"Ancestor of Narcissus": Stevens and Psychoanalysis Between Freud and Deleuze

Author(s): DAVID R. JARRAWAY

Source: The Wallace Stevens Journal , Fall 2010, Vol. 34, No. 2, Special Issue: Stevens,
Freud, and Psychoanalytic Theory (Fall 2010), pp. 161-180
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 " Ancestor of Narcissus": Stevens and
Psychoanalysis Between Freud and Deleuze

DAVID R. JARRAWAY

Freud's eye was the microscope of potency.

- Wallace Stevens, "Mountains Covered with
Cats"

To become imperceptible oneself. . . [t]o have disman-

tled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the
true double at the other end of the line . . . this , pre-
cisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to
be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself
gray on gray.
- Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus

the ego is not . . . master in its own house and cannot

aspire to Cartesian certainties
- David Macey, "On the Subject of Lacan"

COMMENTATORS
COMMENTATORS allyinvestment
investment prone observe theally
to inwritings
in the ofwritingsprone toWallace
ON a skeptical
Sigmund Freud observe
and inof Sigmund a skeptical
Stevens'
psychoanaly- aloofness Freudaloofness withand inrespect
poetry with and respect to tothe
prose psychoanaly- the arepoet's
poet's usu-
sis more generally. "[Stevens] barely mentions Freud," Daniel Schwarz
remarks (35); and when the poet does, he is likely to be somewhat dis-
missive, as in Stevens' well-known remark in the Letters that he would
"probably not be able to stand up to Freudian analysis" (488).1 To persist
nonetheless in embracing a fruitful critical relation between Stevens and
Freudian psychoanalysis, as I aim to do in this essay, would require com-
mentators to indulge a certain degree of the poet's own skepticism just
noted. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (along with psychoanalyst Félix
Guattari) evinces a quite similar arm's-length approach to Freud in the
two volumes that comprise Capitalism and Schizophrenia, namely Anti-Oe-
dipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and for an excess of "egotism"
in readings of Freud that Stevens himself, in the letter to Ronald Lane
Latimer from 1936, is prone to find in an analogy to "sex" in Freud as "the
explanation for everything" (L 305, 306). Hence, "[t]he relations between
the ego and reality," Stevens tells us in the prose portion of "Three Aca-
demic Pieces," "must be left largely on the margin" (CPP 691).

THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 34.2 (FALL 2010): 161-180.

© 2010 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC.

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 Problematizing excessive egotism within a certain institutionalized
reception of Freudian psychoanalysis, therefore, and putting in its place
a considerably de-institutionalized notion of "schizophrenia" accounts
fairly much for the measured skepticism taken toward Freud throughout
a good deal of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. As Daniel W. Smith observes,
"Following Karl Jaspers and R. D. Laing, [Deleuze and Guattari] attempt-
ed to examine schizophrenia in its positivity , no longer as actualized in a
mode of existence (an ego), but rather as a pure process , that is, as an open-
ing or breach that breaks the continuity of a personality or ego, carrying it
off on a kind of voyage through an intense and terrifying 'more than reali-
ty' " (189). For some purveyors of psychoanalysis, as Deleuze and Guattari
themselves remark, "Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like
their resistance to being oedipalized [because] . . . [t]hey mistake words for
things . . . are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality . . . [and] resemble
philosophers - 'an undesirable resemblance' " ( Anti-Oedipus 23). But in a
more enlightened psychoanalytic discourse, that is, a discourse not quite
so insistent upon the theoretician's "ideal forms of causation, comprehen-
sion, or expression," a human identity that is "more than reality" or more
than egotism, in Daniel Smith's terms, can conceivably take shape "as a
distinct personality if the process [of production] is halted," and such a
unique personality "is allowed to go on and on endlessly in a void, so as
to provoke that 'horror of . . . extremity wherein the soul and body ulti-
mately perish' " ( Anti-Oedipus 23, 24). The "greatness" of Freud, according
to Deleuze and Guattari, lies precisely here; and, so I shall contend, the
basis for Stevens' guarded attraction to Freud as well.2 By voiding "libido
or sexuality" of all "objects, aims, or even sources (territories)," Freud ini-
tially sets the human personality endlessly adrift within "the wide open
spaces" of longing and desire and, in his earliest work at least, imparts to
it all the vagaries of "an abstract subjective essence" ( Anti-Oedipus 270) - a
vagueness and an abstractness to which I shall return later specifically in
the context of some of Stevens' later work principally to be found in Parts
of a World , published in 1942.
As the fourth of seven gatherings of verse, Parts of a World is targeted by
many of the poet's critics, including me (see Question of Belief esp. 1-19),
as that volume demarcating the programmatic shift to a "late Stevens,"
and under that rubric, as a significant rhetorical as well as critical transi-
tion in the Stevens canon from formalist to more realist concerns, or, in
more rigorous theoretical terms, from structuralism to poststructural-
ism, from aestheticism to historicism, or perhaps from High Modernism
to Postmodernism. As Krzysztof Ziarek puts the case (following the later
commentary of J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Riddel), "For [Stevens'] late po-
etry does not simply move toward a unity that would resolve the opposi-
tions and leave a sense of balance achieved through a unifying concept; on
the contrary, it underscores the remainder, a residue of distinct otherness,
however unnameable, which because of its ineffable character resists any

