414
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.
PARTISAN REVIEW
In "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" Stevens writes:
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
But it is hard only ifyou take an idealist stance and find the world, on
unblazoned days, difficult to appropriate or to subdue. A different situa–
tion would arise if you were to give up this sordid ambition and let the
world be. Philosophic idealism is common - or perhaps under Levinas's
sway I should say rampant - in modern literature, especially in one tradi–
tion of modem poetry. But the novel has, to a large extent, made up for
that extravagance and provided a place for Levinas's criteria of ethics and
justice. Intricacies of being and knowledge do not dominate the novel or
constitute its first philosophy. It is in the novel that an attempt is made to
imagine human beings not as statistical or abstract figures but as presences,
living their lives in personal, social, and other tenus.
Let me give an example of this imagining. In Chapter Nineteen of
The Portrait
of
a
LAdy,
Madame Merle and Isabel Archer are paying ex–
tended visits to Gardencourt, where old Mr.Touchett is dying. The
women like each other and spend a lot of time willingly together, talking
about subjects of mutual interest. One afternoon the subject of one's ap–
purtenances comes up for discussion. Isabel says, rather too quickly, that
she cares nothing for such things. Madame Merle answers:
That is very crude of you. When you have lived as long as I, you will see that
every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account.
By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing
as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurte–
nances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It
overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again. I
know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great
respect for
things!
One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self;
and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps -
these things are all expressive.
Isabel disagrees with this account:
