The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact? Author(s): Gregory Brazeal Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No.
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The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?

Gregory Brazeal
Cornell University
A case is madefor giving up the quest to identify WallaceStevens' "supremefiction." The poet hoped to usher in the creation of an idea that would serve as afictive replacement for the idea of God, known to befictive but willfully believed. His hope has remained unfulflled. By the poet's own explicit standards, the supreme fiction does not appear in any ofhis poems, nor in his poetry as a whole, nor in poetry in general. Thevery idea of a supremefiction may depend, at least in part, upon a problematic conceptionofbelief drawn from a popular misreading of William James' "TheWill to Believe."
Keywords:Wallace Stevens / supremefiction / criticism/ philosophy/ William James
"Afterall, I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction."
WALLACE STEVENS,
8, 1942 DECEMBER
f, as Foucault says, the author is the principleof thrift in the proliferationof

meaning, then it is in the spirit of interpretive thrift that this essay will draw
upon Wallace Stevens'writings.The author'swords will be used to make the case, as simply and sparinglyas possible, for giving up the quest to identify the "supremefiction,"Stevens'most ambitiousphilosophicalobject.The poet hoped to usher in the creation of an idea that would serve as a fictive replacementfor the idea of God, known to be fictivebut willfullybelieved.His hope has remained unfulfilled. By the poet's own explicit standards,the supreme fiction does not appearin anyof his poems,nor in his poetryas a whole, nor in poetryin general.Is it possiblefor such a long-standingcriticalquestto be abandoned, or at least qualified as a lesser priority? The case of Oedipus and the "tragicflaw"offers a hopeful parallel.At one time, it might have seemed inevitablethat readersof Oedipus Rex would alwaysaskof Sophocles'play which of Oedipus'negative character traitshad broughtabouthis tragicdownfall.' It might have seemed a profound,challenging andworthwhilequestion,posed but left unresolved by Aristotle in his definitionof
tragedy. But once the "tragic flaw"was recognized as a Victorian mistranslation of
The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?
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Aristotle's"hamartia," the impetusbehind the hunt lessened.Criticswere still free to follow the tragicflaw'strail,but without Aristoteliansanction,the hunt seemed less worthwhile.Today,it has largelyrecededfrom scholarlyview. So might scholarsone daygive up attemptingto identifythe "supreme fiction" in Stevens'poetry.As I will argue,Stevens offerslittle or no sanction for the idea that the supremefiction can be found there,or even that it exists at all.To reador teach Stevens as though the creationof a supremefictionwere the culminationof his careeris to be set up for an unnecessary disappointment. If I covera good dealof verywell-troddencriticalgroundin what follows, and make points that may seem obviousto manyreaders of Stevens,it will be in the spiritof offeringa summarizing reminder:a presentationof what seem to me the most salient argumentsin favor of not reading Stevens for a supremefiction, and a collection in one place of the most relevantevidence.Finally,in a brief concluding note, I ventureinto slightly more speculativeterritoryin orderto proposea possibleexplanationfor the failure of Steven'ssupremefiction to arrive. I arguethat the veryidea of a supremefiction may depend,at least in part,upon a problematicconception of belief drawnfrom a popularmisreadingof William James'"The Will to Believe." To what extent did Wallace Stevenslay claim to the title of philosopher? Did he see himself as an inventorof fine philosophicalideas? On the one hand, Stevens read widely in philosophy,and his poetry,essays and letters aboundwith referencesto Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,James,Santayana, Bergson,Kant,Plato, Lucretius,Vico, Descartes,Hegel, Berkeley:the list could go on. He corresponded with philosophers of his time, such asJeanWahl,andfrom the startof his career, his poetryis sprinkled with philosophical-sounding terminology and ruminations. He struggledand toyed,througha long poetic career, with various forms of "the dumbfounderingabyss/ Between us and the object,"2 whether the epistemologicaldistancebetween knowersand things in themselves,or the equally taunting "failure in the relationbetween the imagination and reality" (WS 649). In doing so, he gave poetic expressionto perhapsthe centralphilosophicaldrama of the modern era.The philosopher Simon Critchley calls Stevens, against great competition,"thephilosophicallymost interestingpoet to havewritten in English in the twentieth century" (15). Numerous essaysand book-length studies attest to the philosophicaldepth and complexityto be found in Stevens'works. On the other hand, Stevens himself confessed,in a letter toward the end of his life, to having"never studied systematicphilosophy," sayingthat he "shouldbe bored to death at the mere thought of doing so. I think the little philosophy that I have read has been readvery much in the spirit of... a substitutefor fiction."3 FrankDoggett, one of the earliest and most respectedphilosophicalinterpreters of Stevens'poetry,suggests that the "conceptsthat emerge from long reading of the poetry of Stevens are so slight and so basic that any elementarycoursein philosophy or even a few yearsof interestedreadingcould yield all of them."4Stevens' most concertedphaseof philosophicalreadingdoes not appearto havebegun until the early1940's,or at the earliestthe mid-1930's,when the poet was alreadyin his fifties (WS 966; Richardson, Later170-1,175). As an undergraduate at Harvard,
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Journal ofModern Literature
Stevens met with the philosopherGeorge Santayana, but their meetings seem to have revolvedaroundpoetry and the exchangeof poems, ratherthan philosophical discussion.The young Stevens took no philosophy courses,apparentlynever saw Santayana lecture,and concentratedinstead on literarystudy andjournalism. Throughout his life, he confessedan intermittentinsecurityabouthis philosophical skills (Richardson, Later385; L 476). Thereappearsto have been a brief period,in the wake of his increasedattention to philosophyin the early 1940's,when Stevens at least flirtedwith the idea of attemptinga more systematicand orthodoxwork of philosophy,orjoked about doing so. It was duringthis time that he createdhis longest and most philosophically ambitiouspoem, "NotesTowarda SupremeFiction,"and began writing the highly theoreticalessayson realityand the imaginationthat would eventuallybe collectedas The NecessaryAngel. "[I]fI had nothing else in the world to do exceptto sit on a fence and think aboutthings,"Stevenswrites in 1942 to his wealthyexpatriate friend Henry Church,whom he admiredfor spending his life in precisely this way,"... I could very well do a THEORY OF SUPREME FICTION, and I could try to do a BOOK OF SPECIMENS, etc."(L 431). He soon abandoned the idea,however,proposingit insteadas a projectto "occupy a school of rabbisfor the next few generations" (L 435). If Stevens everconsideredwriting a theoretical treatmentof the supremefiction in philosophicalor criticalprose, a "literaltext" (L 443) to complementhis poetry,the ambitionpassed. Especiallyafter his intensifiedinterestin philosophybegan to wane, Stevens came to insist that even his most philosophy-laden poetryshouldnot and could not be readfor a paraphrasable, systematicdoctrine.He may even have seen his prose in this light. In the introductionto The Necessary Angel,he remindsthe readerthat the essayswhich follow "arenot pages of criticism or of philosophy"(WS 640). Perhapshis most strictlyphilosophicalwork, the 1951 lecture"ACollect of Philosophy," includes the definitiveand uncharacteristically unqualifiedstatement,"I am not a philosopher" (WS 860).The lectureitself lends some credenceto Stevens' disavowal. Not only does the "Collect" deal exclusively with the "poetic" ratherthan logical, doctrinal or systematicaspects of philosophy,but it seems to have been collected largelyfrom letterswritten by Stevens'friends and from the summaries containedin Arthur KenyonRogers'1917 introductorytextbook,A Student's Historyof Philosophy. Though the philosopherPaulWeiss, one of the friends Stevens quotes in the lecture,invited Stevens to submit the final version of the essay for publication in the Review of Metaphysics, he eventuallyretractedthe offer and returnedthe manuscript.Stevens laterdeclined to have it publishedin any form.5 In his final years,he repeatedlymade clear that he did not view his poetry as a philosophicalsystemdisguisedin symbol and sound.To SisterBernettaQuinn, in 1952, he writes,"My object is to write estheticallyvalid poetry.I am not so much concernedwith philosophicalvalidity"(L 752). Again, to an aspiringreviewerin 1954: "[W]e are dealing with poetry,not with philosophy.The last thing in the world that I should want to do would be to formulatea system" (L 864).