162 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL

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unification. Such implication of a 'beyond/ of a poem that never reaches
words, cannot, then, be explained or interpreted in traditional metaphysi-
cal terms which inform the critical categories used to describe Romantic
and post-Romantic poetry" (108-9).3 In the quite delimited context of gen-
der and sexuality, then, the programmatic move to Otherness with all its
implication in the "beyond" in the construction of identity - the "distanci-
ated subject" as I elaborate it further in " Going the Distance": Dissident Sub-
jectivity in Modernist American Literature - secures the place for a "poetics
of androgyny" in Stevens' work, as I explain below.
In Stevens' subsequent collection Transport to Summer (1947), and in
the late lyric in particular entitled "Mountains Covered with Cats" (1946),
which provides readers with the only nominal reference to "Freud" in the
entire Collected Poetry , the shift from an "invalid personality" - "outcast,
without the will to power / And impotent" - to its powerfully imagined
opposite - "spirits . . . seen clear . . . without their flesh" (CFP 318-19) - this
shift would uncannily appear to chart rather closely the one from ego-anal-
ysis to schizo-analysis in Deleuze just described, indeed right down to the
liquidation of the hoary body-and-soul binary. But if "Freud's eye [as] the
microscope of potency" accounts for this shift in psychoanalytic paradigms
in Stevens' poem, it is only because that "eye" has placed human personali-
ty beyond form, beyond comprehension, and beyond expression in that "more
than reality" just as Deleuze (and now Stevens) describes: "The spirits of
all the impotent dead, seen clear, / And quickly understand, without their
flesh, / How truly they had not been what they were" (CFP 319).
As I have argued in these pages and elsewhere, the "poetics of androg-
yny" in both early and late Stevens puts readers very much in touch with
an open-ended continuum for the serial construction of subjectivity coter-
minous with Deleuzian deterritorialization and abstraction that Stevens
himself is arguably prone to formulate in terms of "A shape within the
ancient circles of shapes, / And these beneath a shadow of a shape" as
the poet's programmatic "queer assertion of humanity" in all of its shape-
shifting and shadowy forms (432, 445). 4 As I frame the case most recently
in an essay on the complex relationship between Stevens and philosopher
George Santayana, the aim of the poetics of androgyny in both writers is
"tò establish a necessary ambivalence about gender identity and about a
depersonalizing desire in general - an ambivalence that not only 'renders
heterosexuality noninevitable' . . . but also 'preempts the possibility of a
purely gay-affirmative reading' as well . . . [thus providing] a liberatory
egress from all sexual economies" ("Both Sides" 219).
Having made the case for the "enlargement of the human self beyond its
libidinally 'routine limitations' or characterizations" ("Both Sides" 212),
I would like now, with this issue's focus on psychoanalysis, to elaborate
further upon the linkage between Stevens and Freud mediated by Deleuze
through the means of another later lyric of the poet from which I draw, in
part, my title. For it is in the poem entitled "Jumbo" (1942), to recur to

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Stevens' previous book once again, where in the final stanza we encounter
the poet's only reference to the mythological figure of "Narcissus."

Ancestor of Narcissus, prince

Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager. (CPP 241)

Yet it is mostly under the rhetorical impress of that very figure, so I shall
argue in Deleuze's own parallel referencing of "narcissism" in the psycho-
analysis of Freud in what follows, that we come fully to understand just
how microscopically potent Stevens may have imagined "Freud's eye" to
have been in the context of the publication of Parts of a World , other texts
from which I shall allude to in passing.

The trees were plucked like iron bars

And jumbo, the loud general-large
Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free.

Who was the musician, fatly soft

And wildly free, whose clawing thumb
Clawed on the ear these consonants?

Who the transformer, himself transformed,

Whose single being, single form
Were their resemblances to ours?

The companion in nothingness,

Loud, general, large, fat, soft
And wild and free, the secondary man,

Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,

Hill scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker. . . . (CPP 241)

Right from the opening stanza, the setting at liberty of the eponymous
"Jumbo," the "wild and free" "Ancestor of Narcissus" in Stevens' text, ar-
guably accounts for its exhilarating and celebratory tone. But if it is a tone
that Freudian psychoanalysis may go a good way to explain, as I aim to
show, this application of Freudian theory is one that, like Stevens' own ret-
icence about Freud's writings, Deleuze himself takes up with considerable
caution. Before proceeding any further, therefore, with a psychoanalytic
reading of the poem licensed by that allusion to Narcissus, we should per-
haps understand better the nature of the French philosopher's caution.
In A Thousand Plateaus , Deleuze and Guattari (as paraphrased by Keith
Pearson) observe, "every molar [i.e., consciously socio-symbolic or ideo-

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logical] formation has a molecular unconscious (a multiplicity or a popu-
lation), which both marks its tendency to decompose and haunts its op-
eration and organization" (182). From such an insight, commentators on
Deleuze are fairly much persuaded, as with Stevens, of a generally dismis-
sive attitude brought to bear on the discourse of psychoanalysis by the
completion of Capitalism and Schizophrenia through the 1970s and 1980s.
"Psychoanalysis is to be critiqued," Pearson for one observes, "for reduc-
ing becomings to the one complex, the complex of molar determination
(Oedipus, castration)," and elaborates further: "Freud's psychoanalysis
is critiqued not . . . because it reduces becomings solely to articulations
of Oedipal desire, but rather for employing this enunciation in order to
delude patients with the belief that through therapy they will be able to
speak finally in their own name as unitary organisms" (182). Elsewhere
Pearson remarks, "Freud's conception of organic life runs counter to the
deepest tendencies of Deleuze's thinking of difference and to his affirma-
tion of univocal Being as difference" (113).
In Deleuze's earlier work, Difference and Repetition (1968), however,
certain lineaments of this critique can already be descried. Adumbrating
in that previous text what Deleuze calls "a mobile distribution of differ-
ences . . . within an intensive field," and finding these differences extraor-
dinarily coordinate with "what Freud called the Id, or at least the primary
layer of the Id," Deleuze is unequivocal about the fact that "It is here that
Freud's problem begins": the binding up of difference's intensities into
what Deleuze calls "a genuine reproductive synthesis, a Habitus":

