ABSTRACT
The question of enough, of the possibility of “a satisfaction in the
irremediable poverty of life” (OP 167), or of the successful effort on the part of
“a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words, occasionally of the
dissatisfied thinker to find satisfaction through his emotions” {OP 165), is one
that is posed again and again throughout Wallace Stevens' poetry. If the
question is more than rhetorical, it is, for Stevens, above all a question of
rhetoric, having to do with the inexhaustible figures and fictions, “The poses of
speech, of paint, / Of music” (CP 199) in which language so delights. The
imperative “Add this. It is to add,” which closes “Add This to Rhetoric,”
affirms an irreducible rhetorical factor in language, always in excess of any
“proper” state of expression. The title of the poem “The Lack of Repose”
depicts a condition inherent in Stevens' quest for satisfaction in words. If “in
nature it merely grows,” in language, “It is posed and it is posed” (CP 198), re-
posed and re-puzzled, without any final repose in sight. However, the quest
itself presupposes, in theory at least, the possibility of satisfaction, a moment in
which there would be at last enough, and therefore the operation of a certain
economy of desire, working according to what Derrida calls “the law of proper”
or “the law of the house” (oiko-nomici)l Of course, that the possibility of an
absolute satisfaction can never be seriously entertained anyway would seem self-
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evident. But this very self-evidence makes it all the more remarkable that in
Stevens' poetry precisely such a possibility is, however speculatively, constantly
entertained. “To find the real, / To be stripped of every fiction except one, /
The fiction of an absolute” (CP 404) is the ultimate desire underlying his work.