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And yet, and yet-there is the supremefiction. It would be extremelymisleading to suggest that Stevenswas without philosophicalambition,either in the early1940'sor later.But it was an ambitionof a very particular kind. Stevens summarizeshis projectin an importantbiographicalnote written in 1954, less than a yearbefore his death:
Theauthor's worksuggeststhe possibility of a supreme fiction,recognized as a fiction, in which men couldproposeto themselves a fulfillment. In the creation of any such fiction,poetrywouldhave a vital significance. Therearemanypoems relatingto the interactions betweenreality andthe imagination, whichareto be regarded as marginal to this centraltheme.(L 820)
After a lifetime of poetic effort, Stevens presents his central achievement not as the creation of a supremefiction, but the "suggestion" of the "possibility" of such a creation.What has appearedto many critics to be the centraltheme of Stevens'poetry-the "interactions betweenrealityand the imagination"-is in fact peripheral, the poet suggests,to the mere"suggestion" of such a grand"possibility." The remainderof this essaywill attemptto maintainas cleara line as Stevens does here between the project for a supremefiction and the poetrythat suggestsits possibility.If realityand imaginationaremarginalto the supremefiction,"thiscentral theme,"then the centraltheme is itself marginalto the poetry.Of course,the idea of a supremefiction owes its prominenceto Stevens'"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."Thepoem attractsour attention,and its title leads us towardwhat seems a tantalizinglycomplex and elusive idea, preciselythe sort of implicit profundity that literarycriticismexcels at haulingup from the depths.Yet"Notes," as the title suggests,does not presentus with any examplesof supremefiction;rather, it offers some preparationof the grounds for the arrivalof one. It leads us in a series of peregrinations towarda supremefiction,but stops short of the promisedland.The poetry and the projectkeep a certaindistancefrom each other,making it possible for one to standwhile the other falls. Before turningto a closer look at what Stevens meant by "asupremefiction," we should pause for a moment on the wording of his biographicalnote. As late as 1954, less than a yearbefore his death, Stevens does not claim to have invented or discovereda supremefiction. He suggeststhat men could proposeto themselvesa fulfillmentin such a fiction--not that men can so propose,as we would tend to say if the fiction were alreadyrealized.Again, had he believedthe supremefiction to exist, Stevens could have written, "In the creation of any such fiction, poetry has a vital significance." Had he wanted to leave his own accomplishmentmore ambiguous,he could have written,"poetrywill have a vital significance"- as if to say:whether or not I have createdsuch a fiction, any future creationswill necessarilybe poetic. But he chooses instead to say,"In the creationof any such fiction, poetry wouldhavea vital significance."The conditionalmood suggeststhat Stevens refersto somethingthat,in his opinion,has not yet arrived. On the one hand,there
are many poems about reality and the imagination, and on the other hand, there
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wouldbea vital role for poetryin anysupremefiction.His poems exist;the supreme fiction does not, but it is possible. What, then, is a supremefiction?The notion is grandin scalebut surprisingly simple in structure.A supreme fiction would be a specific idea, known to be a fiction, that would be as valid and fulfillingas the idea of God, and which people could will themselves to believe. By willfully believing in this fictive idea, they might compensatefor whateverhas been lacking since the generallyproclaimed loss of belief in God. Stevens truly seems to have hoped that his poetry,and in particular "Notes towarda SupremeFiction,"opened the way to the invention of such an idea, a willed replacementfor religiousbelief. The earliestroots of the supremefiction seem to lie in Stevens'rejection of the Puritanfaith of his childhood,an apostasythat proceededgradually, even fitfully,so that it is difficultto locate any single, defining moment of the loss of faith. By the time he left Harvard in 1900, at the age of twenty,Stevenshad already expandedhis notion of God in a generallyromanticand mysticaldirection, but remainedrespectful of piety as an ideal (Richardson, Early 60, 62). His waveringorthodoxyin this period can be detected in his journals,where he writes of an "oldargument" in his mind accordingto which "thetruereligiousforcein the world is not the churchbut the world itself:the mysteriouscallingsof Nature" (L 58), which revealor betoken "theInvisible" (L 59).The younglaw studentof 1902 remainsunwillingto rejectthe churchor the idea of God outright,settling insteadupon a tense balancebetween his religiouscommitments."Thepriest in me,"he writes,"worshipped one God at one shrine;the poet anotherGod at anothershrine" (L 59), namelyin the natural world of his long weekend rambles.These two "deities" presentno "conflict," only a "contrast" (L 59), and Stevensgives little indicationof experiencingthe evolution in his religiousbeliefs as a crisis. Soon, however,the divinities'truce begins to unravel.In a passionatelyconflicted letter of 1907, Stevensdeclaresto his futurewife, Elsie Moll, that he is "not in the least religious," but at the same time that he is "very, very glad"to hear of her growing involvementin a church (L 96). The ostensibly unreligiousStevens then goes on to note that he continues to say his prayers "everynight,"though he adds,"notthat I need them now,or that they areanythingmore than a habit,halfunconscious" (L 96).Throughout the letter,he seemsunwillingto concedeanytruth to revealed,organizedreligion,but also unableto rejectits validity.It is as though Stevens hopes to reject Christianityfor himself but to defend its legitimacy for others,perhapsso that he can avoid seeing its adherents--including the woman he courts,the ancestorshe admires,and much of his living family-as mere dupes of an illusion from which he has freed himself. When Stevens writes a month laterthat he has thrownawayhis Bible duringa bout of springcleaning,and adds, almost offhandedly, "I hate the look of a Bible"(L 102), we might interprethis words,followingJoan Richardson, as evidenceof a "religious crisis" that reachedits meridianin the springof 1907 (Early253). But even in subsequentyearsStevens maintains an ambivalentrelation to the terms of his childhood faith. In a 1909 letter to Elsie Moll, he speaksof the contemporary Christianchurchas "largelya
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relic" and presentsthe miraculousevents ofJesus'life as open to doubt,but finishes by saying that "everyoneadmits in some form or another" the existence of God (L 140). What is clearfrom the progressof Stevens'withdrawal from Christianity in his twenties and thirtiesis that it did not representa devastationfor him. Each step of the way,other illusionsor ideals-whether of a romanticNature,a mystical Invisibleor an enchantedlove-took the place of the earlierorthodoxdogma. For example,on EasternSunday,1916, Stevenswrites to his wife, still a practicing Christian,"Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol.It is a religiousperversionof the activityof Spring in our blood"(L 193). Even in this seemingly bitter denunciationof religiousritual,contemporaneous with Harmonium,the poet implicitly sets forth a competing value:the pagan,corporealvigor of springtime. Not until much laterin life does Stevensbegin to articulate his dissatisfactions with the alternativesto religion he has found at his disposal.In a January,1940 letter to the critic Hi Simons, Stevens writes of "thinkingof some substitutefor religion" as "ahabit of mind with me ... My trouble,and the troubleof a greatmany people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all broughtup to believe" (L 348). Severalmonths later,this habit of mind has metamorphosedinto the beginnings of a project."If one no longer believes in God (as truth),"Stevens continues to Simons,"it is not possible merelyto disbelieve;it becomes necessary to believe in something else"(L 370). The poet makes explicit the patternalready evident in his earlier journalsand letters,accordingto which orthodoxyis rejected not in the name of nihilism but of some higher object of belief, whether romantic, mysticalor pagan.But now he suggests that the ersatzbeliefs upon which he has hitherto relied have proved,in the end, somehow inadequateto the task. In the earlierletter,Stevens notes, "Humanismwould be the naturalsubstitute [for religion],but the more I see of humanismthe less I like it" (L 348). It is unclear what, specifically, Stevens might have had in mind by "humanism," but a remarkablepassagelaterin the letter,partof a commentaryon "Anglais Mort a Florence," offersa hint:
Most people stand by the aid of philosophy, religion and one thing or another, but a strong spirit ... stands by its own strength. Even such a spirit is subject to degeneration. I suppose we have to consider new faiths with reference to states of helplessness or states of degeneration. If men have nothing external to them on which to rely,then, in the event of a collapse of their own spirit, they must naturally turn to the spirit of others. I don't mean conventions: police. (L 348)
If we assumethat "humanism" is synonymouswith, or at least closely related to, the standing alone (without God) of a strong spirit,then Stevens'troublewith humanismwould seem to be its fragility.Given the uncertaintyof even a strong spirit'sstrength,a purehumanismwould leave its bearerexposedto the possibility of helplessnessand spiritualcollapse,as the poem upon which the commentaryis based suggests."Anglais Mort i Florence" takes as its subjectthe reminiscencesof a once spirituallypowerful,now dulled and cadaverous, figureof age. In his state
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of perceptualdegeneration, the figuregraspsupon the suretyof delight he knew in youth,"When to be and delight to be seemed to be one, / Before the colors deepened and grew small" (WS 120). Now, no longer able to standby his own strength, no longer able to achieve the effortless spiritualcommunion he once knew, the fading spiritprops himself upon "God'shelp and the police"(WS 120). Humanism, the poem and letter seem to suggest,simply cannot sustainitself againstthe onslaught of age and its attendantmaladies.By acceptingnothing conventional, nothing establishedby any power apartfrom itself, and by being, itself,ultimately no more securethan the vulnerableflesh upon which it depends,the strong spirit of humanismpushes inexorablyin the directionof its own undermining,toward relianceon "newfaiths,"religious conventions,and the protection of police who promise a more enduringsecurity. The more Stevens saw of humanism,he wrote, the less he liked it. His statementmay have had less to do with having readmore humanist philosophy than with "seeingmore of" the frail being at humanism's center.At the time of his letter to Simons, Stevenswas enteringhis sixtiethyear. In anotherletter to Simons,written a few months after his note on "Anglais Mort a~Florence,"Stevens continues his slow progress away from established replacementsfor religiousbelief, now taking as his target a Coleridgeanconception of the imaginationas primalcreativeforce."Logically," he writes,perhapswith the implication"because I am a poet,""Iought to believe in essentialimagination, but that has its difficulties. It is easierto believe in a thing createdby the imagination. A good deal of my poetry recentlyhas concernedan identity for that thing" (L 370). Whereas in the earlierletter,with its talk of "thinkingof some substitute for religion,"it remainedpossible to imagine the substituteas some pre-existing ritualor system of beliefs, Stevens now makesclearthat the substitutefor belief in God will be "athing createdby the imagination," or in other words, a fiction. He goes on in the letter to referto "Asideson the Oboe,"a recentpoem in which the identificationbetween something like religiousbelief and fiction is made explicit. The work begins with the pivotalpronouncement:
Theprologues areover.It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So,saythatfinal belief

Must be in a fiction.It is time to choose.(WS 226)
"Finalbelief" could mean chronologicallyfinal, as what is reached after all searchinghas ended, the belief that will neverbe superseded; or logically final, as the ultimategroundfor all otherbeliefs,the belief that cannotitself be questioned. Either way,it would seem to bear affinitieswith the kind of belief one previously had in God. Stevensassertsthe equivalence of finalbelief andbelief in a fictioneven more clearlyin an undated notebook entry,possiblyfrom the same period as the letters,shortlybeforehe began compositionof "NotesTowarda SupremeFiction": "Thefinalbelief is to believe in a fiction ... The exquisitetruth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly" (WS 903). The fundamentalcontours of the supremefiction arenow in place.In orderto compensatefor the loss of God, one will believe in a fiction.Only the name for this kind of fiction is lacking.
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But what sort of idea, fictional or otherwise,could replacethe idea of God? What would such an idea look like? In a frequentlycited October 15, 1940 letter to Henry Church proposingthe establishmentof a chairof poetry,Stevens offers a few hints as he attemptsto define poetry and its aims.We can readthe resultant "Memorandum" as a partialsummingup of the progression in the previoussection. First, Stevens cautions that by "poetry" he does not so much mean words written in verse form as he does "poeticideas,"the "subject-matter" of poetry.What is a "poeticidea"? Stevens illustratesby example."Themajorpoetic idea in the world," he explains,
is and always has been the idea of God. One of the visible movements of the modern imagination is the movement away from the idea of God. The poetry that created the idea of God will either adapt it to our different intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary.These alternatives probably mean the same thing, but the intention is not to foster a cult. (WS 806)
The extremeseriousnessof Stevens'ambition for poetry is evident in his distinguishing this ambition,twice in a three-page memorandum,from a cult.Two centuriesafterthe death of William Blake,who would mistakethe goal of poetry for the creationof a religious sect? Yet once we understandthat Stevens hoped to see poetry offer an adaptationor substitutionfor belief in God, or a negation of it, his insistence becomes more comprehensible. As Stevens suggests,the three possibilitiesfor poetry may amount to the same thing: "adaptation" can be seen as substitutionwith an alteredoriginal,and "makingit unnecessary" can be seen as substitutionwith nothing. All three possibilitiesrepresentmodes of substitution for the idea of God. Assuming that a functionalreplacementfor belief in the "major poetic idea in the world,"God, might itself be a poetic idea, it is worth noting that poetic ideas also play a prominentrole in Stevens'lectureof a decadelater,"ACollect of Philosophy."There, he offersno straightforward elucidationof the criteriaaccording to which an idea qualifiesas "poetic," except to say that any poetic idea would have to be "securely lofty"(WS 853) and would give "theimaginationsuddenlife" (WS 851). A list of poetic ideas,accordingto Stevens,would includethe following: "God" (here,similarlyto the letterto Church,"the ultimatepoetic idea" [WS 859]), "theascentto heaven,""the infinityof the world," and the "inexhaustible infinityof a priori" in our minds (WS 860), all surely"lofty" ideas either in the literal sense of rising aloft to the heavens or in the more figurativesense of infinity as a transcendence of finite numbers.Poetic ideas can also have the form of propositions, such as "allthings participatein the good,""theworld is at once the best and most rationalof worlds," "allthings happenby necessity," and "everything is everywhere at all times"(WS 855, 858). Ideas such as these are to be themes of what Stevens calls,without elaboration, but echoing the title of his by then celebrated long poem, "supreme poetry"(WS 854).6At the end of the lecture,Stevens drawseven closer to the languageof supremefictions,identifyingthe "willingnessto believe beyond belief"with "the presenceof a poet"(WS 867). If we assume Stevens'use of the
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phrase"poeticidea" did not change substantially between his letter to Church and his lectureon philosophy,and the parallelphrasingregarding the idea of God suggests he did not, we might conclude that the supremefiction itself, the subjectof "supreme poetry," would be a "poeticidea."It would possess a family resemblance with the poetic ideas listed above:"the ascent to heaven," "allthings happen by necessity," and so on. These arethe sorts of things one might believe in, once one disbelievesin God and if one finds something lacking in the very earth-bound, unlofty constraintsof humanism. Stevens had used the phrase"supreme fiction" years earlierin a short poem from Harmonium, "A High-Toned Old ChristianWoman,"but had then abandoned it. The name suddenlyre-emergesdecades later in the May, 1941 lecture, "TheNoble Rider and the Sound of Words." There,Stevens describes"howpoets help people to live their lives":
