18) “A Quiet Normal Life”
“XVIII. Knowledge is Faith mediated by Symbols”
“A Quiet Normal Life” might serve as an example of how a poem in “The Rock” does or does not gain richness when reference is made to “Scepticism and Animal Faith.” We might begin this experiment by examining the poem alone and establishing a general consensus about what critics have had to say about it. Then we might take up Santayana alone, outlining what he says in Chapter XVIII. Finally, we can bring these two works together to determine whether such an enterprise takes our understanding of the poem any further.
I. The Poem
In general, there are two major ways that critics approach Stevens’ poems. The first is to consider the way a work takes up Stevens’ central theme–often referred to in shorthand as “reality versus the imagination.” The other technique is not particular to Stevens but employed with other authors as well, and that is to regard the work biographically as revealing issues of special concern to the writer or as addressing the writer’s ideas about his craft (i.e., “poetry about poetry”). Both approaches provide valuable ways of understanding Stevens’ poems, and both may be employed to explicate “A Quite Normal Life.”
When it comes to the first technique–examining the way a poem addresses his central theme of “reality versus the imagination”–it should be noted that Stevens’ positions on this topic are variable. Sometimes he is suspicious of the ways the imagination contaminates reality by means of pathetic fallacies; then he embraces his apothegm that “The imagination loses its vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real” (NA 6). At other times, facing what seems to be bare reality, he notes that even there the imagination is inescapable; then he concludes, as he does in the poem “The Plain Sense of Things,” “even the absence of imagination had / Itself to be imagined” (CP 531). This systole and diastole are the most familiar gambits in Stevens’ poems. Dozens of scholarly books and scores of analytical essays have made that point.
“A Quiet Normal Life” is accessible to this common kind of approach. With its negative rhetoric, the poem begins in a demythologizing vein:
His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not
In anything that he constructed, so frail,
So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,As, for example, a world in which, like snow,
He became an inhabitant, obedient
To gallant notions on the part of cold.
The poem begins, in other words, in an anti-imaginative way with its dismissal of mental “constructions.” But the example that Stevens provides (of a snowy inhabitant obedient to cold) requires a bit more explanation: It is an allusion to Stevens’ well known poem “The Snow Man” where the effort to achieve an arctic nothingness, free of mental additions, is finally recognized as one more kind of imagining and an effort to conjure up an imagined Nothingness.¹
Understanding the reference to “The Snow Man” then, if we return to “A Quiet Normal Life,” we might read the opening this way: the place of the poem’s persona was not in anything he mentally constructed, not even in some invented “naught” like the conjured-up Nothingness imagined in “The Snow Man.” Instead — and here the poem turns from negative rhetoric to the positive presentations of the concluding stanzas — when it comes to the persona’s place . . .
It was here. This was the setting and the time
Of year. Here in his house and in his room,
In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peakedAnd the oldest and warmest heart was cut
By gallant notions on the part of night –
Both late and alone, above the crickets’ chords,Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.
There was no fury in transcendent forms.
But his actual candle blazed with artifice.
This is the conclusion of “A Quiet Normal Life” and we might understand it the way many others have commonly understood it: as reflecting a familiar pattern seen in other poems by Stevens. Here, the poem’s persona abandons imaginative constructions and transcendent elaborations, and is (instead) instructed by reality and the night itself, but (at the very last most moment) concedes that the imagination is still present and “his actual candle blazed with artifice.” This is the pattern of the “The Plain Sense of Things” where the motion is against imaginative extravagance and towards the state mentioned in the poem’s title, but this effort still concludes “Even the absence of imagination had / Itself to be imagined” (CP 531). This is the pattern of “The Snow Man” where reality preempts imaginative speculation to arrive at “nothing that is not there,” only to discover an imagined Nothing that remains.² And here, too, is the last poem of The Rock, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”–which is, of course, an idea itself.
