Troubles with Reality and Order through the Imagination in a World of Disbelief and Disorder: Wallace Stevens and Supreme Fiction

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” - Sigmund Freud There have been a lot of writers throughout history who praised or criticized the world’s beauty and ways. They all had their ideas and advice for humanity. But America’s most celebrated twentieth-century poet Wallace Stevens did not just rain down his ideas in his writings but took them as his motto for life. And he called the sum of his ideas ‘Supreme Fiction’. This Supreme Fiction, according to Stevens, is a supreme level of poetry that cleanses the mind and soul of its readers and reduces the hardships they have to face in real life. In other words, Supreme Fiction is Stevens’ replacement for the idea of God. Deeply influenced by the Nietzschean idea of the ‘Death of God’, Stevens wants to create a replacement for God for people to find comfort in a world of disbelief and disorder in the twentieth century.

A Xenoglossary for the Americas

This chapter advances a “tropological history” of inter-Americanism by showing how foreign words (xenoglossia) became a key poetic device for Wallace Stevens, José Lezama Lima, and Jorge Luis Borges after World War II, at the low ebb of political inter-Americanism. It shows how Stevens’s monumental “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” used this device in order to reimagine the poetic identity of the Americas—a gesture resonant with the US Congress’s contemporaneous debates about globalization. While Stevens’s “lingua franca et jocundissima” (his self-designated attempt to fashion a playful, sonorous global language) was rebuked in the United States by nationalistic postwar critics, the chapter demonstrates how it belongs to a rich vein of postwar poetry by Borges and Lezama, who respond to national and insular literary formations with similar turns toward international language norms and the style of “post-symbolism.”

‘A Supreme Fiction’: Michael Fried and Art Criticism

One of the striking aspects of the trenchant legacy of Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ is its status as a piece of art criticism. Widely perceived as difficult and personal, philosophical and explicatory, doxa or sermon, the essay stands out. To explore its singularity, this article compares Fried’s conception of the period criticism of 18th-century French painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and the method of criticism enacted in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) which he saw as connected. The author pursues this and other crossings between Fried’s art historical writings and art criticism, tracking it to an extended endnote in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002). ‘Art and Objecthood’ is a key essay in this story aimed at Fried’s thinking about criticism, its history, theory and practice. Doing this matters because it puts the critic in a particular relation to art and to Fried’s idea of an ‘ontologically prior relationship between painting and the beholder’.

The charismatic queen and the centrality of self-love

Two distinct portraits of a ‘fairy queen’imply contrary views of human natureand contrary aesthetics.In Spenser’s epic a mystic Glorianadrawsnoble heroes to realise the twelve virtues, perfecting the soul in Godlikeness. In Shakespeare’s comic stage-play asensually potent Titania evokes a different fairy realm. Directly experienced, her bodily splendor and witty combative speeches arouse desire not justinthe privilegedbut in rude commoners, who commandeer the play’s most engaging scenes. Instead of vying with Spenser’s elitequests for morality in an intellectual heaven-based allegory, Shakespeare views morality inall social classes, the humbler earthy sort matching the more pretentious. Both are ego-drivenyet communally civil. This ironic engagement with Spenser’s ‘supreme fiction’ wondrously expands Shakespeare’s own artistry.Equally polarized are the poets’ views of self-love as a touchstone of human psychology. Like Calvin and Luther, Spenser discredits self-love as shameful, both in monarchs like Lucifera and in louts like Braggadocchio, causing Redcrosse’s wretched fall and Guyon’s helpless faint. In contrast, Shakespeare’s characters, noble and vulgar, show a positive form of self-love if carefully managed, as observed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Primaudaye.

Catching Up with Wells: The Political Theory of H. G. Wells’s Science Fiction

H. G. Wells’s The Rights of Man (1940)—which provided the groundwork for the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights—has been re-released with a new Introduction by novelist Ali Smith, who reminds us of Wells’s political prophetic call for “a real federation of mankind,” and of the fact that we have still failed to meet the future he envisioned. If we are to catch up with Wells, we must, however, examine the foundations of Wells’s “cosmopolitan” vision, which requires examining both his scientific non-fiction and his scientific romances. Looking to Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in particular, and the influence of Wells’s early scientific essays on Moreau’s narrative, we get a picture of Wells as a writer and a man who is anxious about the identity and future of the human species, but who nevertheless puts his faith in the “apparatuses” of “education and moral suggestion,” which are held together by “common faith.” Much like Charles Taylor and Simon Critchley, Wells calls for more than a political reconstitution, or institution, of right: he calls for a new cosmic imaginary, or supreme fiction, that has the potential to redeem and preserve the human species.