There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, I ought to say,no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it. (WS 662)
What does Stevensmean by "supreme fictions" in this lecture,composedonly monthsbefore"NotesTowarda SupremeFiction"? Severalkey termsin the passage allow for very divergentinterpretations, especially"poet," "world," "conceive" and "incessantly." On the one hand,Stevens'earlier quotationof a poem byWordsworth indicates that he does, at least partly,mean "poet" to referto historically-situated individuals who wrote in verse.But in what sense do their poems give to "our" lives anythingso essentialthat we would be unable to "conceive" of life without them? Do I reallyturn to the creationsof Wordsworthand otherslike him "incessantly"? And in what sense do these poets create"worlds," if, as Stevens has just said,they "adhere to reality" (WS 662)? Perhapswe should read"incessantly" as hyperbole, or "poet" as a label not only appliedto writersof verse like Wordsworthbut to all those who haveshapedour inheritedwaysof thinking,as Stevenssuggestsin "Men Made Out of Words": "Thewhole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositionsof its fate"(WS 309). If the whole racefrom whom our languageand ideas come is a "poet," then perhapswe do turn to this poet "incessantly" in our thoughts. Either way, Stevens'use of "supremefictions"in "Noble Rider" would seem irreconcilable with what will soon be called "asupremefiction,"the newly formedfictionalsubstitutefor God recognizedas a fiction.He does not speakhere of a "possibility" but of (plural)fictions which we mustalready possess, since if we did not possessthem,we would be unableto think aswe do.We seem forcedto take the passagenot as the long-awaitedchristeningof Stevens'philosophico-religious project,but as one more step in that direction,a deferralof the grandconjunction of signifierand signified. Judgingby the publishedletters and other writings,it seems that Stevens did not decide upon "supreme fiction" as the name for his long-germinatingidea of a
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substitutefor religiousfaith until he decided upon the title of his latest work.This appearsto have happenedat some point in early1942, a little less than a yearafter writing of "supreme fictions"in "TheNoble Rider." Stevens composed the poem at an uncharacteristically brisk pace, assemblingall 630 lines, ten for each of his sixty-threeyears,in barelythree months.When he was nearlyfinished,he wrote his publisherwith details of the project,now (at last) entitled "Notes Toward a SupremeFiction."Thethree sections of the poem, he explains,"arethree notes by way of defining the characteristics of supremefiction" (L 407). When naming his poem andwriting of these "characteristics," did Stevenshavein mind the projectto invent a fictionalsubstitutefor the idea of God, as describedin the pages above? The identificationseems clearenough in letterswrittenshortlyafterthe poem's completion,such as the following note to Henry Church.Speakingof the "fiction ... of the NOTES," Stevenswrites:
We are confronted by a choice of ideas: the idea of God and the idea of man. The purpose of the NOTES is to suggest the possibility of a third idea: the idea of a fictive being, or state, or thing as the object of belief by way of making up for that element in humanism which is its chief defect.7
Whether or not we follow "AnglaisMort a Florence"in taking the "chief defect"of humanism to be the human beings at its center,subjectas they are to the rebelliousdefections of age and infirmity,it seems that we have reachedthe culminationof our story.Fromthe vagueprojectof a substitutefor religiousbelief, to the idea that this substitutewould be a fiction,to the idea that this fictive idea would be willfully believed,we finally arriveat the name of such a substitute:the "fiction" of the "Notes," that is, the "supreme fiction." The "supreme fiction" towardwhich the "Notes" directthemselvesis, as of this April 21, 1943 letter, something both possible and not yet realized.As we have seen, it will remainpossible and unrealizedfor the remainderof Stevens'life,from the "Collect" of 1950 (where it is describedas "acompensationof time to come" [WS 855]) to the biographical note of 1954, in which Stevenswrites that his work "suggeststhe possibility of a supremefiction."Combining the poet's statements, we can saythat someone may one day dreamup an idea of"a fictivebeing, or state, or thing"that will "adapt" the idea of God "to our differentintelligence,or create a substitutefor it, or make it unnecessary," at the same time "makingup"for the insufficienciesin humanism.8An idea of a "being": perhaps something like the being of God, the majorpoetic idea in the world; or of a "state": perhapssomething like the state of all things happeningby necessity,anotherpoetic idea;or of a "thing": perhapssomethinglike heaven,the "securely lofty"poetic inventionthat Stevens seems to have admiredsecond only to that of God. Someone may one day be inspiredwith such a fictive idea, and perhapsthe inspirationwill have had to do with the readingof Stevens'"Notes." But Stevens neverrecordedencountering such an idea, nor did he leave any evidence of believing he had createdone. In must be acknowledged,however,that a significantgap exists in the story sketchedabove.In the time betweenthe compositionof"Notes Towarda Supreme
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Fiction" in early 1942 and the April 1943 letter to Henry Church, Stevens composed a handful of letters that have, perhapsas much as the "Notes"themselves, fueledthe questto identifya supremefictionbasedon or in Stevens'poetry. In these letters, Stevens sometimes seems to identify"poetry" in some sense as the supreme fiction towardwhich the "Notes" gesture.For example,in the letter from Stevens to his publisher, quoted above,immediatelyafterexplainingthat the three sections of the poem "arethree notes by way of definingthe characteristics of supremefiction,"Stevens continues,"By supremefiction, of course,I mean poetry"(L 407). What could be more unequivocal? Does this not provethat, in spite of all we have seen, Stevens did believe he had identified the supremefiction, the long-sought replacement for God? Does this not provethat he believedpoetryitself (in general, or as an ideal)would stand in for God, and believedthis duringthe very period in which he composed"Notes,"which,as I suggested,probablyprovidesthe ultimate groundsfor our interestin the idea of"supreme fiction"? Even if he laterrenounced the identificationof poetryas a or the supremefiction,this renunciation would not negate his having identified the two duringthe compositionof the poem. Two aspectsof Stevens'identification of"supremefiction" and "poetry" might hold us back from proclaimingthat Stevens did, after all, identify in poetrywhat he could no longer find in God. The firstis the absenceof an article.Stevens does not say that poetry is "thesupremefiction," or even "asupremefiction," but simply "supreme fiction." A poet who writes,"Wherewas it one first heardof the truth? The the" (WS 186)-such a poet is not unawareof the semantic weight of an article."The" or "asupremefiction" might havesuggestedthesupremefictiontoward which the "Notes" direct themselves,a supremefiction that might fill the gaps in humanismand compensatefor the demise of the ChristianGod. Instead,we have "thecharacteristics of supremefiction,"and "bysupremefiction." We have a term without articlethat largelydisappears from Stevens'subsequentletters. The second element which might give us pause is the "of course."It seems highly doubtfulthat at any time Stevens saw the precisenatureof a monumental, fictivesuccessorto religiousbelief as somethingobviousor self-evident.No matter what the substitutefor the idea of God might be, it would almost certainlynot be a matterof course,nor of an "ofcourse."Whatever Stevensmeansto equatepoetry with, then, it would seem not to havebeen "thesupremefiction" that would satisfy the sense of post-theistic longing. Perhapsby saying he "means" poetry when he says supremefiction, Stevensuses the word "means" in a sense analogousto its use in the following scenario: A choreographer intends to createa "supreme spectacle" in an upcoming show. She informs the producerthat "supreme spectacle" consists of the following characteristics: abstraction,change, and pleasure."By supreme spectacle," she adds,"ofcourse,I mean dance." Here, the "ofcourse" makesperfect sense: the three characteristics of "supreme spectacle" were so general,they left it unclearthat the spectaclewould involve(of course)the mediumof dance,which is after all the choreographer's trade.So might Stevens have meant to note, in passing, that any supremefiction would, of course,also be the subjectfor poetry,and would be embodiedin poetry.He saysas much in the 1954 biographical note, cited
