19) “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
“XIX. Belief in Substance”
Early in 1950 Stevens promised to send some new poems to Hudson Review, but by December 5 he was apologizing to Joseph Bennett that he had been “overwhelmingly busy at the office–and in consequence too tired to do anything” (L. 701). Three days later, however, he apparently had found something in his files. Stevens wrote Bennett:
I send you a poem [“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”] after all. I had originally intended to write a long poem on the subject of the present poem but got no farther than the statement God and the imagination are one. The implications of this statement were to follow, and may still. As I said in my note of December 5th, I have not particularly felt like going on with it since I started it. After writing to you I looked at the opening lines which I am now sending you and I thought they might do, particularly since I wanted very much to send you something. (L. 701–702)
Three observations arise from Stevens’s note. The first is that the poem was an experiment with an idea; this seems a confirmation of the compositional technique described in “A Collect of Philosophy” where Stevens repeatedly declares and shows how some philosophic ideas as “poetic” or inspiring to a poet. The second is that “Final Soliloquy,” while originally intended as part of something longer, now impressed Stevens’ as a poem that could stand on its own; and indeed, as Harold Bloom has pointed out (359), the poem has become a critics’ favorite in and of itself. Finally, the letter suggests that “Final Soliloquy” was a start on a long poem that Stevens eventually hoped to write.
Each of these observations suggests a useful avenue for exploring the poem. Without diminishing the keen insights of critics who have employed other techniques, in a somewhat arbitrary way consonant with the intentions of this study, I am pursuing here an hypothesis based on the third observation and my conclusion that Stevens did eventually write that long poem: “The Rock,” the title poem of his book.¹ Given that opinion and only in retrospect, “Final Soliloquy” seems a “false start.”
As a comparison suggests, “Final Soliloquy” was meant be a response to Santayana’s central “Chapter XIX. Belief in Substance” but it went astray. Stevens created a more satisfactory response to that chapter in the first section of his long poem “The Rock” (“I. Seventy Years Later”). Then he went on sequentially to the next chapter (“XX. On some Objections to Belief in Substance”) for the second section of the poem (“II. The Poem as Icon”), and then to the following chapter (“XXI. Sublimations of Animal Faith”) for the third and final section (“III. Forms of the Rock as Night-Hymn”). These three compose the one long poem that appears in Stevens’ book.
If, as Stevens’ letter suggests and as I am proposing, “Final Soliloquy” was a “false start,” then another circumstance suggests the same. “Final Soliloquy” was published along with a second poem, “The Course of a Particular,” in the same issue of The Hudson Review (Spring 1951). I have previously indicated how “The Course of a Particular” is a “false start” because it deviates from the arguments of Chapter XV and because Stevens seems to have recognized that and corrected it with another poem that he chose for inclusion in The Rock, “Long and Sluggish Lines.”² The curious fact that both “false starts” were published in the same issue of Hudson Review suggests that Stevens may have dug them out of his files and sent them to Bennett as a way of fulfilling his promise to submit something.
I. The Title
We might begin a consideration of Stevens’ poem by reckoning with its title. The “Interior Paramour” has been seen as Stevens’ muse, a familiar incarnation who appears in other poems as an alluring female.³ The muse is, of course, an imagined creature and that is why the poet emphasizes he is talking about an “interior” paramour — that is, a fancied double like the “friend and dear friend” imagined as keeping company by Penelope in “The World as Meditation.” Freudians might also note that the imagined companion is an interior “paramour,” hinting at repressed erotics.⁴
The consistent use of “we” makes the poem see like dialogue: “we rest,” “we collect,” “we are poor,” “we forget,” “we feel,” “we say,” “we make.” But the title tells us the poem is a “soliloquy.” Which is it? And if a soliloquy, who is speaking: the poet or muse? Moreover, it is “final” soliloquy not in some funereal way but because the imagined doubling will at last collapse, the ventriloquism end, the artificially bifurcated finally rejoined, the fiction cease to exist.
By way of further explanation, we might consider a tonally similar passage in Stevens, the opening or dedication to his famous poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” These words might be regarded as an epithalamion:
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace. (CP 401)
The surprise is in the first line where the expected “who” is replaced by “what.” This suggests something about the beloved. This is love between the self and the non-self, ego and non-ego.
II. Fichte & His Errors
Santayana’s Chapter XIX discusses belief in substance. By “substance” Santayana means that which exists apart: the non-self, nature, existence, matter, the world-at-large which is the subject of memory and experience. Belief in substance is an important cornerstone in Santayana’s system because without it an individual would be confined to the solipsistic world of the sceptic where nothing external is acknowledged.
In his discussion of substance, Santayana mentions Fichte’s notion that the ego posits the non-ego. Santayana objects to the idea that the ego precedes and creates the non-ego, as if the world was only a dream imagined by the self. Santayana argues, instead, that the ego comes to recognize that there is a world that exists apart from it because the ego is a substance and is assaulted by other substances. The ego does not pre-exist and create the non-ego, as Fichte believed; instead, the ego discovers the non-ego amidst the jostle of existential circumstances. By the way, Santayana asks, why would Fichte’s ego even bother to create a non-ego: “Why should [an] ego be troubled with the delirious duty of positing anything at all?” (184).
That question is an aside, but it resembles another well known theological chestnut: Why would God even bother to create the world? Santayana was familiar with this puzzle and even mentions it later in Scepticism and Animal Faith: “What secret necessity could have compelled him [God] to create anything at all?” (237).⁵ But I digress. But I digress in the manner which Stevens seems to have followed: noting an aside phrased as a question, noting a link between that question and another common theological query, trying out a fascinating idea, and responding with “Final Soliloquy of an Interior Paramour.”
