INTERROGATING THE VISIBLE AND ENCOUNTERING THE SELF: A READING OF THE POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS

Abstract

This paper explores in detail how the abstraction in language can question the givenness of human experience. Experience is the contextualized comprehension of sensations as meaning, and the interrogation of meaning de-contextualises experience and dissolves it into meaningless sonic utterances. The epistemological pretexts of the experience disappear as the abstraction disintegrates the meaning and approximates the language to a nonhuman world of pure sensations. The poems of Wallace Stevens unfold a world of Deleuzian percepts and affects prior to the human perception and affection. The poem is not a representation of lived experiences but an interrogation of the semantic and the syntactic structures that construct meaningful experiences. The interrogation opens up the proximate of primal sensations that are to converge on a particular linguistic self. There is no given being for the self apart from its becoming in language, and so, abstraction in poetry enables the self to listen to the ‘cry’ of its own elemental selves in becoming.