Music as a narrative-forming device and ironic mode in Wallace Stevens’ “Peter quince at the clavier”

In this article, the author analyzes Wallace Stevens’ poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” The focus of this paper is on the functional role of narrative in the poem and its poetics. To be more precise, the author offers both a formalistic and a pragmatic account of the plot in the poem (the latter is premised on the social effect the poem produces or is supposed to produce in a social space). The author draws on a formalist distinction “fibula - sjužet” put forward by theorists like B. Eikhenbaum, V. Shklovksy, L. Vygotsky. The author also sketches a the project of a deconstructive revision of formalist conception based on the approach suggested by the American theorist, Peter Brooks. Brooks’ approach, heavily steeped in postmodernist ethos, sees sjužet and fabula not as static constructs but, on the contrary, conceives of each of them as a dynamic impetus in the “field” of the text, as a driving force shaping the readerly “desire.” Instead of binary model “fabula-sjužet,” the author chooses to triangulate three terms: plot - fibula - sjužet. This tripartite model suggests the following: plot, as a dynamic configuration of readerly experience, arises from the workings of fabula on sjužet. The author demonstrates how in this poem 1) plot figures as a dynamic model of structuring the poetic utterance, 2) plot is constituted by the means, specific to poetry (tropes, sonic devices), 3) plot helps bring about a pragmatic intention of the poem: staging a communicative failure, defamiliarizing a common communication script.