For many generations “America” was sheer verbal invention : a provocation of the advertising circular and the conceptual challenge of a newly discovered realm. But” ‘Discovery’ was a double concept, since it referred both to the act of finding and to the later act of revealing what had been found” (Franklin, 182). In calling many of his Maximus poems “letters,” Olson wedges himself into that exploratory stance in which each notation redefines the utility of perception. “[O]ne real center in American experience has been the isolated self”—recalling Olson’s “Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I, Maximus, address you”—“which is given some connection to presumed communities (and thereby an identity) by its engrossment of America as an elaborate, even arcane, sign of where it stands and what it means” (Franklin, 183). America is the name for what language does in the world. As long as there is a struggle for freedom within language, that struggle will be tropical inasmuch as it solicits its occasion from language in heat. The trope of this struggle (or rutting) makes it, if not American, at least of the Americas (rendering South American Spanish and Portuguese, along with North American French and English, so distinct from their transatlantic origins). “For, in the end, America has been a series of competing stories told by figures who ought to have seen their community precisely in their parallel efforts at narrative persuasion, in their exuberance of faith, their diligence of speech” (Franklin, 203).*
The discovery of America was an accidental by-product of a European ambition to open trade routes to the Orient. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, Columbus felt certain that the land of the Great Khan and the Emerald City was just over the ridge, down the river, or farther along the shore. This conviction was excited by a cartographic coincidence : on Columbus’s maps, the south coast of Cuba bore a superficial similarity to the Chinese province of Mangi, east of the long-sought Malay Peninsula (“the Golden Chersonese”), regarded as the ultimate trading zone. On his second voyage Columbus explored the Cuban coastline until he reached the point where the Malay Peninsula was presumed to bear southward. Rather than confirm this by continuing his exploration, the admiral opted instead to return to Spain. Under threat of severe bodily punishment and heavy fines, in the presence of the fleet scribe, the crew was forced to take an oath that the coast they had explored could not possibly belong to an island because of its size. Columbus also compelled assent to the fantasy that “a few leagues hence, sailing along this coast land would be found where civilized people exist, and who know of the world” (O Gorman, 89).
Columbus’s desperate commitment to the Orient reflects a Eurocentric appetite for expansion, a craving for contact with others who “know of the world,” but whose knowledge would confirm Europe’s estimate of its own centrality. The rotundity of the globe, after all, was a recent postulate. The antipodes and the infernal regions—given the fact of such a world—were now places to be encountered on the way home, not eccentric zones to which an aberrant course might lead. By the same token, such desirable places as the Golden Chersonese might as readily be encountered en route. Diversity and difference, the sheer fact of otherness, were henceforth to be raw material for self-affirmation.
History tends to be perceived as either topological (Greece, Rome, British Empire) or typological (monarchy, oligarchy, democracy);* but Columbus stands at the inaugural moment of a different kind of history. He didn’t discover America, he troped America. Expecting India, he called the Caribbean peoples Indians, and the islands themselves came to be known as the West Indies. He was so obsessed with the Great Khan of China that he heard the islanders’ tribal name Carib as “canib” (from which we get “cannibal”), or agents of the Khan.
Four centuries after Columbus’s celebrated tropism, Walt Whitman found himself still alive to celebrate the year of the Columbiad, 1892, in “A Thought of Columbus”:
Thousands and thousands of miles hence, and now four centuries back,
A mortal impulse thrilling its brain cell,
Reck’d or unreck’d, the birth can no longer be postpon’d:
A phantom of the moment, mystic, stalking, sudden,
Only a silent thought, yet toppling down of more than walls of brass or stone.
(A flutter at the darkness’ edge as if old Time’s and Space’s secret near
revealing.)
America is resolved in a “phantom of the moment,” a thought in one man’s mind, a trope that comes to tyrannize the rounded world. The globe troped in a single thrilled brain cell does indeed “flutter at the darkness’ edge” like the predawn sky at Alamogordo, moments before yet another new world blazed forth in 1945, “toppling down of more than walls of brass or stone.”
To follow the turn of that initial trope of a “New World” is to begin to hear the actual place of this world as tropical, in and of the tropics : fecund, hot, multiple. When Europeans came to settle the American shores, they were prepared to endure a spiritual and physical wilderness, to void its tropes by means of their own blinding revelations. They erred in presuming revelation could immunize them from the tropic difference of a new world. Olson’s kingfishers are emblematic of New World settlers : “as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes a dripping, fetid mass.” Echoing Heraclitus, he names the tropic claim:
To be in different states without a change
is not a possibility.
“The Kingfishers” revisits a site memorialized by Joseph Conrad, who documented that fundamental inability of Europeans to thrive in such circumstances. His characters come apart in the heat, the cadaverous living remnants of imperial ravages in tropical outposts, helpless avatars of the “fetid mass” of their own civilization in extremis.
Place nourishes transformation. Each place is a place, with its own bio-anatomy of stability and transfiguration. A place is not “anywhere”: it is always here. This is what the European settlement of the Americas refused to concede, and such imaginative parsimony was the principle by which Columbus troped Caribs into Indians. Tzvetan Todorov notes that by imposing themselves militarily on native populations, the European conquistadors “destroyed their own capacity to integrate themselves into the world.” By this he means that a particular hermeneutic circle was closed : just as global circumnavigation returns all travelers home in the end, military authority ensures that all communications are returned to sender, secured in the language of domination.
