90
PARTISAN REVIEW
Thus living in many sensuous worlds indicates a failure in imagi–
nation. The supreme fiction becomes fictitious indeed, a dizzy plural–
ism, a rage for order that cannot be spent:
...
the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good.
Stevens has established, in spite of his misology, the "fiction" of rela–
tivism.
As
Whitehead has explained, the isolated event has lost its
status in complexes of events until "the whole is evidently constitutive
of the part." By a fiction more available to science than to the imagi–
nation, Stevens theorizes that the whole cannot exist without the parts,
that the part is the equal of the whole; under these sanctions he lives
incessantly but reluctantly in change and accepts the law of chaos as
the law of ideas.
Through one of the incongruities of the Waste Land, Stevens
has in effect allied himself with so alien a figure as Paul Elmer More
in resisting the Demon of the Absolute. In 1928 More announced:
"This Demon of the Absolute is nothing else but rationalism, what
Francis Bacon called the
intellectus sibi permissus."
Although the
orthodox humanist would insist that landscape is not adequate, Ste-
.vens has devoted himself to elaborating More's thesis that "there are no
absolutes ·in nature; they are phantoms created by reason itself in its
own likeness, delusions which, when once evoked, usurp the field of
reality and bring endless confusion in their train."
Stevens himself is troubled to utilize his relativism: whether he
will or no, man "must become the hero of his world." The gusto of
living incessantly in change is a paralyzing optimism, a denial of
loneliness in Jersey City, of the old chaos of the sun.
If,
as Whitehead
says, "endurance is the repetition of the pattern in successive events,"
Proust rather than Stevens has dispensed with fictions and lived in
the texture of process with a neutrality and unremitting grasp of the
essential prose.
Dispossessed of adequate fictions, Stevens at moments may be
Prufrock-'ia most inappropriate man in a most unpropitious place."
From this unpropitious place and time of year, from promenades
among ideas, Stevens resorts to bright landscapes, the "majors of the
August heat"-a nomad exquisite of the Waste Land whose philoso–
phy is an exercise in viewing the world.
