Modernism and Phenomenology by Ariane Mildenberg

Author:Ariane Mildenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781349592517
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

The passage echoes Husserl’s observation that concrete objects are surrounded by a ‘distinct or indistinct co-present margin, which forms a continuous ring around the actual field of perception’: ‘What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate . . . is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality.’ The flow of consciousness, according to Husserl, is immersed in an infinite ‘misty horizon,’ 93 figuring the infinity and continuity of the world, which exists before reflection but can never be fully expressed, and yet it is the horizon, that is to say, the very background against which all acts and expressions stand out. The task of the phenomenologist is ‘to penetrate to th[is] primal ground,’ 94 which is ‘always already there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all praxis.’ 95 It is in this fundamental ground of experience that ‘the immediate a priori phenomenology, the first philosophy’ takes root. Similarly Stevens’s ‘first idea’ belongs to what ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ calls ‘the giant’: ‘It feels good as it is without the giant, / A thinker of the first idea.’ 96 So what, then, does Stevens mean by this ‘giant?’ In ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ the poet’s ‘few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet –’ will always be ‘part of the never-ending meditation, / Part of the question that is the giant himself’ and ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ speaks of ‘[a] giant, on the horizon, glistening.’ ‘The truth must be,’ Stevens writes in ‘Poem Written at Morning,’ ‘That you do not see, you experience, you feel, / That the buxom eye brings merely its element / To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced / Upward.’ 97 The ‘shapeless giant’ and the ‘giant on the horizon, glistening’ are figures for the insubstantial shapes of pre-semantic experience, which the ‘buxom eye’ fixes in poetic trope. Like the Husserlian ‘misty horizon,’ Stevens’s idea of the ‘giant’ is ‘gigantic’ as well as unapproachable (to borrow from Wahl): it can never be fully possessed in words and yet remains the foundation of all reasoning and expression.

Working back from this, ‘Supreme Fiction’ should not detach the subject from the world in a spiritual moment of elevation; rather, like reduction, it brings to light the subject’s pre-conceptual bond with the world prior to all polarities, as expressed in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’:There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

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