Desire For Order:A Lacanian Reading Of Wallace Stevens' Major Poems

As one of the five most important American poets during the twentieth century,Wallace Stevens lived in an age of disorder and disbelief and had witnessed the mounting of anxieties and the dwindling of imagination among his contemporaries.In order to help people live through this loss of faith,Stevens writes ceaselessly about fulfilling the desire for order and proposes poetry to be the remedy.Researches before the 1980s mainly focused on exploration of themes and aesthetic stands,during which Stevens' "reality and imagination complex" was pushed to the front.The following two decades saw the rise of historical,political and ecological perspectives,after which gender and international approaches were brought into discussion.Recently,some scholars have focused on Stevens' poetic language and contributed post-structuralist readings.Pointing out certain parallels between Stevens'poetry and Lacanian psychoanalytical theory,M.Keith Booker and Chetan Deshmane have offered a new approach.This thesis attempts to offer an interpretation concerning both the drive and the means to quench the desire for order in Stevens' major poems through such a Lacanian perspective.For both Stevens and Lacan,a central order,by which one expects to unite oneself with the exterior world,stands beyond human reach.The failure of religion and reason during a time of omnipresent external violence,together with his personal predicament in overcoming the Oedipal Complex,pushes Stevens to confront the absence of order without the help from deities.Now that religion has failed to save human beings,it is only through human efforts that a reconstruction of order can be expected.Sharing Lacan 's obsession with imagination,Stevens explores the close interaction between imagination and reality in his poetry writing,claiming that the "violence from within",namely,the internal rage striving for order,propels us to press back the"violence without" by speaking the unspeakable through an imperfect human language.According to Stevens,it is through these imaginative activities that human beings regain fleeting moments of unity with the world.During these processes,people attempt to seek resemblances between the subject and the exterior world so as to identify with them.For Lacan,the Real is impossible that may be approximated but never grasped.Stevens shares Lacan's critique of the limitation concerning imagination's power in piercing through the Symbolic so as to reach the Real.Since imaginative representations of the reality can only provide images and metaphors that are destined to be falsified and discarded in a never-ending process of signification,they can never reach the reality per se in its fixity.Admitting this fatal flaw,Stevens emphasizes on the necessity of changes in an attempt for redemptions.This thesis ends with Stevens' return to the quotidian and argues that the only way to satisfy human desire for order lies in a continuous effort to rediscover the here and now.Poetry,the supreme fiction in which we willingly believe,provides us with an access to perceive everydayness with new perspectives in search for a shifting centrality.