems to suit Deleuze’s purpose (176), promises something quite other. And just at this conjuncture between the critical theory of Deleuze and the poetic practice Doty, it is none other than Wallace Stevens who now provides us with the crucial intertext.

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From the point of view of the safety zone of logical speculation, there is first of all in Stevens the kind of subjectivity predisposed to hold off otherness – that “crack” in the self just alluded to – in order to make its own truth entirely self-coincident. That would be the kind of indulgent self-representation that greets us in “Wild Ducks, People and Distances” (1945), for instance, where “the final fatal distances” of Stevens’s villagers only serve to show just how resistant they are to “the weather of other lives” (c p p 329, emphases added). On the other hand, in the process of identification that I view characteristically deployed in modernist American poetry, we are more likely to encounter in Stevens the representation overshooting its object to problematize the strict correspondence to external reality thus making truth “ambulatory,” according to James, since, in Massumi’s gloss on that Pragmatist term, “Words point-toward, in active tending, more than they pin down, in logically fixed designation” (118, 119).2 Such rhetorical ambulation is thus likely to land us in a more daring space of “internal difference, / Where the Meanings are –” according to Emily Dickinson (Complete Poems 118), a modernist prototype of Stevens’s diva-dame perhaps. For Doty, the closeness betokened by such internality suggests something deeply paradoxical about human experience as he remarks continuously throughout another essay wholly inspired by classical painting, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: how things “placed right next to us” (or in Dickinson’s case, inside us) “in absolute intimacy” are at the same time “unknowable” (66). As Doty goes on to observe, “they satisfy so deeply because they offer us intimacy and distance at once, allow us to be both here and gone,” and thus concludes: Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think – to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention. (67) Or, as Deleuze might gloss the paradox of identity here: “Distance is, at arm’s length, the affirmation of that which it distances” (Logic of Sense 173). In sum, then, “dwelling in categorical ambiguity” from Doty’s “Letter to Walt Whitman” cited earlier becomes a rather apt encapsulation of Stevens’s diva-dame, a Deleuzian state of “becoming”

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somewhere between the poet’s Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, who first “approached the real … in order to get at [her]self,” and later finds that self “rushing from what was real” (“Mrs. Alfred Uruguay,” c p p 225), and his Lady Lowzen, “for whom what is was other things,” and who therefore “skims the real for its unreal” (“Oak Leaves Are Hands,” c p p 243). But in several other texts from Source, we can imagine Doty outdistancing Stevens precisely on the matter of a noncategorical and nonreferential approach to identity – what Deleuze is pleased to refer to as the “pre-individual and impersonal,” a kind of “counter self” in modern writing traversed by that “aleatory” otherness mentioned earlier (Logic of Sense 176). Thus, from an early poem in the collection entitled “Fish R Us” where we read about “a billion incipient citizens” who are “suspended, held / at just a bit of distance / (a bit is all there is), all / facing outwards, eyes,” we then move on to one midway through the volume entitled “Elizabeth Bishop” (in “An Island Sheaf” series), and there to ruminate with considerable uncertainty about some “homeless one” dawbed into an undated watercolour by Bishop – uncertain because “we aren’t sure what one / of anything is. And therefore must begin the work again” (45). Until finally we come to the eponymous concluding poem to the collection, entitled “Source,” whose opening stanzas tenderly position its central focus upon “three horses in a fenced field,” but of course “within a slight distance.” There, the text’s remaining stanzas climax with the poet’s searching meditation about “the cool womb / of nothing” and the generous “breathing space” rather like Deleuze’s notion of that discursive aleatory point driving all living things into some impossible / compossible state of (non)being: The poem wants the impossible the poem wants a name for the kind nothing at the core of time, out of which the foals come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming ................................... Cold, bracing nothing, which mothers forth mud and mint, hoof and clover, root-hair and horse-hair … [and] … the rust spotted little one unfolding itself into the afternoon. (75)

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The contents of this concluding poem, indeed of the entire gathering, become rather like those of grandmother’s purse movingly rendered in Doty’s Still Life memoir: “each laid out barely touching each other, each made poignant with distance and time” (15). But whether it takes the form of either poetry or prose, as Deleuze remarks elsewhere, art “no longer selects but affirms the disjointed terms through their distance, without limiting one by the other or excluding one from the other, laying out and passing through the entire set of possibilities” (“He Stuttered” 110–11). We might conclude, therefore, by pointing to an earlier interview wherein Doty himself remarks upon a similar set of distanciated possibilities, observing as he does that “the distance of art is a great gift to us because it is a way of standing back and seeing who we are, what we have found.” Continues Doty: We are turning experience around in our hands so we can look at it, see its facets and its possibilities … to encourage that kind of standing back in order to see that this impulse to write could take many different forms … [Hence,] we can train ourselves to see over time that each impulse has in fact multiple possibilities … in order to make better intuitive decisions later on. (“Ice & Salt: An Interview with Mark Doty” 6) Hence, if “incompossibility” is now a means of communication (Deleuze, once again), it’s only because “the poem wants the impossible” (Doty, once again), “a name for the kind of nothing at the core of time.” Or in early Stevens’s “The Snow Man” and its infamous “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (c p p 8) as a kind of augury for the self-detachment in the latter, wherein distance speaks quietly and large in space to men and women “without reference to their form” (c p p 263) cited previously, and therefore joins them together in “universal freedom” (to recur to my opening epigraph). Judith Butler theorizes about a “social space for community” in more rigorously gendered terms than either Doty or Stevens, observing as how “a distance will be opened up between that hegemonic call to normativizing gender and its critical appropriation” (Bodies That Matter 137, emphasis retained). And so, not quite “the cold, bracing nothing” alluded to in Doty’s “Source” (75). A better reading for the implied distance of that nothing, I think, comes from a final gloss of Stevens by Doty in his “American Sublime.” Although “all in

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the dark” like Stevens’s well-known metaphysician (see my Question of Belief), “Nothing. No,” Doty scruples to conclude: “Flying, just visible / in the faint signal of the exit sign: our little hero circumambulating still” (“Source” 69). In a Deleuzian account of that “nothing” as “pure amodal reality,” Massumi once again reminds us that “language cannot reach this directly future-feeling limit of thought” if it is shackled to the empirical order of the senses. “But in imagination, it can approach it [since] … [language’s] partnership with pure thought … ‘semblances in which nothing … appears’” underscores [the word’s] true “creative power” (122). This final “going round” therefore allows us to finesse the precise join between Doty and Stevens in the supreme fashion of the precursor poet’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”: “the going round / And round and round, the merely going round … [as] a final good” (c p p 350). But at what devastating cost do we forego the amodal reality of the diva-dame’s transformative becomings by remaining immovably devoted to the strictly empirical and orderly? In answer to that, we ourselves remove to a context quite different from Doty and Deleuze to round out this theoretical chapter, but no less instructive, from a Deleuzian point of view, with an example from modern American fiction.

•• In this new context, so different from the purely imaginative presentiment of texts like “Adult Epigram” and “American Sublime,” we find ourselves now in that horrifically sobering borderland – a state of emergency, really – between the United States and Mexico of the present day, a frontier land, as Larry McMurtry recently observes, “that has been dangerous from the day it became a border.” “Settlers, travelers, diplomats, surveyors, military men, even the outlaws themselves,” writes McMurtry, “learned to tread cautiously in northern Mexico, that vast area that had been, in turn, New Spain, then (after 1821) Mexico, then (for nine years) Texas, then (1846–48) a war zone, and, finally, thanks to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, Mexico for good” (51). “Cormac McCarthy’s justly acclaimed [novel] Blood Meridian deals with the border country in the period of transfer,” continues McMurtry, “and if that doesn’t scare you his more recent look at the border, No Country for Old Men, probably will” (51). And perhaps never more so than in light of this border country now returned fairly much to the status of “war zone” once again by 2009. According to one recent report, “Mexican drug gangs

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are killing rivals in record numbers,” with 850 deaths tallied for the month of July of this year alone (Cardona A5). The report goes on to observe that “the death rate so far this year stands at around 4,000, about a third higher than in the same period in 2008,” and concludes that although “Mexico has managed to disrupt cocaine supplies and make some major arrests,” nonetheless “top [drug] barons are still at large and more than 13,000 people have died in drug violence since [President Felipe] Calderon took office in December 2006” (Cardona A5).3 In recounting the state of emergency signalled by the drug wars in America of the present day, McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men essentially tells the gripping story of thirty-one-year-old Llewellyn Moss, a day-labouring welder by profession who, one day on a hunting expedition for antelope, happens upon the massacre of eight Mexican drug runners and, a short distance away from the killing field, a huge stash of cash amounting to some $2.4 million. Deciding to abscond with the money and start a new life for himself and his wife, Carla Jean, in California (with a sickly mother-in-law in tow), Moss fatally falls afoul of two hitman, Anton Chigurh and another named Wells, vying for the drug money ostensibly at the behest of rival gangs. The suspenseful progress of Moss’s thievery is all the while monitored by the much older Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, haplessly endeavouring to curtail drug trafficking in the Tex-Mex border country and continuously frustrated in the process since both Moss and his wife (along with Wells) will be added to the ghastly death toll by the end of the novel while the criminally responsible Chigurh will continue to roam at large. An overwhelming sense of frustration in face of America’s burgeoning criminality and recidivism thus forces Sheriff Bell into an early and regretful retirement, a sorry conclusion anticipated by a number of despairing meditations throughout the novel like the following: I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country … And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework … Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket

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people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m getting old. That it’s one of the symptoms. But my feeling about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem that what I’ve got. (No Country, 195–6, italics retained) Borrowing its title from “Sailing to Byzantium,” the novel thus plays into a kind of Yeatsian nostalgia hovering above this and several other of Sheriff Bell’s ubi sunt ruminations throughout the story. But the “bigger problem” as McCarthy assesses America’s present state of emergency in this novel transcends the mere wistfulness of an attenuated nostalgia. Published four years after the “September 11” attacks in 2001, and thus in the wake of America’s decade-long obsession with security in its various forms – national security, Homeland Security, border security, and so forth – No Country for Old Men registers a sense of panic about human vulnerability that the story’s male characters are prone to articulate in particular. As Moss for one observes, “It had already occurred to him that he would probably be never safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did?” (109). Echoing Moss here, Dori Laub sums up the case in “September 11, 2001 – An Event Without a Voice” in Judith Greenberg’s important collection of essays, Trauma at Home after 9/11, when he affirms that “no place is safe,” and that “there is no such thing as the safety of a home [since] it can vanish in a moment” (207). In the context of Moss’s previous remark about the precariousness of masculine identity, an identity even more vulnerably imperilled by the very porosity of McCarthy’s cross-border setting, homing in on masculinity, much less housing it within some kind of secure and recognizable self-concept, is thus likely to be an equally vanishing prospect. And it’s this vanishing state of emergency that throughout the decade McCarthy’s authorship appears only to enlarge, for instance, in a passage like the following from his more recent The Road: When [the father] rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where [his son] had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was … [later,] someone had come out of the

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woods in the night and continued down the melted roadway. Who is it? said the boy. I don’t know [replied the father]. Who is anybody? (41–1) Yet a quite different notion of masculine self-concept, “something all but unaccountable” remarked above, is suggested by James Berger’s essay in the Greenberg anthology, and Berger’s extended argument about the status of “truth” as that which “must be continually imagined” post 9/11 (57). As Berger sees it, “the truth of the (changing) present is understood in terms of the truth of the past, which will also change as it is reimagined, reunderstood.” If in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men it’s the crisis surrounding masculinity itself which in particular becomes the “truth” that must be signally reimagined – “the ever-never-changing same” as Stevens would have it – one compelling interpretation of male identity especially commends itself: one in transit between becomingwoman as a kind of emasculated state of emergency rife for guarded renovation and safe home improvement (à la President George Bush) to its opposite. With the latter, on the other hand, ­masculinity presents itself as an emergent occasion for reassessment and reconfiguration in the womanist terms (à la philosopher Gilles Deleuze) that I  attempted to elaborate earlier in this chapter, and will continue in what follows here as a kind of estranged “becoming” rather like those homeless trout on the very last page of McCarthy’s The Road once again: “Polished and muscular and torsional … [they] were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing that could not be put back. Not be made right again … they hummed of mystery” (241, emphasis added). The character of Anton Chigurh in No Country perhaps makes boldly the case for the kind of masculine identity that we imagine for Stevens’s “tired romance” noted earlier, that is, a masculine identity determined to lose no ground despite its essentialist imperilment as foregrounded in the context of modern drug warfare. By essentialism here, I mean the axiomatic mindset concerning masculinity that views it as inevitably fixed, entirely self-contained, and totally impervious to alteration vis-à-vis the outside world. As Chigurh’s chief masculine opponent, Wells, summarily concludes, it’s not so much that Chigurh is a “psychopathic killer” that makes him so dangerous: “There’s plenty of them around,” Wells scoffs. It’s simply the case that what Wells has to contend with is inexorable: “In general.

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The invincible Mr Chigurh” (141, 140, emphasis added). Chigurh’s own reliance upon the tossing of coins that occurs in two very memorable scenes in the novel perhaps symbolizes his changeless imperturbability since winning or losing, whether in games or in real life, is already preordained. “Anything can be an instrument,” Chigurh announces in the first coin-toss episode early in the story involving a guileless filling-station owner. “Small things. Things you wouldn’t even notice,” he assures the garageman. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same … What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes, that’s true. (57) But far from interchangeable, history is unchangeable tout court Chigurh would contend. And for him, the coin thus becomes emblematic of an ironclad immutability that redounds to human identity itself, and finds its correspondent fixity in the punning image of Chigurh’s own frightening “eyes”: “Blue as lapis. At once glistening and totally opaque. Like wet stones” (56). In the second and much longer coin-toss episode near the end of the novel involving Moss’s wife Carla Jean, Chigurh again intends to make plain that choosing an alternative outcome for oneself – Carla Jean’s pleading for her life as against Chigurh’s own “word” to her husband to kill her (255) – that such contingency is a mere diversion from life’s fateful implacability: I had no say in the matter … The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes, and even more ­seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. (259) Thus in response to Carla Jean’s continued pleading – “You don’t have to [kill me], she said. You don’t. You don’t” (259) – Chigurh can only shake his head. “You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow

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for special cases” (260, emphasis added). For Chigurh to acknowledge that “things could have turned out differently,” and that “they could have been some other way” – “They are not some other way. They are this way” (260) – would require, astonishingly, for Chigurh to “second say the world” as he uneasily admits. But implacable masculinity has only “one way” and “one say” in the world, as Chigurh forcibly requires Carla Jean “truly” to see herself (261): “Yes, she said sobbing, I do. I truly do … Then he shot her” (260). With Carla Jean’s “truly” here, we’re a fair distance from Stevens’s diva-dame, that is, from James Berger’s earlier “truth” as that which “must be continually imagined” in the post-9/11 context of America’s national trauma. And so we look for an alternative model of identity perhaps in the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who indeed might have a “second say” on the contemporary world and man’s more adaptable place in it, as he admits late in the novel: “I’m not the man of an older time they say I am. I wish I was. I’m a man of this time” (279). However, despite Bell’s more complex appreciation of the accelerating criminal culture in America at present as noted in wistful reflections like the one cited earlier, in truth Bell seems as fearful and guarded about the question of male vulnerability as Chigurh previously. We know this from an experience he shares with his elderly Uncle Ellis, himself a former law enforcement officer rendered a paraplegic in the fight against crime in which his nephew is presently engaged. In short, what Sheriff Bell imparts to his uncle is even more fear about male weakness – in Bell’s case, weakness impacted with an enormous sense of guilt for having been wrongfully awarded a Bronze Star for meritorious conduct in an altercation with some German riflemen overseas during the Second World War. On that memorable morning decades ago, rather premonitorially like the 9/11 attacks closer to the present, Sargent Bell had been blown out of a two-room stone house along with some members of his army platoon. For the rest of the day, he had attempted to fend off enemy fire in a field beyond the decimated house. By nightfall, however, his courage faltered, and he admits for the first time to anyone alive that “[he] cut and run … [and] that it seemed a pretty good idea at the time” (276). As Bell shamefully recounts his male betrayal at this point: I watched it get dark and I had not heard nothin from anybody that was in the wreckage there for a while. They might could of

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all been dead by then. But I didnt know that. And quick as it got dark I got up and left out of there … And sometime the next night I come to an American position and that was pretty much it. I thought after so many years it would go away. I don’t know why I thought that. Then I thought that maybe I could make up for it and I reckon that’s what I have tried to do. (277–8) For several decades afterward, therefore, Bell resorts to the enforcement of law as a stay against male vulnerability in the very way that Chigurh resorts to the game of chance. And if the figures of house and home become the very means by which to trope invincibility and impregnability in place of manhood’s psychic vulnerability as Freud among other modern theorists suggests,4 it’s perhaps no accident that being blown out of a house so long ago is the very thing that ultimately will restore Ed Tom Bell to some degree of masculinist protection and safety. By that point, the guardedness of law for Sheriff Bell has outlived its purpose in America’s present crime-­ ridden culture, and now points the way to a highly prized domiciled retirement completely beyond active duty as the sheriff reflects at the end of the novel in the presence of his wife, Loretta, who states, “I think I’m going to like havin you home for dinner,” to which Ed Tom replies, “I like bein home any time,” and “I bet [Mama] wishes Daddy [now dead] could come home [too]” (301). The domestication of male identity within the sheltered and nurturing precincts of the family home thus affords another sense of “becoming-woman,” and perhaps reiterates, for some, a further state of emergency for embattled manhood in the present time.5 The countless references throughout the narrative to all the prominent male characters’ staring out of windows – “[Moss] rose and stood looking out the window at the stars over the rocky escarpment to the north of town” (23); “[Chigurh] stood there holding the [milk] carton in one hand and looking out the window” (80); “Wells studied [Moss]. He turned and looked out the window” (151); “[Bell] leaned back in his chair and looked out the window at the bleak courthouse lawn” (167); and so forth – all of these repeated references, to the degree that they underscore the safety and protection of male identity under the symbolic aegis of domestic enclosure, also tend to ironize masculinity’s fearful prophylaxis to a greater degree I would argue. And the homeland paranoia consequent to the 9/11 attacks in America arguably serves, several years on in McCarthy’s novel, to

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underpoint the irony of masculinity’s failed “transcendence” (Foster 64) to an even further degree. Together, all the foregoing references cumulatively circle back to the whole problematic of the known within the highly constrained parameters of male subjective space – a problematic that Sheriff Bell  wrestles with continuously. “But I didnt know that,” “I don’t know why I thought that,” and so on (278), he says in that anecdote recounted to Uncle Ellis previously, but also elsewhere throughout the story: “This other thing I don’t know” (62); “What do you reckon it is we’re fixin to find down here? I don’t know, Bell said” (71); “Bell shook his head. I don’t know” (194; further on 39, 95, 79, 213, 216, 228, 245, 268, and 293). To be so knowingly impervious to the larger contours of experience is arguably the most lethal state of emergency in McCarthy’s novel. As lethal perhaps as knowing too much, the suicidal position approximately of Carla Jean, who thinks she knows everything there is to know about her husband from a domestic viewpoint, and whose “becoming-woman” thus joins her to the benightedness of her male counterparts when she boasts to Sheriff Bell: “He aint left me. I know him … I know him yet. He aint changed [at all]” (128). The fact of the matter, however, is that unbeknownst to wife Carla Jean, Llewellyn Moss does change in the novel, and change dramatically. Perhaps it’s his frightening stay at the Trail Motel in Del Rio that accounts for the radical alteration in character when he almost loses his life in a do-or-die confrontation with the lethal Chigurh. Or, perhaps from his hospital bed where he has taken refuge after his near-death altercation with Chigurh, it’s his subsequent phone conversation with Chigurh and Chigurh’s threat levelled against Moss’s wife that accounts for the change: “You bring me the money and I’ll let her walk. Otherwise she’s accountable. The same as you” (184). Whatever the case, when Moss eventually absconds from the hospital and we find him on the move again – McCarthy is deliberately mum about whether Moss is making his way to either a showdown with Chigurh or a reunion with Carla Jean – Moss is clearly a different man when he meets up with an anonymous female hitchhiker en  route to California, and surprisingly begins giving some of the stolen drug money away: He counted out a thousand dollars onto the formica and pushed it toward her and put the roll back in his pocket …

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What’s that for? To go to California on. What I gotta do for it? You don’t have to do nothin. Even a blind sow finds a acorn once in a while. Put that up and let’s go. (223) With this entirely selfless gesture, we sense in Moss here not a little of Sheriff Bell’s own attempts “to put things in perspective” as he reflects upon his visit to Moss’s father at the end of the novel to ­commiserate with him about his son’s eventual death at the hands of Chigurh. As Bell’s meditation continues: “It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong” (295, italics retained). So who is the Llewellyn Moss that we “really” see by the end of the story, and what might his significantly altered character reveal about McCarthy’s own (re)assessment of masculine identity after 9/11? At this point, I might suggest we revise our view of masculine emergency in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and in so doing revise our view of “becoming-woman” as well. In the Dialogues, Gilles Deleuze (with Claire Parnet) remarks that “experimentation on ourselves is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us” (11). Such “experimentation,” I would contend, constitutes fairly much the theoretical wager in McCarthy’s novel when we reflect upon it from the point of view of identity construction. In the ever-expanding space that opens up in the narrative between the hyper-violent and sociopathic behaviour of Anton Chigurh and that of the hyper-quiescent and socio-empathic Sheriff Bell, readers of McCarthy quite emphatically experience a palpable shift away from the model of American masculinity instinct – from both self-protective aggression and self-absorbed isolation­as outlined earlier. In these two oft-repeated guises we find what Deleuze (with Félix Guattari) in A Thousand Plateaus refers to as the “faciality function” of man as “the molar entity par excellence” in Western culture: “the form under which man constitutes the majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based: white, male, adult, ‘rational,’ etc., in short the average European [or American] subject of enunciation. Following the law of aborescence, it is [this] central Point that moves across every space of the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition” (Thousand Plateaus 292).

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Now that “distinctive opposition” to the “central Point” of masculinity in a novel like No Country for Old Men cannot be the entity categorized as “woman,” for that would merely flip the gender binary and deposit yet another molar or arborescent construction of personhood in place of central man. “Becoming-woman,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, thus argues for a complete departure from these two molar points of reference, angling instead for a molecular construction of subjectivity that “on the contrary passes between points, comes up through the middle, [and] runs perpendicular to the points first perceived … [or] to distant or contiguous points,” rather like a “line of flight.” This important strategy for dismantling binary systems is made similarly elsewhere in A Thousand Plateaus: “The only way to get outside the [gender] dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo … [Accordingly,] children draw their strength from the becoming-molecular … [causing them] to pass between sexes and ages … the becoming-woman of the man as well as of the woman … the becoming young of every age” (277). Hence, the alignment of a male character like Moss with the “becomingwoman” in Deleuze is not an attempt to “feminize” or “womanize” his masculine identity, for as Jerry Aline Flieger rightly observes, “‘woman’ is not even a noun in [Deleuze’s] lexicon,” and further observes: “In the term ‘becoming-woman,’ woman has the same ­syntactical force as the adjective ‘intense’ or ‘animal,’ as in ‘animal magnetism.’ [Therefore,] the most important term in ‘becomingwoman’ is neither noun or adjective, but the verbal gerund, designating ‘becoming’ as a line of flight, moving towards excess, other, exteriority. Deleuze’s world is not in stasis; hence, woman is not a goal or a term, but a potential, a valance” (“Becoming-Woman” 47). As a prospective “line of flight,” Deleuze and Guattari further explain the “becoming” potential of noncentral (i.e., “becomingwoman”) identity as follows: A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin or destination; to speak of the absence of an origin, to make absence of an origin an origin, is a bad play on words. [Nonetheless,] a line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement … [As such,] it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running

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perpendicular to [two points] … [and thus] constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, [and] carrying one into the proximity of the other – [a] border-­proximity [as it were] … (Thousand Plateaus 292, 293, emphasis added) While it is true, therefore, that the character of Llewellyn Moss when we last take leave of him may conceivably settle into a narrative space somewhere between the aggressive activity of Chigurh and the proactive passivity of Bell, ultimately it’s his encapsulation of the “three virtues” of becoming-woman, namely, “imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality” (Thousand Plateaus 280) given by his mysterious attachment to the female hitchhiker that best limns our final and most indelible impression of him in the novel. And while Henry James, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the American novelist par excellence for “molecularizing the content of the secret” in his myriad characterization, and “linearizing its form” (290), Cormac McCarthy’s own investment in the ethic of “becoming-woman” in this novel at least arguably makes his authorship the rival of James’s by unhousing a post-9/11 protean masculinity within that dark and tangled cross-border “noman’s-land” somewhere between America and its Mexican “other.” This arguable claim, which I make by way of conclusion, is mounted, of course, on the additional basis of Moss’s very departure from the most visible female presence in McCarthy’s narrative, namely, his wife Carla Jean – the woman in the story who purports, we recall, “to know” everything about her husband. On this very issue, Moss couldn’t be more different from his wife, as revealed in the following exchange, one of his last in the story: [The female hitchhiker] looked at him. I guess I aint sure what the point is, she said. The point is there aint no point [Moss replied]. No. I mean what you said. About knowin where you are. He looked at her. After a while he said: It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You don’t start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it. (227)

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With the emphasis in this passage very much on the serial accumulation of experience in establishing one’s relation to the world without fixed origins and final ends – “Ever step you take is forever” – and with the emphasis, too, on the withholding of clear answers and known outcomes – “The point is there aint no point” – in a quite Deleuzian fashion, Moss gives voice to that “becoming-woman” notion of identity that, in the above citation from A Thousand Plateaus, can only “speak of the absence of its origin [and] make absence of an origin an origin” (293). Or, to gloss the passage in slightly different terms, his “becoming-woman” announces itself as a “deterritorialization” of identity where the continuous line of flight of its territorialization can only actively make it a failed “reterritorialization” and so on its way to another as yet indiscernible and imperceptible approximation of identity in the manner that Stevens insists upon in his “Adult Epigram” with that “appearance of Again” (c p p 308). The capitalized “Again” is important here. For as Deleuze and Guattari also insist, “Even blacks, as the Black panthers said, must become black. Even women must become-woman” (291).6 In fact, “queer” is Moss’s own idiomatic take on such becomings – that inescapable tag for masculinity which, he reminds his hitchhiking companion, is always its own immediate disavowal: “Say it again [that] I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s good. You need to practice that” (No Country 228). McCarthy’s designation of “queer” in the context of a not-knowing, therefore, points once again to the imperceptible and indiscernible in matters of identity construction, what Claire Colebrook in her introduction to Deleuze and Feminist Theory eloquently describes as “the opening of a possibility for thinking beyond subjectivity and identity,” that is, “thinking [of] new modes of becoming – not as the becoming of some subject, but of a becoming towards others, a becoming towards difference, and a becoming through new questions” (3, 12, emphasis retained). And within that movement towards others and towards difference perhaps lies at least one important “truth” about American culture, according to James Berger earlier, “that must be continually imagined” in the post-9/11 context of the country’s national trauma as one very salutary possibility highlighted in the figuration of Stevens’s diva-dame for moving beyond it. “Voices may be territorialized on the distribution of the two sexes,” Deleuze and Guattari likewise observe, “but the continuous sound flow still passes between them as in a difference of potential” (Thousand Plateaus 308). Precisely

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that “possibility” and that “potential” contribute most to making “becoming” such a “queer” prospect in Moss’s “don’t know” sense of the term, a notion of sexual and gender (along with racial and national) difference that I elsewhere nominate as the “dissident” or “distanciated” subject (see Jarraway, Going the Distance). Whether racial, feminist, or queer, then, the “becoming-woman” that McCarthy’s novel gives voice to, in any case, will be a deterritorialization of identity at the very point of utterance and so an emergent state of self-formation rather than an emergency one quite reminiscent of Stevens’s “appearance of Again” (c p p 308). Commenting on this particular neologism in Deleuze, Inna Semetzky rather insightfully views deterritorialization as “an event of leaving the symbolic home and cutting ties with the familiar territory which thus leads to one’s uprooting” (95). In this quite eventful way, Moss thus forms an interesting parallel to the anti-hero in French novelist Paul Morand’s Monsieur Zéro, a prickly protagonist who “flees the larger countries, crosses the smallest ones, descends the scale of States, establishes an anonymous society in Lichtenstein of which he is the only member, and dies imperceptible, forming the particle 0 with his fingers: ‘I am a man who flees by swimming under water, and at whom all the world’s rifles fire … I must no longer offer a target’” (Thousand Plateaus 279). As a newly emergent masculinity, the in-between character of Llewellyn Moss, in the final analysis, comes into (or better, out of) its own precisely in these terms before he vanishes forever: homeless, as we might expect, and so now “the self [as] only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities,” hence “a borderline functioning as Anomalous” (Thousand Plateaus 249), that is, a Hermes-like “borderline figure, with one foot in each traditional gender role” (Foster 59), if not more. In this way, then, “To do away with the subject is to do away with any ground or home for thought; thought becomes nomadic,” according to Colebrook, nomadic, that is, as a further instance of “a becoming that embraces all those questions and problems that have precluded thought from being at home with itself – including the thought of woman” (11, 17, emphasis added). In “Wounded New York,” Judith Greenberg’s own essay contribution to Trauma at Home referenced earlier follows a similar Deleuzian train of thought; she remarks that “‘home’ promises both belonging and estrangement and the difficulty of defining either according to a monolithic vision” (31). Clearly, it’s “no country for old men,” but instead, “a zone of

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indiscernibility” as Deleuze and Guattari reiterate (Thousand Plateaus 277). Within that brave new American frontier, they further observe, “even the most virile, the most phallocratic [writers], such as Lawrence and [Henry] Miller … in writing … become-women” (277), without which, Semetzky corroborates, “their own creative becoming would not be possible” (115). This final reading of Moss’s character perhaps makes most sense in terms of McCarthy’s symbolism of the Tex-Mex no-man’s-land in which we take our terminal view of Moss’s line of flight speeding through the southern night. But the borderland also invites the reading that positions him at the intersection between the “multiplicities” of past and future, and so puts us finally in mind of the two dreams that Sheriff Bell recounts on the novel’s final pages: the first of a mason carving out “a stone water trough in the weeds by the side of the house” – the houseless location is important here as we shall see in the chapters to follow – “[with] some sort of promise in his heart” (307–8); and the other of his father “going through this pass in the mountains … and carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do” (309, italics retained). Moss’s tragic demise at the hands of Chigurh consigns him definitively to a being-past, it is true. Yet it’s a past that, in the post-9/11 climate of a “no country for old men” now a decade or so on, only makes sense in terms of the becoming-future that both Bell’s dream figures, like Moss himself, make promise of as McCarthy’s novel concludes: “goin on ahead … fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold” (309, italics retained).

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2 “The Novel That Took the Place of a Poem”: Stevens and Queer Discourse It is necessary to consider that sexuality always exceeds any given performance, presentation, or narrative which is why it is not possible to derive or read off a sexuality from any given gender presentation. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” The very essence of romance is uncertainty. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest If you can’t imagine something, it can’t come into being. bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread

The collocation of Wallace Stevens and queer discourse, for some, is likely to be somewhat of a stretch. I say this not with an eye to the second element of my chapter’s subtitle, but principally to the poet designated in the first. “Queer is hot,” after all (Berlant and Warner 343). Stevens is not. Nor, I would hazard, has he ever been. To the contrary, Wallace Stevens, through the years, has garnered the canonical reputation, as Joseph Harrington observes, of “a retiring aesthete writing verses,” one who “loathed reading in public” and who was prone “to block out or keep a lid on what was going on around him [so that] alienation, historical reality, or the Other came back (unconsciously) to haunt him” (95, 96).1 In the last couple of decades, however, thanks largely to the meticulous historical analysis of Stevens’s published work and the archival retrieval of his unpublished work, by critics such as James Longenbach and Alan Filreis, we have been able to revise “the critical consensus ‘on the urbane

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Stevens, the ornate and carnivalesque Stevens’” (Filreis, Actual World 28). Now, a more politically aligned and socially imbricated poet allows us confidently “to answer those readers who see Stevens’ aesthetic as one of retreat or mere aestheticism” with “the poet engaged by the world around him” (Longenbach 279).2 The critical reconstruction of a more engagé Stevens has, moreover, placed the poet at the forefront of a number of theoretical movements that have been preoccupying the literary academy fairly much from the 1990s and onward: critical legal studies in the work of Thomas Grey, canon formation in the study by John Newcomb, and a combination perhaps of new historicism and cultural studies in the work of Frank Lentricchia (Ariel and the Police). Studies of Stevens in the area of gender and sexuality reached a critical mass as an extra addition to all of these prodigies of theoretical vanguardism with the publication of Melita Schaum’s collection of essays, Wallace Stevens and the Feminine (see also Jarraway, Question of Belief), and then again with Angus Cleghorn’s more recent “Erotic Poetics” gathering on Stevens. If “Wallace Stevens and Narrative” at a Modern Language Association convention in 1994 struck one as an unlikely discursive cross-pollination at first (see Schwartz), I would venture to say that “Stevens and Gay Narrative” (the original inspiration for this chapter) should sound downright fantastical, not because the new work on gender and sexuality in his poetry has insufficiently prepared the way. Rather, eyebrows are likely to be raised because, as Lee Edelman argues, “The critical literature written about Stevens for over half a century now offers little that could be understood as providing a ‘gay reading’ of the poet or his work – this despite the fact that it is remarkably easy … at the very least, to see him in terms of a fin de siècle aestheticism evocative of a culturally identified ‘decadence’ inseparable from associations with sexual irregularity” (24). My purpose, then, in continuing to enlarge the theoretical parameters of Stevens in the area of gender and sexuality with this chapter is to endeavour to forge solid linkages between the poetry and queer discourse. But rather than risk turning Stevens into another variation of the contemplative solipsist and aesthete by focusing on the critics’ longstanding pathological reception of his work in gender contexts, I would prefer to train attention instead on what the gay writer finds so valuable in Stevens – a gay novelist, for instance, like Michael Cunningham.3 For there Wallace Stevens appears as the opening

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epigraph to Cunningham’s first foray into gay fiction, A Home at the End of the World (h e w hereafter) – a rather queer invocation by Cunningham that demands no less than the full citation of “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” a later text of Stevens from 1952, as follows: There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction, How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactnesses Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home. (Collected Poetry and Prose 435; c p p hereafter) I give the complete text of Stevens’s poem, first of all, as a means of summarizing the plot of A Home at the End of the World, for it does seem that the three parts of Cunningham’s novel roughly approximate, in more expanded form, a kind of brief narrative that Stevens’s own poem is unfolding. For instance, as Stevens’s “protagonist” feels the insistent urge to fulfill himself “in his own direction,” and ultimately to discover, in partnership with some “they,” “his unique and solitary home” by the end of the poem, so Jonathan, the chief protagonist in Cunningham’s novel, imparts a similar sense of homecoming, as the poet’s “sea” modulates into the novelist’s “small body of clear water” on his story’s final page:

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I was nothing so simple as happy. I was merely present, perhaps for the first time in my adult life. The moment was unextraordinary. But I had the moment. I had it completely. It inhabited me. I realized that if I died soon I would have known this, a connection with my life, its errors and cockeyed successes. The chance to be one of three naked men standing in a small body of clear water. I would not die unfulfilled because I’d been here, right here and nowhere else. (h e w 422) But how is Jonathan empowered to recognize this unique “moment,” how ought we to characterize it, and most importantly, how does it enable a gay man’s novel, in the end, to take the place of a straight man’s poem? A Home at the End of the World tells the story of the complexly interconnected lives of Jonathan Glover and Bobby Morrow, first as they come to an awareness of their gay sexuality in the intimate relationship they share as adolescents growing up in the sixties in Cleveland, in part 1; then later, in part 2, as their identities expand to incorporate alternative forms of partnership, when Jonathan heads off to college and subsequent employment in New York as a newspaper columnist, and Bobby follows him there, after the gradual failure of his own restaurant business back in Cleveland through the seventies. New York, then, becomes an initial place for each “to go in his own direction,” the catalyst for which Cunningham supplies through the character of Clare. For it is Clare, a fortyish sometime artisan of costume jewellery with a lesbian past, who provokes in both Jonathan and Bobby, now in their late twenties, the urge to satisfy sexual needs outside the bounds of conventional loyalty and friendship, sending the former off to pursue a highly erotic relationship with a budding actor by the name of Erich, and enticing the latter to cultivate more paternal inclinations by becoming the father to her child, Rebecca. If the “theory of poetry is the life of poetry,” as Stevens claims, and that life resides not so much in what reality is, but rather in “the many realities which [reality itself] can be made into” (c p p 914, emphasis added), then surely the highly irregular lives of Cunningham’s leading characters are nothing if not “poetic.” The monolithic notions of familial loyalty, marital monogamy, and passional privacy – the unmovable mountains if not the unshakeable bedrock of mainstream, heterosexual culture – these notions would all appear to

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dissolve in the sheer “poetry” of Jonathan’s and Bobby’s and Clare’s extraordinarily unconventional lives. No more so does this poetry come to take the place of that mountainous culture than in the final part of the novel, when all three, now in loving domestic partnership, remove to upstate New York to start up a family restaurant, ironically called Home Café, in a rural setting much like the one suggested by Stevens’s poem: “We wouldn’t be a commune, exactly. I mean, we’re more like a family don’t you think?” “I suppose so,” [Jonathan] said. “We are nothing like a family,” Clare said … “You want to have the baby,” Bobby said … “We can have it. We can all three have it.” “You’re crazy [Clare replied]. Do you know how crazy you are?” … She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I [Jonathan] think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction. “Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. (h e w 315, 317–18) The “chaotic love” shared by all three characters that refuses to focus in the “conventional” (i.e., hegemonically heterosexual) manner on the traditional two-parent family structure speaks very much to the image in Stevens’s poem of an “exact rock” composed of “inexactnesses,” that is to say, of a domestic economy that completes itself “in an unexplained completion” (c p p 435) – a variation of that “categorical ambiguity” discussed in the last chapter. Thus, we’re never truly certain, at the end of the novel, why Clare withdraws (with Rebecca) from her partnership with Jonathan and Bobby, now that her life has been afforded “a direction to drive in,” although fear perhaps of too much completion is suggested (h e w 403, 338). Nor are we completely sure on what more permanent basis Jonathan’s lover Erich might have entered Jonathan and Bobby’s “unique and solitary home,” as he does just before dying of AIDS in the final chapter (h e w 417). Finding themselves, however, “in the middle of a highly peculiar and unorthodox arrangement, in a house that could fall down around [them] at any moment,” all of these characters can be sure about one thing: “At least we love each other” (h e w 337, 338).

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The allusion in the longer citation above to a “romance” that provides for dignity and direction in the younger characters’ lives of the main plot also suggests, largely through contrast, how the subplot, developed mainly through the lives of older characters, may be working throughout the novel. For in the subplot, the focus is on the strained marital relationship between Jonathan’s parents: Ned, who spends much of his time away from the family managing a decrepit movie house in downtown Cleveland, and Alice, a mostly live-athome mom who never fully manages to come to terms with her son’s homosexuality that she, one evening, stumbles onto quite by accident in the front seat of the family car. The Glovers’ failed marriage is shadowed by an even more tragic relationship shared by Bobby’s parents, the Morrows. The loss of their eldest son, Carlton, through a freak accident in their living room (more about which, later), drives Bobby’s mother to a premature death as a consequence of depression and drugs, and induces an alcohol dependence in his father that later leads to his own demise when he accidentally burns down the family house. Bobby Morrow comes to live with Alice and Ned for several years when Jonathan moves away to New York. But as a surrogate son, and a gay man with a failed restaurant business of his own besides, Bobby can only exacerbate the Glovers’ sense of marital failure that we read much like the open book “turned in the dust” of Stevens’s poem (c p p 435), highlighted especially when they finally remove to their dusty retirement home in the Arizona desert. A good part of that failure resides in the Glovers’ inability to move beyond the closed economy of the reproductive family structure, once they realize that romance is over. As Alice early in the novel is given to observe, “I liked to think you could change your life without abandoning the simple daily truths” (h e w 68). But when confronted much later, after Ned Glover’s death in Arizona, with the genuine prospect of change, in the form of her son Jonathan’s more open domestic arrangement with Bobby and Clare, Alice is ultimately made aware of the nature of the family romance that may have done her and her husband in: “We [Alice and Ned] have a hard time staying together as couples.” “And I,” [Jonathan] said, “am seriously considering the possibility that those limits are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bobby, Clare, and I are happy together. We plan on staying together … History changes. Mom, it isn’t the same world anymore. The

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world’s going to end any minute, why shouldn’t we try to have everything we can?” … “I’d [Alice] have liked to tell him something I’d taken almost sixty years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness – a small enough chance – lay in welcoming change. But I couldn’t manage it.” (h e w 362–3) In this most instructive passage, Cunningham gives us to understand that one kind of home and one kind of world have come to an end – the “limits” represented by the older generation in the novel – but also that the “possibility” of a new kind of family enterprise is emerging, in the sexual and parental experimentation of the younger generation, to take that former home and that former world’s place. Not only is Alice incapable of managing this shift in domestic paradigms in her own life, she would also appear barely able to articulate that “welcoming change” even to her own son. This shift in domestic paradigms, we should moreover note, is not without precedent elsewhere in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.4 There, it is charted through the contrast between two distinct kinds of “romance” alluded to previously by Cunningham. On the one hand, there is a retrograde kind of “old romance” whose distortions are imaged by Stevens as “backward flights,” that is, “the bitterest vulgar do / And die” that Alice Glover would appear to want to associate with “the simple daily truths” just mentioned, but whose vulgarity Stevens, in any case, would insist upon “re-statement” (c p p 245, 24, 31, 385, 118). On the other hand, Stevens gives voice to a more ­forward-looking “romance of the precise” that he makes the subject of his riddling four-line “Adult Epigram,” which I examined in the previous chapter but bears restating in full just here: The romance of the precise is not the elision Of the tired romance of imprecision. It is the ever-never-changing same, An appearance of Again, the diva-dame. (c p p 308) With the presentation of a new notion of romance foregrounding a fundamental “ever-never-changing,” and significantly associated with the repetitions of some “diva-dame,” the poet hopes to counter “the tired romance of imprecision” described previously. Further, Stevens’s more “precise” romance ought to return us to the “exact

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rock” in “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” a rock that I think A Home at the End of the World can usefully help us to understand might stand as a resonant trope for the family and home of a more enlightened cultural and social vision than the one shared by the older generation in Cunningham’s narrative. John D’Emilio in his important “Capitalism and Gay Identity” outlines the historical provenance of such a futural vision starting in the nineteenth century, and pinpoints at its centre the vitally significant “separation of sexuality from procreation” when the societal production of material goods finally became socialized under the system of bourgeois capitalism (see also Kinsman 39–40, 97–8). From that time forward, D’Emilio documents, heterosexual relationships could at last give vent to ways of “establishing intimacy, promoting happiness, and experiencing pleasure,” thus allowing for the additional likelihood that some men and women might want “to organize a personal life around their erotic / emotional attraction to their own sex,” and what is more, formulate “a politics based on sexual identity” (3–16, esp. 7; see also 75–6, 104–5). That the history of this futural vision or romance-of-precision is far from complete – in Cunningham, it seems almost barely to have got underway – is perhaps suggested in Stevens’s poem, where its corresponding “outlook” (troped by the “exact rock”) is precisely that “view toward which they [the lookers-out] had edged,” or approximated only with their “inexactnesses” (c p p 435). Indeed, the prospect that such a vision might ever be completed is highly doubtful. When the biological view of sexuality founded on procreation gives place to the ideological view of sexuality mobilized by pleasure, only a romance whose essence is uncertainty, in the formulation of Oscar Wilde, will do from this time forward. And since a romance of pleasure bespeaks a divergent repertoire of cultural differences rather than a convergent core of natural or essential truth, the assignment of gender, from Oscar Wilde’s time to our own, is one that can hardly be “carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate” (Butler, “Critically Queer” 22; also Bodies That Matter 23, 57, 67, 101, and 129). Completion of gender, like the completion of family, is therefore seen ideally as  “incompletion” in Cunningham’s novel. Or, alternatively, is left “unexplained,” as in Stevens’s poem, which would fairly much amount to the same thing, “opposed in every way,” Deleuze might say echoing Stevens’s “Adult Epigram,” to “the classical or romantic

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book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject” (Thousand Plateaus 9). Having dwelt thus far on the plot structure of Cunningham’s novel as it relates to a kind of “emplotment” of important thematic elements in one of Stevens’s later, epigraphic texts, I would next like to touch upon a couple of further, entirely thematic, issues shared by both authors, before taking up what I would consider, finally, to be the most important intersection between Stevens’s poetry and queer discourse more generally. By now, however, it should be fairly clear that I am invoking a notion of “queer discourse” so as to include both theory and practice in exploring Stevens’s hypothetical interventions in the same-sex gendered context. At Berlant and Warner’s provocative suggestion, “queer commentary” might be an even better approximation of what I’m attempting here. “We wonder,” Berlant and Warner meditate, “whether queer commentary might not more accurately describe the things linked by the rubric [“queer theory”], most of which are not theory. The metadiscourse of ‘queer theory’ intends an academic object, but queer commentary has vital precedents and collaborations in aesthetic genres and journalism. It cannot be assimilated to a single discourse, let alone a propositional program … like theory in the sense of rigorous, abstract, metadisciplinary debate” (343–4). Within this critical purview, the queer crosspollination between Stevens’s poetry and Cunningham’s novel begins to look less and less phantasmal. As to the latter’s thematization first of all of the family structure, Cunningham’s narrative gains an immeasurable resonance from Stevens’s poetry on the issue of that structure’s suspect ideological overdetermination. A I DS activist Larry Kramer sets this issue more clearly before us when he observes: The Family. The family. How these words are repeated and repeated in America – from campaign rhetoric to television commercials. This is a country that prides itself on proclaiming family values, as if there were no others, as if the family was homespun and united and loving, as if it is necessary to produce a child – like a product – to justify or countenance a sexual act … Well, I am a member of a family, too … But the ranks are closed, ­something is happening to gay men, and we are suddenly no ­longer affiliated with the family. Where do they think we came from? The cabbage patch? (271)

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The concept of the family rendered by Kramer in this heated passage is chiefly discredited for its monolithic exclusion of difference – the difference of the nonreproductive gay man in particular, but also of those whose value systems might conceivably lie outside the regulation of normative unity and consanguine domesticity. In Cunningham’s novel, Bobby’s brother Carlton, who may or may not be gay, suffers most the highly constraining virtues of what Kramer acidly calls “the family”: “In Carlton’s future we all get released from our jobs and schooling. Awaiting us all, and soon, is a bright, perfect simplicity. A life among the trees by the river” (h e w 27). To Carlton, the values of home and hearth are not a given, nor is their containment within the disciplinary regime of the family pure and transparent. “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the,” Stevens perhaps might be heard to echo on this last point (c p p 186). The fact that Carlton dies by smashing through the plate-glass door sealing the Morrow living room from the outside world (h e w 43) functions as a powerful metaphor for all those who perchance might run afoul of seemingly transparent virtue. Little wonder, then, that his gay brother Bobby would feel compelled to follow Carlton, figuratively, out that shattered door some time later, and endeavour to experience what freedom he might within a completely transformed, and hence more life-sustaining, alternative family structure, as a consequence of that coming out: I was living my own future and my brother’s lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen – into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum … I saw that as myself and my brother combined – in both our names – I could pursue a life and a surprising future. I could feel him in his other world by being both myself and him in this one. I stood in that kitchen while Clare threw me one entrance line after another. (h e w 189) In the most profound sense, then, the title of Cunningham’s novel speaks to Carlton’s “other world, a quieter place, more prone to forgiveness” (h e w 407). And unlike the family world excoriated by Kramer, more tolerant of difference. The previous image of Clare repeatedly feeding Bobby entrance lines into a completely transformed domestic space – softer, quieter,

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more forgiving – might perhaps remind us, once again, of the divadame in Stevens’s “Adult Epigram,” and the repetitions of a more “precise” romance that the dame’s “appearance of Again” in that text are specifically intended to connote. As the diva-dame in Cunningham’s novel, Clare would thus appear to be carrying forward Stevens’s point that romance, there in its family version, is clearly not an ideological fait accompli. Rather than an ontologically overdetermined given, a cultural category like family or romance, Cunningham and Stevens would agree, ought ideally to be perceived as an experience that becomes repeatedly refigured and reformed through time, in response to the alteration of historical and cultural forces, not an experience that could finally be unified and made complete by means of some stable and transparent signified. For Stevens in particular, the sedimentation of cultural experience depends very much upon whether or not it is constituted by “lights masculine” or “lights feminine,” two quite antithetical approaches to the material world that the poet strenuously labours to differentiate in “Of Hartford in a Purple Light” (c p p 208). With “lights masculine,” as Stevens argues, Hartford can only be rendered in terms of “heroic attitudes,” masculinity’s “big hands” severely limiting and restricting its representation to “the plaster of the western horses, / Souvenirs of museums” (c p p 208). This approach runs quite contrary to Hartford as an experience that, like “Master Soleil,” ought more accurately to be viewed as flowing through time, much as the ocean, like a poodle, “spatters incessant thousands of drops, / Each drop a petty tricolor” (c p p 208). “Lights feminine,” along this line, offers something far richer and more variegated: “a region full of intonings,” that is to say, “Hartford seen in a purple light” (c p p 208): But now as in an amour of women Purple sets purple round. Look, Master, See the river, the railroad, the cathedral … When male light fell on the naked back Of the town, the river, the railroad were clear. Now every muscle slops away. (c p p 208) The feminine’s problematizing the unific clarity of worldly perception moves ultimately in Stevens’s text toward the dissolution of a “stone bouquet” by “the ocean, ever-freshening,” in the poem’s final

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image (c p p 208). Feminist readers of Stevens’s work have been quick to seize upon such counter-patriarchal moments as occasions in which the poet may be sounding out a “feminine voice,” the recovery of which, as Jacqueline Brogan argues, “gives expression to what is beyond control, beyond order, beyond dominance in our actual lives and thereby endows with significance that little which we can order in words” (“Minotaur” 16–17). “Literature on this level,” Melita Schaum argues even further, “becomes a scrutiny of ideology through a subversion of its medium, a rupture of consensus, a sabotage of the patriarchal ‘universal’ that questions the strictures of doctrine and subverts the notion of authority” (“Views of the Political” 177). But if the consensual ideologies are universally heterosexist as well as patriarchal, we no doubt are able to envision Stevens’s poetry, on this level, forging a very strong link between feminist and queer discourse as well, in collective prospect of the dissolution of all adamantine sources of hegemonic authority and doctrine. A similar point, we might also note, is reached by “the patriarch” in Stevens’s “Yellow Afternoon,” who insists on the “repose” of “final sculpture” as a means of bringing himself in touch with his own, true being: “There as he is / He is” (c p p 216). For in that poem’s finale, in a setting rather close to the “soft nowhere quality” of Bobby’s darkened kitchen previously, a similarly unsettling “woman” forces the patriarch to confront the rank mystery of human identity, “and in so doing invok[es] a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes his own” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 58), in place of its sculpted “fatal unity” (c p p 216): The thought that he had found all this Among men, in a woman – she caught his breath – But he came back as one comes back from the sun To lie on one’s bed in the dark, close to a face Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one and speaks. (c p p 216)5 By this means, Stevens sustains feminine temporality rather than patriarchal permanence as a cultural imperative in his later poetry.6 And in so doing, I would like to imagine he cues Cunningham to provide for a similar rhetoric of temporality in his own work, where a permeable “poetry” of personal evolution and development takes the place of mountainous ideological ratification in the lives of his

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novel’s youthful, and decidedly nonmasculinist, ambisexaul characterizations. That a female character, a further instanciation of Stevens’s diva-dame, should be accorded the upper hand in this whole process is, again, a lesson that Cunningham conceivably might also have learned from Stevens. For in Stevens’s “The Hand as a Being,” where a “naked, nameless dame” makes “[o]ur man” thrice conscious of “too many things,” it takes a feminine “hand” to “compose” his mind by releasing it from any essential sense of self-identity – “the mi-bird flew / To the ruddier bushes at the garden’s end” (c p p 243) – and in that “end” may perhaps additionally have suggested to Cunningham a handy title for his novel, at the end of the world as we presently know it. Besides overdetermination, however, a further aspect of the thematization of ideology in both Stevens’s and Cunningham’s writing takes us back to the issue of exclusion, mentioned earlier by Larry Kramer. The heated political controversy that has developed over time in North America, and elsewhere, concerning the legal rights of same-sex partnerships with respect, for example, to spousal benefits in the workplace – such a controversy has from its inception been fuelled by the perception, usually among those persuaded by a fundamentalist logic, that certain cultural forms and social structures, like family or kinship, ought to take precedence over others. “My position has been that families [i.e., traditional heterosexual arrangements] have inherent rights,” an especially vocal Liberal politician in Canada, for instance, was frequently heard to declaim almost twenty years ago. “They’ve existed before the church and they’ve existed before the state and therefore these inherent rights must not and should not be undermined by anyone” (Dawson, “Rebel” 18; see also Dawson “MP Lashes Out,” and Bryden and Stewart). The foundational ideology of special rights or status, in this case, is mounted on the basis of several exclusionary assumptions, as anthropologist Kath Weston astutely observes: “that everyone participates in identical sorts of kinship relations and subscribes to one universally agreed-upon definition of family,” that “human procreation [is] kinship’s ultimate referent” so that “privilege [is] accorded to a biogenetically grounded mode of determining what relationships will count as kinship,” and that “because gays selfishly pursue nonpro­ creative relationships, they threaten civilization by promoting a society that declines to reproduce itself” (22, 33, 35, 156).

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But Weston speaks most directly to the issue of ideology in the manner that both Cunningham and Stevens have been at pains to revolve it, as we’ve seen, when she further writes: What gay kinship ideologies challenge is not the concept of procreation that informs kinship … but the belief that procreation alone constitutes kinship, and that “nonbiological” ties must be patterned after a biological model (like adoption) or forfeit any claim to kinship status. (34, emphasis retained) The several references in Cunningham’s novel alone to the family as an institution – “we’re, like, really a family,” “We could be a new kind of family,” “the lopsided family we’d tried to form” (h e w 220, 253, 290; see also 172, 345, 353, 354 and 386) – these references support Weston’s observation here that it’s not the family structure per se that is under attack in same-sex discourse so much as those symbolic features of the institution that work toward exclusion in its traditional hegemonic mode, and whose features therefore require rethinking, and perhaps retooling. In holding fast to some configuration of “family,” Cunningham thus secures an intersection with the writing of Oscar Wilde, the Stevensian problematizer of “romance,” or as Jonathan Dollimore describes him, “the outlaw turn[ed] up as inlaw.” Explains Dollimore: “At the same time as he appropriates [society’s most cherished cultural categories] he also transvalues them through inversion, thus making them now signify those binary exclusions … by which the dominant culture knows itself” (633–4). Thus, when Jonathan and Bobby find themselves, near the end of the novel, “standing at the brink of the old cycle” – and it’s tempting to think that a version of Stevens’s romance-of-imprecision is suggestively linked to this cycle (see my Question of Belief, esp. chapter 1) – we are ineluctably drawn back to a similar moment of transvaluation in the story when Jonathan and Clare stand before the old country house they are about to refurbish in upstate New York, and as “forces of order … with talents and tools and [their] belief in a generous future … look at the house and see what it can become” (h e w 402, 327, emphasis added). Cunningham’s characterization of a gay man and a lesbian woman as futural “forces of order,” according to Lee Edelman, is retrospectively perhaps what the homosexual will have come to represent in

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late twentieth and twenty-first century culture. “For when homosexuality enters the field of vision,” as Edelman argues, “it occasions a powerful disruption of that field by virtue of its uncontrollably figuralizing effects … so radical a fracturing of the linguistic and epistemic order [indeed] that it figures futurity imperiled, it figures history as apocalypse, by gesturing toward the precariousness of familial and national survival” (168). But Wallace Stevens, too, is preoccupied with a quite similar apocalyptic moment in the epistemic reordering of modern American culture, in his prophetically titled “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” when he writes: There are these sudden mobs of men, These sudden clouds of faces and arms, An immense suppression, freed, These voices crying without knowing for what, Except to be happy, without knowing how, Imposing forms they cannot describe, Requiring order beyond their speech. (c p p 100) I would like to think that within the whole breadth of change that Stevens envisions for the future of modern life in this citation, that the biological model of parenthood might be one of those “immense suppressions” from which gay men and women might, at last, be freed. And moreover, when like Jonathan and Clare, gay men and women look to their own “houses” to see what they might become, searching for new orders, new forms, new arrangements – “modes of revealing desire,” as Stevens calls them (c p p 100) – that they may not, as yet, be able to describe or articulate, the hope is that those alternative structures of family partnership would not be exclusionary in their turn. Instead, any one of the “strains” that might evolve, “rather than representing a crystallized variation of some mythically mainstream form of kinship [would] simply present one element in a broader discourse on family whose meanings are continuously elaborated in everyday situations of conflict and risk” (Weston 200). In such terms, modern culture might be compared to the “generations of the bird” in Stevens’s “Somnambulisma”: “They follow, ­follow, follow, in water washed away,” and are hence like the ocean “resembling a thin bird, / That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest,” simply because “they lacked a pervasive being”

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(c p p 269–70).7 Or, perhaps in view of its continuous elaboration of a multitudinous array of both straight and gay discourses, modern ­culture is more like that “giant of nothingness” in “A Primitive like an Orb” – a “giant ever changing, living in change”: A giant on the horizon, given arms, A massive body and long legs, stretched out, A definition with an illustration, not Too exactly labelled, a large among the smalls Of it, a close parental magnitude, At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave And prodigious person, patron of origins. (c p p 380) Stevens’s close elaboration of a “parental magnitude” in this passage, a magnitude that exists by virtue of its ability to stretch itself beyond all forms “exactly labelled” – “inexactnesses,” in a word – in the end, migrates to a place beyond the containments of domestic space, in the image of the wood-dove “upon the roof,” in his late “Song of Fixed Accord” (1952). In that image of familial extrusion that we see so much of in Cunningham, Stevens is able to suggest how cultural discourse can be made “not subject to change” (c p p 441), as he scruples, but the subject of change, for it is only in that position that kinship will have “deftly stepped aside to evade the paradigmatic blow,” in Weston’s excellent phrasing (213), and like Stevens’s bird, answering to the former giant in this late text, have “made much within her” (c p p 441; see also Martin and Mohanty). Clearly, then, the poetry of Wallace Stevens informs the fiction of Michael Cunningham in several important respects, so that at last, we are perhaps given to ponder the nature of the relationship Stevens’s writing may be said to forge with contemporary queer discourse in more general terms. As a starting point, we might return to Stevens’s notion of a “romance of the precise” a final time, and recall the importance there of the principle of repetition – “Again, the diva-dame” (c p p 308) – in sustaining its “ever-never-changing” appearances through time, and thereby upholding the historical viability of the traditions of home and family for all manner of sexual partnerships and kinship relationships. “You start,” Deleuze also reminds us, “by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves,

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with new points located outside the limits and in other directions” (Thousand Plateaus 11). Judith Butler acknowledges the same principle of repetition at work in the renovation of gender identity for the queer theorist – the very principle, that is to say, “in the arbitrary relation between such acts [of stylized repetition], in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, [and consequently,] in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (“Performative Acts” 271; also “Imitation” 28, and Bodies That Matter 45, 105, 137–8). The possibility of repetition, then, is the hallmark of reformative queer discourse, a point obviously not lost on Cunningham, where we read repeatedly about “expanding possibility,” “limitless possibility,” “nascent possibilities” – a world “gaudy with possibilities” (h e w 72, 90, 109, 4; also on 11, 61, 150, 190, 198, 214, 224, and 314). He “searches a possible for its possibleness,” Stevens would likely say, offering us his characters’ lives as “Prologues to What Is Possible” (c p p 411, 437). There is no possibility of repetition, and no corresponding possibility of sexual renovation, however, if the home at the end of the world may be thought to harbour any kind of substantive conception of identity, or foundational notion of selfhood. The home is a repeatedly alterable concept in Cunningham’s novel because it is fashioned after the repeatedly transformable lives implicated within it, an issue that I shall take up in greater detail in the next chapter. To think otherwise is to fall prey scandalously to “identity” as “a lure of knowledge,” as Judith Roof argues: Identity is a lure in the same way that origins are: a single stable identity is an illusion produced by a nostalgic wish for mastery. This is not to say that individuals don’t have identities: they do; but these identities are flexible, contradictory products of multiple intersecting conditions. They change through time and are capable of occupying more than one position simultaneously, and if we accept psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, identity is an illusion of wholeness constantly undermined and destabilized by an unconscious beyond the control of the individual and not necessarily consistent with the identity individuals believe they have. (158–9; further on 14, 79, 81, 150, 172, 242–3, and 254)8 Accordingly, as Clare observes to the twenty-eight-year-old Jonathan part way through the story, “People can’t be held accountable, not

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even at twenty-eight … At that age you’re still thinking yourself up” (h e w 267). In regard to her own self, Clare admits to having “invented a life of [her] own,” and because considerably older in years, having “developed a more general sense of pride in [her] larger self,” what Bobby later refers to as “her revised self” (h e w 180, 326). Bobby should know. For like both Jonathan and Clare, he inhabits his body “with the same mix of wonder and confusion,” and as Jonathan himself approvingly notes, “moved through the world in a chaos of self” (h e w 58). “Confusion” and “chaos” are honorific terms here, as they are, according to Richard Poirier, in the Amherst Student letter by Robert Frost, whose “casual forms of speech” Poirier joins to Wallace Stevens, going back to the tradition of American Pragmatist thought raised in the introduction, as “a way to play against the power of concepts or epistemic formations” (Poetry and Pragmatism 186–7, 153). The resistance to such conceptual epistemë matches up precisely with the Pragmatism of William James, and the “urgent plea” there, as Frank Lentricchia observes, “for the recognition of irreducible ideological plurality – the nontransferable and untranslatable character of any point of view, whether personal or social – [that] speaks for the residual localism of a project like [Robert] Frost’s … James’s antitheoretical or antistructural (decentered) view of structure is precisely the sort of idea of structure which might be sympathetic with a world of distributed and diffused eaches which do not cohere and should not, must not be forced to cohere” (“Ideologies of Poetic Modernism” 245; also Ariel and the Police 107, 124–5; and Modernist Quartet 18, 20–1). Likewise, “Stevens makes the same pluralist point, so reminiscent of William James,” according to Thomas Grey, because “Stevens as a poetic thinker is not only a pragmatist, but closer to James than to any other philosopher” (98, 83). And yet the concept or form that Poirier understands American poets in this tradition to be most resistant to is what he calls (after Emerson) “acquired selfhood,” and follows both Emerson and William James in arguing that “true individualism depends often on a willing suspension of self-assertion … lest our own cherished beliefs block or disrupt the flow of experience” (Poetry and Pragmatism 42). The individual, therefore, who is truly responsive to culture’s flow will demonstrate “soul” to the degree that he or she “abandons one form or an incipient form for the always beckoning promise of another” (25; cf. Lentricchia, “Ideologies of Poetic Modernism”

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237). All gay men and women who, at some point, abandon the default sexuality of heteronormative culture in order to free themselves into an alternatively gendered lifestyle are undoubtedly “soulful” in this pragmatist sense. And Poirier may, perhaps, be minded of  their case in particular (e.g., “AI D S and the Tradition of Homophobia”) when he observes, “You are free only when you are getting out of whatever closet you are in, including your idea of yourself,” in order to submit to “the poverty of subjectivity, the poverty of self”: Poverty is all you have to hold onto, and it is only in this poverty – born of the “rock” – that you find … some generative, creative power that in fact only temporarily allows expression of itself through the medium of a human being. (Poetry and Pragmatism 73)9 With this allusion to a “rock” as an image for the substantive deregulation of subjectivity, as well as for its generative empowerment, we return, for a final time, to that “exact rock” of Stevens’s “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” and perhaps understand now the extraordinary significance it bears in relation to the “souls” of the empowered and empowering young lives unfolded in the gay narrative that follows. In rounding out this “other” context for Stevens’s poetry, we may get a better purchase on the place of that “rock” in Cunningham’s novel, and what it represents for queer discourse more generally, by turning to yet another rock in Stevens’s poetry – to the “insolid rock” by the sea, in the first section of “Two Versions of the Same Poem,” significantly subtitled “That Which Cannot Be Fixed” (c p p 308). The rock, in this text, appears to bear a strong resemblance to the “giant” scanned previously in “A Primitive.” But here, Stevens seems even less willing to make that identification: “Does it / Lie lengthwise like the cloud of sleep, not quite reposed? And does it have a puissant heart / To toll its pulses, vigors of its self?” (c p p 308). It’s as if the powerful hold that the rock now exercises over Stevens’s imagination resides entirely in its total resistance to being named, rather like the “giant of nothingness,” without the ascription of “giant”: … water-carcass never-named, These vigors make, thrice-triple-syllabled,

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The difficult images of possible shapes, That cannot now be fixed. Only there is A beating and a beating in the center of The sea, a strength that tumbles everywhere, Like more and more becoming less and less, Like space dividing its blue and by division Being changed from space to the sailor’s metier (c p p 308) If this “water-carcass never-named” is an empowering image for queer discourse, its true meaning can only reside at the level of possibility merely – “difficult images of possible shapes,” as the poet states, “that cannot now be fixed.” As William James further observes, “The ‘absolutely’ true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge.” But because “experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas,” that “ideal vanishing-point” for truth will not likely be reached anytime soon, if at all (Pragmatism 145). And so we fall back upon the “pragmatics” of the written word once again “to define the effectuation of the condition of possibility” (Thousand Plateaus 85, emphasis retained) in both Stevens and Cunningham. In James’s image of the boiling over of experience, we are instead left with the sense in queer discourse, as in my own epigraph from Butler, that sexual meaning will always exceed the determinate content of any given narrative or given gender presentation, organized as each narrative and presentation is “around a radical and irreducible incoherence” that, Eve Sedgwick argues, is the “homosexual definition” par excellence in the twentieth century (85). What we further fall back on, in the passage from Stevens, and in queer discourse more generally, is that “space” as wide as the sailor’s ocean and as deep as the eel’s “perverse marine,” the image with which the above passage from “Two Versions” concludes. I’m minded here of Canadian lesbian writer Mary Meigs’s injunction “that each of us must learn to free-fall in our almost unlimited space of possibilities” (37), since the more and more that space admits of definition, the less and less it yields to conceptualizing control, or categorizing

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containment, what Stevens calls “reason’s constant ruin,” also in the passage’s conclusion (c p p 309). In Michael Cunningham’s novel, moreover, this fecund space surfaces only for an instant, in the penultimate chapter, where Bobby is given to reflect on Clare’s possible absence from their present home as one of those “errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we in fact create” (h e w 413). Cunningham’s point seems to be that the diva-dame has enough imagination to bring Jonathan and Bobby’s current home into being (as in my additional epigraph from hooks and West), but not enough reason to want to live there, perhaps drawing the conclusion that, with domestic space fixed and named as it factually is by the end of the novel, “a certain ability to invent [their] own futures has been lost” (h e w 338). Fixing and naming domestic space in this terminal way, we should perhaps additionally note, would run contrary to the “revolutionary spirit” that William James had willed to his young modernists (Frost, Stevens, Robinson, et al.) at Harvard – “the hope,” as Lentricchia describes it, “for an aesthetic of pragmatism, and the life that ceaselessly begins anew, radically refreshed, when the mind lays by its imperious needs to replicate itself in all that it sees” (Modernist Quartet 32). In any case, Clare, with her immense powers of imagination, represents a clear contrast to the members of the older generation in the novel – to Alice Glover, for instance, “stuck in a fake house in the desert because she couldn’t imagine a life without a corner cupboard,” or to Ned Glover, who “couldn’t imagine anyone being happy if he wasn’t tied down,” and whose “lack of imagination,” according to his wife, “threatens to curb [his own son’s] life” (h e w 303, 356). In which case, it will become time for Clare’s daughter, Rebecca, to rework the definition of kinship once more, reforging its meaning “through a resignification of the very terms which effect [one’s] exclusion and abjection” (Butler, “Critically Queer” 29): Rebecca will be back someday, and the house will be waiting for her. It’s hers. It isn’t much – a termite-gnawed frame building remade in small pieces, with the work of inexperienced hands. It isn’t much but it stands now and will stand when she’s twenty. Now, right now, I can see her. It’s as clear as a window opened onto the future … I can see her come to stand on the porch of a

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house she’s inherited. A house she never asked for, a house she can’t quite think what to do with … That’s all I see. It’s not a significant vision. But I see her with surprising clarity. (h e w 407) In the gap opened up, once again, between imaginative possibility and created certitude is lodged the future promise of a sequent repetition of transvalued kinship, mobilized by the excessive poverty and the impoverishing excess of queer discourse. The intersection between Stevens’s poetry and Cunningham’s fiction gives us an extraordinary insight into the power of that discourse. But its true test will ultimately lie in the extent to which, through its agency, the “social space for community” becomes enlarged, and as in this last citation from the novel, “the terms of domination” within that space become turned, in Butler’s prophetic words, “toward a more enabling future” (Bodies That Matter 29).

