Stevens After Davidson on Metaphor

Clive Stroud-Drinkwater

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 26, Number 2, October 2002, pp. 346-353 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/phl.2003.0001

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Sympo

Clive Stroud-Drinkwater

STEVENS AFTER DAVIDSON ON METAPHOR

n Notes toward a Supreme Fiction1 Wallace Stevens suggests that the absolute as we imagine that an angel would experience it constitutes the supreme ction. We conceive the experience of the angel only in a fantasy, but it is our fantasy, and therefore the experience of the angel and its absolute are things that we comprehend in our imagination. Thus, in imagination we can apprehend that which we may at rst suppose only angels can apprehend, since the lapishaunted air of the angels absolute is a creature of our own imagination and nothing more. When Stevens asks, Is it he or is it I that experience this?, the question is rhetorical, since the angels experience exists only within the poets imagination. In Sunday Morning, likewise, Stevens suggests that the concept of paradise is dened only within the limits of human imagination. It is a construct which people can comprehend only in the terms of their essentially nite passions, moods, grievings, elations, remembrance and desire; it is a construct which people create in a chant of paradise, / Out of their blood, returning to the sky. Abstracting from our ordinary feelings will not leave us with a transcendent conception of paradise; on the contrary, it will deprive us of our sense of value. The image of the inhuman god (Jove in the clouds with his inhuman birth) is sterile, remote from all human concern. For Stevens, The ultimate value is reality.2

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It is possible to regard this as a sad and resigned afrmation that we have at most this world and its parochial values, since God is dead and we cannot really have paradise at all,3 but it is also possible to regard it as an afrmation of the genuine value of the ordinary and the human. On this interpretation of Stevens, Sunday Morning calls us from the shadows of a self-defeating attempt to transcend our own values to a consideration of the place of ordinary values in our conception of paradise:
Shall she not nd in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

The question, which is already rhetorical, is answered atly in another poem, The Rock; the imagination can indeed nd paradise in reality:
In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock, Of such mixed motion and such imagery That its barrenness becomes a thousand things And so exists no more. This is the cure Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.

In this cure we imagine the world as paradise, or the rock as meaningful, or barrenness as a thousand things. There is, however, an unresolved tension between imagining one thing as another and recognizing that the things are, in fact, different. Max Black regards this tension as the greatest weakness in his interaction theory of metaphor.4 In Notes Stevens addresses this problem:
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I nd you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?

The problem here is the general problem of metaphor: metaphors seem to constitute an evasion5 since they are usually literally false.6 For example, the fat girl is presumably not literally summer or night, and may not even be fat or a girl, metaphors being what they are. To the fat girl, the poet says,

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His metaphors disguise the object; the object is represented in them as more than naturalin other words, not natural, not the thing as it is. The very thing and nothing else (Credences) that Stevens, the poet of the real world, wishes to see thus becomes obscure, a thing in an obscure world / Of things that would never be quite expressed, / Where you yourself were never quite yourself (The Motive for Metaphor, in CP ). Consequently, in Notes the poet entertains the thought that I should name you atly, waste no words, / Check your evasions, hold you to yourself. But his conception of the fat girl remains metaphorical still:
Even so when I think of you as strong or tired, Bent over work, anxious, content, alone, You remain the more than natural gure . . .

Evasive metaphor itself cannot be evadeda fact not peculiar to poetry, however. Daniel Dennett puts the point succinctly, in the context of a scientic analysis of human consciousness: metaphors are not just metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without them.7 The problem, therefore, is how to reconcile the need for metaphors, generally false and evasive as they are, with a sense of responsibility to reality. Stevenss solution is in Notes, in the realization that metaphor has an essential role in our grasp of the world as it really is, not despite its evasion of the literal truth but because of it: Thats it: the more than rational distortion, / The ction that results from feeling. Yes that, Stevens declares. Stevenss resolution of the evasiveness of metaphor with responsibility to reality is consistent with Davidsons remarks on metaphor in many key respects. According to Davidson, a metaphor that is in itself literally false directs our attention to some truth about the world. Perhaps it is a truth that is otherwise ineffable because, as Davidson says, there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character and when we try to say what a metaphor means, we soon realize that there is no end to