This binding or investment of difference is what makes possible

in general, not pleasure itself, but the value taken on by plea-
sure as a principle: we thereby pass from a state of scattered
resolution to a state of integration, which constitutes the second
layer of the Id and the beginnings of an organisation. (96)

Thus, from "an activity of reproduction which takes as its object the dif-
ference to be bound," according to Deleuze, there "emerges a new differ-
ence," and an eldritch one to be sure: "the formed eye or the seeing sub-
ject," an instauration of the dread Cartesian cogito from a former hoary
age of rationalist Enlightenment (96).
Yet upon closer inspection of this earlier work, we find that this particu-
lar critique of Freud is not entirely how Deleuze perceives his relationship
to psychoanalysis. Counterpoised to the formed or integrated subject just
scanned are various manifestations throughout Difference and Repetition
of what Deleuze is pleased to refer to in the "Conclusion" as "an ante-
I or ante-self" (277): the larval subject, the cracked identity, the schizoid
personality, and so forth, all to which Freud's eye "as the microscope of
potency" beckons us to return in a moment. Such manifestations of what
in the Dialogues with Clare Parnet a decade (1977) later would become

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instances of "non-personal individuation" or "deterritorialized identity"
(123) - these instances of the so-called subjectless subject would continue
rapturously to preoccupy Deleuze to the very end of his career.
In the previously cited "Mountains Covered with Cats," the poem's
concluding "How truly they had not been what they were" (318) might
be Stevens' gloss on such instances of "pre-personal individuation," sub-
jectless subjects that perhaps fall generally within the androgynous rhe-
torical ambit of Stevens' "shadow of a shape" throughout the poet's final
gathering of verse, The Rock (1954), that I explore at length in "Both Sides"
(213 ff.). But the imagery of shadows in Stevens' much earlier Parts of a
World directs us to premonitory instances of pre-personal individuation
that Freud's microscopic eye perhaps persuades us to think might be sig-
nificantly related: "the shapeless shadow cover[ing] the sun" (CPP 190),
for instance, in "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"; or, "The noble figure,
the essential shadow, / Moving and being" (CPP 206) in "The Candle a
Saint"; or, maybe best of all, "the shiddow-shaddow of lights revolving . . .
through iridescent changes, / Of the apprehending of the hero" (CPP 249)
in "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War," among others. Yet for
Deleuze (and herein the further link to Stevens), the governing model in
Difference and Repetition for such instances of pre-personal individuation is
that of narcissism itself emanating from Freud's theory, although it is the
narcissistic ego extrapolated from Freud by Paul Ricoeur that Deleuze is
especially drawn to, a subject whose "perpetually disguised" and "per-
petually displaced" lines of flight would appear to be "interiorising the
difference" to just the right degree (110).
In a rather adulatory passage not often characteristic of Deleuze, he
observes that "the narcissistic ego is related to the form of an I which oper-
ates upon it as an 'Other,' " and continues this decidedly Freudian moment
by venturing further that "This active but fractured I is not only the basis
of the superego but the correlate of ... a complex whole that Paul Ricoeur
aptly named an 'aborted cogito.' " "Moreover," continues Deleuze,

there is only the aborted Cogito, only the larval subject . . . the
fracture of the I ... no more than the pure and empty form of
time, separated from its content . . . [Hence,] [t]he narcissistic
ego is . . . the phenomenon which corresponds to the empty
form of time without filling it, the spatial form of that form in
general [whose] phenomenon of space . . . assume[s] the ulti-
mate shape of the labyrinth, the straight-line labyrinth which
is, as Borges says, "invisible, incessant." Time empty and out
of joint. (110-11)

For some theoretical pundits today, the Borgesian passage just cited
from Deleuze appears uncannily proleptic. In The Man without Content
(1994), Giorgio Agamben remarks notably on a "radical tearing or split"

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in modern art when the artist sets aside "the inert world of contents in
their indifferent, prosaic objectivity," and thereby allows a "free subjec-
tivity" to "soar[] above the contents as over an immense repository of
materials that it can evoke or reject at will" (35). Indeed, it is possible to
argue that the notion of a "contentless subject" is the leading theoretical
crux as well in much of Deleuze's own work. The destruction of human
identity, for instance, as a "silent, imperceptible crack, at the [subject's]
surface, a unique surface Event" in Deleuze's subsequent The Logic of
Sense (1969) (155) redoubles the "fissure or crack in the pure Self," in Dif-
ference and Repetition , and thus affords the human subject "a mysterious
coherence in the last instance which excludes its own," what Deleuze,
in a further bow to Freud (via Ricoeur), is pleased to call "A Cogito for a
dissolved self" (58).
Yet the rending and subsequent soaring of the modern contentless sub-
ject in Deleuze here (and later, Agamben) is arguably the theoretical crux
of Stevens' very own "Jumbo," composed decades earlier. Conceivably,
readers are privileged to access this interpretive crux via Deleuze's ex-
trapolation of narcissism from the early Freud as pre-Oedipal subjectiv-
ity's "pure and empty form" just described, or in the poet's own words,
"companion in nothingness," hence the "Ancestor of Narcissus":

Who was the musician, fatly soft

And wildly free, whose clawing thumb
Clawed on the ear these consonants?