•• Before naturally turning in the next chapter to the “other” context of the more conventional straight novel within which to set Stevens’s work, we perhaps should round out this one with some further speculation about the significant appeal the poet’s work obviously has for gay novelists like Michael Cunningham here, and gay poets like Mark Doty (in the preceding chapter) whose work I return to in greater detail below. In his landmark The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991), Ross Posnock advances the claim that, in remarkably parallel ways, novelist Henry James and philosopher George Santayana undertook throughout their writing careers “to create new forms of sexual identity, new configurations of mastery and passivity, femininity and masculinity.” “In short,” remarks Posnock, “the androgynous becomes an alternative model of behavior,” and he observes further that the inspiration for James’s and Santayana’s “recovery” of androgyny was nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman – “the great mother of poets, who renovates the claustral self and expansively embraces polymorphous sexuality” (194–5). In the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens more and more appears to be the poet to have assumed Whitman’s gender mantle, a point to which I shall return much later in this book’s conclusion. Well-known American gay poets, for instance, such as Frank O’Hara, John

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Ashbery, Richard Howard, and Robert Duncan are some of the most important moderns to have acknowledged an early debt in America, and writers like José Rodríguez Feo, José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy elsewhere.10 Nor should contemporary writers of gay fiction like Cunningham be overlooked in this regard as we have just seen. The work both in prose and in poetry of gay author Mark Doty is perhaps the most compelling. His Atlantis, winner of the 1996 Lambda award for “Outstanding Work of Poetry,” bears an opening epigraph from Wallace Stevens, and this book, and the previous collection, My Alexandria, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1994, are, in fact, dedicated to “Wally,” Doty’s lover of twelve years, whose passing, due to complications arising from A ID S, is movingly elegized in a later work, the majestic prose memoir entitled Heaven’s Coast. At the same time, all three books equally bear the androgynous impress of their Stevensian precursors – writers whose “artistic practice … at the highest level of intensity erodes the distinction between doing and feeling, male and  female,” and sets us before a “multiplicity [that] bespeaks [in Santayana’s words] the ‘variety, the unspeakable variety, of possible life’” (Posnock 200, 209). How an ostensibly heterosexual male canonical American writer would come to have so extraordinary an impact on a legion of contemporary gay authors – such an impact is one, I would argue, that only the lure of androgyny in Posnock’s use of that term is likely to make any headway in explaining. To this end, we might pause for a few moments to reflect upon exactly how a discourse of androgyny serves to mediate poetic projects as radically disjunct as those apparently demarcated by straight as opposed to gay authorship. In this regard, a model text in Stevens’s Collected Poems from which we can derive considerable instruction is the 1945 poem “A Word with José Rodríguez Feo.” The background for the writing of this poem is provided by an important correspondence shared between Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo begun during World War Two while the latter was an undergraduate English student at Harvard (Stevens’s alma mater), and where he first began to translate some of the poet’s early work. Even after Rodríguez Feo’s return to Havana in 1943, where he founded the ground-breaking literary arts journal, Orígenes, the letter-writing continued for a dozen more years, ending just short of Stevens’s death in 1955. According to the editors of the complete correspondence, Secretaries of the Moon, we are invited to view “A

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Word with José Rodríguez Feo” as “a reminder of the general difficulties attending those who would like to call themselves keepers and servants of the arts,” and à propos certain derogatory critics of Stevens (like Yvor Winters), as a specific caution against “let[ting] your ideas get fixed or associated in permanent groupings” (16, 17). Along this line of interpretation back in 1986, the “Rodríguez Feo” of the poem, as “one of the secretaries of the moon, / The queen of ignorance,” must therefore make allowance for how “The night / Makes everything grotesque,” since “Night is the nature of man’s interior world.” As the poem emphatically adjures: “We must enter boldly that interior world / To pick up relaxations of the known” (c p p 293). A decade later, an editorial entry into the interior of the Stevens– Rodríguez Feo correspondence more theoretically emboldened by the discourses of gender and sexuality is likely to yield an alternative line of interpretation – one calculated to pick up on more relaxations of “the known,” and less inclined to observe merely that “all such relationships are fictions that suffice for a time” (Secretaries 17). Editors today would be keen to observe the less “known” fact, for instance, that the gay Cuban activist and exile, Reinaldo Arenas, writes at length in his lively memoir, Before Night Falls (1993), about a former lover, Virgilio Piñera, and that it was the redoubtable Rodríguez Feo, along with Piñera, who left Orígenes a decade after its founding and “started another [magazine], almost entirely oriented to homosexuals and much more irreverent, right under the eyes of [President] Batista’s reactionary and bourgeois dictatorship” (82). Called Ciclón, Rodríguez Feo’s new magazine, which he worked on for three years before abandoning it in 1957, became notorious for putting the writings of the Marquis de Sade into Cuban circulation. From this more sexually animate perspective, therefore, it seems almost impossible to miss the intensely “camp” style in many of Stevens’s and Rodríguez Feo’s previous exchanges – an “elaborate style,” according to David Bergman, “which while seemingly superficial, reveals to the initiated an unspoken subtext” (99). Hence the camp subtext “unspoken” by the several references to “pink” shirts, “blazing” coloured ties, and “purple” birthday parties, not to mention, at times, their frank cruisiness: “Take my friend Patricio. He has a beautiful build and the most amazing green eyes. Just to look at him you tremble with fascination” (Secretaries 129, 130, 148, 132). Like “other creatures of the rainbow,” in Stevens’s endearing

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term from their ardent correspondence (193), both he and Rodríguez Feo shared an interest in a not inconsiderable number of homosexual authors, including Walter Pater, Arthur Rimbaud, André Gide, Djuna Barnes, Osbert Sitwell, T.E. Lawrence, Ronald Firbank, and Truman Capote (67, 84, 64, 171, 194, 203, 200). Moreover, their peripheral interests – “the ‘queerness’ of St. John Perse’s poems,” the “queer style” of Marianne Moore, the “queerest writ[ing]” of Jorge Luis Borges (60, 134, 175) – often seemed intended to return them, again and again, to this sexually dissident pantheon. It would be a grave error, however, on the basis of this epistolary record, to impute to either Stevens or Rodríguez Feo any determinate sexual identity, dissident or otherwise, despite how much they found each other to be “quite alike” outside mainstream society’s “secluded little world” (63, 176). What seems so central to their correspondence, and central as well to the discourse of androgyny, is precisely the “relaxations of the known” of any kind. “I detest a man who knows that he knows,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, card-carrying member and confrère of William James in early Pragmatism’s “Metaphysical Club,” was given to exclaim. “When you know that you know[,] persecution comes easy. It is as well that some of us don’t know that we know anything” (qtd in Menand 62). On this point, and as “creatures of the rainbow,” they also join the moon in that poem as “queen[s] of ignorance” (c p p 333). For Stevens especially, the point was crucial, as he makes clear in a letter written to Rodríguez Feo dated the same year as that eponymous poem: I have been thinking a bit about the position of the ignorant man in what, for convenience, may be called society and thinking about it from this point of view: that we have made too much of everything in the world and that perhaps the only really happy man, or the only man with any wide range of possible happiness, is the ignorant man. The elaboration of the most commonplace ideas as, for example, the idea of God, has been terribly destructive of such ideas. But the ignorant man has no ideas. His trouble is that he still feels. (71–2) It is possible to read “the ignorant man” in this important passage as a kind of code word for “homosexual,” and this would seem to be the way that Rodríguez Feo interprets the term. “I have many such ignorant men for friends,” he divulged to Stevens in a follow-up

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letter a few days later, “and I have been criticized bitterly by some of my literary friends who consider it a waste of time and a contamination” (74). In the case of Stevens himself, however, I am inclined to think that the model of the ignorant man that he had in mind was more likely a man of feeling like George Santayana, a thinker in whom Stevens first became intrigued – as revealed in an exchange of poems with the famous professor of philosophy – while Stevens was yet an undergraduate long ago at Harvard, and in whom a welcome interest had latterly been revived in correspondence with Rodríguez Feo (22). Relaxing all categorical ascriptions of gender like heterosexual and homosexual, a man of feeling like Santayana perhaps taught Stevens the greater virtue of androgyny as “more a dimension of sensibility and psychic economy than of actual behavior,” and thereby sensitized Stevens, and writers like him, “to a variety of possibilities and options [as replacements for] the absolutisms that sanction gender polarities as if they were wholly natural” (Posnock 200, 209). Hence, if Santayana was “the only really happy man” resulting from a “wide range of possible happiness,” it was the discourse of androgyny that quite likely made him so. Such a discourse also helps us to understand how Stevens, near the end of a long and deeply troubled marriage, could express toward Santayana the “feeling that he made up in the most genuine way for many things that I needed” (36, emphasis mine), an issue that I shall return to later in chapter 4. The epigraph from Wallace Stevens that Mark Doty has chosen to head Atlantis, his Lambda Award–winning gathering of poems, essentially rehearses, in miniature, the foregoing argument for androgyny that we find extended throughout the Stevens–Rodríguez Feo correspondence, and which is synthesized in the poem that Stevens composed in its honour. The epigraph’s two lines are from the opening of Stevens’s 1942 poem “Montrachet-le-Jardin”: “What more is there to love than I have loved? / And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright …” (c p p 234). By the end of Stevens’s poem, however, as by the end of Doty’s volume, we realize that the opening question of “Montrachet” is flatly rhetorical. That is to say, we realize that when the affairs of the heart are fitted to the rhetoric of androgyny rather than to the conventional binaries of essentialist logic, there will always be something more to love than we should at first have thought. Rather than “nothing more,” then, it is the something more that causes the “O bright, O bright” in Stevens’s next line

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suddenly to dim; and we are returned, once again, to the “queen of ignorance” formerly, and that happy range of amorous possibility troped by “Night [as] the nature of man’s interior world” (c p p 293). In Stevens’s “Montrachet,” the poetics of androgyny are thus infused with shadows: A shadow in the mind, a flourisher Of sounds resembling sounds, efflorisant, Approaching the feelings or come down from them These other shadows, not in the mind, players Of aphonies, tuned in from zero and Beyond, futura’s fuddle-fiddling lumps (c p p 234) These “other shadows” thus permit the sexual transvaluation of the lunar queen of ignorance in this poem into “something” more recognizably masculine: Out of the hero’s being, the deliverer Delivering the prisoner by his words, So that the skeleton in the moonlight sings, Sings of an heroic world beyond the cell, … to make the cell, A hero’s world in which he is the hero. (c p p 235) In Doty’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold,” the poetics of androgyny follow a remarkably similar nighttime argument: No one’s here,    or hardly anyone, and how strangely      free and fine it is to be laved and extended, furthered    in darkness, while shadows      give way to other shadows and the bay murmurs   its claim: You’re a rippling,     that quick, and you long to be

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loose as air again, unfettered   freshness, atmosphere     and aria, an aspect of fog … (97) In an important sense, all of Doty’s Atlantis may be construed as “an aspect of fog” – a “Fog Argument,” as it were – picking up on the title of one of the volume’s concluding poems (83). Yet to understand that “aspect” of the complete volume, and the poetics of androgyny underwriting it, we need to take some account of the ways in which Doty’s later prose memoir, Heaven’s Coast, helps to illuminate his gender-bending project as a whole. One of the many anecdotes included near the end of that extraordinary work recounts a case of mistaken identity involving Doty’s dear friend, Lynda, the night that he and his long-time partner, Wally, take her to a drag show in Provincetown, where they had just moved. As he tells the story, Lynda is greeted with great regard by the “hostess,” … It takes me a minute to get it that the reason my friend’s getting this extra attention is because the queen on stage thinks she’s a man. I’m not sure at first Lynda knows this, or how she’ll feel about it … And then I realize Lynda’s utterly delighted, in a sort of heaven: between the two of us, also in disguise as butch men, she is being seen as “in drag” too … in her finery, wearing her vocabulary of style and gesture, wearing herself. (275) If the discourse of androgyny, in the run of human experience, bespeaks a uniquely gendered space fraught with relaxations of the known, the text presented here could hardly be more overdetermined: Lynda’s not knowing that she may be perceived as a man, the hostess not knowing that Lynda may be a woman, and Doty’s not knowing their not knowing, at first, then later, not knowing how they may feel about not knowing, and so forth. Yet how delighted we are made to feel about the indeterminacy of this drag-space: instead of that “nature that is grotesque within / The boulevards of the generals” – a kind of trope perhaps for the policing of androgyny within heteronormative (i.e.,“general”) culture that Stevens’s “A Word with José Rodríguez Feo” goes on to recount (c p p 293) – what we have here is an unexpectedly pleasing revelation: “a sort of heaven” (275).

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Much earlier in Heaven’s Coast, in the context of Wally’s mysterious condition resulting from A I D S, Doty is given similarly to reflect: “Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-­knowing? … Doesn’t doubt always stand at the ready, prepared to undo the articles of faith?” He goes on to conjecture: Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by the forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, of what it will never quite be your share to see. The only thing we can say with great certainty about human perception is that it is partial. (64–5) The drag queen in the previous anecdote thus seems to provide the perfect emblem for that partiality of human perception foregrounded by Doty’s androgynous poetics, particularly when we note that both his and Wally’s “disguise as butch men” also falls within the range of that poetics’ revisionary rhetoric. The appearance of the drag queen in Doty’s earlier book of poetry, My Alexandria, underscores further the provisionality of gender categories, ones that Judith Butler has so tirelessly and for so long persuaded us to read as the facta of performance rather than the data of expression (“Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification” 31; Gender Trouble 16–25). Thus, in Doty’s “Chanteuse,” “a beautiful black drag queen – perched / on the edge of a piano, under a spot” conveys “all the sheen artifice / is capable” within the highly symbolic “Alexandria” by means of “the radiance of her illusion” (26, 24, 29). Her “illusion” further links up to “la fabulosa Lola” in “Esta Noche,” elsewhere in My Alexandria:         In the dress    the color of the spaces between streetlamps Lola stands unassailable, the dress    in which she is in the largest sense fabulous: a lesson, a criticism and colossus of gender, all fire and irony. (18, 19) Lola’s “criticism” of gender, accordingly, steers us back to the words that Doty finds appropriate to sum up “the drag queen’s perennial message” in his mistaken-identity anecdote: namely, “we’re

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all self-made here” (275). To construe gender in any other but these provisionally performative and self-authenticating terms would expose us to what Stevens calls the “great danger” of a certain “disposition to act up to the type,” thereby compelling us to languish within the constraint of conceptual categories: “to live in clusters: unions, classes, the West, etc.” (Secretaries 177, 137). The drag rhetoric of Stevens’s own “queen[s] of ignorance,” an androgynous discourse that, like Lola’s above, is “ironic” enough to include himself and Rodríguez Feo as “secretaries of the moon,” therefore privileges the relaxation of clusters and classes within an “interior world” that will perhaps never be known. Ross Posnock, who also writes about a certain “relaxation of the will” in the fictional characters of Henry James “that permits them to open themselves up to others as well as to their own internal otherness,” on this particular point cites Christopher Newman from The American as saying: “You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about” (316/n2). But “isn’t that the point, not to know?” as Doty remarks in his memoir’s epilogue, for surely, “In not-knowing, hope resides” (295, 296). Doty’s epistemology of elective ignorance brings forward two further issues in Heaven’s Coast that help to clarify the poetics of androgyny in his other work. One has to do with a more innovative approach to conceptualizing subjectivity in the terms suggested by the drag queen, that is, as a self-made rather than a self-present phenomenon of human experience. Once again, it is the author’s good friend, Lynda, and her sometimes feeling as if she were “a gay man trapped in a woman’s body” who teaches Doty much about “the vulnerability and porosity of the self, [and] the power of its costuming gestures” (97). In this factitious formulation, the self’s porosity gestures toward what the late Robert K. Martin importantly identifies as “the absence at the heart of a socially constructed sexuality,” a notion suggested to him through a meticulous scrutiny of Roland Barthes’s “exploration of the fluidity of sexual definition” (285). For Doty, much of that sexual fluidity is imparted to him through his very close attachment to nature; hence, “the very fluidity of the landscape gets inside us, and encourages our own ability to slip our fixed bounds and feel ourselves as extended, multiple, various” (31). By slipping the fixed bounds of selfhood in this way, we endeavour to match up the absence at the core of our own sexuality with that which greets us everywhere in nature: a huge tree, for instance,

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“unseeable in its entirety, knowable only in its parts, each viewpoint yielding a different version”; or a mysterious coyote whose “gaze across the gulf of otherness” suggests something “beyond [and] unpursuable”; or even the deathly syndrome of AIDS overtaking its host as one might “imagine his body filling with an absence” (128, 305, 150). The net effect of all these aporetic occurrences – “aphonies, tuned in from zero” that we recall from the earlier extract from Stevens’s “Montrachet-le-Jardin” (c p p 234) – perhaps maintains nature in a state of perpetual flux. Scaled down to the dimensions of a similarly fluid subjectivity, the effect of absence contrives to make Lynda seem “a fragile surface constructed above an abyss,” and also assures that “nothing can fill the space Wally occupied in [Mark Doty’s] life” (103, 205). Exempla of a selfhood that bears no promise to complete itself either in life or in death, each reminds us of “the angel” in a poem from My Alexandria entitled “The Wings,” whose self-made form willfully interposes itself “between us and the unthinkable” (49). Like the drag queen, a further reappearance of Stevens’s diva-dame in this study, Doty’s mediating angel would tend to corroborate Theodor Adorno’s emphatic observation that “without exception, men [and women] have yet to become themselves” (qtd in Posnock 128). Or perhaps Alice James’s observation about her pragmatist brother William: “He’s just like a blob of mercury [because] you cannot put a mental finger upon him” (qtd in Menand 76). A second and final issue in Heaven’s Coast, shedding further light on Doty’s androgynous poetics, has to do with the general status of desire in his discourse. In the poem “Chanteuse,” we notice that “the radiance of [the drag queen’s] illusion” is coupled with “her consummate attention to detail” (29). This coupling suggests that an absence within subjects, as within objects, does not deprive them of any kind of existential reality. As in the discourse of Jacques Lacan, reality is not absent. The critical theorist Slavoj Žižek states the case expertly in elucidating Lacan’s debt to Immanuel Kant on this point: We know and we can prove that the phenomenal universe is not reality in itself, that there is “something beyond”; but neither Reason (metaphysics) nor Intuition (ghost-seeing) can provide access to the Beyond. All we can do is delineate its empty place, constraining the domain of the phenomena without in any way extending our knowledge to the noumenal domain. (About Lacan 89)

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As Jerry Aline Flieger further observes, “the Lacanian object of desire” proves to be “incommensurate [only] with our vantage point, our current plane of experience,” and it is precisely this incommensurability that binds reality and experience inextricably to each other in a perpetual dance of desire, “like Achilles and the hare, forever inaccessible one to the other, circling around each other in a series of missed appointments” (“Listening Eye” 100). In Heaven’s Coast, therefore, desire functions as that “ineradicable force that binds us to the world” (17). In so doing, it points us in the direction of that general “absence in [rather than of] reality” that Stevens also noted in his poems and which, in “Montrachet-leJardin,” specifically serves as the provocation for the “free requiting of responsive fact” (c p p 145, 237). Hence, as he puts it in his correspondence with Rodríguez Feo, “Reality is the footing from which we leap after what we do not have and on which everything depends,” and it is out of that “reality” that we find ourselves “making … a gayety of the mind” (128–9). Queer theorists today would perhaps object to the term “gayety” in this characterization of the modern subject’s absence in reality, since what such theorists are presently after is “a new kind of sexual identity, one characterized by its lack of a clear definitional content”: The homosexual subject can now … make use of the vacancy left by the evacuation of the contradictory and incoherent definitional content of “the homosexual” in order to take up a position that is … constituted not substantively but oppositionally, not by what it is but by where it is and how it operates. Those who knowingly occupy such a marginal location, who assume a deessentialized identity that is purely positional in character, are properly speaking not gay but queer. (Halperin 61–2) “The danger of the label queer theory,” however, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner point out, “is that it makes its queer and nonqueer audiences forget [their] differences and imagine a context (theory) in which queer has a stable referential content and pragmatic force” (344–5). Hence, to “occupy such a marginal position,” even knowingly, may not be radical enough for the poetics of androgyny. In this discourse, Doty’s memoir seems to suggest, the willfully “ignorant” subject – “Wally,” say, or the “Wallace” who stands behind him like a shadow – finds himself “reaching toward a world he cannot hold and loving it no less, not a stroke less” (20). In any case, as Doty

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scruples to explain, “Desire … has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity, a handful of images … which enlarges us, which engages the heart, which takes us out of the routine limitations of self” (20). To “know” more than this androgynous desire would be to “affirm,” as Stevens points out in the final lines of “Montrachet” – affirm, that is, some kind of foundational truth about androgynous subjecthood – whereupon, as his great poem mockingly concludes, “at midnight the great cat / Leaps from the fireside and is gone” (c p p 237) very much like the mercurial William James. Indeed, Doty provides an excellent gloss on this queer conclusion in Stevens when he writes: “Perhaps that is one thing the soul is: our outward attention, the energy and force in us that leaps out of the self, almost literally, into the life of the world” (34). Yet who can really know for sure? The leap of Stevens’s midnight cat returns us, once more, to Doty’s epigraph in Atlantis, and affords me the opportunity to say some final words about that remarkable prize-winning collection. For it, too, like Stevens’s cat, is in a sense attempting to dodge a fairly autocratic presence like the one at the end of “Montrachet” who, in face of “life’s latest, thousand, senses” nonetheless wants to declare: “But let this one sense be the single main [one]” (c p p 237). If in the gender context of the epigraph, there is always more to love, then sexuality can have no single or main sense. Desire, like the sexual subjects and objects it mediates, is boundless, and imbues the cat with an “androgynous comic spirit [that] challenges gender as absolute, self-identical, and static essence,” thereby surrendering the categories of masculinity and femininity to a drag volatility that refuses to be “reined in by a cultural ‘harness’ disguised as natural truth” (Posnock 213), or in this case, single sense. Were it possible to chase after that comic spirit, Stevens’s cat, no doubt, would lead us into something like that which Doty envisions in “Fog Argument”: into the void   a page on which anything might be written though nothing is. What I love is trying to see the furthest grassy extreme,

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that fog-marbled horizontal … Rippling strokes, a few high dunes hung on the edges of the page like Chinese brushstrokes, barely there, and out on the far shore ................. love, I know it ends, you don’t have to remind me, though it seems a field of endless jade. (83–4) The prospect of “a field / of endless jade,” in this text, presents itself at that “precise limit / where salt marsh gives way / to fogged water’s steel” (83) – at that juncture, in other words, between land and sea, perhaps the most important setting in all of Doty’s work, and one that I shall return to later in this study. Would this particular setting be so important to Doty precisely because at the seashore or by the coast the poetics of androgyny accommodate themselves so well to “the creature which embodies the two worlds, unlike us”? To be of a coast, a mer-being, is to partake of the liminal, that watery zone of possibility where one thing becomes another, where the rules of one world are suspended as we enter into the next. The coast is the shifting zone of change and transformation. A coast is not a line really but a borderland, site of a continual conversation between elements which transforms both. (23) If it is a “watery zone of possibility” into which Stevens’s cat has led us, then the liminal void or fog into which we have been plunged is surely “a fluidity not of meaninglessness but of endlessly expanding meanings” (Martin, “Roland Barthes” 287): “a page on which anything / might be written,” or “a field of endless jade.” As Deleuze remarks, “We know that many things pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming” (Thousand Plateaus 242). In

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Atlantis, that androgynous sense of betweenness or liminality serves everywhere to remind us just how far our meanings can(not) go: “the forest and the trees” in “Grosse Fuge,” “the flesh and the word” in “Homo Will Not Inherit,” “now and ever” in “Aubade: Opal and Silver” – figures all, as “Nocturne in Black and Gold” puts it, for “fogged channels, a phantom glow … midway between form and void” (24, 78, 101, 94; emphases mine). As we might expect, this continuous oscillation in Atlantis between equally meaningful terms – “Go. / Don’t go. Go.” (98) – sustains a similar vision of “a wide and unknown world of possibility” in Heaven’s Coast, the very possibility through which we experience “a shift in the quality of being from ordinary life,” and experience as well what “suggests and supports a future” (50, 62, 293). “Having been a thousand things,” such possibility seems finally to be asking the same question posed throughout the androgynous poetics of Atlantis: “why not be endless?” (95) The key, of course, to the endless rhetoric of androgyny is its resistance to discursive closure – a resistance that queer theorists usually talk about in terms of the effects of “distance”: “the distancing of straight reality,” for instance, that Sue-Ellen Case finds Oscar Wilde bringing to the stage by means of his “artifice, wit, [and] irony” (60); or the “distance inherent in language,” according to Elspeth Probyn, that Michel Foucault exploited in order to “break with any linear and causal model of the association of the words and things, statements, and their positivity” (445; see also Foucault “Distance”). In a brief meditation on the cremation of the body, Doty, too, is observant of the way language serves “to distance us … from the fact of the body’s burned residue,” even though “there is about the material itself a kind of distance, a lack of relation to what it was” which when lost, could very well be fatal to the gay man, if like the severely ailing Wally, he “can’t stand at a distance from himself – not in the way to which we’re accustomed” (33, 227). All of these observations on distance would underscore, once more, that gendered absence or space at the very centre of the poetics of androgyny. In perhaps the finest poem of Atlantis, the long and elegiac “Grosse Fuge” – Doty’s homage to Beethoven and his Opus 130 string quartet, a poem that offers the most resistance to closure – he refurbishes that androgynous space with further hope for the possible: In the wet black yard, October lilacs. Misplaced fever? False flowering, into the absence the storm supplied?

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Flower of the world’s beautiful will to fill, fill space always to take up space, hold a place for the possible? A little flourish, a false spring? What can I do but echo myself, vary and repeat? Where can the poem end? What can you expect, in a world that blooms and freezes all at once? There is no resolution in the fugue. (26) I like to imagine that this poem, particularly in its choice of title to set the tone at its beginning and its lack of resolution at the end, is designed to cast an especially ironic light upon the generals’ reduction of the nature of humankind’s interior world to “an absolute grotesque,” in Stevens’s “A Word with José Rodríguez Feo” (c p p 293). The irony also intensifies, I think, when we recall how the nice, neat dream of “Terra Paradise” in “Montrachet” is so rudely broken open by “a heavy difference” and “the grace … of responsive fact” (c p p 237). In the androgynous work of Mark Doty, heaven’s coast is as close as we are ever likely to get to the closure of such a paradise, and the “alien grace” he envisions in a poem significantly entitled “Difference” becomes as comforting (or noncomforting) as an eternal reward (54). An alienating difference, I would therefore conclude, is a good distance itself from suggesting that the poetics of androgyny are necessarily agnostic, or bereft of any possible spiritual dimension. “I say it / without arrogance,” Doty confesses in “Homo Will Not Inherit,” that “I have been an angel / for minutes at a time, and I have for hours believed … that in each body, however obscured or recast, / is the divine body – common, habitable –” (77). If in his memoir, Doty finds that he “cannot be queer in church” (17), it is not that he has too little faith in a higher power, but perhaps too much – too much, that is, to be at all happy about where a transcendent idea of this kind might inevitably be leading him. Here we recall, and perhaps only now begin to understand, Stevens’s remark earlier to Rodríguez Feo that “the elaboration of the most commonplace ideas as, for example, the idea of God, has been terribly destructive of such ideas” (Secretaries 72). Since, according to Stevens, “it is the belief and not the god that counts,” as I have argued at some length in my Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief, “one is naturally given to speculate that … a poet is most likely to recover the loss of conventional

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forms of belief in his own art” (2). In the case of Doty in particular, the question of belief, to the truly androgynous poet, is rather like trying to listen to Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge”:     … how hard it is, to apprehend something so large in scale and yet so minutely detailed Like trying to familiarize yourself exactly, with the side of a mountain: this birch, this rock-pool, this square mosaic yard of tesserated leaves, autumnal, a jeweled reliquary. Trying to see each element of the mountain and then through them, the whole, since music is only given to us in time … (22) Stevens would hardly object to this formulation. In fact, since “reality is the great fond,” the problem of being both worldly and otherworldly at once may indeed be midway to presenting a solution. At least, according to Stevens, that would be the view of Henry James, whose own androgynous rhetoric, like that of the “ignorant man” Santayana, had succeeded in putting him “in the world of actuality” and “a little out of it” at the same time. As James states in one of the most memorable of Stevens’s letters to Rodríguez Feo: “To live in the world of creation – to get into it and stay in it – to frequent it and haunt it – to think intensely and fruitfully … by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation – this is the only thing” (qtd in Secretaries 62). In the actuality of Doty’s poetry and prose, the majestic wisdom of this extraordinary citation from James becomes translated itself, over the span of Doty’s own canon of poetry, into three riddling simple words: living in difference. It is, therefore, “toward a great, benign indifference which is the force of life itself” that we expect Doty’s future work to continue to move, since, like Job exhorted by the Voice from the Whirlwind, his work reviewed here seems to have Wallace Stevens’s poetics of androgyny lodged so firmly in his ear, if not the Word of God Himself, citing as he does the Book of Job at the close: “Who is this whose ignorant words / smear my design with darkness?” (Heaven’s Coast 300, 301).

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3 “No Place like Home”: Stevens and Contemporary American Fiction Something quite intricate and fierce occurs in homes, and it seems to me without doubt worthwhile to examine what it is. John Updike, “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” You become a self that fills the four corners of night. / The red cat hides away in the fur-light Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” On one side [of our wanting to be inside, within] is the need for home … and on the other is the desire for travel and motion … We long to connect; [and yet,] we fear that if we do … individuality will disappear. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Throughout his long and prodigious career, American writer John Updike has been fascinated by human identity in modern culture – a  preoccupation that perhaps became crystallized for him upon ­completion of his third book of poetry entitled Midpoint (1969). Ruminating fondly about that volume some ten years later, Updike observes: “I remain pleased with Midpoint. It’s about the mystery of being alive – of being you as opposed to being somebody else. Perhaps that’s the abiding mystery in my metaphysical universe” (“Conversation [Reilly]” 145). Ten years further on, the mystery continues in a book of memoirs entitled Self-Consciousness (1989). “In most people,” Updike therein remarks, “there is a settled place they

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speak from,” but in his own case, identity “remains unsettled, unfinished, provisional” (80).1 If the mystery of being somebody is the abiding metaphysical thematic throughout much of Updike’s work – in an earlier interview he claims that his “religious sensibility operates primarily as a sense of … the mystery and irreducibility of one’s identity, mixed in with fear of the identity … being squelched” (“Interview [Campbell]” 103) – little wonder, then, that the mystery of human identity enters early into the poetic textuality of Midpoint as an “O, that white-hot nothing” that later forms part of a worldly “dislocated Real” where “Strange holes, excitons, wander loose” (7, 20). I shall return to these mysterious formulations a bit later. For now, I want to draw attention to their overall sense of indeterminacy as a more general means of situating Updike’s work within the literary rhetoric of “distance” as outlined in my opening chapter, but more specifically in terms of the rhetoric of interiority as a species of the “safe distance” bespeaking a more conventional approach to subjectivity. In Updike’s four “Rabbit” novels (so indebted to Stevens as we shall see), the metaphoricity of safe interiors in what follows proves to be necessary, but more often debateable, as witnessed in Cunningham’s treatment of the domestic space of “home” in the last chapter. In response to the age-old demand to describe what is life and what is death, we again recall that the ancient female sage in Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize address is guardedly silent: “she does not [answer]; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space” (n.p.). So Updike near the end of Self-Consciousness is minded of a similar wordless distance that, like Morrison’s, may be put to the uses of reflecting upon life’s mystery, and the soul’s secret manifestation within that strange presentiment. Writes Updike: “There are distances in New England, hard to see on the map, that come from the variousness of regions set within a few miles of one another, and from a tact in the people which wordlessly acknowledges another’s right to an inner life and private strangeness” (254). Hence, the caution once again of Emerson in “Experience”: “Of what use is genius if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?” (474).

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Obviously, the caution of Emerson is not lost on Updike, registering as he does his own troubled perception in Midpoint, once again, of “Creation [as] a stutter in the Void” wherein may be descried a certain “distance losing its value like inflated currency” (32). That the writer’s stammering may be intended to work against the voiding of a more capacious or distanciated human identity, however, is substantially the argument of an important essay by Gilles Deleuze, who remarks that in the case of a poet like the Russian Osip Mandelstam, the language of modernism is one of perpetual disequilibrium that only begins “to vibrate and stutter” when speech, whose conventional “homogeneous system of equilibrium” is lost since it “never assumes more than one variable position,” and a more spasmodic linguistic “zone of continuous variation” is offered in its place (“He Stuttered” 108). Updike champions the stuttering writer to a similar effect, citing the instance of Henry James’s father: “The Senior Henry James evidently had some trouble enunciating, for after meeting him in 1843, Carlyle wrote to Emerson, ‘He confirms an observation of mine, which indeed I find is hundreds of years old, that a stammering man is never a worthless one. Physi­ ology can tell you why. It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow-creature, that makes him stammer” (qtd in Self-Consciousness 81). Could it not be, therefore, that distance loses its value in the context of literary creation remarked by Updike precisely at that point in which the mystery of being human is stutteringly voided (or avoided), or in other terms, is somehow so foreshortened or so domesticated or so squelched – interiorized, in a word – that human identity becomes the equivalent of “a satisfied person, a content person, [and so] ceases to be a person” at all (“Art of Fiction” 34)?2 One tends to feel that Updike himself has come to know something of the deadening effects of a demystified interiority thanks, ironically, to the burgeoning of his own artistic celebrity: The person who appears on the cover of Time or whose monologue will be printed in The Paris Review is neither the me who exists physically and socially or the me who signs the fiction and poetry. That is, everything is infinitely more fine, and any opinion is somehow coarser than the texture of the real thing. (“Art of Fiction” 31)

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Thus, homing in on rather than infinitizing out from identity’s sophisticated privileged space interiorizes subjectivity to the point of abject debility,3 and it thus suggests to Updike a governing tropology to which he will return again and again in his work when he remarks: “Something quite intricate and fierce occurs in homes, and it seems to me without doubt worthwhile to examine what it is” (“Nice Novelist” 11; cf. Self-Consciousness 98–9). Preoccupied, then, with the value of “distance,” it is the quartet of novels devoted to the life and career of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in which Updike finds an appropriate vehicle for putting to work and mapping out the tropology of homely or domestic space in all of its debilitating interiority. If for Updike, subjectivity approximates, much as in the psychoanalysis of Lacan, the irreducible texture of some Real Thing in the passage cited previously, identity is mysterious and strange perhaps for the very reason infamously propounded as well by Lacan in his Écrits: “What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what it was … but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming” (Écrits 86, emphasis added). To a similar degree, Updike also champions the notion of the becoming-subject, taking his cue from French novelist Michel Tournier who observes that the self “exists only intermittently and when all is said, comparatively seldom.” Continues Tournier: Its presence corresponds to a secondary and as it were reflexive mode of knowledge … We cannot use the image of the candle shedding its light upon objects. We must substitute another: that of objects shining unaided, with a light of their own … Then suddenly there is a click. The subject breaks away from the object … There is a rift in the scheme of things, and a whole range of objects crumbles in becoming me. (qtd in Self-Consciousness 142, emphasis retained) But if Updike repeatedly worries the fierce intrication of identity and home just noted, we can surmise that one aim in his fiction is perhaps to reverse the projects of Lacan and Tournier as it were, and therefore to reveal how subjectivity’s process of becoming is rudely voided by the pathological interiority that more and more comes to supplant its salubrious futural anteriority (and by implication, its more

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healthful alterity) throughout the length and breadth of “Rabbit” Angstrom’s essentially homebound career.4 We see this starting right with the first novel, Rabbit, Run (1969), in which Angstrom is portrayed “safe in his own skin, [and] doesn’t want to come out,” and how his “hatred” of changeful experience “makes a kind of shelter for him,” and thus prevents him completely from coping with – “He turns and runs,” in fact – the death of his infant daughter Rebecca, the Angstroms’ first born who is accidentally drowned by his wife Janice in a careless moment of stuporous alcoholic inebriation (108, 245, 253). In the second novel, Rabbit Redux (1971), a similar allergic reaction to change interiorizes his self within “a tight well whose dank sides squeeze and paralyze him,” and thus makes him incapable once again of reaching out to another dysfunctional woman in need to whom he has become emotionally attached. Named Jill Pendleton, she later dies accidentally in a fire in the Angstroms’ house, the very house where “Rabbit” is portrayed as “floating rigid to keep himself from sinking in terror,” and so “completing his motion into darkness, into the rhythmic brown of the sofa” when “terror returns” – the terror interposed for the human subject at the midpoint of either becoming or voiding the Other – hence, a terror that, rabbit-like, “squeezes [Harry] shut like an eyelid” (247). And so onto the fourth novel in the series, Rabbit at Rest (1990), where the advice of one of Harry’s doctors counselling him to “get interested in something outside your self, and your heart will stop talking to you” (476) comes much too late. For by the final page of the novel, it is implied that his heart will in fact terminate the now elderly Angstrom in a far more lethal way, leaving him alone and dead from angina within the cold and empty confines of an antiseptic hospital room in Miami far removed from his home town Brewer, and thus leaving readers with the image of “one of the most solipsistic characters in [Updike’s oeuvre]” literally “shut up in the solitude of his own heart” according to Marshall Boswell (235). It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in the third of the “Rabbit” Angstrom novels, Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Updike should employ the opening stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (1937) in an opening epigraph; to wit, “The difficulty to think at the end of the day, / When the shapeless shadow covers the sun / And nothing is life except light on your fur –” (Collected Poetry

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and Prose 190; c p p hereafter). But it is perhaps the last three stanzas of Stevens’s poem that are most revealing: The grass is full And full of yourself. The trees around are for you The whole of the wideness of night is for you, A self touches all edges, You become a self that fills the four corners of the night. The red cat hides away in the fur-light And there you are humped high, humped up, You are humped higher and higher, black as stone – You sit with your head like a carving in space And the little green cat is a bug in the grass. (c p p 190) In a staged encounter between a self-absorbed rabbit and an alien cat in Stevens’s poem, not unexpectedly rabbit becomes “a self that fills the four corners of night,” thus hiding red cat away in its own “furlight” (c p p 190). Stevens’s commentators theorize at considerable length about the human subject’s withdrawal into “enclosed sheltered space” more generally in Stevens’s poetry in an effort to foreground the poet’s continuous brief throughout his work against “the solipsistic retreat into dark and enclosed domestic space” that, in American literature, reaches back to Emerson, once again, and in particular, to Emerson’s important observation (in his essay on Plato) that “the experience of creativeness … is not found in staying at home, nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other” (qtd in Jarraway, Question of Belief 30). In the lines of the poem cited by Updike, rabbit’s “shapeless shadow covers the sun,” so that for cat, “nothing is left except light on your fur.” Because Updike admits in some respects to “the radical centrality” of Freud in his novel writing (“Nice Novelist” 16),5 I’m inclined to argue that the shapeless shadow of Rabbit covering the sun in both novel and poem is attributable to what American literature in a (post)Freudian age is particularly prone: that the ego, according to David Macey, is no longer “master in its own house, and can no longer aspire to Cartesian certainties” (74). The removal of Cartesian certainties thus requires us to think about “deconstructing reified gender dichotomies,” as

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Jessica Benjamin points out, and contemplate instead subjectivity in “transitional terms,” that is, “leaving a world of fixed boundaries with uncrossable borders for a transitional territory in which the conventional opposites create movable walls and pleasurable tensions” (115). For Updike, such leave-taking would appear to imply thinking about male subjectivity outside the conventional context of the American nuclear family: “When young I had wanted a wife who would be attractive, and motherly, and artistic, and quiet, and she materialized. We wanted children, and they obediently came, healthy and lovable and two of each sex. Now, through no fault of their own, they composed a household whose walls seemed to be shrinking around me, squeezing my chest … The anxiety surrounding me made breathing yet harder; it reduced my space” (Self-Consciousness 99). Following Stevens’s metaphorical lead, it seems only appropriate, accordingly, for Updike to install his beleaguered “Rabbit” in this third novel of the series as the head of a Toyota automobile dealership, and thus transpose his critique of subjective (a)voidance from the interiority of house and home and hospital room to the claustral interiority of the American motor vehicle itself. “As [Angstrom] sits snug in his sealed and well-assembled car,” writes Updike in Rabbit Is Rich, “the venerable city of Brewer unrolls like a silent sideways movie past his closed windows” (27). “Trapped within his own skin,” but also within “a terror of being himself and not somebody else,” as Updike elsewhere remarks upon his running protagonist (“Interview [Orr]” 160) – the deliberate interiorization of male subjectivity therefore becomes as suspect here as it is revealed to be throughout the other “Rabbit” novels as we’ve seen.6 To enlarge further upon the significance of Stevens’s “Rabbit” poem in the context of Updike’s fiction, I would like to flesh out in a bit more detail Updike’s aforementioned critique of interiority with reference to this third novel in the quartet, and to the specific nature of subjective (a)voidance extrapolated from Stevens’s text. “Very few reviews or articles,” Updike contends generally about his novels, “seem to me to take the clues that the epigraphs [are] meant to offer” (“Interview [Campbell]” 84), so that Stevens’s poem can perhaps be our guide, once again, in laying out much of Updike’s scurrilously masterful critique. Indeed, the several deliberate invocations throughout the novel to Stevens’s poem – the description of Angstrom as “a kind of ghost in the way [people] talk of him as if he wasn’t standing right there” (39); or of his “being tumbled by a cat” (61); or of his

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taking full possession of a golf green as “a cloud covers the sun” (159) – such parallel referencing invites readers of Rabbit Is Rich to pay rather close heed to Stevens’s text throughout Updike’s novel. If as I suggested earlier, interiority in Updike speaks primarily to the self’s failure to negotiate a healthful relationship with otherness, Updike arguably follows Stevens’s text wherein rabbit’s abject failure to a large extent resides in its inability to come to terms with “the monument of cat.” “We feel safe,” Updike elsewhere acknowledges, when “huddled within human institutions – churches, banks, madrigal groups – but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments … The self’s responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other” (Self-Consciousness 257): Stevens’s monumental red cat, once again. What is more, if this failure is coterminous with (a)voiding rather than ultimately becoming Other as both Lacan and Tournier suggest, then following Stevens’s text further, the active gesture of exclusion and the more passive operation of repression (Jarraway, Question of Belief 98) are perhaps the two most signal forms of this failure throughout Updike’s novel. Hence, “from a certain angle,” as the narrator remarks – either from the angle of exclusion or the angle of repression, let’s say – “the most terrifying thing in the world is your own life, the fact that it’s yours and nobody else’s” (163). The terror, therefore, that one’s own life might be significantly altered by an encounter with somebody else’s is perhaps what most inspires the gesture of exclusion in the quest for self-interiority – the gesture that actively translates into the paroxysms of racism, sexism, and homophobia for Angstrom throughout the novel. On the matter of race, for instance, few minorities manage to escape Angstrom’s prejudice: “Something about spics,” he ruminates to himself, “they don’t like to see white kids making out, they surround the car and smash the windshield with rocks,” while “Arabs [can] take their fucking oil and grease their camels with it”; and “How did the Japanese ever get to Brewer anyway?” (29, 201, 335). On the matter of the opposite sex, it seems impossible for Angstrom to view women in any but the most sexually reductive of terms: “Rabbit can never look at [Thelma Harrison] without wondering what she must do to keep Harrison happy. He senses intelligence in her, but intelligence in  women [had] never much interested him,” an assessment that redounds to Angstrom’s own wife, Janice, whom he suspects “does know something. Cunts always know something,” and then later to

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all the female members of his family circle, “Janice or Ma Springer or this Pru, cunts all around him” (49, 109, 171). Cindy Murkett, whom Angstrom lusts after throughout the entire novel but is never quite able to seduce, won’t even pass the intelligence test: “He will follow her slit down with his tongue, her legs parting … and around the corner next to his nose will be that whole great ass he has a thousand times watched jiggle as she dried herself off from swimming” (369). Most excluded by interiority’s miasms of intolerance are the occasional gay men who cross Angstrom’s path, or at least the men he suspects to be gay. The Reverend Archie Campbell, for instance, the Baptist minister who can be seen to destroy the good order of the Angstrom home by entering into it to marry off his son Nelson to his already pregnant girlfriend Pru – Reverend Campbell, Angstrom admits, is “a pro: Rabbit can respect that. But how did he let himself get queer?” (177): Campbell taps out the bowl of his pipe with a finicky calm that conveys to Harry the advantages of being queer: the world is just a gag to this guy. He walks on water; the mud of women and making babies never dirties his shoes … nothing touches him. That’s religion. (181) There’s certainly enough bias in this assessment to convince Rabbit’s son Nelson that the Reverend is gay: “‘I mean it’s obscene,’ Nelson insisted. ‘What does he do, fuck the church up the ass?’” (192) But whether or not Reverend Campbell is in fact gay, being slightly different from some societal norm seems enough to provoke the interiorized self into a funk of (a)voidance: “At last some boy [called] Lyle brings in a gray cloth sack like you would carry some leftover mail in … something faggy about him, maybe his short haircut” (333). Thus, in the ongoing incendiary conflict between father and son throughout the novel, the homosexual serves as a kind of recriminative tool when, for instance, Nelson jokingly alludes to himself as a “queer” (read = failure) in Harry’s eyes, while Harry parodically refers to his inept offspring as “Nellie” (read = effeminate) (110). “Remember,” Marshall Boswell cautions the reader, “each issue in an Updike novel has two sides” (157). So that if interiority’s exclusions present us with the active and manifest form of subjective (a) voidance, their flip side is the more passive and latent operation of psychic repression bound up with the terrifying realization that

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nothing is ultimately certain with respect to human identity, and that the ego’s exclusions may all be for naught: “‘You mean we’re not real people?’ Rabbit asks” (85). Thus, no matter how high rabbit humps up his ego, to go with Stevens’s poem once again – “You are humped higher and higher, black as stone” – its head “like a carving in space” cannot quite shake out the presentiment of otherness: “the little green cat [as] a bug in the grass” (c p p 190). “Lost in space” is perhaps what the operation of repression tells us most insightfully about Angstrom in the novel, so angst-ridden (to play up the patronymic symbolism) is he now by the anteriority rather than the interiority of human identity: “A huge hole to fill up,” Angstrom despairs (419). Angstrom, of course, is also minded of the popular 1960s T V series entitled Lost in Space (415) – a spatial presentiment that elsewhere in the novel has terrifying associations for him in connection with the vastness of a “fresh blue sky” (101; further on 23 and 403). Significantly, in the concluding chapter of Self-Consciousness entitled “On Being a Self Forever,” Updike brings this particular image back, once again, to the protean and fluid randomness of his mysterious selfhood: “When I look up at a blank blue sky … I become aware of a pattern of optical imperfections – specks in my vitreous humor like frozen microbes – that float always, usually unnoticed, in the field of my seeing. These are part of my self … [Hence,] I think of my self [as] a flaw that reveals my true, deep self, like a rift in Antarctic ice showing a scary, skyey blue at the far bottom” (212, 213). These spatial tropings for subjectivity, particularly the “huge hole,” can therefore return us once again to that “white-hot nothing” displaced onto those “strange holes” wandering so loosely through the poetry of Midpoint mentioned earlier. In psychoanalytic terms, Updike’s nomadic excitons may put us in mind of a similarly graphic misordering of symbolic identity targeted by Lacan as the literal embodiment of his infamous “corps morcelé” (see Écrits 4–5), and in Rabbit Is Rich a reminiscence of this formulation for anteriority’s indeterminacy takes us to the very heart of the terror motoring Angstrom’s need for repression: “In middle age you are carrying the world in a sense and yet it seems out of control more than ever, the self you had as a boy [is now] all scattered and distributed like the pieces of bread in the miracle” (169, emphasis added). But this passage also takes us to the heart of Updike’s treatment of women throughout the novel, and a final means of rounding out his critique of interiority as subjective (a)voidance.

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What intrigues me most about Updike’s spatial tropings for the scattered “nothing” of identity that Angstrom can’t quite take control of, and that clearly emanates from Updike’s own “sense of life as many-layered and ambiguous” given the “different shapes and textures and mysteriousness of anything that exists” (“Art of Fiction” 45) – what especially intrigues me is the extraordinary coordination these spacings establish once again with contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and in particular, the notion of woman as an “empty” construction of what Jacques-Alain Miller refers to as “semblances.” Explains Miller: “A semblance is something whose function is to mask nothingness … [only] because we cannot discover Woman, we can only invent her” (14). But rather than “filling the hole in the lack” (as in Freud’s analytical investigations), in true Lacanian fashion Miller lights upon another solution alternative to the futility mirrored by Angstrom in the passages just cited: “This solution consists not in filling the hole, but rather in metabolizing it, dialectizing it … making oneself a being with nothingness. This opens up a whole new clinic of the feminine, a clinic of the lack of identity … [that is to say,] of being the hole in the Other by giving it a positive form” (16–17). “Metabolizing” and “dialectizing” female identity just described can return us once again to a by now familiar presentation in Stevens: “An appearance of Again, the diva-dame” (c p p 308). That Updike is of a mind to positivize identity in just this way for several of his women characters, that is, to metabolize their being in terms of the white-hot nothing underwriting the anteriority of human life, is perhaps what makes them so threatening to a character like Angstrom. Nelson Angstrom’s friend Melanie, for instance, who helps him to return from university and settle back in with his family in anticipation of his marriage to Pru, bugs “Rabbit” in the sense of Stevens’s poem not so much because she tools around Brewer on a twelve-speed Fuji, consorts with all the “wrong elements” in her waitressing job (“hippies and Hispanic families from the south side instead of the white-collar types from West Brewer”), and frequently behaves “kooky as a bluebird” (96, 77, 113). It’s simply that her identity cannot be interiorized in all the ways that Angstrom requires his own to be – a diva-dame par excellence: Melanie was mystical, she ate no meat and felt no fear. She lacked that fury … smiling out at [Nelson] from within the bubble where the mystery resided that amounted to power … the

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mocking implacable Buddha calm … “You should read [Gurdjieff],” she says [to Nelson]. “He’s wonderful … He believed we all have plural identities.” (133) The important allusion to Melanie’s mysticism in this passage is thus in keeping with Updike’s positivizing her anteriority as a hole in the Other since the mystic subject, according to Michel de Certeau, “finds its effectiveness at the very moment that it loses itself in that which is revealed within itself to be greater than itself” (qtd in Jarraway, “Sublime Objects” 90) – subjectivity as a many-layered texture of plural identities here, and elsewhere in the novel as “a world of endless possibilities” (87). Little wonder, then, that Nelson (as the above citation goes on to relate) wants “to take up one of the beer bottles and smash it down into the curly hair of Melanie’s skull” (133), since “Rabbit” had much earlier fantasized a similar moment concerning his all too-knowing wife Janice: “to take a large round rock and crush her skull with it” (56). Like father, like son. The spatial association that thus comes to sum up best the (w)hole of Melanie’s mystic sense of plural possibility in Updike’s novel is, as we might expect, distance: “Her eyes lift, so the whites beneath the irises show, as she looks toward her distant origins” (84). And it’s a trope that significantly comes to attach itself to the other women in the novel. Nelson’s wife Pru, for instance, who “irritates him … with her defiant dancing and her pregnancy and all these blacks and queers she’s not afraid of” – Nelson himself, in a moment of abandonment, actually “enjoys watching her from a distance” (297, 293). His father, by contrast, when he “feels himself towering and giddy,” with “ashamed words strikes across a great distance” attaching itself to his wife Janice while she “listens motionless to her doom” (347). So that when Updike talks about distance losing its value in the stuttering void of human relationships, we are perhaps instructed to think that it’s only because having (a)voided so much of the possibility for becoming other than oneself, the Angstrom ego humped so high actually forms as Updike states “a barrier to some secret beyond,” thus leaving “a whole world half-seen in the corner of one’s eye snuffed out” (415, 418).7 Hence, Ruth Leonard, an old flame of Angstrom’s in years gone by, renders her excoriating assessment of his character as the novel concludes: “Stuck on yourself from cradle to grave … You’re nothing but me, me, me and gimme, gimme” (400, 401). What’s only left, then, is interiority’s lethal evacuation of

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anterior distance in the novel’s final line: “His. Another nail in his coffin. His” (423). As Updike himself admits in the introduction to his four-novel compilation, Rabbit Angstrom, “Rabbit is, like the Underground Man, incorrigible from first to last” (xxii, emphasis retained). In conclusion, Updike provokes us to imagine what in American literature might be the alternative to subjective (a)voidance in his “Rabbit” novels, and in an essay on “Whitman’s Egotheism” in Hugging the Shore, leads us back to Emerson once again when he observes: “The world in which Emerson, and the American artist, finds himself is not one subdued to human uses by previous generations but a ‘dumb abyss,’ a wilderness radically strange, in which has been planted the other radical strangeness of one’s self” (107). The noticeable switch in spatial metaphors in this passage whereby the abyss linked to a more estranged and open subject comes to take the  place presumably of the void connected to one more subdued and closed puts us in mind of just where that abyssal space of open possibility is likely to occur: neither at home, nor in some place away from home, Emerson reminds us, but in the transitions in the spaces in-between. In what appears to be a specific meditation on this reflection of Emerson, American poet Mark Doty (in this chapter’s final epigraph) alerts us to the fear that attends our need for homely interiors and that seems always to be simultaneous with our desire to transit away from them: the fear that “individuality will disappear” (3). Hence, in an act of sodomitical sexual congress that must represent a maximum of egoism humped high when “Rabbit” finally beds Ronnie Harrison’s wife in a wife-swapping scenario near the end of the novel, the “void” that he experiences is the furthest thing from Emerson’s “abyss” since it’s a “nothingness seen by his single eye,” the narrator astutely remarks, and in an adjoining passage, “a void, a pure black box, a casket of perfect nothingness” (379, 378). But as I have been at pains to show throughout this detailed analysis of the rhetorical convergence between Wallace Stevens and John Updike, there is another kind of nothingness in Updike, indeed in American literature, one interposed, as Doty again remarks, “between holding on and letting go,” and it is the singular achievement of Updike’s “Rabbit” novels that, in line with Emerson, their future anteriority can point to the “wisdom [that] lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles” (6).8

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Stevens puts this crucial moment of rumination succinctly halfway through his majestic poem: a “nothing to think of [that] comes of it – / self” (c p p 190). The word self is important here, appearing as it does on a line entirely alone. What will it choose: the void of rabbit, or the abyss of cat? Interiority or anteriority? In Self-Consciousness, Updike would appear to provide the perfect gloss for this momentous choice when he writes: Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable ­problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible. Tenacious of this terror, this adamant essence as crucial to us as our sexuality, we resist those kindly stoic consolers who assure us that we will outwear the fright, that we will grow numb and accepting and, as it were, religiously impotent … [But] as Unamuno says … “I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am that I feel myself to be here and now.” (228–9) Hopefully, then, in order to live, our ability to see through the tenacious terrors cast up everywhere by the “adamant essence” of selfhood will spare us the (a)voidance of nothingness as a “problem” rehearsed above. Or, in terms of Updike’s equally majestic fictional quartet, to negotiate our way past “Rabbit” on his sofa or “in his bed, his molars in their crowns” (76), and on to that moment once more in Midpoint where “I am another world, no doubt; no doubt / We come into this World from well without” (43).

•• In expanding upon the extraordinary resource that Stevens’s poetry can prove itself to be in the context of John Updike’s fiction, I seek to enlarge that context rounding out this chapter further by turning briefly to two other novelists contemporary with Updike, namely, Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth.9 Stevens is nowhere specifically invoked in this wider context as in Updike’s “Rabbit” books to be sure. But it’s the Deleuzian underpinnings of this study forwarded from the previous readings of Stevens’s work that, via the figure of the diva-dame, make the poet’s presence palpable and ineluctable in any case since, as Stevens himself was wont to declaim, while “the

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theory of poetry is the life of poetry,” it is truly “the theory of poetry [that] is the theory of life” (c p p 914). To begin, in Missing Mom (2005), one of Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent novels, the iconographic representation underpointing each of the novel’s five sections appears to be a tiny house, a cartoon-like structure outlined in contrasting black and white with four misshapen holes punched out for windows and possibly a door. Visually, this icon has intimate connections to the title of this particular novel, as cousin Lucille reveals to its chief protagonist, Nikki Eaton, near the end of the story: “Missing your mom can be a place to hide, see? Like that house …” (393). But the tropology of house and home, particularly in some of its unsafer aspects, has thematic links to other of Oates’s more recent fiction as well. In the novelist’s slightly earlier The Falls (2004), for instance, son Royall Burnaby belatedly shudders at the prospect of “liv[ing] with [mother Ariah] in that narrow cramped house” where his fiancée “would be gobbled up alive, and made over into a second daughter for Ariah” (298). With the decidedly unhomely import of its iconography both literally and metaphorically, then, the architecture of houses provides the opportunity for musing about its thematic significance in Oates’s own later work, but along with Cunningham and Updike examined previously, and with the literary theory of Deleuze, for musing also about the symbolic status of such domestic architecture in American literature more generally. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard observes, “There is ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul” (6). Yet in the context of American literature and culture, as Emerson once again reminds us, there appears to be something intensely problematic about strict demarcations of domestic space since “the experience of creativeness,” he remarks in an essay on Plato, “is not found in staying at home, nor yet travelling, but in transitions from one to the other” (qtd in my Question of Belief, 30n10) as in the famous Negro spiritual with its emphasis on “Goin’ Home.” In her recently published Journal, Oates thus strikes a peculiarly Emersonian note when she observes how she also “crave[s] travel,” and by implication, “anonymity.” In this journal entry from 26 July 1975, Oates continues, “I really did not want to come home this time. The anonymity of travel beckons me. No mail! No telephone calls! No constant restriction to a few cubic feet of consciousness: Joyce Carol Oates” (80, emphasis added).

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Taking Emerson at his word, therefore, novels like Oates’s Missing Mom and The Falls, and in addition, Broke Heart Blues (2000) where the strict demarcation of domestic space is troped as “the black hole in the firmament where God used to be” (92) – such ­narratives serve as invitations to explore the deep sense of irony attached to the troping of house and home generally in American fiction. And it is a sense of irony, as I shall argue (following Deleuze), that Dorothy’s repeated invocation of “no place like home” from The Wizard of Oz suggestively endeavours to impart in her own traumatic states of transition throughout much of Victor Fleming’s 1939 film. Yet much before Oates’s fiction and Fleming’s film, the writing of Herman Melville serves as the provocation for Gilles Deleuze (along with Félix Guattari) to remark that “Everything begins with Houses,” and further to suggest that the ironization of the house in American fiction is part and parcel of “a kind of deframing following certain lines of flight … in order to open it onto the universe” and thereby “dissolve the identity of the place” – and, by implication, human identity – “through variation with earth” (What Is Philosophy? 189, 187). The fearful mother-daughter likeness in The Falls mentioned earlier would appear also to be the occasion for such subjective deframing: “the more we know of each other, the less it signifies” (240). If Oates’s own recent work can be seen to exemplify the deframing of identity in this ironic way, how might this decomposition play itself out more particularly in a narrative like Missing Mom? In her most recent collection of essays, The Faith of a Writer (2003), in a piece entitled “‘What Sin to Me Unknown …’”, Oates remarks, “All my life I’ve been fascinated with the mystery of human personality. Who are we? – so diverse, yet, perhaps, beneath diversity, so much akin? Why are we here? And where is here?” (37). The placeless sense of mystery surrounding the human personality here accords rather well with David Macey’s own Lacanian view of subjectivity as something “non-known” (in a bow also to Maurice Blanchot) – something rather like “an absence” or “a void,” an “always-already lost object,” and hence “a mirage of totality” (77, 75). “Caught between the imperatives of the super-ego and the instinctual demands of the id,” Macey once more observes, “the ego is not, however, master in its own house, and cannot aspire to Cartesian certainties” any longer (74, emphasis added). Instead, Macey concludes (bowing to Michel Leiris this time), “the ego is a collage of identifications, the work of a

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psychic bricolage.” Macey underscores his houseless characterization by emphasizing the ego’s inability to exist “in situation,” an “abstraction,” therefore, “that becomes an opaque obstacle to the understanding of concrete subjectivity” (75, 81). In line with Deleuze’s own anti-Cartesian formulation of subjectivity as “a mysterious coherence” or “Cogito for a dissolved Self” in Difference and Repetition (58), Macey thus nudges us toward the dismantled self in A Thousand Plateaus whose veritable “becoming” lies precisely in “one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray” (197). “From Hardy to Lawrence, from Melville to Miller,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “the same cry rings out: Go across, get out, break through, make a beeline, don’t get stuck on a point … break through the wall of the signifier … toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless” (186, 187, emphasis added). Dismantling Cartesian certainty even further, Oates herself, in another essay collection entitled (Woman) Writer, contends that “it is the fluidity of experience and not its Platonic essence that is significant,” adding that “truth is relative, ever changing, indeterminate …” Accordingly, and obviously hearkening back to a figure rather like Stevens’s diva-dame, Oates avers: “identity is not permanent; it is a philosophy of the individual, stubborn, self-reliant, and [again, in line with Deleuze] ultimately mysterious” (377–8). Undoubtedly, it’s this philosophy of the impermanent that provokes Oates in her Journal to caution the novelist, as an empirical “observer of facts … objective and subjective ‘reality,’” to “guard against the demonic idea of imagining that he possesses or even can possess ultimate truth.” “Absolute truth,” she further observes, “is a chimera that draws us all but will destroy us should we ever succumb. Art especially is destroyed. Or, rather: set aside. When one believes he has the Truth, he is no longer an artist” (71). This caution tends, once again, to underscore that “image of mystery” with respect to human identity that is foregrounded in the introduction to the Journal, a sense of existential vagueness that Oates claims she borrows from Emily Dickinson (xii–xiii). “Meta-personality” thus becomes Oates’s term for the mysteries of human subjectivity: “someone both myself and not quite myself” (3, 7). All of these observations would appear to converge in the character of fifty-six-year-old Gwen Eaton, the eponymous “Missing Mom” of Oates’s recent novel. In sum, it tells the story of a mother brutally assaulted and left to die in her own home early in the narrative by a

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transient petty thief and drug dealer by the name of Ward Lynch whom Gwen had once befriended on one of her community-service forays as part of the volunteer work she had undertaken in the past few years after her husband’s untimely death at age fifty-nine from a  heart attack. It’s the novel’s chief narrator and unattached thirty-one-year-old daughter Nikki who first discovers Mom to be missing, and shortly thereafter, murdered. But the older married daughter, Clare, reluctantly rallies round her younger sister (who will then move from her apartment in Chautauqua Falls back into Mom’s bungalow in Mt Ephraim) in order to dispose of all their mother’s worldly goods including the house while awaiting the trial of Ward Lynch. Between the arrest and ultimate sentencing of Mom’s vicious assailant, two years transpire, and it’s within that time period that the larger mysteries and opacities of Gwen Eaton’s motherly character become partially revealed. While it may appear to be the case that Gwen Eaton was continuing to live out in widowhood the mostly tranquil and uneventful life she had supposedly enjoyed in blissful domestic partnership with her husband Jon – “She wanted her Nikki to be happy like her Clare and that meant marriage, kids, home. Family” (Missing Mom 25) – the word nice (34) hardly seems the appropriate construction for capturing “the measure of Mom’s life” that Nikki is so insistent upon early in the story, perhaps out of guilt for her own failed attempts at long-term relationships prior to  its unfolding. For as the two daughters sort through the things in  Mom’s house, darker revelations with respect to their mother’s ­personal life begin to manifest themselves: first, according to Aunt Tabitha, that Gwen had from time to time thought of leaving the marriage to her husband of some forty years; second, that when much younger, she had had a previous sexual relationship with another man by the name of Brendan Dorsey, and that it had produced a pregnancy and soon after an abortion that ultimately terminated the relationship and drove Dorsey into the Episcopalian church in an act of expiation as revealed in a heated exchange of letters that were carefully hidden from her family; third, that at an even much younger age, as an eleven-year-old child, Mom had been witness to the death of her own mother, not from some “wasting-away disease” as Gwen was later given to embroider upon this unfortunate event, but to the grisly death of a suicide, her mother, Marta Kovach, “having slashed both her forearms with a butcher knife” (390).

