Stevens Textplication #43: Floral Decoration for Bananas

Let’s get one thing straight before we begin: Floral decorations with bananas, as shown in the picture above, are ridiculous. Faced with this, how can our refined flaneur transcend such an ennui-generating presentation? One could righteously and humorously complain about the total breach of aesthetic protocol, something that would make life more rich in that moment, or one could elect the approach Stevens took, mine the situation for as much symbolic and intellectual material as possible, thereby creating a work of art that is still thought about 95 years later. Here it is:

  Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.

               These insolent, linear peels

               And sullen, hurricane shapes

               Won't do with your eglantine.

               They require something serpentine.

               Blunt yellow in such a room!

               You should have had plums tonight,

               In an eighteenth-century dish,

  And pettifogging buds,

               For the women of primrose and purl

               Each one in her decent curl.

               Good God! What a precious light!

               But bananas hacked and hunched....

               The table was set by an ogre,

               His eye on an outdoor gloom

               And a stiff and noxious place.

  Pile the bananas on planks.

  The women will be all shanks

  And bangles and slatted eyes.

  And deck the bananas in leaves

               Plucked from the Carib trees

               Fibrous and dangling down,

               Oozing cantankerous gum

               Out of their purple maws,

               Darting out of their purple craws

               Their musky and tingling tongues.

The poem is crystal clear by Stevens’ standards, a few exotic words, ambiguous phrases and irregular rhyme schemes aside. The speaker is a comic guide in the proper table etiquette. He explains in stanza one what’s wrong with the setting, in stanza two what a proper floral decoration with eglantine (sweet briar rose) would look like, in stanza three why the banana decoration is so detrimental to harmonious relations, and in stanza four – with precise detail – how a banana should properly be presented.   

What lifts it beyond this surface, of course, is the rich suggestiveness the poet brings to the discussion. It’s clear from the start that, with apologies to Freud, sometimes a banana is more than a banana. Poems about sex by great, long-dead poets are somewhat analogous to the thought of sexual relations between one’s parents, but sexual torment practically screams at the reader from the outset. Even the use of the archaic term “nuncle” (meaning uncle) calls to mind how the fool addressed King Lear by this term when talking of perverted things:

LEAR: When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

FOOL: I have used it, nuncle, ever since thou madest thy daughters thy mothers. For when thou gavest them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches (sings) Then they for sudden joy did weep / And I for sorrow sung, / That such a king should play bo-peep / And go the fools among. Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie. I would fain learn to lie. 

LEAR: An you lie, sirrah, we’ll have you whipped.

As the fool tells the truth to the king of his own debasement, so the speaker reveals how the emperor has no clothes when it comes to the placing of phallic objects (“linear … blunt”) in the midst of femininity. The speaker prefers the sexually charged alternative of “plums … buds … (pink) primrose … curl” as if female sexuality should not have a male involved at all. “Bananas hacked and hunched… stiff … noxious” forces women to be “shanks … bangles ... slatted eyes”, almost an exact description of a hand job. Instead, bananas, like the forbidden fruit in Eden, should be covered in leaves. But that leads to the even more suggestive reveal – in an exact description of a banana tree – of “cantankerous (cankerous?) gum … oozing … out of purple maws,” where “purple craws” have “musky and tingling tongues.” One way of parsing this soft-core porn poetry is to say: If the male sexual organ is to be so prominently displayed, so should the female genitalia.

In the sexual reading of this poem, stanza one shows the “insolent” and “sullen” male desire, “blunt yellow” (erect) instead of “serpentine” (flaccid). Stanza two shows female desire, dressed and prissily prepared but only “precious light,” something only to look at that is somehow false in the artificiality of its expression. Stanza three presents a “bunch” of men, like sailors from a “plank” having to be rudely serviced by women/prostitutes, as opposed to, in stanza four, letting the natural coupling of male and female occur, however garish it might appear.  