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above:"Inthe creationof any such fiction,poetrywould have a vital significance." Why would a supremefiction appearin poetry,and not, say,in philosophy, politics, cuisine or dance?Is this purelya poet's bias?Part of the explanationmay be that Stevens,aswe saw in the closing lines of "Collect," identifiesthe veryidea of "belief beyondbelief"with the "presence of a poet."It maybe possibleto createa supreme ideain theology,equestriansculpture,or science, and it may be possible to create an entertaining and otherwiseadequate fiction in prose,but a supremefiction-both fictive and capableof holding its own againstreligiousfaith-demands a poetic vehicle. Or so Stevens seems to have believed. In associatingsupremefiction and poetry,Stevens may also have had in mind his isolated first use of the phrase "supreme fiction,"decades earlier,in the teasingly blasphemous poem from Harmoniummentioned above, "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman."The poem begins with the declaration,"Poetryis the supremefiction,madame" (WS 47), and goes on to imaginepoetry and the "fictive things"of its creationas an exuberant, transformative "opposinglaw"to the severe moralizing of orthodox Christianity.As we have seen, the poem long predates Stevens'identificationof the phrase"supreme fiction" with his hope for a fictive replacementfor religiousbelief, so we have no reasonto readthe poem'sfirst line through the lens of the later and largerproject.Without any furtherspecification, the "supreme" in "supreme fiction" would naturallyevoke the idea of a "supreme being,"in which case the line might be paraphrased, "Your God, madame,maybe the supremebeing,but poetry is the supremefiction." Given the delight the poem takes in "fictivethings,"such an assertionwould be tantamountto suggestingthat poetic fiction trumps the high-toned Christian's grave deified being. Alternately, and with even more pagan mischief,the line could be read as saying,"YourGod, madame,is certainlya fiction,but poetry is the supreme fiction."Such iconoclasm might be a little too causticeven for Harmonium, but if we follow it, "fiction" could mean something like "imaginative creation" or "actof the imagination" and would need no connotation of a specific,fictive,willfully believed idea with which to fill a God-shaped void. Certainly,there have been writers who have valorized poetry to religious heights, and Stevens sometimes belongs among them. But it is unclear how his respectfor the powersof poetry in these moments could constitute an identification of the supremefiction. In one of his undated aphorisms,he writes,"God is a symbolfor somethingthat can aswell take otherforms,as,for example,the form of high poetry" (WS 907), and in anotherhe states,"Afterone has abandoneda belief in god, poetry is that essencewhich takes its place as life'sredemption" (WS 901). God and high poetry may both be symbols for the same lofty idea or thing, and "poetry" may in some sense serve as the recompensefor the loss of God, but what, specifically, arewe to make of"poetry" in these hermetic fragments?Did Stevens see the creationof verse as afictive idea that men could will themselves to believe? What would it mean for the very ideaof poetry to be a fiction?(Does anyonenot believe that poetryexists?)Perhapswe could imagine a poet inventinga supremely lofty, or even somehow mystical, conception of the nature and importance of
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poetry.Then we could see this conception,if recognizedas a fiction and nevertheless believed,and if sufficientas a surrogatefor the idea of God, as fitting Stevens' standard for a supremefiction.But Stevenshimselfgives no indicationof believing he has carriedout this project. By the end of 1942, Stevenshad already revisedthe ambiguous termsof his letter to the CummingtonPress("Bysupremefiction,of course,I mean poetry").He writes to Henry Church,"I have no idea of the form that a supremefiction would take.The NOTES start out with the idea that it would not take any form: that it would be abstract." Then, once again adding a provocative"of course," Stevens adds,"Of course,in the long run,poetrywould be the supremefiction;the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives pleasure" (L 430). Keepingin mind the loftiness of the poetic implied by Stevens in his treatmentof "poeticideas,"could this idea of changeablypleasing poetry constitute the fictive idea that might replacethe idea of God?Yet as soon as Stevensbegins to articulate how poetry might be a supremefiction, he displacesit into a potential,not actual, "longrun." If poetryis to become in some sense the supremefiction,then the precise contoursof that sense must remainunclear.A month later,in anotherof his exegeticallettersto Hi Simons, Stevenshas become even less definite:"I ought to say that I have not yet defined a supremefiction ... I don'twant to say that I don't mean poetry;I don'tknow what I mean" (L 435). He lamentshis failureto "rationalize"the "enigma," to make it more precise,and in a follow-up note two weeks laterabandonssuch attemptsaltogether. "Ithink I said in my last letter to you that the SupremeFiction is not poetry," Stevensconcludes,now clearlymarkingout the statureof the ideawith capitals, "butI also saidthat I don'tknowwhat it is going to be. Let us think about it and not say that our abstraction is this, that or the other" (L 438). Such refusalof speculationabout the location of his fictive grail settles into an officialposition for Stevens."I confess that I don'twant to limit myself as to my objective" (L 485), he writes of the supremefictionin 1945. Never againdoes he identify"a" or "the" supremefiction,or supremefictions in general,with poetry, or with anythingelse. But on anothermatterhe is equallyconsistent:the kind of supremefiction gesturedtowardin his poem'stitle "wouldneveramount to much ... until it has all come to a point"(L 435). A supremefiction must be specific, a specific idea. It must be the sort of thing one could hold in one's mind, clearly, perhapson the way to war,as Stevens implies in the epilogue to "Notes."It will be an "arbitrary objectof belief,"and will serveas an "artificial subjectfor poetry,a sourceof poetry"(L 485). Idea,belief,subject:the supremefiction maybe abstract, but it will alsobe specificand articulable, perhapswith as muchrhetorical precision as the older "poeticideas" of God, heaven,or the necessityof all things. Once again,the crucialfact, unchangedsince Stevens first began to muse on the need to believe in "somethingelse"once one no longerbelievesin God, is that he does not believe this other belief to have yet been created.Even during the period in 1942 and 1943 when he seems to speculate,in shifting terms,aboutthe possiblypoetic statusof a supremefiction,Stevensdoes not assertthat he or anyone else has arrived at or even realizedin poetic practicethe relevantidea of poetry.He
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writes of "Notes" duringthis period,"thenucleusof the matteris containedin the title. It is implicit in the title that there can be such a thing as a supremefiction" (L 430). Therecan be,though there is not. He insists to Hi Simons, in one of the rarepassagesin the publishedletterscontainingan underlinedphrase,"Inprinciple there appearto be certain characteristics of a supremefiction and theNOTES is confined to a statement ofafew ofthosecharacteristics" (L 435). As if anticipatingthe half-century of critical controversythat would enshroud the supreme fiction of the poem'stitle, Stevens emphasizesthat the "Notes"do not contain that which they point toward.Nor do they constitute an exhaustiveor systematicstatement of the natureof the thing.They merelyoffer a "few" of the characteristics it would "appear""in principle" to need.In this letterto Simons, Stevensalso makeshis suggestion, noted above,that the subjectof a supremefiction "couldoccupy a school of rabbisfor the next few generations," and characterizes such work as "tryingto createsomething as valid as the idea of God has been, and for that matterremains" (L 435). The supremefiction can, conceivably, be created.It is possible. Given the late composition of the 1954 biographicalnote, and its gesture toward"the possibility of a supremefiction,"it seems reasonableto assume that Stevens hoped a sufficientsupremefiction might appearafter his death. Perhaps tragically, it has not. I would even have to disagreewith MarjoriePerloff'salready less-than-optimisticclaim