[T]here exist two major forms of communication, one between man and man, the other between man and the world …. We are accustomed to conceiving of communication as only interhuman, for since the “world” is not a subject, our dialogue with it is quite asymmetrical (if there is any such dialogue at all) (Conquest of America, 97).
The world viewed as unresponsive object forecloses earth as place or home from any but the most mercantile considerations. The manifest resistance of America’s places to such calculation appeared to the settlers in the form of Indians. These people were not recognized as “natives” because their habitation of the land didn’t conform to European habits of soil dependency. They were therefore disposable : human weeds impeding cultivation. But as Todorov suggests, the main strike against them was the innate bias of their own communication axis, which privileged dialogue with an articulate natural world over interhuman exchange. European travelers returned home with enslaved Americans in tow, to be displayed in the metropole as pure ciphers of difference, parts of speech bereft of context, living verbs shorn of scholastic declensions. They were not solicited for what they might know, but exhibited as mute artifacts, tableaux vivant. By this means Europeans spurned the tropological lesson that the world in another’s language is another world. Rather than being an animate environment, the “New World” was simply a less defiled—if more unruly—version of the Old World.
Wallace Stevens’s Crispin is a figure of the colonial imagination wrestling a space for itself out of tropic wilderness. “The Comedian as the Letter C” opens with a proposition : “Nota : man is the intelligence of his soil, / The sovereign ghost.” “It was a flourishing tropic he required”—so as to offset the lunar perversity in which he had previously sought “the blissful liaison, / Between himself and his environment, / Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight.” As he encounters “the fecund minimum” in the tropics, Crispin readjusts his principle : “Nota : his soil is man’s intelligence. / That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find.” Yet this is but the Satanic temptation of man conceived as steward of earth, restlessly seeking “A still new continent in which to dwell,” because “the purpose of his pilgrimage / … [is] to drive away / The shadow of his fellows from the skies.”
As the poem goes on, the Satanic momentum is accelerated by prepositional duplicities. Stevens reveals poetry to be not verse but verso of language, the other side of its coin of sense—sensed and incensed in its unhinged coign.
Beauty is natures coyn, must not be hoorded,
But must be currant, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss,
Unsavoury in th’injoyment of it self;
If you let slip time, like a neglected rose
It withers on the stalk with languish’t head.
Beauty is natures brag, and must be shown …
In lines like these from Comus, Milton is of the devil’s party, as Blake remarked. But the occasion is reopened, in effect, by Stevens, ventilated in the New World tropic where any given thought or perception or sign can be imposed, or transposed, onto another place. Tropical poetry is a language proposing in itself an omnipresent relevance “transcending all limit and privacy” (as Emerson put it). Ominous, omnivorous, tropical poetry teaches a biodegradable thinking, a thought for composing beings, for being decomposed and recomposed, for being composed (with equilibrium, staying cool), for being compost (heating up). The poem’s plot is no sequence of narrative events, but a garden plot that makes its protean heap a biodegradable mask of regeneration. Poetry is the immense reserve of language, a claim on underground and underworld where a new prospect is grounded.
The heterological nature of words, redoubled by grammatical ambiguities, is quintessentially tropical, rich in tropism : a struggle between veracity and voracity. This, more than anything, is the world Crispin comes to inhabit, a “Green barbarism turning paradigm” in his “flourishing tropic … an abundant zone, / Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious” like the poems of Stevens’s own Harmonium. The fate—“All din and gobble”—that befalls Crispin in his final costume as fatalist is “Delivered with a deluging onwardness.” The deluge engulfing earth is not aquatic but human, with Crispin’s heirs at the helm, the sea of humanity “Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops.” The accumulated wisdom of the sage or patriarch issues in the gurgle of babes. Within the market economy designated “literature,” poetry occupies the position of this comedic trope; and in order to embody the tropic, the language of poems has had to retain some figure of the human, a composite portrait that the economy of literature anachronistically retains as the author, but which the texts realize as a still wet palette of tints and smears, the unauthored ground of erasures and geomorphic drift. Poetry is biodegradable thought, “the honey bearing chaos of high summer.”
Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness hears the voices of the muses whisper out of that tropic he has come to master; “But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.” Kurtz is no poet, so he can’t live with that hollowness. But poets know that such a cavity can be a drum for sounding rhythm, a ham bone or basin to catch the Muse’s thunder as it lets down “gigantic quavers of its voice.” The hollow is not only the life of the poet, but can even endure domestication : the comedian as the letter C is a recomposition (by phonemic transference) of Kurtz (though not going so far as to include that Old World “K” of Kafka’s golem-haunted imagination): Kurtz as Crispin, a “connoisseur of elemental fate” whose poetic destiny is to domesticate the great solitude with a fund of tropisms. Crispin’s “blissful liaison, / Between himself and his environment” becomes as well Stevens’s own mock rehearsal for his lifework, which was (combining Milton with Mallarmé) to make the world into the final poem, to render all the world’s significations tropological. That this is also the propensity of market economy is worth noting; but the gold standard or any other model of currency exchange legislates a specific model, the heliotropism which Derrida charts in philosophical rhetoric in “White Mythology,” and which persists in the idealist alliance of king-phallus-capital-logos. Stevens, on the other hand, like Dickinson before him, openly toys with the posturings of idealism by absorbing the materialist priorities of a composting dispensation into a ground of thought where the reality will not be mutilated by the report. “The plum survives its poems”; and “The wheel survives the myths. / The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.” “The wheel, the lever, the incline, / May survive, and perhaps, / The alphabet.”