This is the critics’ common understanding of “A Quite Normal Life” when they employ the theme of “reality versus the imagination” as a guide to explication and as they note, in Samuel French Morse’s words, Stevens’ “flirtations with paradoxes.”³ The other common way critics approach Stevens’ poems is in a biographical manner, sometimes linking analyses of the theme of “reality versus the imagination” with determinations of Stevens’ personality. For example, while Harold Bloom acknowledges the condemnation of “transcendent” thought in “A Quiet Normal Life,” he reads the final line (“But his actual candle blazed with artifice”) as “insincere” and “unconvincing” because (taking into consideration other poems and Stevens’ relationship to Emerson) he has concluded that Stevens, the man and the poet, is an “involuntary Transcendentalist.”⁴
Another line of biographical criticism takes Stevens’ poems as self-referential: that is, they are poems-about-poetry and indicate Stevens’ attitudes towards his craft. Lucy Beckett, for example, sees “A Quiet Normal Life” as a late-in-life episode in Stevens’ vacillation about his profession. In some poems of The Rock, she argues, he seems boastful about his career: bragging about how, word for word, he created “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain.” In others, like “The Planet on the Table,” he is more modest and simply says, “Ariel was glad he had written his poems” (CP 563). In still others, he takes the opposite position, eschewing the poetic in favor of “The Plain Sense of Things” or preferring “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.” “A Quite Normal Life,” Beckett argues, belongs in this latter group where the vacillating Stevens seeks a place “not / In anything he constructed.”⁵
This thematic approach and these biographical forays make “A Quiet Normal Life” accessible to explication and wonderfully “open up” the poem. And these views, I suggest, present a common understanding of the poem and a critical consensus about its meaning. Having considered the poem by itself, as it were, let us turn to Santayana’s Chapter XVIII and consider it in a similar straightforward fashion.
II. The Chapter
When Stevens praises Santayana’s “exquisite and memorable” writing style in “A Collect of Philosophy,” he adds that the philosopher’s writings “do not offer themselves to sensational summary” (OP 187). That is certainly true of Scepticism and Animal Faith, and it is the case with Chapter XVIII (“Knowledge is Faith mediated by Symbols”). The chapter’s seventeen pages and nineteen paragraphs (some several pages long) are closely reasoned, and Santayana’s approach to his subjects is granular. Moreover, the ordinary reader is likely to be slowed by Santayana’s expository style which shifts between logical reasoning, figurative language, and anecdotal example. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this experiment and despite Stevens’ caveat, let me endeavor to summarize the chapter.
Important to Chapter XVIII is the distinction the philosopher makes between two terms he uses in specific ways: intuition and knowledge. By “intuition” Santayana means the simple regard of images that, moment by moment, pass into our ken; in this way, we are like aesthetic spectators in a theater who merely watch “essences,” his term for these floating images. “Knowledge” differs because it involves rising above the present in a supra-natural way, as it were, and making links. For example, we might say “this” resembles a “that” which we encountered some time ago. In this way, knowledge bridges the flux, considers objects that are absent, and makes comparisons. With knowledge, essences are used in a symbolic fashion, like tokens or words in a vocabulary.
Santayana takes pains to indicate that knowledge is not the same as intuition because of the immediacy of the latter. Such an equation would, in fact, be absurd because it would mean that to know something, our idea about it would have to resemble the object; such an absurd requirement would mean, for example, that whenever we use the word “flower,” we would need to be in circumstances aromatic with their perfume. Instead, the word “flower” can serve as a symbol of something physically absent. As the philosopher says elsewhere, “Knowledge lies in thinking aptly about things, not becoming them” (SAF 95).
Another point Santayana makes is that knowledge differs from intuition because the latter is essentially passive: “Intuition subsists beneath knowledge, as vegetative life subsists beneath animal life. . . . Any poet or any philosopher . . . is free to prefer intuition to knowledge. But in preferring intuition he prefers ignorance” (172). To be sure, before discussing the more rigorous efforts of knowledge, Santayana acknowledges the attraction of a passive life confined to intuition, a retreat from the hurly burly of life to an aesthetic absorption in the passing parade of images. However, Santayana ultimately dismisses such dreamy self-indulgence as “nihilism” and “dumb ignorance,” and notes that life obliges us to seek knowledge (171).