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As cousin Lucille, once again, recounts this grisly circumstance: See, it was kept secret. Only just a few people knew. It was such a terrible thing, that woman hurting herself so bad, in such a way, right in her bed, where Gwen was the one to find her. Gwen would never talk about it afterward only just around it, sort of, you know how she was, she’d “talk” with me about it, sometimes. But nobody else … When Gwen was a little girl, her dream was to be married and have her own house. And she’d be so safe in that house!” (390, 391) The fact that Gwen Eaton will eventually lose her own life in a very real house ironizes the safety of such domestic settings from a literal point of view to be sure. But if, as Diana Fuss remarks in The Sense of an Interior, “literary critics present the house as nothing other than subjectivity, [as] a self under construction” (3), from a metaphorical point of view, as readers we’re inclined to think (reading Oates after Deleuze) that the safe harbouring of subjectivity is likely to be a considerably ironic undertaking to the same degree. So that, as Oates further observes in the introduction to her Journal, while “the obvious motive for much of literature is the assuaging of homesickness, for a place or a time now vanished,” and thus “to assuage hurt and / or rationalize it” (xiii), “less obviously, the reader kept at a little distance by the writer’s coolly crafted ‘art’” perhaps tells a different story about how unsafe houses can sometimes be as quasiextensions of the human self.10 In a further meditation on this more ironic sense of house and home, Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus invite us to view the chaos of worldly experience as “an immense black hole in which one endeavours to fix a fragile point as a center” (312). “But home does not prexist,” they tell us, “it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space” (310). Continue Deleuze and Guattari: Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable “pace” (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a breakaway from the black hole … [so that] the point launches out of itself, impelled by centrifugal forces that fan out to the sphere of the cosmos … [In other words,] [o]ne opens the circle not on the side where the old

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forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters … One launches forth, hazards an improvisation … One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. (312, 311) In such terms, the home in American literature ideally bespeaks a state of homelessness – “one launches forth, hazards an improvisation” – or what Fuss once again, in her compelling reading of “The Dickinson Homestead,” tags a “limitlessness.” Writes Fuss: “[Emily Dickinson’s] experience of reading [a] letter in [her] room’s farthest corner enlarges the speaker, expanding the boundaries of ‘narrow wall’ and ‘narrow floor’ to accommodate her limitlessness” (60). Here, we may recall Gwen Eaton’s own insistence on keeping the door to her house’s attached garage always open: “A garage door open to the street is like a wall missing from someone’s house,” daughter Nikki alarmingly remarks (Missing Mom 279). “In fact,” however, as Deleuze and Guattari further observe, “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between multiplicities” (Thousand Plateaus 249) as it stages its breakaway from the home’s black hole in the passage previously cited, and thus corroborating their compelling remark in What Is Philosophy? that “even houses are drunk and askew … like a poem by Emily Dickinson” (164–5). A further gloss from Emily Dickinson thus, via Deleuze, perhaps serves to summarize Nikki’s missing Mom most appropriately: “Peruse how infinite I am / To no one that You – know –” (qtd in Fuss 60). Now in Joyce Carol Oates, the “no one that You – know –” answers precisely to a “night self” that she riffs off the “interiority” of Edward Hopper’s justly famous painting entitled Nighthawks, 1942 (in Kranzfelder, Hopper 148–9). In a prose meditation on this painting in Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999), Oates comments that, as a young teenager, she found this aberrant notion of subjectivity descending upon her, as in Hopper’s Nighthawks, during “those long, lonely stretches of time when no one else in the house was awake (as far as I knew); the romance of solitude and self sufficiency in which time seems not to pass or passes so slowly it will never bring dawn” (346). In clear contrast to the night-self’s “mystery in the insomniac night” under the influence of the enigmatic Hopper, Oates pits the very conventional and the very house-bound “day-self”: “a ‘self’ that was obliged to accommodate others’ expectations, and

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was, indeed, defined by others, predominantly adults.” Hence, the homeless join between Oates’s “night-self” and that identity on the futural and improvisatory side of Deleuze and Guattari’s “immense black hole,” when Oates writes: “Yes, but you don’t know me … in adolescent secrecy and defiance. You really don’t know me!” (346). Here, the “black hole” in A Thousand Plateaus is somewhat different from the first. “This time,” Deleuze and Guattari remark, “there is no longer a wall upon which the frequency is tallied but instead a black hole attracting consciousness and passion … the black hole of a selfconsciousness carried by the tide toward death.” Under its influence, “the subjective regime proceeds entirely differently,” Deleuze and Guattari elaborate: Precisely because the sign breaks its relation of significance with other signs and sets off racing down a positive line of flight, it attains an absolute deterritorialization expressed in the black hole of consciousness and passion. The absolute deterritorialization of the cogito … thus the cogito is always recommenced, a passion or a grievance is always recapitulated. Every consciousness pursues its own death, every love-passion its own end, attracted by a black hole, and all the black holes resonate together. (133) In a further meditation on contemporary painting, this time in her essay “The Artist Looks at Nature: Some Works of Charles Sheeler (1883–1965),” Oates discloses in especially Deleuzian fashion her being overtaken by variations of her very own “night-self” while perusing Sheeler’s oil painting entitled Upstairs (1938): “simple geometric figures are so arranged to suggest stairs leading up from a well-lighted room into the darkness of an unseen upstairs – an ominous unknowable future … [where] all is still, silent, utterly mysterious. One seems to be gazing upon one’s own future” (Where I’ve Been 353). In The Faith of a Writer, Oates cites a substantial passage from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that would appear to suggest one important source for the distinction between “day” and “night” selves: “that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness … a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation and regret … It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true

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object … of life” (“Notes on Failure” 62). Not unexpectedly, therefore, the contraposition between the “day” and “night” selves recurs continuously throughout Oates’s Journal (on 184, 230, 291, 299– 300, and esp. 432) where she pits “the plotting ‘rational’ self” against “the groping, dreaming, inchoate ‘night’ self.” As in the case of Oates’s novel Missing Mom, then, “Through the mimetic act of unlocking [an Emily Dickinson] poem,” Fuss contends, “readers are invited to discover their [own] unbounded interiority … For Dickinson, the most private spaces are the most public, and hiding is simply the best way to be seen” (60). “One ventures forth on the thread of a tune,” as Deleuze and Guattari might gloss this intermingling of private and public noted previously. And as in the case of this novel as well, Fuss further remarks that “the door in Dickinson’s poetry is a completely indeterminate figure” like the “instability” of the human subject itself, and she finds further corroboration in the work of German philosopher Georg Simmel “that the door is far superior to the dead geometric form of the wall [since] to Simmel, a wall is ‘mute,’ but a door ‘speaks’” (43). Thus, in Missing Mom, we encounter passages like the following: “As if we’d been brought to the threshold of a door long locked against us and at last the door has been opened but – what is inside?” (179). And because “a door more successfully transcends the divide between the inner and the outer[,] a door [being] where the finite borders on the infinite” (Fuss 43), so windows in Oates’s novel take on an added importance with respect to the opacities of human character as well: “We were alone together in the kitchen. Mom was looking so sad, staring out the window at the bird feeder where a swarm of small birds … were fluttering and darting at the seed. Yet she didn’t seem to be seeing them” (Missing Mom 38, emphasis added). “I spend most of my time looking out the window. (I recommend it.),” Oates observes in The Faith of a Writer (138). Not unexpectedly, the act of peering out of windows recurs numerous times throughout Oates’s Journal (see esp. 222, 274, 342, 458, and 490), and could arguably explain her hypnotic attraction to Edward Hopper’s painting more generally (Conversations 175). For as Gail Levin, Hopper’s most important biographer records, “the one important feature” shared between Hopper’s artist studio in New York City and his summer home in Truro, Massachusetts, was their “treasured sense of openness – of openness that he could look out on, no matter how small his own interior space might be,” that is,

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“the kind of view [Hopper] had as a boy in the family house at Nyack [New York] with its unobstructed view of the river down the hill” (258–9). I might argue even further that Oates’s hypnotic attraction to Hopper’s artwork might be enormously instructive in helping readers to decode this “outsideness” that is truly “home” in American narrative in broader terms, in view of the obsessive thresholding of doors and windows throughout much of the Hopper portraiture canon.11 The epistemological conundrum alluded to previously – “You don’t know me, you really don’t know me” – I would argue, accounts precisely for the difference between “house” and “home” in Oates’s Missing Mom here, and in a good deal of her other later fiction as well.12 And in a quite unknowing way, that is to say, the “house” is like “the territory [that] is constantly traversed by movements of deterritorialization that are relative and may even occur in place, by which one passes … in order to wed to the Cosmos,” conclude Deleuze and Guattari. To which definition we are perhaps invited to fit the notion of “home”: “A territory always en route to an at least potential deterritorialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a reterritorialization (something that ‘has-thevalue-of’ home”; Thousand Plateaus 326). Oates captures a similarly mobile dynamic in a journal entry for 1 May 1981: This way, and then that way; gravitational tugging this way, that way, this way, backward & forward, yearning to be at home & quiet & composing my chart of people, as I am doing, yet also wanting (though less powerfully) to be out with my friends […] and so it goes, and so it’s a ceaseless tug-of-war, for one has only to touch nearly any individual in this part of the world and a lifealtering friendship might blossom … My God, what a sobering thought: yet it’s absolutely true. But then the journal entry concludes, “Yet one must resist” (419). However, another Journal entry from a year later (18 September 1982) underscores a similar dynamic: “Lovely idyllic strophe & antistrophe … I can feel that I can wander a great distance psychically because at home, here, my imagination is rooted in an actual structure of language: I may move along slowly enough (it took me a full week to write ‘Night’ … in fact, working fairly intensely every

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morning, and for an hour or two every afternoon) but at least I am moving … that consolation!” (485, emphasis added). In Missing Mom, therefore, “the secret lives our mothers live” that daughter Nikki remarks upon quite late in the novel (388) in Gwen Eaton’s case at least would appear to be mapped precisely along Deleuze’s and now Oates’s unhomely and deterritorializing lines of flight – multiple paths by which Mom continues to enlarge her own very mysterious sense of identity in constant Emersonian transit between home and her encounter with other people and other places in the larger cosmos that lies beyond. Even dalliances with stray cats, Gwen’s adopted pet “Smoky” for example, would appear to be part of this self under continuous (re)construction, indeed a “character” in the novel whose “becoming-animal” is perhaps emblem of some of the most unaccommodating aspects of Mom’s very own “nightself”: “Each time I unlocked the door to my apartment and stepped inside, Smoky seemed not to know who I might be … [and] more recently [at] the sound of a car door being slammed outside, Smoky would panic and leap from me, digging his claws through the fabric of my clothes into the soft flesh of my thighs” (188, 189). Self-effacement or self-occlusion or self-opacity, then, the epistemological conundrum underwriting the “missing” in Oates’s novel title and recapitulated in the holes punched out of that iconographic cartoon house continuously underwriting each of its chapter units – this conundrum sets the tone and provides the structure for the major triangulation of character throughout the story, right from its very brief opening chapter (entitled, “last time”), which reads: Last time you see someone and don’t know it will be the last time. And all that you know now, if you’d only known then. But you didn’t know, and now it’s too late. And you tell yourself How could I have known, I could not have known. You tell yourself. This is my story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too. (3) Again and again, the nonknowledge theme recurs in Oates’s novel just as Deleuze and Guattari outline it in Nietzsche’s “cyclic unity of  the eternal return” as “the nonknown in thought” (Thousand Plateaus 6): in the Missing Mom chapter entitled “rupture”: “Couldn’t

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[Nikki] have known that her mother might be murdered, isn’t she ashamed!” (58); in a further chapter entitled “remanded for trial”: “I  must have known, and yet I had not wished to comprehend” (145); in yet another called “love me?”: “Don’t you judge us Clare: you don’t know Wally Szalla. You don’t even know me” (192); and still another called “taboo”: “Rob jammed his fist against his heart in a sudden forceful gesture, as if words were failing him … No matter what people say about you. See, people don’t know you” (317); and so forth. Thus, the dismantling of the territory of the “house” in favour a more mysterious and deterritorializing “home” offers the surest insight into the lives of the novel’s chief triangulation of character mentioned previously. In the first instance, Clare Eaton, referred to in the novel as “the good daughter who remained” (66), would appear to pay the greatest price for territorializing domestic space, faithfully enacting in that largely reproductive space what she constantly calls “family responsibilities” (139, 174) – dutifully attending to two kids and a faithless husband as it turns out – in clear contrast to her scapegrace and itinerant sister, Nikki, whose removal from the conventional family romance Clare mostly resents: My life is other people! not me. I wasn’t the one to break away from Mt. Ephraim and lead a selfish life – I didn’t practically abandon our mother when she became a widow – I’ve never slept with a man married to another woman – I’ve never broken our mother’s heart humiliating her in front of relatives and friends: that’s you, Nikki. Don’t look so wounded, you must know this. (174) But as more and more of the secret life of Mom is revealed, Clare eventually stages her own breakaway from the territorialization of reproductive married life, starting with her thoughtless marriage to husband Rob: “I don’t love him. I don’t even know if he loves me. We’re like these people who met at a party and got to talking and wound up trapped in an elevator together, stuck between floors” (187). In a deterritorializing line of flight that removes her from Mt Ephraim to Philadelphia to pursue a more creative life for herself in the world of academe, then eventually back to Mt Ephraim once again to attempt a marital reconciliation on a completely different footing, Clare instantiates the Deleuzian dynamic of “home” whose “[re]distribution of [domestic] space” (Thousand Plateaus 312) thus

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opens onto a new future as a function of the very working forces it shelters in potentia. In the second instance, Clare’s younger sister Nikki reverses this emancipatory trajectory. By moving back into Mom’s house, she thus yields to the old forces of chaos pressing against domestic space and forecloses upon the very dynamic of change so necessary for its reconfiguration. “For when you wake up in your old girlhood bed,” as Nikki contemplates her problematic return, “there is a sweet ­bubble of no-time when you might be fourteen, or eight, or better yet, four. In that luxury of thinking Nothing has happened yet. And maybe it won’t” (213). However, under the impress of Mom’s secret life – “Even those secrets of Mom’s I would never know” (401) – and now with sister Clare as a model for the reconfiguration of domestic space motored by incalculable mystery, eventually Nikki finds herself prepared to take leave of the house just as cousin Lucille characterizes it: “a place to hide” (393). But it’s really the third instance of Oates’s characterization, in the especially transitory person of Detective Strabane, who becomes the true catalyst for Nikki’s dynamic transformation beyond the self’s anchorage in reterritorializations of past time simply by refusing to follow Nikki back into her timeless abode. “Each time you saw me, like around the house,” he tells her, “the meaning of me would be lessened. The past would be lessened” (423). By eventually removing with Nikki to a holiday in Key West by the end of the novel, and perhaps a permanent marital partnership as well, Strabane hazards an improvisation on customary domestic space in the very way his affecting words to Nikki at the end of the novel predict: “The future becomes wider, see? As the past is lessened” (423). As we take our leave of Missing Mom, therefore, what continues to abide of the Eaton residence at 43 Deer Creek Drive is a certain sense of mystery engaged by the preceding triangulation of characters. To this extent, an argument for “housing” Deleuze himself within a canon of American narrative literature is likely to end up with something quite opposite, an argument, that is to say, whose house-hunting rationale is more likely to be “haunted,” ironically, by its very own unhousing. In Oates’s own case, this further ironic sense of “home” haunting various of the houses in her recent fiction contributes, undoubtedly, to a kind of Gothicism colouring much of her prodigious fictional canon in works like Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), and American

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Gothic Tales (1996), among several others, and perhaps points to the  hugely significant Gothic tradition within American narrative more generally. Earlier, I pointed to a link between Oates and Emily Dickinson (via Deleuze) in their ironic treatment of house and home. Undoubtedly, a shared sense of the “Gothic” forges an even stronger connection between them, at least in the sense of that term conceived by Deleuze.13 “Gothic art” for Deleuze, as Peter Hallward argues, “allowed the emergence of an irregular, mobile and disruptive line, a haptic art, an art of dynamic becomings, of linear connections and disconnections” (110). And its impossible not to view these “dynamic becomings” in relation to the deterritorialized “matter-movement” underwriting the “Barbarian Gothic art” of the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, and graphically depicted in a photo image from Eisenstein’s film Strike (1924), as a myriad of its characters are seen to emerge from what Deleuze and Guattari describe as their “holey space” in another clear separation between “home” and “house”: “On the one side of the nomadic assemblages and the war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the sedentary assemblages … put the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate together, plug the lines of flight … impose upon the connections a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions,” and more (Thousand Plateaus, 414, 415). As with the “plane of consistency” elsewhere, the “holey space” of Gothic is no place like home: “not a principle of organization but a means of transportation. No form develops, no subject forms; affects are displaced, becomings catapult forward and combine into blocks, like the becoming-woman of Achilles or the becoming-dog of Penthesilea” (268). Hence Oates’s own remark that “the gothic mode [provides] the metaphor for all we can’t name and can’t bear” in its “mysterious aesthetic bond between pleasure … and cruelty” (Journal 418). Haunting that mysterious aesthetic, as I’ve attempted to outline, is the notion of a nameless sense of selfhood – “subjectless individuation,” Deleuze and Guattari term it (266) – rigorously installed in Oates’s own fictional holey or mad house where “the essence of sanity,” to gloss a further Journal entry, lies in our “ability to tolerate openness, doubt, ambiguity …” (185). That significant join between Dickinson and Oates noted above,14 I might conclude, finds a further corroboration in Deleuze and

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Guattari as we might expect. In their well-known “Treatise on ­Nomadology,” in which the remarks on Eisenstein’s filmmaking appear, Deleuze and Guattari develop further their theory of “Gothic architecture” fairly much in the same terms that Dickinson and Oates view the mysteries of human identity. For them, “the static relation” of form to matter (or mind to body) gives place, instead, to “a dynamic relation [of] material forces” symbolized by  the Gothic “vault”: “a series of successive approximations, or placings-in-­variation” (Thousand Plateaus 364), which perhaps returns us to that “perpetual metamorphosis” of character synonymous with Stevens’s diva-dame throughout this study that Deleuze and Guattari are inclined to link to the “Everything” of “Houses” cited at the outset.15 And so, I would argue, for the haunted subjects in Oates’s later fiction: houseless nomads rather than “universal subject[s] within the horizon of [an] all encompassing Being” that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “constitutes American literature” itself (Thousand Plateaus 379).

•• In another important Journal entry, Oates in true diva-dame fashion observes: “I feel myself at the center of a multitude of ‘selves,’ of voices. I can be anyone, I can say anything, I can be literally anything. Whatever lends itself to belief … on the realistic or mythical level” (110). Later on in her Journal, Oates is given to remark further upon “the puzzle of identity and personality! There isn’t any adjective that I can apply to myself, or to anyone, with confidence. ‘Adjectives’ are simply fractured viewpoints … expressing only the viewer’s response … A veritable logjam of selves, and how to maneuver through them … how to navigate … negotiate …” (343). Yet it’s precisely that “puzzle of identity” which Philip Roth himself takes up in the context of “home” – a problematic site toward which his chief protagonist is “bound,” for better or worse, near the end of Zuckerman Unbound. In the concluding “Look Homeward, Angel” section of Zuckerman Unbound, Roth stages a brief return of his hapless hero, the now famous novelist Nathan Zuckerman, to the New Jersey of his youth, and so reverses “three thousand pages of Thomas Wolfe [Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, read] straight through on the screened in back porch of [Nathan’s] family’s stifling home” during his high school years much earlier (Unbound 180). Thus, late in the novel, we read the following:

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Instead of going directly back to New York, [Nathan] instructed the driver to follow the sign that said “Newark,” postponing for just a while longer the life of Nathan Zuckerman whom the mute inglorious little Zack had rather surprisingly become. He guided him along the highway and up the ramp to Frelinghuysen Avenue; then past the park and the tip of the lake where he and [his brother] Henry had learned to ice-skate, and up the long Lyons Avenue hill; past the hospital where he had been born and circumcised, and on toward that fence that had been his first subject. His driver was armed. The only way, according to [Alvin] Pepler, to enter this city anymore. (221) As this final section of the novel concludes, three important revelations about Nathan Zuckerman’s coming-of-age in hometown Newark are imparted to the reader – revelations having to do with “that fence that had been [Nathan’s] first subject” just described. That fence, as it turns out, forms the subject of the budding novelist’s first foray into fiction, “a short story [entitled ‘Orphans’] sent out to the editors of Liberty, then Collier’s, then Saturday Evening Post under the ersatz name Nicholas Zack, and for which [Nathan Zuckerman] received his first set of rejections slips” (Unbound 221). In sum, the short story recounts the extraordinary experience of a Roman Catholic nun soliciting the services of the storyteller’s chiropodist father in order to treat an ingrown toenail. “With a bedroom window overlooking a Catholic orphanage, [a small Jewish boy] wonders,” so the story goes on to ponder, “what it would be like to live behind their fence rather than his” (220): “He had never been more curious about anything in his life than about the nun’s unshod feet, but his father said nothing that evening within hearing distance of the children, and at six, Nathan was neither young enough nor old enough to go ahead and ask what they looked like” (220). But even more intriguing in this dissolution of religious barriers is the revelation of the further breakdown of ethnic and possibly sexual boundaries. This more curious experience occurs when the daughter of the Ukrainian building superintendent, “Thea the Tease, an older girl with a big bust and a bad reputation,” and “the grocer’s daughter, Doris” both entice Nathan across “an alleyway between [their] two houses,” by telling Nathan “how pretty he was” (219, 223–4): “When they shut the garage doors, he feared the worst – his mother had

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warned him that Thea was too ‘developed’ for her age, and no one had to remind him that she [too] was Christian” (224). With these two boundary-breaking revelations concluding Zuckerman Unbound – I shall return to the third in my conclusion – we get a first genuine insight into what Philip Roth arguably discovers about Newark (and about New Jersey more generally) in the kind of “America” that he may be in search of in the Zuckerman Quartet – a sequence of novels that in addition to Zuckerman Unbound includes The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Prague Orgy (1985). James Donald in his landmark Imagining the Modern City, like Roth’s neophyte storyteller, contends that in the subjective life of the modern city dweller, “there is no possibility of defining clearcut boundaries between reality and imagination,” so that “the city becomes the symbolic space in which we act out our more or less imaginative answers to the question which defines our ethos: how to be ‘at home’ in a world where our identity is not given, our beingtogether in question, our destiny contingent and uncertain” (17, 145). While it may be, therefore, that in Zuckerman Unbound, “all [Nathan] wanted at sixteen was to become a romantic genius like Thomas Wolfe and leave little New Jersey and all the shallow provincials therein for the deep emancipating world of Art” (180), his return to “The Garden State” twenty years on, in the first instance, is bounded with considerable irony as underscored in Roth’s very title. For if “seeing is believing, and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown” (Unbound 221), Newark New Jersey of the present day is hedged by a quite opposite sense – a “sense of beyond,” in Iris Marion Young’s formulation for one, since in dwelling in the city, “[one] can never grasp the city as a whole” (2). Conceivably, then, the return to Newark for Nathan must be just as Henry James describes in a line from one of James’s letters that becomes a kind of mantra for Roth’s protagonist throughout the story: to wit, “All this is far from being life as I feel it, as I know it, as I wish to know it” (Unbound 100, emphasis retained). With its “‘being-together’ of strangers,” the social differentiation of the city thus sets the standard for “a positive inexhaustibility of human relations,” as Roth’s neophyte storyteller perhaps only begins to realize, and in such terms the city achieves a maximum sense of definition as a cultural site quintessentially marked by “an openness to unassimilated otherness” (318, 319), or what Deleuze more broadly might term a site of “deterritorialization.”16

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Now the ironization of seeing, believing, and ultimately knowing is brought strenuously to the fore in this second “Zuckerman” novel with the narrator’s recent sensational publication entitled Carnovsky. Though generally perceived by a guileless readership as a scandalously salacious pseudo-autobiographical work of fiction, Nathan Zuckerman is even more perturbed to discover that the book’s hapless protagonist, Gilbert Carnovsky, should so often be perceived as a straightforward stand-in for himself, as for instance “when a smiling middle-aged woman came up to tell him that from reading about his sexual liberation in Carnovsky, she was less ‘uptight’ now herself” (Unbound 9). Of course, Philip Roth’s own notorious publication of Portnoy’s Complaint some dozen years previously can only further enlarge the ironic relation between fact and fiction, thus prompting many critics to view the Zuckerman Quartet as “a long saga in which the relationship between life and art is meditated upon” (Wilson 103). Yet it is precisely for the purpose of enlarging that complex relationship, I would argue, that Roth resorts to the presentation of hometown Newark and home state New Jersey in all its ironic import – a Newark that Roth, according to Mervyn Rothstein, “can never really get away from [since] it is as much a part of Mr. Roth, in his books and his writing, as it was part of his father [Herman] … the bard of Newark [so labelled in Roth’s biographical treatment entitled Patrimony: A True Story from 1996]” (278, 279). And its three characters, especially in the much earlier Zuckerman Unbound, namely, Alvin Pepler, Caesara O’Shea, and Henry Zuckerman – two from Newark itself as it turns out – bear much of the burden of that ironic import of “home” as I now, briefly, will endeavour to show. Much in line with the city theory of James Donald and Marion Young remarked upon previously, Michel de Certeau in his own meditation on the modern city in The Practice of Everyday Life helps further to prise apart the irony underwriting Roth’s treatment of his own and his hero’s “home town” by observing, “In this place that is a palimpsest, subjectivity is already linked to the absence that structures it as existence and makes it ‘be there,’ Dasein.” Continues de Certeau: “But as we have seen, this being-there … must ultimately be seen as a repetition, in diverse metaphors, of a decisive and originary experience, that of the child’s differentiation from the mother’s body” (109). With the introduction and extensive development, firstly, of  Alvin Pepler’s character within the first and third sections of Zuckerman Unbound – “I’m Alvin Pepler,” and “Oswald, Ruby, et

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al.,” respectively – Roth settles precisely upon a metaphorical personation of subjective differentiation. Such differentiation, however, runs counter to all of Pepler’s insistent claims to be like Gilbert Carnovsky, so admirably modelled Pepler feels on his own person in Zuckerman’s eponymous novel, and by implication like Zuckerman himself: fellow Jewish Newarkers who have both had a brush with military life in the past, and more recently, are attempting to outlive some scandal (Pepler’s being caught out in a quiz-show scam postKorea) closer to the present. But Pepler naturally can insist on this likeness inured as he is to making truth claims about his own life as well as others’ fairly much as a fait accompli. “My true story is before the American public,” Pepler vouchsafes to Zuckerman in one place; and “At last people in New Jersey [are] beginning to have a real respect for knowledge, for history, for the real facts of life instead of their own stupid, narrow, prejudiced opinions,” he proclaims to Zuckerman in another (39, 145, emphases added). Totally invested in such knowingness, Pepler thus becomes the very embodiment of what Zuckerman perceives as a “stupendous vrai” (137), a kind of epistemological absolutism that he finds epitomized in a tag from Flaubert that reads Ils sont dans le vrai: A working title, Zuckerman thought, and [he] recorded in the white window of the composition book cover the words Dans le vrai. These composition books Zuckerman used for his notes were bound in the stiff covers of marbled black-and-white design that generations of Americans envision still in bad dreams about lessons unlearned. (132) The “bad dreams” and the “lessons unlearned” here bring us back to the absence that structures subjective existence, according to de Certeau’s take on urban life noted previously. And Zuckerman can find himself “unbound” from the “stiff covers” of Pepler’s own blackand-white mimetic version of existence only because his own formative years in Newark have taught him to be chary of le vrai in all its forms – “The whole world wants to know,” after all, “and they want to know from [Zuckerman]” most of all (Unbound 64) – and despite that absence of truth, to discover his real vocation as a writer as he announces at the start of the novel: “Oh, Madam, if only you knew the real me! Don’t shoot! I am a serious writer as well as one of the boys!” (6).

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Knowing “the real” Nathan Zuckerman would appear fairly much to substantiate “the real facts of life” for which New Jerseyites, so Pepler contends, now have such respect in the wake of Carnovsky. But it’s Roth’s own The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography published a few years after the Zuckerman Quartet (in 1988) that tells quite a different story – a version of Roth’s “real life” roughly up to the time of Portnoy that, not uncoincidentally, Roth introduces into his autobiography courtesy of a concluding chapter voiced by the Nathan Zuckerman persona once again. “Is this really ‘you,’” Zuckerman queries his real life author, “or is it what you want to look like to your readers at the age of fifty-five?” The passage continues: Do you mean that The Facts is an unconscious work of fiction? Are you not aware yourself of its fiction-making tricks? Think of the exclusions, the selective nature of it, the very pose of factfacer. Is all this manipulation truly unconscious or is it pretending to be unconscious? I think I am able to understand the plan here … you’re remembering those forces in your early life that have given its fiction its character and also reflecting on the relationship between what happens in a life and what happens when you write about it – how close to life it sometimes is and how far from life it sometimes is … as you journey from Weequahic [New Jersey] Jewishness into the bigger American society. (164) Curiously, the problematic relation between fact and fiction rendered here is exactly the one worried by Alvin Pepler himself back in Zuckerman Unbound in his efforts to compose a review of Carnovsky as an attempt to approach if not enlarge its reality. “We are, after all,” writes Pepler, “the total of our experiences, and experience includes not only what we in fact do but what we privately imagine” (Unbound 150). But what interests me most between the two problematic accounts of reality – one emanating from a factual context, and the other from a fictional one – is the textual space that is invoked and shared between them with writing that is simultaneously “close to life and far from life” in the Roth version, or what Pepler refers to as a “Distance” in rounding out his own version – a rhetorical space or gap that “either blurs experience or heightens it.”17 “For most of us,” so Pepler concludes, “it is mercifully blurred; but for writers, if they can be restrained from spilling the beans before they are digested, it is heightened” (150).

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When that rhetorical space or gap becomes read as the absence that structures the existence of the individual subject in order for it to “be there,” following de Certeau once again, it quite likely brings into clear focus a second important character in Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, that of film star Caesara O’Shea introduced in its second section entitled “You’re Nathan Zuckerman.” Nathan is captivated by Miss O’Shea in much the same way that Pepler seems mesmerized by Carnovsky / Zuckerman. But leaving the matter of sexuality aside – in any case, Pepler can only proffer Zuckerman a semen-stained tissue before he disappears for good, while O’Shea is apparently heavily involved in an affair with Fidel Castro at her exit – the basis of Nathan’s attraction could not be more different than Pepler’s. For despite all her film star notoriety, it’s more “the thrill of all that unknownness” that truly draws Nathan to Caesara since, as Caesara herself attempts to explain her celebrity, “your you isn’t the world’s you” (Unbound 97, 88). The fact of Caesara’s celebrity is certainly undeniable. But it’s precisely given that fact that the film star, and her seeming endless theatricalization of identity, makes an important intersection with the autobiographer, or what the Zuckerman persona in Roth’s The Facts prefers to call a “personificator,” which he explains as follows: You have the reverse experience of most of your American contemporaries. Your acquaintance with the facts, your sense of the facts, is much less developed than your understanding, your intuitive weighing and balancing of fiction [and so] You make a fictional world that is far more exciting than the world it comes out of. My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses of yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what you are or ever were. By now what you are is a walking text. (162) As the very embodiment of a “walking text,” or what The Facts in another place refers to as “this fictional autobiographical projection of a partial you” (172), Caesara can thus thrill Nathan with her diva-dame “unknowness” as it were, bowing to Wallace Stevens once again, mainly because it’s one that she can also thrill to in Nathan himself: “I knew there would be more to Zuckerman than nice manners and clean shoes” (Unbound 85, emphasis added). And it’s a “more” or theatricalization of absence that Nathan’s literary agent perhaps helps us trace to that openness to unassimilated otherness

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back in Newark when she remarks: “But then there’s a little Mother Superior in you too isn’t there? Or maybe that’s part of the act. Keeping the Kike at Bay. More goyish than the Puritan fathers,” to which Nathan can only reply, “Right to the heart of my mystery” (77). Enlarging further upon that sense of mystery underwriting the theatricalization of identity here, Roth comments additionally in The Facts: “Yes, there is mystery upon mystery to be uncovered once you abandon the disguises of autobiography and hand the facts over for imagination to work on. And no, the distortion called fidelity is not your métier – you are simply too real to outface full disclosure. It’s through dissimulation that you find your freedom from the falsifying requisites of ‘candor’” (184). Or, as Emerson sums up the case in his essay entitled “Circles,” therefore, “[We are finally] not to be understood” (27). When we return once again to the concluding “Look Homeward, Angel” section of Zuckerman Unbound to assess the significance of the third and final character, Nathan’s brother Henry Zuckerman, in the Jersey context, a conversational exchange between Jonathan Brent and Philip Roth from 1988 should prove helpful. In the spirit of de Certeau rehearsed previously, Brent is quite intrigued by Roth’s Zuckerman persona in The Facts, and how apt he is “about all the silences, the blank spaces in the portrait,” thus prompting Brent to query Roth: “Is this blankness also part of who you are yourself?” Roth’s reply is instructive: Sure, blank space is part of who one is to oneself. You know and also you don’t know. But there’s a difference, on the one hand, between not knowing and not knowing that you don’t know and, on the other, not knowing and knowing why you don’t know – and even paradoxically, knowing what it is you don’t know … To put it simply, I didn’t think the book complete without a Zuckerman casting serious doubt on autobiographical objectivity as an attainable goal. (Brent 234) To my mind, Nathan’s brother Henry strikes me as the perfect embodiment of the self as a “blank space” aware of its unknowness or absence, but one who willfully chooses not to know it or otherwise ignore it. Henry’s extremely ambitious aspirations to the stage at one point while a dentistry student at Cornell University surely reveal that,

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like Caesara O’Shea previously, he is keen to authenticate a much “bigger character” than the kind his overcontrolling Jewish father, so narrowly focused on material success for his two sons, is prepared to countenance. “Maybe what you ought to start squeezing out of yourself,” so his more unbounded brother Nathan recommended at the time, “is the obedient son” (Unbound 213). By retrieving an annotated copy of Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares from his girlfriend Carol, accordingly, and proposing marriage to her in the process, Henry did appear to indicate that he was “prepared” to make good on his brother Nathan’s advice. But over time, the pressures of career and marriage and kids, or as Henry himself sums up the case, “Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families … the way it is for the rest of us” (217) – the pressures to conform to real life expectation eventually bind Henry more and more to his father, and to the father’s deathbed judgment that brother Nathan is the true “bastard” son for having failed in “knowing what you really are” (217). In precisely refusing that “knowing” reality throughout the novel as we have seen, Nathan would prefer to hear the word “batter” rather than “bastard” issue from his dying father’s lips: Batter. The mixture time had beaten together for making Zuckermans. Suppose their father had closed out with that: Boys, you are what I baked. Very different loaves, but God bless you both. There’s room for all types. Neither the Father of Virtue nor the Father of Vice, but the Father of Rational Pleasures and Reasonable Alternatives. Oh that would have been very nice indeed. (214) The “room for all types” – those Deleuzian “realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless” referred to previously in Oates – hence the room for “Reasonable Alternatives” in this passage surely dovetails with that “blank space” for a selfhood that Roth is so insistent upon locating between fact and fiction, and which characters like Henry Zuckerman can only choose to ignore at their peril: “He answered [Nathan] with his eyes pressed tightly shut. ‘It’s ­murder’” (215). So to return, with Nathan Zuckerman, to the New Jersey of his youth, we may recall as a third and final revelation in that concluding section of Zuckerman Unbound Roth’s final glimpse of the narrator as he is led out of the family home by Thea and Doris, so

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“developed” for their years, and made to stand “by a big black grease spot and repeat everything [Thea] said [although] The words meant little to him” (224). Enticed into a much darker space quite outside the Zuckerman household, the description here possibly puts us in mind of the psychoanalysis of David Macey once again, and his caveat that “the ego is not master of its own house.” Like psychoanalysis, so Roth himself has remarked, “[Imaginative literature] frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling [allowing] both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not always available in day-to-day conduct; or, if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal or advisable … Ceasing for a while to be upright citizens, we drop into another layer of consciousness. And this expansion of moral consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, is of considerable value to a man and to society” (Reading Myself 195). It’s tempting, in conclusion, to view that “big black grease spot” alongside which Nathan is positioned and made speechless as emblematic of the very expansion of consciousness just as Roth describes – “the black hole” in Deleuze, we recall, in response to which “One launches forth, hazards an improvisation … One ventures from home on the thread of a tune” (Thousand Plateaus 311). In a related context, that black spot perhaps becomes emblem, according to Slavoj Žižek, of “a non-symbolized stain, a hole in reality which designates the ultimate limit where ‘the word fails’” (Everything You Wanted 239). Either way, in Roth’s novel it becomes that mysterious site where the precious words of a literary artist like Nathan first begin to take hold. For as Nathan goes on to relate about that border-breaking encounter so many years ago in Newark, “It was the first strong experience of the power of language … as the orphanage fence beyond his bedroom window was the first momentous encounter with caste and chance, with the mystery of destiny” (Unbound 224). Unbound by the circumscriptions of everyday life, Roth’s formative New Jersey years thus allow him access to a power that, in contrast to Alvin Pepler and Henry Zuckerman in this one novel, promises to enlarge the breadth and the scope of subjectivity – the “Human Stain” as Roth will nominate it a decade later, and elaborate it in a dozen or more novels yet to come – an “unbound” subjectivity that ultimately is “no place like home.” As to the absent enlargement of that powerful promise, we have the unboundedness

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of Nathan Zuckerman’s own words just here for now: “‘Who you supposed to be?’ [a black security guard asked him]. ‘No one,’ replied Zuckerman, and that was the end of that. You are no longer any man’s son, you are no longer some good woman’s husband, you are no longer your brother’s and you don’t come from anywhere anymore, either” (224–5).

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4 “Both Sides and Neither”: Stevens, Masculinity, and American Film An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind. Sigmund Freud, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning To be irrational and unintelligible is the character proper to existence. George Santayana, Soliloquies in England Men grow small in the distances of space. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

The fact that a number of contemporary American gay writers continue to return to the poetry of Wallace Stevens – the work of Mark Doty and Michael Cunningham are the signal instances in previous chapters of this study – will probably suggest the limit case for Stevens’s “masculinity” in his own poetry, and the “erotic poetics” hypothetically subtending it. But in view of the extensive correspondence between José Rodríguez Feo and Stevens gathered together in Secretaries of the Moon (1986), and of the considerable interest recounted there by the letter writers in a number of other homosexual authors familiar to both at the time (Walter Pater, Arthur Rimbaud, André Gide, Djuna Barnes, Osbert Sitwell, Ronald Firbank, and Truman Capote, among others), it’s possible to imagine an American gay filmmaker like George Cukor entering the ranks of

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that redoutable queer pantheon – a filmmaker whose work I reserve for analysis in the second part of this chapter. As a bridge to that reading of Cukor in this first part, I focus on the shadow presence conceivably at back of the gay coterie as it were in the Stevens-Feo correspondence, namely, the philosopher George Santayana. As recounted in chapter 2, Santayana was a professor of philosophy in whom Stevens first became intrigued while still an undergraduate at Harvard. As an avid reader of Stevens over the years, however, I myself have been continually fascinated by the pre-eminent place accorded Santayana by Stevens later on in life, featuring him as the poet does in one of the longer poems from his last collection, The Rock, entitled “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” composed in 1952. As a prologue, then, to my reading of Stevens in the context of American film, some further light on that grand old “inquisitor of structures,” as Santayana is characterized in the last stanza of one of Stevens’s most engaging final poems (Collected Poetry and Prose 434; c p p hereafter), will I hope prove to be instructive. According to John McCormick, Santayana’s most recent and perhaps most reliable biographer, Santayana was almost certain to have been gay, involving himself in at least one amatory relationship with John Francis Stanley, second Earl Russell (and brother to Bertrand), whom Benjamin Jowett once suspended from Balliol College, Oxford, for “entertaining” another man in his rooms overnight (Lane 170–1). So that when Santayana composes a sonnet in response to several that Stevens had read to him over the course of several visits while a Special Student at Harvard, it’s possible to add Santayana’s name to that pantheon of gay writers noted previously.1 “Obviously, his mind was full of great projects of his future,” Stevens remarks on these meetings in a letter to Rodríguez Feo from 1945, “and while some of these have been realized, it is possible to think that many have not … [Nonetheless, Stevens concludes,] I always came away from my visits to him feeling that he made up in the most genuine way for many things that I needed [for] [h]e was then still definitely a poet” (H. Stevens, Letters 481–2). But according to Ezra Pound, not very much of one. Milton J. Bates cites a satirical sketch from Pound’s Pavannes and Divisions (1918) that dismissively indicates what Pound really thought of Santayana and his circle of Aesthetes fancifully translated from Harvard to Oxford around the turn of the century after Pound himself emigrated to England a decade or so later:

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This little American went to Oxford. He rented Oscar’s late rooms. He talked about the nature of the Beautiful. He swam in the wake of Santayana. He had a great cut glass bowl full of lilies. He believed in Sin. His life was immaculate. He was the last convert to Catholicism. (qtd on 24) Stevens’s daughter Holly, who cites the same letter of her father to Feo just alluded to (in Souvenirs and Prophecies, s p hereafter), records a quite different impression. “It is obvious Santayana had a lifelong influence on my father,” she observes, adding a quote from Santayana (from another of her father’s letters from 1949) that perhaps crystallizes Stevens’s memory of him: “I have always bowed, however sadly, to expediency or fate” (qtd on 69). Hence, prolonged inspiration combined with poignant sadness contrive to produce, several decades later, some of Stevens’s most moving lines in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” – lines composed just a couple of years short of Stevens’s own conversion to Catholicism on his deathbed: In so much misery; and yet finding it Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin, Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead, As in the last drop of the deepest blood, As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen Even as the blood of an empire, it might be, For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome. It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene. (c p p 433) At first glance, these lines convey perhaps more the sense of the elegiac than the erotic. But if the erotic is passionally coterminous with human desire, it may be helpful to remember that desire most often “has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity … which enlarges us, which engages the heart, [and] takes us out of the routine limitations of the self” (Doty, Heaven’s Coast 20). The self-enlargement that Doty has in mind here would thus appear to transcend any specific or particular sense of a “gay” identity. Hence Irving Singer observes that in

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Santayana’s philosophical novel, The Last Puritan (1935), “What remains at the core of the novel is not homosexuality but rather friendship as an ideal intimacy. In view of the love that it generally incorporates, it may be called erotic; but nothing is gained by reducing it to one or another type of libidinal sexuality – whether overt or merely ‘latent’ as Freud would say” (59). Indeed, that splendidly specific enlargement of the human self beyond its libidinally “routine limitations” or characterizations perhaps might be thought the primal attraction of Santayana for Stevens from the very beginning to quite likely the very end of his poetic career. American historian and cultural pundit Edmund Wilson had a longstanding attraction to the philosopher for much the same reason. Visiting with Santayana in his convent room at the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome seven years before Stevens composed his justly famous poem, Wilson, on assignment for The New Yorker magazine, observes that even in old age, “[Santayana] is still in the world of men, conversing with them through reading and writing.” Continues Wilson: While others, in these years of war, have been shaken by the downfall of moralities or have shuddered under the impact of disaster … He has made it his business to extend himself into every kind of human consciousness with which he can establish contact, and he reposes on his shabby chaise longue like a monad in the universal mind. (qtd in Mishra 31) According to his most recent biographer, Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson himself had also “made it his business to extend himself into every kind of human consciousness with which he can establish contact,” since in Wilson’s view, “the writer who is anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something that has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena … With each such victory of the human intellect, we experience a deep satisfaction” (qtd in Mishra 33). If for Wilson the model for such deregulation of the limitations of human consciousness was George Santayana, conceivably Stevens himself derived a  “deep satisfaction” in equal measure from this most ancient of mentors. The splendid specificity of that “afflatus of ruin” in the lines of Stevens’s poem cited above, and elsewhere in the text with “The bed,

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the books, the chair, the moving nuns, / The candle as it evades the sight,” and so forth – such specificity becomes for Stevens and his Old Philosopher “The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome, / A shape within the ancient circles of shapes, / And these beneath the shadow of a shape” (c p p 432). In light of Wilson’s preceding commentary, the “shadow of a shape” I therefore take to mean that inarticulable human space, “pure amodal reality” as William James would characterize it (Massumi 122) quite outside the routine limitations of selfhood that expediency or fate had required Santayana otherwise to bow down to throughout his long life as noted in Stevens’s letter from 1949 (H. Stevens, Letters 635), and which the philosopher’s shadowy presence now allows him to escape in Stevens’s majestic poem by virtue of his placement in-between: Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness, In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair,  alive Yet living in two worlds, impenitent As to one, and, as to one, most penitent, Impatient for the grandeur that you need (c p p 433) Hence, worldly specificity becomes for Santayana the condition of his very own nonspecificity – “The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme / Of the unknown” as Stevens puts the case ­earlier in the poem (c p p 432) – and it is within that very condition of nonspecificity or self-dispossession that the erotism of Stevens’s late lyricism may be located. Robert K. Martin’s brief but penetrating reading of Santayana in The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry attributes something of the status of a dispossessed self to the poet, observing that “Santayana’s sense of himself as a Latin, or half Latin, was an important part of his self-definition.” “One might say,” Martin further remarks, “that he felt incomplete, a permanent alien, too English for Spain, too Spanish for England or New England. His dual nature made him an outsider and observer of life,” adding in a shrewd footnote that “the half-Latin figure may be seen as an emblem of the androgynous self” (112, 232n37). But Santayana’s androgynous dualism is a characterization he was perhaps prepared to take upon himself, as he records in an early passage from his autobiographical Persons and Places from which I have taken this chapter’s title: “I am

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born cleric or poet. I must see both sides and take neither, in order, ideally, to embrace both, to sing both, and love the different forms that the good and beautiful wear to different creatures” (155).2 This kind of tacking between identities within the noncommittal rhetoric of the androgyne (to go with Martin’s suggestion) would appear, indeed, to be the very condition of erotism itself as Freud might be thought to imply (in the opening epigraph). Suspended “intermezzo” as Deleuze would say somewhere between the renunciation of reality and the playfulness of phantasy, according to Freud, the artist hypothetically sides with both, finding his way back to reality “by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind” (qtd in Shand-Tucci 75).3 In this way, Stevens can suggest (in another letter to Rodríguez Feo from 1945) that “in the world of actuality, in spite of all I have just said [about reality], one is always living a little out of it” – an idea, Stevens goes on to remark, that is suggested to him (like Santayana as we shall see momentarily) by Henry James (H. Stevens, Letters 505–6). With the emphasis firmly upon multiplicity – “different forms” in Santayana, “truths of a new kind” in Freud – we are thus led back to Stevens’s “To an Old Philosopher” once more, where the erotism of the poetics is so insistently sustained by a similar emphasis upon a like multiplicity – “distances of space,” “circles of shape,” and so forth – from which the androgynous “inquisitor of structures” significantly placed upon a “threshold” repeatedly takes “form / and frame” by the end of the poem (c p p 434). A spiralling erotism (to go with Stevens’s “circles of shape”) might be the best characterization at this point, a term that hypothetically can also be extrapolated from Santayana whose own “spiral theory” of subjectivity “denies that there is any inner kernal to be identified with one’s real nature.” “At any moment,” as Singer explains this theory in much of Sanatayana’s writing, “a person is just the sum total of his or her experiences … On this view there is no break between the self and its experience, for experience is the self: in toto, the self is only a series of past, present, and future experiences” (30, emphasis retained), hence a variation of the diva-dame’s “ever-never-changing same” in  Stevens’s “Adult Epigram” recurring throughout this study.4 According to Malcolm Woodland, in more global terms “Stevens’s poetry presents many ways of being masculine, and there is often considerable tension among the different versions of masculinity that emerge in his texts,” the main one perhaps lying in that tension

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between “masculinity as a capacity [solely] for heterosexual relationships” and “the somewhat hyperbolic and strangely incomplete alternative [of] an exaggerated homosocial masculine stance set up in resistance to this [former] temptation” (28, 67). Elsewhere, Woodland astutely clarifies his more global hypothesis, noting that in Stevens, “the poetry’s figurations of gender do not just alternate between masculine and feminine positions, but explore … a wide range of different masculinities … son, lover, husband, father, businessman, poet and so on” (69). In so doing, Stevens’s poetry engages a type of homosocial “sympathy” quite prevalent in a bygone era of American literature that Caleb Crain exhaustively explores in works ranging from the gothic romances of Charles Brockden Brown, through the essays and lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the sea narratives of Herman Melville, where “at the height of sympathy’s reign, American men could express emotions to each other with a fervor and openness that could not have been detached from religious enthusiasm a generation earlier and would have to be consigned to sexual perversion a few generations later,” thus giving the lie, once again, to tensile states of “double mental existence” as figurations of “imposture” (35, 77, 78). I shall return to the particular link between homosociality and religious enthusiasm later in my argument. For now, one might even hazard the conjecture that much of the erotic contouring of Stevens’s final collection of poems is pendant upon the dismantling of bifurcated or antinomous forms of identity where figures of various kinds are located again and again at the intersection between contrary states of experience. In “An Old Man Asleep,” for instance, which begins the volume, we find in the very first line “two worlds asleep.” These are then matched in the second stanza with “the self and the earth,” which stand in some kind of “peculiar” relation to each other as a threshold-like river interposed between them aims to suggest, though riddlingly, with its own peculiar nomination by the letter “R” (c p p 427). Further along, in the somewhat related “Long and Sluggish Lines,” a certain “wakefulness inside a sleep” presents another form of bifurcated identity, but a more insistent one this time – “a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction” as the poem states – and where the temptation is to resolve the conflict in some way, “talk it down,” as it were (c p p 443). And so on to the collection’s very concluding poem, “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” where “a scrawny cry from

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outside the mind” is never easily separable from “a sound in [the] mind” itself, the interanimation of inside and outside in some psychic space in-between thus forming, as with Freud’s truths previously, “a new kind of reality” in the poem’s terminal line (c p p 452). The two-sidedness of much of this rhetorical self-division conduces to produce throughout the volume some androgynous figures indeed. In “Madame La Fleurie,” for example, “a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light,” is specifically intended to be something like we have never seen before: “a language [one] spoke … but did not know … in the handbook of heartbreak,” hence “crisp knowledge devoured by her, beneath a dew” (c p p 432, 431). Not quite male or female, the androgynous figure in all of its polymorphous perversity in this text thus forges a clear link to a similar kind of preOedipal figuration in “Long and Sluggish Lines” once again, namely, “these--escent--issant--pre-personae” that establish another strong polarity: here, the division between a childhood world of “comic infanta” and an adult world of “tragic drapings” (c p p 443).5 Precisely what gendered form (or forms) human identity is expected to take as it bursts all routine limitations of discursive self-possession is entirely open to speculation. At this point, we perhaps become one with the oarsman in Stevens’s “Prologues of What Is Possible” when he discovers that the heavy vessel buoying him up for most of his life has suddenly lost all ballast, and he finds himself “voyaging out of and beyond the familiar,” removed, the text scruples to point out, “from any man or woman, and needing none”: The object with which he was compared Was beyond recognizing. By this he knew that likeness   of him extended Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between him self, And things beyond resemblance there was this and that   intended to be recognized, The this and that in the enclosures of hypotheses Of which men speculated in summer when they were half   asleep (c p p 438) Here, nothing short of “a fantastic consciousness” would seem up to the task of enclosing Stevens’s androgynous figurations in some kind of hypothetical or speculative formulation. Not unexpectedly,

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Stevens positions this phantasy consciousness (the link to Freud, once again, is inescapable) “at noon at the edge of [a] field” in the opening section of his longest poem, the eponymously titled “The Rock,” and it is there, I would argue, that the erotic poetics of Stevens’s late work comes into its own in what this text refers to as “a queer assertion of humanity” (c p p 445). How so? What by now seems clear about Stevens’s androgynous aesthetic throughout much of this late work arguably undertaken in homage to Santayana is its suspicioning of any determinate knowledge or understanding or certitude with respect to human identity. Yet it’s a suspicioning that is longstanding with the poet. “There is a perfect rout of characters in every man,” Stevens records in a journal entry from 1906, “and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old” (s p 166). Almost fifty years later, then, we should not be surprised to discover once more an Old Philosopher whose “spirit’s greatest reach” pushes beyond the known – “beyond the eye” (to go with a favourite pun of Stevens) in “that more merciful Rome / Beyond” – and thereby positions himself “in the presence of the extreme / Of the unknown” that becomes coterminous with a “celestial possible,” and an “O, half-asleep” that is “the memorial of [Santayana’s] room” in the convent in Rome (c p p 432, 433). As one gloss on that important “O” just cited, Kate Bornstein aptly hypothesizes that the “zero must be the point where people and their ideas move out beyond their boundaries to become their opposites” (212, emphasis added). The idea is particularly Deleuzian. As Rosi Braidotti recently remarks, “Sexual difference, far from a boundary marker, has to be relocated along the idea … of Deleuze’s notion of the empirical transcendental, so as to become a threshold for the elaboration and the expression of multiple differences which extend beyond gender but also beyond the human” (Nomadic Theory 79–80). If knowledge of identity, in such terms, is a zero-sum game, Stevens’s “queer assertion of humanity” would appear to be extraordinarily prescient in view of how queer theorists today are predisposed to view that vexed term “queer”: not by “the contradictory and incoherent definitional content of ‘the homosexual,’” but rather by “a position that is … constituted not substantively but oppositionally,” and by “a deessentialized identity that is … properly speaking not gay but queer” (Halperin 61–2, emphasis retained). But if it’s possible to hear Stevens behind the queer theorist today, under the impress of an erotic poetics it should be even more possible to hear

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Santayana behind Stevens some time ago – the Santayana who once remarked that “this world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as fact … [So that] To be irrational and unintelligible is the character proper to existence” (Soliloquies in England [1936], qtd in Posnock 213). Stevens’s own “Irrational Element in Poetry” would thus appear to provide the perfect gloss on Santayana’s queer assertion of human unintelligibility. For there, the poet himself asserts “that the unknown as the source of knowledge, as the object of thought, is part of the dynamics of the known [that] does not permit of denial.” Furthermore, It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom. We accept the unknown even when we are most skeptical. We may resent the consideration of it by any except the most lucid minds; but when so considered, it has seductions more powerful and more profound than those of the known. (c p p 791) Arguably refurbishing the irrational as an elemental force in his last collection of verse, Stevens perhaps pushes the unintelligible aspect of his androgynous aesthetic to the limit by allowing his erotic poetics to take expression, in Santayana’s case at least, within the context of his (and perhaps Stevens’s own) Catholicism given by the convent setting in “To an Old Philosopher.” But how can Catholicism and erotism be thought to coexist? In his landmark study of architect and aesthete Ralph Adams Cram, Douglass Shand-Tucci insistently makes the claim that “the erotic and the spiritual are not opposites, nor separable” (citing Eric Gill on 176; further on 198, 293, and passim). The linkage between Catholicism and homosexuality is “an old tale,” Shand-Tucci contends, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited being the greatest modern instance (175). But even in ancient times, “the type of ‘passionate friendship’ familiar to the early Church [from Classical Greece] was common … while ‘the loving relation of [male] teacher and student in religious communities was very much a medieval ideal’” (189). Indeed, as Shand-Tucci further points out, “The Catholic moral law (as opposed to zealous polemicism) has always held to the teaching that homosexual sexuality as such is not sinful and is morally neutral; it is only its genital expression (like all genital expression outside heterosexual marriage) that is problematic” (176, emphasis

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retained). Michael Kimmel in his monumental landmark study Manhood in America: A Cultural Study would tend to corroborate Shand-Tucci’s historiography, enlarging it to the end of the twentieth century, and beyond, by claiming succinctly that “masculinity is largely a homosocial enactment,” and that even though homosociality can sometimes be “deeply erotic and emotionally as well as sexually charged,” nonetheless “genital sexuality is not a requirement for homosociality as the foundation for masculinity; in fact [Kimmel goes on to explain], homophobia becomes a cultural requirement to separate the erotic charge that often accompanies homosocial interaction. I argue that historically masculinity is largely a homosocial enactment but that it is also an enactment among heterosexual men, and that homophobic fears of effeminacy ensure its heterosexuality” (7, 392n95, 366n11). On the question, therefore, of whether the male nineteenth-century American writers he studies had sex, Crain admits he has no interest in pursuing (13), and for reasons that seem especially germane to the aestheticism of androgyny shared by Santayana and Stevens that I am attempting to explore in this chapter. Explains Crain: “From the vantage of our era, it is difficult to appreciate the cultural experimentation of the eighteenth century – which encouraged individuals to follow a sympathetic attachment as far as it would go. They dwelt in possibilities that we cannot help but reduce to prose. Whether or not a couple had sex is a natural question to ask, but the answer will not allow us into the private meaning of their bond” (33; further on 239). For Donald Yacovone, the Boston-based group of abolitionists allied to William Lloyd Garrison come to exemplify much of the erotism of fraternal love extending back to the Middle Ages, but in America, making its quite visible appearance a generation or two before Stevens and Santayana met at Harvard at the turn of the century. “As members of a profoundly religious movement,” Yacovone writes, “abolitionists discovered that the language of ecstasy represented the only discourse that could express the intensity of their emotions and the depth of their commitment.” Yet while their expressions of undying love for each other through much kissing, tear-shedding, and hand-clasping all reenacted “a ritual as old as Christianity,” more to the point was the abolitionists’ “language of fraternal love [that] symbolized a rejection of rigid definitions of gender and reflected a theory of Christian social androgyny that sought to restructure American society” (86, 87). For Garrisonians, in this

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regard, their role model was the Christ himself, “a feminized fraternal figure, a model man, perhaps reflecting women’s strong influence within the Garrisonian community,” but in any event, a personage betokening that “humanity is dual,” according to one fervent abolitionist, “and yet when perfected is one … [since] a perfect character in either man or woman is a compound of the virtues and graces of each” (91). However, cautions Yacovone, as in the case of many historians of gay and lesbian culture today, we can too easily distort the view of androgyny presented here “by mistaking the language of religious ecstasy and sincerity, or agape, for homoeroticism or outright homosexuality,” reducing it, that is to say, to a narrow reflection of our own faddish knowledgeability about such matters rather than, as with the irrational element in Santayana and Stevens’s erotism, allowing its language to speak a more “generous construction” of human identity in Yacovone’s fine phrase (93–4, 95). On that level, as Stevens once again reminds us, knowledge mediated by the irrational elements of poetry “has seductions more powerful and more profound than those of the known” (c p p 791). Precisely this “irrational” construction of religion, therefore, is forwarded in Shand-Tucci’s historical account of Ralph Adams Cram. If  Catholicism for this Victorian architect becomes “the principle expression or carrier of his sexual orientation,” it had to be understood “in a most characteristically Platonic way” (198). And here the model for Cram was, not surprisingly, the Platonic Aestheticism of George Santayana with whom, like Stevens, Cram was repeatedly in contact at Harvard during the fin de siècle – the Platonism, that is to say, of Santayana’s Sonnets and Other Verses (1894) where the name of the “great love” of Santayana’s rather ascetic life at the time, Warwick Potter, is withheld, and the cryptic “W.P.” is inscribed in its place (173). In this Platonic model, it is “the form of [the] young man [that] leads to a truer, more eternal form,” according to Robert Martin once again, that form of the “imaged Word” giving itself over ultimately to its source “in the mystery of the Incarnation, as expressed by St. John, that most Greek of Christians” (Homosexual Tradition 198). Shand-Tucci thus cites Camille Paglia (from her Sexual Personae [1990]) on the sexual import of the Christian Pla­ tonism here; to wit, “Decadence … is drenched in sex, but sex as thought rather than action.” “The Platonic ideal,” Shand-Tucci concludes, “is not only the model that best reconciles Cram’s religion with his sexuality but also accords with the way in his era aesthetes

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and decadents were inclined to feel the creative process was sustained,” explaining further that “a relationship that does not fully satisfy genital needs can still be primary if not exclusive if the people involved regard intellectual needs as primary and physical needs as secondary” (196, 255; also on 256, 259, 292, and 383). In Persons and Places, Santayana provides his own justification for “the total abdication of physical, social or egotistical claims” on the psyche when he remarks: “The passion of love, sublimated, does not become bloodless, or free from bodily trepidation, as charity and philanthropy are. It is essentially the spiritual flame of a carnal fire that has turned all its fuel into light. The psyche is not thereby atrophied; on the contrary, the range of its reactions has been enlarged. It has learned to vibrate harmoniously to many things at once in a peace which is an orchestration of transcended sorrows” (429). Hence, in the sonnet that Stevens composed at Harvard, “Cathedrals are not built along the sea” (for which Santayana apparently provided an answering sonnet), we should notice in Stevens’s concluding couplet that “Through gaudy windows there would come too soon / The low and splendid rising of the moon” (qtd in s p 32–3). “Santayana, the last and the best of the poets of the Genteel Age,” Martin surmises, “left in the end a legacy that was as vague as that of the earlier poets” (Homosexual Tradition 114). “Vague” is an important word here. It is interesting to note, for instance, the emphasis leant this particular epithet in Ralph Adam Cram’s collection of Gothic horror stories, Black Spirits and White (1895), for example in “The White Villa,” where in a rather Stevensian-like setting, the protagonists find themselves “lying in the grass to the east of Poseidon, looking dimly out towards the sea, heard now, not seen, – vague and pulsating murmur that blended with the humming of the bees all about [them]” (qtd in Shand-Tucci 196). In Ross Posnock’s illuminating comparison of Henry James and George Santayana, he observes that James rejected “his father’s flaccid, genteel idealism,” and in its place, came to feel, according to James’s Autobiography, “‘confidence in the positive saving virtue of vagueness’ itself” (203).6 Matching the import of vagueness in James, Stevens’s final collection of poetry perhaps offers the “slight dithering” in “Prologues to What Is Possible” (c p p 438). But whether vague or dithering, the point of the erotic poetics in both Santayana and Stevens is to establish a necessary ambivalence about gender identity, and about a depersonalizing desire in general – an ambivalence that not only “renders

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heterosexuality noninevitable,” as Christopher Lane cogently argues, but also “preempts the possibility of a purely gay-affirmative reading” as well (185).7 In sum, therefore, an ambivalent erotism renders the androgynous aesthetic a liberatory egress from all sexual economies, and thus allows it to reinstall itself on a more generic plane: “the beauty and passion informing poetry” tout court (Lane 177). In an important essay on “The Reinstatement of the Vague” in American literature, Richard Poirier cites a passage from William James’s Will to Believe that is especially appropriate to the kind of ambivalent identity that, after Santayana, Stevens’s own erotic poetics can be seen repeatedly to gesture toward throughout his final work. I say repeatedly because, according to James, “The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible” (qtd on 279). Santayana’s close association with William James and the philosophy of Pragmatism at Harvard during the period when Stevens was a student would undoubtedly have made this important notion of self-opacity fairly portable among all three writers (see Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police, chapter 2; and Poirier). As Stevens himself recollects a decade or so later: “Reality is the great fond, and it is because it is that the purely literary amounts to so little” (H. Stevens, Letters 505). But the fond notion of self-opacity is one that also extends back to Melville and Whitman (if not beyond) where “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life” was perhaps first instated (279).8 Stevens’s punning “mystic eye,” indeed, can forge an even stronger linkage to William James and the phantom subject, the Pragmatist model for which in James’s last published essay composed before his death was the conspicuously “ungenteel” American poet Benjamin Blood who clearly has a direct connection to Santayana when James records: “‘Simply,’ [Blood] writes to me, ‘we do not know [about life]. But when we say we do not know, we are not to say it weakly and meekly, but with confidence and content … Knowledge is and must ever be secondary – a witness rather than a principal – or a “principle”! – in the case. Therefore mysticism for me!’” James’s ­further characterization of such nonknowledge, and indeed of a pluralistic mystic like Blood himself, is, interestingly, “queer and cactuslike,” and in an even more phantom-like phrase, “ever not quite” (“A Pluralistic Myth,” Writings 1312). James Russell Lowell’s honorific of “mystic practicalism” might suit the case here, but Bates (34–5) is

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correct, I think, in attaching the “mystic” side of that descriptor more to writers like Santayana (and Emerson, and I would add, Benjamin Blood, before him). Poirier’s focus, therefore, upon the parallel images of gap and abyss for a self-instinct with absence and mystery throughout the poetry of Frost reveals that the notion of the phantom subject would continue to have considerable futurity as well (see esp. “Reinstatement of the Vague” 280–1). Several of Stevens’s own invocations throughout The Rock say as much: in “The Plain Sense of Things,” the “inert savoir” and “the absence of imagination” (c p p 428); in “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” the “unexplained completion” and the “inexactnesses” (c p p 435); in “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside,” the “mystic eye” and the “outward blank” (c p p 448); and so forth, in addition to phantom titles such as “The Hermitage at the Center” (c p p 430) and “Vacancy in the Park” (c p p 434). “That Stevens stands as an epitome of this tradition [that argues for “the virtue and necessity of vagueness”],” as Bart Eeckhout cogently remarks, “is one more telling indication of how far he managed to go in his poetic attempts at resisting the intelligence almost successfully” (34) – and never more so, as I have been arguing, when that intelligence is fully trained upon the problematic of human identity with George Santayana as the poet’s lifetime guide. In conclusion, then, I think it would be a terrific oversight to underplay the important function that Stevens’s erotic poetics play in his late work in solemn deference to more sober or sedate concerns given his seniority and stature as an accomplished and much celebrated writer in his twilight years. Focused as his erotism is upon the possessive forms of selfhood that relinquish ambivalence and the “luxurious disbanding of identity” (the phrase is Lane’s on 192) at their peril, Stevens’s androgynous aestheticism firmly in the wake of Santayana, and contrary to the Pound era, offers the “Prologues to What Is Possible” well beyond the phobic essentialism of what that poem refers to as the “ordinary” and the “commonplace”: “what self, for example, did he contain that had not been loosed, / Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread … By an access of color, a new and unobserved, slight dithering” (c p p 438). Here, we perhaps may recall some of the potential ditherers that Jackson Lears takes up in an important chapter in No Place of Grace, renowned New England thinkers contemporary with Stevens and Santayana like George Cabot Lodge, Charles Eliot Norton, and Van Wyck Brooks.

