Chapter 15 - Constructive Disorderings

Summary

In this chapter on “Constructive Disorderings,” Eyers argues that Wallace Stevens subtly eludes our most common ways of treating literature. Where many scholars today reflexively adopt a historicist-contextualist approach to literature, Stevens, Eyers argues, instead produces a rather more uncanny, and more powerful, approach to historical time. Focusing in particular on “Of Mere Being” and “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Eyers locates in this verse repeated scenes of historical-temporal “afterwardsness,” whereby what would seem to have come first in fact came later, and where what one would have expected to follow on is instead shown to have been there all along. Far from resulting in mere disorder, however, such instances, when read closely and associatively, bring into being a singular poetic logic of historical time and, further, a radical rerouting of our expectations about modernism.