Knowledge also differs from intuition because it is based on “animal faith” and a questionable belief in an existing world full of objects. To a sceptic, such a belief is not logically warranted but, Santayana notes, it is an instinctual credence in almost everyone else. To make this point, Santayana refers to the proverbial scene of a child reaching for the moon. Such an incident indicates, he says, a belief that the desirable object exists out there in a physical and external world.
That remote object taken to exist and symbolized by the word “moon” may be described in various ways: as “a light in the sky” by the matter-of-fact, as “the goddess Diana” by the myth-minded, or as “a satellite of earth” by the scientifically demanding astronomer. This variety of descriptions signals something important: with knowledge, our concern is not so much with the truthfulness of descriptions as with their adequacy to our purposes. As Santayana says elsewhere, “The most perfect knowledge of fact is perfect only pictorially, not evidentially, and remains subject to the end to the insecurity inseparable from animal faith” (107).
That last point is important to Santayana: “Knowledge accordingly is belief: belief in a world of events, and especially those parts of it which are near the self, tempting or threatening it” (179). Strictly speaking, what we take to be objects are the result of “the babble of our innocent organs under the stimulus of things” (179), which are then adumbrated and given names, and then extrapolated and converted through animal faith into freestanding objects that are projected and said to exist out there in an external world. Knowledge, to say this again, rests on dubious grounds and requires a leap of faith to believe in existents. But that is not to suggest such a belief is unimportant: “While life lasts, in one form or another this faith must endure” and it “launches the adventure of knowledge” (180–181).
III. Chapter + Poem
Having established a consensual understanding of the poem “A Quiet Normal Life,”⁶ and having summarized Santayana’s Chapter XVIII in a straightforward way,⁷ we can turn to the subject of this exercise: to see whether bringing the two together adds to our understanding of the poem.
The first point to make in comparing the two is that there is nothing like the extensive textual echoes between “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain” and “XI. The Watershed of Criticism” which suggest that one is a précis of the other. If anything, it would be more accurate to say the nineteen-page chapter was a “jumping-off point” for the one-page poem. But demonstrating that one is the source of the other is not the purpose of this experiment. Instead, our endeavor is more modest: to see if in bringing the chapter and poem closer together, we come to a better understanding of “A Quiet Normal Life.”
To that end, we need to start afresh by setting aside the theme of “reality versus the imagination” which critics habitually bring to Stevens’ work. Instead, given the subject of Santayana’s chapter, we need to consider a different dyad: “intuition versus knowledge.” And we might begin to do so by considering the poem’s waxy conclusion: “his actual candle blazed with artifice.”
When he distinguishes between intuition and knowledge, Santayana takes a moment to concede the appeal of the former as a retreat from the hurly burly of life into an aesthetic absorption with the passing parade of images. Here he chooses a particular metaphor: “What better than to blow out the candle, and to bed!” In the very next sentence, however, he dismisses such self-indulgence as “nihilism” and “dumb ignorance.” He continues as a poetic chandler: “Accordingly, so long as I remain awake and the light burning,” life obliges him to eschew lotus land and seek knowledge (171).
To be sure, Stevens’ own “candle” need not be seen as a clone of Santayana’s; that waxy object is not an uncommon object in the poet’s work.⁸ But the addition of the descriptor (where the candle “blazed with artifice”) is unusual and might be explained with reference to Santayana. Unlike intuition, the philosopher says in the passage quoted above, knowledge does not mean blowing the candle out but keeping it ablaze. And as for “artifice,” as Santayana says throughout his chapter, “knowledge is faith,” the willing acceptance of a “fiction” (the possibly dubious belief in an existing world).
This “leap” of faith is the one bit of drama in the chapter’s otherwise consistent effort to rein in extravagance and value the ordinary: to shift from intuition to the matter-of-fact business of knowledge, to prize (in other words) what the title of Stevens’ poem calls “A Quiet Normal Life.” This shift from intuition to knowledge is likewise a transition to existential limitations, from the timeless contemplation of eternal essences to the more narrowed and everyday circumstances of “the Here and Now” [Santayana’s capitalizations](165). This may explain why, when Stevens considers the appropriate place for his persona, he says in a narrowing conclusion: “It was here. This was the setting and the time / Of year. Here in his house and in his room, / In his chair.”