In a fashion, what we see here is the modus operandi described in “A Collect of Philosophy” where Stevens plucks interesting ideas out of philosophic texts and suggests they are “poetic” — viz. they are inspiring to a poet who wants to make something of them. But what should be noted is that “Final Soliloquy” deviates from the point of Santayana’s chapter because it embraces those ideas of Fichte that the philosopher objected to. Stevens would later correct that deviation in a subsequent poem, the first section (“Seventy Years Later”) of “The Rock.”
III. The Tightness of Fichte
The opening stanzas of “Final Soliloquy” begin an endorsement of the imaginative absolutism of Fichte:
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Knowledge, Santayana explains, because it is concerned with the world-at-large, carries with it a belief in substance. In this poem, as in the previous one (“A Quiet Normal Life”), Stevens repeats Santayana’s metaphor of knowledge as a light or candle. The stanzas recount an ascetic retreat “out of all the indifferences” to the ultimate and miraculous power of knowledge by which, in Fichte’s terms, the ego posits the non-ego . . . or, in Stevens’ terms, the self creates “the world imagined.” The critical austerity that Santayana says Fichte sought–”he had a very tight tense mind, and posited a very tight tense world” (184)–is what is sought here (“we collect ourselves . . . within a single thing. . . wrapped tightly around us”).
In the last stanzas, Stevens seems to follow Fichte’s arguments and miss Santayana’s objections to them:
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
IV. Where Stevens Went “Astray”
Stevens’ recognition of the resemblance between God and Fichte’s creative ego lead him to the equation that “God and the imagination are one” and to the conclusion that the ego creates the non-ego with the same divine freedom of God creating the world. Stevens wasn’t bothered, in other words, with Santayana’s objections to Fichte: that the ego does not pre-exist and then create the non-ego by divine-like fiat but, instead, discovers the other in media res and amidst existential circumstances.
Stevens’ notion that knowledge imaginatively creates the world misses Santayana’s objection; we don’t “make a dwelling in the evening air,” as the poem has it, instead, we find ourselves in a dwelling. Knowledge and the imagination are not active but reactive:
The whole life of imagination and knowledge comes from within, from the restlessness, eagerness, curiosity, and terror of the animal bent on hunting, feeding, and breeding. . . . It is out of his organism or its central part, the psyche, that this [recognition of the world] has been bred. (185)
While Stevens echoes Santayana’s words in phrases like “out of the central mind,” what he leaves out of the Santayana passage above is more significant. What is absent is Santayana’s insistence that the world comes to be recognized because of the “restlessness” of animal life. Instead, in Stevens’ poem, we are “in a room / In which we rest” and where it might seem that the ego is the Creator and “God and the imagination are one.”⁶
Stevens misses Santayana’s point, or he is experimenting with an idea different from Santayana’s. The world is not our dream, and it is not created by the divine fiat of the imagination; it is discovered because the ego is alive, because it is a substance assaulted by other substances, and because this leads it to recognize a world that exists apart from it. “If the substance of the ego were not alive,” Santayana insists, there would be no occasion for it to think and recognize the world (185).
If the intent of the poem is to faithfully respond to the philosopher’s ideas rather than experiment with Fichte’s notion, then “Final Soliloquy” misses Santayana’s insistence that the existential conditions of being “alive” are what leads the self to recognize the world. Later, Stevens seems to have detected this divergence because when he came to amend his response to Chapter XIX in the first section of “The Rock” (“Seventy Years Later”), the word “alive” would be emphatically repeated.
In these ways then, “Final Soliloquy” can be seen a “false start” and, it seems, consigned to Stevens’ files. Still, it would prove useful when he wanted to belatedly respond to a promise made to Joseph Bennett and send something along to Hudson Review. In any event, when it came to Santayana’s “Belief in Substance,” Stevens would do a better job in the poem that followed, the title poem, “The Rock.”
Notes.
- “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” seems to have been the very first poem composed of those that would later appear in The Rock. As Stevens’ letters to Joseph Bennett suggest, it was written some time before December 5, 1950 (L. 701–702). In fact, internal evidence seems to suggest that it was an earlier attempt at a theme in the poem which follows it: “The Rock,” which was published in a Summer 1950 of the magazine Inventario. “Final Soliloquy” would, then, have been composed prior to that, possibly in the Spring of 1950. See note #2 in “A Chronology of Composition of the Poems”: https://j-griswold.medium.com/a-chronology-of-the-composition-of-the-poems-f96d865de977.
- See the textual note in the discussion of “Long and Sluggish Lines”: https://j-griswold.medium.com/17-long-and-sluggish-lines-c7edb7b1ee47
- The most relevant discussion is Mary Arensberg’s “Wallace Stevens’ Interior Paramour,” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 3, no. 1/2 (Spring 1979), 3–7.
- Before the poem is read in a heteronormative way, we might note that the gender of the paramour is not identified in the poem nor signaled in Stevens’ use of the pronoun “we.”
- This observation comes in the midst of a discussion of Spinoza’s notion (Deus sive natura) that the terms “God” and “nature” are interchangeable. With Fichte, we might be said to encounter the opposite proposition: that the terms “God” and “mind” are interchangeable. This seems to me the notion Stevens is toying with when he says, “God and the imagination are one.”
- David Dilworth points out the echo here of one of Stevens’ adagia:
Proposita:
1. God and the imagination are one.
2. The thing imagined is the imaginer.
The second equals the thing imagined and the imaginer are one. Hence, I suppose, the imaginer is God. (OP 202)
Related as well, are the links implied in the title and subjects of Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.
