"The More Than Rational Distortion"
in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
 

This essay originally appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal 8 (1983): 1-7.

All quotations are from the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens unless otherwise indicated.

The desire to hold nature to itself, to name it "flatly," is ever-present in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. In the late poem "The Rock," for example, Stevens expresses his hopes for a final "cure of the ground / or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure / Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness." But this desire is never fully satisfied, for mankind's conceptual pigeonholing of reality is continually overthrown by a prompting to make things over new which comes from within "reality" itself. In "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", Stevens call this prompting the "more than rational distortion," and he identifies it further, while in direct address to what he calls the "Fat girl" (the earth, the provider of all the raw materials of the human mind) in praise of her wonders, as "The fiction that results from feeling"; that is to say, mankind's perception of "the more than rational distortion" inspires the ability to imagine and brings about the need for creation of those fictions which will help counter the "pressure of reality" exerted upon us by the world in which we live, a world which, though seemingly familiar, remains always "in difference," always unmastered, inhuman:

A poem like "Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers" (246-47) illustrates well the function of the "more than rational distortion" in Stevens' phenomenology of perception. The poem describes a woman's reconstruction in memory and imagination of how a vase on her piano once became for her "crude and jealous formlessness / Became the form and the fragrance of things / Without clairvoyance, close to her." Though the flowers are, by the poem's close, "real," that is natural and ordinary--they were not always so, as the poem makes clear, nor in Stevens' poetry are any of things of our world: everything is seen in the way in which it is seen only because we learned to see it in that way.

Once, when the flowers first appeared on her piano, it seemed to the woman "as if thunder took form" there. And, as the poet admonishes the "little owl within her"--her true phenomenological wisdom--to recall accurately her imagination's initial construction of the scene, the true process by which the flowers became real and "close to her" is revealed. Out of what was originally only distortion and dissonance ("crude and jealous formlessness"), her eyes learned to perceive "how / High blue became particular / In the leaf and bud," "how the central, essential red / Escaped its large abstraction," "how the inhuman colors fells / Into place beside her, where she was." It was, we are told, a process of "human conciliation," "A profounder reconciling" that had made an alien, "inhuman" image become something that can be known in "An affirmation free from doubt." To Stevens every image is similarly secured for the processes of human thought from out of the "difference" in which we perpetually find ourselves; but in Stevens' world of process stability cannot endure; the woman's vase of flowers will yield again to distortion and, yet again, to imaginal reconstruction.

The more than rational distortion exists because, as Stevens explains in The Necessary Angel, "There is in reality an aspect of individuality at which every form of rational explanation stops short" (93). The difference between this ever elusive individuality existent in things and the reality momentarily captured by the human mind is the more than rational distortion; and it is the business of the poet, as Stevens insists again and again in both his prose and poetry, to seek it out, for its influence creates poetry, makes poetry's making. Each image which we secure of the world, Stevens declares, is merely "an elaboration of a particular of the subject" (NA 127), an excerption, and these "elaborations" Stevens tends to call "facts." Thus the province of the imagination is, to Stevens, factual; for to Stevens imagination is our capacity for apprehending the true uniqueness, the true individuality, of things.

Consequently, imagination has several distinctive characteristics for Stevens. Imagination is, first of all, "always at the end of an era." Because imagination always seeks a new order and a new individuality,

The imagination in Stevens' view is, therefore not so much within us, as a power within which we dwell. For, as Stevens explains, the poet Thus for Stevens the realms of complete fact and complete imagination are, contrary to all standard definitions of these two words, made up of the same contents. As Stevens explains, And that which makes objective facts seem to possess an imaginal quality is the more than rational distortion. For the more than rational distortion, as Stevens conceived of it, need not be thought of as a product of fancy (in the Coleridgean sense). It is not the creation of the intellect at all; rather, it is indisputably there, a primary process, present in the very potentiality of perception whenever our inherent tendency to gloss reality momentarily falters.

We all live, Stevens felt, in a world of imagination, even the most nonpoetic. "Take the case of the man for whom reality is enough," he observed, "Does he not dwell in an analogy?" (NA 129). But though all men may perceive the world through those imaginal constructions which they impose upon it, a time eventually arrives when the "analogy" breaks down--for the imagination is always at the end of an era--and reality becomes momentarily distorted. One for whom reality is never enough, dwelling always in an in-between realm, between eras of the imagination, the poet perceives reality and imagination as a seamless continuum. The poet knows that perhaps there exists

To the individual for whom reality is enough such states of "clairvoyant observation" would be perplexing, even mind-blowing. Stevens enjoyed imagining the results; his Collections Poems contains numerous examples of the encounters of non-poetic minds with the more than rational distortion.

Before such encounters, the world revealed in perception remains "as unreal as real can be / In the inexquisite eye (468) of all the many smugly rational individuals of Stevens' poetry: the men at the Sorbonne in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", who long to make "the irrational . . . rational" (406); Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, who has "said not / To Everything" (249); the Doctor of Geneva (24), the early and late Crispin of "Comedian as the letter C." All these individuals are certain of the meaning of reality until "flicked by feeling" (407) they begin to perceive that their assessment of the real is too shallow. Crispin, for example, takes his unobservant eyes to sea and there, meeting for the first time, without his usual mediation, the "Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, / Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust" (28) of the ocean, has his mind blown by the more than rational distortion inherent in things. For he witnesses there:

His new experiences make "him see how much / Of what he saw he never saw at a;;" (36), and although by the poem's end his "relation" to this newly discovered world has been "stopped," it for the moment makes him a new and better poet.