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These men “were most restive under bourgeois definitions of gender identity,” but they nonetheless “sought to resolve contradictory impulses toward autonomy and dependence, to unify a fragmenting sense of selfhood, to preserve some ethical or religious framework amid evaporating creeds” (223, 225). For Jackson Lears, a strong counter-example to those men previously listed might have been an intellectual like Stanley Hall: “For Hall, the androgynous adolescent symbolized his own effort to recast sexual ambivalence. His program for adolescent education was a revealing litany: ‘repose, leisure, art, legends, romance, idealizations, in a word, humanism.’ The moon-goddess presided over the curriculum. It embodied a ‘feminine’ alternative to male ego ideals, an alternative with links to the mythopoeic unconscious.” In the end, however, as Lears observes, “Hall remained committed to the masculine ethos, [gradually] insisting that the exposure of male adolescents to feminine values was only a temporary, vitalizing preparation for adulthood” (249). For Ralph Adams Cram, clearly the alternative to male ego ideals lay in his immersion in something as impersonal as architecture for, according to Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “Architectural meaning … originates in the erotic impulse itself, in the need to quench our physical thirst … The effect of architecture is always beyond the purely visual, evoking the memory and expectation of erotic fulfillment … Architectural meaning, like erotic knowledge, is primarily of the body” (qtd in Shand-Tucci 83). In Stevens’s tribute to Santayana, interestingly, we notice that “the life of the city never lets go, nor do you want it to. It is part of the life in your room. / Its domes are the architecture of your bed” (c p p 433, emphasis added) – architecture here revealing that poetry perhaps performed the same erotic function for “an inquisitor of structures” (and for Stevens) as that other professional preoccupation did for Cram. I shall return to this curious relationship between poetry and architecture in chapter 6. As in Stevens, then, Santayana for Lears acquires a stature bordering on the heroic for it was men like Santayana who “sought liberation from the ‘straitened spirit’ of the late-Victorian bourgeoisie by casting beauty in many guises,” his model of aestheticism contrarily promulgating “the romantic activist’s suspicion that possibilities for authentic experience had diminished if not disappeared in late-­ Victorian culture” (191). Edmund Wilson, as we noticed much earlier, was of a like mind in his own response to the philosopher. And when Wilson endeavoured in his own work to show “how writers

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and intellectuals of an extraordinary successful society [like America] may have to ‘break down the walls of the present’ … to move beyond the bitter nostalgia and radical optimism of their native ideologies in order to seek ‘the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art’” (Mishra 33), we sense that for Wilson, Santayana was the model inquisitor of ideologies that Stevens had known right along. The key, of course, would lie in all those unsuspected possibilities just mentioned. Santayana’s phantom presence as the driving force behind Stevens’s erotic poetics throughout The Rock, I would finally argue, continues to sustain such possibilities for authentic experience. In the volume’s title poem, they become “New senses in the engenderings of sense,” despite our “desire to be at the end of distances,” that is to say, the imaginative possibilities for self-­enlargement that, following Santayana’s example, it’s now conceivable for us to put between the tired old “transcendent forms” of human identity, as in “A Quiet Normal Life,” and their opposite: “A new knowledge of Reality” in Stevens’s concluding poem (c p p 446, 444, 452). In the opening chapter of this study, I raise once again the important matter of safeguarding the distance in American literature’s fraught relationship with dissident identity (see also my Going the Distance).9 But if “men are growing small in the distances of space” as Stevens would have us imagine in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” (c p p 432), it’s only because we underestimate the power of erotism’s “spectral otherness”: “not a representation of male or female,” as Marjorie Garber reminds us, “but of precisely, itself: its own phantom or ghost” (“Transvestite Continuum” 278). Both sides and neither, as an Old Philosopher in Rome might say.

•• At this point, it should be fairly clear that my purpose for taking up the American film work of George Cukor as one “other” context for enlarging the significance of Stevens’s poetic achievement should have little to do with Cukor’s designation as a “gay” film director. In light of Stevens’s championing the Jamesean opacity and vagueness of a phantom masculinity, more to the point it seems to me is Cukor’s famous characterization as a “collaborative” filmmaker – an identity located neither on one side of the camera nor on the other, but somewhere in-between: “both sides and neither,” as it were. But even the label “collaborative” is hedged with peril, as Deleuze h ­ imself insists. For such “abstractions,” Deleuze tells us, “explain nothing, they

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themselves have to be explained: there are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same” (Negotiations 145). Still, if there is some sense of a “collaborative auteur” in director Cukor’s extensive filmography, pundits might agree that such collaboration arguably reached a kind of apogee when the director teamed up with the husband-and-wife screen writing duo of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon after the Second World War. Starting in 1946, and for the next seven years, such memorable films as A Double Life (1947), Adam’s Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), and Pat and Mike (1952) to name only the high points were the stellar results of this extraordinary artistic alliance. In the first part of this look at Cukor, I shall focus attention especially upon the second of these titles because another element of collaboration becomes further foregrounded in Cukor’s middle period: the great acting duo of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Already well known from their first appearance together in director George Stevens’s (no relation to Wallace) hit film Woman of the Year seven years earlier, the Hepburn / Tracy duo would appear only to heighten Cukor’s participant “relationship with his actors” that, according to Robert Emmet Long, “was a creative collaboration, just as it was with the technical team he employed – designers and cameramen [and screenplay writers] – who were among the best in their field and gave his movies their romantic gloss, warmth, and excitement” (xii; further on 45, 56, 70). An entire directorial career spent working within “the Hollywood system” at the beck and call of various autocratic movie moguls could have felt considerably oppressive to Cukor. And yet in a late interview granted to Peter Bogdanovich in 1983, Cukor admits: “I’ve found I can function in this climate; technically, one is bedazzled here [because] [t]here is a spirit about making pictures in Hollywood – everybody really involved – that I like so much. I may be sentimental about this … but I think [that vitality] still exists to some extent” (469–70, emphasis retained). To round out this chapter, I shall turn to Hepburn and Tracy’s very first pairing together in the aforementioned Stevens’s vehicle filmed during the war years (1942). There, my purpose shall be to contrast the rather more singular vision of Stevens’s brand of Hollywood filmmaking when set beside Cukor’s unique both-sides-and-neither collaborative style to reveal just how controversial filmic collaboration

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might be in America’s intra- and postwar climate. For according to Paul Cronin, Stevens “was vehement that the director retain absolute control of his work and be able to affect every element of a film’s production.” Observes Cronin further: Always anxious to assert his rights as a director, something he did no matter whose feathers were ruffled in the process, Stevens never hesitated to ensure he had everything needed to construct precisely the film he wanted … Stevens’s friend, the director Joseph Mankiewicz, explains that “after the actors were gone, the technicians were gone, there was nothing left but George and his film … And that’s why the making of films, I thought, for George was a very private, personal thing.” (xi, emphasis added) In one interview in particular collected by Cronin (from 1963), Stevens himself candidly admits: “I personally like to see films that are the work of as singular a consciousness as possible. By that I mean of one individual, not a group around a table.” Later in the interview, Stevens observes: “Those are the kinds of films I like to see – as singular as you can make the point of view. Only then does a film take on a definition for me. The ‘auteur’ concept is certainly the most desirable form of filmmaking, from my point of view” (25, 28). Individual creativity, then, was synonymous with such original auteurship, according to Stevens. Cukor, on the other hand, divulges (in an interview from 1972): “One does so many things instinctively while making a picture. That is why there is room for originality in film making, even though it is a collaborative effort” (Long 70). Clearly, then, the controversy surrounding collaboration makes a very clear separation between two quite disparate approaches to American filmmaking in the last century. And much of this controversy, as I shall also endeavour to show, is arguably attributable to two quite different approaches to the representation of gender and sexuality flagged, in part, by the somewhat ironic appearance of “women” in the titles of the two Hepburn / Tracy films elected for scrutiny – a representation that can more accurately be understood under the critical rubric of subjective displacement – “both sides and neither,” once again – in postwar America as we shall also see. In response, therefore, to an otherwise astute anonymous reader of this study who at first might not “get the connection” between Wallace Stevens and George Cukor about

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whom this chapter is programmatically structured, I can only invoke once more the poet’s diva-dame as a shadow presence behind the leading ladies portrayed in the Hepburn / Tracy films about to be inspected. With her feminist distanciations or becomings pitted, in Deleuzian terms, against the more masculinist syntheses of Being, the diva is the perfect emblem for the vagaries of “both-and-neither,” a phantom passenger somewhere between “pure being and pure nothing” as Elisabeth Bronfen’s Night Passages quite recently portrays her, “whose function as tertiary term is to render difference visible” (Bronfen 81) by means of her “ever-never-changing” filmic performativity. But to begin with Cukor, although the director had moved over to the MG M studios in the postwar years, the notion of filmic collaboration was not entirely new to him. Back at RKO during the early 1930s where he had been hard at work on such pictures as What Price Hollywood, A Bill of Divorcement, and Rockabye (all from 1932), Cukor preferred a teamwork approach to filmmaking. “He loved the slow, complicated, and sometimes torturous [sic] collaborative process that stymied so many others,” Patrick McGilligan, one of his biographers, recounts. “He was good at the collaborative process. He enjoyed solving the problems, negotiating the egos. He enjoyed delegating … so much [so] that sometimes it seemed he was doing nothing” (74). With the Kanins after the war, the teamwork approach to filmmaking was taken to unbelievably new heights. “Even when they were not in the same country,” McGilligan observes, “the collaboration between them was exceedingly close in all areas of production.” As is made clear from the cache of telegrams and letters in the Cukor archives, the Kanins had ideas about everything, from ­costumes to camera angles. Cukor dutifully sent them reports of every stage of production, still photographs of each scene, and regular assessments of the dailies. (207) The question then becomes: Why did Cukor so intensely feel the need to expand his collaborative predilections by resorting almost programmatically to teams of screenwriters and actors a couple of decades later in the early 1950s?10 One very practical answer to this question might be sought in the historical temper of the times. Thanks to an arguably more phobic

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kind of filmmaking emanating from Hollywood during the war as we shall see later in the case of Stevens’s Woman of the Year, the cultural predicament for a gay artist like Cukor in America’s postwar years was never an easy one, as I have remarked extensively elsewhere (see Going the Distance, esp. chapter 4). The widely accepted linkage throughout the 1950s, for instance, between sexual and political deviance, as John D’Emilio points out, “made the scapegoating of gay men and women a simple matter”: “the effete men of the eastern establishment lost China and Eastern Europe to the enemy” while “‘mannish’ women mocked the ideals of marriage and motherhood” (“Homosexual Menace” 60). Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM at this moment in Cukor’s career, and notorious for his scandalous firing of the homosexual actor Bill Haines a decade previously, was perhaps typical of the era: “a flag-waving Republican and friend of the Roman Catholic prelate Francis J. Spellman, [Mayer] had little grasp or tolerance of homosexuality” (McGilligan 156). Understandably, Cukor’s films were some of Mayer’s least favourite. Hence, Cukor might have attempted to displace much of the animosity directed at his own artistic ego by negotiating (as at RKO previously) a more disparate notion of “auteurship” by investing it in the high-powered writing and performing teams enlisted to carry it onward and upward around him. If the teamwork approach to filmmaking allowed Cukor the opportunity to “blend himself in” more to the phobic temper of the times as McGilligan further observes (196), it’s perhaps also important to be minded of the fact that an element of “shame” was attached to Cukor’s homosexuality for most of his life. “That taboo,” McGilligan observes, “was a nagging obstacle in telling the story of his life, right through to the end of his days … [since apparently] the director would not acknowledge for the record this central fact and compulsion of his life” (206, 298).11 A more nuanced explanation for Cukor’s artistic collaborations through these years, and one that I think is perhaps more in touch with the volatile gender issues presented in a film like Adam’s Rib as announced by its title, is offered by the critical theory of Gilles Deleuze, himself an avid fan of American films throughout his lifetime. Remarking on his own predisposition to collaboration, most notably with Félix Guattari in long philosophical treatises like AntiOedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze observes that they “didn’t collaborate like two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make ‘a’ third stream,” thus making of

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his own sense of collaboration a concatenation of humanistic affects. “Affects aren’t feelings, they’re becomings that spill beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else)” (Negotiations 136, 137). Remarking further on their affective association, Deleuze observes: There’d be a problem if we were precisely two persons, each with his own life, his own views, setting out to collaborate with each other and discuss things. When I said Félix and I were rather like two streams, what I meant was that individuation doesn’t have to be personal. We’re not at all sure we’re persons … [hence,] a nonpersonal individuality … They express themselves in language, carving differences in it, but language gives each its own individual life and gets things passing between them … our individuality is rather like that of events … something passing through you [like] a current, which alone has a proper name. (141) In a purely filmic context, for Deleuze, the great French “auteur” Jean Luc Godard would appear to be something of a lightning rod, and thus a model, for this collaborative current. “Godard constitutes a force in his own right,” Deleuze remarks, “but also gets others to work as a team.” Furthermore, “What counts with [Godard] isn’t two or three or however many, it’s A N D , the conjunction AN D ”: A N D is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities … which each time marks a new threshold, a new direction of the zigzagging line, a new course for the border. Godard’s ­trying to “see borders,” that is, to show the imperceptible … belonging to neither but carrying both forward in their disparate development, in a flight or in a flow where we no longer know which is the guiding thread, nor where it’s going … on the border between images and sounds … That’s what Godard [has] done. (37, 44, 45, emphasis added) When we inspect a film like Adam’s Rib more closely, I would contend that as a master of collaborative force for the displacement (if not the destruction) of human identities, that is precisely what Cukor’s direction has done as well. Godard’s project to dismantle the rigid demarcations of human identity just described in order to make it more porous like language

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(“on the border between images and sounds,” etc.) has an interesting connection to the largely homosexual New York School of poetry upon which I shall focus in greater detail in the next chapter. Emanating from the stultifying ethos of the 1950s, the artistic credo of that Cold War coterie of writers, recounted in detail by Michael Davidson, was to a significant degree “collaborative” as well. “By looking at the collective milieu in which poetry is produced,” observes Davidson, “we might see poetic composition as a collaborative [function] … alienated from the then dominant versions of community in the United States. As a form of collaboration, poetry displays the porous borders between the work of art and the work that art performs in shoring up consensus” (18). The net effect of such collaboration, according to Davidson’s compelling study of masculinity in the Cold War era, was to make identity rather like its phantom construction in the work of Santayana and Stevens reviewed earlier, that is, “free floating,” “multiple,” “constant[ly] shifting,” and “multifarious … existence as a series of costumes, attitudes and positions” (27, 59, 105, 123). Katharine Hepburn’s observation, therefore, that Cukor was “complicated to such an extent, [with] so many layers, that he did not really know himself” (qtd in McGilligan 341, emphasis added) would appear to fit into this collaborative construction of postwar identity. As Davidson aptly characterizes the collaborative subject’s epistemological conundrum, “there is the countervailing knowledge [concerning masculine identity] that what is revealed is blank, a conceptual chasm for which language is inadequate.” What is more, observes Davidson, “It seems less important to ‘name’ it as homosexuality, as many critics have done, than to see it as an identity in formation, an identity in drag” (123). As Deleuze nicely sums up the case at this historical conjuncture, “What one says [or writes or perhaps even films] comes from the depths of one’s ignorance, the depths of one’s own underdevelopment. One becomes a set of liberated singularities, words, names … little events, the reverse of a celebrity” (Negotiations 7). Expanding even further on the thought here, much later in Negotiations (“A Portrait of Foucault”), Deleuze importantly remarks: “There’s no subject, but only a production of subjectivity: subjectivity has to be produced when its time arrives, precisely because there is no subject … Subjectivity is in no sense a knowledge formation or power function … subjectification is an artistic activity distinct from, and lying outside knowledge and power … [and therefore] mustn’t be seen as just a way of protecting

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oneself, taking shelter … [but rather] becomes an art it takes a lifetime to learn” (113–14). On first view, however, Cukor’s Adam’s Rib does not strike moviegoers as a vehicle for identity reversal or displacement (or even destruction) so much as it does a film text for its rigorous entrenchment. In sum, it tells the story of an abandoned housewife named Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) who seeks redress by unloading an untrained pistol at her long-time abusive husband Warren Attinger (Tom Ewell) and his sometime home-wrecking mistress Beryl Caighn (Jean Hagen) discovered in flagrante delicto – “Caught in Love Tryst” as one sensational newspaper headlines it – at the end of a typical working day. The case lands reluctantly in the lap of New York assistant district attorney Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy), whose prosecution is made even more reluctant when the case becomes taken up as a cause célèbre by his blue-stocking wife Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn), a graduate of Bryn Mawr and Yale Law School, and now in a private law firm of her own. In classic battle-of-the-sexes style, the ensuing courtroom drama engages husband and wife, comedically at times, in an incendiary conflict pitting the sacrosanct force of the law identified with the male, on the one hand, and the mitigating feeling for hearth and home identified with the female, on the other – a conflict, indeed, that puts the Bonners’ very own marriage on the line. “What blow you’ve struck for women’s rights I’m sure I don’t know,” Adam snarls at Amanda the evening before husband and wife make their final courtroom summations, and the jury renders its verdict, “but you sure have fouled us up beyond all recognition. You’ve split us right down the middle.” To which Amanda responds the next evening, alone with Kip Lurie (David Wayne), the Bonners’ bothersome next-door neighbour, after she wins the verdict in favour of Doris Attinger that day: “No part of marriage is the exclusive province of any one sex. Why can’t [Adam] see that?” But after some fake gun-pulling to get Amanda to side with the law as a force for human rights, and some further fake tear-­ shedding on Adam’s part, husband and wife are at last reconciled, signalled by a curtain to their four-poster bed being circumspectly drawn on their concluding love-making, but not before the male is made to sing a little of the female’s own tune courtesy of Cole Porter, whose title song, “Farewell, Amanda,” I shall return to later. By the close of the film, then, gender roles would appear to have settled back into the ideological binaries constraining them at the

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outset whereby a certain element of public protest exercised by the female at the end of Doris Attinger’s wildly unsteady gun ultimately becomes disciplined as, in private, she is made to submit to the controlling force of the male’s higher Reason. “I’m old fashioned,” we recall Adam remarking to Amanda on the eve of their short-lived break-up, “I like two sexes,” and “I don’t like being married to a New Woman … a competitor, a Com-pet-itor!” The dialogue at this point in the screenplay clearly registers what Elaine Tyler May observes as “the continuing anxiety surrounding women’s changing sexual and economic roles” during the Depression and World War Two in America – an anxiety that undoubtedly “helps to explain the unprecedented rush into family life and the baby boom of the postwar era” that we shall see more clearly in Stevens’s Woman of the Year in the next section of this chapter. But as already touched upon with Cukor’s Adam’s Rib almost a decade later, “Such concerns,” according to Tyler May, “were reinforced by the rise of a domestic cold war ideology and by the culture surrounding it as well.” Continues Tyler May: “Stable family life not only seemed necessary to national security, civil defense, and the struggle for supremacy over the Soviet Union; it also promised to connect the traditions of  the past with the uncertainties of the present and the future” (“Explosive Issues” 167). Hence, the expensive hat, initially purchased to placate his restive wife and transferred by Amanda herself to the visible cause of such restiveness in the public court of law, is snatched from Mrs Attinger’s wayward head as a climax to her trial, and becomes proudly sported by its true owner, once again, for the purpose of Amanda’s wooing her Adam in the film’s concluding scene. Yet it’s an narrative reaching even farther back than Tyler May’s remarks above – as far back indeed as the formation of the middle-class woman in the nineteenth century, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes: “Women’s sexuality was controlled, men’s uncontrolled and unbounded. To live beyond boundaries gave men power [but] it destroyed women. Outside family boundaries, woman had no legitimate sphere” (205). But with the reinstallation of both Doris and Amanda to their proper life within the domestic confines of the private sphere symbolized by that “tenderly trimmed bonnet” as Adam describes it (and which Amanda almost threatens to burn in the final scene, but pulls back), we wonder if women really do have any control within their family boundaries either, since man’s identity would appear overbearingly to thrive

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“within and without the family” as Smith-Rosenberg historically observes (205). If Cukor’s collaborations, first with the Kanins in composing the screenplay to Adam’s Rib, then with Hepburn and Tracy in bringing it to life, conduce viewers of the film to think of gender identity as a nonpersonal individuality on the model of Deleuze, that is, as an imperceptible state of becoming, belonging to no one person in the team but carrying each and all toward some unknown and undecidable end described previously, then much of the asymmetrical dichotomizing of gender would appear to be worried by this overall sense of indetermination as well.12 Abstracting from male and female, therefore, explains nothing, to invoke Deleuze’s caution once again, since there are no such things as transcendent universals or absolutes, but as Deleuze insists, only processes: “sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same” (Negotiations 145). Nudging such subjectifying toward displacement rather than determination precisely in this way, a collaborative Cukor worries other important aspects of classic Hollywood filmmaking as well – aspects perhaps underpinning more mainstream approaches to character presentation and development as we shall soon see in the less collaborative work of a director like George Stevens. First is the dismantling of any hard and fast notion of realism in such representations. On this point, we recall the Bonners’ home movies shown in the first of five scenes that are flagged by a cue card throughout the larger film with the words “That Evening.” Ostensibly giving us some true insight into a more unbuttoned version of the couple’s intimate life together at their getaway farmhouse named “Bonner Hill” in Connecticut for which the mortgage has just been liquidated, the sequence of silent film vignettes is entitled “The Mortgage the Merrier: A Too Real Epic.” With its own interpolation of scene titles – “Congrats: You Own It Now,” “Censored,” “The End,” and so forth – much like the film proper with which we are engaged, and with the Bonners’ own excessive mugging in several of the set-ups – “Tree-kissing: a famous old Connecticut custom,” quips Kip’s running commentary – nothing depicted in these reels could be less “real,” hence more further from the “truth.” As Judge Bonner, who watches the depiction of himself right alongside his son Adam, remarks, “We acted this all out later, of course. I mean, it’s not actual.” And once again, Kip’s drawing our attention to the

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artifactual nature of the representation, some of which bears footage taken upside down, seems apt: “Who took all these pictures, your cow?” Taking a step back from the presentation, then, we recognize “reality” for what it is: not so much a true “representation” of events but what Deleuze is pleased to call a “repetition.” “Re-petition opposes re-presentation,” Deleuze tells us (Difference and Repetition 57), a repetition accordingly whose “power of fantasy” lies not in something called “realism” but whose essence is entirely symbolic since “symbols or simulacra are the letter of repetition itself” (17). As such, the Bonners’ “Too Real Epic,” much like reality T V today, turns out to be a good deal more contrived than at first thought, perhaps even insidious, for “repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, [indeed] that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself. It is not underneath the masks, but is formed from one mask to another … The mask, the costume, the covered is everywhere the truth of the uncovered … [thus] the true subject of repetition” (17–18). The important shift, of course, to the nonobjective and the nonrepresentational in various forms of artistic production following World War Two and on into the Cold War 1950s in America is landmark, the most notable example perhaps occurring in painting with the transition from “Regionalism” to “Abstract Expressionism” as Erika Doss painstakingly explains. The Cukor / Kanin collaboration with the Bonners’ “Too Real Epic” may thus be registering this shift to a degree from the filmic point of view. Yet in a more professionally determined context, this somewhat alarming sense of a rather elastic hold on reality offered by repetition Amanda Bonner’s feminism does not view as insidious at all, but to the contrary, seems somewhat elated by. In response to her own legal secretary who views the scapegoating of adulterous women in modern society in contrast to their scapegrace male counterparts as a fatalistic fact of life – “I don’t make the rules,” the worker observes – Amanda cannot be quite so cynical: “Sure you [make the rules], we all do.” The upshot, therefore, of repetition’s worrying the very tenuous line between fact and fiction in the Bonners’ home movies has important implications for the film as a whole when we transfer our attention now to Cukor’s first-time collaboration with the Hepburn and Tracy characters. If much of the real truth of the Bonners’ country life seems up for grabs, so must the truth of their professional life back in the city be

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seen to be resistant to too ready comprehension or too facile compartmentalization; or to put a more positive Godard-like spin on it, a professional life “belonging to neither but carrying both forward … in a flight or a flow where we no longer know which is the guiding thread, nor where it’s going” (Deleuze, Negotiations 44, emphasis added). Precisely in this context, our collaborative Cukor aims to dismantle, in the second place therefore, all the neat dualisms formulaically associated with this particular husband-and-wife pairing: the female in private practice, on the one hand, who is able to go public in her defence of a much maligned mother, and the male as public defender, on the other hand, who relishes a private moment at home preparing his wife lamb currie in the second “That Evening” sequence. Tears, in this dissolution of dualisms, would appear to be the sign of gender’s most fluid imperceptibility: the “old juice” Adam calls Amanda’s tears (see figure 1) that she uses as a feint to give her husband a swift kick (“Let’s all be manly,” she says in the third “That Evening” sequence); and the tears Adam himself is able to shed at will as a feint to dissuade Amanda from running against him for county court judge on the Democratic ticket (“There ain’t any of us don’t have our little tricks you know,” he says in the concluding “And That Night” sequence). Referring to each other as Pinky / Pinkie throughout the film (“‘Y’ for him, ‘ie’ for me,” Amanda tells the court reporter at one point) barely arrests the gender bending. Nor does a name like “Amanda” from which “a man” like Adam can just barely be seen to protrude. Indeed, Cukor’s collaboration with actress Katharine Hepburn in particular exploits a longstanding history of gender ambiguity perhaps coordinate with his own (and Deleuze’s) depersonalizing approach to identity that Hepburn’s most searching biographer, Andrew Britton, dates back to an article entitled “The Screen’s Real Mystery Woman” from a November 1937 issue of Picturegoer Magazine. There, Britton finds “beneath two stills, one in the ‘lyrical’ mode and one of Hepburn en travestie, a caption anounc[ing]: ‘Feminine Katie and her masculine self of Sylvia Scarlett contemplate each other – and don’t seem much impressed.’” Like Deleuze who views the collaborative subject as a lifetime process of construction and reconstruction quite like the nonrepresentational repetitions of the diva-dame in Wallace Stevens as the “appearances” of “Again” (c p p 308), Britton is thus given to remark that “the conflicting images imply not simply that the character of Hepburn’s sexuality is ambiguous, but that the ambiguities remain obstinately unreconciled and

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Figure 1

thus appear as contradictions” (91). So Cukor’s best biographer reports that the director’s own “ambivalence about revealing himself became one of the obstacles to completing” an ongoing autobiography to the very end of his life (McGilligan 350). If the issue of male / female containment is thus made problematic by the displacement of their apparent dualisms, such collaborative decontainment casts a further important reflection on the smaller film contained within the larger noted previously. Ruminating on the

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relationship between the two in his indispensable essay on Adam’s Rib as part of a study of The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Stanley Cavell is provoked to think that “the profound difference between the containing and the contained movie may be said to be that relation of containment itself.” He writes, “The French title I have heard for what I have described as containment is mise en abîme, placement in abyss; I think of this as endless displacement, a good phrase for the endless mutual reflections these films create for one another” (206). I would go even further than Cavell, however, and suggest that the abyss of endless displacement moves considerably beyond film reflecting upon film in Adam’s Rib, and perhaps casts both as a profound reflection on the status of gender itself in its repetitive state of endless peformativity signalled by all those cue card signages throughout the film’s diagesis. Here, Giorgio Agamben is helpful in commenting upon a “radical tearing or split” in modern art – we recall Adam Bonner’s remark about being split “right down the middle” – when a modern art form like film sets aside “the inert world of contents in their indifferent, prosaic objectivity,” and thereby allows a “free subjectivity” to “soar above the contents as over an immense repository of materials that it can evoke or reject at will.”13 Concludes Agamben: “Art is now the absolute freedom that seeks its end and its foundation only in itself, and does not need, substantially, any content, because it can only measure itself against the vertigo caused by its own abyss” (35, emphasis added). For Agamben, then, the artist is the man (or woman) without content, and has no other identity than “a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression” (55). In Cukor’s collaboration with Hepburn and Tracy, I would argue, the artist’s place is taken over by the performer or actor, but more especially the actor in close-up. In Adam’s Rib, one thinks especially of the camera studying in close-up the worried faces of Amanda and Adam just before the jury announces its verdict. In such close-ups, as Deleuze usefully observes in his cinema studies, the actor is brought up fully before his or her “relationship in fear to the void or absence,” that is, “the fear of the face confronted with its nothingness” in its need “to go beyond the states of things, to trace lines of flight just enough to open up in space a dimension of another order favourable to [its own] composition” (Movement-Image 100, 101).14 The close-up in Deleuze, of course, is his favourite instance of the affection – or becoming-image – an image in-between action and

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perception that opens up a gap or hole or interval in various states of affairs “without filling it in or filling it up” (65). Adam Bonner’s persistent stammer throughout the film – “Ladies and Juttlemen of the Jerry,” he stumblingly begins his final summation – is perhaps an anticipation of this affective in-betweenness, a stammering we should note “not in order to get back to a prelinguistic pseudo-reality,” but an attempt to make his character, like language, “flow between [the] dualisms” within which it is socially and sexually bound (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues 34; cf. also Deleuze, “He Stuttered”). Or, following Agamben previously, make his character soar above a whole repository of ideological entrapments coterminous with a far too moralizing / molarizing court of law. Hence, the inspiration behind Amanda’s third and final character witness in her defence of Doris Attinger when she calls Olympia La Pere (Hope Emerson), a sometime carnival acrobat, to the stand. In this hilarious scene, after performing a number of amazing back-flips across the courtroom floor, the spectacular Miss La Pere, true to her mannish name, then proceeds to hoist Adam Bonner high into the air, much to the irate disgruntlement of the presiding judge who seems powerless to quell the deafening uproar that this sensational display of womanly strength consequently unleashes. Viewers especially attentive to the production values of this droll scene, however, are likely to be less impressed when they notice the guy wires that director Cukor employs to have his leading man appear to be effortlessly thrust upwards to the courtroom ceiling by means of the olympian musculature of this carnivalesque female athlete. If there ever was an affective image in Adam’s Rib for Cukor’s collaborations soaring off into the imperceptible nothingness of depersonalized identity along Deleuzian lines of flight, this surely must be it. Kip Lurie’s “mild show-biz homosexual tinge” (Cavell, Pursuits 214) clearly prepares the way for this projected misordering of subjectivity with his earlier line to Amanda cheering on her feminist activism in the courtroom: “You’ve got me so convinced, I may go out and become a woman.” And Adam’s rejoinder – “And he wouldn’t have far to go either” – thus becomes especially ironic given his own present state of aerial animation.15 But perhaps even more inspired than this moment is the “revealing experiment” Amanda would have the jurors undergo by inviting them to imagine how each of the contestants involved in the court proceeding might look – Doris, Warren, and Beryl – if he or she were suddenly to take on the appearance and

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thus the identity of the opposite sex, as in fact they do thanks to some morphing trick photography on Cukor’s part. These rather surreal transformations that result perhaps give viewers the clearest sense of how the filmmaker’s art under the impress of collaboration “loosens itself from itself” as an unworldly both-sides-and-neither surrealism takes the place of uninflected camera-ready realism, “and moves in pure nothingness, suspended in a kind of diaphanous limbo between no-longer-being and not-yet-being” (Agamben 53). If as Stanley Cavell argues, “comedies of remarriage” open up a “distance between ‘the facade of reality’ and ‘a real existence of ethical forces behind or beyond’” that we are then imaginatively required to span (Contesting Tears 41), one strategy for taking the measure of this lacuna, as I have been arguing, lies in the very ethic of artistic collaboration itself. As a key to subjective displacement in one of Hollywood’s great screwball comedies from the 1950s, Adam’s Rib thus foregrounds the real genius behind Cukor’s collaborative auteurship that perhaps so offended Mayer when he caught an early glimpse of it in one of the director’s best friends, Bill Haines, mentioned earlier: “his ability to re-create himself, as if by magic, yet again” (Mann 290). This final manifestation of the “nothingness” toward which I am arguing Cukor’s collaboration appears to be nudging us is imbued with a terrific sense of irony given some of Adam and Amanda’s own gender reversals throughout the film outlined previously. So that if Cukor’s very title of the film now strikes us as considerably ironic, it’s a sense of irony coordinate with the evolution of modernist art according to Agamben once again: “Irony meant that art had to become its own object, and, no longer finding real seriousness in any content, could from now only represent the negative potentiality of the poetic I, which denying, continues to elevate itself beyond itself in an infinite doubling” (55). Which returns us, as promised, to the title song of the film, and the curious doubling it is afforded in Adam’s rendition of Cole Porter’s lyrics at the film’s close: No longer a woman “stepping on the stars” in Kip’s death-dealing version of the “Farewell Amanda” lyric rendered at the piano earlier in the film, but one fully transformed now into a lover “gazing [up] at the stars” in a life-affirming image of a “Hello Amanda” – a version filled with infinite potentiality and hope. And lest we feel that “veranda” is perhaps a bit too cornball a rhyme for “Amanda,” we would do well to remember that the house

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for Deleuze (“Bonner Hill,” in this instance) as we recall from the last chapter is an invitation to think about identity formation in terms of life’s infinite potentiality just noted – “an entire becoming,” Deleuze calls it – that verandas, both literal and figurative, may give us access to since it is precisely through such means, “through a window or a mirror [that] the most shut-up house opens onto a universe” (What Is Philosophy 180). Having feared earlier that their lives threatened to outdo the parody of a Punch-and-Judy show, how appropriate, therefore, that Adam should ring the curtain down on Adam’s Rib with a French invocation: “Vive la différence!” If in his quick translation, the expression “means hurray for that little difference” that both Adam and Amanda have at last agreed to acknowledge at the conclusion, it’s an important difference that, like Cukor’s own Deleuzian collaborations, we are not quite given to see, but have only to imagine.

•• As a means of teasing out further the implications of Cukor’s bothsides-and-neither approach to filmmaking, and the rather complex treatment of character that its collaborative work entails, I turn now briefly to director George Stevens’s Woman of the Year wherein Hepburn and Tracy made their first screen appearance together seven years prior to their partnership with Cukor. As a way into employing Stevens’s less collaborative brand of filmmaking noted earlier as a distinct foil to Cukor’s own, let me begin with an early scene in Stevens’s film wherein New York Chronicle sports columnist Sam Craig (Spencer Tracy) is seen listening in with his barroom cronies to a radio quiz show featuring Tess Harding (Katharine Hepburn), an op-ed columnist for the same newspaper, and as we learn, a frequent verbal sparring partner for Sam. When asked to identify the most frequently run distance in American sport on the show, the uncomprehending Tess is speechless for a rare moment, and the usually disgruntled Sam is only too happy to bark the correct answer to his buddies: ninety feet, the distance between home plate and first base. But Tess would go much further to enlarge the metaphorical distance between herself and baseball’s home base. By half-mockingly suggesting that the game of baseball be banished entirely from American life, in Amanda Bonner style, she sets herself even more at odds with her sportswriter colleague, who one year after the US entry into the Second World War can only perceive such an outrageous suggestion

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as but another “threat,” as he says, “to what we call our American way of life.” Sam’s championing the importance of home life in wartime America opens Stevens’s film to a level of subtext vis-à-vis Cukor’s later 1949 film that would only continue to bulk larger and larger in the Cold War years to follow in other of Stevens’s postwar Hollywood hits including I Remember Mama (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), to mention only a few. Here, I refer to the subtext of gender history alluded to earlier in this chapter, and the purported distance (to go with the baseball metaphor once again) that would now appear to open up between Stevens’s own filmmaking in 1942 and the representation of middleclass men and women in the century preceding that achieves something of the nature of a status quo. Alluding to the 1 March 1942 Life magazine cover featuring two women in white shirts, tailored jackets, and bow ties, Michael Renov offers a citation from the cover story that ostensibly reveals where Stevens’s wartime filmmaking that same year might be headed: “this year, not only the smart dressers but all busy women seem to have discovered the comfort, stylevalue and well-groomed look of a suit tailored like a man’s” (18). Yet it is precisely Renov’s view (and Elaine Tyler May’s referenced earlier) that “aggressive females were an aberrant species-women in men’s clothing.” Accordingly, “the vigor of the new woman was most easily contained by its exnomination,” and “the threat of sexual difference created by the increasingly visible female reduced by unsexing the offending party” (18). Explains Renov further: [Female] selfhood is neutralized by romantic alliance or marriage, or [female] selfhood is annihilated by death. With the first resolution … strong professional women choose to moderate their careerist tendencies in deference to romantic alliances … All ­realize that love and marriage are reason enough to compromise their ambitions and become domesticated … [With the second resolution,] women die that their men may be inspired to greater heroics. Their destruction is yet another instance of the disavowal of sexual difference, the negation of the threat to patriarchy so characteristic of the wartime women’s film … [where] women are either coupled and thus defused of their threatening energy, or offered up in ritual sacrifice to the renewal of male strength and the impossibility of self-affirming female potency. (22)

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By foregrounding the female potency of his “Woman of the Year” in the title, as we shall see, Stevens’s wartime women’s film would thus ostensibly appear to fly in the face of the amelioration of sexual difference in either of the plot resolutions outlined above. In point of fact, however, the argument in this final section of the chapter aims to bolster Renov’s view (although Woman of the Year is nowhere mentioned in his article) that “particularly strong women attempting to make their marks in a world in which their gender, their otherness, poses a threat, must be contained,” and so (following resolution one), “neutralized” by marriage. Accordingly, “woman is placed within the constraints of Law, renamed and domesticated by motherhood and wifely duties” in order to “serve the further exploits of men” (22). Thematically, then, my argument comes very close to the reading of the film proffered by Marilyn Ann Moss who contends that Woman of the Year reveals “a lapse in Stevens’s generally fond regard for the female character.” “Instead,” continues Moss, “his camera takes a persistent pot shot at her, insisting that she ultimately acquiesce to the demands of her partner, Sam. If [Tess] refuses, she is humiliated, scorned and made to suffer the consequences” (80). On the more globally political level, Stevens, about to join the American war effort overseas the following year as a documentary filmmaker, aims “to level all that Tess … and her body signify, that is the threat to America by anything European, anything related to foreign governments or citizens, anything having to do with ‘otherness’ at a time when war seemed imminent and traditional American values needed to be shored up, protected and secured” (81). I should point out, however, that in enlarging Renov’s argument throughout this section with the exemplification of Woman of the Year, my purpose is not, via Stevens’s filmmaking now, to mount an anti-collaborationist brief against auteur filmmaking tout court. True it is, as Andrew Britton observes, that there is an “extraordinary virulence and unpleasantness” in Stevens’s film that, pursued in its “rigorous consistency and its blithe indifference to the liberal proprieties” of female representation (203, 204), leaves no doubt that Cukor and Stevens stand on opposite sides with respect to the treatment of gender. But pundits of classic Hollywood film quite rightly might scruple that great auteur workmanship like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator could prove to be as subversive of gendered (and other) binaries as even some of the best work of Cukor just dealt with.

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My intention, therefore, in constrasting an earlier Hepburn / Tracy vehicle to a later one here is merely to explore further the whole notion of filmic collaboration as one possible critical optic for both assembling and coming to a better understanding of one type of filmmaking powerfully set to work in American culture particularly through the postwar years. Or, to reverse the terms, my intention is to reveal how the exnomination, the amelioration, if not the neutralization of sexual difference in postwar America (following Renov) helps to set more boldly in relief Cukor’s collaborationist treatment of gender identity dealt with previously – a collaborationist approach that, in the very first instance as Deleuze once again reminds us, is not about “knowledge formation” at all (nothing here, that is, to exnominate or ameliorate or even neutralize) but rather, as with Stevens’s Santayana-like treatment of “masculinity” earlier, is about that which lies quite outside knowledge: “not what we are,” says Deleuze, “but, rather, what we become, what we are in the process of becoming” (What Is Philosophy?112). Now as a gay director, Cukor may arguably be more predisposed to this insight than most filmmakers of the time. For according to Deleuze’s own best collaborator, Félix Guattari, like woman, the homosexual as a singular “departure from binary power relations, from phallic relations” stands as a model for that very process of becoming itself – a “becoming homosexual”: It’s a direction. Toward what? Quite simply toward another logic … that is no longer a reading of a pure representation, but a composition of the world, the production of a body without organs in the sense that the organs there are no longer in a relationship of surface-depth positionality, do not postulate a totality referenced on other totalities, on other systems of signification that are in the end, forms of power. Rather, these are forms of intensity … that construct alternative coordinates of existence at the same time that they live them. (“Pragmatic / Machinic” 218) In this concluding section of my argument, therefore, Stevens’s wartime filmmaking stands in distinct contraposition to Cukor’s postwar filmmaking, despite the Hepburn / Tracy linkage, to the degree that Stevens’s formulaic representations of gender in every way serve to distance themselves from Cukor’s diva-dame repetitions of sexual process lived by and through their collaborative difference.

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Like Adam and Amanda previously, in Stevens’s film Sam and Tess only appear to provide us with the reversal of the “system of family organization” undergirding the sexual regimen of men and women a hundred or so years previously. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, once again, “The double standard enforced by British common-law rulings respecting divorce, required women to confine their sexuality within the narrow boundaries of their reproductive family,” and at the same time, “permitted men to escape those restrictions [so that] [m]an’s sexuality could thrive within and without the family” (205). Hence, in Woman of the Year, Tess Harding would seem precisely to be dismantling such a double standard. In one of her several notorious speeches declaimed before an eager audience of blue-stocking intelligentsia gathered at Riverside Hall, her stand is unequivocal: “Our place is not in the home … [but rather] in the first line of battle … a battle to preserve and extend democracy [as] the freedom of one to defend the freedom of all.” Such worldliness, indeed, is only in keeping with the cosmopolitan outlook Tess acquires as the daughter of a world-travelled diplomat reared motherless in South America and China – “Uncle Tom in the Argentine, Huck Finn down the Yangtze” – schooled fatherless in Europe (Switzerland, Leipzig, the Sorbonne), and hired as a globe-trotting foreign correspondent with apparently limitless access to any number of national movers and shakers: Roosevelt, Churchill, even Cuba’s soon-to-be-deposed President Battista. Playing Uncle Sam to a Tess of a more Hardyesque lineage, the poor sports columnist, once interested in this decidedly homeless woman of the year, can only mug behind the potted palms from the Riverside Hall stage just noted, and once seated, ineptly drop all of his cigarettes at the feet of the ladies who, like Tess on not a few vampish occasions throughout the film, will actually dare to smoke those cigarettes. Tess’s further daring to harbour in her apartment the Yugoslavian statesman Dr Martin Lubeck newly escaped from a Nazi concentration camp (with whom she converses in perfect German) is further discomfiting to a homebody like Sam. Tess cannot sit still it seems – her New York dwelling a kind of mini League of Nations whose denizens (French, Russian, Slavic, Mexican in one memorable scene) she graciously moves among, with several other foreign languages fluently at her disposal. Thus, when she finally comes around to contemplating marriage with Sam, Tess’s first thought, not unexpectedly, is “the frightening idea of getting tied down.”

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Tess’s initial resistance to marriage in order to legitimate a life for herself outside the family sphere thus anticipates the gender restiveness of women in Cukor’s later film, but also registers a certain restiveness in Stevens’s earlier project from the point of view of America’s entry into the Second World War one year prior to Woman of the Year’s release. As women’s historian Elaine Tyler May once again observes, “The dislocation of wartime might have led to the postponement of marriage and child rearing, continuing the demographic trends of the [Depression] thirties toward later marriage, a lower marriage rate, and fewer children” (Homeward Bound 50). But as Tyler May further explains, “In spite of the tremendous changes brought about by the war, the emergency situation ultimately encouraged women to keep their sights on the home, and men to reclaim their status as the primary breadwinners and the heads of households” (50). Somewhat in line with Renov’s arguments previously, she goes on to remark how following the war, “the short-lived affirmation of women’s independence gave way to a pervasive endorsement of female subordination and domesticity,” and to a certain “suspicion surrounding autonomous women that had not been present during the depression” (77; cf. Michie 37, 38). In Stevens’s film in particular, much of that suspicion perhaps manifests itself in the infamous baseball sequence wherein Sam scandalously invites Tess into the press box – “No women allowed!” his fellow sportscasters rudely shout at them – in order to tutor her in some of the game’s fundamentals. With a stylish hat large enough to obscure much of the playing field for several of the men seated behind her (see figure 2), Tess really does intimate in this scene that “the nightmare side of the postwar dream included ‘domineering’ women … waiting to overwhelm the returning veterans” (Tyler May 78). And only when she stops asking Sam all of her tedious questions, and learns to be silent and dutifully attentive to the players moving about on the field, does Tess appear finally to become acceptable to the boys. But by that point, her unwieldy hat has curiously disappeared. “All of this is for Tess’s own good,” Marilyn Moss surmises in a related context. “She needs to come home to America,” and “Sam’s dominance must be established before Stevens and American soldiers go to war” the year following the picture’s general release (86). A similar kind of parody visited upon the activist American woman by  the haplessly sidelined breadwinner greets us even more

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uproariously in the closing sequence of the film where Tess, as we shall see in a moment, makes a shambles of a coffee-and-waffles breakfast for Sam who, much earlier in the film, is himself revealed to be terrifically adept at whipping up a dinner of fried eggs on very short notice. Before turning to that final scene, however, let me dwell a moment further on the gender reversals in Stevens’s wartime film sketched thus far, and their import within the context of the so-called Cold War years that might be thought to be inaugural with the release of Cukor’s battle-of-the-sexes vehicle seven years later (though in Cukor, handled with much different results as Stevens’s concluding breakfast scene will reveal). As a backdrop to my commentary on these gender reversals, Michael Renov reminds us that the Cold War, after all, was “the era in which the blame was put on Mame; the feminine mystique operated with the force of law. The prescription for prosperity no longer required a female workforce, but rather an implacable enemy across

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an Iron Curtain” (26). Hence, Virginia Carmichael in her admirable Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War alludes to the containing ideology of certain “perfecting myths as attempts to transcend irrational, impalatable, or unbearable social and historical realities” as a “process of making the (sublime) world cognitively apprehensible in bearable terms” (229n8; see also Garber and Walkowitz). In such terms, the impalatable and unbearable Tess must therefore be called to account as America weighs anchor – Stevens’s appropriate fade-to-credits theme song being “Anchors Aweigh” as we shall hear – and the country sets about to do real men’s work in a real man’s world represented by her tough-talking, no-nonsense, and soon-to-be husband, Sam. Hence, the egg yolks slopping all over Tess’s stylish pumps in the closing scene of Woman of the Year just alluded to would, in striking contrast to Amanda Bonner’s courtroom victory in Adam’s Rib, cleverly suggest the manner in which the impalatable might be reduced to something more cognitively bearable. Accordingly, the anchoring of domestic partnerships like that of Sam and Tess within the later Cold War context of what Kaja Silverman refers to as an ideological “dominant fiction” – sovereign fathers, receptive mothers, procreative family units – is perhaps, following World War Two, America’s perfecting myth par excellence through the ’50s and early ’60s (Male Subjectivity 39). And it surely comes as no accident that a belief in the “realism” of Hollywood cinema through this period, so Silverman argues at length, would become the very means to solidify that dominant fiction (404n70), as Stevens’s hugely successful mainstream film career through the ’50s and early ’60s would only help to corroborate. No home movies or supra-diagetic cue cards, in other words, to worry the very tenuous line between fact and fiction that we had seen earlier in Cukor’s collaborative project. In Stevens’s monochromatic wartime vision of gender representation – “I made [films] in my own way,” he adamantly declares in a 1964 interview (Cronin 35, emphasis added) – Hollywood realism, like the essentializing of male / female identity, is fairly much a cinematic donnée. Two scenes in particular from Woman of the Year help to cement that dominant fiction’s realistic portrayal in place in the years to follow. In the first, what might be thought to be the crisis of the film since it succeeds in driving Sam and Tess apart, we find Tess warming Sam up with a meal in bed (prepared by her maid, of course), and then presenting him with a “son.” As it turns out, little Christian is a

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child refugee from war-torn Greece that Tess has taken on as the president of an international refugee organization, and it matters little to her whether “having a child” equates either to birthing or adopting one’s progeny. For Sam, on the other hand, the status of the offspring within the procreative nuclear family matters enormously: “We can’t keep that child,” he roars in exasperation at Tess. “As a substitution, he simply won’t do.” Later, as Tess prepares herself to attend the banquet for her election as “Outstanding Woman of the Year,” Sam becomes even more outraged at the suggestion that the refugee child be left in the care of a doorman for three or four hours while he and Tess attend the award ceremony. Incensed in her turn that Sam’s sudden change of heart toward the adopted boy is nothing more than a “paternal act,” Tess brutally rounds on Sam, and orders him to stay home with the little Greek boy himself. Lambasting him in a moment of pique for his sports-writing vocation, Tess brings the hapless breadwinner to his knees with the stinging line: “Who would believe that you had anything better to do?” If the dominant fiction essentially resides in the realistic depiction of the proverbial place of women in the home, Tess’s callous rebuke to Sam here only doubly corroborates the homely adage in his own mind, thus prompting the cowed and subdued substitute father to respond, somewhat impotently, with a stinging rebuke of his own: “The outstanding woman of the year isn’t a woman after all.” But a second scene helps to resuscitate even more the dominant fiction for Sam and Tess by the end of the film, and for America in many years to come, as “social tensions related to the notion of sexual difference were displaced by the immediacy of Cold War priorities” (Renov 26). This scene occurs shortly afterwards when Tess is called upon by her Aunt Ellen to act as a witness in Aunt Ellen’s marriage to William Harding, Tess’s diplomat father who follows Sam’s lead and thinks it better now to work at home in the States. Still stung by their previous altercation, Sam declines to accompany Tess to the wedding, pleading naturally enough a previous sports engagement: “a fight, a championship. It’s quite important in a not so important way.” And so alone, and before the marriage altar a second time, Tess finds the moment to be the turning point in her relationship with Sam, succeeding as it does in ultimately driving her back into the arms of her estranged husband by the end of the film. Key to this penultimate scene in the film are the words of the wedding ceremony itself that are dinned into Tess, “an honorable estate

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not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly,” as the order of service declares, “but entered into reverently, discreetly, soberly, and in the fear of God.” And as the ceremony proceeds, Stevens shoots a very long close-up of the radiant Katharine Hepburn weeping as its words resound in her ears – words underscoring the “traditional gender roles as the best means for Americans to achieve the happiness and security they desired” (Tyler May, Homeward Bound 78). “As for her most sacred husband,” the ceremony concludes, “let the bride inspire and sustain him in great moments and small.” Nor is the bride to be “moved in her devotion, but believe in the ideal [of holy matrimony]. It still exists. It is the final truth” – an asseveration thus reinforcing yet again the “traditional arrangements in the home” as Americans themselves “head[ed] homeward toward gender-specific domestic roles” (Tyler May, Homeward Bound 78) during and after the war. At this point, it would seem appropriate now to turn to the final scene of Tess’s own homecoming rounding out Stevens’s text, and perhaps the most important one in the entire film. Here, we find Tess at dawn creeping into the kitchen of Sam’s new bachelor apartment to prepare him his daily breakfast as all dutiful female homemakers ought. The uproarious comedy that ensues as Sam secretly watches Tess’s waffles spew like lava from the waffle iron, her coffee gush in frothy torrents from the coffee percolator, and her burnt toast fly like bullets through the air from a pop-up toaster – all of these comedic hijinks are the rival of the uproari­ ous laughter elicited by Olympia La Pere in Cukor’s later film. But while the laughter is provoked mostly at the expense of the Spencer Tracy character in Cukor, in Stevens’s comedic climax the brunt of the humour is directed mostly at the hapless character played by Katharine Hepburn as previously remarked upon by Moss. And if subjective displacement arguably appears to be the upshot of Cukor’s collaborative relationship with this great acting duo, in Stevens’s film, control and containment would appear to be the point of the directoral relationship – a disciplining of gender performance that would seek to unify the rôle playing as a singular tour de force. His film, in a word, his way. The most blatant instance of the disciplining rather than the displacing of gender performance occurs immediately after this uproarious scene in Woman of the Year. It occurs almost incidentally in the very last minute of the film, and is rendered by that concluding line of Sam as he proceeds, off-screen, to smash a bottle of champagne

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over the head of Tess’s personal secretary who, significantly, happens to be a man: “I’ve just launched Gerald.” Gerald (Dan Tobin), of course, will perhaps remind viewers not a little of that “mild showbiz homosexual tinge” associated by Stanley Cavell with the Kip Lurie character in Adam’s Rib, particularly with the camp line recollected earlier: “You’ve got me so convinced [by your gender performance, Amanda], I may go out and become a woman.” Andrew Britton also sees the gay link between Gerald and Kip, and similarly picks up on its disciplinary import that I am attempting to set out here when he writes, “Significantly, both Gerald and Kip get beaten up by Spencer Tracy at the end of their respective films, so as to assure us that the tentative accommodation of the Hepburn figure which Tracy is about to make doesn’t entail a loss of virility” (187). The comment may be overstating the case somewhat with respect to Cukor’s film as I endeavoured to show with Tracy’s “Vive la différence!” in concluding the last section, although Cukor’s own silence about the Kip portrayal also noted earlier should keep us wondering. Nor do I agree with Britton that “the reconciliation at the end [of Adam’s Rib) is signalled by Adam’s appropriation of the [Cole Porter] song, whose lyric he amends to suggest the finality of the reunion and of the clarification of the blurred gender lines” (187). In my view, Cukor’s postwar collaborations (even with Cole Porter) are not about clarification at all – the point of much of the disciplining of gender in wartime Stevens in this section – but as in Deleuze, “walking across a narrow overpass above a dark abyss … to meet a blind Double approaching from the other side” (Thousand Plateaus 202). For this reason, Patrick McGilligan has chosen the title for his biography of the director’s life, A Double Life, wisely I think. In Woman of the Year, the horror elicited by that tinge of gay innuendo attaching itself to Gerald (and perhaps Kip) enlarges exponentially in prospect of a parallel reversal of gender roles – a reversal that is anticipated, ironically enough, in Stevens’s film in the previous wedding ceremony when Aunt Ellen remarks that she had so counted on Sam being the “bridesmaid” at her nuptials in the way that she had been the “best man” at Sam’s. What is perhaps even more ironic about this reversal of gender rôles is the fact that, upon closer scrutiny, it would appear to corroborate what in fact did happen at the time when America went off to war abroad. In the intensely masculinist theatre of war, as Allan Bérubé scrupulously documents, “even heterosexual men could find themselves abandoning the norms of

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civilian life as they had to rely on each other for companionship and affection” (189). If Gerald as “Queer of the Year” thus becomes, in Sam’s phobic 1940s mindset, the face that launched a thousand fags (and then some) from the retrospective vantage of the gay-liberated ’60s, with even more renewed scrutiny, Sam’s astonishingly cruel act of violence speaks to something calculatingly sinister in the Cold War years lying in between. For here, once again, we are reminded of the widely accepted ­linkage, from this time, between sexual and political deviance that, remarked upon previously by John D’Emilio, “made the scapegoating of gay men and women a simple matter” (“Homosexual Menace” 60). If Tess in Stevens’s Woman of the Year is precisely that mannish woman mocking the ideals of marriage and motherhood at one of the most imperilled moments in modern American culture, it’s only because George Stevens’s brand of Hollywood filmmaking gives voice so clearly to “the central binarism of cold war ideology” as Steven Cohan conceives it: “the opposition of American and alien” (124). With Cukor’s collaborative approach to American filmmaking a few years later, the alien (as witnessed in some of the director’s morphing trick photography noted earlier) becomes displaced from that too exclusionary, rigid binarism. Embracing rather than pathologizing identity, alien subjectivity in Cukor thus fulfills a more ­ameliorative function, nudging as it does (in the punningly “lurid” personage of Kip Lurie) the great American acting duo of Tracy and Hepburn toward that very gendered “pure nothingness” so eloquently characterized by Santayana as “both sides and neither,” or in Agamben’s words once again, as “a kind of diaphanous limbo between no-longer-being and not-yet-being” (53). In the hands of director George Stevens, however, the intractable opposition between American and alien (Cohan) or American and other (Moss), whether that alien otherness be a masculated woman or a feminized man – precisely this opposition, it would appear, takes us to the very heart of the realism that, in a final moment of retrospection, becomes perhaps the most significant context within which to situate Stevens’s cinematic project in clear contrast to Cukor’s through the Cold War’s decidedly uncollaborative years. In this ­context, Slavoj Žižek reminds us that “‘cinematic space’ is never a simple repetition or imitation of external, ‘effective’ reality, but an effect of montage.” “What is usually overlooked,” Žižek goes on to explain, “is the way this transformation of fragments of the real into

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cinematic reality produces, through a kind of structural necessity, a certain leftover, a surplus reality that is radically heterogeneous to the cinematic reality but nonetheless implied by it, part of it” (“Looking Awry” 530). In Woman of the Year, I take this surplus reality to be emblematized by the diagetic references to eggs – the eggs that Tess and Gerald demand that Sam whip up for them both on such short notice part way through the film, and now in the film’s final sequence, the eggs that slop onto the woefully undomesticated Tess’s egregious shoes. From the ’60s vantage of the liberation of women and (gay) men, which Cukor’s filmmaking might be seen incipently to anticipate, admittedly I’m also drawn to not a little egg on director Stevens’s own face. For as Jacques Lacan expands upon this emblem in connection to the surplus Real informing his own psychoanalytic project upon which Žižek’s previous comment is based, “Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella” (Fundamental Concepts 197). Exactly what “flies off” in the face of the Cold War ideologue, whether he be the claustrally astringent realist filmmaker, or the exponent of sexism, racism, and homophobia in the person of Sam in the very filmmaking itself, is simply that which cannot be contained, controlled, or curtailed – surely the point of Cukor’s unique collaborative style – no matter how many eggs are beaten or how many champagne bottles are smashed. According to Žižek the surplus of the Real just alluded to coincides, especially in Hitchcock, with “the threatening gaze of the other” (“Looking Awry” 530). But if what we see in a character like Tess Harding, to go with the unusual hardiness of her name rather than the clichéd heartfulness, is an “intellectual woman [who] looks and analyses,” then in so “usurping the gaze, she poses a threat to an entire system of representation,” as all diva-dames like her must. Construed thus “as the site of an excessive and dangerous desire,” as Mary Ann Doane rightly remarks, inevitably she “mobilizes extreme efforts for containment, and unveils the sadistic aspect of narrative” (504), and in the Cold War context of George Stevens’s particular project, the sadistic aspect of Hollywood realism inaugural with Sam’s smashing of the champagne in the launching of Gerald offscreen as a means of bringing the gender conflicts of Woman of the Year to a definitive termination. And so, to return approximately to

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the place where we began our analysis of Stevens, what we truly see in Tess’s halting performance on the radio quiz show by the end of the film is a total collapsing of that distance between the rather unusual men and women of the year – way out in left field, shall we say? – and the home plate that is America circa 1942. “Mark your distance,” Deleuze cautiously advises. “It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door” (Thousand Plateaus 319–20).16 To put some distance between ourselves, therefore, and the highly constrained system of representation within which Stevens’s notion of Hollywood realism is solidly invested would require a complete transposition to another cinematic style entirely, and perhaps to a different genre, where the filmic representation, split between “fascination and … [a certain] ironic distance toward its diegetic reality” (Žižek, “Looking Awry” 527) tends to make filmmaking and film viewing far more open and daring and exploratory. I shall return to this more open and daring “other” context provoked by the work of Stevens later in my conclusion. Mean­ while in that final scene, Katharine Hepburn’s somewhat manful suspenders slipping away from her shoulders as she unwittingly goes about parodying the daily ritual of the family breakfast to great comic effect gestures ever so slightly in the direction of such ironic distance. But in the leaden hands of mainstream directors like Stevens, it’s an ironic effect too easily lost in the “aweigh” of anchors clanging Woman of the Year to its strident close. In Adam’s Rib, on the other hand, our watchword at the falling curtain, to repeat, is difference pure and simple: “Vive la différence!” In hurraying that “little difference,” Cukor’s teamwork aims to recuperate much of the irony lost on George Stevens’s inaugural pairing of Tracy and Hepburn – an irony, no doubt, made promise of in the gentle ribbing of the title to Adam’s Rib, a controversial collaborative project that, without our reading of Wallace Stevens’s own ironization of masculinity in the context of American film, might otherwise pass as one of America’s most easy-to-overlook movie features.

