A Modern Poet from a Postmodern Approach

Wallace Stevens - The Auroras of Autumn

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness,
Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances
And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base
These lights may finally attain a pole
In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

In another nest, the master of the maze
Of body and air and forms and images,
Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve
Even that. His meditations in the ferns,
When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,
Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,
The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

          This is the beginning of Wallace Stevens' long poem "The Auroras of Autumn" and it comes down from a long tradition of theological thought and poetry. In theology (as is now the case in real, hard science) it is a common tradition that Something should rise from Nothing (or, as Shakespeare puts it in King Lear, "Nothing will come of Nothing.") The lack of fixity (because symbols require a matrix of other symbols to mean and so bear no relation to The Real) is a fundamental tenant of Postmodernism that sends us spiraling away from the center like a radial spoke away from the hub. What Stevens gives us is a parable of life, death, and most importantly movement that centers itself in its own decay. When Stevens' talks about "form gulping after formlessness," he is also describing "the structural necessity of the absence" (1696) which returns to the Hegelian concept of Ideas that can never contain their content and so must perpetually change like "the skin flashing to wished-for disappearances." In the disparity between our ideas "the bodiless" emerges (and seems somehow more Real than the body which seems to become static, representing only the current state of things and not the force that occupies them.) When Derrida calls for "the departure from the closure of a self-evidence," (1695) he is calling for the end of structures which do not acknowledge themselves as structures and explaining how art is only made from other art - however, it is an irony of post-modernism that Derrida must state his claim in hard words although it is a theory centered around uncertainty. If you start with doubt, it is inevitable that you will end in certainty, and that is the thrust of much of Derrida's work and a clue into Stevens as well. When Derrida says that "the play of substitution fills and marks a determined lack" he sounds remarkably similar to the occultist W.B. Yeats with the prophetic “I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.” In Stevens' poem, Aurora represents both the Borealis and the God of Dawn, making the title of the poem representative of a kind of negatively charged creation. The "substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references" (1692) are like the "meditation in the ferns" which disallows the one-to-one relationship between signified and signifier although the play in the substitutions always express a desire that seems as real and tangible as the slough of skins or the image in Plato's cave.

 Derrida. "Of Grammatology." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
 Stevens, Wallace. "The Auroras of Autumn by Wallace Stevens." www.questia.com. Knopf, n.d. Web. <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=1878918>
Shakespeare, William. "Shakespeare Quotes." www.enotes.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 May 2011. <http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/nothing-can-come-nothing.
Yeats, William . "Blue Hydrangeas." http://bluehydrangeas.wordpress.com. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://bluehydrangeas.wordpress.com/2006/05/10/william-butler-yeats/>