The companion in nothingness,

Loud, general, large, fat, soft
And wild and free. . . . (CPP 241)

Released from any imprisoning shape in the poem's opening stanza -

"The trees were plucked like iron bars" - Stevens' jumbo-sized Narcissus
thus breaks with any identifiable continuity of personality, and soars off
into a wild blue yonder of singular and transforming indétermination that,
as "Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn," may (or may not) have "re-
semblances" to our own quite "secondary," perhaps because more rock-
and-stone-like, determinations. For art enthusiasts of every sort, Stevens
and Deleuze included, this modernist dissolution of selfhood registers a
moment of considerable exhilaration. For as Agamben further observes:
"Art is now the absolute freedom that seeks its end and its foundation
only in itself, and does not need, substantially, any content , because it can
measure itself against the vertigo caused by its own abyss" (35; emphasis
added).
Clearly, then, "To theorize narcissism, it is not necessary (for Deleuze)
to embrace Freud's moral message" in the more standardized reception of

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psychoanalysis, so Dorothea Olkowski contends. Perhaps the same might
be said for Stevens in his own cautious appropriation of psychoanalysis.
In the Deleuzian Ruin of Representation, according to Olkowski, narcissism
can become "the condition of creation, [one] that transforms the child
from a pathetic, revengeful 'patient' into a life artist, a creative and reflec-
tive spirit" whose "displacements and disguises" and "originally multiple
nature" therefore "imply that it is something it is not and never could be,
[namely] something unified and integrated, something signified by some
ultimate myth or symbol" (172, 157, 172-73). Rather, as Stevens himself
remarks in his prose "Adagia": "The subjects of one's poems are the sym-
bols of one's self or of one of one's selves " (CPP 904; emphasis added).
As in Stevens' "Jumbo," then, the "floating and fluid character of indi-
viduality itself" as "a multiplicity of actualisation" not unexpectedly greets
us once again near the end of Difference and Repetition (258). As Deleuze
emphatically adjures: "no doubt the I and the Self must be replaced by an
undifferenciated [sic] abyss, but this abyss is neither an impersonal nor
an abstract Universal beyond individuation" (258). At this point, we per-
haps are given to query how narcissistic egos so "withdrawn from the
external world," and so insistent upon "keep[ing] away from their ego
anything that would diminish it" that they would "plainly [be] seeking
themselves as a love-object" (the very characterizations in Freud's essay on
"Narcissism" in Complete Works 75, 89, 88) - how such an estrus of inferi-
ority might possibly represent for Deleuze, as well as for Stevens, a model
for "the universal concrete individuality of the thinker or the system of
the dissolved Self" (259). Here, an apposite commentary on the subject by
Jacques Derrida may be helpful, and useful as well perhaps in gauging a
more positive measure of both Stevens' and Deleuze's otherwise chary
relation to the standard oedipalized version of psychoanalysis.
In a broadcast interview from 1986, and translated a decade later as
" There is No One Narcissism' (Autobiographies)," Derrida gestures to-
ward a notion of narcissism considerably resonant with that of both Ste-
vens and Deleuze once past the rationalist binary of narcissism/non-nar-
cissism. "Narcissisms" (the plural is important here), Derrida explains, are
"more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended" because in their
very "movement of narcissistic reappropriation," they establish the self's
truest "relation to the other" in order for "love [in the image of oneself] to
be possible": namely, "the experience of the other as other" (199). Narcis-
sism's experience of otherness qua other thus makes it a function of "non-
knowing" which, Derrida scruples, is not "the limit of ... a knowledge,"
but rather "the limit in the progression of a knowledge" (201). By viewing
inferiority as the functional limit of exteriority, and exteriority as the very
condition of inferiority - by turning narcissism inside out as it were - Der-
rida would invite us to view it in the contentless and formless and subject-
less terms that both Stevens and Deleuze would impart to it as a species of
the ante-I or ante-Self of pre-personal individuation noted earlier.

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 Just on this point, we can imagine the microscopic eye of Freud turn-
ing now to other parts of Stevens' depersonalized and discombobulated
poetic world from 1942 for corroboration, for instance, to that "impossible
possible philosophers' man" from "Asides on the Oboe" who, as a spe-
cies of larval or cracked identity, is an invisible or transparent "glass man,
without external reference":

The impossible possible philosophers' man,

The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up. (CFP 226-27)

Without external reference, that is, as a relation of otherness in extremis ,

narcissism is thus arguably "a structural non-knowing, which is hetero-
geneous, foreign to knowledge," or as Stevens characterizes his Narcis-
sus prototype in "Jumbo," a "bad-bespoken lacker" (CFP 241).5 Continues
Derrida:

It's not just the unknown that could be known and that I give
up trying to know. It is something in relation to which knowl-
edge is out of the question. And when I specify that it is a non-
knowing and not a secret ... it is not at all in order to calculate
or to intrigue or to bar access to something that I know and
that others must not know; it is a more ancient, more originary
experience, if you will, of the secret ... an experience that does
not make itself available to information, that immediately en-
crypts itself. (201; emphasis added)

Stated in these terms, experience is a very important word to set beside

narcissism which, like knowledge, appears to be so much beside (rather
than inside) the point of its psychic construction: out of the question, as
Derrida's interview emphatically makes plain. "I rather like the word ex-
perience," he playfully remarks, "whose origin evokes traversal, but a tra-
versal with the body, it evokes a space that is not given in advance but that
opens as one advances" (207). It is precisely these experiential terms - for
the remainder of my essay, I shall speak to three in particular - that help to
refurbish our thinking about a possibly more redemptive linkage between
Stevens and psychoanalysis via the philosophy of Deleuze, at least via
Deleuze's psychoanalytic theory from the period of Difference and Repeti-
tion.