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5 Stevens and New York School Poetry in the Distance The poet enters the poem with a hood over the poet’s eyes. The poet has arrived from a distance from the real world. Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination The subjects of one’s poems are the symbols of one’s self or of one of one’s selves. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between … multiplicities … Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In a searching meditation on “New York School” poets Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and “The Paradoxes of Friendship,” Andrew Epstein pauses over “an intriguing wrinkle” of their early rela­tionship in the final chapter of his magisterial Beautiful Enemies: namely, “O’Hara, always assumed by critics to be so distant from Stevens and his influence, actually began his friendship with Ashbery with a shared mutual passion for the poet” (237). “Stevens was a more important poet to them than Eliot,” O’Hara and Ashbery would apparently divulge to novelist Harold Brodkey while at Harvard together with them in the late 1940s – “a daring and provocative attitude in those Eliotic, New Critical days in Cambridge,” as Epstein observes – and in abandoning Eliot for Stevens, “they wanted [Brodkey] to go along with them” (237). In this chapter, I continue to  enlarge that “other” context that, except in rare instances like Epstein’s, often becomes overlooked by readers of Stevens who prefer to view the poet very much in the terms by which Stevens himself

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concludes his “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” namely, “that familiar / Man [as] the veritable man … the large, the solitary figure” (Collected Poetry and Prose 250; cpp hereafter). In prying open this context even further, however, I come at the important influence of Wallace Stevens on the New York School writers via another often overlooked relationship also confederated under Stevens’s distant mentorship: that between Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest. And while only able to attend to the early years of their enthusiasm for Stevens in the first part of this chapter, an enthusiasm that I can only speculate about in the case of the confederate James Schuyler in a turn to Deleuze once again at chapter’s end, nonetheless I hope to show that the “distant” alluded to by Epstein will prove to be far more parturient than protective as assumed by all those “critics” he references above.1 Barbara Guest’s rise to significant prominence among the New York School writers had been, comparatively speaking, a slow but steady one through the Cold War decades last century (see especially Nelson 3–48). Shortly after receiving her degree in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Guest moved with her first husband, John Dudley, to New York in 1946. It was there, in a Greenwich Village apartment, that she would make contact with a little-known group of young poets who expressed a terrific appreciation for a coterie of painters known at the time as Abstract Expressionists – the so-called New York School. By the early 1950s, however, Guest’s first marriage had dissolved, and her second marriage to Stephen Haden produced a daughter, Hadley, eventually the editor of her Collected Poems (2008, c p hereafter). It was then, according to the “Timeline” of that important volume, that Guest soon “became a central member of ‘The Poets of the New York School’ along with Edwin Denby, Frank O’Hara, James (?) [sic] Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Kenwood Elmslie, and others,” and further bolstered her membership to that group by “[writing] art reviews for the publication Art News” alongside O’Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler through the decade (c p xxii). Of all the New York School poets, however, it is arguably O’Hara who was the most important to Guest throughout the early years of her writing career (see Lehman 176–7), whose preliminary canon would include Poems: The Location of Things, Archaics, The Open Skies (1962), The Blue Stairs (1968), and Moscow Mansions (1973) – early works through which the influence of Stevens conceivably took hold.

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For it was the poetry of Wallace Stevens that truly forged the intimate association between Guest and O’Hara in the New York School context, as the indispensable interview between Mark Hillringhouse and Guest in the American Poetry Review from 1992 makes clear: h i l l r i n g h o u s e : There’s a good use of perspective in [“The View from Kandinsky’s Window” from Fair Realism (1989)], in the lines, their arrangement. I see that you’re using the shapes of the city, the streets, the buildings in an artful way, but approaching it as an object, yet getting distance from it. It’s a nice approach to a city, and the view again from the window, that idea you’re looking out onto a scene. Stevens does this frequently, this meditation on what’s out there to what that scene is, then basing an imagination on it, building a new reality, a new world. g u e s t : This is what Frank and I once talked about, how mysterious Wallace Stevens was to us. Then we started writing our own poetry, really writing it, and Wallace Stevens became simpler to understand. (29)2

Approaching an object but getting a “distance” from it at the same time as in my opening epigraph from Guest – this rhetorical strategy here also appears to account for the “mystery” that so attracted O’Hara and Guest to Stevens in their early careers,3 and to the painterly abstractions of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky as well, and so Guest’s much later poem concludes: “We have similar balconies, scale / degree of ingress, door knobs, daffodils / like Kandinsky’s view from his window / distance at the street end” (c p 213). But why “distance”? Exploring this distanciating strategy in Stevens further, we do well to differentiate between its quite contrary discursive forms throughout the poet’s canon as rehearsed in the opening chapter of this study. First of all, there is the kind of subjectivity that makes use of distance to hold off otherness in order to make its own truth entirely self-coincident, for instance in “Wild Ducks, People and Distances” (1945), where “the final fatal distances” of Stevens’s villagers only serve to show just how resistant they are to “the weather of other lives” (c p p 329). On the other hand, in the process of identification deployed in modernist American poetry underwritten by the Pragmatism reaching back to William James and Emerson, we

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are more likely to encounter in Stevens the representation overshooting its object to problematize the strict correspondence to external reality, and as a proto-modernist poet like Emily Dickinson seems to anticipate, find ourselves well beyond “the Distance / On the look of Death,” and closer to her more daring space of “internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are –” (Complete Poems 118), as in Stevens’s own “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” (1943) for instance: “To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak / And to be heard is to be large in space, / That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part / Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is / To perceive men without reference to their form” (c p p 263). With this last passage in Stevens, we find ourselves set before the first of three poetical criteria that Guest conceivably derives from Stevens and programatically endeavours to enlarge throughout much of her extensive canon: the maximization of discursive space within the poetic text just as Stevens mandates. This spatial largesse thus underpins the mysteries of “The New Realism” (an important title in  John Ashbery’s The Tennis-Court Oath, contained in Collected Poems) of the New York School poets alluded to by Hillringhouse previously, and that Guest herself takes up in a lecture entitled “Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry” from 1990. Writes Guest: “The radical issues of a poem are infinite and this accounts for the immodesty of the poet who confronts endless space. This imposed immodesty needs to be protected in the closed environment in which an artist lives, subject to regulation and mandated law … engaged [as s/he is] in temporary struggles, with the use of the sledgehammer against ice” (Forces 13).4 In another lecture entitled “Poetry the True Fiction” two years later, Guest similarly remarks, “Words of the poem need dimension. They desire finally – an education in space. The poet needs to understand the auditory and spatial needs of a poem to free it so that the poem can locate its own movement, so that it is freed to find its own voice, its own rhythm or accent or power” (Forces 30; and further on 41, 46, 55, 89, 106, and 107). Thus in Frank O’Hara’s own “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” the poem concludes: “And / always embrace things, people earth / sky stars, as I do, freely, and with / the appropriate sense of space. That is your inclination …” (Collected Poems 307).5 Back in the 1950s, of course, advancing to a second (and later a third) marriage through the decade and rubbing shoulders with a sometimes dismissive coterie of mostly male poets,6 Guest herself

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would have had a fairly acute sense of the “closed environment” subject to regulation and law underscored in the image of “the sledgehammer against ice.” Guest’s own “Fair Realism,” to go with the title of a much later collection of poems from 1989, can thus be viewed in terms of a certain countercultural resistance mounted against Cold War ideologues by the New York School in general outlined in the last chapter as they especially beset the postwar filmmaking of George Cukor (see further Jarraway, Going the Distance, chapter 4; and Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, chapter 1). Specifically in line with Ashbery, this more spatialized “realism” purposes to run defiantly counter to what Virginia Carmichael in Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War alludes to as the ideology of certain “perfecting myths as attempts to transcend irrational, impalatable, or unbearable social and historical realities” as a “process of making the (sublime) world cognitively apprehensible in bearable terms” (229n8). In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman’s further notion of an ideological “dominant fiction” also alluded to in the previous chapter – sovereign fathers, receptive mothers, procreative family units, and so forth – is perhaps, following World War Two, the Cold War’s perfecting myth par excellence shadowing Guest’s early canon (39). And it surely comes as no accident that a belief in the “realism” of mainstream Hollywood cinema through this period, so Silverman argues at length, would become the very means to solidify that dominant fiction (404n70), a stifling realism closeting the impalatable and unbearable presentiment of “homotextual poetics” of the predominantly gay New York School poets – the phrase is Shoptaw’s (On the Outside Looking Out 69) – and underwritten by the mysterious counter-realism arguably extracted from the work of Stevens taken up especially in chapter 1 previously. And yet if dissident sexuality is a topos with which Guest forges a further link to the New York School via Stevens, it largely manifests itself in her early work within a spatialized poetics pitted against various forms of oppressive containment. In “Belgravia,” for instance (from The Location of Things), the containment is imaged in the form of a rather large and decidedly patriarchal house whose many fatal enclosures instil a kind of mental claustrophobia: Many rooms are in his house And they can all be used for exercise.

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There are mileposts cut in marble, A block, ten blocks, a mile For the one who walks here thinking, Who finds a meaning at the end of a mile, And wishes to entomb his discoveries. (c p 29) Compelled in such a controlled space to be “in love with a man / Who knows himself better than my youth, / My experience or my ability,” and “Trained now to reflect his face / As rims reflect their glasses,” the narrator’s attention is inevitably attracted to the garden outside the house, a natural site whose reality “cannot refrain from turning ever so little / In other directions and witnessing / The completion of itself as seen from all sides” (c p 29–30, emphasis added). In “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” from the same volume, the extrusion into external space is considerably enlarged. Yet the freedom and exhilaration that accompany it are somewhat curtailed by an  anxiety wrought equally by a fear of the unknown: “Now the ­suspension, you say, / Is exquisite. [But] I do not know … I am no nearer / Air than water. I am closer to you than land and I am in a stranger ocean / Than I wished” (c p 14). Thus in “Parade’s End” from The Blue Stairs, the move is back to containment once again: “Looking at [the parade] from the sidelines / we weren’t so amused / as chilled by the snow wind, / our feet getting smaller / in unadaptable leather // our eyes formed truly gigantic tears” (c p 78). In the end assuaged by the comforts of home, the narrator is nonetheless provoked by a certain mystery surrounding “an unopened poem” in the text’s concluding stanza, and the space for growth that it promises beyond its postwar domestic sequestration: “It should grow / in the kitchen near the stove / if I can squeeze out of my eyes / enough water. Water” (c p 78). This poignant moment in Guest is uncannily like a similar one recounted at the end of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”: “while the grandmother / busies herself about the stove, / the little moons fall down like tears / from between the pages of the almanac / into the flower bed the child / has carefully placed in front of the house. // Time to plant tears, says the almanac” (Complete Poems 124). And I shall return to the relationship between Bishop and Stevens among others as yet an “other” context for gauging the significance of his work in the next chapter. Meanwhile, that “unopened poem” just alluded to in Guest might very well put us in mind of the as yet unopened status of Stevens’s own “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” as Guest alludes to it in

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another lecture entitled “Poetry the True Fiction” from 1992. In a letter from Stevens to his publisher that Guest references in her talk, Stevens had only his title and just “three notes by way of defining the characteristics of supreme fiction”; namely, “I / It must be abstract / II / It must change / III / It must give pleasure,” leading Guest to conclude: “The fiction of the poet is part of restless twentieth century perception based on the discovery that reality is variable, and is open-ended in form and matter” (Forces 26, 27). But if reality is variable, then to the same degree so must be the subjects that inhabit it. On this matter, Guest is minded of Stevens’s “purple bird” in another prose piece (“Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals for Poetry” [1986]) that, along with the poem itself – “a finikin thing of air,” according to Stevens – “shares the extravagance of being rare.” “In whatever disguise reality becomes visible to the poet,” Guest further concludes, “there is the choice of withdrawing from its visibility to create a secret life” (Forces 84, 85). Here, we perhaps recall that larger-than-life reality in Stevens’s “Chocorua”; the poem’s distanciations allow men to be perceived “without reference to their form,” and they therefore represent such a contrast to the master of that morbid house in Guest’s “Belgravia” scanned previously: “Who knows himself better than my youth, / My experience or my ability” (c p 29, emphasis added). I shall return to that morbid house later on in this section of the chapter. Meanwhile, this incipient state of unknowness with respect to identity thus becomes a second major preoccupation that Guest appears to be taken with in Stevens, what Stevens himself tags “The Irrational Element of Poetry” in an essay from 1936: It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom. We accept the unknown even when we are most skeptical. We may resent the consideration of it by any except the most lucid minds; but when so considered, it has seductions more powerful and more profound than those of the known. (c p p 791) Mark Doty, as a more contemporary ephebe of Stevens inspected previously in this study, contends therefore that “poetic description wants to do anything but reinscribe the already known” (Art of Description 63, and further on 88, 137). Moreover, for Guest all the seductions of the unknown lie within the unconscious. And much of

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her prose therefore scruples to underscore the importance of that mysterious contour of human experience for her poetry, as in her essay on “Invisible Architecture” where she remarks: “The invisible authority [of the writer] may be the unconscious that dwells on the lower level, in a substratum beneath the surface of the poem and possesses its own reference” (Forces 19); or again in the essay entitled “Vision and Mundanity,” observing there that “the ‘spirit’ or the ‘vision’ of a poem arises from the contents of the poet’s unconscious … The poet directs this ‘spillover’ into the poem” (Forces 88).7 For one possible summation of this irrational preoccupation in both Stevens and Guest, we might turn once again to the Deleuzian commentary of Rosi Braidotti who importantly asserts: “I take the unconscious [to be] the guarantee of non-closure in the practice of subjectivity. It undoes the stability of the unitary subject by constantly changing and redefining his or her foundations … [thus] allow[ing] for forms of disengagement and disidentification from the socio-symbolic” (Metamorphoses 39–40). For Stevens, the irrational element in poetry thus serves as the warrant for the multiplicitous character of human identity as in the Adagia cited in my second epigraph: “The subjects of one’s poems are the symbols of one’s self or of one of one’s selves” (c p p 904, emphasis added). And similarly for Guest, a warrant for plasticity in the construction of human identity if not for its ultimate vagueness promoted by Stevens arguably under the influence of George Santayana examined at length in the last chapter.8 “Plasticity, strive for noble plasticity,” she adjures in the prose poem entitled “The Beautiful Voyage”: “be in the dark at the beginning of the journey. Here with a vague idea (as Picasso suggested) … amid currents: ‘reality’ and multi-identificational objectives / Body, Mind, Soul // the dark identity of a poem must be encountered” (Forces 78, 80, 81). Under the rubric of “multi-identificational objectives,” then, we begin to descry the instauration of yet another Stevensian diva-dame figuration in Guest’s early poetry. I use the term “figuration” in connection with the diva-dame quite deliberately here. For as Rosi Braidotti further observes, “A figuration renders our image of thought in terms of a decentered and multilayered vision of the subject as a dynamic and changing entity; as such it can be taken as a dramatization of the processes of becoming.” Hence, like Stevens’s diva-dame, “We live in permanent processes of transition, hybridization, and nomadization. And these in-between states and stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation,

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precisely because they are zigzagging, not linear and process oriented, not concept driven” (Nomadic Theory 217). If we return now to the concluding stanza of “Parade’s End” cited previously, and those salt tears “squeezed out of [the narrator’s] eyes” (c p 78), the eyes/I’s of a multiplicitous selfhood authenticated by the “unopened poem” thus make the text’s last word “Water” the very image for the plasticity or fluidity that Guest’s treatment of female subjectivity calls out for, as Timothy Gray makes clear in his own response to Guest’s work: “[Guest’s] ‘plasticity,’ Du Plessis explains, gives rise to ‘multiple subject positions and viewing positions,’ with the poet ‘speaking from the vectors of a site, and not from one voice or from one identity’ … I agree with Du Plessis, though I often want to substitute ‘liquidity’ for ‘plasticity’ and ‘seascapes’ for ‘landscapes’” (84, and further on 88). Hence, Shaw’s corroborating allusion to “the fluid subject positions [that O’Hara] valued,” and remarking further: “For O’Hara, subject positions enacted in writing would not be stable abstractions of a unified psyche (what New Critics would call ‘personae’) bringing insight to an abstract readership” (113). In Guest’s poem entitled “Sand” (from The Location of Things), therefore, it is the ocean in its “distance” in the first stanza that sets the model for such treatment: “The distance / see / the miles produce reckoning, / water / extending / Sand …” (c p 53). And this illimitable “reckoning” of ocean thus succeeds in making the narrator’s own endless quest for self-recognition unquenchable as well:     Salt throat the tongue clasps the swell, releases sends monitoring ceaseless thirst back to ocean depth    tides turn dark    The skeleton shock of wave lift, a column on the shore its profile ever foreign its ruin permanent recurs (c p 54) Hence, the “Rejoice / in ancient nothingness” which concludes the poem (c p 55) – this terminal no-thing-ness – becomes the ideal match for Stevens’s own formless disidentifications noted earlier. “I cannot

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place him,” remarks the narrator in “A Way of Being” (from The Blue Stairs) as if in response to Stevens (c p 81). “Yet I do,” the text continues: “He must ascend indefinitely as airs / he must regard his image as plastic, / adhering to the easeful carpet that needs / footprints and cares for them / as in their wont in houses, the ones we pass by” (c p 81). And here we ourselves might bypass Frank O’Hara for a moment, and instructively take notice of a similarly distanciated moment in fellow New York Schooler John Ashbery, and his much later Flow Chart (1991): “I stepped back and stared, and in that moment saw myself on a visit to myself, / with quite a few me’s on a road receding sharply into a distance” (qtd in Gray 67). “For decades,” Timothy Gray further remarks, “Ashbery has spoken passionately about multiple selves that are always in motion, always in dialogue, constantly measuring themselves against the boy who peeped out in ‘The Picture of Little J.A.,’ part of an agrarian landscape he has long vacated but never truly abandoned … indicat[ing] that his geographical trajectory [from country to city] has provided [Ashbery] with the distance necessary to guage past episodes with clarity and respect” (68; see further 53, 57, 65, 66, and 69). With Guest’s own “multi-identificational objectives” in her poetry, the “passing by” cited previously in “A Way of Being” and echoed in  Ashbery is important. For as Guest’s poem concludes, it is “Understanding the distances / between characters” that is important, not their identification itself, a spatialization that provokes in these characters “their wakeful / or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring / the slow sunset, the quick dark” (c p 82) – “musing the obscure,” as Stevens perhaps might say (c p p 71). Such musing Guest indulges in the lines that conclude her very long “A Handbook of Surfing” (again from The Blue Stairs) where “to negotiate each splendid day / we do this from wave couch / in shrewdness meditate / the expanse the artful dare” (c p 91). Such withdrawal, however, is necessary since “in the polyandry green of life there’s a rule you stride,” and according to Guest’s “Handbook,” it is the rule that states: “There is a point beyond which big storm surf is unrideable” (c p 90). That discursive point of no return surfaces elsewhere in Guest, for instance, in “Safe Flights” (from Location) where it is voiced as “To no longer wish winter to have explanations … to no longer feel the cold, / To no longer pretend in the flower / There is a secret, or in the earth a tomb” (c p 17). Redolent with a mass of ear-piercing split

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infinitives, such a wish arguably marks the point of complete disarticulation in New York School poetics that perhaps puts us in mind of the “final fatal distances” of Stevens that I referred to much earlier – a disturbing rhetoric that I am tempted to twin with Lacan’s notion of the Real, and upon which Ashbery’s and Guest’s new “realism” might be thought to pun. Here, I follow the suggestion of Slavoj Žižek in his take on the “abstract expressionism” with which New York School poetics is often associated (see esp. Shaw, chapter 5). According to Žižek’s psychoanalysis, painting (or poetry) “neither imitates reality nor represents it via symbolic codes,” but rather “‘renders’ the Real by ‘seizing’ the spectator” so that “he [sic] loses his ‘objective distance’” (Looking Awry 174n22). Coordinate with this problematizing the real à la Lacan is Guest’s own reminder that Abstract Expressionist painter “De Kooning is telling us to beware of description or ‘subject matter,’” and further, that “it is within the convoluted travel to the dramatic center that we trace the spirituality within Kandinsky’s painting,” and not the tracing of the centre itself, since as Guest additionally observes, “Kandinsky writes that ‘a problem all art imposes is the evaluation of its distance from the source’” (Forces 31, 85). The thought of Kandinsky is also coordinate with Ashbery’s much longer “Clepsydra” from his contemporaneous Rivers and Mountains (1966) where, likewise, the reader is seized by “a final assumption rising like a shout”: to “be endless in the discovery of the declamatory / Nature of the distance traveled” (Collected Poems 142). The import of both Guest’s and Ashbery’s Lacanian address here is merely to suggest that while “objectivity” may be lost, the metonymical “distance” never is. As Kaja Silverman argues in her cogent gloss on this important psychoanalytic term, because “the look has never coincided with the gaze,” there will always be “the distance which separates them” – and what is more, always “the difficult task of living at a distance from the mirror” (or the painting or the poem; Threshold of the Visible World 156–7, 173). In prospect of such distance, indeed, the Cold War closetry of sexuality and gender under the guise of an undifferentiated mimetic realism promises to dissolve. So it is, then, that we side with the Imagination rather than Reality in Guest, as we do in Stevens, “Imagination [as] the absent flower of Mallarmé” – or the “Necessary Angel” in Stevens – “a turbulent presence to be evoked” therefore over and over again (Forces 104). As Guest further proclaims,

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I cannot end a discussion of poetics without stressing the power of the imagination. To lean on it! To trust it! Imagination is the single most important element in poetry. When I examine a poem, it is not for its form or style. There are plenty of “successful” poems. One must look for the vibrating imagination hid under the stones of form or style. How empty is all their dazzle without imagination. (Forces 103, further on 26 and 106) Guest’s words from 2002 would appear to line up almost exactly with Stevens’s back in 1943: “The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives – if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary. Like light, it adds nothing, except itself. What light requires a day to do … the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye” (The Necessary Angel, c p p 681). Or, as “A Handbook of Surfing” would have it, perhaps glossing the “shrinking from / The weight of primary noon, / The A B C of being” in Stevens’s “Motive for Metaphor” (c p p 257): “an unknown alphabet whose squeaky / letters [are] as apt to let one down [as] forget to lift us up … in the dovecote water” (c p 85, emphasis added). This startling image of an aqueous dovecote thus references a third and final impact of Stevens on Guest’s early poetry that the more general signification of house and home in some of the poems already surveyed takes us to the very heart of. In an essay entitled “Shifting Persona,” Guest makes this last debt to Stevens clear when she speaks of the “genius” of those writers who would allow “their persons to appear to inhabit a closed drawing-room,” yet nonetheless would actually have them “removed from the interior to the exterior as [such characters] move beyond their limited space through the projection of the author.” “They are persons who are capable in their minds,” according to Guest, “of looking outside themselves into another place, of shifting their persons,” and in so being “relieved of ordained claustrophobia, as is the reader … lifted by the author’s inked quill … to project beyond singularity” (Forces 38, emphasis added). And the model for such variorum projection for Guest is none other than Wallace Stevens himself: “That dwelling in the inner sanctum of his home [in Hartford, Connecticut] in which he received nobody, sitting in a garden sipping wine and eating cheese without conversation even with his wife, he maintained the embrace of exile.”

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“In exile there is freedom,” Guest underscores, and for Stevens especially, “freedom to maneuver [as an artist,] freedom to adopt a persona. And freedom, in particular, to use a language in whatever context you wish” (Forces 66). In the Hillringhouse interview, Guest, like so many of the writers taken up in previous chapters of this study, remarks somewhat ambivalently on her relationship to home over the years: “It had created a lot of anxiety. Growing up with my aunt and uncle for instance. I first lived with my grandmother. Then I lived with my parents in Florida. Then I was sent to California to live with my aunt and uncle when I was ten. So I never really had a ‘home.’ That was hard and it created some anxiety so that … When I say the word ‘home’ I almost whisper it” (26). Further, it is interesting to speculate that the figure of the “houseboat” in Ashbery might have provided another member of the New York School with the same creatively fraught sense of a “homelessness at home” (see Foster) that is correspondingly found in Stevens and in Guest, and remarked upon in a letter of Ashbery from December 1976: “I suppose I like the idea of stasis within motion, freedom within constraint (as in Donne’s ‘we are born but to the liberty of the house’ [sermon of 28 March 1619]), which is a certain amount of liberty after all; houses seem to be a recurring theme in my poetry” (qtd in Epstein 310n5). And so, for better or worse, in Guest and her “aqueous dovecote,” perhaps substantiating Gray’s claim that “her personae [are] curiously at home in buoyant surroundings [as] Aqueous elements flood forward in such instances” (74, emphasis added). Linking Stevens and Guest together on this note of ambivalence about house and home, we return once again to David Macey’s instructive remark that “the Ego is not … master in its own house and [therefore] cannot aspire to Cartesian certainties” (74), an aperçu that undoubtedly reinforces the irrational element in both Stevens’s and Guest’s presentation of the formless exiled subject in their work. For it is precisely this element, as we have seen, that puts the exile “outside habitual order” according to Edward Said, whose own important “Reflections on Exile” he derives, not unexpectedly, from Wallace Stevens himself: Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of

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spring are nearby but unobtainable. Perhaps this is another way of saying that a life of exile moves according to a different calendar, and is less seasonal and settled than a life at home. (366) “The house is a burden,” as Guest’s own “Safe Flights” would have it (c p 17). And in her own ironization of domestic space à la Said, Guest forges a further strong linkage once again to Deleuze and Guattari’s provocative reading of Herman Melville’s sea fiction (in What is Philosophy?) where “Everything begins with Houses.” As developed in chapter 3, Deleuze and Guattari proceed to ironize the house in American literature as part and parcel of “a kind of deframing following certain lines of flight … in order to open it onto the universe” and thereby “dissolve the identity of the place” – and, by implication, human identity – “through variation with earth” (186–7). More than Melvillian perhaps, the thought is thoroughly attuned to the exilic reflections of Emerson in his essay for example on “Montaigne”: “The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility … We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. An angular dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of elements … We are golden averages, volitant stabilities or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea” (Essays and Lectures 679). Hence, Adorno more recently pronounces that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home,” since “the only home truly available [in postwar twentieth-century culture], though fragile and vulnerable, is in writing” (qtd in Said 365), as the distanciated hominess of both Stevens and Guest would appear to corroborate. In this “other” context of Stevens and the New York School, therefore, we do well to take Deleuze and Guattari at their word concerning identity in American literature: that “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between … multiplicities” (249), a notion that perhaps Guest’s “The View from Kandinsky’s Window” referenced earlier might be thought to gesture toward. But in much earlier work, in a poem entitled “History” for instance (and dedicated to Frank O’Hara), “We have escaped / from that pale refrigerator,” its shifting persona declaim, and with their egress into the much larger natural world via a precarious “funicular,” thus “allow these nightingales to nurse us” (c p 23–4). And “Santa Fe Trail” in “The Open Skies” section of The Location of Things later would appear to turn the dismantling of domestic space into something of a spiritual apotheosis for the exile: “I go separately / The

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sweet knees of oxen have pressed the path for me … What forks these roads? / Who clammers o’er the twain? What murmurs and rustles in the distance / in the white branches where the light is whipped / piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer and toss ourselves …” (c p 41–2). With texts such as these mainly from the Cold War 1950s, and with the New York School retrospectively in the distance, we are undoubtedly in a brave new “Democratic Social Space” as Philip Fisher would suggest, though one hardly “captured from and damaged by the map of [Abstract Expressionism]” as Fisher would further claim (110). To the contrary, Guest’s outré understanding of “distances” reveals that we are perhaps in the more damaging thrall of what Stevens himself alludes to in his justly famous “The Snow Man” as “nothing” at all (c p p 8), and yet within a quite exhilarating thrall at least for Guest since, as Carmichael once again observes, “There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown” (239n65).

•• When we turn now to the work of James Schuyler, an important member of the New York School perhaps made even more prominent today by David Lehman (“the best-kept secret in American poetry” 243) and Richard Howard (“irreplaceable” 26), the hypothetical link to Wallace Stevens in this “other” context, I shall argue, is the important status of the “irrational element” in poetry rehearsed in the previous section in connection with Barbara Guest’s valorization of the “unconscious” throughout much of her work. Terms like “irrational” and “unconscious,” however, raise the disciplinary spectre of “psychoanalysis” with respect to Stevens’s own work, a topic that I shall reserve for more detailed treatment in the next chapter. But in the context of 1950s Cold War American culture where the “queer perversities” of New York School affiliation – feminism in the case of Guest, and homosexuality in the case of Schuyler – were already beset by several “perfecting myths” in Virginia Carmichael’s telling phrase (229n8) as outlined by Silverman, Tyler May, Renov, and Bérubé in the last chapter, pyschoanalysis arguably might be added to the list as merely one more demonstrable effect of social control.9 By mid-century, however, incipient social control was by no means a novel cultural phenomenon. As Eli Zaretsky argues (following American sociologist Edward Ross), such ideological overdetermination had been around in America since at

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least the early 1900s when it began to manifest itself as “a broad, general, and presumptively desirable shift in the organization of authority, a shift from external coercion to internalized self-control,” or in other terms, “from top-down paternalism to interpersonal, therapeutic controls” (333). And here we enter upon the extraordinary paradox framing my analysis of the “irrational element” in Schuyler. For one of the therapeutic controls operating on behalf of social control more generally throughout American culture over the course of the last century, as Zaretsky further observes, was psychoanalysis itself whose “strikingly different current of analytic thought – namely, ego psychology – … was to propel psychoanalysis to the center of a new culture of rationalization” from roughly the 1930s and onward (334). Such a turn of events must be thought to be odd, indeed, given that in the preceding decade or two, Freudian analysis had been “developed in close proximity to new milieus of transfamilial experimentation” – Zaretsky cites Harlem New York, Bloomsbury London, and Weimar Berlin as more global instances – “wherever, in short, people aspired to a personal life expressive of their individuality and outside the traditional family” (330). In view of its more general aesthetic alignments with the counter-traditional action painting of Abstract Expressionism, therefore, would not the homosexual vangardage of the New York School – the queer identity of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery in addition to that of Schuyler – have done much in the Cold War 1950s to revive the expressive life of a bygone modernism as, in Zaretsky’s words once again, “a permanent resource against rationalization” (346)? Before turning to that very important question in the context of Schuyler’s own relation to psychoanalysis, it might first be useful to review the degree to which his early writing in fact, like that of Barbara Guest, registers a general resistance to ideological control and cultural containment endemic to the postwar decade in which his writing career was launched. David Lehman summarily remarks that “the flowering of Schuyler’s poetry took place in the decade of gay liberation, the 1970s, and the steadily climbing rise in his readership has something to do with his unflinching portrayal of homosexuality” (259). I am persuaded to think, however, that the unflinching portrayal of gay subjects occurs much earlier in Schuyler’s work, and in fact forms the very centre of a strategy on his part to mount in the strongest possible terms his opposition to Cold War

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closures of various kinds. A number of poems from Freely Espousing, the first book of Schuyler’s Collected Poems (c p hereafter) and conceivably overlapping his friendship with Guest, might perhaps be thought to reflect on the years of Schuyler’s earliest writing precisely to this restive end. In the poem “A New Yorker,” for instance, the movement seems to be entirely away from the metropolis where the poet spent most of his writing career beginning in 1949 after a brief sojourn in Greece following his discharge from the navy. Thus “the scenic route to Rio” or “the countryside around Paris” or just “anywhere in Europe” – all seem preferable destinations, as the “eyes turn / to fly away from winter” and toward “romance” whose “leaves of diamonds / sparkl[e] with gaiety” (c p 7–8). In nearby poems, present curtailments appear to be the motivation for such future gay abandon. “We’ll shoot the rapids / on Rogue River / before they build that dam,” the narrator concludes in “Rachmaninoff’s Third” (c p 15). And in “An Almanac,” ominous “Caged mink claw” and “snow bends the snow fence” as “Seats in the examination hall are staggered” and “The stars gleam like ice” (c p 19). Still in more temperate weather, as in “Roof Garden,” with its “tubs of pink petunias,” theirs is a “punctured glow / before a glowing wall / all the walls reflecting light,” so that their shimmering seems “a long, long time ago” (c p ,24). Even imagination, apparently, has its limits. After revolving the image of “a blue fire escape” several times in the first half of the text, the narrator of “Sorting, wrapping, packing, stuffing” is given to ponder: “Imagine going to the sun for the winter” (c p 27). Yet “if it’s like Miami,” s/he surmises, “better we should slip into this Ice Age remnant granite boulder / and grab a snooze” despite the Romance of Serge Eisenstein mentioned at the conclusion. Such an intractable declension into an Ice Age of granite perhaps bottoms out in the longest poem of Freely Espousing, entitled “Now and Then,” which Schuyler positions near the end of the volume:       Driving past, driving down, driving over along the Winooski through the home of Granite City Real Ice Cream The Monument Capitol buildings of rusticated granite marred to our eyes … ......................................................

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and the dark tranquility of hemlocks encroaching on untilled fields (c p 39) If “Granite City” is the quintessential image of “Cold War” culture ideologically etched into heteronormative stone – “a future happily heterodox,” as Schuyler calls it – not all, apparently, is lost. For “‘You can’t make a living / plowing stones,’” a voice in the text drolly cautions, “subsistence / farming [being] well out of style,” and “‘You can’t call it living / without the margin,’” to which the narrator adds, “a margin like that on this page / a paper luxury” (c p 39). The luxurious margin literally on the poet’s page in “Now and Then,” of course, cannot be too far removed from the figurative margin from which, as a New York School writer, Schuyler mounts his opposition to the mainstream “Anglo-American literary tradition as embodied in the works of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics,” as well as “the politically committed didacticism of the Beats and the poets of political protest” (Lehman 358).10 But more than that, I am inclined to connect such luxurious marginality to Schuyler’s general outlook on life captured so memorably in his indispensable Diary when he records in the entry for 22 November 1970 for instance: “Walking with John [Ashbery] yesterday, as the afternoon became evening, to get keys & other shopping, the extraordinary excess of experience” (99, emphasis retained). For surely it’s just such luxurious excess that, now and then, threatens to break completely apart all the adamantine sedimentations of Granite City, and usher its denizens into an experience so completely beyond them – “surprise: ‘Why here it is: / the most beautiful thing’” (c p 41) – as to be almost inarticulable, as we remarked in connection with Guest’s split infinitives in “Safe Flights” analyzed in the previous section: Quick and clear as the water where cress grows the cold breaks on the hills to the soft crash of a waterfall beyond a beaver pond and slides on flinging imaginary fragments of cat’s ice from its edges to flash a bright reality in the night sky and it – the cold – stands, a rising pool, about

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Sloven’s farmhouse and he dreams of dynamite. (c p 40) More generally, dynamite in this passage is perhaps hurled at the scientism of everyday life in the 1950s “culture of rationalism” alluded to previously by Zaretsky. As David L. Clark observes in an insightful comment relevant to the more expressive thought of Schuyler here, Natural scientists, as well as those who succumb to their views, are hallucinating the object of their analyses – that is, “life” – as long as they fail to grasp “that there is something inexplicable in living beings.” This “inexplicability” does not await a more accurate or penetrating investigation, but remains irreducibly out of mind. All of “living nature is only what has become rigidified of a past stirring of that becoming viewed metaphysically, a rest behind which lies the unruliness of the ground; just as if it could erupt again, unruliness not just being the lack and indeterminacy of the rule.” (25) Yet it is the very “excess” of nature or the very “unruliness of the ground” imaged by the “dynamite” in the above passage that portends an earthshaking removal from the slovenly stasis of “cold” and “ice” in Granite City to a “bright reality” or extraordinary sense of “beyond” – elsewhere in the poem, “when dawn / peels back like a  petal to disclose blue depths / deep beyond all comprehending” (c p  41) – this crashing transformation of experience, paradoxically, is barely dissociable from what makes experience so crushing at the same time. As John Ashbery frames the case in “The Impossible” from 1957, “Stanzas in Meditation is no doubt the most successful of [Gertrude Stein’s] attempts to do what can’t be done, to create a counterfeit of reality more real than reality … the only thing worth trying to do” (253–4). I might borrow a further gloss on the complex thought here from Slavoj Žižek’s extended commentary on F.W.J. Schelling when Žižek insightfully remarks, in terms not unrelated to Schuyler’s “excess of experience,” that “the notion of the excess of the Real in its very material density results from a certain deadlock of symbolization” (Indivisible 109). In other words, if for Schuyler the ideological closure of American Cold War culture becomes the deadlock of symbolization writ large, it would be hardly like him to

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turn his back on such a culture. Continues Žižek: “Human freedom is actual, not just an illusion due to our ignorance of the necessity that effectively governs our lives, only if man is not mere epiphenomenon of the universe but a ‘being of the Center,’ a being in whom the abyss of the primordial Freedom breaks through in the midst of the created universe” (Indivisible 54). In Freely Espousing, the Real Ice Cream that perhaps serves as an emblem for the “abyss of the primordial freedom” that breaks through the intractable sedimentations of the created universe becomes precisely, therefore, a function of the creation labelled Granite City itself: “You can’t call it living / without [that] margin.” Now, I think, we can truly begin to appreciate the extent to which a New York School writer like Schuyler may have attempted to restore the expressive life of the individual so much enjoyed in an earlier period of modernism last century. But before pursuing that expressive reclamation specifically with respect to the Cold War closeting11 of subjectivity through the postwar decades, I offer a word or two further about the epistemology guiding the poet’s earlier work. Schuyler’s countercultural privileging of a dense largess of experience to the point of incomprehension just noted is perhaps best understood in contrast to the more mainstream conservative response to ordinary life as epitomized in the “realism” of Hollywood cinema through the 1950s; Kaja Silverman, we recall, underscored Hollywood “realism” as the very means to solidify and institutionalize the paternalism of the dominant fiction (404n70). Like Hollywood, Schuyler “always liked looking at things” and was “attracted to writers who share[d] that infatuation” (Hillringhouse 5). But if Elizabeth Bishop was “one of [his] all time favorite poets,” and if he “love[d] Darwin” even more (10, 11; cf. Thompson 121; Lehman 255, 355; and c p 78–9), Schuyler’s infatuation with things was destined to run quite counter to the mimetic realism of Hollywood if Bishop’s wellknown description of Darwin is any indication. For in her justly famous “Darwin Letter” from 1966, Bishop observes: I can’t believe we are wholly irrational – and I do admire Darwin – [b]ut reading Darwin one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of the endless, heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic – and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels that strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute

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details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown (qtd in Schwartz and Estess 288) In any event, “what interested [Schuyler] in visual art,” as Nathan Kernan, the editor of The Diary, observes, “may have had less to do with the idea of creating a likeness than with the impossibility of doing so, and relates to ideas of spontaneity and discovery [that Schuyler] associated with abstract-expressionist painting, collage, and, in a specific sense, photography” (15). Schuyler’s “Real Ice Cream,” therefore, might perhaps be a playful invocation of the anti-mimetic “New Realism” that John Ashbery proposes in concert with Barbara Guest’s “Fair Realism” explored in  the previous section. Of course, as gay men, both Ashbery and Schuyler in particular in the 1950s would be keen to offer a New Realism to the reading public as a means of relieving it of an old and intensely homophobic one. As David Halperin remarks, “‘Homosexual,’ like ‘woman,’ is not a name that refers to a ‘natural kind’ of thing. It’s a discursive, and homophobic, construction that has come to be misrecognized as an object under the epistemological regime known as realism” (45). In precisely the same terms, Lee Edelman suggests that a New Realism was also the very means by which these New York School poets might at the same time disinter themselves and their readers from the ideological oppression of the takenfor-granted “dominant fiction” described earlier. Writes Edelman: “The appeal to so-called ‘common sense’ reinforces the hypostatization of the ‘natural’ upon which homophobia relies, and thus partakes of an ideological labor complicit with heterosexual supremacy.” Hence, under the epistemological rubric of realism, “the convergence of knowledge and common sense may be understood more profitably as licensing the operation of unexamined ideological structures” (xviii). Slavoj Žižek, once again, makes the same point about Abstract Expressionism in his indispensable Looking Awry where he theorizes that painting “neither imitates reality nor represents it via symbolic codes,” but rather “‘renders’ the Real by ‘seizing’ the spectator” so that “he loses his ‘objective distance’” (174n22) and by installing in its place, as in The Indivisible Remainder, the “distance which separates ‘words’ from ‘things,’” or in other terms, “the irreducible gap between the subject and the signifier” or “between possibility and actuality” – “the gap between a real entity and its symbolic

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reduplicatio” as a kind of “perturbed tautology” (61, 46, 57, 66). In Schuyler’s Diary, a type of nonsignifying “space” is offered in almost identical terms: “through two rents, one smiling the other densely dark, glows the freezing eternal summer of space,” that is, “the ample space … [that] will almost always suggest air & openness – so wanted in a city – a space of light” (90–1, 99). Moreover, the several tenebrous invocations to “silence” in the Diary seem almost intended to produce the same indeterminate effect: “The beauty of a faintly seen rowboat at a mooring, afloat in clouded white – the patina’d silver of an old mirror, almost – without a seam between water or sky; without sky or water; bright, pale, impenetrable, soft silence. Extraordinary silence to the eye which cancels out the diesel” (55; cf. 27, 37, 80–1).12 Carried over into the poetry of Freely Espousing, these perturbing spaces or silences linked as they are to an excess of experience invariably tend to become epistemological occasions for the displacement of knowledge or perception rather than their confirmation. In the opening of a poem like “May 24th or So” (whose vagueness of title ought to be significant in itself), we find “Among white lilac trusses, green-gold spaces of sunlit grass,” and it is before these that “Everything trembles / everything shakes / in the great sifter,” and that set us “awfully far / from the green hell of August” at the poem’s conclusion (c p 24–5). In “Master of the Golden Glow,” the epistemological conundrums continue: “Say, who are you / anyway? ‘I think we may have met before. / God knows I’ve heard enough about you’” (c p 33), and a little later: I’ll tell you who I am: someone you never met though on a train you studied a boil on my neck or bumped into me leaving a party “Sorry” or saw throwing bones in the ocean for an inexhaustible retriever. (c p 34) As attentive readers of Schuyler’s indecipherable spaces, how often are we made to feel like that indefatigable retriever. And yet as Silverman remarks in a context relevant to this one, “the astonishingly various accounts … offered by biographers and critics dramatize the impossibility of knowing what ‘really’ happen[s]” in any given life (Male Subjectivity 300). Thus, in a couple of opening poems

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from Schuyler’s next volume in Collected Poems, entitled The Home Book 1951–1970, “A Grave” proves at the beginning to be no more illuminating about the death of “one of our kind” than at the end: “Now he was part of the lighted blackness, slept / in what the screw of our ship set in motion” (c p 47). The subsequent “Poem” sums up Schuyler’s problematic poetic epistemology succinctly. For although “We talk together in a common way / Art, like death, is brief; life and friendship long,” and in the end, “I do not always understand what you say” (c p 48). And yet it would appear as if it was just exactly this impossible understanding through which psychoanalysis may conceivably have gained a healthy berth in Schuyler’s writing as a powerful means of loosening the ideological constraints of 1950s consensus culture and perhaps even dismantling the Cold War closet altogether. For if an excess of experience was key to the counter-realism of Schuyler’s poetic epistemology, it was psychoanalysis that more than anything, with its ministrations fully attentive to the unknowable unconscious, so completely authenticated Schuyler’s own aesthetic of indeterminacy. Closer to our own day, Judith Butler observes that “every repetition [of identity] requires an interval between the acts, as it were, in which risk and excess threaten to disrupt the identity being constructed [and that] The unconscious is this excess that enables and contests every performance of identity” (“Imitation and Gender” 28). But it was Lionel Trilling back in the 1950s who perhaps did the most to champion the sexual excesses of psychoanalysis as “a liberating idea,” so Eli Zaretsky records. For according to Trilling, it is “Freud’s emphasis on sexuality … [that] proposes to us that culture is not all-powerful. It suggests that there is a residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control, and that this residue of human quality, elemental as it may be, serves to bring culture itself under criticism and keeps it from becoming absolute” (qtd on 348). As we perhaps might intuit from the discussion of the irrational in Stevens and Guest among others earlier in this chapter, Schuyler himself held great store by psychoanalysis. His Diary, among other references to the topic, records a familiarity with the work of the eminent psychologist Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History [1962]), alludes to the importance of dreams in Schuyler’s own life and work, and offers at least one direct citation from Freud in which the psychoanalyst adjures himself “to restrain speculative tendencies and follow the advice of [his] master,

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Charcot,” the pre-eminent authority on female hysteria and hypnosis (98, 140, 228–9, emphasis added). “I very much like the idea of things coming out of the unconscious,” Schuyler was once given to remark in an interview published the year after his death (Diary 12). And no doubt the several breakdowns he experienced throughout his lifetime – the Diary records at least two major ones (122, 174) – would constantly have kept the poet very much within the psychic vicinity of the unconscious, and particularly on those occasions when Schuyler felt it was being “deprived,” but most alarmingly, when the poet feared the unconscious was being “understood” (85, 77). Which is why I think, like Deleuze and Guattari in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, Schuyler would have been particularly resistant to the disciplinary turn that Freudian psychoanalysis had taken in America with the popularization of ego-psychology in the pre- and postwar years alluded to earlier, and why a post-Freudian approach to Schuyler’s work is perhaps what is most warranted in critically responding to it today. Central to a post-Freudian approach to Schuyler’s early poetry, therefore, would be a considerable appreciation for the paradoxical role that the “pure signifier” plays in the poet’s various attempts to dismantle, under the impress of a psychic excess and indeterminacy, the Cold War closure of postwar subjectivity for the purpose of placing the quality of human life, as Trilling observed, “beyond the reach of cultural control.” To this end, Žižek helpfully explains that “in order for a series of signifiers to signify something (to have determinate meaning), there must be a signifier (a ‘something’) which stands for ‘nothing,’ a signifying element whose very presence stands for the absence of meaning (or, rather for absence tout court). This ‘nothing,’ of course is the subject itself, the subject qua $, the empty set, the void which emerges … when I contract myself outside myself, [and] deprive myself of my substantial content” (Indivisible 44, emphases retained). Elsewhere, Žižek sums up the case more programatically: “Our point is that the emergence of ‘subject’ is strictly correlative to the positing of this central signifier as ‘empty’: I become a ‘subject’ when the universal signifier to which I refer … is no longer connected by an umbilical cord to some particular content, but is experienced as an empty space to be filled out by the particular (feminist, conservative, state, pro-market, socialist …) content” (Indivisible 131, emphases retained). Not surprisingly, therefore, the substanceless signifier

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of absent identity abounds in Schuyler’s early work: for instance, in “Self-Pity Is a Kind of Lying, Too” where “an old lady [the narrator] / once saw shivering / naked beside a black / polluted stream” bears comparison to “white which is / some other color or / its absence [since] it / spins on itself” like the poem’s own speaker (c p 48–9); or in “February,” where “a woman who just came to her window / and stands there filling it / jogging her baby in her arms” at the same time appears “so far off … on a day like any other” (c p 5); or in “Royals,” a riddling poem about people of “another order” who in “tell[ing] nothing about themselves … seem to tell us everything,” and so “perhaps are what we become for a part of life / without knowing afterward” (c p 10).13 In the end, what interests me most about the “irrational element” of Schuyler’s Cold War poetry is exactly how “queer” it must appear for its time – “the inflection of queer” here in the sense “that problematizes normative consolidations of sex, gender and sexuality,” and that “by refusing to crystallize in any specific form, [being “queer”] maintains a relation of resistance to whatever constitutes the normal” (Jagose 99). In post-Freudian terms, as Žižek might further corroborate, “we are dealing with the free floating of a multitude of signifiers prior to their capitonnage – that is, before a subjective resolution converts this multitude into a unified structured field of meaning … through the synthetic act of the subject” (Indivisible 52–3). So that when Trilling alludes to “a residue of human quality” that arguably sustains itself through the sheltering of Schuyler’s closet critique, can that residue really be so very far from Lacan’s queer “remainder” – that is to say, from “the subject qua $ [as] neither a thing nor a state of things, but an event which occurs when the symbolic enchainment [of Cold War culture, say] fails in its endeavor to absorb the Real of the Thing without remainder” (Indivisible 57)?14 To round out this “other” context, then, one might point in conclusion to the Death of Chatterton section of the poem entitled “Voyage autour de mes cartes postales” in Schuyler’s The Home Book as a likely instance of the kind of subject that literally remains dead to decipherment, or at least, to ready cognition: Cold light fall down upon the bed composing the painting on his left and upper hip androgynously swelling in gentian kneepants.

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A hint of ambiguity perhaps, like Duse as L’Aiglon?   ......................... Chatterton, that marvelous boy, whoever it is it isn’t you. (c p 66) But for the residual purpose of maintaining a goodly distance between the signifiers in a chain, and thus remaining totally resistant to the containing symbologies of Cold War comprehension, the “androgynous” subject here could just as well have been a bottle of milk, as in the text by that title in the earlier Freely Espousing: “a shaft of white drink narrowing / at the cream and rounded off in a  thick-lipped grin. Empty and unrinsed, / a diluted milk ghost entrapped and dulled light and vision … unpigmented though pretty opaque, not squashed but no less empty. // Trembling, milk is coming into its own” (c p 31–2).15 If the ultimate phallic signifier residually incapable of rational subjectivizaton is “not merely the objectal correlative to the subject [but rather] the subject itself in its impossible existence, a kind of objectal stand-in for the object” (Indivisible 102), what better signifier than bottled milk? “It had a little lid that didn’t close properly or resisted when pulled … Heavy as a breast, but lighter, shaping itself without much changing shape: like bringing home the milk in a bandanna … whose strength was only felt dragged under water” (c p 32). As with “Real Ice Cream,” then, Schuyler’s “Milk” sets the reader once again a fair distance from “Granite City” previously. So that if the symbolic order of Cold War culture might complete its circle of semanticization neatly around that queer non-place, as the Late Emperor of Real Ice Cream composing in Stevens’s shadow, it’s possible to imagine that Schuyler, like Barbara Guest, could find much lifetime “Enjoymeant” there (the pun is Žižek’s Indivisible 75) nonetheless.16 For Schuyler, much of that enjoyment arguably would carry over into later work in the form of blank refusals to signify intelligibly or coherently – “this grunt of words” (c p 261), as he termed it – thus upping the ante so to speak with Barbara Guest and her own propensities toward “disarticulation” noted earlier as a means by which to disrupt Cold War consensus culture, catch it off guard, or throw it off balance. The strategy is dizzyingly Deleuzian as we had occasion briefly to witness it with reference to the act of stuttering in the film analysis worked up in the last chapter. In one of his most important

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essays from Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze cites the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (from The Noise of Time) in an effort to prise apart the act of stuttering as a strategy for desubjectification and disidentification along Stevensian lines developed throughout this study: “What was it my family wished to say? I do not know. It had been stuttering from birth, and yet it had something to say. This congenital stuttering weighs heavily on me and many of my contemporaries. We were not taught to speak but to stammer – and only by listening to the swelling noise of the century and being bleached by the foam on the crest of its wave did we acquire a language” (qtd in “He Stuttered” 108). According to Deleuze, the new language acquired by modern poets like Mandelstam is a language of perpetual disequilibrium that only begins “to vibrate and stutter” when speech, whose conventional “homogeneous system of equilibrium” is lost since it “never assumes more than one variable position,” and a more spasmodic linguistic “zone of continuous variation” is offered in its place (108). Moreover, crucial to this transition from coherent speech to the language of loss is a certain critique of familiar or accepted knowledge – “I do not know” in the Mandelstam citation – whereby one passes from textuality that is “syntactic or grammatical” and moves instead via the “scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur” to “regions far from equilibrium” in Deleuze. These regions of disequilibrium Deleuze characterizes as “a series of differential positions or points of view on a specifiable dynamism” that is invariably linked to a state of becoming – “becoming-child” (and elsewhere, “becoming-animal”) – linked to a “body without organs” as it were (112, 110, 109, 113, 111, italics retained). Stuttering is affective, we can conclude, to the extent that affect in poetry is not synonymous with feeling or sensation in the normative sense of the word, but is part and parcel of precisely these “becomings” that “spill over beyond [feelings]” in the whole renovative dynamism of “becoming someone else”: becomingOther (Deleuze, Negotiations 137). Or as Wallace Stevens might say, “becoming-diva.” In “He Stuttered,” not unexpectedly Deleuze offers examples in the context of modern American literature from Melville’s Bartleby (“I prefer not to”) and the poetry of e.e. cummings (“he danced his did”), but only in passing (112). For an American author later in the twentieth century, Deleuze could just as easily have lighted upon Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, or any number of other New York

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School writers coming to prominence through the culturally stultifying years of the early Cold War era. Schuyler’s own very long Pulitzer Prize–winning The Morning of the Poem from 1981 – a remarkable text that the narrator himself describes as a “poem [that] seems mostly about what I’ve lost” (c p 296) – conceivably offers almost a textbook case for Deleuze since the affective fit between stuttering theory and stammering practice can oftentimes appear almost programmatic, starting with the “grunt of words” itself. For “behind this grunt of words” of the stuttering body, the narrator of the poem descries another self – a becoming-Other – curiously linked to Baudelaire (like Mandelstam, one of Deleuze’s own favourite European writers) as in the following:       The watermelon   is fresh, And good behind this grunt of words I see   you, Baudelaire’s mask your sign, Legs apart, addressed to your easel, squeezing   out the tubes of oils Whose names you know: what is that green you   use so much of, that seems to Devour itself? (c p 261) The “grunt of words” triggered by the allusion to Baudelaire in this early passage will thus modulate later in Schuyler’s very long and sometimes rambling text to various other Deleuzian-type stammerings and murmurings and burblings – affective stutterances, if you will: to Mr Smeltzer’s inscription on the blackboard of “a short and seemingly / Senseless poem” by William Carlos Williams, for instance, that the narrator cannot seem to locate in any “collected poems” (c p 285–6); or to the “stream of consciousness” of Dorothy Richardson (c p 286); or to “the clotted / Irish rhetoric” of James Joyce and “all that Welsh spit” (Frank O’Hara’s phrase) of Dylan Thomas (c p 286); or even to the babbling of a love-list of favourite Italian Renaissance architects: “Bernini and Palladio and Laurana” not to mention “Donatello and della Quercia, / Canova and Verrocchio [and] the Pisani” (c p 277). For Schuyler, all of these spasmodic gruntings bespeak not so much the homogeneous equilibrium of meaningful speech (to recur to Deleuze previously) but rather to the “innate love of / words” themselves whose better sense, according to Schuyler, lies

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in the very words, that is, “how / The words are themselves / The thing said” (c p 268). But if the equilibrium of conventional meaning is lost to the use of words in Schuyler’s long poem, at back of that is a much larger epistemological conundrum having to do with the “names you know” in the preceding reference to Baudelaire: “what is that green you / use so much of, that seems to / devour itself?” (c p 261). The Baudelaire persona’s self-consuming artifacts would appear to suggest that the conventional correspondence between words and things and a certain foreshortening of realistic truth-telling might be the more profound loss in Schuyler’s great grunt of words. That mimetic realism may be discursively problematic for Schuyler’s narrator is thus alluded to in a passage just prior to the Baudelaire reference with a cutting remark about the “boring pseudo-symbolism of / something meaning something / That doesn’t mean a thing at all,” or as another stammering reference to things Italian would have it: “La commedia non par finita; / Ma pure è finita” (c p 261). In place of Baudelaire’s strong determination “to see things as they are too fierce, and yet not too much” (c p 260) – the allusion here clearly to the similar problematic of realism in Wallace Stevens’s The Man with the Blue Guitar (see Jarraway, Question of Belief, chapter 2) – we find later in its place the conundrum of a German shepherd staring off into an epistemological abyss: In the highest window of A house across the street a German shepherd rests   his paws on the sill and Hangs his head out, gazing down, gazing down,   gazing down, and taking in the scene … (c p 269) A dog quite like Schuyler’s here in Deleuze’s Dialogues may put us in mind of “a procedure of animal-becoming” wherein one “does not try to say anything other than what [the dog] becomes, and makes [us] become with him” (48, emphasis added; cf. Deleuze, The Fold 131): namely, “the always immanent plane of Nature-thought” where the transcendence of realism inevitably gives place to a more transitive plane of thought “in accordance with a spiral” (What Is Philosophy? 89) akin to the infinite vistas opening out before the German shepherd just noted. And because this plane of immanence is not quite “an improbable Cloud-Cuckoo-land,” Schuyler’s

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stammerings have little patience for those characterized as “realist / in a sickening sort of way” (c p 285). Becoming-animal – “here in Vermont, chasing rabbits, having a wonderful roll in the horse shit” – promises something quite other. “Whippoorwill!” the narrator conspiratorially remarks to his own pet dog, “What have you done?” (c p  279). Underwriting the problem of mimetic representation as we have been worrying that issue throughout this chapter, and throughout Schuyler’s poem here, of course, is the more crucial problematic of knowledge itself that Schuyler lays out clearly just after the aforementioned reference to Baudelaire when the narrator emphatically declares: “it doesn’t matter: / the truth, the absolute / Of feeling, of knowing what you know, that is / the poem, like / The house for sale buried in a luxuriance of / overgrown foundation planting” (c p 262). Knowledge – at once tentative, opaque, fragmentary, and beyond absolute feeling – thus serves as another provocation to the narrator’s stuttering affect with increasing frequency: “I want to go away into that blue or dark or / certain or uncertain land: why / Can’t we know that it is there and there we’ll / meet” (c p 264); or, “Love, love / Is immortal, Whippoorwill, I know that. / [But] How can I know that? God knows, I may be dumb” (c p 279); or, “tell me, you who know, / What is that bird big as a duck … with a black / Bib and dark tan stripes, is it a kind of dove / or pigeon? What could I gain by knowing?” (c p 267–8). A good many of these references ultimately converge in an anecdote the narrator somewhat haltingly recounts concerning the artist Fairfield Porter, often (except for a hat) given to nature painting in the nude near his home on Great Spruce Head Island, and Porter’s surprising encounter there one day with a vacationing canoeist also in the nude:       A winter or two   later, in brash New York at a party, Fairfield Noticed a man across the room who kept frowning at him. The frown broke into a smile, the smile into a grin. The man pointed to him: “I know you: you’re the man   in the hat!” (c p 288) The sheepish displacement here of true identity – “I know you” – onto the nondescriptness of Porter’s hat and the irony entailed in that recognition – a knowing that nakedly serves to underscore a

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frank unknowingness – such misrecognition, really, foregrounds the “banks of fog” (c p 301) through which Schuyler’s stuttering text aimlessly floats, particularly when we revolve the poem from the point of view of the stammering’s causality. But as Deleuze once again reminds us, at that level of bodies or of corporal substances, “Causality always moves not just from the clear to the obscure, but from the clearer (or more clear) to the less-clear, the more confused. It goes from the stable to what is less. Such is the requirement of sufficient reason: clear expression is what increases in the cause, but also diminishes in the effect” (The Fold 134). And never more so than in the stuttering effects / affects of the poet’s willfully unknowing text. Ultimately, Schuyler’s own grunt of words steers us in the direction of a certain unknowingness about human identity itself throughout the poem since, as Deleuze remarks, “Pure affects imply an enterprise of desubjectivation,” and “Experimentation is our only identity” (qtd in Smith, “Introduction” xxxiii, xxxvii, emphasis retained). For instance, the “banks of fog” just alluded to provide the setting – Lake Geneva in Switzerland where Henry James once stayed – for the narrator’s revolving a number of other indeterminate identities like the androgynous or queer one oft imputed to Henry James himself: I walked past Calvin’s house on moist cobbles, bought a volume of   Gide’s diary   saw George Raft in Scarface, and took the train, To Italy, passing the inspiration of Byron’s “The Pris  oner of Chillon.” Switzerland, so long. (c p 301) The echt-nonidentity at back of all of these, if we go with several of the poet’s burblings about grass – “there / are shadows on the grass / Fit to lie in; study the leaves or blades” (c p 275) – is perhaps the most indeterminate of all American poetic subjectivities, namely that of Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, whose absent presence hovers intermittently throughout the poem. And it’s an absent presence undoubtedly shadowing Deleuze, too, since “creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass,” he scruples to note, and therefore “what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in perpetual disequilibrium … Being well spoken has never been either the distinctive feature or concern

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of great writers” (“He Stuttered” 111). In Schuyler, the early Williams or Stevens comes once again to mind: “Slowly perambulate through grass scattered with pecking white / chickens … where peacocks fan their tails” (c p 295). If the poet’s stutter bespeaks a grammar of disequilibrium as Deleuze suggests, Schuyler helps to show how much of the stammerer’s deviant rhetoric of affect points toward “the self that must be destroyed” (“He Stuttered” 113) – the self that more conventional forms of language aim to foundationalize, essentialize, and homogenize. “It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself,” Deleuze explains further, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities [i.e., affects] running through them …” (Dialogues 11). Once again, Baudelaire appears to serve as the model for such affective or deviant self-fashioning: “a nineteenth- / Century dandy dude smelling strongly of vanilla bean,” and thus anticipating a century later “my cutie, / reeking of poppers … At the sauna” that a more strait-laced person designated “X” in Schuyler’s poem seems quite perturbed by:      he was, to my surprise, cross, unsympathetic, in fact Disgusted: it was all out of his range, the range of Things that happen to folks you know. (c p 273) Clearly out of “X’s” range would be that series of differential positions or points of view opened up by the stuttering writer’s rhetoric of disequilibrium that, according to Deleuze, “make[s] the language take flight … racing along a witch’s line … [and] making it bifurcate and vary each of its terms, following an incessant modulation” (“He Stuttered” 109). The conglomeration previously scanned of Henry James, André Gide, George Raft, and Lord Byron might constitute one such differential series in Schuyler’s poem. But another rhetorical witch’s line of flight can just as easily open up, from another artistic direction, an equally uncontainable series:      A big white Butterfly zigzags by, and a smaller yellow one:

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  distantly a dog barks, nearby a young child  yammers And squawks … … I subside in my Room [where] last month I spent A hundred dollars on long-distance calls … ........................ … Rembrandt, Whistler, Goya, Félicien Rops … a stream densely Banked by unmown grass …   I’d like to collect etchings of the post-Whistler Period, minor works by minor masters, evocative and   fresh. (c p 300) The rhetorical zigzag of Schuyler’s poetical stammer in this passage, particularly with the switch midway to the painterly series, perhaps best reveals how style becomes nonstyle in the destruction of the univocal self.17 According to Deleuze, One’s language lets an unknown foreign language escape from it, so that one can reach the limit of language itself and become something other than a writer, conquering fragmented visions that pass through the words of the poet, the colors of a painter, or the sounds of a musician. “The only thing the reader will see marching past him are inadequate means: fragments, allusions, strivings investigations. Do not try to find a well-polished sentence or a perfectly coherent image in it, what is printed on the pages is an embarrassed word, a stuttering …” (“He Stuttered” 113) Now key to the disequilibrium of the poetic stutterer is a certain distance interposed between the disjointed terms of his fragmented utterance – a distance that discursively opens up a space within the text in order to allow the terms of its nonstyle “without limiting one by the other or excluding one from the other” to lay out and pass through the poetic text’s “entire set of possibilities” (“He Stuttered” 111). In the passage just cited, Schuyler’s parallel invocation of a related distance with his “distantly a dog barks” and “long-distance phone calls” suggests a programmatic attempt elsewhere in the poem to enlarge the space between the normative usages of language

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intended to rein in the stutterer’s grammar of disequilibrium, and a paradoxical “silence in words” that functions as a kind of “limit that marks [language’s] outside,” and that thus serves as the provocation for the stuttering self in fact to become “something other” (“He Stuttered” 112, 113). Thus, “Hobbled down this everlasting hill to distant / Bell’s and bought / Edible necessities” (c p 263); or “Air conditioners capped with snow and in the / distance the problem, / An office building straight from Babylon” (c p 263); all the while, “a freight train passes (the distant / sound of breakers), down the valley toward Olean” (c p 293). The several allusions to distance just rehearsed thus return us to the figure of Baudelaire near the beginning of The Morning of the Poem for a final observation concerning the status of affective stutterance in Schuyler’s great grunt of words. Recall in that earlier reference that it is Baudelaire’s “mask” that interposes itself in that distance between the stutterer’s self, the “you” accessed by the “names you know[s],” and some Other troped by the colour green that appears to devour itself, and presumably “you” as well. In other words, the reference to Baudelaire suggests that the stuttering subject is not a single but a dual or distanciated persona: “an Alreadythere,” Deleuze might say, “at the very heart of thought,” but also “someone frenzied who is in search of that which precedes thought” – a kind of schizoid subject one might say. Deleuze offers this further elaboration: Philosophy and schizophrenia have often been associated with each other. But in one case the schizophrenic is a conceptual persona who lives intensely within the thinker and forces him to think, whereas in the other the schizophrenic is a psychosocial type who represses the living being and robs him of his thought. (What Is Philosophy? 70; cf. “schizophrenization” in Smith 180–1n68) From the point of view of Schuyler’s poetic text, it’s clearly the conceptual persona living affectively within the poet and compelling him to think that forms the model of the schizoid or stammering subject, rather than the psychosocial type given to the repression of thought. Moreover for Schuyler, the stammering of the distanciated subject somewhere in between thinking and that which precedes thinking is rather similar to the experience of déjà vu, and thus like

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Deleuze, puts him very much in mind of a nonpathological form of schizophrenia as in the following:      A lot of   people believe that a proneness to déjà vu, that Strange and not unwonderful feeling, I have experienced   this, this light, these trees, these birds, heard   the very Words you are saying, before . . . … there, you said it: they see this as   a definite symptom of schizophrenia … ............................ One lobe of the brain registers the event, what in   simple reality   is said or happens and is seen, while the other Lobe takes it in a split second, an infinitesimal split   second later, so, in a sense, there is a real déjà   vu … so know-it-all George and Edwin can go screw themselves with stalks of glass   wheat (c p 289) In theory, then, the poetical stammer suggests to Deleuze thought searching “less in the manner of someone who possesses a method than that of a dog that seems to be making uncoordinated leaps” (What Is Philosophy? 55). In discursive practice, this grunt of words suggests to Schuyler his own pet dog Whippoorwill, once again: “Most beautiful of all, on a long long lawn running, / racing as whippets / Are bred to do and leaping straight into / Kenward [Elmslie’s] arms, who / Casually closed them: quite an act!” (c p 279) Quite an act, indeed – an “act of thought” Deleuze might say, and say in a characterologically American frame of mind since, according to the famous pronouncement of Emerson, to think is in fact to act. On this basis, we might conclude that Deleuze perhaps forms a close attachment to American writers like Whitman, Melville, cummings, and now hypothetically Schuyler, because their thought process is so actively conceptual – “concept” here speaking to “the event” of thought rather than to “the essence or the thing” (What Is Philosophy? 21). Thus, if we say a conceptual person stammers, we can only mean his articulation is a response to (or a function of) “the

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inseparability of a finite number of heterogeneous components” traversing language “at infinite speed” – “forms whose only object is the inseparability of distinct variations” (21). Hence, if we comprehend Schuyler’s conceptual grunting as “the event of the Other” – “the bird as event,” as it were (What Is Philosophy? 21) – little wonder that Schuyler should trope its line of flight in the above passage and throughout the poem in terms of the becoming-animal of his favourite dog, and a dog significantly accorded the name of a bird at that. As act, as event, as line of flight, this grunt of words thus becomes an actively distanciated rhetorical mode opening up in the space between word and thing, subject and object, self and world, and in terms of abjectly equilibrilizing any of that hybrid or protean or myriad distance, can remain only mute: “Silent midnight walks in the deep snow” (c p 284) since “this poem seems mostly about what I’ve lost” (c p 296): the this, the that, Whippoorwill, buried friends, And the things I only write between the lines. What   can one write between the lines? Not one damn   thing. (c p 296) A poetry so stammeringly in excess of all that it is able to curb or control or contain within its capaciously affective “stutterances” thus suggests to Schuyler the perfect metaphor for taking leave of his great grunt of words by recounting the experience of his failed bladder one night as a soldier in Paris during the War “when [he] first got bombed on Pernod”:    there I was, confronting a urinal: I   inched down my zipper and put my right hand into The opening: hideous trauma, and there was no way I   could transfer my swollen tool from hand to hand   without a great Gushing forth (inside my pants), like when Moses   hit the rock: so     I did it: there was piss all over Paris, not To mention my shirt and pants, light sun tans: why   couldn’t it have been in the depths of winter,   and me in heavy Dark overcoat? (c p 302–3)

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This concluding anecdote puts me very much in mind of a similar one recounted by one of the interviewees in Robert Jay Lifton’s The Protean Self: about another soldier, this one more recently in the National Guard, who also loses control before a large mob of protesters, and in the heat of the moment reveals, while yelling at the demonstrators, a pronounced speech impediment. “It really humanized the situation very much, and I really felt sorry for him … He’s a captain in the National Guard, but he stutters” (131). By the end of Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, I think it’s fairly clear that his own poetic stutterance is intended to reveal neither the depth, as an American writer, of his own humanity nor the breadth, as readers, of our sympathy toward him. If Schuyler’s great grunt of words is about anything at all, it’s surely about getting out from under the self-­ congratulating coherences and containments of liberal humanism, and through becoming-child, becoming-animal, becoming-Other, reaching toward that which is not a “self” and not a “world” but rather a “cosmos, the explosion of the world … [what] is not a memory but a block, an anonymous and infinite fragment, [and] a becoming that is always contemporary” (“He Stuttered” 114). “Not one damn thing,” in other words, Schuyler reminds us from the citation above. Piss on it, otherwise.

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6 “The Play between the Spaces”: Stevens and Psychoanalysis Freud’s eye was the microscope of potency. Wallace Stevens, “Mountains Covered with Cats” To become imperceptible oneself … to have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line … this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus Wittgenstein is supposed to have said – I’ve not been able to find where the quote came from, but somebody showed it to me – “Every poet who remains a poet beyond adolescence finds the true theme is homecoming.” W.S. Merwin, “Leave the Door Open”

Thanks to Wallace Stevens, our focus in the last chapter on the “irrational element” in poetry by means of its speculative relationship to Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis from the 1950s and onward perhaps requires us to explore further Stevens’s own specific debt to the psychoanalytic enterprise itself. I therefore designate psychoanalysis as an “other,” and here a terminal context among others in this study, all the while exercising some caution, as in the last chapter when the subject was broached in relation to Schuyler by means of (and with respect to) Deleuze. This hesitation in Stevens’s case arises because commentators on Stevens’s poetry and prose are usually prone to observe a skeptical aloofness with respect to the poet’s investment in the writings of Sigmund Freud and in psychoanalysis

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more generally. “[Stevens] barely mentions Freud,” Daniel Schwartz remarks (35); when the poet does, he is likely to be somewhat dismissive, as in Stevens’s well-known remark in the Letters that he would “probably not be able to stand up to Freudian analysis” (H. Stevens 488).1 To persist nonetheless in embracing a fruitful critical relation between Stevens and Freudian psychoanalysis, as I aim to do in this final chapter, would require commentators to indulge a certain degree of the poet’s own skepticism just noted. Gilles Deleuze (along with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari) evinces a quite similar arm’s-length approach to Freud in the two volumes that comprise Capitalism and Schizophrenia, namely Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and does so for an excess of “egotism” in readings of Freud that Stevens himself, in the letter to Ronald Lane Latimer from 1936, is prone to find in an analogy to “sex” in Freud as “the explanation for everything” (H. Stevens, Letters 305, 306). Problematizing excessive egotism within a certain institutionalized reception of Freudian psychoanalysis, therefore, and putting in its place a considerably deinstitutionalized notion of “schizophrenia” accounts fairly much for the measured skepticism taken toward Freud throughout a good deal of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. As Daniel W. Smith observes, “Following Karl Jaspers and R.D. Laing, [Deleuze and Guattari] attempted to examine schizophrenia in its positivity, no longer as actualized in a mode of existence (an ego), but rather as a pure process, that is, as an opening or breach that breaks the continuity of a personality or ego, carrying it off on a kind of voyage through an intense and terrifying ‘more than reality’” (“Introduction” 189, emphases retained). For some purveyors of psychoanalysis, as Deleuze and Guattari themselves remark, “Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics. He doesn’t like their resistance to being oedipalized [because] … They mistake words for things … are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality … [and] resemble philosophers – ‘an undesirable resemblance’” (Anti-Oedipus 23). But in a more enlightened psychoanalytic discourse, that is, a discourse not quite so insistent upon the theoretician’s “ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression,” a human identity that is “more than reality” or more than egotism, in Daniel Smith’s terms, can conceivably take shape “as a distinct personality if the process [of producing an ego] is halted,” and such a unique personality “is allowed to go on endlessly in a void, so as to provoke that ‘horror of … extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish’” (Anti-Oedipus 23,

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24). The “greatness” of Freud, according to Deleuze and Guattari, lies precisely here. By voiding “libido or sexuality” of all “objects, aims, or even sources (territories),” Freud initially sets the human personality endlessly adrift within “the wide open spaces” of longing and desire and, in his earliest work at least, imparts to it all the vagaries of “an abstract subjective essence” (Anti-Oedipus 270) – a vagueness and an abstractness connected to subjectivity that I developed in the context of “collaboration” back in chapter 4, and to which I shall return later in this one. In a late lyric by Stevens entitled “Mountains Covered with Cats” (1946), which provides readers with the only nominal reference to “Freud” in the entire Collected Poetry, the shift from an “invalid personality” – “outcast, without the will to power / And impotent” – to its powerfully imagined opposite – “spirits … seen clear … without their flesh” (Collected Poetry and Prose 318–19; c p p hereafter) – this shift would uncannily appear to chart rather closely the one from ego-analysis to schizo-analysis in Deleuze just described, indeed right down to the liquidation of the hoary body-and-soul binary. But if “Freud’s eye [as] the microscope of potency” accounts for this shift in psychoanalytic paradigms in Stevens’s poem, it’s only because that “eye” has placed human personality beyond form, beyond comprehension, and beyond expression in that “more than reality” just as Deleuze (and now Stevens) describes: “The spirits of all the impotent dead, seen clear, / And quickly understand, without their flesh, / How truly they had not been what they were” (c p p 319). As I was at pains to explain in chapter 4, the “poetics of androgyny” in both early and late Stevens puts readers very much in touch with an open-ended continuum for the serial construction of subjectivity – the everchanging “Again” of the diva-dame (c p p 308) – that is coterminous with Deleuzian deterritorialization and abstraction that Stevens himself is arguably prone to formulate elsewhere in terms of “A shape within the ancient circles of shapes, / And these beneath a shadow of a shape” as the poet’s programmatic “queer assertion of humanity” in all of its shape-shifting and shadowy forms (c p p 432, 445).2 As I frame the case in chapter 4 devoted to the complex relationship between Stevens and philosopher George Santayana among others, the aim of the poetics of androgyny in both writers is to establish a necessary ambivalence about gender identity – an ambivalence that, following Christopher Lane, not only “renders heterosexuality noninevitable … but preempts the possibility of a purely

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gay-affirmative reading” as well (185), thus affording a welcome Deleuzian release from all sexual economies. Having thus made the case for the enlargement of the human self beyond its libidinally routine limitations or characterizations, I would like now with the focus on the context of psychoanalysis in this chapter to elaborate further upon the linkage between Stevens and Freud mediated by Deleuze through the means of another later lyric of the poet. For it is in the poem entitled “Jumbo” (1942) where we encounter Stevens’s only reference to the mythological figure of “Narcissus.” And yet it’s mostly under the rhetorical impress of that very figure, so I shall argue in Deleuze’s own parallel referencing of “narcissism” in the psychoanalysis of Freud in what follows, that we come fully to understand just how microscopically potent Stevens may have imagined “Freud’s eye” to have been in the context of the publication of his fourth collection of verse, Parts of a World (1942), other texts from which I shall allude to in passing. As the fourth of seven gatherings of verse, Parts of a World is targeted by many of the poet’s critics including myself (see Question of Belief, esp. 1–19) as that volume demarcating the programmatic shift to a “late Stevens,” and under that rubric, as a significant rhetorical as well as critical transition in the Stevens canon from formalist to more realist concerns, or in more rigorous theoretical terms, from structuralism to poststructuralism, from aestheticism to historicism, or perhaps from High Modernism to Postmodernism. As Krzysztof Ziarek puts the case (following the later commentary of J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Riddel): For Stevens late poetry does not simply move toward a unity that would resolve the oppositions and leave a sense of balance achieved through a unifying concept; on the contrary, it underscores the remainder, a residue of distinct otherness, however unnameable, which because of its ineffable character resists any unification. Such implication of a “beyond,” of a poem that never reaches words, cannot, then, be explained or interpreted in traditional metaphysical terms which inform the critical categories used to describe Romantic and post-Romantic poetry. (108–9) In the quite delimited context of gender and sexuality, then, the programmatic move to Otherness with all its implication in the “beyond” in the construction of identity – the Otherness of the diva-dame

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figuration examined throughout this study – secures the place for a “poetics of androgyny” just rehearsed.3 But before re-engaging with that poetics, here is Stevens’s “Jumbo” in its entirety: The trees were plucked like iron bars And jumbo, the loud general-large Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free. Who was the musician, fatly soft And wildly free, whose clawing thumb Clawed on the ear these consonants? Who the transformer, himself transformed, Whose single being, single form Were their resemblances to ours? The companion in nothingness, Loud, general, large, fat, soft And wild and free, the secondary man, Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn, Hill scholar, man that never is, The bad-bespoken lacker, Ancestor of Narcissus, prince Of the secondary men. There are no rocks And stones, only this imager. (c p p 241) Right from the opening stanza, the setting at liberty of the eponymous “Jumbo,” the “wild and free” “[a]ncestor of Narcissus” in Stevens’s text, arguably accounts for its exhilarating and celebratory tone. But if it’s a tone that Freudian psychoanalysis may go a good way to explain, as I aim to show, this application of Freudian theory is one that, like Stevens’s own reticence about Freud’s writings, Deleuze himself takes up with considerable caution. Before proceeding any further, therefore, with a psychoanalytic reading of the poem licensed by that allusion to Narcissus, we should perhaps understand better the nature of the French philosopher’s caution. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari remark, “every molar [i.e., consciously symbolic or ideological] formation has a molecular unconscious (a multiplicity or population) which both

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marks its tendency to decompose and haunts its operation and organization” (qtd in Pearson 182). From such an insight, commentators on Deleuze are fairly much persuaded, as with Stevens, of a generally dismissive attitude brought to bear on the discourse of psychoanalysis by the completion of Capitalism and Schizophrenia through the 1970s and 1980s. “Psychoanalysis is to be critiqued,” Keith Ansell Pearson for one observes, “for reducing becomings to the one complex, the complex of molar determination (Oedipus, castration),” and elaborates further: “Freud’s psychoanalysis is critiqued not because it reduces becomings solely to articulations of Oedipal desire, but rather for employing this enunciation in order to delude patients with the belief that through therapy they will be able to speak finally in their own name as unitary organisms” (182, emphasis retained).4 In Deleuze’s earlier work, Difference and Repetition (1968), however, certain lineaments of this critique can already be descried. Adumbrating in that previous text what Deleuze calls “a mobile distribution of differences … within an intensive field,” and finding these differences extraordinarily coordinate with “what Freud called the Id, or at least the primary layer of the Id,” Deleuze is unequivocal about the fact that “it is here that Freud’s problem begins”: the binding up of difference’s intensities into what Deleuze calls “a genuine reproductive synthesis, a Habitus”: “This binding or investment of difference is what makes possible in general, not pleasure itself, but the value taken on by pleasure as a principle: we thereby pass from a state of scattered resolution to a state of integration, which constitutes the second layer of the Id and the beginnings for an organization” (96). Thus, from “an activity of reproduction which takes as its object the difference to be bound,” according to Deleuze, there “emerges a new difference,” and an eldritch one to be sure: “the formed eye or the seeing subject,” an instauration of the dread ­Cartesian cogito from a former hoary age of rationalist Enlightenment (96). Yet upon closer inspection of this earlier work, we find that this particular critique of Freud is not entirely how Deleuze perceives his relationship to psychoanalysis. Counterpoised to the formed or integrated subject just scanned are various manifestations throughout Difference and Repetition of what Deleuze is pleased to refer to in the conclusion as “an ante-I or ante-self” (277): the larval subject, the cracked identity, the schizoid personality, and so forth, all to

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which Freud’s eye “as the microscope of potency” beckons us to return in a moment. Such manifestations of what in the Dialogues a decade later would become instances of “non-personal individuation” or “deterritorialized identity” (Deleuze and Parnet 123) – these instances of the so-called subjectless subject would continue rapturously to preoccupy Deleuze to the very end of his career. In Stevens’s previously cited “Mountains Covered with Cats,” the poem’s concluding “How truly they had not been what they were” (c p p 318) might be the poet’s gloss on such instances of “pre-­ personal individuation,” subjectless subjects that perhaps fall generally within the androgynous rhetorical ambit of Stevens’s “shadow of a shape” throughout the poet’s final gathering of verse, The Rock (1954), that I explored at length in chapter 4. But the imagery of shadows in Stevens’s much earlier Parts of a World directs us to premonitory instances of pre-personal individuation that Freud’s microscopic eye perhaps persuades us to think might be significantly related: “the shapeless shadow cover[ing] the sun,” for instance, in “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (c p p 190) examined closely in chapter 3; or “The noble figure, the essential shadow, // Moving and being” in “The Candle a Saint” (c p p 206); or maybe best of all, “the shiddow-shaddow of lights revolving … through iridescent changes, / Of the apprehending of the hero” in “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” (c p p 249), among others. Yet for Deleuze, the governing model in Difference and Repetition for such instances of pre-personal individuation is that of narcissism itself emanating from Freud’s theory, although it’s the narcissistic ego extrapolated from Freud by Paul Ricoeur that Deleuze is especially drawn to, a subject whose “perpetually disguised” and “perpetually displaced” lines of flight would appear to be “interiorizing the difference” to just the right degree (110). In a rather adulatory passage not often characteristic of Deleuze, he observes that “the narcissistic ego is related to the form of an I which operates upon it as an ‘Other,’” and continues this decidedly Freudian moment by venturing further that “this active but fractured I is not only the basis of the superego, but the correlate of … a complex whole that Paul Ricoeur aptly named an ‘aborted cogito.’” “Moreover,” continues Deleuze, there is only the aborted Cogito, only the larval subject … the fracture of the I no more than the pure and empty form of time,

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separated from its content … [Hence,] The narcissistic ego is the phenomenon which corresponds to the empty form of time without filling it, the spatial form of that form in general [whose] ­phenomenon of space … assume[s] the ultimate shape of the labyrinth, the straight-line labyrinth which is, as Borges says, “invisible, incessant.” Time empty and out joint. (110–11) For some theoretical pundits today, the Borgesian passage just cited from Deleuze appears uncannily premonitory. In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben remarks notably on a “radical tearing or split” in modern art when the artist sets aside “the inert world of contents in their indifferent, prosaic objectivity,” and thereby allows a “free subjectivity” to “soar above the contents as over an immense repository of materials that it can evoke or reject at will” (35). Indeed, it is possible to argue that the notion of a “contentless subject” is the leading theoretical crux as well in much of Deleuze’s own work. The destruction of human identity, for instance, as a “silent imperceptible crack at the [subject’s] surface, a unique surface Event” in Deleuze’s subsequent The Logic of Sense (155) redoubles the “fissure or crack in the pure Self” in Difference and Repetition, and thus affords the human subject “a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its own,” what Deleuze, in a further bow to Freud (via Ricoeur), is pleased to call “a Cogito for a dissolved self” (Difference and Repetition 58). For art enthusiasts of every sort, this modernist dissolution of selfhood registers a moment of considerable exhilaration. For as Agamben further observes, “Art is now the absolute freedom that seeks its end and its foundation only in itself, and does not need, substantially, any content, because it can only measure itself against the vertigo caused by its own abyss” (35, emphasis added). Yet the rending and subsequent soaring of the modern contentless subject in Agamben is arguably the theoretical crux of Stevens’s very own “Jumbo” composed a little over fifty years earlier. Conceivably, readers are privileged to access this interpretive crux via Deleuze’s extrapolation of narcissism from the early Freud as pre-Oedipal subjectivity’s “pure and empty form” just described, or in the poet’s own words, “companion in nothingness,” hence the “Ancestor of Narcissus”: Who was the musician, fatly soft And wildly free, whose clawing thumb

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Clawed on the ear these consonants? ................................ The companion in nothingness, Loud, general, large, fat, soft And wild and free … (c p p 241) Released from any imprisoning shape in the poem’s opening stanza – “The trees were plucked like iron bars” – Steven’s jumbo-size Narcissus thus breaks with any identifiable continuity of personality, and soars off into a wild blue yonder of singular and transforming indetermination that, as “Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,” may (or may not) have “resemblances” to our own quite “secondary” perhaps because more rock-and-stone-like determinations. As in Stevens’s “Jumbo,” then, the “floating and fluid character of individuality itself” as “a multiplicity of actualization” not unexpectedly greets us once again near the end of Difference and Repetition (258). As Deleuze emphatically adjures: “no doubt the I and the Self must be replaced by an undifferenciated [sic] abyss, but this abyss is neither an impersonal nor an abstract Universal beyond individuation” (258). At this point, we perhaps are given to query how narcissistic egos so “withdrawn from the external world,” and so insistent upon “keep[ing] away from their ego anything that would diminish it” that they would “plainly [be] seeking themselves as a love-object” (the very characterizations in Freud’s essay “On Narcissism” in Complete Psychological Works 75, 89, 88, emphasis retained) – how such an estruss of interiority might possibly represent for Deleuze, as well as for Stevens, a model for “the universal concrete individuality of the thinker or the system of the dissolved Self” (259). Here, an apposite commentary on the subject by Jacques Derrida may be helpful, and useful as well perhaps in gauging a more positive measure of both Stevens’s and Deleuze’s otherwise chary relation to the standard oedipalized version of psychoanalysis. In a broadcast interview from 1986, and translated a decade later as “‘There Is No One Narcissism’ (Autobiographies),” Derrida gestures toward a notion of narcissism considerably resonant with that of both Stevens and Deleuze once past the rationalist binary of narcissism / non-narcissism. “Narcissisms” (the plural is important here), Derrida explains, are “more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended” because in their very “movement of narcissistic reappropriation,” they establish the self’s truest “relation to the other” in

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order for “love [in the image of oneself] to be possible”: namely, “the experience of the other as other” (199). Narcissism’s experience of otherness quâ other thus makes it a function of “non-knowing” which, Derrida scruples, is not “the limit of knowledge,” but rather “the limit in the progress of knowledge” (201, emphasis retained). By viewing interiority as the functional limit of exteriority, and exteriority as the very condition of interiority – by turning narcissism inside out as it were – Derrida would invite us to view it in the contentless and formless and subjectless terms that both Stevens and Deleuze would impart to it as a species of the ante-I or ante-Self of pre-personal individuation noted earlier. Clearly, then, “to theorize narcissism, it is not necessary (for Deleuze) to embrace Freud’s moral message” in the more standardized reception of psychoanalysis, so Dorothea Olkowski contends. In the Deleuzian Ruin of Representation, narcissism can become “the condition of creation, (one) that transforms the child from a pathetic and revengeful ‘patient’ into a life artist, a creative and reflective spirit” whose “displacements and disguises” and “originally multiple nature” therefore “imply that it is something it is not and never could be, (namely) something unified and integrated, something signified by some ultimate myth or symbol” (173, 157, 172–3). “This primary narcissism, this love of one-self as reflected in the eyes of another who is morphologically ‘the same’ [rather like the diva’s “appearance of Again” in Stevens], is,” so Rosi Braidotti contends [following the early Luce Irigaray], “a necessary precondition to the affirmation of a positive difference that repairs the symbolic damage suffered by women in a phallogocentric system.” Braidotti concludes: “This is no essentialism, but rather a molecular, transversal space of formation of collectively sustained microsingularities” (Nomadic Theory 167). Hence, as Stevens himself remarks in his prose Adagia, “The subjects of one’s poems are the symbols of one’s self or of one of one’s selves” (c p p 904, emphasis added). Just on this point, we can imagine the microscopic eye of Freud turning now to other parts of Stevens’s depersonalized and discombobulated poetic world from 1942 for corroboration; for instance, to that “impossible possible philosopher’s man” from “Asides on the Oboe” who, as a species of larval or cracked identity, is an invisible or transparent “glass man, without external reference”: The impossible possible philosopher’s man, The central man, the human globe, responsive

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As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass, Who in a million diamonds sums us up. (c p p 226–7) Without external reference, that is, as a relation of otherness in extremis, narcissism is thus arguably “a structural non-knowing, which is heterogeneous, foreign to language,” or as Stevens characterizes his Narcissus prototype in “Jumbo,” a “bad-bespoken lacker” (c p p 241).5 Continues Derrida: It’s not just the unknown that could be known and that I give up trying to know. It is something in relation to which knowledge is out of the question. And when I specify that it is a non-knowing and not a secret … it is not at all in order to calculate or to intrigue or to bar access to something that I know and that others must not know; it is a more ancient, more originary experience, if you will, of the secret … an experience that does not make itself available to information and knowledge, and that immediately encrypts itself. (201, emphasis retained) Stated in these terms, experience is a very important word to set beside narcissism which, like knowledge, appears to be so much beside (rather than inside) the point of its psychic construction: out of the question, as Derrida’s interview emphatically makes plain. “I rather like the word experience,” he playfully remarks, “whose origin evokes traversal, but a traversal with the body, it evokes a space that is not given in advance but that opens as one advances” (207). And it is precisely these experiential terms – for the remainder of this first section of the chapter, I shall speak to three in particular – that help to refurbish our thinking about a possibly more redemptive linkage between Stevens and psychoanalysis via the philosophy of Deleuze as a kind of rhetorical play between the spaces (at least via Deleuze’s psychoanalytic theory from the period of Difference and Repetition). First, for a reading of Stevens discursively in play between Freud and Deleuze, it can hardly be underestimated just how important the perception of a psychoanalytic unconscious ought to be in revolving the whole question of self-identity in exactly the undecidable manner charted by experience in its secret and cryptic traversal of the narcissistic body as rendered by Derrida. Rosi Braidotti, while suspicious of “the normative cage within which psychoanalysis has enclosed [human desire]” on behalf of “the authors of the Anti-Oedipus,” and

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perhaps on behalf of the author of a poem like “Jumbo” – Braidotti is nonetheless entirely persuasive about the importance of the ­Freudian unconscious for Deleuze. “I take the unconscious,” to cite Braidotti once again, “as the guarantee of non-closure in the practice of subjectivity. It undoes the stability of the unitary subject by constantly changing and redefining his or her foundations [thus providing] a constant return of paradoxes, inner contradictions and internal idiosyncrasies, which instill instability at the heart of the self … [and thereby] allow for forms of disengagement and disidentification from the socio-symbolic” (Metamorphoses 100, 99, 39–40).6 Remarked upon in the last chapter, this insight would appear to have been anticipated as early as 1950 by Lionel Trilling in his chapter on “Freud and Literature” in The Liberal Imagination (see Zaretsky). It is thus perhaps the case that narcissism is one of Deleuze’s preeminent Ideas that he draws from psychoanalysis for no other reason than the fact that “the Idea is not the element of knowledge but that of an infinite ‘learning’ which is of a different nature to knowledge” – knowledge that is “extra-propositional or subrepresentative” having to do with “the presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness” (Difference and Repetition 192). Stevens’s own conception of “the unknown as the source of knowledge, as the object of thought [as] part of the dynamics of the known,” is astonishingly coordinate with Deleuze’s ruminations about knowledge. Stevens’s formulation appears in “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (1936) we recall, the title of which essay has obvious linkages to the psychic unconscious just described, and bears repeating just here: It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom. We accept the unknown even when we are most skeptical. We may resent the consideration of it by any except the most lucid minds; but when so considered, it has seductions more powerful and more profound than those of the known. (c p p 791) In this “unknown” way, then, identity remains a “problem” throughout much of Deleuze’s writing since, like Derrida’s experience previously, problems “always open questions which draw spectators … into the real movement of an apprenticeship of the entire unconscious, the final elements of which remain the problems themselves” (Difference and Repetition 192, emphasis added). But conceived as

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either Idea or Problem, as one of the “‘differentials’ of thought, or the Unconscious of pure thought,” narcissism has no direct relation “to a Cogito which functions as a ground or as a proposition of consciousness, but to the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito; in other words, to the universal ungrounding which characterizes thought as a faculty in its transcendental exercise” (194). Hence, the importance accorded to the unconscious in psychoanalysis prompts Deleuze to conceive of most modernist works of art (in this instance, his examples are novels since Joyce, but they could just as easily have been some of the later collections of Stevens) as “developed around or on the basis of a fracture that [such works] never succeed in filling” (195). The tropology of fracture here, and elsewhere throughout Difference and Repetition, presents us, therefore, with a second pyschoanalytic contour fashioned after experience conceived in terms of a space that the narcissistic ego can only open up (or on to) as it advances. As such, it becomes coterminous with open space itself: “a space which is unlimited,” Deleuze avers, and one in which “nothing pertains or belongs to any person, but [in which] all persons are arrayed here and there in such a manner as to cover the largest possible space” (36). At this point, we can now imagine Freud’s potent eye microscopically gravitating from the sunny blue skies of “Jumbo” to the enigmatic nighttime setting of “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light” elsewhere in Stevens’s Parts of a World, where a breathtaking ellipsis dead centre in the text provides for the maximization of such subjective space just at that moment when the narcissist’s proverbial glassy mirror dissolves, and something quite Other comes to take its place: The page is blank or a frame without a glass Or a glass that is empty when he looks. The green of night lies on the page and goes Down deeply in the empty glass … Look, realist, not knowing what you expect. The green falls on you as you look, Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech ......................... Teaching a fusky alphabet. (c p p 267, emphasis added)

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In the Derrida interview, the relation to otherness (as an interruption of normative psychic economy) is rendered in similar terms: “the possibility of the relation to the other” (209, emphasis added). And the rendering of a limitless possibility is indeed how Freud himself winds up his synopsis of the “narcissistic type” from the purview of object-choice: to wit, “A person may love … what he himself would like to be” (Complete Psychological Works 90, emphasis added). Hence, “in every psychic system,” Deleuze surmises, “there is a swarm of possibilities around reality, but our possibles are always Others” given “the Other as the expression of a possible world” (260, 261, italics retained). Once again, we are very much in the psychic vicinity of Stevens with his “impossible possible philosophers’ man” from “Asides on the Oboe” (c p p 226). In a further uncanny link between Freud’s narcissism and Stevens’s, Deleuze can only conclude that “there is no love which does not begin with the revelation of a possible world as such, enwound in the other which expresses it” (261). At this point, the larval subject for Deleuze arguably becomes the rival of the narcissist, a notion suggested to him by the treatment of embryology in “the celebrated 1895 Freudian Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Difference and Repetition 118). But in terms of maximizing the possibility or potentiality of psychic space “experienced only at the borders of the livable, under conditions beyond which it would entail the death of any well-constituted subject,” it’s perhaps Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that lies at back of the larval subject’s “vital movements, torsions, and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain” (118). As fractured conduits to unknown possibility, the  “terrible movements” of nightmares, accordingly, are entirely unsuited to “a substantial, completed and well-constituted subject, such as a Cartesian cogito,” and thus “can only be sustained under the conditions of a larval subject” (118). Indeed, because thought at the level of possibility “cannot be an essence, a substance, a philosophical meaning,” and to that extent becomes “what ruins philosophical legitimacy in advance,” nonetheless as Derrida reminds us, it is also the unthought “which prevents philosophy from closing on itself” (119). Psychoanalysis, too, is all about such riddling narcissistic dis-closure, so that, according to Deleuze, “Even the philosopher is a larval subject of his own system” (119). But as a third and final term conditional to psychoanalytic experience, even riddling disclosure may be venturing overmuch about the

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limitlessly unspeakable nature of narcissism since for Deleuze “the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other,” he tells us in Difference and Repetition, “and in so doing invoke a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its own” cited earlier (58). “Represent” is hardly the right word here either since much of that mysterious coherence he tells us later in A Thousand Plateaus has to do with becoming imperceptible to oneself, as in my opening epigraph: “To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line … this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray” (197). In Stevens’s “Bouquet of Belle Scavoir” elsewhere in Parts, just such a dark encounter is staged between a potential ancestor of Narcissus and his double in the form of a cryptic female “scavoir,” which as a Deleuzian repetition of Stevens’s infamous diva-dame is obviously intended to defeat knowing patriarchal selfreflection by means of her perpetual evasion:          III How often he walked Beneath the sky To receive her shadow into his mind …          IV The sky is too blue, the earth too wide. The thought of her takes her away. The form of her in something else Is not enough.          V The reflection of her here, and then there, Is another shadow, another evasion, Another denial. If she is everywhere, She is nowhere, to him. (c p p 211–12) Meeting one’s true double at the other end of a narcissistic line of  flight is merely another of those inside-out convolutions of the

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dissolved Cogito back in Difference and Repetition where “the self of ‘I think’ includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other,” and where “for a brief moment we enter into a schizophrenia in principle which,” Deleuze would have us believe, “characterizes the highest power of thought [since it] opens Being directly onto difference” (58): precisely the motive for diva-dame metaphorization throughout this study. In Stevens’s “Bouquet of Belle Scavoir,” however, such empowerment is entirely lost on the male persona as it collapses into a more conventional and more stereotyped narcissism of vain self-­ absorption and self-reproduction at the end of the poem where, impossibly, “It is she that he wants, to look at directly, / Someone before him to see and [more impossibly] to know” (c p p 212). In distinct contrast to the “bad-bespoken lack” of “Jumbo’s” “Ancestor of Narcissus” (c p p 241) previously, the conventional narcissist in this text would appear to be disadvantaged by the lack of such “lack” as it were, “lack” understood in terms of what Ziarek brilliantly unpacks in Stevens’s much later “Lebensweisheitspielerei” (1952) as an “indigence of light” as perhaps “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light” initially experiences such benighted indigence in the earlier Parts of a World. As Ziarek goes on to explain, “The indigence of light … spells a lack of cognition … [that] also intimates the possibility of otherness outside or beyond the range of intellection” as arguably symbolized by the “Belle Scavoir” figure. Continues Ziarek: The fact that we are native to otherness and indigent of light ironizes the image of a self-identical subject [the masculine selfabsorbed Narcissus stereotype, I am arguing], for whom the other comes as a surprise, a threat … and an indication of the limit placed on the household of consciousness. For if otherness can indeed disrupt the apparent peace of self-sameness, it is only because alterity is native to identity, a sort of “internal paramour” as [another] of Stevens’s poems suggests. (131–2) I shall return to Stevens’s “household” troping of conventional consciousness briefly further down. Now if there is a rival discourse to psychoanalysis that arguably provokes both Stevens and Deleuze to continue to revolve the gray on gray imperceptibility of human identity that the extremes of

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difference are likely to disclose, the philosophy of American Pragmatism arguably presents an engaging parallel anticipated in the opening chapter to this study. I conclude with this comparison not because Anglo-American writers are generally superior to European ones so Deleuze himself contends (Dialogues, chapter 2); nor because ­William James, the father of American Pragmatism, authors two volumes on The Principles of Psychology with which both Stevens and Deleuze were undoubtedly familiar.7 More important is the fact that the Pragmatist approach to experience is ineluctably predisposed to foreground so much of the secretive and mysterious and inarticulable that Deleuze helps us to think Stevens himself might have found so compelling about psychoanalytic approaches to identity, if his ­several ancestors to Narcissus scattered throughout Parts of a World are any indication. An important citation from the nineteenth-­ century American poet Benjamin Blood, which Deleuze extrapolates from William James (via Jean Wahl) and positions in an early chapter of Difference and Repetition, says as much: “Nature is contingent, excessive, and mystical essentially,” writes Blood, “and there is in it as much wonder as of certainty … Not unfortunately the universe is wild … [for] Nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different … never an instant true – ever not quite” (qtd on 57). That telling phrase, “ever not quite,” thus serves as the provocation in William James’s own ruminations on the poet to laud the “genius of reality” for escaping from “the pressure of the logical finger” in much the same terms that Stevens, in rhetorical play between Freud and Deleuze, champions the self’s mysterious coherence: “no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity,” continues James, “but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification” (Writings 1312–13). As Deleuze himself puts the case for the narcissist’s “ever not quite” at the end of Difference and Repetition: “there is always something else implicated which remains to be explicated or developed,” then, in another Derridean formulation, concludes, “all this is made possible only by the Other-structure and its expressive power in perception” (281, emphasis added). All of which, of course, should put us in mind of Stevens’s “Belle Scavoir” once again: “The sky is too blue, the earth too wide. / The thought of her takes her away. / The form of her in something else …” (c p p 212, emphasis added). Or even better, the Supreme Fiction of  Deleuzian difference throughout this study, Stevens’s protean

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diva-dame: “the ever-never-changing same” (c p p 308). I invoke Stevens’s Supreme Fiction here bowing once again to that “other” context of contemporary American narrative earlier (see chapter 3) in which his poetry demonstrates considerable resonance. Novelist Toni Morrison comes to mind, especially in a novel like Jazz where a female character appropriately called “Wild,” in the Benjamin Blood sense of the word, is “out there – and real,” “at [life’s] edge some said or maybe moving around it in it” (167, 166). So many of Morrison’s women, like Stevens’s diva-dames, aim ultimately to deterritorialize subjective space, and thus as Félice remarks to Violet in this narrative, “make the world up the way you want it … [into] something more than what it is” (208, emphasis added). Hence, when Joe Trace goes in search of Wild to settle her identity once and for all at her purported “home in the rock,” rather like Stevens’s “Belle Scavoir” once again, Wild continues her movement about the world, “Unseen,” Morrison’s narrator remarks, “because she knows better than to be seen” (221). As “an armful of black, liquid female” (145), she bears all the “fluid intensive factors” of deterritorialized individuation: “ris[ing] to the surface yet assum[ing] neither form nor figure … staring at us without eyes” (152). To come back to the earlier point about the narcissist’s highly mobile traversal of experience, it is Emerson in the Ur-Pragmatism of his essay entitled “Experience” who remarks, “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them” (294). The mysticism of American Pragmatism as a rejoinder to the narcissism of Freudian psychoanalysis would likely send Deleuze off to any number of American novelists for exemplification: Herman Melville, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller (among others) are all favourites throughout the Deleuzian canon. Because, as Braidotti argues, Deleuze’s own particular brand of “pragmatic philosophy rejects the ghosts of metaphysical interiority, the ‘hauntology’ of missing presence” to favour a more “vitalistic pragmatism” of “just do[ing] it” that is “relevant to today’s world” (Metamorphoses 185, 75, 115), several other of Stevens’s poems in Parts of a World strike me as especially de-interiorizing – deterritorializing, Deleuze would say – in this very inside out kind of way. In “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man,” for instance, as in “Jumbo,” the emphasis is all on “bluish clouds … above the empty house … As if someone lived there” (c p p 205). In “Man and Bottle,” the directive is to “Destroy romantic tenements / Of rose and ice” (c p p 218), and

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so like the one in “Variations on a Summer Day” to “Pass through the door and through the walls,” and join up with “Those bearing balsam … [and] Pine-figures bringing sleep” outside (c p p 215). As “Montrachet-Le-Jardin” frames the case for all these texts, “Man must become the hero of his world,” and so “Sing of an heroic world beyond the cell” (c p p 235). If it is the case, as W.S. Merwin declares, that “every poet who remains a poet beyond adolescence finds the true theme is homecoming” (89), the epigones of Narcissus secreted throughout some of Stevens’s later writing at least help us to see, thanks to Deleuze, how intensely problematic are the strict demarcations of domestic space as quasi-extensions or figurations of human personality as we had seen especially in the case of Michael Cunningham’s treatment of that poetic theme in chapter 2, and its  important implications for other American novelists dealt with in  chapter 3. As Ziarek further reminds us, “Poetry begins at the moment the mind realizes that there exists an exteriority, otherness, ‘not ourselves,’ which cannot be subsumed under consciousness. This otherness not only cannot be explained in terms of the unity of the self and world but rather should be seen as itself precluding any possibility of such unification. For what Stevens’s work discloses is a difference at the origin of language … more fundamental than the one between the mind and the world” (111, emphasis added).8 But in further ironizing domestic space in American literature (following Herman Melville especially) by viewing it back in chapter 3 in terms of “a kind of deframing following certain lines of flight … in order to open it onto the universe” and thereby “dissolve the identity of place” – and by implication, human identity – “through variation with earth” (What Is Philosophy? 189, 187), Deleuze sets the stage for a more cautious Freudian interpretation of psychic interiority in Stevens’s work which the “hauntology” of Narcissus (to recur to Braidotti’s apt phrasing) answers to precisely.9 But much before Stevens and Freud, it is the father of American Pragmatism himself, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reminds us once again that “the experience of creativeness is not found in staying at home, nor yet travelling, but in transitions from one to the other” (qtd in my Question of Belief 30n10). As an augury of “the transformer, himself transformed” in “Jumbo,” this Emersonian aperçu hypothetically places Stevens’s “Ancestor of Narcissus” in a playful Deleuzian space somewhere between the two “Contrary Theses” in Parts of a World, that is, between “The bareness of the house [where] / An acid sunlight fills

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the halls” in part “I” (c p p 239) and “a final refuge, / From the bombastic intimations of winter” in part “II” (c p p 242) as Stevens’s “abstract subjective essence” (Anti-Oedipus 270) in the latter labours to reveal:             He walked toward An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy Were contours … .......................... The abstract was suddenly there and gone again. (c p p 242) A “deep disparateness” settles over such human abstraction, Deleuze might say, “to the extent that the disparates have first invented their order of communication in depth,” only later “tracing hardly recognizable intensive paths through the ulterior world of qualified extensivity” (Difference and Repetition 237) as their mystic narcissistic energy or intensity is turned inside and outward. As I hope to have demonstrated thus far in this chapter, Stevens’s own psychic abstractions trace similar barely recognizable paths throughout his later work, but in the play between the psychic spaces demarcated by Freud and Deleuze, we now might think deliberately because intensively so. “Within intensity,” Deleuze further remarks, “we call that which is really implicated or enveloping difference; and all that which is really implicated or enveloped distance” (237). According to Ziarek, therefore, “the difficulty of ‘to be’ lies precisely in maintaining a distance.” Such a distance, “suggested in a non-spatio-temporal understanding of place,” is contradicted by the “household” of consciousness alluded to earlier (116, 131–2), which Stevens does so much to ironize in Parts – distance as a “Description without Place” as it were in the sequent 1947 Transport to Summer (c p p 296–302). “Difference, distance and inequality are the positive characteristics of depth” in relation to human experience, Deleuze concludes (237). And although “the movement of explication is the movement by which difference tends to be cancelled,” nonetheless much can be profitably and residually learned when its “distances tend to be extended and developed into lengths” (238) – the length, say, of a new volume of poetry by Stevens, or an early study of Freud’s narcissism.

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To round out the discussion of this last “other” context for Stevens’s work, I turn now to a poet partly contemporary with it for the purpose of elaborating further that Deleuzian psychic space, which now we should understand perhaps in the terms of the difference that a figure like the diva-dame makes to Stevens that must be the opposite to anything like a “household” consciousness alluded to above. Among other American writers, the work of Elizabeth Bishop referenced in passing in the last chapter’s commentary on Barbara Guest would seem like an odd match for Stevens – a doubly “other” context, therefore – despite an entire volume of essays devoted precisely to that hypothetical alignment dating back to 1995 (in the “Special Issue: Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop” for The Wallace Stevens Journal edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan). “I know Miss Bishop’s work. She lives in Key West,” was apparently all that Stevens was prepared to disclose on his side of the relationship (qtd in Travisano 284). As for Bishop, Thomas Travisano records that “[she] wrote to her first biographer, Anne Stevenson, in 1964, that ‘At college, I knew ‘Harmonium’ almost by heart … But I got tired of him and now find him romantic and thin – but very cheering, because, in spite of his critical theories (very romantic), he did have such a wonderful time with all those odd words, and found a superior way of amusing himself’” (285). Much later, a quite recent symposium held in Canada on Bishop entitled “‘It Must Be Nova Scotia’: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop” (2011) would appear to interpose a national border between Stevens and Bishop, and perhaps separate their work even further. My own sense, however, is that Stevens’s work was profoundly transformative for Bishop, but not necessarily for authenticating her own “feminine responsiveness to the world [Stevens] inhabits” that ultimately redounds to our own fresh reception of Stevens himself to this day, as Margaret Dickie concluded in her introduction to the “Special Issue” essay collection back in 1995: “Far from the grand visionary poet he has often been imagined to be, Stevens … is the poet who looked at the world, offers descriptions of place, and draws us closer to reality” (114, emphasis added). I wonder. We do well to remember Bishop’s “Darwin Letter” once again where, in Bishop’s response, “one feels that strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown”

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(qtd in Schwartz and Estess 288, emphasis added). As Braidotti remarks in a related context: You look through reality to focus elsewhere. In fact, you are focussing on the ever-receding horizon of elsewhereness itself, that is, infinity. An instransitive gaze that marks the intensive state of becoming. What looks like absent-mindedness, on closer scrutiny reveals itself to be a qualitative leap toward a more focused, more precise, more accurate perception of one’s own potentia, which is one’s capacity to “take in” the world, to encounter it, to go toward … a creative void without forcefully imposing a form that corresponds to the author’s own intentions or desires … (Nomadic Theory 234, emphasis added) If that “unknown” in Bishop’s “Darwin Letter,” then, is telling us anything at all, it’s just that words like “place” and “reality” right alongside “house” and “home,” as we shall see, tend to line up with a “household” consciousness that the “ever-receding horizon of elsewhereness” (following Braidotti) within Bishop’s own work, in psychic resonance with Stevens’s I would argue, was programmatically determined to question time and time again. Nonetheless, it should be said that the inducement to view Elizabeth Bishop’s identity as more “Canadian” than “American” – “It must be Nova Scotia” – is considerable, one that perhaps extends back over three decades, when Dalhousie University in 1979 prophetically awarded Bishop an honorary degree only six months before her sudden death (from a stroke) at the age of sixty-eight. Through the years, poems such as “The Bight,” “At the Fishhouses,” and “First Death in Nova Scotia” undoubtedly have imparted to readers, in Canada and elsewhere, the sense of the profound rôle that the country above – specifically, the Maritimes – has played in Bishop’s imagination and art throughout her lifetime, hence inciting what the poet herself once described as a “wave of nostalgia for the N OR TH” (Millier 347). Bishop’s “Canadian” provenance, by now only too familiar, is nonetheless worth repeating, starting with those important formative years in Great Village, the Nova Scotian town to which Bishop was abruptly transported from Massachusetts at the age of three by her Canadian-born mother, following her father’s early death, and from which she was shortly thereafter removed by

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her grandparents, as her mother gradually went insane in a Dartmouth asylum nearby. In the decades that follow, readers of her biographies and letter collections travel repeatedly with Bishop back to the Maritimes: once, on an extended walking tour while yet a student at Vassar; twice, to Sable Island, to complete a travel piece (ultimately abandoned), before undertaking a seventeen-year sojourn in Brazil; and three times at least, during her final years at Harvard, back to Great Village in Nova Scotia, to visit with ancient family members and long-time friends. One of Bishop’s most famous poems, “The Moose,” which later became her Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, was conceived on a trip back home in 1946, even though it took her another sixteen years elsewhere to complete (see Fountain 294–6). Cape Breton Island, the inspiration for her equally important “Cape Breton” and “A Summer’s Dream,” was, according to Bishop, “the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen” (Millier 191). And there is little in modern American poetry to match the sheer control and artistry at the close of still another Maritime experience recounted in “At the Fishhouses”: “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world” (Complete Poems 66, c p hereafter). “Primer Class,” the very last prose piece among several also undertaken by Bishop, and left incomplete at her death, was to be a  story, significantly, about elementary education in Nova Scotia. Bishop’s beginning was thus in one sense her end. But as I have for a long while made the case elsewhere (see Jarraway, “Lesbian Poetics”) and will continue to reiterate here, my own response to Bishop’s supposed nostalgia for the North via her considerable attachment to the Maritimes is to view both with a degree of skepticism. My skepticism, of course, is by no means anomalous. Camille Roman, for instance, is prone to view Bishop’s identity as “international,” that of “a displaced person with a diasporic, hybrid identity that complicated even the usual terms of ‘mother country’ and ‘country of settlement.’” Indeed, “She [would reach] the national cultural center of power in Washington D.C., in the early Cold War ‘containment’ victory narrative during 1949 and 1950, only to find that it could offer no real home or ‘mother country’ to her” (109). And Gary Fountain registers a similar skepticism concerning Bishop’s sequestration in both Key West and an earlier Nova Scotia prior to Washington, D C : “Neither place, neither country, however, was a

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home: in one, because of a wrecked love affair, the house was up for  sale; in the other, rooted in the irretrievable past, and fraught with ambiguous psychological instability, home was unreclaimable” (294).10 Personally, I venture my own skepticism with a view to what I would now like to take up as a Deleuzian “problematic” when attempting to home in on an “identity” for Bishop, whether it be personal or familial in its most individual sense, or cultural or national in its most global. In briefly outlining this problematic, I come back to Emerson’s reflection on the status of “home” in American letters that several of the writers implicated in the work of Wallace Stevens in this study have given voice to when contemplating the strict demarcations of domestic space; namely, “An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of many elements … We are golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea” (Essays and Lectures 679). Hence, in Bishop’s own prose meditation on such volitant stability, her title “Homesickness” might appear to cast a further ironic reflection on the strict demarcation of domestic space just as Emerson suggests and underscore what Brett Millier observes as Bishop’s “lifelong distrust of houses” since “houses were, for her, always, always ‘soluble’” (270). As seen through the eyes of “little brother Amos,” he of “the little blue cap, embroidered with a maple leaf and the word CAN AD A curved underneath in yellow letters,” in “Homesickness” Bishop poignantly depicts a young child never taking his gaze off the left-hand rear wheel-track flattening out like a ribbon behind them … straight, then taking little jerking changes of direction when the wagon lurches: a mysterious little road going along all by itself, imposing itself on the big road and all the other little wheel-roads, flat or crusted, darker or lighter, spinning itself out of itself, [the child] thought as if the wheel were a big spider. (Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box 189) Little Amos’s sense of vertigo here undoubtedly puts us in mind of a  similar moment some twenty-five years later in “In the Waiting Room” from Geography III (1976) where “the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space” leads another young child, little “Elizabeth” three days shy of “seven years old,” to query “Why should [she] be one [of them], too?” (c p 160).11

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Though widely separated in time, these spatial moments in Bishop when identity may be seen to spin wildly out of control arguably serve as invitations, taking Emerson at his word, to explore the deep sense of irony attached to the troping of house and home in American literature more generally. And it is a sense of irony, as I shall argue, that Dorothy’s repeated invocation of “no place like home” from The Wizard of Oz suggestively endeavours to impart in her own traumatic states of transition throughout much of Victor Fleming’s 1939 film. The gloss on Dorothy’s conundrum, to heighten the irony, might very well have come from Bishop’s own “Questions of Travel” in the volume of poems so entitled (1965): “Think of the long trip home. / Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?” (c p 93). “Questions of Travel,” then, helps once more to usher us before the ironization of the house in American writing that Deleuze is pleased to view as “a kind of deframing following certain lines of flight” in order to propel human identity closer to a more organic “variation with earth” (What Is Philosophy? 189, 187). As a parallel instance, though not Deleuzian, Thomas Foster’s characterization of the career of female protagonist Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1932) as “a line of flight [and] access to the world beyond the walls of the private home” nonetheless finds Janie, rather like Bishop, deframing a “falsely universalized femininity” whose domesticity formerly instructed women everywhere “to distinguish interior and exterior spaces and keep them from mixing” (150).12 With so much of Canada in her mind and art, for so long, and from such an early age, we are quite rightly made considerably skeptical about Bishop as a model of subjective deframing just as Deleuze and Guattari previously describe. And especially skeptical in light of much of Bishop’s lengthy correspondence with Robert Lowell. “I really can’t bear much American life these days,” she would despairingly write to Lowell from her South American home in Petrópolis, Brazil, “[for] surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time” (qtd in Millier 292). In an even more revealing letter to Lowell some time later, she was given to remark: “Probably what I am really up to is re-creating a sort of de luxe Nova Scotia all over again, in Brazil” (qtd in Millier 428). Yet just as her Canadian childhood slipped ineluctably from her grasp, so inevitably would Brazil – “They don’t believe in me,” she is reported to have remarked about her fellow passengers aboard

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the SS Brazil Star homeward bound in 1964 (Millier 388) – and at that point, Bishop knew that it was time to move on from South America as well: Even Lota has asked me to write about the price of a little old house we know of in Connecticut. This is just the wildest daydreaming – but I’d ST I L L like to own something in or around G V [Great Village], I think … Do they have oil furnaces in N.S. now? – I think they must – I don’t think I could cope with an old fashioned furnace. Bishop addresses these words to her Aunt Grace back in Nova Scotia in 1963 (qtd in Millier 347), and in yet another panicked state of transition, approximates no other creature so much as her very own “Sandpiper,” from roughly the same period, again from Questions of Travel: He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic … ............................................. He runs, he runs … Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between [his toes], ............................................. The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear. The tide is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which. His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, Looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! (c p 131) Obsessed once again with space – here, an in-between space of sand and sea – and joined this time to a world that is both mistily vast and minutely clear at once – Bishop’s “Sandpiper” nudges us toward a no-place like home that, I would argue, is more in tune with a deframed or nonidentity as it were, well beyond anything decidedly “Canadian” or “American,” North or South. Peggy Samuels’s recent study, therefore, of the important influences of modernist painters Paul Klee and Kurt Schwitters in Bishop’s formative years underscores in particular the category of “space” with respect to Klee (66,

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and further on 79, 209) – a category important to Emerson’s own privileging of the notion of “nonidentity” just as we might predict. For according to Andrew Epstein, “Emerson feels that the self must resist any firm or settled identity for fear of being immobilized, trapped into conforming to its own false, limiting ideas of itself. ‘Every spirit makes its house,’ Emerson warns in ‘Fate,’ ‘but afterwards the house confines the spirit’” (Epstein 66).13 Indeed, in his introduction to Open House: Writers Redefine Home, editor Mark Doty cites the American poet Hayden Carruth on a similar note: “I felt the pressure of the house enclosing me, / And the pressure of the neighboring houses / That seemed to move against the darkness, / And the pressure of the whole city, and then the whole continent …” (xiv). Comments Doty: “We’re all trying to make a home, as we always have, trying to fit ourselves into the world, and the world to us … But we can [only] gesture in its direction: our sense of home, our understanding of what location means, has shifted, in the last few decades, in ways that trouble and invigorate at once” (xvii). Remarking further, therefore, on Bishop’s own general “sense of homelessness,” Samuels avers: “I take seriously, and somewhat more literally than other scholars, that for Bishop orientation meant making a home by positioning the subject in a real space wider than a room or a house” (13). Imparting to this space a gendered inflection via Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti can only add that “it cannot be contained in the power (potestas) structures of the dialectics of masculine / feminine. It is rather an active space of empowerment (potentia) and becoming that is capable of producing spaces of intimacy, experimentation, and relation to others” (Nomadic Theory 148). Bishop’s unhousing of female identity, then, tends to make it, and indeed human identity in general, tantamount to mystery, secrecy, uncertainty – precisely the conclusion that Colm Tóibín draws from his own close inspection of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell: while Lowell “spent a great deal of his life spilling the beans about himself … Bishop, on the other hand, remains a mystery” (12). This sense of mystery, in Bishop’s particular case, is undoubtedly fuelled by her notorious reputation throughout her lifetime as a poet of ­singular detachment. At least, that is the received impression throughout some 110 interviews compiled by Fountain and Brazeau in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop where much of the testimony

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overwhelmingly labours to characterize the poet as extremely shy (in seven separate interviews, by my count), and otherwise “reserved” and “aloof,” “very private,” “reticent and composed,” “very, very quiet,” and “extremely retiring” (71, 74, 135, 151, 178). As the “Giant Snail” from Bishop’s “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” (1969) reminds us, “Draw back. Withdrawal is always best” (c p 141). Ironically, however, in the whole of the voluminous correspondence with Lowell just mentioned, it is he who champions the mystery of nonidentity rather than Bishop. In a letter from October 1961, Lowell writes, “But there’s a blankness that we and everyone else are always moving on in our one way trip to the dust, and will get there, still not understanding, for all’s incomplete and not to be understood … [so that I] can rest satisfied in my chaos – the universal human chaos, perhaps” (380). The chaotic sense of mystery surrounding the human personality adumbrated by both Bishop and Lowell thus accords rather well with Stevens’s quasi-Freudian view rehearsed earlier in this chapter as a diva-dame-like “collage of identifications, the work of a psychic bricolage,” or a “Belle Scavoir”-like “abstraction” therefore “that becomes an opaque obstacle to the understanding of concrete subjectivity” (Macey 75, 81). “Nobody knows,” Bishop would say – a tag that according to Millier once again “became almost a mantra for Elizabeth, and she tried for years to write a poem about it” (14). Hence, the view of subjectivity in “Sonnet,” the very last text in Bishop’s Complete Poems, where “the speaker does not appear in the body of the poem,” but rather “hovers on the beveled edge between presence and absence. Because she cannot be held by the words of the poem …” (Samuels 204). In line with an anti-Cartesian formulation of subjectivity as “a mysterious coherence” or a “Cogito for a dissolved Self” (Deleuze, Difference 58), Stevens’s psychic subject thus aligns itself with the blank or chaotic identity shared between Bishop and Lowell with the dismantled self in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus whose veritable “becoming” lies precisely in “one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray” (197). “From Hardy to Lawrence, from Melville to Miller,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “the same cry rings out: Go across, get out, break through, make a beeline, don’t get stuck on a point … break through the wall of the signifier … toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless” (186, 187, emphasis added). But in breaking through the walls of signification,14 is this not how

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Bishop herself, in a further corroboration of Lowell, conceives of the architecture of identity as she encounters it in partnership with Lota de Macedo Soares early on in her South American sojourn, in a letter dated from 1952? [Lota] is building an ultra-modern house up on the side of a black granite mountain, with a waterfall at one end, clouds coming into the living room in the middle of conversation, etc. The house is unfinished and we are using oil-lamps, no floors – just cement covered with dogs’ footprints. The “family” has consisted of another American girl … 2 Polish counts for a while, the ­architect over weekends, etc., all a strange tri- or quadri-lingual hodgepodge that I like very much. (Travisano and Hamilton 134) In this general boundaryless “hodgepodge” of displaced identity, we should perhaps also keep in mind what Bishop would aver some two decades later whilst remarking on the “Sandpiper” text in her acceptance speech for the Books Abroad / Neustadt International Prize for Literature: “I have always felt I couldn’t possibly live very far inland, away from the ocean; and I have always lived near it, frequently in sight of it” (qtd in Millier 450, emphases retained; cf. also 32 and 62).15 In her conflation, here, of land and sea at the level of possibility merely, Bishop conceivably finds a way of dealing with her paradoxical relation to Canada that would put it forever beyond her reach, but make it no less a diminished imaginative prospect for all of that. At this point, I am emboldened to analogize the Deleuzian problematic of home in Bishop with one extraordinarily coordinate in the ongoing work of contemporary architect Frank Gehry whose own relation to Canada (born and raised as “Owen Goldberg” in Toronto, but educated stateside at the University of Southern California and at Harvard) is something of an uncanny mirror image of Elizabeth Bishop herself. Bishop, of course, had a close attachment to modern architecture in her long-time partnership with Macedo Soares whose skills as a professional architect were apparently self-taught. In the Lowell correspondence, Bishop writes in one letter about forming an immediate friendship with Isabella Gardner because “our greatest bond right away was contemporary architecture,” and in another about Richard Kelly’s “wonderful” gift, a copy of a book based on an exhibit at MoMA in New York entitled “Architecture Without

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Architects” (Travisano and Hamilton 202, 565). Then too, Macedo Soares’s own work with “four of the best architects” in Rio de Janeiro as Lota laboured for several years at her landscape redevelopment project for the city kept Bishop in constant touch with the profession, not to mention the “28 or so German architects arrive[d] by bus” one day to inspect their Brazilian country house in Petrópolis, whose apparent constant state of ongoing construction was nonetheless, according to Bishop, “one of the best examples – of architecture that is – in S A ” (353, 344, 361). As one of the co-translators of Modern Brazilian Architecture (with Henrique Mindlin), and as a sometime architect herself with the refurbishment of the ramshackle Ouro Prêto house in Minas Gerais following her sometime estrangement from Macedo Soares, Bishop would have known from whence she spoke. One is thus tempted to think that Gehry himself would have found much to approve of the “architectural” Elizabeth Bishop in light of some of his own aesthetic predilections, which might be enumerated as follows: (1) that architecture should always have “the appearance of being under construction” since “a structure in process is always more poetic than the finished work” (qtd in Friedman, Houses 143); (2) that as with Gehry’s own present-day house in Santa Monica, it should look like “[the architect] took something old and reinvented it” (191); (3) that ideally its “interiors” should be designed “in relation to the ocean” if not “fronting on the ocean view” itself (210); and perhaps most importantly, (4) that it should be “totally charming and [yet] a bit mysterious” quite like, so one pundit contends, the architect himself (265). As Gehry sums up his aesthetic credo over a lifetime: “I think of the final product as a dream image, and it’s always elusive. You can have a sense of what the building should look like and you can capture it. But you never quite do”16 (qtd in Isenberg 62). In sum, then, architect Gehry, like poet Bishop, aims to  enlarge his own very mysterious sense of identity in constant Emersonian transit between home, and his encounter with other people and other places in the larger cosmos that lies beyond. “And so it is in the relationship between us and our houses, those ‘other persons’ in our lives,” remarks Marjorie Garber, since “the house of our dreams is never quite possessed, never perfect, never finished” (Sex and Real Estate 119). Architecture as a kind of “play between the spaces” in Gehry’s own resonant phrasing (qtd in Isenberg 6), that is, a problematic

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structure located somewhere between land and sea, between past and future, and between reality and dream – “something, something, something” – architecture within these avant-garde formulations does seem amazingly to accord with “no place like home” in Bishop, and that is perhaps rendered most vividly, but again problematically, in a text like “The End of March”: I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of – are they railway ties? (c p 179) The query here about “railway ties” perhaps establishes another link between Bishop and Gehry since exposing the raw building materials of the structure to open view – “nothing is concealed” (Friedman, Architecture 26; further on 217) – has become a trademark feature of the many Gehry houses over the years. Bishop herself indulged this inclination as she contemplated her refurbishment of the Ouro Prêto manse back in Brazil in the mid-1960s: “The house has the most beautiful roof in town – it is like a lobster lying [on] its stomach with its tail curled at right angles – and that’s the kitchen – there is scarcely a straight wall in it, and the oldest walls (some a yard thick) are made of what I think you call mud & wattle (?) – the sticks tied together with raw-hide. This has never been used since about 1730” (qtd in Millier 371). Moreover, Gehry’s daring predilection for exposing the raw construction materials of his various architectural projects (corrugated aluminum, chain-link fencing, timbered joists, etc. as prominently displayed in his own house again in Santa Monica [Friedman, Arhcitecture 38]) has some relation to “the depth created [in Bishop’s poetry] by folding material against and into other material,” as Samuels remarks. “Bishop’s intensity of feeling for intermingling, layering, and interpenetrating materials produces her special feeling for the materiality of verse,” according to Samuels (23). Bishop’s final domicile at 437 Lewis Wharf in Boston would appear to approximate, in Gehryesque terms, the “crypto-dreamhouse” playfully rendered in “The End of March” cited above: “a

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famous old tremendous warehouse called the ‘Granite Warehouse,’” as Bishop records, “built in 1838 – abandoned for years, but in wonderful condition,” and especially Gehryesque since “I have a verandah – looking over part of the harbor and up the Mystic River; [and] beamed ceilings (original beams), brick walls with iron hoops and hooks still in them; [and] a flu … for a Franklin stove – well wonderful, or will be” (Travisano and Hamilton 744). The best form of architecture ideally, according to Gehry, bespeaks “the breath of new life injected into old forms,” that is, it “make[s] something new from the old familiars.” As Gehry avers similarly elsewhere: “It seems to me that when you’re doing architecture, you’re building something out of something” (Friedman, Architecture 34, 44). But already in Bishop’s scrupulously detailed description of the Lewis Wharf restoration, reality fairly quickly begins to fail the dream – “Of course I wish it were three times bigger …” (744), and as with “The End of March,” a too-close approximation renders even Bishop’s final domicile not a little “dubious”: “A light to read by – perfect! But – impossible” (c p 179, 180). In conclusion, then, if literary artists “present the house as nothing other than subjectivity,” so Diana Fuss observes, “[as] a self under construction” (3), from a metaphorical point of view, as readers we’re inclined to think that the safe harbouring of subjectivity is likely to be a considerably ironic undertaking to the same degree. Little wonder, therefore, that while grandmother sings peremptorily to her “marvelous stove” in “Sestina” from Questions of Travel once again – “It was to be, says the Marvel Stove” – it is the child in the poem who is provoked to draw yet another “inscrutable house” (c p 124). “I think of [a building] as a dream-image, and it’s always elusive,” we recall from Gehry (qtd in Isenberg 62). In a further reflection along this line, we perhaps further recall (from chapter 3) American novelist Joyce Carol Oates observing in her published Journal that “the obvious motive for much of literature is the assuaging of homesickness, for a place or a time now vanished.” But “less obviously, the reader kept at a little distance by the writer’s coolly crafted ‘art’” tells a different story, Oates implies, about how unsafe houses can sometimes be like so many quasi-extensions of the human self. Commenting on a similar distance in Gertrude Stein, Thomas Foster notes: “Reimagining domestic space as a site of travel across the distance separating herself and [other], and language as the means of transport, is how Stein defines the hint of ‘more’ that

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inhabits ‘every space,’ the architectural become intersubjective” (142). “I want an old farmhouse,” Bishop was once given to remark, “but I think it’s better to … see from a distance – not to be right there with the rocks and mud [since] this is all a day-dream” (qtd in Jarraway, Going the Distance 172).17 In A Cold Spring (1955), therefore, it is interesting to note Bishop’s rather curious juxtaposition of the poems entitled “Letter to New York” and “Argument.” In the former poem, “coming out of the brownstone house / to the gray sidewalk, the watered street, / one side of the buildings rise with the sun like a glistening field of wheat” near its ending (c p 80) is immediately corroborated by the latter poem in its opening: “Days that cannot bring you near / or will not, / Distance trying to appear / something more than obstinate, / argue argue argue with me / endlessly / neither proving you less wanted nor less dear” (c p 81). It can hardly be an accident, therefore, that in “Squatter’s Children,” Bishop would prefer to position her “specklike girl and boy” in a “threshold” space – an “inside-out ambiguity” as von der Heydt views it similarly in Emerson’s poetry (59, 70) – between “a specklike house” on the one hand, and some more phantasmatic “bigger house” on the other hand, whose many-mansioned “lawfulness endures” somewhere off in the distance (c p 95). In a final meditation on this more ironic sense of house and home, I return for a final time to Deleuze and Guattari’s invitation for us to view the chaos of worldly experience as “an immense black hole in which one endeavours to fix a fragile point as a center” (Thousand Plateaus 312), much like “the play between the spaces” shared between Bishop and Gehry, as I have been arguing. “But home does not prexist,” they tell us, “it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space” (310). Continue Deleuze and Guattari: “Sometimes one grafts onto that [space] a breakaway from the black hole … [so that] the point launches out of itself, impelled by centrifugal forces that fan out to the sphere of the cosmos” (312). In such terms, the home in American literature bespeaks a state of homelessness, and in the hands of an artist like Elizabeth Bishop, after Wallace Stevens and the diva-dame, provokes readers of the literature to query the degree to which its various representations of human identity can ever be pendant upon absolute and total mastery of one’s own house. From Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables through Cather’s The Professor’s House to André Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog and both

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Marilynne Robinson’s and Toni Morrison’s most recent novels curiously entitled Home: Can the home truly be where the heart is in American fiction? Is a “House of Fiction” in Henry James’s famous phrase ever a viable notion for conceptualizing a canon of literature in America yesterday and today? Why, in fact, has Elvis left the building? In all of these writers’ foregrounding the home’s inexorable conflict between holding on and letting go in their work, “perhaps wisdom lies,” remarks poet Mark Doty in true Deleuzian fashion (in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon), “in our ability to negotiate between these two poles” (7, emphasis added). After Deleuze, “between things, interbeing, intermezzo” is, after all, what truly constitutes “American literature”: “to move between things, establish a logic of the A ND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings” (Thousand Plateaus 25). And if “ground zero” is something of a “false conception” (25) to begin thinking about Elizabeth Bishop’s own work within that “other” context, then in the most ironic sense of all, following Stevens among others, there truly is “no place like home.” How else to account for so many of the haunted subjects in Bishop’s international canon of poetry: houseless nomads rather than “universal subject[s] within the horizon of [an] all encompassing Being” (Thousand Plateaus 379)? As Bishop elaborates that abject and alien predicament in a final text like “Cape Breton” from A Cold Spring once again, “a man carrying a baby gets off [a small bus], / climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow … to his invisible house beside the water” (c p 68, emphasis added). Architect Gehry might provide a further gloss on Bishop’s nomadism here as well. “We’re living in a world that keeps constantly changing and evolving, and my sense is that it’s important to respond to that change … I [myself] am in a state of being unfinished …” (qtd in Isenberg 257–8).18 For a poet like Bishop who had so much of Wallace Stevens’s work by heart, “a state of being unfinished,” one tends to feel, at play in some Stevensian diva-dame-like space between Freud and Deleuze, was as close to “home” as Elizabeth Bishop quite happily thought she might ever get: “wherever that may be” (c p 94, emphasis retained).

