Making It Explicit: Frank Lentricchia's "Versions of Existentialism"

Literary critic Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (U of Chicago Press, 1980) makes explicit the connection between Wallace Stevens and Sartre. FL does not accomplish this feat by means of historical reconstruction (i.e., he makes no effort to prove "influence"); rather, he recognizes the conceptual kinship between Sartre's philosophical project and Stevens's poetic one.

FL took his cue from Frank Kermode's implicitly Stevensian book The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction wherein Kermode traces "the long tradition of postromantic epistemology which begins with the reorientation of the knowing subject effected by Kant and is later radicalized in directions that Kant would never have approved" (ANC, p. 31). The figures who radicalized Kant included Nietzsche, Vaihinger, William James, Ortega y Gasset and, last but not least, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose early work, according to FL, embodies "its ultimate extension" (ibid).

Yet it is Stevens, and not Sartre, who stands out in Kermode as "the culmination and summary representative" of what FL terms "the conservative fictionalist tradition in modern poetics and philosophy" (ibid). This tradition "captured the American theoretical imagination because it appeared to offer a clean break" with the "grander aestheticism" of Northrop Frye's Anatomy and the New Critical "isolationists of the image" (ANC, pp. 31-32).

Stevens's "conservative fictionalism" resides in his view of "truth" and "reality" as "alien" beings and as "'violence' which ever pressures us." The imagination, on the other hand, "is the response of our subjective violence which presses back against an inhuman chaos. Imagination makes space between us and chaos and thereby grants momentary relief from sure engulfment, madness, and death. With ['truth' and] reality so horribly privileged, fictions may be understood as heroic evasions..." (ANC, p. 33).

FL pronounces Stevens an "existentialist" because his "dominant theme is the stubborn independence, the final freedom of being from mind and the priority of natural existence over consciousness" (ANC, p. 34). For readers of Sartre, this dichotomy should sound oddly familiar. Like Sartre's ontological distinction between being and nothingness, Stevensian "poetics is a two-term system where fiction and reality engage in endless and complex play in which one term, while open to qualification by the other, always successfully resists subsumption by its opponent" (ibid).

These intriguing parallels merit further consideration and will receive it as we continue to explore the Sartre-Stevens connection.

More Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford: OUP (1953), p. 335:

Coleridge very carefully kept science, poetry, and religion distinct by attributing each, primarily, to its appropriate faculty of understanding, imagination, and reason. It was only in the early Victorian period, when all discourse was explicitly or tacitly thrown into the two exhaustive modes of imaginative and rational, expressive and assertive, that religion fell together with poetry in opposition to science, and that religion, as a consequence, was converted into poetry, and poetry into a kind of religion.

Sartre and Stevens were both heirs to this early Victorian shift. Sartre converted its epistemological dualism into the phenomenological ontology of being and nothingness; Stevens into the metaphysical dualism of reality and the imagination.

Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

From the entry "Poetry" in the Continuum Encyclopedia of American Poetry, p. 900.

Wallace Stevens was another modernist poet whose influence would be deferred for many years; he was a symbolist like Eliot rather than an imagist like Pound and Williams. Stevens was an existentialist as well. Most of his poems were expositions of the proposition that mankind ought by now to have grown out of romantic notions that there is a god who created the universe and looks after everything in it. To believe in such a creator is to blind oneself to the fact that people need to perceive life with "a mind of winter"--as Stevens wrote in his poem "The Snowman" from his first book Harmonium (1923)--and become responsible for their own actions, make their own order out of the chaos of existence.