In these circumstances, Stevens describes what befalls his persona: “the oldest and the warmest heart was cut / By gallant notions on the part of night.” This is different, it should be noted, from the circumstance of the earlier and frostbitten character in the poem (the counterpart from Stevens’ “The Snow Man”) who is “obedient / To gallant notions on the part of cold.” We have seen Santayana say that knowledge is not the same as intuition; so, knowledge of the cold does not require a sameness and adjusting the body’s temperature to intuit the frigid. Instead, with knowledge, there is a difference between the knower and the known (which cuts the “warmest” heart).
In these ways then, when read with a copy of Scepticism and Animal Faith close at hand and open to Chapter XVIII, “A Quiet Normal Life” can be viewed in a fresh way as a poem that emphasizes (along the lines of Santayana) the differences between intuition and knowledge. Such a view, incidentally, does not preclude seeing the poem in the familiar way as an embodiment of Stevens’ habitual theme of “reality versus the imagination”; instead, putting Stevens and Santayana alongside each other either adds to that conventional understanding of the poem or suggests how Stevens drew familiar arrows from his quiver to strike a new target. At the same time, it goes without saying, this Santayana-inflected explication does not preclude biographical understandings of the poem as a “late” work or as a revelation of the poet’s obsessions. Indeed, when it comes to these multiple interpretations, as Stevens says in “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction,” it is “not a choice between, but of” (CP 427).
Notes.
1. Despite the seriousness with which some exegetes take the poem, Samuel French Morse has convincingly argued that “The Snow Man” is an “elaborate hoax” (Wallace Stevens: Life as Poetry [New York: Pegasus, 1970], 118). The comic proposition of the poem is that there must be an absurd identity between the knower and the known–for example, that the only people who can talk about Hawaii are those who are physically in Hawaii or, more to the point, only the frostbitten (those who “have been cold a long time” and only at the moment they are dutifully shivering outdoors) are permitted to speak of winter:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (CP 10)
Like “A Quiet Normal Life,” “The Snow Man” begins with an effort at demythologizing, at eliminating the imagination (“not to think” what the wind may be whispering), of being subject only to reality (in this case, the arctic extremities of a frozen day), until a person is “nothing.” In that way, we reach Stevens’ brilliant conclusion: “And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In other words, the individual who has eliminated the gratuitous additions of imagination encounters reality alone and “nothing that is not there.” But he also encounters–and note the addition of the article “the”–“the nothing that is” because he has imagined his Nothing (with its frozen and in extremis imagery) and, in this way, his imagination lingers still. As the poem “The Plain Sense of Things” says: “Even the absence of imagination had / Itself to be imagined” (CP 531).
2. See note above.
3. Samuel French Morse, “The Native Element,” The Kenyon Review, Vol. 20, №3 (Summer 1958), 446.
4. Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1977), 356–357.
5. Lucy Beckett, Wallace Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1977), 202.
6. Special thanks to David Dilworth for his help with this essay’s first section, “The Poem.”
7. I could not have created this summary without the intelligent help and supervision of Richard Rubin.
8. Candles appear in: ten poems in the Collected Poems (including two poems of The Rock, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” and “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”); two poems of Opus Posthumous; and two plays (including one titled “Carlos Among the Candles”). In terms of textual echoes between the poem and the chapter, the more interesting repetition is “babble” (and its close relations). In the poem, Stevens refers to “the crickets’ chords, // Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound”; and it should be noted that “babbling” is an unusual word choice for Stevens since it only appears one other time in his entire corpus. “Babble” is an equally rare word in Scepticism and Animal Faith, appearing only one time, as it happens, in this chapter we are examining: “Images in sense are . . . not parts of nature: they are the babble of our innocent organs under the stimulus of things” (179).
