“God is a Circle, whose Circumference is nowhere and whose Centre is everywhere.” As if to stretch that hermetic maxim to its earthly limits, Stevens takes the humblest of ready-made objects, an actual mason fruit jar identified by the great scholar Roy Harvey Pearce as a "Dominion Wide Mouth Special” widely distributed in the United States from 1913 to the present, (i.e. when notable fruit-lover Stevens was in fact traveling in Tennessee (April and May 1918)),1 and he sees what happens when he places it on the ground. The result has stunned readers and puzzled scholars for almost 100 years. Here is the poem:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,The poem’s basic dynamic is well-expressed by Donald Gutierrez:
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Being placed on top of a hill gives the jar an apex of human purpose through nature...It is the design of a created object embodying a human, cultural purpose. Further, the roundness is the symbolic design of purpose placed in nature, which in itself lacks purpose or order. The jar's roundness, exerting a centripetal force on the "slovenly wilderness," endows the wilderness (including the hill) with the order of a center. All the natural disorderliness of the wilderness acquires a purposive spatial character through "centering," and is given a figurative order in the way "rounded" and rounding human purpose shapes significance into the raw matter of earthly phenomena. Accordingly, human circularity, human centralization, civilizes "wilderness," not only the wild, that is, but chaos, nullity, meaninglessness, by providing it structure. This governing force is so powerful that even in its plainest, simplest representations ("grey and bare") the jar compels a "surrounding."2I’m reminded of a proper British lady I once saw in Barbados, surrounded by an overwhelming miasma of vine and bloom, calmly snipping at some hibiscus with her garden trimmer, with just a few strokes keeping all of nature in check. John Vernon takes that thought one step further:
In "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" [Stevens] asserts that each person sees in the pineapple a "tangent of himself," and that "the fruit so seen" is also "a part of the nature that he contemplates." In "Connoisseur of Chaos" he says that "the pensive man ... sees that eagle float / For which the intricate Alps are a single nest." The point of both poems is that the wholeness of the world is composed by a single object that opens upon it, the pineapple or eagle, and this unity of object and world in turn passes through the perspective that opens upon it, the someone who puts the pineapple together or "the pensive man" who sees the eagle.The wikipedia entry on this poem gives an interesting account of some of the different ways Anecdote has been "plausibly" interpreted. There are the cultural critics who see the dominion jar as a symbol of industrialization, mass-production, homogenization and other deleterious effects of capitalism, and the feminist critics who view the clear round jar as a symbol of the male that has subdued the natural female to take "dominion." The common thread of both of these readings is the control of the small jar over everything else, and that's the root of the problem with these approaches. The jar (apologies to Freud) is just a jar. It's absurd in any literal reading to think of an empty mason jar taking control over all of Tennessee as described (unless we feel Stevens is susceptible to awkward, paint-by-numbers symbolism). It's more the absurdity (and impossibility) of the jar's prominence in the larger world that is the interest to the poet here.
This is why the jar in "Anecdote of the Jar" can "Make the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill." And it is why such an object as the jar couldn't possibly be an inert thing enclosed in its shape; it reaches out for the eyes of whoever is watching and with those eyes arranges the world around it.3
Somewhat closer are the more traditional “new criticism” readings that approach the Tennessee jar akin to Keats' Grecian urn, a symbol of art (or poetry), more specifically for the way it shapes reality by framing it, by transforming the wilderness with the human touch. The “slovenly” surrounds the jar, the “sprawl” goes around it. There are difficulties of course with this comparison; a mass-produced jar is not the same thing as a Grecian Urn, and the “gray and bare” found object does not inspire in the poet the reveries of Keats towards the urn's meaning and beauty. One could suggest this is an ironic take on the modernist revolution, where the jar replaces the urn like photography replaced painting, but how then does one reconcile this stringent irony with the idea of the jar standing in for all art? Whatever the aesthetic arguments for or against the jar, the poem does have something to do with the will to see the jar as all-encompassing, to look through art (imagination) and find an absurd dominion over, well, life itself. As Joseph Carroll writes, Stevens “transfers his own imaginative activity to an inhuman medium.”4
A related reading would be what I would term the anti-Romantic interpretation, where the poem rejects the easy interplay between humans and nature in spirit that was cultivated by the Romantic poets as the rapture that illuminates God (although in reality the interplay was very problematic, see Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” for example). In Anecdote the jar and nature have nothing in common, they relate as in a dysfunctional marriage between reality and the imagination, no melding of souls, just some bending of wills perhaps. The jar is “clear,” so presumably it mirrors the scene around it, but it is not the “transparent eye” Emerson proposed that in utter emptiness finds its being by filling in spirit with the world around it. What’s missing of course is consciousness. It is the “I” and not the jar with sentience. The jar can’t stand in for the stereotypical Romantic poet, again it’s the will to see it in this way that makes the différance.