First, for a reading of Stevens hypothetically positioned between Freud

and Deleuze, it can hardly be underestimated just how important the
perception of a psychoanalytic unconscious ought to be in revolving the
whole question of self-identity in exactly the undecidable manner charted

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by experience in its secret and cryptic traversal of the narcissistic body
as rendered by Derrida. Rosi Braidotti, while suspicious of "the norma-
tive cage within which psychoanalysis has enclosed [human desire]" on
behalf of "the authors of the Anti-Oedipus ," and perhaps on behalf of the
author of a poem such as "Jumbo" - Braidotti is nonetheless entirely per-
suasive about the importance of the Freudian unconscious for Deleuze. "I
take the unconscious," writes Braidotti, "as the guarantee of non-closure
in the practice of subjectivity. It undoes the stability of the unitary subject
by constantly changing and redefining his or her foundations [thus pro-
viding] a constant return of paradoxes, inner contradictions and internal
idiosyncrasies, which instill instability at the heart of the self . . . [and
thereby] allow for forms of disengagement and disidentification from the
socio-symbolic" (100, 99, 39^10).
Stevens' own hypothetical linkage to a psychoanalytic unconscious per-
haps establishes itself in one important sense along the line of such forms
of disengagement in his explorations of selfhood as his critics are prone
to observe. Bart Eeckhout, for one, following Helen Vendler, offers "dis-
tancing ploys" as the equivalent of "forms of disengagement" - subjective
ploys that arise intermittently from Stevens' own "violently fluctuating
moods and multiple ambivalences" that, from a psychic point of view, re-
veal the poet to be "a highly divided figure who was able to dramatize his
own inner contradictions" just as Braidotti describes (42, 43; and farther
on 36, 38, 108 nlOO, 139, and 220 n26).
It is arguably the case, therefore, that narcissism is for both Deleuze
and Stevens a preeminent "Idea" that they draw from psychoanalysis for
no other reason than the fact that, as Deleuze puts the case, "the Idea is
not the element of knowledge but that of an infinite 'learning,' which is
of a different nature to knowledge" - knowledge that is "extra-proposi-
tional or subrepresentative" having to do with "the presentation of the
unconscious, not the representation of consciousness" (192). Stevens' own
conception of "the unknown as the source of knowledge, as the object
of thought [as] part of the dynamics of the known," is astonishingly co-
ordinate with Deleuze's ruminations about "the Idea" of (or perhaps, on
the way to) knowledge. Stevens' formulation appears in "The Irrational
Element in Poetry" (1936), the title of which essay has obvious connec-
tions to the psychic unconscious just described, and is elaborated further
as follows:

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in

the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom. We accept
the unknown even when we are most skeptical. We may resent
the consideration of it by any except the most lucid minds; but
when so considered, it has seductions more powerful and more
profound than those of the known. (CPP 791)

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 In this "unknown" way, then, identity remains a "problem" throughout
much of Deleuze's writing since, as in Derrida's experience previously,
problems "always open questions which draw[] spectator[s] . . . into the
real movement of an apprenticeship of the entire unconscious, the final ele-
ments of which remain the problems themselves" (192; emphasis added).
But conceived as either Idea or Problem, as one of the " 'differentials' of
thought, or the Unconscious of pure thought," narcissism has no direct
relation "to a Cogito which functions as a ground or as a proposition of
consciousness, but to the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito; in other words,
to the universal ungrounding which characterizes thought as a faculty in
its transcendental exercise" (194). Hence, the importance accorded to the
unconscious in psychoanalysis prompts Deleuze to conceive of most mod-
ernist works of art (in this instance, his examples are novels since James
Joyce, but they could just as easily have been some of the later collections
of Stevens) as "developed around or on the basis of a fracture that [such
works] never succeed in filling" (195).
The tropology of fracture here, and elsewhere throughout Difference and
Repetition , presents us, therefore, with a second psychoanalytic contour
that Stevens' Parts of a World would appear to exploit as well - a contour
fashioned after experience conceived in terms of a space that the narcis-
sistic ego can open up (or on to) only as it advances. As such, it becomes
coterminous with open space itself: "a space which is unlimited," Deleuze
avers, and one in which "[n]othing pertains or belongs to any person, but
[in which] all persons are arrayed here and there in such a manner as to
cover the largest possible space" (36). At this point, we can now imagine
Freud's potent eye microscopically gravitating from the sunny blue skies
of "Jumbo" to the enigmatic nighttime setting of "Phosphor Reading by
His Own Light" also in Stevens' Parts of a World , where a breathtaking
ellipsis dead center in the text provides for the maximization of such sub-
jective space just at that moment when the narcissist's proverbial glassy
mirror dissolves, and something quite Other comes to take its place:

The page is blank or a frame without a glass

Or a glass that is empty when he looks.

The greenness of night lies on the page and goes

Down deeply in the empty glass . . .

Look, realist, not knowing what you expect.

The green falls on you as you look,

Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech

Teaching a fusky alphabet. ( CPP 240; emphasis added)

