WAllACE STEVENS
901
Azcan, he applies the word in a derisive manner; but "fat" is an ad–
jective with consistently benign connotations in Stevens' poetry. He
uses it typically in
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
(Part III, poem
10) to describe the symbolical female embodiment of "the fiction that
results from feeling," and that, as every reader of Stevens knows, is
his chief reality (reality, that is, in its final, completed sense) -the
synthesizing imagination itself.
It is characteristic of the elaborate conflicting connotations in
this poem (representing the inchling's confusions) that the favorable
word "fat" is qualified in the last line by the unfavorable adjective
"portly." In
Harmonium
the page adjoining "Bantams
in
Pine–
Woods" is occupied by "Anecdote of the Jar," in which a jar is placed
on the top of a wilderness-encircled hill in Tennessee:
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild,
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It has been pointed out before that the good, untrammelled wilder–
ness is subdued by the presence of that jar to a conventional and man–
made drabness ("It took dominion everywhere"), and like Azcan
the jar was of a port in air.
It
had style (more properly, manner or
affectation) rather than reality. When the inchling uses "fat" and
"portly" interchangeably he serves notice that he is unable to make
the necessary distinctions (connoisseur of the hard-surfaced fact that
he is).
And he reveals his incapacity even more remarkably by conjoin–
ing "portly" and the Chieftain's hoos. One would hardly guess it from
the poem itself, but these hoos are a symbol of Azcan's innate vitality.
In
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
we find these verses:
We say: At night an Arabian in my room
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor. By day
The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hOQ