Crispin's ocean voyage exposes him to what Stevens elsewhere calls "the vulgate of experience," or the "eye's plain version" (465), Stevens' designations for the natural order of things before human reason begins to structure it. This "gaudy, gusty panoply" (30), however, is not to be endured, for as Stevens observes "The plainness of plain things is savagery" (467). For the "vulgate" is "gibberish"; it makes no human sense. And yet it is, nevertheless, the source of all poetry: this "muddy centre" of our experience existed, Stevens reminds, "before we breathed," and even then it was "Venerable and articulate and complete" (383; my italics). It remains, even now, the authentic source of inspiration, of newness, of the facts with which the imagination deals, and the real motion of the poem is, as Stevens suggests,

The presence of the "vulgate of experience" in a poet's mind--a presence which the poet must feel if he is to be at all "realistic" (for the "vulgate," in a sense, is alone "real," all other orders being mere extrapolations from--translations of--it)--Stevens likes to call the "the first idea." The "first idea" always remains "The hermit in a poet's metaphors (381), and when a contradiction is noted by the poet when he perceives a clash, a sense of incompatibility, between the "vulgate" and the currently accepted translation, or fiction, by means of which he at present sees the world, then the "hermit" comes out of hiding, summoning the no-longer reclusive poet to dip down into the well of experience again in order to begin to make new. "The more than rational distortion" is Stevens' name for the perception of incongruity which is the genesis of this whole process.

The more than rational distortion in Stevens' poetry is identified with iridescence and dissonance, that is, with the difference between the expected and the seen. Crispin, for example, journeys into "A savage color" (30), within which his perception changes until he seems to be hallucinating. In "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" it is "the grossest iridescence of ocean" which "Pierces us with strange relation" and causes us to question the reality of the world" (383); in "The Doctor of Geneva" it is again the ocean--the Pacific--which assaults a man accustomed to lakes with "visible, voluble deluging. / Which yet founds means to set his simmering mind / Spinning and hissing with oracular / Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste" (24); in the "Place of the Solitaires" (another of Stevens' many appellations for poet) "perpetual undulation" (60) is characteristic; in "Ordinary Evening in New Haven," even the "faithfulness of reality," of the quotidian round of day and night, only serves to "make gay the hallucination in surfaces" (472); and the true hero, we are told, is the individual who is able to blend in "hymns" the "iridescent changes" which he experiences in

Again and again Stevens describes the source of poetic inspiration in terms of distortion; poetry's real genesis is for him always, as it is in "The Sun This March," For Stevens it is the corner of the eye, the peripheral vision, which makes poetry; for it is there that the unexpected makes itself felt, that the more than rational distortion is noted; it is our peripheral vision which discovers and does not impose. In our peripheral vision "fictive things / wink as they will" (59).

"The poem," Stevens claims, "must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully" (350). That is, it must escape the focal's imposition of a stereotyped reality. For Stevens, "to impose is not / To discover" (403); our imaginative gains are not to be secured from "applied / Enflashings" of "reason's click and clack" (387). Stevens retains a faith that poetry is not a willed imposition of an anthropomorphic point of view by man on his world; in "The Comedian as the Letter C" the poem's first line--"Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil"--metamorphoses into Crispin's later "rude aesthetic," formulated after his experience of the more than rational distortion on his ocean voyage; "Nota: his soil is man's intelligence" (27, 36). Because "The squirming facts" of the periphery "exceed the squamous mind" (275), there must be in the poet a trust in "the ever-never-changing-same, / An appearance of Again, diva dame" (353) that it will alone sustain him and his art. For Stevens, this "diva dame" is nothing else than the earth, the "Fat girl, terrestrial"; and though he longs to see her "naked"(396), he cannot. For she can be seen only "in difference," "familiar yet an aberration." She makes herself visible only through the more than rational distortion.

The more than rational distortion, although a seeming, is real; and when Stevens tries to persuade us of its existence, his sense of urgency is apparent.

And, therefore, the "seeming" of the imagination is not a seeming at all, but a power by which things are made to be what they are, for as Stevens explains: In "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," in what is perhaps Stevens' fullest explanation of his understanding of the meaning of imagination, He draws a similar analogy: Imagination, Stevens is telling us, adds to the world nothing that is not there, for like light it only discovers what is there in the panoply of sensation, though it may not yet be realized. The imagination receives the gifts of the periphery, draws out of the "vulgate of experience" as non-ordinary reality which will one day come to seem factual. When the imagination is understood in this way, then we comprehend, as Stevens explains in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," the nature of his project as a "carpenter" of the real; out of the "more than rational distortion" he perpetually constructs a reality which will stand only until the more than rational distortion will once again signal reality's demise and the need for a new reality:
David Lavery, English Department, Middle Tennessee State University
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