Which brings us to the Deconstructionist reading (albeit one I’ve never actually read), which would have the poem turn on the last two lines: “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.” In this view, the jar becomes the reader, thus it is an invisible (“clear”) intruder on the scene, that takes “dominion” over the “text” by resisting it, by not giving in to the natural expression of the work of the art because it is separate, and secondary. This unwillingness or inability to “read” controls the meaning of the text, making the reader not the creator the driving force, the “winner” so to speak. (An expensive college education didn’t go to waste on me!)
In reality, the so-called post-structuralist critics are too circumspect to take it this far, they simply say, from J. Hillis Miller to Harold Bloom and on, that the poem is incoherent in structure and epistemologically meaningless, so the reader can make anything they want of it, and thereby betray their own agendas of reading. This fits in nicely with their agenda, which is to paint Stevens as a poet who can’t be explained or resolved because he hasn’t reconciled two seemingly contradictory propositions: “reality is imagination” and “imagination is reality.” Thus poems like “Anecdote of a Jar” are seen as resistant to all attempts to explain them, that in fact it plays “gotcha” on critics for trying to put words Stevens’ wisely stayed away from using on insolvable puzzles of doubt in the mind’s ability to know.5
To me this is a dereliction of duty on the part of the critic to understand what the words are actually saying. In Stevens’ world, reality exists, but it is continually made problematic by the imagination, the subjective or non-material side of being that quickly gets caught in the nether world between what is and what appears. The point is not that Stevens’ continuous efforts to separate out the subject from the object, the imagined from the real, from continual interpenetration are impossible. Of course they are impossible (Montaigne and any number of classic thinkers could have told them that).6 What gives significance to this effort of creating a “fiction” out of the real through a back and forth examining of how things get abraded away on either side of self and world, is the way that process of perception leads to a fuller understanding of the numinal, the sublime, the metaphysic. This means specifically the role of the imagination in creating and fulfilling our spiritual being, in identifying what is most genuine about us (“the voice that is great within us”)7—even if it is not “real.” That Stevens is fundamentally a mystical writer seems lost on so many critics, but if one looks at his subject as one of intellect at war with itself I suppose it resembles only a lost cause, to the critic at least if not to the poet.
Most of the approaches I’ve surveyed here miss something essential about the structure of this poem, that it is not the jar that is important but the “I” that places it. This may be because the I immediately drops out of the “picture” after setting down the jar. There is a kind of transference of consciousness into the jar through the process of letting the imaginative feel of the scene take over. The order out of chaos in other words takes over the one who orders it. It is here we finally get a glimpse at how this poem ties into Stevens’ central concern: how easily and inextricably the real becomes the imagined. One becomes the things surrounding one, but at the same time ineluctably separate. Human subjectivity transforms the sharpness of life to a blur, the truth to a lie, but that's where “all the magic happens,” the self is found.
The convexity of the round jar causes the appearance of the wilderness to surround it in a reflection. Look at the jar for its capacity to contain and reflect light. “Round it was,” not the jar (see picture above), but the beam of light created in its refraction (from, say, late afternoon sun upon it).
This light “made the slovenly wilderness / surround that hill.” Do I have to spell out the Christian iconography here? “The wilderness rose up to it, and it sprawled around, no longer wild.” Like any heathen, it was saved. The jar was “tall and of a port in the air.” Isn’t that how Jesus is described? “It took dominion everywhere” as reflected light, or as The Light.
Yet “the jar was gray and bare” – it was merely a container for light. The real is only the place from where the imagination takes off, to find the truth of one’s spiritual nature (as the Eastern sages say “we are not bodies having a spiritual experience, but spirits having a bodily experience”). “It did not give of bird or bush,” its gift was not that of nature or the material world, it was “like nothing else in Tennessee.” The Baptist, anti-Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist, et al churches that seem to infest Tennessee like no other U.S. state cannot quite, in their hallowed rituals and sanctified buildings, capture the singularity of light the empty mason jar brings to the all-seeing eye of the observer.
Notes:
1. Roy Harvey Pearce, "’Anecdote of the Jar’": An Iconological Note," The Wallace Stevens Journal 1:2 (Summer 1977), 65.
2. From "Circular Art: Round Poems of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams." Concerning Poetry 14:1 (Spring 1981).
3. From The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
4. From Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987.
5. For more on this see Tim Morris. Wallace Stevens: Poetry and Criticism. Cambridge UK: Salt Publishing, 2006. Pp. xi-xxvi.
6. This essay is indebted to the work of Paul de Man, whose radical approach to texts is exemplified in essays like “Montaigne and Transcendence” (1953). Unfortunately de Man never wrote about Stevens, so the speculations here can’t be more directly linked to his great interpretative work.
7. A line from “Evening Without Angels” from Stevens’ Ideas of Order collection (1935).