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 In the Derrida interview, the relation to otherness (as an interruption
of normative psychic economy) is rendered in similar terms: "the possibil-
ity of the relation to the other" (209; emphasis added). The rendering of a
limitless possibility is indeed how Freud himself winds up his synopsis of
the "narcissistic type" from the purview of object-choice: to wit, "A person
may love . . . what he himself would like to be " ( Complete Works 90; empha-
sis added). Hence, "In every psychic system," Deleuze surmises, "there
is a swarm of possibilities around reality, but our possibles are always
Others," given "the Other as the expression of a possible world" (260, 261).
Once again, we are very much in the psychic vicinity of Stevens with his
"impossible possible philosophers' man" from "Asides on the Oboe." In
a further uncanny link between Freud's narcissism and Stevens', Deleuze
can conclude only, "There is no love which does not begin with the revela-
tion of a possible world as such, enwound in the other which expresses
it" (261).
At this point, the larval subject for Deleuze arguably becomes the rival of
the narcissist, a notion suggested to him by the treatment of embryology in
"the celebrated 1895 Freudian Project for a Scientific Psychology " ( Difference
and Repetition 118). But in terms of maximizing the possibility or potential-
ity of psychic space "experienced only at the borders of the livable, under
conditions beyond which it would entail the death of any well-constituted
subject," it is perhaps Freud's Interpretation of Dreams that lies at the back
of the larval subject's "vital movements, torsions, and drifts, that only the
embryo can sustain" (118). As fractured conduits to unknown possibil-
ity, the "terrible movements" of nightmares, accordingly, are entirely un-
suited to "a substantial, completed and well-constituted subject, such as a
Cartesian cogito," and thus "can only be sustained under the conditions of
a larval subject" (118). Indeed, because thought at the level of possibility
"cannot be an essence, a substance, a philosophical meaning," and to that
extent becomes "what ruins philosophical legitimacy in advance," none-
theless as Derrida reminds us, it is also the unthought "which prevents
philosophy from closing on itself" (119). Psychoanalysis, too, is all about
such riddling narcissistic disclosure , so that, according to Deleuze, "Even
the philosopher is a larval subject of his own system" (119) - an "impos-
sible possible philosopher," shall we say?
But as a third and final term conditional to psychoanalytic experience,
even riddling disclosure may be venturing overmuch about the limitlessly
unspeakable nature of narcissism for both Stevens and Deleuze. For the
latter, "the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as
that of an Other," he tells us in Difference and Repetition , "and in so do-
ing invoke a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its
own" that I cited much earlier (58). "Represent" is hardly the right word
here, since much of that mysterious coherence he tells us later in A Thou-
sand Plateaus has to do with becoming imperceptible to oneself as in my
opening epigraph: "To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be

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alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line . . . this, precise-
ly, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer
be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray" (197). In Stevens' "Bouquet of
Belle Scavoir," also in Parts of a World , just such a dark encounter is staged
between a potential ancestor of Narcissus and his double in the form of
a cryptic female "scavoir" - a female presence that is obviously intended
to defeat knowing patriarchal self-reflection by means of her perpetual
evasion:

III

How often had he walked

Beneath summer and the sky
To receive her shadow into his mind . . .

IV

The sky is too blue, the earth too wide.

The thought of her takes her away.
The form of her in something else
Is not enough.
V

The reflection of her here, and then there,

Is another shadow, another evasion,
Another denial. If she is everywhere,
She is nowhere, to him. (CPP 211-12)

Meeting one's true double at the other end of a narcissistic line of flight
is merely another of those inside out convolutions of the dissolved Cogito
back in Difference and Repetition where "the self of 'I think' includes in its
essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other,"
and where "for a brief moment we enter into a schizophrenia in principle
which," Deleuze would have us believe, "characterizes the highest power
of thought [since it] opens Being directly onto difference" (58). In Stevens'
"Bouquet of Belle Scavoir," however, such empowerment is entirely lost
on the male persona as it collapses into a more conventional and more
stereotyped narcissism of vain self-absorption and self-reproduction at
the end of the poem where, impossibly, "It is she that he wants, to look
at directly, / Someone before him to see and [more impossibly] to know"
(CPP 212).
In distinct contrast to the "bad-bespoken lack[]" of "Jumbo's" "Ances-
tor of Narcissus," the conventional narcissist in "Bouquet of Belle Scavoir"
would appear to be disadvantaged by the lack of such "lack" as it were,
"lack" understood in terms of what Ziarek brilliantly unpacks in Stevens'
much later "Lebensweisheitspielerei" (1952) as an "indigence of light."

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Perhaps "Phosphor Reading by His Own Light" initially experiences such
benighted indigence in the earlier Parts of a World. As Ziarek goes on to
explain, "The indigence of light . . . spells a lack of cognition . . . [that]
also intimates the possibility of otherness outside or beyond the range of
intellection," as arguably symbolized by the "Belle Scavoir" figure. Ziarek
continues:

The fact that we are native to otherness and indigent of light

ironizes the image of a self-identical subject [the masculine self-
absorbed Narcissus stereotype, I am arguing], for whom the
other comes as a surprise, a threat . . . and an indication of the
limit placed on the household of consciousness. For if other-
ness can indeed disrupt the apparent peace of self-sameness, it
is only because alterity is native to identity, a sort of "internal
paramour" as [another] of Stevens's poems suggests. (131-32)

I shall return to Stevens' "household" troping of conventional con-

sciousness in a moment. But as a means of rounding out this psychoana-
lytic portrait of a quasi-Freudian Stevens courtesy of Deleuze, it may be
worth commenting upon a rival discourse to psychoanalysis very much in
play between both thinkers that arguably provokes Stevens and Deleuze
to continue to revolve the gray on gray imperceptibility of human identity
that the extremes of difference are likely to disclose. Here, I refer to the
philosophy of American Pragmatism as a further engaging parallel that
helps instructively to fill out the psychoanalytic one. I conclude with this
comparison not because Anglo-American writers are generally superior
to European ones, so Deleuze himself contends ( Dialogues , Chapter 2);
nor because William James, the father of American Pragmatism, authors
two volumes on The Principles of Psychology with which both Stevens and
Deleuze were undoubtedly familiar.6
More important is the fact that the Pragmatist approach to experience
is ineluctably predisposed to foreground so much of the secretive and
mysterious and inarticulable that Deleuze helps us to think Stevens him-
self might have found so compelling about psychoanalytic approaches to
identity if his several ancestors to Narcissus scattered throughout Parts
of a World are any indication. An important citation from the nineteenth-
century American poet Benjamin Blood, which Deleuze extrapolates from
William James (via Jean Wahl) and positions in an early chapter of Differ-
ence and Repetition , says as much: "Nature is contingent, excessive, and
mystical essentially," writes Blood, "and there is in it as much wonder as
of certainty. . . . Not unfortunately the universe is wild . . . [for] Nature is
miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the
different . . . never an instant true - ever not quite" (qtd. on 57). That tell-
ing phrase, "ever not quite," thus serves as the provocation in William
James's own ruminations on the poet to laud the "genius of reality" for

