The Comedian as Wallace Stevens

RICHARD HUGO DESCRIBES a photograph of Wallace Stevens: ‘benevolent, pompous, dignified and, if you look real close, not taking any of it seriously’.1 One striking thing about this remark is its conjunction. Hugo doesn’t say ‘but … not taking any of it seriously’; he says ‘and’, as though Stevens’s pomposity and dignity were commensurable with a deeper, or subtler, sense of humour. Instead of the serious and the unserious excluding one another, they cohabit the poet’s likeness. Hugo’s reconciliation of ostensible opposites speaks to a distinction made by Stevens in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’: In an essay on the ‘poetics of the preposition’, John Hollander observes that ‘Stevens often depends upon the complex of’: in this example, the word functions analogously to Hugo’s ‘and’, valorising the claim that a ‘choice’ might be more like a synthesis, an incorporation of seemingly antithetical elements that nonetheless ‘in each other are included’.3 This inclusive modality of choice might in turn allow the poet and reader – or here, the ‘Canon Aspirin’ – to cross the ‘point / Beyond which thought could not progress as thought’. That is, a kind of dialectical thinking – one which, for instance, reconciles the solemn with the playful – might help us, as we read earlier in the poem, to ‘catch from that / Irrational moment its unreasoning’ (CPP, p. 344): to apprehend, if not the Supreme Fiction itself, then something moving ‘toward’ it.