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Conclusion: Diva-Dames in the Dark Art, according to Plato, is a dream for awakened minds, a work of imagination withdrawn from ordinary life … and yet giving us a perspective and dimension on reality that we don’t get from any other approach to reality. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination Dreams are our eggs, our larvae, and our properly psychic individuals. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition All life is from the egg. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade

In the heyday of formalist (or structuralist, or archetypal) criticism, the great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye once ventured a very shrewd insight in concluding a breathlessly synoptic overview of Stevens’s entire oeuvre that I think still holds up today. In the essay entitled “The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens” from 1957, Frye makes clear why Stevens’s poetry perhaps situates itself so well among the other contexts explored throughout this study for gauging the extraordinary achievement of his work in the century past. Specifically, Frye remarks on the “anti-‘poetic’ quality” of Stevens in contrast, say, to T.S. Eliot who has “pre-eminently,” according to Frye, “the sense of a creative tradition … [which] makes [Eliot’s] poetry so uniquely penetrating, [and] so easy to memorize unconsciously” (254, 253). As for the “anti-‘poetic’” in Stevens, Frye claims that this quality was “the result of his determination to make it new, in Pound’s phrase, to achieve in each poem a unique expression and force his reader to make a correspondingly unique act of apprehension” (254). What is more, Frye claims that

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Stevens owed this “anti-‘poetic’ quality” to Walt Whitman, a nineteenth-century precursor poet “who urged American writers to lay less emphasis on tradition, thereby starting one of his own” (254). Continues Frye: It is significant that Whitman is one of the few very traditional poets Stevens refers to, though he has little in common with him technically. It is partly his sense of a poem as belonging to experience rather than tradition, separated from the stream of time with its conventional echoes, that gives Stevens’ poetry its marked affinity with pictures, an affinity shown also in the ­curiously formalized symmetry of the longer poems. (254) Gilles Deleuze, of course, whose theory registers its own anti-­ traditional debt to Whitman directly (“no American writer should write like an Englishman,” he writes in “Whitman” 58) and indirectly (“the brain itself is much more [like] grass than a tree” in A Thousand Plateaus 15) can go a long way, as this study reveals, to show just how Stevens’s own “sense of an autonomous poetic theory,” in contrast to more traditional American writers, was “an inseparable part of [his] poetic practice,” as Frye rightly observes (253). But what interests me more is the claim that Stevens’s more direct link in the theoretical context conceivably might lie in his “affinity with pictures” – how, for instance, on the matter of the criticism of drama, according to Frye, the poetry of “Shakespeare and Aeschylus” can easily line up right alongside the filmography of Cecil de Mille (253). In concluding this study, therefore, I turn back to that “other” context for Stevens’s work taken up in chapter 4, namely, American film. But here, I want to pursue further my suggestion at the very end of that analysis that a transposition to a completely “other” cinematic style in the annals of “Hollywood realism” may be required in order to enlarge the sense of that “little difference” in the representation of  woman that we catch only a slight glimpse of when Katharine Hepburn’s manful suspenders slip unwittingly away from her shoulders as she goes about parodying the daily ritual of the family breakfast near the end of George Stevens’s 1942 Woman of the Year. And to explore this more distanciated view of the diva-dame in this quite different context, I choose, alarmingly to some no doubt, to linger further within the theoretical precincts of Northrop Frye himself, who like Wallace Stevens, may have a more Deleuzian contour to his capacious archetypal armature than we might at first think.

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On first view, Frye himself might have been somewhat discomfited with this “other” context within which I propose to draw upon his critical oeuvre. After all, in a somewhat dismissive passage on Marshall McLuhan in The Critical Path (c p hereafter), Frye claims that it is the written document that is “the model of all teaching … repeating the same words however often one consults it … [hence] a repetition of the kind that underlines all genuine education,” and indeed, that “makes democracy technically possible” (150–1).1 Yet in Anatomy of Criticism (ac hereafter), there are enough references to moviemaking throughout that tour de force of literary theory – “the Chaplin films” in the mythic context of John Milton, Ben Jonson, and the Old Testament, in one example (228) – to invite media pundits to view filmmaking with the same “assumption of total coherence” (ac 16) that, throughout his long career, Frye had brought to the canons of great literature. And their efforts would not have been misplaced, according to Frye, since “the real communicating media are still, as they have always been, words, images, and rhythms [and] not the electronic gadgets that convey them” (c p 152). My conclusion, however, is not about to engage a whole system of archetypal analysis for reading film in the breathtakingly encyclopedic manner that Frye seemed effortlessly to apply to practically all of Western literature. “The purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to clarify,” Frye rightly observes in the Anatomy’s concluding essay (ac 247), and to my mind, the archetypal systematization of movies, without a prodigiously gifted and agile mind at back of it, is likely to be disastrous for both Frye and film. “The basis of generic criticism in any case,” continues Frye in that concluding essay, “is rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public” (ac 247). Now the movie genre that conceivably promotes the authentication of Stevens’s diva-dame figuration while at the same time receiving considerable illumination from Frye’s criticism is a brand of highly unusual Hollywood filmmaking emanating from the 1940s and 1950s, and retrospectively nominated “film noir.” Indeed, given its exceptionally ironic relation to more mainstream2 types of interand postwar Hollywood film production, film noir with its emphasis upon anti-heroes and femmes fatales, obscure plot-lines, weird chiaroscuro lighting, and jagged camera angles among some of its more prominent technical features is about as detached – “archetypal” rather than “allegorical” in its worried “external relation to history” – as the ideal “critic quâ critic” ought to be (c p 99).3 Conceivably,

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such filmmaking might almost be the textbook example of Frye’s “Mythos of Winter,” where the genres of “Irony and Satire” ineluctably recycle his archetypal criticism away from Tragedy, and back to the mythoi of Comedy and Romance (ac 223–39). Mark Hamilton, for instance, in an ambitious PhD dissertation entitled “Northrop Frye Goes to the Movies,” locates a number of well-known noir texts ranging from The Maltese Falcon (1941) through to Silence of the Lambs (1991) precisely within this critical ambit (212–49). My own interest in Frye in relation to film studies I restrict here to the noir film canon of Alfred Hitchcock. Fully launched by America’s entry into the Second World War in 1941 with films like Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), and Saboteur (1942), Hitchcock’s film noir output would almost appear to have become programmatic with the addition of Shadow of a Doubt made in 1943. And with its own special concatenation of dreams and eggs as in my opening epigraphs, it’s perhaps possible to delineate more precisely in social and cultural terms what that program from a considerably detached British filmmaker recently installed in David O. Selznick’s breakaway independent film studio might be when the ironies of a film like Shadow of a Doubt are engaged from a distinctly Frygian perspective. Here, I’m thinking particularly of two scenes that occur roughly halfway through the film: the first, when Niece Charlie, the film’s ostensible femme fatale, at a family dinner recounts the dream – a nightmare really, as she admits – of seeing her Uncle Charlie aboard the train that has recently brought him to the Newton family home in Santa Rosa, California, from back east, and her recollection of him “looking so unhappy”; and the second scene, a bit earlier, when Emma Newton, Charlie’s mother, finally consents to having her cake-making photographed for a feature magazine article on the typical American family sponsored by an agency called the “National Public Survey.” “I’m ready for the eggs, now,” she calls out to the photographer, ruminating a short while later, “I can’t go on making cakes.” What might be the cultural lading of these two scenes shadowed by Hitchcock’s peculiar noir mix of dreams and eggs, and shadowed further by Frye’s own conception of the communicative arts’ sense of critical or ironic distanciation? Interposed between the two scenes in Shadow of a Doubt just mentioned is a third that should make Frye’s helpfulness for the study of noir quite plain. Set in Gunner’s Grill in the film’s depiction

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of small town life, we find in this scene another magazine reporter ostensibly on a date with Niece Charlie. In real life, the reporter is Detective Jack Graham, and he divulges to Niece Charlie that the photographing of her mother’s cookery, like the National Public Survey, has all been a ruse. The deception has allowed Graham and his camera-toting partner Fred Saunders to gain undercover access to the Newton family home in order to suss out the identity of Uncle Charlie as a possible suspect in the “Merry Widow Murderer” caper back east for which (as Niece Charlie will glean from a newspaper article tracked down in the Santa Rosa public library later) a nationwide search had been undertaken to determine the whereabouts of the killer of three rich Philadelphia women. In The Modern Century, Frye follows Freud in viewing contemporary society on the model of a vast “repressive anxiety-structure,” and propounds the notion of a “sadist vision” rather like that of the Merry Widow Murderer just noted as a means of cutting through “the whole structure of society itself as an anti-art, an old and worn-out creation that needs to be created anew” (79, 86). In the “cult of the holy sinner” – Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux is cited as one example – “the person achieves an exceptional awareness … from acts of cruelty,” Frye contends, “or at least brings about such an awareness in us” (84). Several of Uncle Charlie’s trenchant castigations of modern life punctuating his appearances throughout the film thus correspond precisely to that form of “exceptional awareness” that Frye attributes to the figure of the “holy sinner,” which I am inclined to locate in the noir genre as well. At the Newton family’s supper table quite early in the film, for instance, Uncle Charlie’s eloquent take on society’s contemporary ills comes close to spellbinding: The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands dead, husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands, drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night, smelling of money, proud of their jewellry but of nothing else. Horrible, faded, fat, greedy, women … Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?4

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Additionally, the kind of awareness or “visionary” experience invoked here Frye aligns with the term “reality” rather than that of “realism.” “That is partly what I mean,” Frye explains, “by saying that the arts form a kind of counterenvironment, setting something up which is really antipathetic to the civilization in which it exists. [Hence,] … reality is a much more inclusive term in literature than realism. It seems to me that at certain moments of intensity what literature conveys is the sense of controlled hallucination … where things are seen with a kind of intensity with which they are not seen in ordinary experience” (“Literature as Therapy” 33). I shall return to this whole issue of Hollywood “realism,” opposing it to a noir “reality,” further down. For now, what is crucially at stake in the surrendering of Uncle Charlie’s identity definitively to the enforcement of law, and the inevitable and fatal punishment that is sure to follow, is a certain inevitable and perhaps equally fatal disciplining of Niece Charlie’s own identity in the film that suggestively registers itself in the nightmare of her uncle aboard the train, and from which in fact he is fated to lose his life near the end of the film, ironically, at the hands of his very own niece. For what is so compelling about a character like Uncle Charlie for his niece is his mysterious resistance to any kind of determinate nomination – a point that they mutually corroborate early in Uncle Charlie’s visit when young Charlie remarks upon that “something” inside her uncle that “nobody knows about,” and that therefore makes both her and her uncle “sort of like twins.” Uncle Charlie doubly reinforces the observation with the remark that “it’s not good to find out too much,” and seals his rejoinder with the gift of what later appears to be a stolen emerald ring. The mysterious fluidity of Uncle Charlie’s identity throughout the film, Hitchcock insists, is sustained as much by his fictitious self-naming as his inventive self-fashioning: in the seedy crumpled attire of Mr Spencer back in Philadelphia at the opening, in the high-class outfit of cape and cane as Mr Otis aboard the train to Santa Rosa shortly after, and as the glitzy fashion-plate in leather brogues and swish panama hat as Mr Oakley in and out of Santa Rosa in what follows. Even by the end of the film, despite the fact that Uncle Charlie has thrice attempted to do away with his niece, we’re not ever really sure that he was in truth the Merry Widow Murderer, since another purported killer had apparently done himself in, absconding from the law back east by running into an airplane propeller. “Cut him to pieces,” Herbert Hawkins, the next-door

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neighbour, ghoulishly remarks, which just might be the perfect ­metaphor for the mordantly exhilarating misordering of male identity throughout much of Hitchcock’s noir canon over the next two decades or so, right through to Psycho (1960). Such a graphic misordering of symbolic identity Jacques Lacan would likely target as the literal embodiment of his infamous “corps morcelé” (see Écrits 4–5). Here, I’m thinking of that wonderful passage in The Four Fundamental Concepts in which Lacan reminds us  that “whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, [we can] imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella” (197). “Doing it with a man” might suggest that Lacan’s “hommelette” in this passage is intended to signify the dissidence of the queer subject flying off in the face of the more normative reproductive one signed by the egg. If so, this ironic reading of the antihero’s identity courtesy of Lacan can be further abetted via another insightful passage from Frye that invites us to read Emma Newton’s breaking of eggs in Shadow of a Doubt all over again. “One of the most obvious uses [of the imagination’s ironic “power of detachment”],” Frye observes in The Educated Imagination, “is its encouragement of tolerance.” Explains Frye: “In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. [Moreover,] bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities” (32, e i hereafter). Thus, in The Well-Tempered Critic, Frye avers, “Literature provides a kind of reservoir of possibilities of action. It gives us wider sympathies and greater tolerance, and new perspectives on action; it increases the power of articulating convictions, whether our own or those of others” (150, w t c hereafter). And for that “reservoir of possibilities” in The Educated Imagination, once again, Frye resorts to the image of the egg or embryo: “The world of the imagination is a world of unborn or embryonic beliefs [so that] if you believe what you read in literature, you can, quite literally, believe anything” (31, emphasis added). Or, as Herman Melville’s narrator would have it in The Confidence-Man (1854), “All life is from the egg …” (1098). But as a “reservoir of possibilities,” it’s ­conceivable that Frye may have had the second canto of Stevens’s “Things of August” in mind as well:

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We make, although inside an egg, Variations on the words spread sail. The morning-glories grow in the egg. It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it And the hawk cats it and we say spread sail, Spread sail, we say spread white, spread way. The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins And the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg. Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break  through. Have liberty not as the air within the grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate. (c p p 417–18) According to Frye, therefore, it is precisely within the office of the imagination to release the reservoir of possibilities: “the imaginative act breaks down the separation between subject and object, [on the one hand] the perceiver shut up in ‘the enclosures of hypothesis’ like an embryo in a ‘naked egg’ or ‘glass shell,’ and [on the other hand] a perceived world similarly imprisoned in the remoteness of its ‘irreducible X’” (“Realistic Oriole” 251). However, the bigots and fanatics alluded to previously are likely to ignore such a vast horizon of human possibility –“Breathe freedom, oh, my native, / In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate,” as Stevens remarks above – and instead, would likely be set considerably ill at ease with the queer subtext of Hitchcock’s film, an insistent subtext right from the significant dedication to gay playwright and novelist Thorton Wilder at the beginning (for helping Hitchcock’s wife, Alma, with the screenplay one supposes) to Uncle Charlie’s dandified leave-taking for San Francisco at the end, and variously throughout with remarks like the one Emma proffers in response to her brother’s special contribution to one evening meal in particular:

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“Wine for dinner? That sounds so gay!” But in light of the filmmaker’s twinning of the two “Charlies” noted previously, I would tend to view Frye’s embryology egging us on, as it were, in the direction of a notion of subjectivity in more capacious terms than any determinately straight or gay labelling of identity would inevitably fail to enclose. And it’s perhaps Gilles Deleuze via his own particular sense of an emancipatory embryology (as in my second epigraph) who points us in the direction of this much larger notion of human selfhood, if in the very first instance, the dreams engendered by eggs put us more liberally in touch with “our properly psychic individuals.” For as Deleuze goes on to elaborate the reference in Difference and Repetition, In order to plumb the intensive depths or spatium of an egg, the directions and distances, the dynamisms and dramas, the potentials and potentialities must be multiplied. The world is an egg. Moreover, the egg in effect, provides us with a model for the order of reasons: differentiation-individuation-dramatisation-­ differenciation. (251) As a dynamic of infinite potentiality, “a vision of possibilities, which expands the horizon of belief and makes it both more tolerant and more efficient,” according to Frye (e i 55), the egg for Deleuze (like the embryo for Frye) becomes “the model of life itself,” as Daniel Smith remarks, “a powerful nonorganic and intensive vitality that traverses the organism; by contrast, the organism, with its forms and functions, is not life, but rather that which imprisons life” – the egg, therefore, suggesting an intensive reality “that is ‘beneath’ or ‘adjacent to’ the organism, and continually in the process of constructing itself” (“Critical, Clinical” xxxvii). As a figure for the “holy sinner” in this rather capacious sense of  identity-potential, Uncle Charlie’s characterization throughout Hitchcock’s film is rendered more scrutable from the point of view of the social critique that he insistently mounts against the “fat wheezing animals” of the world and that often seems to distill into a horrifically twisted misogyny: “silly wives … useless women … Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women,” and so forth. If the world is “a horrible place,” as Niece Charlie contends that her uncle thought it might be, it’s not because he “hated the whole world” but only one particular “organic” version of life that Uncle Charlie took violent exception to

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– the world, as he contends, “as a foul sty with swine inside.” The organic reification of American culture in economic terms especially – the opening shot, for instance, of Uncle Charlie abed in a darkened claustrophobic room surrounded by cast-off ten-and twenty-dollar bills (see figure 3), and later the jokes at the expense of fat bank presidents and their silly sycophantic employees (Niece Charlie’s bank-telling father Joe in particular) – it’s this reified level of monetary form and function in society that most provokes Uncle Charlie’s egregious misanthropy. Thus, it’s considerably off the mark for Niece Charlie herself, outside the church door at her uncle’s funeral in the film’s closing scene, to conclude to her newly affianced Jack Graham that “people like us have no idea what the world is really like.” After all, it is she who appears to us in an opening shot in the film identical to that of Uncle Charlie – prostrate within another darkened and enclosed room in Santa Rosa this time rather than Philadelphia. And intuiting all of humanity’s reservoir of possibility and potentiality as all Stevensian diva-dames must, it is she who mounts an organic critique of modern culture in the presence of her father in the identical terms of her eponymous uncle-twin (see figure 4): “We’re in a terrible rut … mother works like a dog: dinner, dishes, bed. I don’t see how she can stand it.” The portrait of Emma Newton in this revealing assessment thus returns us to Emma’s cake-making alluded to previously in one of the film’s most engagingly conflicted moments that occurs about halfway through. From Frye’s critical perspective, three things it seems to me are worth remarking in this seemingly unexceptional bit of homey American domesticity dating from the World War Two years. First, I think it’s important to observe for Emma’s part a certain initial resistance to or perhaps detachment from the detectivesquâ-reporters’ insistent scrutiny, subjecting every last nook and cranny of the nuclear family unit, from parlour armchair to kitchen mixing bowl, to their collective probing gaze. Might not Emma’s resistance here in part be construed as an attempt metaphorically to sustain the dynamism of the embattled subject, and so hold open that dream-like “withdrawn[ness] from ordinary life” as in the opening epigraph from Frye (e i 43), and thereby maintain an ironic detachment – the Deleuzian “spatium” remarked previously – that conceivably allows for the multiplication of possibilities and potentialities so threatened by their documentary containment within the constraining ideology of something like a typical American family?

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Figure 3

Just before this scene, we recall, it is Uncle Charlie who insists that he has never truly been photographed (even though a picture from his youth is produced for his alarmed inspection), and just after, the elder Charlie who will insist that Fred Saunders surrender the film containing pictures of Charlie taken against his will. More importantly much later, we recall somewhat retrospectively what had been at stake in Emma’s own foreclosing the directions and distances of a differentiated and differenciating identity when she admits rather poignantly what it might have cost her in her own yielding to a typical bourgeois domesticity that her present reunion with her younger brother obviously puts her so much in mind of: “And you know how it is,” as she wistfully ruminates, “how you sort of forget you’re you [because] You’re your husband’s wife.” In the Newton household, Emma’s two daughters are arguably much more insistent upon maintaining their own sense of unique individuality – or perhaps more accurately in a Deleuzian sense,

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Figure 4

“pre-personal” or “pre-individual” singularity (Logic of Sense 55, 107 and passim) – in the face of a coercive middle-class domesticity. For the younger daughter Ann, who complains that her decidedly unmodern mother makes no allowance for science in her life, this recalcitrance includes turning up her nose at the proffering of cute stuffed animals and a doll house made of newspapers when an adventure story like Ivanhoe comes more easily to hand. And for Niece Charlie, in the restive style suggested by her namesake uncle, her identity flies clearly in the face of any patriarchal accommodation as she weasels past both police and detectives afoot in Santa Rosa in the middle of the night in order to track down at the town library her uncle’s purported homicidal aggression to its criminal lair mentioned earlier, and at the film’s climax, in true “noir” femmefatale style – a diva-dame in the dark for sure – take complete control of her own (and Uncle Charlie’s) life. The more socially constrained Newton matriarch Emma is a mere shadow of her doubtful progeny to go with Hitchcock’s title, mustering only the gumption to extend an invitation to her hapless brother to speak about his world travels

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at a meeting of her Ladies Club. In the context of the cake-making scene just viewed, therefore, a second thing Emma gives expression to – at the point at which the eggs are broken – is a rather poignant urge to fold, as it were, her somewhat queerly characterized brother into the Newton family romance, obviously “the tired romance of imprecision” as Stevens alludes to it in “Adult Epigram” (c p p 308), to which she herself has perhaps reluctantly and to an extent regrettably yielded. Indeed, by consenting to photographs after some initial hesitation, Emma at some psychic level arguably also gives expression to the need to see her own daughters ultimately folded, too, into the family batter / barter of the American recipe for domestic fulfillment circa 1943. For a third and final significance that can be gleaned from Emma’s cookery, we might do well to recall on the subject of artistic representation Frye’s very important distinction in The Modern Century between “stupid realism” and “prophetic realism” (m c 61). For Frye, this distinction amounts to the crucial separation in Coleridge between the natura natarans view of experience based upon the “subject-object relation of consciousness,” and thus the classicist’s mere imitation of nature, and the natura natarata view of experience whereby, as in the romanticist’s view and no doubt Stevens’s “romance of the precise” in “Adult Epigram” (c p p 308), we become “identified with the processes and powers of nature,” and through such an identification, embody the very “organic power of nature” itself. With the latter, Frye goes on to explain, “the realistic tendency achieves a second culmination,” as in French Impressionism: “not a separated world that man contemplates, but a world of power and force and movement which is in man [and] where objects become events, and where time is a dimension of sense experience” (m c 59, 59–60). In a subsequent passage, Frye elaborates this tendency as a kind of “revolutionary realism,” that is, “a questioning, exploring, searching, disturbing force [that] cannot go over to established authority and defend the fictions which may be essential to authority” since this “new kind of energy” – “the revolt of the brain behind the eye against sensation”– is “without reference to representation” (m c 62). In an essay entitled “Auguries of Experience” from 1987, this revolutionary tendency is further aligned with what Frye (following Freud, once again) refers to as “the essential ‘reality principle,’” which “consists in what human beings have made,” and therefore what “they can remake,” as opposed to reality tour court

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where “‘Reality’ can only be what does not change or changes entirely on its own terms: as far as we are concerned, its future has already occurred” (8). Yet if in film theorist Raymond Belour’s unalterable and widespread view, all Hollywood narratives are about man’s entry into the symbolic order as dramatizations of the male Oedipal story (qtd in Bergstrom 93), Belour’s clearly reactive and ultimately disempowering scenario seems to me to provide precisely the kind of stupid realism that a noir vehicle like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt aims to move beyond by means of the prophetic realism proactively evinced especially through the characterization of the Newtons’ restively empowered female progeny as our diva-dames in the dark. But move to where in 1943? Virginia Carmichael’s “perfecting myths” undergirding the anchoring of domestic partnerships within the later Cold War context of Kaja Silverman’s “dominant fictions” following World War Two all become America’s ultra-conservative social ideologies par excellence through the 1950s and early 1960s as reviewed back in chapter 4. And the correspondent belief in the “realism” of Hollywood cinema underwriting them all through this period did in fact become the very means by which Hitchcock himself secured his own successful mainstream film reputation following his noir period through the 1960s and early 1970s. Ironically, much of that ideological perfecting and anchoring and solidifying is mirrored in the development of Niece Charlie’s character in the second half of Shadow of a Doubt for which Emma’s cake-making / egg-breaking scene perhaps serves as the turning point: from her thinking that her uncle was “the most wonderful man in the world” earlier in the film, to her later threat, before Uncle Charlie’s Ladies Club talk: “I don’t want you to touch my mother. So go away, I’m warning you. Go away or I’ll kill you myself.” But in much larger historical terms, a great deal of that declension could be thought to be mirrored in American culture that Hitchcock’s film might be seen to register in its way as a kind of turning point: from the intensely masculinist theatre of war when, as Allan Bérubé scrupulously documents, “even heterosexual men could find themselves abandoning the norms of civilian life as they had to rely on each other for companionship and affection” (189); thence, to the Cold War years, and the widely accepted linkage in the decades following between sexual and political deviance. As John D’Emilio points out, “the effete men of the eastern establishment lost China and Eastern Europe to the enemy” while “‘mannish’ women mocked

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the ideals of marriage and motherhood” (“Homosexual Menace” 60). Thus by the end of the film, although her name belies it, Niece Charlie is hardly the mannish woman mocking the ideals of marriage and motherhood as we saw at its start. With her imminent marriage to Detective Graham at the conclusion, she has arguably come to her senses. Growing now in tandem with the rest of the world whilst “the other” shrinks, as Humpty Dumpty would say, for all intents and purposes, she becomes like Lewis Carroll’s Alice – as unrecognizable to Humpty Dumpty as Niece Charlie is perhaps unrecognizable to Uncle Charlie (and to us) at the point at which she threatens to do her singularly nomadic uncle in. Here, I am alluding to another egg-headed passage in Deleuze, this time from The Logic of Sense, where the figure of Humpty Dumpty as a kind of shadow for what Uncle Charlie comes to represent in Hitchcock’s noir canon provides the sternest of warnings about the killing constraints of “Commonplace” ideologies, and the price we pay for allowing “consciousness” to become completely overtaken by them. Thus in Deleuze: [Humpty Dumpty] is uniquely made of shifting and “disconcerting” singularities, will not recognize Alice, for each of Alice’s singularities seems to him assimilated in the ordinary arrangement of an organ (eye, nose, mouth) and to belong to the Commonplace of an all too regular face, arranged just like everyone else’s … As Humpty Dumpty says, it is always possible to prevent that we grow in tandem. One does not grow without the other shrinking. [Hence,] there is nothing astonishing in the fact that paradox is the force of the unconscious: it occurs always in the space between consciousnesses, contrary to good sense or, behind the back of consciousness, contrary to common sense. (80) In mythic terms, of course, we’re only too well aware of Humpty Dumpty’s great fall from the wall, and now in filmic terms, Uncle Charlie’s horrific fall before a speeding locomotive. In a parallel rumination concerning the fall to madness of Friedrich Nietzsche, Deleuze imagines such destruction as the loss of the subject’s “free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity … independent of the matter of their individuation and [as in Melville] the forms of their personality” – in a word, the death of “‘Overman’ … [as] the superior type of everything that is” (107, italics retained). “This is strange

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discourse,” Deleuze wistfully concludes (107), and thus puts us in mind of Uncle Charlie once again in his first encounter with his niece in Hitchcock’s film when the uncle remarks, “You’re a strange girl, Charlie.” Hitchcock’s “noir” filmmaking through the 1940s and 1950s by which I take Shadow of a Doubt to be emblematic, while aiming to be equally popular would appear, given the burden of social criticism outlined previously, to be proposing a view of human experience considerably more ironic – irony as a principle better understood in the context of its rhetorical rather than its generic or modal import for the study of narrative as Frye suggests in several of his later works. Here, I’m minded of a key passage in The Educated Imagination, once again, where Frye writes persuasively about the “effect of irony” that allows us “to see over the head of a situation” – over the head of his very own Anatomy of Criticism let’s say – and thus is able “to detach us, at least in imagination, from the world we’d prefer not to be involved with” (e i 22). Film noir’s brief mounted against mainstream Hollywood moviemaking in a text like Shadow of a Doubt offers careful viewers imaginative detachment – Deleuze throughout this study refers to it as “distance” – precisely as Frye describes: “where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action” (e i  32). Holding the world in critical suspension in this rather ironically detached way has a good deal of the ambivalent about it to be sure. One thinks, for instance, of Frye’s ideal critic suspended between literature’s allegories of “concern” and its archetypes of “freedom” as “[the critic] seeks not so much to explain a poem in terms of its external relation to history or philosophy, but to preserve its identity as a poem and see it in its total mythological context” (c p 99). If it’s a case of having it both ways – “detached but not separated from [one’s] community,” as Frye would have it (c p 131) – to recur to Emma’s cookery for a final time, with our own considerable detachment we may tend to read into Frye’s critical irony not a little of the darker significance of Freud’s theory of “incorporation.” As Tania Modleski psychoanalytically unpacks that term in the context of Hitchcock’s representation of women, “On the one hand, the subject wishes by devouring the object to destroy it and, on the other hand, both to preserve it within the self and to appropriate its qualities [as] truly wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too” (110; see also Laplanche 19–20). Modleski, of course, is offering a highly qualified

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feminist reading of the Hitchcock canon in her deployment of Freudian psychoanalysis. But I would tend to see a much larger authentication of both Frye’s and Deleuze’s horizon of possibilities for belief and action in Emma’s having her cake that speaks very much to the restive temper of wartime America. If Emma’s cake-making like Hitchcock’s filmmaking is incorporative in Frye’s ironic sense, surely it aims to safeguard that spatium of dynamic individuation where the Deleuzian “differenciation” of identity gains a happy berth for itself by virtue of the continuous process of self-construction beneath the intolerable weight of a too transparently known and too consciously predetermined symbolic life. Even if, as Frye elsewhere remarks, “identity … is the one that we have failed to achieve,” it is “no less a genuine ideal for not having been built” (m c 123). So while Uncle Charlie may come across as merely another superficial version of the American confidence man throughout Hitchcock’s filmic incorporation, it perhaps pays to remember that in Herman Melville’s novel by that name, the first stage of confidence is “distrust” – distrust in all forms of determinate truth whose “peculiar virtue being unguessed” requires that we “conclude nothing absolute from the human form,” but instead “ponder the mystery of human subjectivity in general” since “the beauty of mystery is everywhere” (928, 958, 1083, 978, 1053). The fact, moreover, that Uncle Charlie could derive considerable pleasure in life from trashing the stultifying models of a too predetermined symbolic life just noted, albeit at the expense of distracted fathers, discomfited detectives, perhaps even merry widows – “The whole world is a joke to me,” he significantly remarks – this fact perhaps reveals that within the genre of noir, a filmmaker like Hitchcock could have his cake, too. By focusing throughout this ­conclusion on Hitchcock’s irony in its broadest and perhaps darkest sense, therefore, and by focusing in particular on those elements of countercultural resistance mounted against America’s intra- and postwar domestic ideologies, Frye’s critical theory makes it possible for us to imagine a kind of filmmaking that would appear to run defiantly counter to the Hollywood realism closeting the impalatable and unbearable presentiment of the effete man and the mannish woman ambiguously in play between the Tweedle Dee of Uncle Charlie and the Tweedle Dum of his hapless niece. “Irony,” Frye has remarked, “is not the centre of human reality, but only one of several modes of imaginative expression, and it is a

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function of the critic to provide some perspective for irony” (c p 132). I might conclude this Deleuzian anatomy of filmic irony in Hitchcock by pointing out, following Frye in his own Anatomy, that the mystery of human identity alluded to previously can never be merely “extrinsic,” that is to say, that kind of “mystery of the unknown or unknowable essence … which involves art only when art is also made illustrative of something else, as religious art is to the person concerned primarily with worship” (88). To the contrary, my take on Frye in this “other” context of film inaugurated by Stevens’s poetry and its “affinity with pictures” angles for a more “intrinsic” kind of mystery, that kind which, Frye astutely explains, “remains a mystery in itself no matter how fully known it is … [because it] comes not from concealment but from revelation, not from something unknown or unknowable in the work, but from something unlimited in it” (ac 88, emphasis added). Precisely this sense of a knowledge of textuality – poetic, fictive, filmic, or otherwise – infinitely engaged stands to make all the difference,5 it seems to me, between the merely passive critic of Wallace Stevens’s work among others, and a more active and energetic and endlessly inspired (and inspiring) reader of communicative art on the very models of Northrop Frye and Gilles Deleuze themselves.

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Notes

chapter one

  1 Massumi makes the Jamesian point more forcefully this way: “The semblance, or pure appearance of a thing is a kind of processual distance it takes on itself. When in the course of everyday life we march habitually and half consciously from one drop of life to the next, we don’t attend to the ripples. We see through the semblance to the next, not letting it appear with all its force. It’s like the thing falls back from the distance it potentially takes on itself” (51, and further on 22, 49, 61, 73, 134, 160, 189n10, and passim).   2 “Language has more fundamentally to do with speculation than designation,” Massumi continues, “or any form of one-to-one correspondence between words and things. There is always, implied in a linguistic gesture and the thinking it advances, the tacit complication of an ambulation – the potential unfolding of an event against a weltering background. ‘Thus, the ultimate fact for sense-awareness is the event’ [according to Alfred North Whitehead]. The ultimate fact – the truth – is the event and the welter of potential steps it navigates” (119).   3 The year-end issue of Time magazine (for 28 December 2009) cites a cumulative death toll of “14,000 people,” and editorializes: “Meanwhile, corruption in the ranks of the police, army, and government officials is so endemic that some analysts have declared the nation of 110 million people a failed state” (Anon. 29).   4 In the opening pages of her admirable Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, Marilyn R. Chandler notes that it was Sigmund Freud who once famously remarked in his Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (1966) that “the one typical … representation of the human

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figure as a whole is a house” (qtd on 11–12). In like wise, Chandler’s study is proffered as “an exploration in the ways in which a number of our major [American] writers have appropriated houses as structural, psychological, metaphysical, and literary metaphors, constructing complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family structure, house and social environment, house and text” (3, and elaborated further on 10, 18, 36, 47, 53, 68, 82, 92, 157, and 221). As Sheriff Bell’s allusion to the stone house while recounting his horrific wartime experience reveals, Cormac McCarthy would thus also appear to have some investment in this psychic tropology – an issue that I shall return to at the end of this chapter with the brief reappearance of yet another memorable stone house, but will also take up in more variable ways in the chapters to follow.   5 Glossing Thomas Foster’s important study of “home” truths in modernist American literature, Sherrif Bell up to this point might be seen to be “resisting placement within a traditional feminine [passive] position of domesticity and immanence” by means of the “traditional masculine position of universality and transcendence” underwritten ostensibly by the active enforcement of law, hence historically perpetuating throughout American culture to the present day “the oppositional categories of masculine and feminine, transcendence and immanence, self and other, categories that are hierarchically organized into structures of dominance” (64).   6 Once again, the reference to “woman” in the process of “becoming-woman,” as Rosi Braidotti reminds us, “does not refer to empirical females, but rather to topological positions … [as] the marker[s] for a general process of transformation” and “positive forces and levels of nomadic consciousness” (393) that seem so well to fit the case of the transitory Moss in clear contrast to the imperturbable Chigurh and Bell outlined previously. chapter two

  1 Stevens’s standoffish reputation to a significant extent, Harrington also points out, should be laid at the feet of some of our best commentators on modernist writers: “Critics in the late eighties portrayed Stevens as an isolato who tried to ‘evade’ historical reality (Marjorie Perloff), a solipsist who squelched or ‘appropriated’ any voice except his own (Gerald Bruns), or a dissatisfied, alienated consumer (Frank Lentricchia)” (95–6).   2 In an important letter dating from the Second World War, Stevens himself declared that although “it is the personal in the poet that is the origin of his poetry … This does not mean that he is a private figure. On the other hand, it does mean that he must not allow himself to be absorbed as the

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politician is absorbed. He must remain individual. As individual he must remain free” (qtd in Schaum 188).   3 In heading in this most fantastical direction, from a position already thoroughly invested in more mainstream discourses on the poet, I am nonetheless persuaded by Judith Butler, much of whose work originally inspired this radically new embarkation, “that one writes into a field of writing that is invariably and promisingly larger and less masterable than the one over which one maintains a provisional authority, and that the unanticipated reappropriations of a given work in areas for which it was never consciously intended are some of the most useful” (Bodies That Matter 19).   4 In Stevens, the paradigms are not “domestic” per se but more generally discursive, and charting their shift in the context of belief, to take one example, is the burden of much of my own reading of the Stevens canon that endeavours to foreground in the poet “a realignment that allows belief to pass from a literal quest to a figural question, as the discursive paradigms shift between modernism and postmodernism in American ­literature” (Question of Belief 17, and onward). The specific linkage to Cunningham is provided through the notion of two contrasting forms of “romance,” within which both poet’s and novelist’s thematic rhetoric can be clearly seen to converge, as I argue from this point forward, and to the end of the chapter.  5 Cf. in Cunningham: “We are so far into the field that the darkness has closed behind us, blotting out the road and house … We stand there in a starry, buzzing darkness complete as the end of the world” (410). The preponderance of settings “in the dark” in the novel is rivalled only by their frequent appearance, as I have thoroughly documented, throughout Stevens’s poetry (h e w 11, 19, 45, 56, 70, 92, 95, 96, 189, and 197 are additional).   6 By this later point in Stevens’s career, as Paul Morrison remarks, “the purpose is not to posit an ontologically stable essence that can then be ‘named flatly’ as what [the female] is … she is not what Derrida calls the ‘eschatological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without difference’”; rather, the “unnamed woman [is] the absence that engenders figuration” (99, 112; see also Brogan, “Sister of the Minotaur” 17).   7 We notice, however, that when a pervasive being does show up in Stevens, “a single being, sure and true,” for instance, in “World without Peculiarity,” we are also shown how “difference disappears,” and female presence is demonized as a “hating woman” – some “thing upon his [being’s] breast” (c p p 388).  8 Cf. additionally Chauncey’s suggestion that “there [are] a variety of ways to be gay,” in consequence of “the plasticity of gender-assignment” (278, 62),

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and thus Castle’s notion of the “apparitional lesbian,” esp. on 30, 45, 149, 170, and 220.   9 Similarly in Stevens, Thomas Grey is pleased to find “a self not yet finally defined and thus without known limits,” since Stevens “often said the poet must stay open to the flux of experience and unfinished, hence never quite himself,” and that “‘there is a perfect rout of characters in every man’” (54, 136–7n36, 142n45; see also 49, 81, and 98). 10 For the debt of these last three to Stevens, see especially Eric Keenaghan’s Queering Cold War Poetry (2009) and my review of same in the Wallace Stevens Journal. chapter three

  1 Two physical afflictions throughout Updike’s personal life, SelfConsciousness makes clear, have bodily contributed to Updike’s own unsettled and provisional sense of self: First, a bad case of stuttering in his youth, which creates a kind of “cleavage” between thought and word and thus for the novelist “demonstrates the duality of our existence,” or in other terms, “a kind of recoil at the thrust of your own voice, an expression of alarm and shame at sounding like yourself, at being yourself, at taking up space and air … [in which case] the captive tongue is released into Maskenheit, the freedom conferred by masks” (87). Second, a chronic case of psoriasis onset in maturity, that like stuttering, imparts to Updike a sense of “duplicity” with respect to his ego – a “dualism, indeed, such as existed between my skin and myself [that] appeared to me the very engine of the human,” but like the Maskenheit of stuttering, affords him “a certain optimism” as well: “like a snake, I shed many skins … [so that] the possibility of a ‘new life,’ in this world or the next, has been ever present in my mind” (75).   2 “A truly adjusted person,” Updike further observes, “is not a person ­at all – just an animal with clothes on or a statistic. So that it’s a happy ending, with this ‘but’ at the end” (34). Hence, his emphasis in a much later interview on “dramatizing aspects of your own self [while] turning it into a person,” adding “that manipulation of the alternatives that we all have within us is the most creative and honest thing we do” (“An Interview” 206).   3 “Our lives depend upon an interior maze of pumping, oozing tubular flow,” observes Updike elsewhere, “whose contemplation itself can induce claustrophobia.” Hence, “our lives begin with a slither through a tight place, and end, according to Tolstoy’s vision in ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich,’

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with being pushed deeper and deeper into a black sack” (SelfConsciousness 90, emphasis added). I shall return to this idea of claustrophobia in Updike’s own “Rabbit” novels momentarily.   4 As an imaginative writer, Updike would no doubt heartily concur with Rosi Braidotti’s observation following Deleuze that “the tense that best expresses the power of the imagination is the future perfect … [as] the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject” (“Becoming-Woman” 400). I shall also return to this issue of subjective possibility in Updike’s fiction a bit later in my argument.   5 On the influence of Freud in his work, Updike further states: “I, myself, read Freud rather late in life, but I can say that he helped me. He also definitely helped America, because he – on top of the Calvinistic commandment to prove ourselves on earth through the accumulation of wealth – gave us the possibility to prove ourselves … Since Freud, sexuality is also something positive, not something negative as it was suggested by the Puritans” (“Conversation [Winkler]” 175).   6 Nelson Angstrom refers to the motor car as his father’s “best friend” in Rabbit Is Rich (233), but it was in fact Harry’s “only haven” as early as Rabbit, Run (36).   7 Significantly, in his essay on Wallace Stevens in Hugging the Shore, Updike remarks that “Joined to [Stevens’s] reflective, deliberate cold side there was something combative and uproarious, which expressed itself in contention with distance” (“The Heaven of an Old Home” 613).   8 “The dreamed-of balance” is how Doty describes this strenuous negotiation later in Still Life: “to be rooted in the house, in comfortable domestic alliance, in relation – and to have one’s freedom of association, too, weightless, with the quick mobility of air or fire. Both solid and spirited, both fixed and unbound” (63).   9 Although Updike is now deceased in this trio, “contemporary” here, and in my chapter title, was initially intended to signal “living authors” in contrast to the work of a “modern” poet nonetheless resonating uncannily among them from the “other” side. 10 On the importance for Oates of maintaining this important aesthetic “distance” between reader and text, see further in her Journal on 83, 118, 166, 187, 295, 380, 387, 414, 423, and 480. 11 In the Kranzfelder sampling of Hopper paintings, the following are fairly representative on this point: “Morning in a City, 1944” (51), “Morning Sun, 1952” (52), “Cape Cod Evening, 1939” (96–7), “South Carolina Morning, 1955” (100–1), “High Noon, 1949” (102), “Cape Cod Morning, 1950” (103), “Summertime, 1943” (122–3), “Sunlight on Brownstones,

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1956” (129), “Summer Evening, 1947” (156–7), “People in the Sun, 1960” (164–5), and “Rooms by the Sea, 1951” (176). 12 The epistemological conundrum of the “unknown self” that becomes a central claim throughout much of Oates’s Journal (172) inevitably leads to Oates’s important self-characterization there as “The Invisible Woman,” in a key entry from 15 August 1978: “A title for this journal I have just decided upon. Since I feel myself ‘invisible’ so often. In small domestic ways as well as the larger, more obvious ones” (410, 269, 363, 269). “Invisibility” thus tends to be coordinate with Peter Hallward’s suggestion that Deleuze “abandons the category of the subject altogether,” that is, “abandons the subject in favour of our more immediate subjection to the creative life or thought” (163). Further reference in Oates’s Journal to “anonymity” may be found on 372, 382, 423; and, linked indissociably to “invisibility” on 365, 423, 437, and passim. 13 Daneen Wardrop in her admirable study of Emily Dickinson’s Gothic underscores a certain “hesitation” in face of the synthesis and integration of human identity coterminous with the “epistemology of Western thought” (108; further on 167, 173, 174, and passim). “We meet no Stranger but Ourself” is Dickinson’s horrific riposte to such subjective consolidation (qtd on 115). Such hesitation “beyond the pale of ‘normal’ individuation,” as Wardrop put it (195n13), is arguably a Deleuzian formulation in light of my preceding argument, and allows the Gothic project to pass from Dickinson to Oates as I endeavour to show in what now follows. 14 “My connnection … with the distinguished dead Emily Dickinson,” Oates observes, is “[felt] so like oneself … in [a] void” – “The universe squeezed into a single room,” she elsewhere remarks (Journal 421, 255; further in Faith of a Writer 26). “By this pathway Emily Dickinson created herself as a poet,” Oates surmises, “and I am exactly the same” (255). 15 “Successive approximation” comes fairly close to what Wardrop, once again, foregrounds as “hesitation” in Dickinsonian Gothic since “hesitation prolongs a moment of happening in the now, and a series of such moments, nows, gives itself over to suspense … [or] Uncertainty, the Heideggerian principle manifested as literary space [which] implies the condition of nearing as opposed to the condition of arriving” – approximation, in other words (15, and further on 130, 140, 141, 143, and passim). 16 “In the metropolis,” Donald similarly argues, “fleeting contacts and transient relationships make it difficult to assert your own personality. This problem then produces a more expressive, and again specifically modern, reaction. It manifests itself in an aesthetic of self-creation, which can verge

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on being a parody of individuality” (11). I shall return to this whole issue of the problematic construction of urban identity at the end of the chapter. 17 For a further elaboration of such “Distance” in the context of the dissident subject in American literature, see the opening chapter here and my Going the Distance more generally. chapter four

 1 In George Santayana, Literary Philosopher, Irving Singer remarks that “hardly anything is known about Santayana’s sexuality,” but proffers further: “One of the rare bits of evidence occurs in a conversation between Santayana and [Daniel] Cory [author of Santayana, the Later Years: A Portrait with Letters (1963)] that is often misquoted. They have been ­reading the poetry of A.E. Housman, and Santayana remarks: ‘I suppose Housman was really what people nowadays call “homosexual” … I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days – although I was unconscious of it at the time’” (57).   2 In Bates’s view, it is in fact Stevens who offers the more compelling model for androgynous dualism contrary to Santayana’s self-attribution: “If Santayana and Garrett Stevens [Wallace’s father] could not be one man [“vacuous gentility” in the former as opposed to “vulgar opportunism” in the latter], they could still be – and were – cobegetters of the poet who spent a lifetime trying to restore these halves to their first integrity, surprising critics who thought the task impossible and dismaying those who thought it misguided” (35).   3 The link between Freud and Santayana (and by implication, Stevens) on the issue identity in relation to erotism is nicely suggested by Singer who notes that “like [Freud] too, Santayana derives all ideals from human interest in the sense that nothing could be an ideal except in relation to some need or desire. [Hence,] Santayana’s ideal objects are just imagined satisfactions, and authoritative only as human beings choose to make them so” (89; see also 62, 91, 98, 101, and 133).   4 “In order to know whether someone is fulfilling his or her real nature,” Singer clarifies further, “we would look not for integrity with an underlying core of personhood, but rather for a spiral that harmoniously wends its way through the universe,” and offers the well-known lines of Madame Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady as an example; to wit: “What shall we call our ‘self’? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it flows back again” (30).

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  5 In the “androgynous mixing of genders” that Ross Posnock attributes to Santayana, an androgyny “that incorporates otherness into the self,” Posnock views such mixing of “flexible gender indentifications” as one “occur[ring] in the pre-Oedipal phase” of human development (200). In relation to American literary history, this phase is arguably coordinate with Emerson’s pre-Freudian antebellum discourse, as in his lecture on “The Heart” (1838) wherein, as Caleb Crain writes, “[Emerson] seems to have fused his experiences with men (i.e, [Martin] Gay) and his experiences with women (i.e., [Lidian] Jackson) into one narrative of how affection coaxes the self into belief in other selves … [since] Emerson did not distinguish homosexual from heterosexual relationships. As he wrote in his essay ‘Love,’ ‘Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality’ … [because it is an] androgynous relationship that concerns ‘The Heart’…” (190, emphasis added).   6 In Marjorie Garber’s work on the sublimation of sexuality in more contemporaneously androgynous figures like Liberace, Valentino, and Elvis, it is further interesting to note that “‘The Pelvis’ [sobriquet for “Elvis”] – the anatomical region which seems at first specific, but is in fact both remarkably vague and distinctly ungendered – became the site of speculation and spectatorship” (“Transvestite Continuum” 275). I shall return to Garber’s work briefly at the chapter’s conclusion.   7 “We must remember,” Yacovone once again observes (citing Robert K. Martin as well), “that ‘many Victorians managed what seems to us the difficult balancing act of believing that love between men which had no overt physical consequences was therefore untouched by physical motivation.’” A salutary sense of the vague, therefore, perhaps becomes something of a psychological out “for some individuals of the nineteenth century [where] there may indeed have been ambivalent, disturbed, or incomprehensible sexual drives behind their friendships” (94).   8 Bates observes that in giving the name “Genteel Tradition” to a group of New England writers – upper class, tasteful, masculinely heroic – at Berkeley in 1911, Santayana “praised Walt Whitman as the only American writer who managed to escape it completely” (23). Singer, to the contrary, detects some notable “opposition to pragmatism” on Santayana’s part (31; also at 17).   9 Anent the tropology of distance taken up in the introduction, a quatrain of the early Stevens published in the 2 June 1900 issue of Advocate reveals that a preoccupation with this notion was with Stevens from the beginning. The stanza reads: “He sought the music of distant spheres / By night, upon an empty plain, apart; / Nor knew they hid their singing all the years / Within the keeping of his human heart” (qtd in Souvenirs and

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Prophecies 70). And so at the termination of Stevens’s career with “the desire to be at end of distances” just cited. Significantly, Holly Stevens observes that the much earlier quatrain “could have been dedicated to Santayana” (70). 10 McGilligan offers further insight into just how intense these predilections became for all concerned, citing Garson Kanin on the issue in particular: “We were all great pals, in addition to being coworkers,” said Kanin. “He [Cukor] was certainly a great respecter of the text, once it had been set. And we used to have a lot of conferences and talk about the script … It was all very ensemble in spirit. And things we didn’t like, or which irritated one, or you didn’t understand, you were able to state it, which one doesn’t always get an opportunity to do in this business. It was not just friendship, but an artistic collaboration” (193–4). Likewise in Cukor’s work with screenplay writer Moss Hart (on A Star Is Born [1954]) who succeeded the Kanins, “Both [Hart] and Cukor made career virtues out of collaboration” (221). 11 In the very last interview in the Long collection conducted by the gay journal The Advocate in 1982, Cukor maintains a discreet silence about his sexual orientation apparently to the very end (he died a year later). In response to the question, “Do you think that everybody’s private life – even a celebrity’s – is really their own business?” the director replies: “Mine is. Besides, it would embarrass me. Not that I’m cagey or anything like that. I’m just of a different generation” (183–4). 12 Concluding one of his several commentaries on Adam’s Rib, a film that clearly has mesmerized American philosopher Stanley Cavell over a long career, Cavell similarly observes: “Perhaps it is the temptation to know and say more than we can know and safely say [about Cukor’s film]. Perhaps it is the wish to deny that we know all there is to know in order to say what is to be said” (Cities of Words 81). 13 Similarly, in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, “a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the ‘I think’ … [means] the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other, and in so doing invoke a mysterious coherence in the last instance … [coterminous with] a dissolved self …” (58). 14 Elsewhere, Deleuze remarks that “the face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye” (Thousand Plateaus 168). 15 Cavell’s gay characterization of Kip Lurie was one that Cukor himself was somewhat resistant to, according to the director’s other substantial

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biographer, Emmanuel Levy, who records the director as saying: “There should not be even the slightest indication that Kip is a pansy” (178). Levy attributes the remark possibly to an overly censorious production code at the time, but the definitional displacements of collaboration as I am arguing might also indicate why Cukor was “uncomfortable” about talking about Kip’s character in this way, and therefore chose to “remain silent” about him (178). I shall return to this issue in the final section of this chapter. 16 “Furthermore,” Deleuze remarks, “we must simultaneously take into account two aspects of the [distanciated] territory: it not only ensures and regulates the coexistence of the members of the same species by keeping them apart, but makes possible the coexistence of a maximum number of different species in the same milieu by specializing them” (320). See further my Going the Distance, “Introduction.” chapter five

  1 On this more prophylactic sense of distance that I endeavour to worry in much of what follows, Epstein aptly cites a passage from Marjorie Perloff’s landmark Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977): “O’Hara’s view of Wallace Stevens is respectful but somewhat distanced … A great poet, in short, but one who looks to the past rather than to the future.” Far from “never seem[ing] to have much interest in … Stevens” (a further claim of Perloff’s early study), Epstein persists once again to the contrary: “Perloff, like so many other critics, overlooks O’Hara’s early enthusiasm for Stevens and his later, subtle responses to Stevensian motifs and ideas [elaborated elsewhere in Beautiful Enemies]” (325n4).   2 “Stevens, of course, is the precursor [poet],” writes Epstein, “who has been most firmly linked with Ashbery, from O’Hara’s initial review of Some Trees to Harold Bloom’s campaign to canonize Ashbery as Stevens’ greatest descendent” (237), so that the Hillringhouse interview can begin to ­dismantle that monocular mindset concerning the New York School poets with Barbara Guest’s own testimonial just here.   3 According to Sara Lundquist, Guest frequently projects “her own sense of the mystery of things, the way people and objects occupy space, of gorgeous surfaces, and suggestive depths” (20).  4 Cf. also John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972): “there is now interleaving the pages of suffering and indifference to suffering a prismatic space that cannot be seen, merely felt as the result of an angularity that must have existed from earliest times and is only now succeeding in making its

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presence felt … as an open field of narrative possibilities” (Collected Poems 273).   5 “Appropriate sense of distance” might be a further gloss on this passage from O’Hara. For as Lytle Shaw observes, “The names are recalcitrant matter – designating identities from which we (and here this ‘we’ includes O’Hara) are held at a careful distance. To universalize them is therefore not adequate; instead, they are strategic reminders that block our easy identification” (33). This distancing technique thus becomes a privileged trope throughout much of Stevens’s “Poetics of Coterie”: see further on 44, 68, 69, 125, 156, 167, 173, 174, and 233.   6 “Joe Lesueur [affirms] the boy’s club attitude exhibited by charter members of the [New York School poets], explaining that ‘no woman besides Jane [Freilicher] was part of the clique, not even Barbara Guest’” (qtd in Gray 70).  7 Cf. further Guest’s “The Shadow of Surrealism,” a talk given at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 1986: “When I look at certain paintings they begin to enter my unconscious. I then ask how the metamorphosis took place, and if the process I witness can be used in my own work” (Forces 53).   8 On behalf of Frank O’Hara on this point, Lytle Shaw follows Svetlana Boym’s take on the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, another of O’Hara’s elderly precursor-poets: to wit, “Excessive personification and depersonalization become closely interwoven, and the poet’s self-­ metaphorizing ‘I’ turns into a discontinuous series of personae, in which it is impossible to distinguish between mask and face, cloth and skin” (qtd on 128; and further on 112, 113, and 233).   9 Barbara Foley remarks generally on the “mass paranoia about Communists infiltrating the government and its security apparatus [that] served to equate Communism with treason in the national imagination” (542). In Carmichael’s terms, then, the linking of “Communist” and “queer” would seem almost inevitable as Walkowitz points out in her introduction, in addition to remarking how “a Cold War rhetoric” might further relate these scandalous realities to “lack of patriotism, bad motherhood, and other accusations framed as social pathology” (7). For more on the linkage between Communists and queers, see also D’Emilio (Making Trouble 60–2), Savran (4–6), and Jarraway (Going the Distance 71–2). 10 Specifically in relation to the former tradition, Lehman is tempted to characterize the opposition of New York School writing as “antiacademic” – writing “opposed [to] the specific mood and mind-set, and the critical dispensation, prevailing in the English departments of America in the postwar era … [when] poets were taught to regard a poem as a verbal icon, a

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taut web of tensions in balance, in the manner of … John Donne or George Herbert.” “Antiacademic in this case,” Lehman scruples to add, “means not a prejudice against the literary; it means an upheaval in canons of taste and judgment – shattering of the well-wrought urn of midcentury” (332). For a further contextualization of this issue in relation to Frank O’Hara, see Jarraway, Going the Distance 79–80. 11 Cesare Casarino’s searching rumination that “the closet seems to date as the strategy of containment, as the instrument of oppression, and as the site of production par excellence of same-sex desire in modern Western culture” (200) thus usefully suggests the paradoxical trajectory that I propose to outline for the “irrational element” of Schuyler’s queer depictions of expressive life in what follows. 12 Remarking on a similar “silence” in the opening section of Lyotard’s The Differend, William Watkin raises the issue of a “debate on how to put silence into language in such a way that it will not negate its irreducible specificity,” and concludes, quite rightly I think, that “the relation of the thing to language in Schuyler is similar” (267n8). 13 On this issue of absent signification or identification, Lehman invites comparison with Ashbery: “In ‘The Skaters,’ Ashbery refers to ‘this leaving-out business,’ calling attention to his poetry’s obliqueness but refusing to offer an explanation, ‘except to say that the carnivorous / Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving / Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still. / Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves’” (135). 14 On the relation between the Real in this concluding passage and its relation to both determinate and indeterminate forms of subjectivization just scanned, Clark is helpful once again: “As the groundless ground, the ‘real’ can itself only be glimpsed transversally through the anthropomorphizing figures with which we populate the ‘objectively’ known universe and that grant it – and presumably us – some measure of peace. Seething beyond that repose is a lawlessness of die Sehnsucht and die Sucht, themselves, of course, figures, too, that humanize the ‘real’” (25). 15 The sheer obliquity of the subjectivization in Schuyler’s “Milk,” therefore, does seem to distance itself from “a distinctly gay macho style” propounded by Robert Corber at this historical juncture (146; and further on 104, 145, 159, and passim). 16 Žižek explains psychoanalytic “enjoyment” (jouissance) in relation to “the status of the excessive voice which stands for the eclipse of meaning” (147).

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17 According to Braidotti, “Nomadic citizenship” constructed via the “figuration” of something quite close to Stevens’s diva-dame is thus “created as an in-between space of zigzagging and of crossing: nonlinear and chaotic, but in the productive sense of unfolding virtual spaces” (Nomadic Theory 226). chapter six

 1 In Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief, I cite that remark, adding that “in response to a New Verse questionnaire on matters generally poetic, [Stevens] indicates that he had read only Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (OP 307) though it is Freud’s The Future of an Illusion that is recorded in Stevens’ library,” according to Peter Brazeau. Further, “Stevens’ dismissive attitude toward Freud in his letters may be further sampled in communications to Ronald Lane Latimer (January 10, 1936) and Harry Duncan (February 23, 1945), which carries over into some of the prose of The Necessary Angel on 14–15 and 139–40” (42, 42n24).   2 The issue of “androgyny” in Stevens has elicited several psychoanalytic readings provoked by the writings of Carl Jung: Frank Doggett, Edward Kessler, Susan Weston, and Denise Frusciante most recently. My own approach in previous chapters has been to take up the matter in more historically and culturally resonant terms than those of Jung, but not in quite so disparaging a way as Frank Lentricchia alluded to by Brogan (Violence Within 175n21). In response to the “open-ended continuum for the serial construction of subjectivity” à la diva-dame just alluded to, Daniel Schwartz suggests that “we may find it helpful in reading Stevens to abandon the concept of a consistent persona and to admit the possibility of hearing multiple – and at times contradictory and cacophanous – voices, as if they were intersecting planes on the order of a Cubist collage or diverse motifs in a symphony” (7; further on 6 and 28).   3 With her own focus on Parts of a World (in addition to Stevens’s subsequent Transport to Summer [1947]), Jacqueline Brogan accounts for the “later” Stevens as the result of “his response to the Second World War” so that readers “find the beginnings of Stevens’s change from a rather posturing ‘masculine’ or ‘virile’ poet, quite full of the ‘rage to order,’ to a poet increasingly open to what we might metaphorically call the ‘feminine’ or ‘other,’ including racial ‘others’ … that culminated in a genuine ‘revolutionary poetics’ that remains important to us today” (Violence Within 7, and further on 105, 109, 119, and passim).

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  4 Elsewhere Pearson remarks, “Freud’s conception of organic life runs counter to the deepest tendencies of Deleuze’s thinking of difference and to his affirmation of univocal Being as difference.” He therefore finds Nietzsche “and his teaching of eternal return” as the better provocation and model in Deleuze for organic life “to open itself up to the open system of the ‘outside,’ not to resist the temptation of the demonic and the monstrous [Freud’s infamous Death Drive], but to encounter those ‘dark precursors,’ the difference in itself which relates heterogeneous systems and the disparate” (113, 114). This opening of subjectivity to the ghastly prospect of some dark or demonic “outside” I shall return to later in the chapter.   5 Accordingly, “the creation of (this) concept of the Other Person,” so Gregg Lambert contends, “represents perhaps the most profound and yet most subtle transformations [sic] in Deleuze’s entire philosophical system” (10), and in light of “Jumbo’s” elephantine “transformer, himself transformed” (c p p 241), perhaps the most profound alteration in Stevens’s own canon as well.   6 For “forms of disengagement,” Bart Eeckhout (following Helen Vendler) offers “distancing ploys” that arise intermittently from Stevens’s own “violently fluctuating moods and multiple ambivalences” that, from a psychic point of view, reveal the poet to be “a highly divided figure who was able to dramatize his own inner contradictions” (42, 43; and further on 36, 38, 108n100, 139, and 220n26).   7 For further contextualizations of Stevens and Jamesian Pragmatism, see Lentricchia, Grey, and Poirier most prominently, in addition to my commentary on it in chapter 4. The linkages of American Pragmatism to Deleuze, in addition to the reference taken up below in Difference and Repetition, are more abundantly developed in A Thousand Plateaus where “a pragmatics (semiotic or political)” is invoked “to define the effectuation of the condition of possibility” referred to previously (85, emphasis retained; further on 25, 85, 148, 217, and passim). Inna Semetsky enlargens these linkages to the second-generation American Pragmatism of John Dewey.   8 Anent Braidotti’s “hauntology” as subjectivity’s indigent lack, see also the Freudian “Coda” to Mutlu Blasing’s recent Lyric Poetry entitled “The Haunted House of ‘Anna’” (198–203).   9 Hence, to go with Merwin’s titular “Leave the Door Open,” Deleuze and Guattari further observe, “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between multiplicities” (Thousand Plateaus 249) as it stages its breakaway from the home’s “black hole” alluded to elsewhere (Thousand Plateaus 311).

