Apocalypse without apocalypse

Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode

by Malcolm Woodland

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. 256 pages

Few attendees of Linda Hutcheon's plenary address at the Modernist Studies Association two years ago in Vancouver are likely to forget her rather startling opening apology. The well-known author of works like A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) confessed that she had done serious injury to modernist studies by claiming that all the good stuff was supposed to come after modernism, as no true student of that historical period could possibly believe. Genuflecting to the conference theme, "Other Modernisms, Modernisms Others," the former president of the MLA was abjectly remorseful: "Mea culpe, mea culpe, mea maxima culpe!" she beseechingly declared. Not surprisingly, Malcolm Woodland, a colleague of Hutcheon's at the University of Toronto whose help he tallies in the acknowledgments, strikes a similar note in Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode. In the final pages of this book, Charles Altieri, Daniel O'Hara, and Fredric Jameson (along with Hutcheon) are all enlisted to corroborate the current contention that "'postmodernism' is no longer a vital concept for the arts" (216). More to the point, "categorizations of Stevens as either modern or postmodern so often seem part of the project to divide the literary goats from the literary sheep" (217). Woodland's tripartite analysis of Stevens's apocalyptic poetics, therefore, aims definitively to suture this critical and theoretical impasse.

In one of his most famous critical pronouncements in prose (from The Necessary Angel collection of essays), Stevens contends that "It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era" (qtd. on 34). For Woodland, this assertion raises several important questions concerning the poet's response to apocalyptic desire, among them Stevens's own relation "to apocalypse's figuration of supreme discursive power" and how poetry might "deal with apocalypse's excessive desire ... that exceeds all possibility of fulfillment" (18). But answers to these are only useful to the degree that they shed light on the most important question of all: namely, "Stevens' place in relation to the two major epochs of twentieth-century literary history--modernism and postmodernism." To this end, Woodland provides three contexts for revolving the apocalyptic mode in a select number of poems from Stevens's poetic canon: in part 1, "Stevens and the End of War," apocalypse is considered from the historical perspective (especially in the second chapter, "An Ever-Enlarging Incoherence: War, Modernisms, and Masculinities"); in part 2, "Stevens and the Genres of the End," analysis of apocalypse is provided from a formalist perspective (with detailed readings of "Credences of Summer" and "The Auroras of Autumn" in chapters 4 and 5 respectively); and in part 3, "Going after Apocalypse," the notion is given a comparatist treatment (a final chapter links Stevens's apocalyptic poetry to Jorie Graham's The Errancy, and a brief afterword takes up the work of Mark Strand and John Ashbery).

Yet despite the admirably variorum treatment of Stevens's apocalyptic poetics through six fairly detailed chapters, Woodland aims to show that it is a poetics considerably fraught with tension, ambiguity, and ambivalence all the way, and therefore reveals a significant degree of resistance to postmodern readings of Stevens's work that his later critics (Michael Beehler, Joseph Kronick, and me included) are often far too reticent to acknowledge. In Woodland's analysis of "The Auroras of Autumn," for example, considerable tension is seen to emerge in the poem's closural movement--so much so, indeed, that making the separation between the modern and the postmodern in such an estrus of contradiction is scandalously perilous. Yet for Woodland, "the difficulty of making such a distinction is, perhaps, an indication of the ways in which the poem resists categorization as postmodern" and would accordingly make the issue of closure "at least according to Hutcheon's and Altieri's versions of postmodernism, belong to a modernist aesthetics" (164). The point reaches back to a highly nuanced reading of Stevens's essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" in chapter 2, where the nomination of "nobility" as the imagination's distinguishing feature would appear to support the poet's "distance from postmodernism" (45). But it also reaches forward to Woodland's brief modulation to those other contemporary poets mentioned previously writing in Stevens's apocalyptic wake in the conclusion, where "acknowledging the contradictory forces at work in Stevens's resistances to apocalypse" foregrounds the "contradiction inherent in modernist aesthetics" tout court (208). Minus the post, in other words, modernism constitutes an apocalyptic rhetoric without the apocalypse--a paradoxical formulation that Woodland cleverly extrapolates from Derrida (183).