that Stevenscomes to recognizein the courseof"Notes" that the supremefiction can exist "onlyin the 'fluentmundo'of poetic language,a seriesof endlessfiguralrepetitions" (52).This would imply that Stevensrecognized the impossibilityof creatinghis supremefiction.Thebiographical note of 1954 suggests he did not, and continuedhoping for its arrival. His death-bed conversionto Catholicism,if it occurred, might even suggest that he finallydecided to adopt an older poetic idea (God), an earlierpoet's fiction,as his own, in light of his inability to find a self-made fiction that would suffice.9 Stevens thus appearsto disagreewith criticswho identifythe supremefiction as the idea in "Notes" of "thisinventedworld,"or of "the majorman,"or who say that the supremefiction is the ecstasythe poet experiences,or that it is a solitary poet sublimatedinto a mortalgod, or "perception beyond reason," or a belief lying behind Stevens'final poems in "the world as inhuman meditation" or "realityas cosmic imagination," or "apoetic vision of the supremespirit creatingspace and time and manifestingitself in each creativeact of human consciousness."'0 At the same time, the poet also seems to distancehimself from criticswho would read a concept like the supremefiction as inherently,necessarilyor structurally "absent," ratherthanprovisionally lackingbut capableof arriving at anymoment,once someone thinksof a good enough idea." It is not that anyof these interpretations fails to find supportin Stevens'poetry.Rather,nearlyall of them find more than adequate support.We seem to be confronted with preciselythe kind of "equipollence" by which the ancientskepticsaimedto bring aboutepoche, or suspensionofjudgment. Perhapswe should set the readingsoff againstone anotherin an illustrationof the peculiar"impossibility" of reading Stevens,or the pluralisticrichnessof his verse. Or perhapsthe best way of readingStevenswould be to adopt one, as if by a leap
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of faith,or by the fiction that one identificationalone couldbe correct-to choose a door arbitrarily and enter it, ratherthan standingperpetuallyin the interpretive hallway. But we can at least recognizethe possibilityof an alternative, and the fact that this alternative seems to have been the poet's own: a recognitionthat Stevens did not fully realizethe projectset out in (what he saw as) the "central theme"of his poetry. A possibility we have not yet consideredis that Stevens'idea of a supreme fiction could itselfbe a supremefiction, an idea recognized as fictive but believed nonetheless, and offering a substitutefor belief in God. Even here, though, it is difficultto meet the poet's demandingstandardsfor what a supremefiction must be and do. We can distinguishbetween at least two senses of "Stevens' idea of a supremefiction" that could serve as candidatesfor supremefictionhood:the idea that there couldbe a substitutefor the old religiousideal, recognized as invented and yet believed;and the specficidea that would fulfill this role,which the critics mentioned abovefind in one aspector anotherof Stevens'poetry. In the first case, it is difficultto see how such a mere possibilitycould sufficeto fill the gap left by a departing God. Could believing in the simple, barepossibilityof the eventual concoction of some grand poetic idea sufficeto drown out "the eternalsilence of these infinite spaces"?12 In the second case, we can begin by wonderingwhether there are indeed any critics who truly believe in the existence of some particular supremefiction,though they know it to be of Stevens'owncreation,somethinghe made up and wrote aboutin his poetry.We can imagine,for the sake of argument, that at least some of the most philosophicallyor theologicallyambitiousinterpreters of Stevens'supremefiction might, in fact,believe in the existenceof what they describe-"reality as cosmic imagination," for example-not only as a theme in Stevens'poetrybut as the truth.But a problemariseswhen we considerthe nature of their belief. Does our imaginarycriticbelieve that realitytrulyis cosmic imagination?Or does he recognizethat it isn'treallycosmic imaginationany more than Jove is sitting atop a cloud in the heavens,and yet believe in it anyway?Only in the lattercasewould "reality as cosmic imagination" qualifyas a supremefiction in Stevens'sense:believed though recognized as make-believe.Yet, if the imaginary criticknowsthatwhat he believesis not true,in what sense exactlydoes he "believe" in it?And is such a belief trulystrongenough to standin the footstepsof a perhaps outmoded but in time past very imposing divinity? Stevens was awareof the paradoxlying at the heart of any possible supreme fiction,though it does not seem to have causedhim many sleeplessnights. Simply put, how is it possiblefor anyoneto believein somethingshe recognizesas untrue? Those whom Stevens called the "rationalists" in their "square hats"may see such an objectionas a knock-down argumentagainstthe very possibilityof a supreme fiction, but not the poet. Though Stevens tends to avoid speaking of supreme fictions in veridicalterms, preferringlocutions such as "afiction, recognized as a fiction" to "afiction, recognized as untrue," he does not hold back from this step unconditionallyeither in his poetry or his letters.Shortly after the completion of "Notes," for example,Stevensparaphrases the idea"underlying" the poem by saying
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"it might be possible for us to believe in something that we know to be untrue" (L 443); and in a poem collected in the samevolume as "Notes," the speakerrefers to "thenicer knowledgeof/ Belief, that what it believes in is not true"(WS 291). Stevens seems to have no categoricalobjection to saying of something that it is known as "nottrue" and at the same time that it is believed,or believedin. (Stevens does not seem to draw any strict distinction between "belief"and "beliefin.") It might also be noted that nowherein his publishedwritings, so far as I know,does Stevens speakof belief in something known to be "false," though such a possibility would seem implied by his other statements,from a square-hattedpoint of view. Stevensfavorsthe use of"fiction" to the more philosophically weighted "untrue" or "nottrue," and "nottrue" to the morejarring"false,"just as he favorsthe cognitively weaker"recognized" to the epistemicallydefinitive"known." How does Stevens extricatehimself from the paradoxof belief in something known to be a fiction? He does not take the easy way out of contradiction,by craftinga clever, Thomisticdistinction."Thebelief in a supremefiction is of a different kind than ordinarybelief,"or, "the supremefiction is untrue in one sense, but true in another,higher sense"-the poet will have no commerce with such mickey-mocking.Nor does he insist that a supremefictionwould be "neither true nor false," like Planck's "working hypothesis" in "ACollect of Philosophy." Instead, he confrontsthe paradoxof fictivebelief head-on and casuallydismissesit. In the same 1942 letter to Henry Church in which Stevens imagineswriting a "bookof specimens" and statesthat he has "noideawhat form a supremefictionwould take," he also reportsthe following encounterwith a student at Trinity College:
I saidthat I thoughtthatwe had reached a point at which we couldno longerreally believein anything unlesswe recognized thatit wasa fiction.T'he studentsaidthatthat was an impossibility, that therewas no suchthing as believingin somethingthat one knewwas not true.It is obvious, however, thatwe aredoingthatall the time.(L 430)
As an example, Stevens mentions the idea of heaven:"Thereare plenty of people who believe in Heaven as definitely as your New England ancestorsand my Dutch believed in it"(L 430). But do they recognize it as a fiction, much less know it to be untrue?The helpless philosopher might intrude to say helpfully that Stevens must assume anyone in his time and milieu to know,in some sense, heaven to be unreal.Or he might attemptto squareStevens'language with Kant's Copernicanrevolution, as if the poet weredrawingattentionto the way that objects must conformto our knowledge,and not vice versa,the sense in which what once seemed real apartfrom us is in fact, in a sense,a "fiction""created by us."But must we attempt to make the irrationalrationalonce again?Can we, in the end?Why does Stevens' supreme fiction keep running into problems at seemingly every turn-including the final turn,its apparentfailurethus far to be realized? Perhaps we should not be surprised.In Stevens' letters, references to the supremefiction areoccasionallyaccompaniedby allusionsto William James'"will
to believe":
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if we are willing to believe in fiction ...