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10 Hence, the importance of “a borderland imagination” throughout much of the Bishop canon, so Fountain concludes; that is, “a creating spirit that is beyond nationality, beyond imperialistic control” (307). I shall come back to this issue of the “borderland” or “threshold” at the end of the chapter. 11 “I was homesick for 2 days once when I was nine years old,” Bishop records in a notebook entry while making her way to Europe in 1935, “[because] I wanted one of my aunts. Now [as a fully formed adult, Bishop implies] I really have no right to homesickness at all” (qtd in Millier 87). 12 For the historical evolution of the “homely domesticity” within Western culture that ultimately epitomizes “the woman’s role in the home” by the turn of the last century, see Rybczynski’s Home: A Short History of an Idea (75, and passim), and further, Rubinstein’s “There’s NO Place Like ‘Home’” for the sometimes “traumatic” implications of such emplacement. 13 Clearly invigorated by a houseless nonidentity, Bishop not surprisingly was taken with a Paul Klee exhibition mounted at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1949–50 and significantly titled Flight from Self (First Stage), which Samuels documents the poet visiting on at least three separate occasions (224n1). 14 Again, the thought is quintessentially Emersonian as in his essay on “Experience,” to wit: “Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans” (qtd in von der Heydt 194). Hence, as von der Heydt notes, Bishop’s “Sandpiper” is a poem “about precisely her own fascination with the ocean,” a text which Bishop inserts in a talk in late career referenced further down. “The speech, with which Bishop accepted a poetry award,” writes von der Heydt, “was given in Norman, Oklahoma, and Bishop dwells for fully two-thirds of the short talk on her life on shores and the unfamiliarity of being so far inland” (215n11). 15 According to Samuels, “Bishop associated verse with water, especially with water’s fluctuation between two and three dimensions so that verse becomes felt as a deep surface.” Indeed, one fragment in Bishop’s notebooks “claims to have promised ‘Always to live over water / & never to resist its verses.’” “The most explicit linkage [between the surface of the sea and poetic ­lineation],” Samuels concludes, “occurs in ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’: ‘the waves are running in verses this very fine morning’” (37, 39). 16 “As Gehry’s work is about gradual evolution – the development of a project as it takes shape through a long series of physical models –,” so the editor of Architecture + Process remarks, “we have included a number of process models that demonstrate the architect’s unique working method”

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(Friedman 8, and further on 17, 19, 22, 54, 195, and passim). Further examples of Gehry’s “process” architecture effectively showcasing all of the features previously enumerated can be sampled in Friedman, especially with reference to the following: Steeves House (later Smith House) in Brentwood, California (102); Davis Studio & Residence in Malibu, California (122); Norton Simon Guest House in Malibu, California (136); Spiller House in Venice, California (134); Wosk Penthouse in Beverly Hills, California (190); Norton House in Venice, California (208); Winton Guest House in Wayzata, Minnesota (232); Sirmai-Peterson House in Thousand Oaks, California (234); Schnabel House in Brentwood, California (308); and of course Gehry’s own “Old and New House” in Santa Monica, California (38). 17 On the “distance” in both Stein and Bishop as a rhetorical formulation for dissident subjectivity, see my Going the Distance for extended chapters on both these not unrelated American writers. 18 “Some clients don’t understand the process,” Gehry further remarks. “What I’m telling them is, ‘I’m bringing you into the process. Watch it, get involved …’ [But really,] I don’t know where I’m going. I just [try to] explain the issues” (qtd in Friedman, Architecture 53). conclusion

  1 In an essay entitled “The Search for Acceptable Words” published in 1973, Frye proffers a similar reservation concerning the media in mass culture: “The book quâ book is not linear: we follow a line while we are reading it, but the book itself is a stationary visual focus of a community. It is the electronic media that increase the amount of linear experience, of things seen and heard that are quickly forgotten. One sees the effects on students: a superficial alertness combined with increased difficulty in preserving the intellectual continuity that is the chief characteristic of education.” Hence, “the book … is the technological instrument that makes democracy a working possibility” (Spiritus Mundi 9, 8). However in a much later essay, “Literature as Therapy” from 1989, Frye is much more convinced of the power of filmmaking. “What I am suggesting,” he records there, “is that we should not overlook the immense recuperative power that literature, along with the other arts, could provide in a world as crazy as ours. Poets themselves often do not realize their own potentiality in this regard. I think filmmakers, of all the producers of art, have perhaps the clearest and most consistent notion of it” (34).

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  2 I use “mainstream” here in the sense of what Frye would characterize as the “normal.” Thus like film noir, “What irony appeals to is a sense of normality on the part of the audience. That is, we recognize a certain action to be grotesque or absurd or evil or futile or whatever, and it is that sense of normality in the audience that enables irony to make its point as irony. Without the sense of the normal [“mainstream” as opposed to “noir” filmmaking], irony would cease to become ironic and become simply description” (“Literature as Therapy” 29).   3 For a more thoroughgoing survey of the typical features of the noir genre, see Dickos, Street with No Name, especially the introduction, 6–9.   4 The screenplay dialogue accessed here, and throughout the remainder of this conclusion, can be found at http://www.reelclassics.com/Movies/ Shadow/shadow2.htm.   5 And all the difference, finally, between the merely passive and the more active student in our very own classrooms, Frye further reminds us, where “literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great [works], but to some possession of [their] power of utterance [whose] ­ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one …” (w t c 47).

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Index

abolitionists, 122–3 Abstract Expressionism, 168, 173, 178 acquired selfhood, 54–5 Adagia (Stevens), 165, 204 Adam’s Rib (film): approach to, 7–8; Cavell on, 141, 255n12; close-ups in, 141–2; and Cukor’s collaborative approach, 137, 142–3, 153, 155, 156, 157; dismantling of dualism in, 139–40; dismantling of realism in, 137– 9, 151; effect of, 133; and endless displacement, 141; gender treated in, 135–7, 146, 147; queer tinge to, 142, 154, 255n15; and Stevens, 157; synopsis of, 135; title of, 143; title song of, 143–4, 154; “Vive la différence!” ending, 144, 154, 157; vs. Woman of the Year, 144, 147, 155 Adorno, Theodor, 19, 67, 171 “Adult Epigram” (Stevens), 4, 14–15, 34, 43. See also diva-dame affect, 184. See also stuttering

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Agamben, Giorgio, 141, 143, 155, 202 “Almanac, An” (Schuyler), 174 America, see United States of America American, The (James), 66 American film, see film noir; Hollywood films American literature: and Deleuze, 4, 5, 14, 99, 101, 171, 192, 211, 228; dissident identity in, 128; distance in, 16–17, 75; domestic space in, 7, 79, 88, 89, 93, 213, 227–8, 248n4; Gothic tradition in, 100; homosociality in, 118; identity in, 3, 13; lack of Cartesian certainties in, 79–80; nothingness in, 86–7; outsideness in, 96; vagueness in, 125 American Pragmatism, see Pragmatism “American Sublime” (Doty), 22–3 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 231, 232, 246 androgyny: and an ambivalent erotism, 125; approach to, 7; Christian social, 122–3; and

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28 4 index

distance, 71; Emerson on, 254n5; Hall on, 127; and Henry James, 58, 73; introduction to, 58; key to, 71; Posnock on, 58; and Santayana, 58, 62, 73, 116– 17, 254n5; and Stevens, 58, 59, 253n2; and sublimation of sexuality, 254n6 androgyny, poetics of: as agnostic, 72; aim of, 197–8; betweenness sense of, 71; and coasts, 70; and desire, 68–9; and Doty, 63–4, 73; and elective ignorance, 66, 68–9; gendered absence at centre of, 64, 68, 71; in “Grosse Fuge” (Doty), 71–2; in “Montrachet” (Stevens), 62–3; in “Nocturne in Black and Gold” (Doty), 63–4; in Santayana’s work, 197–8; as self-made, 66; in Stevens’s work, 119–20, 121, 126, 197–8, 201, 259n2 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari): on Freud, 7, 196–7. See also Deleuze, Gilles architecture, 9, 127, 224–5, 226, 262n18. See also home Arenas, Reinaldo, 60 “Argument” (Bishop), 227 art: Agamben on, 141, 202; Deleuze on, 18, 22, 207; Plato on, 229 artist, 112, 117, 141 “Artist Looks at Nature, The” (Oates), 94 Art of Description, The (Doty), 164 “Art of Fiction, The” (Updike), 76, 84 Ashbery, John: on houses in work of, 170; on multiple selves, 167;

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New Realism of, 178; on Stein, 176; and Stevens, 8, 58–9, 158, 256n2 Ashbery, John, works of: “Clepsydra,” 168; Flow Chart, 167; “The Impossible,” 176; “The New Realism,” 161; “The Skaters,” 258n13; Three Poems, 256n4 “Asides on the Oboe” (Stevens), 204–5, 208 Atlantis (Doty), 59, 62, 64, 69, 71–2 “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop), 216, 217 “Auguries of Experience” (Frye), 241–2 Bachelard, Gaston, 88 Bacon, Francis, 18 Barthes, Roland, 66 Bates, Milton J., 113–14, 125–6, 253n2, 254n8 Beautiful Enemies (Epstein), 8, 158, 256nn1–2 “Beautiful Voyage, The” (Guest), 165 becoming-animal, 97, 186–7, 193, 194 becoming-child, 184, 194 becoming-Other, 184, 185, 194 becoming-subject, 77 becoming-woman: approach to, 14; Braidotti on, 248n6; Deleuze and Guattari on, 32–3, 34, 36; as deterritorialization of identity, 35; for dismantling binary systems, 32–3; and masculine identity, 29; and No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), 29, 33–4;

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and woman, 32, 248n6. See also diva-dame “Belgravia” (Guest), 162–3, 164 Belour, Raymond, 242 Benjamin, Jessica, 80 Berger, James, 26, 28, 34 Bergman, David, 60 Berlant, Lauren, 37, 45, 68 Bérubé, Allan, 154–5, 242 Bishop, Elizabeth: acceptance speech for Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize, 223, 261n14; approach to, 9, 215; and architecture, 223–4, 225; association of verse with water, 261n15; borderland imagination of, 261n10; Boston home of, 225–6; and Brazil, 219–20; Brazilian house of, 225; and Canada, 216–17, 219, 223; on distance, 227; and female identity, 221; and Gehry, 223, 225; haunted subjects in work of, 228; homeless identity of, 221, 228, 261n13; on homesickness, 261n11; houses for, 218; on identity, 223; and Klee exhibition, 220, 261n13; and Lowell, 219, 221, 222; and mystery around human identity, 221, 222; reputation of, 221–2; skepticism over identity of, 217–18; space in work of, 220; and Stevens, 215, 216, 228 Bishop, Elizabeth, works of: “Argument,” 227; “A Summer’s Dream,” 217; “At the Fish­ houses,” 216, 217; “Cape Breton,” 217, 228; A Cold Spring, 227; “Darwin Letter,” 177–8,

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215–16; “Homesickness,” 218; “In the Waiting Room,” 218; “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” 261n15; “Letter to New York,” 227; “Primer Class,” 217; “Questions of Travel,” 219; “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics,” 222; “Sandpiper,” 220, 223, 261n14; “Sestina,” 163, 226; “Sonnet,” 222; “Squatter’s Children,” 227; “The End of March,” 225, 226; “The Moose,” 217; Words in Air, 221 Black Spirits and White (Cram), 124 Blood, Benjamin, 125, 126, 211 Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 23 Bloom, Harold, 256n2 Bodies That Matter (Butler), 22, 44, 53, 58, 249n3. See also Butler, Judith Bornstein, Kate, 120 Boswell, Marshall, 78, 82 “Bouquet of Belle Scavoir” (Stevens), 209, 210, 211 Boym, Svetlana, 257n8 Braidotti, Rosi: on becomingwoman, 248n6; on Deleuze’s pragmatic philosophy, 212; on figurations, 165–6; on Freudian unconscious for Deleuze, 205–6; on future perfect tense for imagination, 251n4; on home, 6; on looking through reality, 216; Metamorphoses, 205–6, 212; on narcissism, 204; on nomadic citizenship, 259n17; on sexual difference for Deleuze, 120; on space for making a home, 221. See also Nomadic Theory (Braidotti)

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28 6 index

Brazeau, Peter, 259n1; Remember­ ing Elizabeth Bishop, 221–2 Brent, Jonathan, 108 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 121 Britton, Andrew, 139, 146, 154 Brodkey, Harold, 158 Brogan, Jacqueline, 48, 259n3 Broke Heart Blues (Oates), 16, 89 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 131 Bruns, Gerald, 248n1 Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter, 22, 44, 53, 58, 249n3; on distance, 22; on gender categories, 44, 65; on repetition and gender identity, 53, 180; on sexuality, 37; on social space for community, 22, 58; on writing, 249n3 “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” (Updike), 74, 77, 79 “Candle a Saint, The” (Stevens), 201 canon formation, 38 “Cape Breton” (Bishop), 217, 228 Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari): on Freud, 181, 196, 200. See also Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari); Deleuze, Gilles; Thou­ sand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari) Carmichael, Virginia, 151, 162, 172, 242, 257n9 Casarino, Cesare, 258n11 Case, Sue-Ellen, 71 Castle, Terry, 250n8 Catholicism, 121, 123 causality, 188 Cavell, Stanley, 141, 143, 154, 255n12, 255n15

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Chandler, Marilyn, 247n4 “Chanteuse” (Doty), 65, 67 Chaplin, Charlie: The Great Dictator, 146 Chauncey, George, 249n8 “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” (Stevens), 161, 164 Ciclón, 60 cinematic space, 155–6 city theory, 103, 104, 252n16 Clark, David L., 176, 258n14 Cleghorn, Angus: “Erotic Poetics” special issue, 38 “Clepsydra” (Ashbery), 168 Cohan, Steven, 155 Cold Spring, A (Bishop), 227 Cold War: containment culture of, 8; and family life, 136; and George Stevens, 155; linkage during between sexual and political deviance, 132, 155, 242–3; perfecting myths of, 151–2, 162, 242, 257n9; and Schuyler, 173–4, 176–7, 182–3; sexuality and gender during, 168; and women, 136, 150–1 Colebrook, Claire, 10, 34, 35 collaboration: and Adam’s Rib, 137, 142–3, 153, 155, 156, 157; approach to, 147; as controversial, 129–30; and Cukor, 128–9, 130, 131–2, 147, 154, 155, 156, 255n10; Deleuze on, 128–9, 132–3, 139, 147; ethic of, 143; in New York School, 134 Confidence-Man, The (Melville), 229, 235, 245 consciousness, human, 115. See also unconscious containment, 56–7, 141

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index 287

“Contrary Theses” (Stevens), 213–14 Crain, Caleb, 118, 122, 254n5 Cram, Ralph Adams, 123–4, 127 creativity, 79, 88, 213 critical legal studies, 38 Critical Path, The (Frye), 231, 244, 245–6 criticism, 231 Cukor, George: approach to, 7–8, 112–13, 128; and autobiography, 140; biography of, 154; collaborative approach of, 128–9, 130, 131–2, 147, 154, 155, 156, 255n10; and Hart, 255n10; and Hepburn, 134, 139; and Hepburn/Tracy duo, 129, 141; on Hollywood, 129; and Kanins, 129, 131; on Kip Lurie in Adam’s Rib, 255n15; sexuality of, 132, 255n11. See also Adam’s Rib (film) cultural discourse, 52 cultural studies, 38 Cunningham, Michael. See Home at the End of the World, A (Cunningham) Dabney, Lewis M., 115 “Darwin Letter” (Bishop), 177–8, 215–16 Davidson, Michael, 134 de Certeau, Michel, 85, 104 Deleuze, Gilles: as abandoning the subject, 252n12; on affect in poetry, 184; and American film, 132; and American literature, 4, 5, 14, 99, 101, 171, 192, 211, 228; on animal-becoming, 186; on art, 18, 22, 207; on

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becoming imperceptible to self, 195, 209; on becoming-Other, 194; on becoming-woman, 32–3, 34, 36; Being for, 4, 14, 260n4; on breaking through signifier, 90, 222, 255n14; on capitalist schizophrenia, 14; on causality, 188; on chaos of worldly expe­ rience, 92, 227; on close-ups in film, 141–2; Colebrook on, 10; on collaboration, 128–9, 132–3, 139, 147; on depersonalization and identity, 189; on destruction of human identity, 202; on deterritorialized identity, 201; and difference, 7, 8, 10, 260n4; on dismantled self, 90, 222; on distance, 13, 14, 20, 157, 214, 244; on distanciated territory, 256n16; and diva-dame, 4, 10, 15; on divergence in predication of experience, 18–19; on dreams, 229; emancipatory embryology of, 237; and exclusionary thinking, 18; fractures in work of, 207; on Freud, 181, 196–7, 199– 201; and Freudian unconscious, 206, 207; on gender, 44–5; on Godard, 133; on Gothic art, 100, 101; and Guattari, 132–3; on home and house, 89, 92–3, 96, 98–9, 143–4, 171, 213, 219, 227; on human abstraction, 214; on Humpty Dumpty, 243; on Idea, 206; on identity, 3–4, 20, 21, 31, 206–7; on imaginative detachment, 244; on infinite self-predication, 5, 16; and interiority, 212; on language, 184, 190; larval subject for, 208;

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28 8 index

literary theory of, 3–4, 13–14; on Mandelstam and stuttering, 76, 184; on man in Western culture, 31; on “mysterious coherence” of identity, 48, 90, 202, 255n13; on narcissistic ego, 198, 201–2, 203, 204, 208, 209–10, 211; on Nature-thought, 186; on Nietzsche, 243; on nonknowledge, 97; organic life for, 260n4; Other Person in work of, 260n5; on perception, 18; positive distance of, 6–7, 19; pragmatic philosophy of, 212; and Pragmatism, 4–5, 10, 15, 260n7; on processes vs. transcendent universals, 137; and psychoanalysis, 200–1, 206; on reality, 138, 208; on repetition, 52–3, 138; and schizophrenia, 191, 196; on self-experimentation and identity, 31, 188; on sexual difference, 120; on Strike (Eisenstein), 100; on stuttering, 142, 184, 188–9, 192; on subjectivity, 90, 134–5; on subjectless individuation, 100; and subjectless subject, 201; on towns, 18; on the unconscious and self-reflection, 4, 14; and Whitman, 230 Deleuze, Gilles, works of: AntiOedipus, 7, 196, 197; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 181, 196, 200; Empiricism and Subjectivity, 3, 13; The Fold, 188; “He Stuttered,” 22, 76, 184, 188–9, 190–1, 194; Negotiations, 128– 9, 132–3, 134, 137, 184; Proust and Signs, 14; “Treatise on

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Nomadology,” 101; “Whitman,” 230. See also Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet); Difference and Repetition (Deleuze); Logic of Sense (Deleuze); Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari); What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) D’Emilio, John, 44, 132, 155, 242–3 depersonalization, 189, 257n8 Derrida, Jacques, 203–4, 205, 208, 249n6 “Description without Place” (Stevens), 214 desire, 67–8, 68–9, 114, 253n3 deterritorialization, 34, 35, 94, 103 Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet): on Anglo-American writers, 211; on animal-becoming, 186; on depersonalization and identity, 189; deterritorialized identity in, 201; on self-experimentation and identity, 31, 188; on stuttering, 142; subjectless subject in, 201. See also Deleuze, Gilles Diary (Schuyler), 175, 179, 180–1 Dickie, Margaret, 215 Dickinson, Emily, 20, 93, 95, 101, 161, 252nn13–14 “Difference” (Doty), 72 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze): on destruction of human identity, 202; on distance, 214; on dreams, 229; emancipatory embryology of, 237; fracture in, 207; on human abstraction, 214; on Idea, 206; larval subject for, 208; on modernist art, 207; on “mysterious coherence” of identity, 48, 90, 202, 255n13;

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on narcissistic ego, 201–2, 203, 209–10, 211; and Pragmatism, 15; and psychoanalysis, 200–1, 206; on reality as repetition, 138; on subjectivity, 90; on the unconscious and self-reflection, 4, 14. See also Deleuze, Gilles displacement, 130, 133, 140–1, 143, 153 dissident subjectivity, 3, 13, 35, 128 distance: in American literature, 16–17, 75; and androgynous rhetoric, 71; of art, 22; Bishop on, 227; Butler on, 22; Deleuze on, 13, 14, 20, 157, 214, 244; Guest on, 168, 172; as imaginative detachment, 244; and interiorized human identity, 76, 85; and language, 71; in New England, 75; of nothing, 22–3; and poetic stuttering, 190; positive, 6–7, 19; rhetorical, 5, 18; as safetyzone, 19; for self-­protection, 6; in Stein, 226; and Stevens, 20, 160–1, 254n9; and subjectivity, 160; Updike on, 76, 77, 85 diva-dame: approach to, 4, 15; as “both-and-neither,” 131; Deleuze on, 4, 10, 15; as “dwelling in categorical ambiguity,” 20–1; as figuration, 165; as infinite selfpredication, 5; Stevens on, 4, 15. See also becoming-woman divergence, 18–19 Doane, Mary Ann, 156 Dollimore, Jonathan, 50 domestic space, see home dominant fiction, 151, 152, 162, 177, 242 Donald, James, 103, 252n16

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Doss, Erika, 138 Doty, Mark: approach to, 5, 6; on art, 22; on Bellotto’s View of the Grand Canal, 17; coast in work of, 70; on desire, 67–8, 68–9, 114; on doubt, 65; on “dreamedof-balance,” 251n8; elective ignorance of, 66; on home, 74, 86, 221, 228; on hope, 66; on human experience, 20; on language, 71; and poetics of androgyny, 63–4, 73; and sexual fluidity, 66–7; spirituality of, 72, 73; and Stevens, 23, 59; on unknown, 164; works of, 59 Doty, Mark, works of: “American Sublime,” 22–3; The Art of Description, 164; Atlantis, 59, 62, 64, 69, 71–2; “Chanteuse,” 65, 67; “Difference,” 72; “Elizabeth Bishop,” 21; “Esta Noche,” 65; “Fish R Us,” 21; “Fog Argument,” 69–70; “Grosse Fuge,” 71–2, 73; “Homo Will Not Inherit,” 72; introduction to Open House, 221; “Letter to Walt Whitman,” 5, 19; My Alexandria, 59, 65; “Nocturne in Black and Gold,” 63–4; Seeing Venice, 17; Source, 21; “Source,” 21–2, 23; Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, 20, 22, 74, 228, 251n8; “The Wings,” 67. See also Heaven’s Coast (Doty) doubt, 65 Duncan, Robert, 59 Edelman, Lee, 38, 50–1, 178 Educated Imagination, The (Frye), 229, 235, 237, 238, 244 Eeckhout, Bart, 126, 260n6

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29 0 index

ego, 79–80, 89–90, 110, 170 Eisenstein, Sergei, 100 Eliot, T.S., 10, 158, 229 “Elizabeth Bishop” (Doty), 21 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: ambiguity in poetry of, 227; and androgynous relationship, 254n5; on creativeness, 79, 88, 213; exilic reflections of, 171; “Experience,” 5, 16, 75, 212, 261n14; on home, 218; on mystery of identity, 108; as mystic, 126; and nonidentity, 221; and Pragmatism, 5; on thought, 192; Updike on, 86 empirical transcendental, 120 Empiricism and Subjectivity (Deleuze): on identity, 3, 13. See also Deleuze, Gilles “End of March, The” (Bishop), 225, 226 Epstein, Andrew: Beautiful Enemies, 8, 158, 256nn1–2; on Emerson, 221 “Erotic Poetics” special issue (Cleghorn), 38 erotism: and androgynous aesthetic, 117, 123, 125, 126; and architecture, 127; and Catholicism, 121, 123; and desire, 114; of fraternal love, 122–3; spectral otherness of, 128; and Stevens, 38, 112, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124–5, 126, 128 essentialism, 26, 126 “Esta Noche” (Doty), 65 “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” (Stevens), 159, 201 exclusion: exclusionary thinking, 17–18; from family, 45, 49, 50; for self-interiority, 81–2

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exile, 170–1 experience, 56, 205 “Experience” (Emerson), 5, 16, 75, 212, 261n14 Facts, The (Roth), 106, 107 “Fair Realism” (Guest), 162, 178 Faith of a Writer, The (Oates), 89, 94, 95 Falls, The (Oates), 88, 89 family, 45–6, 47, 50, 51, 52–3, 136 “February” (Schuyler), 182 female subjectivity, 4. See also becoming-woman; diva-dame; women film, 230, 231. See also Adam’s Rib (film); collaboration; Cukor, George; Hitchcock, Alfred; Hollywood films; Shadow of a Doubt (film); Stevens, George; Woman of the Year (film) film noir, 10, 231, 232, 233, 244. See also Hitchcock, Alfred; Shadow of a Doubt (film) Filreis, Alan, 37–8 Fisher, Philip, 172 “Fish R Us” (Doty), 21 Fleming, Victor: The Wizard of Oz (film), 7, 89, 219 Flieger, Jerry Aline, 32, 68 Flow Chart (Ashbery), 167 “Fog Argument” (Doty), 69–70 Fold, The (Deleuze): on causality, 188. See also Deleuze, Gilles Foley, Barbara, 257n9 Forces of Imagination (Guest), 161, 164, 168, 169, 257n7 Foster, Thomas, 219, 226–7, 248n5 Foucault, Michel, 71

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index 291

Fountain, Gary, 217, 261n10; Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 221–2 freedom, 55, 141, 170, 177 Freely Espousing (Schuyler), 174, 177, 179 Freud, Sigmund: on artists, 112, 117; on house, 247n4; Interpretation of Dreams, 208; on narcissism, 203, 208; on organic life, 260n4; and Santayana, 253n3; and schizophrenics, 196 Freudian psychoanalysis: and American culture, 173, 181; approach to, 9; Deleuze and Guattari on, 181, 196–7, 199– 200; on incorporation, 244; ­sexual excesses of, 180; and Stevens, 9, 195–6, 197, 198, 205, 207, 259n1; for transfamilial experimentation, 173; unconscious in, 205–6, 207; and Updike, 251n5. See also ­narcissism; psychoanalysis friendship, 115 Frost, Robert, 126 Frye, Northrop: on art, 229; on contemporary society, 233; on criticism, 231; on “cult of the holy sinner,” 233; and filmmaking, 231, 262n1; and film noir, 232; ideal critic of, 244; on identity, 245; on imagination, 235, 236, 237; on imaginative detachment, 244; on intrinsic mystery, 246; on irony, 244, 245–6, 263n2; on literary education, 263n5; on literature, 235; on realism, 241; on reality,

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234, 241–2; on Stevens, 9–10, 229–30; on Whitman, 230; on written documents, 231, 262n1 Frye, Northrop, works of: Anatomy of Criticism, 231, 232, 246; “Auguries of Experience,” ­241–2; The Critical Path, 231, 244, 245–6; The Educated Imagination, 229, 235, 237, 238, 244; “Literature as Therapy,” 262n1, 263n2; The Modern Century, 233, 241, 245; “The Realistic Oriole,” 229–30, 236; “The Search for Acceptable Words,” 262n1; The WellTempered Critic, 235, 263n5 Fuss, Diana, 92, 93, 95, 226 Garber, Marjorie, 128, 224, 254n6 Garrisonian community, 122–3 gay men and women. See homosexuality Gehry, Frank, 9, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 262n18 gender, 44–5, 65–6. See also Adam’s Rib (film); androgyny; becoming-woman; gender identity; man; masculine identity; Woman of the Year (film); women gender and sexuality studies, 38. See also sexuality gender identity, 53, 124, 137, 197–8 Godard, Jean Luc, 133 Going the Distance (Jarraway), 3, 13, 35, 128, 132 Gordon, Ruth, 129, 131 Gothic tradition, 100–1, 252n13 “Grave, A” (Schuyler), 180 Gray, Timothy, 167

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29 2 index

Great Dictator, The (film), 146 great minds, 19 Greenberg, Judith, 35 Grey, Thomas, 38, 54, 250n9 “Grosse Fuge” (Doty), 71–2, 73 Guattari, Félix: Anti-Oedipus, 7, 196–7; Capitalism and Schizo­ phrenia, 181, 196, 200; and Deleuze, 132–3; on homosexuality, 147; “Treatise on Nomad­ ology,” 101. See also Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari); What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) Guest, Barbara: approach to, 8; on De Kooning, 168; disarticulation of, 183; dissident sexuality in work of, 162–3; and distance, 168, 172; on home, 169–72; on imagination, 168–9; introduction to, 159; on Kandinsky, 168; on mystery of things, 256n3; and New York School, 159; and O’Hara, 159–60; on paintings, 257n7; plasticity of human identity of, 165, 166–7; realism of, 161–2; on Stevens, 160, 169–70; and Stevens’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” 163–4; and the unconscious, 164–5, 172 Guest, Barbara, works of: “A Handbook of Surfing,” 167, 169; “A Way of Being,” 167; “Belgravia,” 162–3, 164; “Fair Realism,” 162, 178; Forces of Imagination, 161, 164, 168, 169, 257n7; “History,” 171; “Invisible Architecture,” 165; “Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious,” 164; “Parachutes,

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My Love, Could Carry Us Higher,” 163; “Parade’s End,” 163, 166; “Poetry the True Fiction,” 161, 164; “Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry,” 161; “Safe Flights,” 167–8, 171; “Sand,” 166; “Santa Fe Trail,” 171–2; “Shifting Persona,” 169; “The Beautiful Voyage,” 165; “The View from Kandinsky’s Window,” 160; “Vision and Mundanity,” 165 Haines, Bill, 132, 143 Hall, Stanley, 127 Hallward, Peter, 100, 252n12 Halperin, David, 68, 120, 178 Hamilton, Mark, 232 “Hand as a Being, The” (Stevens), 49 “Handbook of Surfing, A” (Guest), 167, 169 Harrington, Joseph, 37, 248n1 Hart, Moss, 255n10 Heaven’s Coast (Doty): androgynous poetics of, 59, 64–5, 67; approach to, 6; desire in, 67, 68, 69, 114; Doty’s spirituality, 72; on doubt, 65; elective ignorance of, 66, 68; ending of, 73; possibility in, 71; Stevens’s influence on, 59. See also Doty, Mark Hepburn, Katharine, 129, 134, 139, 141, 144. See also Adam’s Rib (film); Woman of the Year (film) “Hermitage at the Center, The” (Stevens), 126 hesitation, 252n13, 252n15 “He Stuttered” (Deleuze): on art, 22; on becoming-Other, 194; on

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index 293

Mandelstam and stuttering, 76, 184; on stuttering, 84, 188–9, 190–1. See also Deleuze, Gilles heterosexuality, 44, 122 Hillringhouse, Mark, 160 “History” (Guest), 171 Hitchcock, Alfred: aim of, 244; irony of, 245; male identity in films of, 235, 243; noir film canon of, 232; representation of women by, 244–5; success of, 242; and surplus of the Real, 156. See also Shadow of a Doubt (film) Hollywood films: Belour on, 242; collaboration in, 129–30; and film noir, 231, 245; “realism” of, 151–52, 162, 177, 242. See also Adam’s Rib (film); collaboration; Cukor, George; film; film noir; Hitchcock, Alfred; Shadow of a Doubt (film); Stevens, George; Woman of the Year (film) Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 61 home: Adorno on, 171; in American literature, 7, 79, 88, 89, 93, 213, 227–8, 248n4; for Ashbery, 170; and Bishop, 219; as both belonging and estrangement, 35; Braidotti on, 6; Butler on, 35; Deleuze on, 89, 92–3, 96, 98–9, 143–4, 171, 213, 219, 227; Doty on, 74, 86, 221, 228; Emerson on, 218; Freud on, 247n4; Guest on, 169–72; in A Home at the End of the World, 57; as homelessness, 93, 227; as human personality, 213; in Missing Mom, 88, 89, 92, 96, 98–9; in No Country for Old

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Men, 248nn4–5; for Oates, 88, 89, 96, 99–100, 226; as quasiextensions of self, 92, 226; rock as family and, 44; as self under construction, 92, 226; as terminal, 57; for Updike, 74, 75, 77; in Zuckerman Unbound, 101–2, 103, 104 Home at the End of the World, A (Cunningham): approach to, 6; domestic paradigm shifts in, 42–3, 44, 57–8; epigraph from Stevens, 38–40; family structure in, 46–7, 50, 53; gender in, 44–5; identity in, 53–4; “in the dark” settings in, 249n5; possibility of repetition in, 53; space of possibilities in, 57; and Stevens, 38–9, 49, 52, 58, 249n4; subplot of, 42; synopsis of, 40; temporality rhetoric in, 48–9; transvaluation in, 50; unconventional characters as poetic, 40–1 Home Book 1951–1970, The (Schuyler), 180 “Homesickness” (Bishop), 218 homophobia, 122, 132, 155, 178 homosexual, 178 homosexuality: and acquired selfhood, 55; Casarino on, 258n11; and Catholicism, 121; as disruption of field of vision, 50–1; in eighteenth century, 122; and family structures, 50, 51; and Garrisonian community, 122–3; Guattari on, 147; histories of, 123; and Hollywood, 132; and Platonic ideal, 123–4; and political deviance, 155, 242–3, 257n9; same-sex partnerships, 49–50;

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29 4 index

in Victorian era, 254n7; ways of being, 249n8. See also queer discourse homosociality, 118, 122 homotextual poetics, 162 “Homo Will Not Inherit” (Doty), 72 hooks, bell, 37 Hopper, Edward, 93–4, 95–6 house, see home Howard, Richard, 59, 172 human consciousness, 115. See also unconscious human experience, 20, 214, 244. See also subjectivity; unconscious human identity: destruction of, 202; enlargement of, 197–8; and Freudian psychoanalysis, 196–7; fulfilling real nature of, 253n4; Godard on, 133; interiorized, 76–7, 82–3, 85; intrinsic mystery of, 246; and ironization of house, 89; for Updike, 74–5; and Western epistemology, 252n13. See also identity human personality, 89, 197, 213, 222 Humpty Dumpty, 243 Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God, 219

“mysterious coherence” of, 48, 90, 202, 255n13; noncategorical and nonreferencial approach to, 21; Oates on, 90, 101; Roof on, 53; self-experimentation as, 31, 188; Stevens on, 120; for Updike, 77. See also human identity; masculine identity; nonidentity; selfhood; sexual identity; subjectivity imagination, 168–9, 235, 236, 237 imaginative detachment, 244 “Impossible, The” (Ashbery), 176 incompossibility, 18–19, 22 incorporation, 244 individualism, 54 individuality, 86, 133, 203 interiority: and Deleuze, 212; of domestic space, 7; and exteriority, 204; of human identity, 76–7, 82–3, 85; as safe distance, 75; for Updike, 81, 87 “In the Waiting Room” (Bishop), 218 “Invisible Architecture” (Guest), 165 “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (Bishop), 261n15 irony, 143, 244, 245–6, 263n2 “Irrational Element in Poetry” (Stevens), 121, 164, 206

Idea, 206 identity: in American literature, 3, 13, 128; construction, 31, 34; Deleuze on, 3–4, 20, 21, 31, 206–7; and depersonalization, 189; deterritorialization of, 35, 201; distanciated, 6; Frye on, 245; loss of, 18; as lure, 53;

James, Alice, 67 James, Henry: and androgyny, 58, 73; characters of, 66; Deleuze and Guattari on, 33; “House of Fiction” phrase, 228; The Portrait of a Lady, 253n4; on reality, 117; and vagueness, 124 James, Henry, Sr., 76, 124

27062_Jarraway.indd 294

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index 295

James, William: on “‘absolutely’ true,” 56; Alice James on, 67; on Blood, 125, 211; on experience, 56; on nonknowledge, 125; as pragmatist, 54; on “pure amodal reality,” 116; revolutionary spirit of, 57; and Santayana, 125; and vagueness, 125. See also Pragmatism James, William, works of: A Pluralistic Universe, 17–18; The Principles of Psychology, 211; Will to Believe, 125 Jarraway, David: Going the Distance, 3, 13, 35, 128, 132. See also Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief (Jarraway) Jazz (Morrison), 212 Journal (Oates): on absolute truth, 90; on Gothic mode, 100; and identity, 90, 101; on motives for literature, 92, 226; on movement and home, 96–7; night self in, 95; peeping out of windows in, 95; on travel and anonymity, 88; unknown self in, 252n12. See also Oates, Joyce Carol “Jumbo” (Stevens), 198, 199, 202– 3, 205, 210, 213, 260n5 Kanin, Garson, 129, 131, 255n10 Kernan, Nathan, 178 Kimmel, Michael, 122 kinship, 49–50 Klee, Paul, 220, 261n13 Kramer, Larry, 45–6 Lacan, Jacques, 67, 77, 83, 156, 182, 235 Lambert, Gregg, 260n5

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Lane, Christopher, 125, 197–8 language: Deleuze on, 76, 188, 190; and distance, 71; and limit of thought, 23; Massumi on, 23, 247n2; of modernism, 76, 184; and speculation, 247n2; and stuttering, 188–9 Last Puritan, The (Santayana), 115 Laub, Dori, 25 Lears, Jackson, 126–7 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 188 “Lebensweisheitspielerei” (Stevens), 210 Lehman, David, 172, 173, 175, 257n10, 258n13 Lentricchia, Frank, 38, 54, 57, 248n1, 259n2 “Letter to New York” (Bishop), 227 “Letter to Walt Whitman” (Doty), 5, 19 Levin, Gail, 95–6 Levy, Emmanuel, 256n15 Lezama Lima, José, 59 life, 40, 87–8 Lifton, Robert Jay: The Protean Self, 194 literary education, 263n5 literature, 92, 226, 235. See also American literature; poetry “Literature as Therapy” (Frye), 262n1, 263n2 logic, 17–18 Logic of Sense (Deleuze): on destruction of human identity, 202; on distance, 13, 14, 20; on divergence in predication of experience, 18–19; on Humpty Dumpty, 243; on identity, 20; on infinite self-predication, 5, 16;

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29 6 index

on Nietzsche, 243; on positive distance, 6–7, 19; on towns, 18. See also Deleuze, Gilles Long, Robert Emmet, 129 “Long and Sluggish Lines” (Stevens), 118, 119 Longenbach, James, 37–8 Lowell, James Russell, 125 Lowell, Robert, 219, 221, 222 Lundquist, Sara, 256n3 Macey, David, 79, 89–90, 110, 170 “Madame La Fleurie” (Stevens), 119 male subjectivity, 80. See also masculine identity man, 4, 14, 31. See also masculine identity “Man and Bottle” (Stevens), 212 Mandelstam, Osip, 76, 184 Man with the Blue Guitar, The (Stevens), 186 Martin, Robert K., 66, 70, 116, 123, 124, 254n7 masculine identity, 25–6, 28–30, 31, 80, 117–18, 122 Massumi, Brian, 4, 15, 18, 20, 23, 247nn1–2 May, Elaine Tyler, 136, 145, 149, 153 “May 24th or So” (Schuyler), 179 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 257n8 Mayer, Louis B., 132, 143 McCarthy, Cormac: Blood Meridian, 23; masculine identity in work of, 25–6; The Road, 25–6. See also No Country for Old Men (McCarthy) McCormick, John, 113

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McGilligan, Patrick, 131, 132, 140, 154, 255n10 McMurtry, Larry, 23 Meigs, Mary, 56 Melville, Herman: The Confidence-Man, 229, 235, 245; and Deleuze and Guattari on houses, 89, 171 Merwin, W.S., 195, 213 Metamorphoses (Braidotti), 205–6, 212 meta-personality, 90 Mexico, 23–4, 247n3 Midpoint (Updike), 74, 75, 76, 83, 87 “Milk” (Schuyler), 183, 258n15 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 84 Miller, J. Hillis, 198 Millier, Brett, 218, 222 Missing Mom (Oates): approach to, 7; and Dickinson, 93; doors and windows in, 95; house and home in, 88, 89, 96, 97, 98–9; nameless sense of selfhood in, 100; nonknowledge theme of, 97–8; synopsis of, 90–2. See also Oates, Joyce Carol modern art, 141, 202 Modern Century, The (Frye), 233, 241, 245 modern culture, 51–2, 74–5, 238 modern poetry: identification in, 20, 160–1; language of, 76, 184 Modleski, Tania, 244–5 Monsieur Zéro (Morand), 35 “Montrachet-le-Jardin” (Stevens), 62–3, 67, 68, 69, 72, 213 “Moose, The” (Bishop), 217 Morand, Paul: Monsieur Zéro, 35

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index 297

Morning of the Poem, The (Schuyler): affective stutterance of, 8, 185–6, 191–2, 193, 194; approach to, 8; Baudelaire in, 185, 186, 189, 191; becominganimal in, 186–7, 193; concluding metaphor, 193–4; distance in, 190–1; epistemological conundrum in, 186, 187–8; and human identity, 188, 189; and Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 188; Schuyler’s description of, 185; zigzag rhetoric of, 189–90. See also Schuyler, James Morrison, Paul, 249n6 Morrison, Toni: Jazz, 212; Nobel Prize address, 16–17, 75 Moss, Marilyn Ann, 146, 149 “Motive for Metaphor” (Stevens), 169 “Mountains Covered with Cats” (Stevens), 9, 197, 201 “Mrs. Alfred Uruguay” (Stevens), 21 My Alexandria (Doty), 59, 65 “Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious” (Guest), 164 mystic practicalism, 125 names, 257n5 narcissism, 201–2, 203–4, 205, 206, 207, 208 Negotiations (Deleuze): on affect in poetry, 184; on collaboration, 128–9, 132–3, 134; on Godard, 133; on processes vs. transcendent universals, 137; on subjectivity, 134–5. See also Deleuze, Gilles

27062_Jarraway.indd 297

Newcomb, John, 38 new historicism, 38 “New Realism, The” (Ashbery), 161 “New Yorker, A” (Schuyler), 174 New York School: as antiacademic, 257n10; approach to, 8; boy’s club attitude of, 257n6; and Cold War, 162, 172, 173; collaborative ethos of, 134; Epstein on, 158, 256n2; and Guest, 159; and New Realism, 178; and Stevens, 158, 159, 256n2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 243, 260n4 No Country for Old Men (McCarthy): Anton Chigurh in, 26–8; approach to, 5–6; and becoming-woman, 32, 33–4, 35; borderland in, 36; Carla Jean Moss in, 27–8, 33; house in, 29, 248n4; and identity construction, 31, 34; knowingly imperviousness in, 30; Llewellyn Moss in, 30–1, 33–4, 35, 36, 248n6; and masculine identity, 25, 26, 28–30, 31; “queer” in, 34, 35; Sheriff Bell in, 24–5, 28–9, 30, 31, 36, 248nn4–5; states of emergencies in, 25, 30; synopsis of, 24; windows in, 29; Yeatsian nostalgia of, 25 “Nocturne in Black and Gold” (Doty), 63–4 noir film. See film noir; Hitchcock, Alfred; Shadow of a Doubt (film) Nomadic Theory (Braidotti): on figurations, 165–6; on home, 6;

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29 8 index

on looking through reality, 216; on narcissism, 204; on nomadic citizenship, 259n17; on sexual difference for Deleuze, 120; on space for making a home, 221. See also Braidotti, Rosi nonidentity, 220–1, 222 nonknowledge, 97, 125 “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens), 23, 163–4 nothingness, 22–3, 84, 86–7, 141, 142–3 “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (Stevens), 118–19, 128 “Now and Then” (Schuyler), 174– 5, 175–6 “Oak Leaves Are Hands” (Stevens), 21 Oates, Joyce Carol: characters of, 101; and Dickinson, 100, 252n14; on Gothic tradition, 100; home in work of, 88, 89, 92, 96, 99–100, 226; and Hopper, 93, 95–6; on identity, 90, 101; meta-personality of, 89, 90; on motives for literature, 92, 226; on movement and home, 96–7; on night self, 93–4, 94–5; self-characterization, 252n12; on travel and anonymity, 88; on truth, 90 Oates, Joyce Carol, works of: Broke Heart Blues, 16, 89; The Faith of a Writer, 89, 94, 95; The Falls, 88, 89; “The Artist Looks at Nature,” 94; “‘What Sin to Me Unknown…,’” 89; Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m

27062_Jarraway.indd 298

Going, 93, 94; (Woman) Writer, 90. See also Journal (Oates); Missing Mom (Oates) “Of Hartford in a Purple Light” (Stevens), 47–8 O’Hara, Frank: “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” 161; and Guest, 159– 60; and Stevens, 8, 58–9, 158, 256n1; subjectivity in, 166 “Old Man Asleep, An” (Stevens), 118 Olkowski, Dorothea, 204 Open House (Doty), 221 Orígenes, 59, 60 Paglia, Camille, 123 “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” (Guest), 163 “Parade’s End” (Guest), 163, 166 paradox, 243 Parnet, Claire, see Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet) Parts of a World (Stevens), 198–9, 201, 212–13, 214 Patrimony (Roth), 104 Pearson, Keith Ansell, 200, 260n4 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, 127 Perloff, Marjorie, 248n1, 256n1 personification, 257n8 Persons and Places (Santayana), 116–17, 124 phantom subject, 125, 126 “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light” (Stevens), 207, 210 Piñera, Virgilio, 60 “Plain Sense of Things, The” (Stevens), 126 Plato, 229 Platonic Aestheticism, 123

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index 299

Pluralistic Universe, A (James), 17–18 “Poem” (Schuyler), 180 “Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, The” (Stevens), 6, 38–40, 126 “Poetics of Coterie” (Stevens), 257n5 poetry, 40, 88, 184, 213 “Poetry the True Fiction” (Guest), 161, 164 poets, 195, 213, 248n2, 250n9 Poirier, Richard, 54, 55, 125, 126 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 104 Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 253n4 positive distance, 6–7, 19 Posnock, Ross, 58, 66, 69, 124, 254n5 post-Freudian psychoanalysis, 181. See also psychoanalysis Pound, Ezra, 113–14 Pragmatism: aesthetic of, 57; approach to experience of, 211; decentred structure of, 54; and Deleuze, 4–5, 260n7; and divadame, 4; and Emerson, 5; as link between Stevens and Deleuze, 10, 15; as rival discourse to psychoanalysis, 210–11, 212; and Santayana, 125. See also James, William pre-personal individuation, 201, 204 “Primer Class” (Bishop), 217 “Primitive like an Orb, A” (Stevens), 52 Probyn, Elspeth, 71 procreation, 44, 49–50

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“Prologues to What Is Possible” (Stevens), 53, 119, 124, 126 Protean Self, The (Lifton), 194 Proust and Signs (Deleuze): on capitalist schizophrenia, 14. See also Deleuze, Gilles psychoanalysis: approach to, 9, 195; post-Freudian, 181; riddling narcissistic disclosure in, 208–9; and Schuyler, 180–1; as social control, 172–3; space in, 207. See also Freudian psychoanalysis; narcissism queer, see homosexuality queer commentary, 45 queer discourse, 37, 38, 45, 52, 53, 56 queer theory, 45, 68, 120 “Questions of Travel” (Bishop), 219 “Quiet Normal Life, A” (Stevens), 128 Rabbit, Run (Updike), 78, 251n6 “Rabbit as King of the Ghosts, A” (Stevens), 7, 78–9, 80–1, 83, 87, 201 Rabbit at Rest (Updike), 78 Rabbit Is Rich (Updike): Angstrom’s car, 80, 251n6; Angstrom’s terror, 83; critique of subjectivity in, 80, 85–6; distance in, 85; epigraph from Stevens, 7, 78–9, 80–1; exclusion in for self-interiority, 81–3; women in, 83–5. See also Rabbit Tetralogy (Updike) Rabbit Redux (Updike), 78 Rabbit Tetralogy (Updike): achievement of, 86; an aim of,

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30 0 index

77–8; approach to, 7; interiority in, 75, 77–8, 81, 83–4; overview of, 78; Updike on Angstrom, 86. See also specific novels “Rachmaninoff’s Third” (Schuyler), 174 “Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry” (Guest), 161 “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” (Bishop), 222 Real, 156, 168, 176, 178, 258n14 realism: Frye on, 241; of Hollywood films, 151–2, 162, 177, 242; of New York School poets, 162, 178 “Realistic Oriole, The” (Frye), 229–30, 236 reality: Braidotti on, 216; Deleuze on, 138, 208; Frye on, 234, 241–2; Henry James on, 117; Lacan on, 67; looking through, 216; as many realities, 40; Stevens on, 68, 117, 125 Remembering Elizabeth Bishop (Fountain and Brazeau), 221–2 Renov, Michael, 145, 146, 150–1 repetition, 52–3, 138 rhetorical distance, 5, 18 Riddel, Joseph, 198 Road, The (McCarthy), 25–6 rock, 41, 44, 55 Rock, The (Stevens), 118–19, 120, 124, 126, 128, 201 “Rock, The” (Stevens), 120, 128 Rodríguez Feo, José, 6, 59–61, 61–2, 112 Roman, Camille, 217 romance, 42–3, 44, 47 Roof, Judith, 53 “Roof Garden” (Schuyler), 174

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Ross, Edward, 172 Roth, Philip, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 Roth, Philip, works of: The Facts, 106, 107; Patrimony, 104; Portnoy’s Complaint, 104; Zuckerman Quartet, 103, 104. See also Zuckerman Unbound (Roth) Rothstein, Mervyn, 104 “Royals” (Schuyler), 182 “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” (Stevens), 51 “Safe Flights” (Guest), 167–8, 171 Said, Edward, 170–1 same-sex partnerships, 49–50 Samuels, Peggy, 220, 221, 225, 261n13, 261n15 “Sand” (Guest), 166 “Sandpiper” (Bishop), 220, 223, 261n14 “Santa Fe Trail” (Guest), 171–2 Santayana, George: and androgyny, 58, 62, 73, 116–17, 197–8, 254n5; “both sides and neither” aspect of, 7–8; erotic poetics of, 124–5; and Freud, 253n3; friendship as ideal intimacy for, 115; on human unintelligibility, 112, 121; ideals for, 253n3; Lears on, 127; Martin on, 116, 124; as mystic, 126; and Platonic Aestheticism, 123, 124; and Potter, 123; Pound on, 113–14; and Pragmatism, 125, 254n8; sexuality of, 7, 113, 253n1; ­spiral theory of subjectivity of, 117; and Stevens, 113, 114, 115, 128; and vagueness, 124; on

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Whitman, 254n8; Wilson on, 115, 128. See also “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” (Stevens) Santayana, George, works of: The Last Puritan, 115; Persons and Places, 116–17, 124; Soliloquies in England, 121 Sarduy, Severo, 59 Schaum, Melita, 48; Wallace Stevens and the Feminine, 38 Schelling, F.W.J., 176 schizophrenia, 191, 196, 210 Schuyler, James: critics on, 172; epistemology in work of, 179– 80; excess in work of, 175–6, 177, 180; “grunt of words” of, 183; irrational element in work of, 172, 173, 182; Lehman on, 173; and New Realism, 178; nonsignifying space in work of, 179; opposition to Cold War in work of, 173–4, 176–7, 183; opposition to mainstream literature in work of, 175; outlook on life, 175; and psychoanalysis, 180–1; signifiers in work of, 181–2, 182–3; and visual art, 178 Schuyler, James, works of: “A Grave,” 180; “An Almanac,” 174; “A New Yorker,” 174; Diary, 175, 179, 180–1; “February,” 182; Freely Espousing, 174, 177, 179; The Home Book 1951–1970, 180; “Master of the Golden Glow,” 179; “May 24th or So,” 179; “Milk,” 183, 258n15; “Now and Then,” ­174–5, 175–6; “Poem,” 180; “Rachmaninoff’s Third,” 174;

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“Roof Garden,” 174; “Royals,” 182; “Self-Pity Is a Kind of Lying Too,” 182; “Sorting, wrapping, packing, stuffing,” 174; “Voyage autour de mes cartes postales,” 182–3. See also Morning of the Poem, The (Schuyler) Schwarz, Daniel, 196, 259n2 “Search for Acceptable Words, The” (Frye), 262n1 Secretaries of the Moon (Stevens), 6, 60–1, 61–2, 73, 112 Sedgwick, Eve, 56 Seeing Venice (Doty), 17 Self-Consciousness (Updike), 74–5, 80, 81, 83, 87, 250n1 selfhood: acquired, 54–5; enlarged, 237; between fact and fiction, 106, 107, 108, 109; female, 145; “mysterious coherence” of, 48, 90, 202, 255n13; and sexual fluidity, 66–7; as subjectless individuation, 100; terrors of, 87; as threshold, 93, 117, 171, 260n9; Tournier on, 77; two notions of, 4–5, 16. See also identity “Self-Pity Is a Kind of Lying Too” (Schuyler), 182 semblance, 84, 247n1 Semetzky, Inna, 35, 36, 260n7 “Sense of the Slight-of-Hand Man, The” (Stevens), 212 “Sestina” (Bishop), 163, 226 sexual identity, 44, 68. See also androgyny; heterosexuality; homosexuality sexuality, 37, 44, 66–7, 69, 148. See also androgyny; gender and sexuality studies; heterosexuality; homosexuality

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30 2 index

Shadow of a Doubt (film): approach to, 10; critique of modern culture, 238; as emblematic of Hitchcock’s work, 244; Emma’s cake-making scene, 232, 238, 241, 242, 245; Frygian perspective on, 232–3; “holy sinner” in, 233, 237–8; and Humpty Dumpty, 243; identity in, 234– 5, 239–40; ideological perfecting in, 242–3; Niece Charlie, 232, 234, 238, 240, 242–3; prophetic realism in, 242; subtext of, 236–7; Uncle Charlie, 233, 234–5, 237–8, 239, 243, 245 Shand-Tucci, Douglass, 121, 123–4 Shaw, Lytle, 166, 257n5, 257n8 Sheeler, Charles, 94 “Shifting Persona” (Guest), 169 Shoptaw, John, 162 signifiers, 181–2, 183, 258n13 silence, 179, 258n12 Silverman, Kaja, 151, 162, 168, 177, 179, 242 Simmel, Georg, 95 Singer, Irving, 114–15, 117, 253n1, 253nn3–4, 254n8 “Skaters, The” (Ashbery), 258n13 Smith, Daniel W., 196, 237 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 136–7, 148 “Snow Man, The” (Stevens), 22, 172 Soares, Lota de Macedo, 223, 224 social control, 172–3 social space for community, 22, 58 Soliloquies in England (Santayana), 121 “Somnambulisma” (Stevens), 51–2

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“Song of Fixed Accord” (Stevens), 52 “Sonnet” (Bishop), 222 “Sorting, wrapping, packing, stuffing” (Schuyler), 174 Source (Doty), 21 “Source” (Doty), 21–2, 23 “Squatter’s Children” (Bishop), 227 Stanley, John Francis, 113 “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” (Stevens), 126 Stein, Gertrude, 176, 226–7 Stevens, George, 129–30, 144, 145, 151, 155. See also Woman of the Year (film) Stevens, Wallace: and androgyny, 119–20, 121, 126, 197–8, 201, 253n2, 259n2; approach to, 3, 5, 10–11, 246; and belief, 72, 249n4; on conventional consciousness, 210; on cultural discourse, 52; de-interiorizing in work of, 212–13; and distance, 20, 160–1, 254n9; on divadame, 4, 15; as divided figure, 260n6; erotic poetics of, 38, 112, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124–5, 126, 128; on exile, 170– 1; feminist readings of, 48; and film, 230; and Freud, 9, 195–6, 197, 198, 204–5, 207, 259n1; Frye on, 9–10, 229–30; gay following of, 6, 58–9, 112; and gender and sexuality studies, 38; Guest on, 160, 169–70; on identity, 120; on imagination, 169; “in the dark” settings in work of, 249n5; on irrational element in poetry, 8, 121, 164, 165; later

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poetry of, 48, 198–9, 259n3; on life, 40, 87–8; on “lights masculine” and “lights feminine,” 47; masculinities in work of, 117– 18; on modern American culture, 51; multiple voices in work of, 259n2; and narcissism, 203; on nothingness, 87; pervasive being in work of, 249n7; on poets, 248n2, 250n9; psychic interiority in work of, 213, 214; psychic subject of, 222; and “queer,” 120; on reality, 68, 117, 125; and recent theoretical movements, 38; on repetition, 53; reputation of, 37–8, 158–9, 248n1; on romance, 42–3, 47; and Santayana, 113, 114, 115, 128; on self’s “mysterious coherence,” 211; shadow imagery in work of, 201; subjectivity of, 20; on subjects of poems, 158, 204; Supreme Fiction of, 164, 212; Taylor on, 11–12; on theory of poetry, 40, 87–8; on unknown, 121, 164, 206; unnamed woman in work of, 249n6; Updike on, 251n7; vagueness in work of, 126; and William James, 54 Stevens, Wallace, works of: Adagia, 165, 204; “Adult Epigram,” 4, 14–15, 34, 43; “An Old Man Asleep,” 118; “A Primitive like an Orb,” 52; “A Quiet Normal Life,” 128; “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” 7, 78–9, 80–1, 83, 87, 201; “Asides on the Oboe,” 204–5, 208; “A Word with José Rodríguez Feo,” 59–60, 61,

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64, 66, 72; “Bouquet of Belle Scavoir,” 209, 210, 211; “Chocorua to Its Neighbor,” 161, 164; “Contrary Theses,” 213–14; “Description without Place,” 214; “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” 159, 201; “Irrational Element in Poetry,” 121, 164, 206; “Jumbo,” 198, 199, 202–3, 205, 210, 213, 260n5; “Lebensweisheitspielerei,” 210; “Long and Sluggish Lines,” 118, 119; “Madame La Fleurie,” 119; “Man and Bottle,” 212; “Montrachet-le-Jardin,” 62–3, 67, 68, 69, 72, 213; “Motive for Metaphor,” 169; “Mountains Covered with Cats,” 9, 197, 201; “Mrs. Alfred Uruguay,” 21; “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” 23, 163–4; “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” 118–19, 128; “Oak Leaves Are Hands,” 21; “Of Hartford in a Purple Light,” 47–8; Parts of a World, 198–9, 201, 212–13, 214; “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” 207, 210; “Poetics of Coterie,” 257n5; “Prologues to What Is Possible,” 53, 119, 124, 126; The Rock, 118–19, 120, 124, 126, 128, 201; “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” 51; Secretaries of the Moon, 6, 60–1, 61–2, 73, 112; “Somnambulisma,” 51–2; “Song of Fixed Accord,” 52; sonnet written at Harvard, 124; “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside,” 126; “The Candle a

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30 4 index

Saint,” 201; “The Hand as a Being,” 49; “The Hermitage at the Center,” 126; “The Irrational Element of Poetry,” 164, 206; “The Plain Sense of Things,” 126; “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” 6, 38–40, 126; “The Rock,” 120, 128; “The Sense of the Sleight-ofHand Man,” 212; “The Snow Man,” 22, 172; “Things of August,” 235–6; “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” 7, 113, 114, 115–16, 117, 120, 127, 128; Transport to Summer, 214; “Two Versions of the Same Poem,” 55–6, 57; “Vacancy in the Park,” 126; “Variations on a Summer Day,” 213; “Wild Ducks, People and Distances,” 20, 160; “World without Peculiarity,” 249n7; “Yellow Afternoon,” 48 Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (Doty), 20, 22, 74, 228, 251n8 Strike (Eisenstein film), 100 stuttering, 76, 184, 188–9, 190–1, 192–3 subjectivity: Deleuze on, 90, 134– 5; dissident, 3, 13, 35, 128; female, 4; Macey on, 89–90; male, 80; as meta-personality, 90; as “mysterious coherence,” 90, 222; as non-known, 89–90; Oates on, 90; Santayana on, 117; and self-protection, 6, 19; of Stevens, 20; as texture of ­plural identities, 85; and unconscious, 165; for Updike, 77 subjectless individuation, 100

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“Summer’s Dream, A” (Bishop), 217 Taylor, Mark C., 11–12 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 219 theory of poetry, 40, 87–8 “Things of August” (Stevens), 235–6 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari): on American literature, 4, 101, 228; on becoming imperceptible to self, 195, 209; on becoming-woman, 32–3, 34, 36; black hole in, 92–3, 94, 110, 227, 255n14; on breaking through signifier, 90, 222, 255n14; on chaos of worldly experience, 92, 227; on deterritorialization, 94; on dismantled self, 90, 222; on ­distance, 157; on gender, 44–5; on Gothic architecture, 101; on home, 35–6, 92–3, 96, 98–9, 227; on man in Western culture, 31; on nonknowledge, 97; and Pragmatism, 10, 260n7; on psychoanalysis, 199–200; on repetition, 52–3; on self, 158, 171, 260n9; on space between man and woman, 70; on Strike (Eisenstein), 100; and Whitman, 230. See also Deleuze, Gilles Three Poems (Ashbery), 256n4 “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” (Stevens): architecture in, 127; and erotic poetics, 114, 128; multiplicity in, 117; Santayana in, 7, 113, 120; specificity in, 115–16

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Tóibín, Colm, 221 Tournier, Michel, 77 Tracy, Spencer, 129, 141, 144. See also Adam’s Rib (film); Woman of the Year (film) Transport to Summer (Stevens), 214 Travisano, Thomas, 215 “Treatise on Nomadology” (Deleuze and Guattari): on Gothic architecture, 101. See also Deleuze, Gilles Trilling, Lionel, 180, 181, 182, 206 “True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island, A” (O’Hara), 161 truth, 19, 20, 26, 28, 90, 247n2 “Two Versions of the Same Poem” (Stevens), 55–6, 57 unconscious, 164–5, 172, 180, 181, 205–7, 243 United States of America, 5–6, 23–4. See also Cold War unknown, 121, 164, 172, 206, 216 Updike, John: approach to, 7; and becoming-subject, 77; on claustrophobia and self, 250n3; on distance, 85; on distances in New England, 75; on Emerson, 86; on epigraphs, 80; and Freud, 79, 251n5; home for, 74, 75, 77; and human identity in modern culture, 74–5, 77; and interiority, 76–7; issues in novels of, 82; on male subjectivity, 80; on nothingness, 86–7; on own self, 83, 250n1; physical afflictions of, 250n1; religious sensibility of, 75; on self, 250n2; sense of

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life of, 84; on Stevens, 251n7; on stuttering, 76; subjectivity for, 77 Updike, John, works of: “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?,” 74, 77, 79; Midpoint, 74, 75, 76, 83, 87; Rabbit, Run, 78, 251n6; Rabbit at Rest, 78; Rabbit Redux, 78; Self-Consciousness, 74–5, 80, 81, 83, 87, 250n1; “The Art of Fiction,” 76, 84; “Whitman’s Egotheism,” 86. See also Rabbit Is Rich (Updike); Rabbit Tetralogy (Updike) urban identity, see city theory “Vacancy in the Park” (Stevens), 126 vagueness, 124, 126 “Variations on a Summer Day” (Stevens), 213 “View from Kandinsky’s Window, The” (Guest), 160 “Vision and Mundanity” (Guest), 165 von der Heydt, James, 227, 261n14 “Voyage autour de mes cartes postales” (Schuyler), 182–3 Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief (Jarraway): on Parts of a World (Stevens), 198; on Stevens and Pragmatism, 4, 15; on Stevens and realism, 186; on Stevens in gender and sexuality studies, 38; on Stevens’s belief, 72, 249n4; on Stevens’s romanceof-imprecision, 50; synopsis of, 3 Wallace Stevens Journal, 9, 38, 215

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30 6 index

Wallace Stevens and the Feminine (Schaum), 38 Wardrop, Daneen, 252n13, 252n15 Warner, Michael, 37, 45, 68 Watkin, William, 258n12 Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited, 121 “Way of Being, A” (Guest), 167 Well-Tempered Critic, The (Frye), 235, 263n5 West, Cornel, 37 Weston, Kath, 49–50, 51, 52 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari): on collaboration, 147; on the house in American literature, 7, 89, 93, 171, 213, 219; on Nature-thought, 186; on schizophrenia, 191; on stuttering, 192. See also Deleuze, Gilles “‘What Sin to Me Unknown …’” (Oates), 89 Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (Oates), 93, 94 Whitehead, Alfred North, 247n2 “White Villa, The” (Cram), 124 Whitman, Walt, 58, 230, 254n8; Leaves of Grass, 188 “Whitman” (Deleuze), 230. See also Deleuze, Gilles “Whitman’s Egotheism” (Updike), 86 “Wild Ducks, People and Distances” (Stevens), 20, 160 Wilde, Oscar, 37, 50, 71, 94–5 Will to Believe (James), 125 Wilson, Edmund, 115, 127–8 “Wings, The” (Doty), 67

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Wizard of Oz, The (film), 7, 89, 219 Woman of the Year (film): vs. Adam’s Rib, 144, 147, 155; approach to, 8; closing breakfast scene, 151, 153, 156, 157, 230; disciplining of gender performance in, 153–4; and distance, 157; dominant fiction of, 151–3; effect of, 157; gender history subtext in, 145–6; ­gender treated in, 136, 146, 147, 148–50, 154–5, 156–7; Hepburn/Tracy duo in, 129; Moss on, 146, 149; radio quiz show scene, 144–5, 157; and Stevens’s filmmaking approach, 155; surplus reality in, 156; theme song of, 151 (Woman) Writer (Oates), 90 women, 14, 136, 145–6, 149, 150–1. See also becomingwoman; diva-dame Woodland, Malcolm, 117–18 Words in Air (Bishop), 221 “Word with José Rodríguez Feo, A” (Stevens), 59–60, 61, 64, 66, 72 “World without Peculiarity” (Stevens), 249n7 Yacovone, Donald, 122–3, 254n7 “Yellow Afternoon” (Stevens), 48 Young, Iris Marion, 103 Zaretsky, Eli, 172–3, 180 Ziarek, Krzysztof, 198, 210, 213, 214 Žižek, Slavoj: on black spot, 110; on cinematic space, 155–6; on

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human freedom, 176–7; on painting, 168, 178–9; on psychoanalytic “enjoyment,” 258n16; on reality, 67; on signifiers, 181–2, 183; on surplus of the Real, 156 Zuckerman Quartet (Roth), 103, 104 Zuckerman Unbound (Roth): Alvin Pepler as subjective differentiation, 104–5; approach to,

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7; black grease spot in, 110; Caesara O’Shea as unknownness, 106; coming-of-age revelations, 102–3, 109–10; and Henry James, 103; Henry Zuckerman as self as blank space, 108–9; return to home in, 101–2, 103, 104; and self between fact and fiction, 104, 105–6, 107–8, 109; unbound subjectivity in, 111

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