Such a seemingly straightforward account of the differences in male and female sexual response would have had to be disguised behind a socially acceptable cover (a table decoration, for example) to be discerned in the more puritanical times in which it was written. One would think this reading would be more readily embraced today, when sexuality is frankly and openly discussed. Ironically, however, contemporary critics view this poem’s view of sex as very complex and problematic, mostly because this age no longer protects women’s power with modesty but by calling attention to the imbalance in the relative power positions of men and women. The viewpoint that patriarchal privilege fundamentally oppresses and controls women has to dismiss as a theoretical possibility the extraordinary sexual power women have had over men throughout history. Thus the common sense suggestions in the poem – so daring in its day – are largely viewed from today’s lens as nonsensical.

Less nonsensical – but even more offensive to today's tastes – is the idea that the speaker is gay. The poem indeed can be read as a caricature of the gay fusspot hypersensitive to even the smallest violations of taste. That the disgust ("an ogre") resolves naturally to a condemnation of heterosexual relationships in general seems less than coincidental. Better to leave the bananas alone to themselves! 

If this line of thinking makes you squeamish, fortunately there are other readings available. The poem, in fact, is a good example of the open-ended way Stevens used symbols. Bananas can be read in artistic, political and even spiritual terms, in the same suggestive but non-dogmatic way they can be read as a sexual drama.

Eleanor Cook put it rightly, “this is another Stevens poem on how the tropics affect someone from a northern temperate zone.” Stevens however isn’t content with mere contrast. He uses the strange primitivism of the tropics to signify the exotic core of modern art, a subject Stevens and others felt compelled to explore, as it represented a new way of expressing and thinking about art. Bananas, like the African and Asian motifs that inspired the modernists to reinvent traditional Western forms, co-exist uneasily with an antithetical (“eighteenth century”) tradition. The starkness, crudity and dynamism of modern methods, in fact, can come to dominate the aesthetic landscape, as they undoubtedly did in all the arts, from African American blues forms to the simple lines of the International architectural style. Their “musky and tingling tongues” denote a more natural and powerful language of expression than the strict meters and straightened subject matter of pre-war poems. The point, to Stevens, is not to make them “fit” the old, but to make space for the new in a more supportive environment (like the revolutionary Measure little magazine in which this poem was first published).

   

If this is too hypothetical for your taste, bananas can also be used to provide trenchant political commentary. The term “banana republic” was coined by O. Henry around the turn of the century to capture the abuse the colonies had endured at the hands of white exploiters. Bananas became a commercial product almost accidentally. In 1871 – eight years before Stevens was born – American businessman Minor C. Keith was given a rich land-holding opportunity in Costa Rica if he could do what no one had been able to accomplish to that point, build a railroad line from the coffee growing regions to the Caribbean port of Limon. He accomplished this, in part, by growing bananas on the side of the tracks to feed the workers. He also included bananas with the coffee he eventually exported, and it became an instant sensation, becoming one of the dominant commercial crops of Stevens’ times. Unfortunately for the native populations, technically savvy entrepreneurs like Keith had negotiated extravagant deals with the poor host countries that kept banana workers living under abject conditions, without any power to compete, to the point where companies like United Fruit (where Keith’s interests were later merged) essentially ran the countries. Increasing awareness of this social injustice was like the unwelcome guest to the well-made American table, which was by and large trying to imitate European models and spoke a language of equal rights and democracy (except where Jim Crow was concerned). Bananas intrude on such a fragile comity by reminding people of the violence and injustice used to bring such pleasures to the American people. Once the injustice is known, the people become, as the poem rolls on, complicit, no better than the harsh banana traders and dehumanized workers, becoming the “purple craw” of a primitive society trying to scream out its enslavement.

If this is too strident for you, you could look at bananas as the original fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as the Koran proposes, or the secret to fecundity, as the Hindu religion believes. We resist them in our civilized denials, but must ultimately accede to their primal truth.

There are many interpretative possibilities here, all created by the contrast between the simple facts depicted and the emotionally charged rendering. How could bananas cause such consternation? Why would table decorations be such a matter of good and evil? It comes down to the poetic urge, which seeks to express the largeness of emotion hovering just above the surface. Such emotion may be, as in this case, comically false as to the details at hand, but it opens up an uncomfortable truth all around the facts that cannot be so easily suppressed.

Stevens, who wrote this poem as he was preparing his first book for publication, was almost explicitly pointing to a larger and richer interpretative field with which to view his work, and the work of all poets.