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    The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens
    The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens
    The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens
    Ebook349 pages6 hours

    The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens

    By Anca Rosu

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    Wallace Stevens dedicated his poetry to challenging traditional notions about reality, truth, knowledge, and the role of language as a means of representation. Rosu demonstrates that Stevens's experimentation with sound is not only essential to his poetics but also profoundly linked to the pragmatist ideas that informed his way of thinking about language. Her readings of Stevens's poems focus on revealing the dynamic through which meaning emerges in language patterns—a dynamic she calls "images of sound."
     
    Rosu argues that the formal aspects of poetry are deeply ingrained in cultural realities and are, in fact, generated by their context. The sound pattern pervading Stevens's poems at once addresses and violates the reader's assumptions about the functioning of language and, along with them, ideas about reality, knowledge, and subjectivity. Sound is thus the starting point of an argument concerned with Stevens's epistemology and poetics—the way his poems insist on a movement past or through a normal poetic representation of the world to gesture toward a reality that lies outside or beyond systems of representation.
     
    The relationship between sound and meaning isolated and analyzed in The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens is firmly situated among critical debates concerning the poet's aesthetic and philosophical convictions. Rosu claims that Stevens's poetry is not ultimately about the powerlessness of language, nor is it a deconstructive enterprise of destabilizing culturally consecrated truths; rather it achieves meaning most frequently through patterns of sound. Sound helps Stevens make a deeply philosophical point in a language unavailable to philosophers.
     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Alabama Press
    Release dateDec 13, 2016
    ISBN9780817390914
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    • 3/5
      Rosu?s treatise on the dynamics and deconstruction of sound in Wallace Stevens?s poetry is not an easy read. This is not a book you pull down from the shelf at Border?s and think, ?I?ll give this a read.? What she accomplishes, however, makes you feel richer for having done so. The reader will immediately go back to the original works and read them aloud, trying to find meaning in an already multi-layered poetic universe. The beginning dialectics on meaning and the written word bog down what could be a very playful inspection of Stevens?s early works. Very dense, but very rewarding.

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    The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens - Anca Rosu

    Society.

    1

    Sound and Language

    A BOOK-LENGTH STUDY on sound in the work of a single author may seem excessively narrow if not downright paradoxical. Normally, we consider sound in small fragments of prose or verse, and seldom do we feel inclined to follow its implications in a full piece, let alone a large part of a writer’s work. Sound is usually of secondary interest, a poetic device among others that only rarely, and with some difficulty, can be said to determine the meaning of a literary work. "Prosodic study justifies itself only as an adjunct to criticism," declares Paul Fussell in his study Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.¹ In spite of such prejudice, a full study on the subject is imperative for Wallace Stevens, since in his poetry sound is not merely a prosodic element, or a stylistic device of limited significance, but an integral part of a distinctive poetics. For this reason, defining the role of sound in his verse must be not an isolated task but an enterprise derived from and contributing to an understanding of his entire poetic achievement.

    That Stevens uses sound in very special ways is a well-known fact, and his innovative prosody has attracted no small amount of attention. There are a number of approaches to sound reflecting diverse ways of interpreting oral/aural effects. Some studies concentrate on the significance of onomatopoeias, which abound in Stevens’s work. Although departing from the naive belief that the sound of a word can coincide with its meaning, critics find that Stevens can employ sound symbolic words as metaphors² or use onomatopoeia to contrast highly intellectualized language with the preverbal.³ Prosodic studies proper emphasize either an unusual discordance between the pattern of sound and meaning⁴ or the innovative manner in which Stevens uses traditional prosody.⁵ There have also been interesting attempts to read Stevens as a musical poet either by following the development of musical themes in his poetry⁶ or by arguing that the sound of poetry produces noncognitive images in the way music does.⁷ Sound as a thematic element has also attracted attention, although attempts to show the significance of different types of sounds have met with some difficulty in detaching sound as theme or trope from the sound effects themselves.⁸ The quality of Stevens’s diction is sometimes considered to be an aural feature, since through its foreign⁹ or Latin origins¹⁰ it may appeal first to the ear and only second to the imagination.

    These discussions on the subject—most of them in articles or sections of books dedicated to sound in poetry in general—follow a predictable movement from observations about prosody to an evaluation of the relation between sound devices and the poem’s meaning. That relation is found, also predictably, to be one of harmony, unless it is discovered to be quite the reverse.¹¹ The wealth of innovations revealed by these prosodic studies suggests, however, that beyond enhancing the work of interpretation, the relation between sound and meaning may be more intimate than a simple concordance or discordance. In addition, the complex theories that underlie the mainstream criticism on Stevens’s poetry show that the very notion of meaning is problematic in his poems. The question of meaning, however, has rarely been related to that of sound.¹² This may not seem surprising, since, as Kevin Barry notes, "It has become, since Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, an accepted idiom in theories of literature to value writing and to devalue speech. Writing is thought of as the play of difference and of the material sign. However, it is clear that the materiality, diversity and uncertainty of language can also be thought of in terms of its sound."¹³

    The purpose of this study is to discuss precisely the materiality, diversity and uncertainty of Stevens’s language in terms of its sound. But before proceeding in this direction, I would like to establish something like a theoretical framework in which the proper relevance of sound in the perception of meaning may become apparent. To do so, I will have to consider theories of meaning related to both language and music. Through an examination of both, I hope to establish some axioms that will constitute the starting points of my exploration of Stevens: (1) that language is by nature dialogic, and distinctive discursive styles can coexist in the same utterance; (2) that meaning is generated in the interaction between speakers, and sound understood as pattern plays an important role in this interaction; (3) that the meaning of sound pattern in language can be described by analogy with the meaning of music.

    More than any other modernist, Stevens practiced a poetic art that disarms the traditional methods of critical reading. The abundance of criticism on his poetry, especially in the aftermath of structuralism and deconstruction, signals, not only the rise of the poet to posthumous glory, but also a need for a new way to read his work. Such need is generated by the poems themselves, and if it was not felt by his early critics, the reason was that criticism itself had still to progress toward a certain flexibility regarding the ways of reading. For Stevens’s most important innovations reside, as has often been suggested, in the way he manipulates language, and before New Criticism, language itself was not the main concern of critical approaches.

    The question of a new way to read also stems from a quality of Stevens’s poetry often noticed by his critics, especially by Joseph Riddel, namely its self-reflexivity, which draws attention to language as such.¹⁴ Speaking of poetry in poetry is less a matter of direct statement than a matter of letting language play and of making its own materiality relevant. Performance is thus one of the most interesting features of Stevens’s poetry, and although it has been noticed and explored as such, most critics still search for the poet’s ideas in his direct statements. To my mind, the implications of Stevens’s linguistic performance exceed even the import of his direct statements about poetry, for not only does he use language poetically, in a traditional sense, but he also aims to discover where the roots of the poetic as an essence lie.

    Stevens’s own engagement with questions about the nature of language makes it possible, if not necessary, that the discussion of his poems should be integrated within a linguistic theory. In fact, the later critical works of Joseph Riddel and J. Hillis Miller, as well as Paul Bové’s¹⁵ alignment of Stevens with Heidegger’s destructive poetics, have responded to this need that continues to be felt even in recent years, when a more historical and cultural perspective has been directed on Stevens, especially by Frank Lentricchia.¹⁶ Whether integrated in his cultural and historical context or not, Stevens has to be seen as an experimenter with language, simply because such experimentation is the main feature of that very

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