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what we want to mention (pp. 26263). Metaphors allow us to express or suggest much more about reality than we can state in a paraphrase in nonmetaphorical language. For Stevens, however, such literally ineffable truths comprise not only facts about the world as it is in itself but also those about the world as we imagine it. As Davidson similarly points out, Seeing as is not seeing that. Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight (p. 263). One thing is not another thing, but seeing one thing as another is not necessarily a mistake or a false judgment (as in the judgment that a horse that is seen as a deer really is a deer): it can be, as Davidson remarks, an insight (e.g., into a resemblance between a horse and a deer). Stevenss concept of imagining as expresses a similar insight. Imagining the girl as a phantom is not imagining that she is a phantom. When the poet calls the girl a soft-footed phantom, he imagines her as something that literally she is not (and which he knows that she is not), not because he mistakes her for something else (e.g. imagines that she is something else), but because he imagines her as that other thing. In Adagia Stevens claims that Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal, a claim that might be regarded as a paradoxical avowal of the unreality of the real. However, Stevens also says, in the same work, The world is the only thing t to think about. We make sense of these remarks if we regard the new reality that metaphor creates as essentially an image of the original reality as something else. When the poet imagines the girl as something that literally she is not, it is vital that the image is of her as something else. She herself and not merely an image of her, or something else that represents her, features in the image that the metaphor creates (as logicians say, the reference to her in The poet imagines her as a softfooted phantom is transparent or referential, not opaque). Stevenss assertions in Notes are in accord with this view: the difcultest rigor is forthwith, / On the image of what we see, to catch from that / Irrational moment its unreasoning. In that rigor things are not things transformed / Yet we are shaken by them as if they were / We reason about them with a later reason. We think and imagine in metaphors, and Davidson has shown how metaphors work just by being false, without transformations of things or meaningscontrary to the interaction view (of Richards and Black), the controversion theory (of Beardsley), and the fusion view (of New Critics), which all maintain that metaphor creates meanings, and

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that it is a transformed literalism.8 The image of the soft-footed phantom is an image that takes the human being in a certain way, but it does not transform her: it is a fantasy about her in which she nevertheless remains herself, and human. To suppose that she must be transformed in the image is to lose the point that the metaphor is false, and remains false, even as it directs us to notice certain truths about the world, such as that the girl can be seen as a phantom, or imagined as a phantom (while remaining a girl). Stevens wonders whether it is not possible that . . . in a civilization based on science there could be a science of illusions?9 By the word illusions, Stevens refers to what I would describe as images. These are not illusions insofar as they are not false. Taken as literal representations of the way the world is (as an imagining or a believing that one thing is a different thing) they are false, but taken as images of things as other things, they are not literal representations at all. Whether or not there could be a science of images-as, they are part of the natural world, being a natural product of the human imagination. Thus nature informs itself with ctions through us, a view comparable to Hegels notion that the universe comes to self-consciousness in us.10 In this world, as Stevens says in Notes,
We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

The later reason is the dialectical reason that has awakened to the function of the naturalized imagination in enchanting nature with its ctions.11 Thus, there is no escape from reality in the poetic imagination and its evasive metaphors. On the contrary, the poetic imagination adheres to reality and becomes interdependent with it, by projecting its images onto the primordial reality.12 This is what Stevens calls the imagination as metaphysics, as opposed to the romantic imagination, which does not adhere to nature but escapes from it (NA, pp. 13739). The metaphysical imagination creates the world to which we turn incessantly and . . . gives to life the supreme ctions without which we are unable to conceive of it (NA, p. 31). Stevens writes, To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life. . . . We live in the mind (NA, p. 140). These ideas contrast with the ideas of the Logical Positivists, who concern themselves with the real world of science, as divorced from imagination and its ctions. Stevens writes:

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Dr Joads comment on this is: Similarly with external things. Every body, every quality of a body resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes. What is it that vibrates, moves, is changed? There is no answer. Philosophy has long dismissed the notion of substance and modern physics has endorsed the dismissal. . . . How, then, does the world come to appear to us as a collection of solid, static objects extended in space? Because of the intellect, which presents us with a false view of it. (NA, p. 25)

