psychoanalysis
This cluster examines how new worlds are built in the course of revolutions, a set of actions that inevitably involves deep conflicts. For my purposes, two of these conflicts are most significant. First, those who form the “avant-garde” of either political and artistic movements may be recognized by many in intellectual circles, but certainly not by all. Second, the more radical the revolution, the wider the gap between the revolutionaries and those who cannot or will not break away from the old worlds.
Elegies in war years script wartime as endurance of the fraught experience of mass killing on battlefields, in concentration camps and in bombed cities—and, for the post-Freudian mind experiencing the Second World War, they ignite feelings informed by insinuations of the death drive, its curious repressive and recollective effects.
For Wallace Stevens, the lobster is a symbol of the high life. In Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction Stevens presents its consumption as a luxurious pleasure:
We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed
Of his sister [2]
The Canon Aspirin is, as Stevens wrote to Hi Simons, a figure for “[t]he sophisticated man,” “a man with a taste for Meursault, and lobster Bombay,” and his connoisseurship in gustatory matters possesses obvious affinities to the aesthetic satisfactions offered by Stevens’s own lush, Francophonic language.[3] One may or may not accede to Harold Bloom’s proposition that the mango is “visionary food for Stevens, perhaps his equivalent of Coleridge’s ‘honey-dew,’” but the lobster, served up in an Anglo-Indian recipe, accompanied by good French wine, surely signifies a cultivated, if orientalist, taste for recherché pleasures, what we might call the Canon’s culinary capital.[4] Of the lobster we can say what Stevens says of the poem: It Must Give Pleasure.