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escaping from "the pressure of the logical finger" in much the same terms
that Stevens, somewhere between Freud and Deleuze, champions the
self's mysterious coherence: "no complete generalization, no total point
of view, no all-pervasive unity," continues James, "but everywhere some
residual resistance to verbalisation, formulation, and discursification"
(Writings 1312-13). As Deleuze himself puts the case for the narcissist's
"ever not quite" at the end of Difference and Repetition : "there is always
something else implicated which remains to be explicated or developed,"
then, in another Derridean formulation, concludes, "all this is made pos-
sible only by the Other-structure and its expressive power in perception"
(281; emphasis added). All of which, of course, should put us in mind of
Stevens' "Belle Scavoir" once again: "The sky is too blue, the earth too
wide. / The thought of her takes her away. / The form of her in something
else " (emphasis added).
The mysticism of American Pragmatism as a rejoinder to the narcissism
of Freudian psychoanalysis would likely send Deleuze off to any number
of American novelists for exemplification: Herman Melville, Henry James,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller (among others) are all
favorites throughout the Deleuzian canon. Because, as Braidotti argues,
Deleuze's own particular brand of "pragmatic philosophy . . . rejects the
ghosts of metaphysical interiority, the 'hauntology' of missing presence"
to favor a more "vitalistic pragmatism" of "just do[ing] it" that is "rel-
evant to today's world" (185, 75, 115), several other of Stevens' poems in
Parts of a World strike me as especially de-interiorizing - deterritorializing,
Deleuze would say - in this very inside out kind of way.
In "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man," for instance, as in "Jum-
bo," the emphasis is all on "bluish clouds . . . above the empty house . . .
As if someone lived there" (CPP 205). In "Man and Bottle," the directive
is to "Destroy[] romantic tenements / Of rose and ice" (CPP 218), and
so like the one in "Variations on a Summer Day" to "Pass through the
door and through the walls," and join up with "Those bearing balsam . . .
[and] Pine-figures bringing sleep" outside (CPP 215). As "Montrachet le-
Jardin" frames the case for all these texts, "Man must become the hero of
his world," and so "Sing[] of an heroic world beyond the cell" (CPP 235).
If it is the case, as Freud famously remarks in his Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis that "the one typical . . . representation of the human figure
as a whole is a house" (qtd. in Chandler 11-12), the epigones of Narcissus
secreted throughout some of Stevens' later writing at least help us to see,
thanks to Deleuze, how intensely problematic are the strict demarcations
of domestic space as quasi-extensions or figurations of human personal-
ity.7 As David Macey sums up the case for all these epigones in a decid-
edly post-Freudian mood (cited in my final epigraph), "the ego is not . . .
master in its own house and cannot aspire to Cartesian certainties" (74).
We are invited once again to position Stevens' narcissistic figuration be-
yond a household consciousness. "In other words," as Ziarek finesses this

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point in late Stevens, "poetry begins at the moment the mind realizes that
there exists an exteriority, otherness, 'not ourselves/ which cannot be sub-
sumed under consciousness. This otherness not only cannot be explained
in terms of the unity of the self and world, but rather should be seen as
itself precluding any possibility of such unification": "Parts of a World," in
"other" words. "For what Stevens's work discloses," Ziarek concludes, "is
a difference at the origin of language . . . more fundamental than the one
between the mind and the world" (111).
Bowing to Freud just in this household context, Deleuze (along with
Guattari) also acknowledges that "Everything begins with Houses" ( What
Is Philosophy? 189). But in further ironizing domestic space in American
literature (following Herman Melville especially rather than Stevens)
by viewing it in terms of "a kind of deframing following certain lines of
flight ... in order to open it onto the universe" and by "dissolv[ing] the
identity of the place" - and by implication, human identity - "through
variation of the earth" (187), Deleuze sets the stage for a more cautious
Freudian interpretation of psychic interiority in Stevens' work which the
"hauntology" of Narcissus (to recur to Braidotti's apt phrasing) answers
to precisely.8 But much before Stevens and Freud, it is the father of Ameri-
can Pragmatism himself, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reminds us in an
essay on Plato that "The experience of poetic creativeness ... is not found
in staying at home, nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the
other" (qtd. in my Question of Belief 30 nlO). As an augury of "the trans-
former, himself transformed" in "Jumbo," this Emersonian aperçu hypo-
thetically places Stevens' "Ancestor of Narcissus" somewhere between the
two "Contrary Theses" in Parts of a World ; that is, between "The bareness
of the house [where] / An acid sunlight fills the halls" (CPP 239) in part
I and "a final refuge, / From the bombastic intimations of winter" (CPP
242) in part II as Stevens' "abstract subjective essence" ( Anti-Oedipus 270)
in the latter labors to reveal:

He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy

Were contours . . .

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.

