Poetic Models of History and Time in Harmonium

Abstract

Poetic Models of History and Time in Harmonium Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Jonah Shallit, and Jungmin Yoo IN HARMONIUM, Wallace Stevens builds poetic models of history and time, juxtaposing quotidian and historical chronologies to capture the interrelations between ephemeral moments and grand narratives. Stevens thinks historically while remaining critical of history, searching across time for poetic subjects while steadfastly refusing to “play the flat historic scale” with them (CPP 11). As has been widely noted, the supposed objectivity of the historical method became the target of criticism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, for example, the rumination of historical consciousness endangers the mere act of living (“Uses” 62), while in Hayden White’s formulation, historical telling reshapes disparate events into narratives of a completed diachronic process, necessarily sorting the stuff of life into cause and effect, significant and insignificant (6). From such a perspective, history unfolds as an encyclopedic repository of moments abstracted from mundane experiences and organized by temporal linearity. But might there be a different way to envision history? How might one give expression to everyday moments and experiences left out by grand narratives? And to what extent can poetry offer an alternative to the standard ways of interpreting history and time? Rereading Harmonium as Stevens’s attempt to wrestle with such questions, this essay explores the ways in which his poems break down the grand narrative of history and its steady, onward-moving temporality into recurring moments of ephemerality lived and felt at the level of the everyday. Stevens’s poetic imagination reconceptualizes history as an outburst of fluttering moments interwoven through an idiosyncratic temporality, and this conception of history resonates with the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence as well as a Paterian aesthetics that consecrates the sensuous moment. In Harmonium, Stevens presents poetry as an alternative historical method in its own right. The type of temporality that Stevens is interested in shifts attention away from linear progression and toward small moments of ephemerality, rupture, and recurrence. He terms this modality “perpetual undulation” in “The Place of the Solitaires” (CPP 47), a poem that envisions the titular site as a place saturated with a constant renewal of motions and noises following one after another. Here, renewal happens primarily as the recurrence of the same in the undulating forms of “restless iteration” (CPP 48). [End Page 236] Similar imagery reappears throughout Harmonium, as in “The Comedian as the Letter C,” where the heroic Crispin’s grand colonial ambitions slip away in the “motionless march” of chirping crickets and other mundane and pastoral rhythms (CPP 34). Stevens’s attention to these undulations of rhythmic repetition, like the “endless tread” of Rosenbloom’s mourners in “Cortège for Rosenbloom” (CPP 64), suggests a kinship with Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, or the “unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things” (Ecce 273–74). Nietzschean philosophy is less interested in the completion or totality of being than in the enactment of the possibilities of beings, their multiple ways of becoming, and their endless unfolding. Nietzschean time is necessarily a matter of “aporia,” as Ned Lukacher points out (7), in that the duration of time is at once ever becoming and always already eternal. In giving poetic expression to the dual operation of time—which is ephemeral but eternal in the Nietzschean sense—Stevens acknowledges the affirmative possibility created by the vibrancy of each period of a cycle. Stevens’s invocations of time function as heuristics, guiding the reader to nonsequential, unbound, and infinite rhythms and undulations. Time, thus redefined, requires an alternative approach to history: the chronological record-keeping of grand events can no longer be an apt model to capture the nonlinear, recursive sense of time in Harmonium. The ephemeral moments that recur within the eternal cycle not only defy chronological progression but also belie the assumption that moments have to be grand in order to be recorded: the mundane or ordinary, insofar as it is ceaselessly repeated, may as well become a site of “perpetual undulation.” When Stevens condenses a “century of wind in a single puff” or finds the whole of Crispin’s remaining life “Dwindled to one sound strumming...