The difculty here is that there is really nothing false in the appearance that the world presents to us: we really do see the physical vibrations, movements, changes as a collection of solid, static objects extended in space. It is a fact of our being in the world that the world appears to us as it does.13 Stevens explains:
The poet has his own meaning for reality. . . . The subject-matter of poetry is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are. (NA, p. 25)

Apparently, what is important for the poet is not the external scene in itself, but its way of appearing to us (in our life that is lived in the scene). Science may not be about such things, but it is nevertheless unrealistic to deny the existence of ways of appearing. It is a denial of things as they are in our lives, not the things of physics, but the things of phenomenology.14 The realization in Notes that we live in a world enchanted by our own imagination is followed immediately by the ironic remark:
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational, Until icked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, . . .

The paradoxes that the irrational is rational, that the imaginary is real, that the relative is absolute, or that the human being is a phantom are not readily acceptable to reason (one day at the Sorbonne). The rational intellect nds it hard to grasp the dialectical nature of the ction that results from feeling as it is projected onto our real world. The attempt at a rational grasp, represented by the aphorism that the

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irrational is rational, is eeting and not satisfying, disappearing with a ick of feeling in a gildered street. With the reappearance of feeling, however, I call you by name, my green, my uent mundo / You will have stopped revolving except in crystal. With the reappearance of feeling comes inevitably the ood of metaphors, rotted names.15 In Notes, for example, the Canon Aspirin wallows in metaphor in response to the image of sleeping children:
So that he was the ascending wings he saw And moved on them in orbits outer stars Descending to the childrens bed, on which They lay. Forth then with huge pathetic force Straight to the utmost crown of night he ew. The nothingness was a nakedness, a point Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.

When feeling reappears thought can, according to Stevens, progress only as metaphor. There is a point, / Beyond which fact could not progress as fact, and that is the point where ction is necessary. As one of Stevenss commentators asks, is the myth that consciousness weaves about itself and reality true or not?16 The myths may be, like the metaphors, literally false, but the images that they create are real aspects of our rapport with the world, as we live in it and thereby infuse it with them. Thus, the vision of the early Tea at the Palaz of Hoon (in CP ) of the self and the sun as one, the vision of nding oneself in nature as something else, is vindicated by these later reections on metaphor as at once evasion (since of course one is not the sun) and revelation (since one may imagine oneself as the sun while remaining alive to the literal truth that one is not). The vision is repeated near the end of The Collected Poems, in The Planet on the Table:
Ariel was glad he had written his poems. .............................. His self and the sun were one And his poems, although makings of his self, Were no less makings of the sun.

Paradoxically, when the human mind is truly naturalized, when we truly locate our self in nature, we thereby locate our imagination and our

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ction there, too: The world is no longer an extraneous object, full of other extraneous objects, but an image (NA, p. 151). In this image, the sun itself may be imagined as the poet, the creator of the supreme ction, the ctional absolute of the ctional angel. 138 Yodishome Okayama 708-1504 Japan

1. In The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Random House, 1990). (I shall refer to this collection as CP, and to Notes toward a Supreme Fiction as Notes.) 2. Wallace Stevens, Adagia, in Opus Posthumous (New York: Random House, 1957). 3. Albert Gelpi, American Poetry, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 5460. 4. Max Black, How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson, in On Metaphor, ed. S. Sacks (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 192. 5. See Credences of Summer, in CP. 6. See Donald Davidson, What Metaphors Mean, originally published in Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 3147; reprinted in Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 24564. Subsequent page references are to the article as reprinted. 7. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1991), p. 455. 8. Wallace Martin, Metaphor, in Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 761 (n. 3). 9. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 139. (I shall refer to this book as NA.) 10. Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 67130. 11. See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

12. See Stevens, NA, pp. 31, 33; and the notion of a chant of paradise, / Out of their blood, returning to the sky, in Sunday Morning (in CP ). 13. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

14. I discuss this further in The Nave Theory of Colour, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (June 1994): 34554. 15. See The Man with the Blue Guitar (in CP ).

16. Pat Righelato, Wallace Stevens, in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty (London: Macmillan, 1995).