(CPP 242)

A "deep disparateness" settles over such human abstraction, Deleuze

might say, "to the extent that the disparates have first invented their order
of communication in depth," only later "tracing hardly recognizable in-
tensive paths through the ulterior world of qualified extensity" {Difference

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and Repetition 236) as their mystic narcissistic energy or intensity is turned
inside and outward.
"Within intensity," Deleuze further remarks, "we call that which is
really implicated and enveloping difference; and all that which is really
implicated or enveloped distance " (237). According to Ziarek, therefore,
"the difficulty of 'to be' lies precisely in maintaining a distance," that is,
a distance "suggested in a non-spatio-temporal understanding of place"
that is contradicted by the "household" of consciousness alluded to above
(116, 131-32) that Stevens does so much to ironize in Parts of a World - dis-
tance as a "Description without Place" as it were in the subsequent 1947
Transport to Summer. "Difference, distance and inequality are the positive
characteristics of depth" in relation to human experience, Deleuze con-
cludes (238). As I hope to have demonstrated throughout this essay and
elsewhere ("Doty, Deleuze, and 'Distance' " and "Going the Distance " more
generally), Stevens' own psychic abstractions trace similar barely recog-
nizable paths or "distances" throughout his later work, but more espe-
cially the one we might now think he deliberately places between himself
and Freud, as Deleuze so usefully helps us to see. But just barely, since, as
"Montrachet-le-Jardin" reminds us at its close, anything more "I affirm[,]
then at midnight the great cat / Leaps quickly from the fireside and is
gone" (CPP 237).

University of Ottawa
Canada

Notes

!In Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief I cite that remark, adding, "In response
to a New Verse questionnaire on matters generally poetic, [Stevens] indicates that he
had read only Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, though it is Freud's The Future of an Il-
lusion that is recorded in Stevens' library," according to Peter Brazeau. I note also that
"Stevens' dismissive attitude toward Freud in his letters may be further sampled in
communications to Ronald Lane Latimer (January 10, 1936) and Harry Duncan (Febru-
ary 23, 1945), which carries over into some of the prose of The Necessary Angel" (see CPP
650-51 and CPP 728-29) ( Question of Belief 42, 42 n24).
2 An anonymous reader of this essay thus raises the very conundrum I aim to ad-
dress throughout; namely, whether "Stevens' relationship to the Freudian" is the same
as "Deleuze's largely negative /doubtful response to Freud," or whether a general
"parallel between Stevens and Deleuze" can be said to exist at all. As I aim to show,
the "parallel" exists precisely in the "negative /doubtful" response, but one that serves
only to mask an otherwise procréant attraction to psychoanalysis in its decidedly "dein-
stitutionalized" form that my title can only make promise of at this point.
3 With her own focus on Parts of a World (in addition to Stevens' subsequent Transport
to Summer [1947]), Jacqueline Brogan accounts for the "later" Stevens as the result of "his
response to the Second World War" so that readers "find the beginnings of Stevens's
change from a rather posturing 'masculine' or 'virile' poet, quite full of the 'rage to or-
der,' to a poet increasingly open to what we might metaphorically call the 'feminine' or

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'other/ including racial 'others' . . . that culminated in a genuine 'revolutionary poetics'
that remains important to us today" (7, and farther on 105, 109, 119, and passim).
4 The issue of "androgyny" in Stevens has elicited several psychoanalytic readings
provoked by the writings of Karl Jung: Frank Doggett, Edward Kessler, Susan Weston,
and Denise Frusciante most recently. My own approach has been to take up the matter
in more historically and culturally resonant terms than those of Jung, but not in quite
so disparaging a way as Frank Lentricchia, alluded to by Brogan (175 n21). In response
to the "open-ended continuum for the serial construction of subjectivity" just alluded
to, Daniel Schwarz therefore suggests that "we may find it helpful in reading Stevens
to abandon the concept of a consistent persona and to admit the possibility of hearing
multiple - and at times contradictory and cacophonous - voices, as if they were inter-
secting planes on the order of a Cubist collage or diverse motifs in a symphony" (7;
further on 6 and 28).
5 Accordingly, "The creation of [this] concept of the Other Person," so Gregg Lam-
bert contends, "represents perhaps the most profound and yet most subtle transfor-
mations (sic) in Deleuze's entire philosophical system" (10), and in light of "Jumbo's"
elephantine "transformer, himself transformed" (CPP 241), perhaps the most profound
alteration in Stevens' own canon as well. Hence, "Narcissism," Stevens reminds us in
"Three Academic Pieces," "involves something beyond the prime sense of [a] word,"
that is, "a sense of reality keen enough to be in excess of the normal sense of reality,"
which he links to the "ambiguity" of resemblance rather than the "identity" of imita-
tion or representation (CPP 692, 691, 687) - otherness in extremis once again.
6 For further contextualizations of Stevens and Jamesian Pragmatism, see Lentric-
chia, Grey, and Poirier most prominently, in addition to my "Both Sides" 210-11. The
linkages of American Pragmatism to Deleuze, in addition to the reference taken up be-
low in Difference and Repetition, are more abundantly developed in A Thousand Plateaus,
where "a pragmatics (semiotic or political)" is invoked "to define the effectuation of the
condition of possibility" referred to previously (85; see also 25, 85, 148, 217, and passim).
Inna Semetsky enlarges these linkages to the second-generation American Pragmatism
of John Dewey.
7Anent Braidotti's "hauntology" as subjectivity's indigent lack, see also the Freud-
ian "Coda" to Mutlu Biasing's Lyric Poetry, entitled "The Haunted House of 'Anna' "
(198-203).
8 "In fact," however, as Deleuze and Guattari further observe, "the self is only a
threshold, a door, a becoming between . . . multiplicities" (Thousand Plateaus 249) as
it stages its breakaway from the home's "black hole" alluded to elsewhere (Thousand
Plateaus 311), and thus corroborating a further compelling remark in What Is Philosophy?
that "even houses are drunk and askew . . . like a poem by Emily Dickinson" (164-65).
A further gloss from Emily Dickinson thus serves to summarize Stevens' earlier "Belle
Scavoir" most appropriately: "Peruse how infinite I am / To no one that You - know - "
(qtd. in Fuss 60).

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