the need to believe, what in your day, and mine, in Cambridge, was called the will to believe ... (L 431,443)
The most extendedinvocationofJames'idea occursimmediatelyfollowingthe passageabout the skeptic-mindedyouth from Trinity,the boy who insisted "that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true.It is obvious,however," Stevens continues,"thatwe are doing that all the time":
There are things with respect to which we willingly suspend disbelief; if there is instinctive in us a will to believe, or if there is a will to believe, whether or not it is instinctive, it seems to me that we can suspend disbelief with reference to a fiction as easily as we can suspend it with reference to anything else. (L 430)
It is as if Stevens had in mind a model of belief as a sort of mental feat, as if we couldwill ourselvesto believearbitrarily througha kind of innerexertion-like stretchingsomething inside one'smind into an unfamiliarpose, or lifting a peculiarlyheavy mental weight. On this view, coming to believe something known to be untruewould present only a practicaldifficulty,not a logical one. If we found ourselvesunable to believe something, such as a fiction known to be untrue,an appropriate responsemight be: try harder. But James does not speak of belief in this way.Throughout"The Will to Believe," the popularlecturehe publishedas partof a book in 1897, when Stevens was in his first year at Harvardand James had just returnedto the philosophy faculty there, the philosophergoes out of his way to emphasize that we are only capableof believing a hypothesiswhen it strikesus as "arealpossibility,"3something that might very well be true.James refersto such hypotheses as "live," and mocks the idea of attemptingto believe in somethingwhich is "dead" to us:
Can we, just by willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true,... feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars?We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them ... (719)
In otherwords,James leavesno doubtthat he does not believein the possibility of "suspending disbelief," as Stevenssays,with referenceto somethingknown to be a fiction,known to be of our own creationand presumeduntrue.It maybe possible for us to saywe believe such a thing, or to act as ifwe believedit, but to believe it in fact simply lies beyond us. When James turns explicitlyto religiousbelief, laterin the lecture,and suggeststhat it can be intellectuallydefensibleand philosophically lawfulto believe"thatthe best things arethe more eternalthings,"and"thatwe are betteroff even now if we believe" this (731-2), as well as to believein more specific religioushypotheses,he does so on the explicitpresupposition that religiousbelief remainsa live option for his audience."If we areto discussthe question[of religious belief] at all,"he notes at the outset, "it must involve a living option. If for any
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of you religion be a hypothesisthat cannot,by any living possibilitybe true, then you need go no farther" (732). Only a paragraph later,he interruptshis argument to say,again,"Allthis is on the suppositionthat it [religiousbelief] reallymay be propheticand right, and that, even to us who arediscussingthis matter,religionis a live hypothesiswhich may be true"(732-3). After anotherparagraph, concluding the lecture,Jamespoints out yet againthat his argumentappliesexclusivelyto "livingoptions which the intellect of the individualcannot by itself resolve" (734). The point of James'lecture is very explicitly not that we can believe arbitrarily in whateverwe choose, given enough effort or desire,but that in certain cases it can be intellectuallylegitimate to allow ourselvesto believe one hypothesis over another despite the absence of decisive evidence.In such cases, both hypotheses must not only be living,but the choicebetweenthem mustalsobe both "forced" and "momentous": that is, there must be no possibilityof not choosing, and the stakes of the decision must be significantand irreversible (718).14Far from opening the way to belief in what we know to be false,James offers strict and narrowcriteria for the legitimate applicationof the will in mattersof belief. But if Stevens took James to be saying that the suspension of disbelief is everywherepossible, he would have been far from alone. Whether or not the young poet readJames'lecture,or was simply exposed to the languageof its title throughconversation duringhis yearsin Cambridge,his interpretation of the "will to believe" was sharedby many at the time.James himself repeatedlynotes in the course of the lecturethe great potentialsfor misunderstanding, as when he warns againstidentifyingthe will to believewith "faith" as definedby the schoolboywho says,"Faithis when you believe something that you know ain'ttrue.""I can only repeatthat this is misapprehension" (734),Jamesinsists.In lateryears,he regretted the title of his by then most famous lecture."I once wrote an essay on our right to believe," he writes,"whichI unluckilycalled the Willto Believe. All the critics, neglecting the essay,pounced upon the title. Psychologicallyit was impossible, morallyit was iniquitous.The 'will to deceive,'the 'will to make believe,'werewittily proposed as substitutesfor it" (457). He suggests that he should have called the lecture instead "TheRight to Believe,"echoing a phrasewhich occurs in the lecture'sfirst paragraphand would seem to capturethe thrust of the essay much better than its actualtitle. Stevens'apparent reliance, in his conceptionof a supremefiction,on the widely sharedmisinterpretation ofJames'"willto believe" may offer a clue to the difficulties criticshave experiencedover the last half-centuryin attemptingto define the supreme fiction. If we follow James in rejectingthe psychologicalpossibility of believing what we know to be untrue,then the supremefiction may not only be absent from Stevens'poetry,as the poet himself seems to have believed,but may representa simple, general impossibility.It may lie outside the range of human capabilityto find a replacementfor God by believing in something known to be a fiction.In fact,we might even go a step furtherthanJamesand arguethat belief in something known to be untrueis not only apsychological impossibility, but a logical one. It is not so much that we as human beings lack the capacityto believe what
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we know to be untrue,as though such belief were simply an abilitylike any other, and some race of aliens might possess it. Rather,our very concept of belief may imply that what is believedis believedto be true.Our customary ways of using the word "belief" simply do not allow for the possibilityof believingwhat one knows to be untrue.In other words, our inability to will belief in fictions recognized as fictions maybe less like our inabilityto fly or see throughsteel walls, and morelike the "inability" of bachelorsto be married,or trianglesto have four sides.We can imagine a raceof creatures with enormouswings and penetratingvision, but what would it look like for a creatureto believe in something it knows to be untrue? (What would it look like if a bachelorgot marriedbut succeeded,through sheer force of will, in remaininga bachelor?) Thereare,in fact,writerswho believein what the Proustscholar JoshuaLandy has called"lucidself-delusion," the fully consciousadoptionof a belief knownto be illusory(Landy49). For example,as Landy argues,Marcel'scalculatedeffortsin A la recherche dutempsperdu to deceivehimself aboutAlbertine'sfaithfulnessseem to requirea simultaneousknowledgeand refusalof that knowledge,a "synchronically split"(126) mind. Even in everydayspeech,we talk of"deceivingoneself"or being "self-deceived": "Stoplying to yourself,"wecan say,or,"Deep down I alwaysknew ... I just couldn'tadmit it to myself." The model of belief implicit in such statements would seem to allow for at least the logical possibilityof a supremefiction. By assimilatingStevens'project for a supremefictionto a Proustianor Nietzschean model of willed self-deception, as opposed to the Jamesianmodel of a right to believe,we might thus succeed in establishingthe supremefiction as a theoretical possibility,preciselywhat Stevens claimed for it. But the work of creatingthe supremefiction in all of its necessary, hard-wonspecificitywould remainour own, and as yet unperformed.
