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Stevens' Fusky Alphabet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Philip Furia and
Martin Roth
Philip Furia
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Martin Roth
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
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Abstract

Wallace Stevens uses the alphabet as a code to validate the philosophical concerns of his poetry. The alphabet is “murderous” if it represents a sacred and sterile process that assumes a final dispensation as “heavenly script”; the alphabet is “fusky” if it represents an artistic act that continually mediates between the emptiness of things and the imagination to create poetic heavens on earth. Stevens often works with an abbreviated alphabet (ABC, XYZ, etc.) where the letters are “characters” who represent certain relations between the imagination and reality. An understanding of this code informs certain poems where letters play an explicit and major role, such as “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” “Connoisseur of Chaos,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The alphabetical code also informs much of Stevens’ other work and accounts for many of the apparent difficulties of his poetry—the curious vocabulary, the fantastic characters, and the exotic topography of his poetic universe.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 1978, pp. 66 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 This and all subsequent parenthetical page citations are given according to the following abbreviations: LWS—Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966); CP—Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1955); NA —The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951); OP—Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957).

2 See, e.g., Joseph Riddel, The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1965); Michel Benamou, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972); and Frank Doggett, Stevens' Poetry of Tlioitght (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966).

3 The “bawds of euphony” (B of U) are the ordinary women of that poem, suddenly returned to the earth by the sound of their own voice.

4 The pun may be obvious, but it was first noticed in 1960 by Roman Jacobson, “Linguistics and Poetics” in The Structuralists (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 119.

5 As a conservative, Stevens may well have dis cerned a political difference between the labor organizations, although they are never mentioned again in his letters. However, we are interested in the fact that they are alphabetical triads—the CIO is a “murderous union,” moving as it does from co-median C, to solipsistic I, to hierophantic O. We have not discussed F and L in this essay; we have, however, mentioned in passing twin F Phosphor, who turns the world into a mirror of his own imagination, and F/B, B-ephebe, who desires to become priest and proctor. We are not certain about the nature and meaning of L, though it does mediate between heaven and earth (it consists of a vertical and horizontal stroke). In “The Plot against the Giant,” who is himself a bisexual L—“la ... le pauvre,” the third girl, occupying the position of C in the basic triad ABC, will “whisper” into the giant's bent ear, “Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals” (CP, 7).

The “Archbishop of Canterbury” represents another instance of the A of C code for the true poetic process, presented earlier in connection with X—“Anecdote of Canna” and “arches of churches.” Once the Archbishop of Canterbury is realized as imagination with reality, the poet may tell him to jump off the dock, since the poet is half who made him, and the archbishop, like

Mrs. Pappadopoulos, is free to take the plunge, or, like Crispin, to embark on a sea (C) voyage.

For the reader who insists upon further biographical evidence that that intention involved an alphabet code, we might suggest meditation on the fact that, in his formative years as a poet, Stevens was employed as a lawyer for the ABC, that is, the American Bonding Company in Baltimore.

6 The derivation of “swim” from Nota is offered by Merle Brown in Wallace Stevens: The Poem as Act (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 59.

7 In his study Poets of Reality (New York: Athen-eum, 1969), p. 8, J. Hillis Miller describes the process of Stevens' esthetic in a way that we believe corroborates our identification:

The “ghosts” who “return to earth” in Stevens' poems are those who have been alienated in the false angelism of subjectivity. They return from the emptiness of “the wilderness of stars” to step into a tangible reality of things as they are. There they can “run fingers over leaves / And against the most coiled thorn.”