Abbreviations
L WS Holly Stevens,ed. Lettersof Wallace Stevens. New York:Alfred A Knopf,1966. Wallace Stevens. Collected Poetryand Prose.New York: The Libraryof America,1997.
Notes
1. See Dodds'"On Misunderstandingthe Oedipus Rex." 2. From "SaintJohn and the Back-Ache,"in Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetryand Prose.New York: The Libraryof America, 1997. 357. 3. Holly Stevens,ed., Lettersof Wallace Stevens. New York:Alfred A. Knopf,1966. 636. 4. He continues that they "areusually some variationof the idea of the subject-objectrelationship" (viii-ix). 5. L 736. ForWeiss'view of the episode, see Jenkins 73-74.
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6. It is worth noting, in supportof the earlierclaim that Stevenstrulyhoped for the eventualcreation of a supremefiction,but did not believe one to have alreadybeen created,that he also says,"Thegreat poetry I have projectedis a compensationof time to come"(WS 855). 7. Quoted in Bates 203. 8. Ibid.;WS 806. 9. On the conversion,see Bates 296-7, as well as the letter from FatherArthur Hanley to Stevens scholar JanetMcCann,datedJuly24,1977. "He saidif he got well,"FatherHanley concludes,"we would talk a lot more and if not - he would see me in heaven" (Hanley).If Stevens succeededin believing he would, after death, meet people he knew in a place called heaven,it is difficult not to think that his successwould exemplifythe possibilityof belief in an idea recognizedas a fiction. 10. See, for example,Doggett 105; Bates 234, though also see 267-8; Bloom, Wallace Stevens175-6, 212,215; Bloom, "Notes" 77; Heringman 11; McCann 100; Leggett 15; Carroll8. 11. See, for example,Miller 285; Riddel 85-86; Jarraway 141. 12. "Le silence eternel de ces espacesinfinis m'effraie" (Pascal110). 13. James717. The lecturewas originallydeliveredas an addressto the PhilosophicalClubs of Yaleand Brown Universities,then publishedin the New World in June 1896 (ibid.). 14. James'exampleof a "forced" option is, "Eitheracceptthis truth or go without it,"in contrastto an "avoidable" option such as "Eithercall my theorytrue or call it false" (718). If we attemptto refrainfrom making a choice in the formercase,we only succeedin choosing to go without the proposedtruth.The same structure, James suggests,appliesto religiousbelief.
Works Cited
Bates,Milton J. Wallace Stevens:A Mythology of Self Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1985. Bloom, Harold."Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: A Commentary." Wallace Stevens:A Collection of Critical Essays.Ed. Marie Borroff.Englewood Cliffs:Prentice-Hall,Inc., 1963. 76-95. . Wallace Stevens: ThePoemsof OurClimate. Ithaca:Cornell U P, 1976.
Carroll, Joseph. Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction.Baton Rouge:Louisiana State U P. 1987. Critchley,Simon. Things MerelyAre:Philosophy in the Poetryof Wallace Stevens.London: Routledge, 2005. Dodds, E. R. "On Misunderstandingthe Oedipus Rex."Greek Tragedy: ModernEssaysin Criticism. Ed. Erich Segal.New York:Harperand Row, 1983. 177-188. Doggett, Frank.Stevens' Poetryof Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1966. Hanley,Arthur.Letter to Janet McCann. 24Jul. 1977. "WallaceStevens'sallegeddeathbedconversion." Centerfor Programs in Contemporary Writing. Ed. Al Filreis.26 Nov. 1997. 19 Mar.2007 http:// www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/conversion.html. Heringman,Bernard. "WallaceStevens:The Use of Poetry." The Act of theMind:Essayson thePoetryof Wallace Stevens.Ed. J. Hillis Miller and Roy Harvey Pearce.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1965. 1-12. James,William. TheWritings of WilliamJames: A Comprehensive Edition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967. Jarraway, David R. Wallace Stevensand the Question of Belief Metaphysician in theDark. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 1993. 141. Quoted in Leggett 145.
100
Jenkins,Lee Margaret.Wallace Stevens: Ragefor Order. Brighton:SussexAcademic P,2000. Landy,Joshua. Philosophy as Fiction:Self Deception, and Knowledge in Proust.Oxford: Oxford U P, 2004. Leggett, B.J. Late Stevens: The Final Fiction.Baton Rouge: LouisianaState U P, 2005. McCann,Janet. Wallace Stevens Revisited:"The Celestial Possible. "New York: TwaynePublishers,1995. Miller,J. Hillis. "Theoretical and AntitheoreticalStevens."Wallace Stevens: A Celebration. Ed. Robert Buttel and FrankDoggett. Princeton:PrincetonU P, 1980.274-285. Pascal,Blaise.Penses. Manchecourt:GF Flammarion,1976. Perloff,Marjorie."Revolvingin Crystal:The SupremeFiction and the Impasse of Modernist Lyric." Wallace Stevens: ThePoeticsof Modernism. Ed. Albert Gelpi. Cambridge:CambridgeU P, 1985. 41-64. Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The EarlyYears 1879-1923. New York:Beech Tree Books, 1986. . Wallace Stevens: The LaterYears 1923-1955. New York:Beech Tree Books, 1988. Riddel,Joseph. "Interpreting Stevens:An Essayon PoetryandThinking." boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 85-86. Quoted in Schaum 125. Schaum,Melita. Wallace Stevens and the CriticalSchools. Tuscaloosa: U of AlabamaP, 1988. Stevens,Holly, ed. Lettersof Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1966. Cited as "L". Stevens,Wallace.Collected Poetryand Prose.New York: The Libraryof America,1997. Cited as "WS".

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?

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The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact? Author(s): Gregory Brazeal Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No.

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?

Keywords:Wallace Stevens / supremefiction / criticism/ philosophy/ William James

f, as Foucault says, the author is the principleof thrift in the proliferationof

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

Of final belief. So,saythatfinal belief

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction orFact?

Journal ofModern Literature

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