1. STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC CLUES

To see what is meant by waiting for the structural clue, consider the following example:

(2) Shall she not find (in comforts of the sun,)
(In pungent fruit and bright, green wings,) or else
(In any balm or beauty of the earth,)
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

[Stevens, CP, 67]

This has the structure

... find in x, in y, or else in z...

As we read in y, we see that it could be appositive to in x; when we reach the conjunction or else in z, however, we see that it could be the second term in a three-term coordination. Reaching a coordinating conjunction, however, does not decide the question—it only indicates the possibility of coordination, and the decision must be made on grounds of the best reading in context. In context, the pungent fruit and bright, green wings have been established as the comforts of the sun, and there is a disjunction between comforts of the sun and balm and beauty of the earth that is the main ordering principle. Hence the disjunction is really two-way, not three-, and the term in question is a specifying appositive after all. (There is an asymmetry in that balm or beauty... does not have an appositive to match against pungent fruit.... This may explain why I tend to read things to be cherished... as part of the preceding instead of the long delayed Object of find [see II.6]).

Because the structural signal of a conjunction may be delayed for some time, and because it is not decisive but only indicates possible coordination, some readers may employ a semantically based strategy to check items in a series for possible appositive relations before they get to the end of the series. Since appositives refer to the same thing, they are usually either synonymous with, or more or less general than, the initial term. The first example illustrates the simplest case of synonymy (sifting, selecting, comparing); for a more complex case, consider these lines:

(3) Warblings became
Too dark, too far, too much the accents of
Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables
That would formthemselves, in time, and communicate
The intelligence of his despair, express
What meditation never quite achieved.

[Stevens, CP, 314]

Here express... is a verb phrase appositive to communicate... and is easily recognized as such by the synonymous verb which initiates it. We then recognize that the entire verb phrases are appositive and establish an identity between the intelligence of his despair and what meditation never quite achieved. In the next example, the semantic overlapping of terms, though less than exact synonymy, is a comparable clue:

(4) some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend;

[James, AMB, 145]

Here are some other examples:

(5)           sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades....

[Milton, PL, I. 64-65]

(6) Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav'n....

[Milton, PL, I. 242-44J

Notice that though the third appositive is separated from the preceding ones, Milton points out the relation by repeating the this the.

When the apposed term is narrower or more detailed than its antecedent, we will call it a specifying appositive. Examples are legion:

(7) a hint to hospitality, a bid for an invitation....

[James, AMB, 68]

(8) She struck herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps, concealing signs.

[James, WOD, I. 117]

(9) the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour.

[James, AMB, 146]

(10) that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall;

[Milton, PL, I. 114-16]

In (10), full clauses are appositive, ignominy and shame specifying what low means. The next example is perhaps a little harder than the rest:

(11) intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right.

[James, AMB, 146]

What is tricky here is that the specifying appositives are in reversed order:

Here are some specifying appositives from consecutive pages in a Faulkner story ("Delta Autumn"), the last rather complex (appositives are marked with square brackets):

(12) he watched even the last puny marks of man—[cabin, clearing, the small and irregular fields which a year ago were jungle and in which the skeleton stalks of this year’s cotton stood almost as tall and rank as the old cane had stood, as if man had had to marry his planting to the wilderness in order to conquer it]—fall away and vanish. The twin banks marched with wilderness as he remembered it—[the tangle of brier and cane impenetrable evèn to sight twenty feet away,] [the tall tremendous soaring of oak and gum and ash and hickory which had rung to no axe save the hunter’s, and echoed to no machinery save the beat of old-time steam boats traversing it....]

[Faulkner, p. 713]

(13) it seemed to him that the retrograde of his remembering had gained an inverse velocity from their own slow progress, [₁that the land had retreated not in minutes from the last spread of gravel but in years, decades, back toward what it had been when he first knew it: [₂the road they now followed once more the ancient pathway of bear and deer,] [₃the diminishing fields they now passed once more scooped punily and terrifically by axe and saw and mule-drawn plow from the wilderness' flank, out of the brooding and immemorial tangle,] [₄in place of ruthless mile-wide parallelograms wrought by ditching the dyking machinery.]]

[Faulkner, p. 712]

In (13), the first appositive that-clause explicates or specifies the meaning of the first that-clause, and the second and third (verbless) clauses in turn specify what it had been like when he first knew it. The material inside the fourth set of brackets is attached either to tangle or to the laboriously cleared fields (not exactly the fields they now passed, but the fields as he remembered them). The repetition of once more, by the way, is crucially helpful in guiding the reader to the recognition of what is identical to what—it is a kind of clue of parallelism.

The generalizing appositive does not so readily furnish a strategy for running recognition, since it frequently comes only at the end of a series of particulars, but it does signal quite conclusively that the generalizing term is to be taken as appositive to the preceding and that the preceding terms are apposed particulars:

(14) the prohibition of impulse, accident, range—the prohibition, in other words, of freedom—

[James, WOD, II. 294]

Note by the way that the generalizing term replaces the particulars and may include more than the enumerated particulars. In the next example, which is from John Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air, the apposition is of conditional clauses (the passage is discussed in a recent article by Frederick Kirchhoff³):

(15) [₁But if, for us also, as for the Greek, the sunrise means daily restoration to the sense of passionate gladness, and of perfect life]—[₂if it means the thrilling of new strength through every nerve,—the shedding over us of a better peace than the peace of night, in the power of the dawn,—and the purging of evil vision and fear by the baptism of its dew;] [₃if the sun itself is an influence, to us also, of spiritual good—and becomes thus in reality, not in imagination, to us also, a spiritual power,]—we may then soon over-pass the narrow limit of conception which kept that power impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the thought of an angel....⁴

When we reach the second if clause, we must decide whether it is to be understood as a separate condition added to the first: as we read into it we may check for synonymous material, or fuller specification, and, finding it, conclude that it is not, but is instead an appositive. When we get to the third if clause, we must again ask if it constitutes a new, additional condition, and, on seeing that influence of spiritual good generalizes the thrilling, the shedding, and the purging, conclude that it also is not a new condition but merely gathers into itself the preceding two. It is quite possible, of course, that Ruskin does not expect us to consider these discriminations, nor even to notice the shift from human response to nature in the first two if clauses to the objective “influence” of the sun in the third, and that the intended effect is a blurring and fusing of object and response. We can perhaps say a bit more about the way this effect is achieved: the very act of deciding that the three conditions are in fact the same (i.e., appositive) may cause us to overlook the way in which the third clause is not quite the same.

In general, then, the reader can adopt a tactic of checking semantic relatedness between terms in a string: if the term following the first comma is synonymous with the initial term, or more specific or general, it is probably appositive to the initial term; if not, expect a conjunction and establish, tentatively, separate referential indices for each item. If one tries to apply such a strategy in the following passage, however, one may experience difficulties (the passage is part of Milton’s list of devils manifested in secular mythology):

(16) The rest were long to tell, though far renown'd,
Th' Ionian Gods, of Javan’s Issue held
Gods, yet confest later than Heav'n and Earth
Thir boasted Parents; Titan Heav'ns first born
With his enormous brood, and birthright seis'd
By younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove
His own and Thea’s Son like measure found;

[Milton, PL, I. 507-13]

Titan ... is possibly appositive to the Ionian Gods as a specification—but is Titan an Ionian God? Milton says the Ionian Gods had Heaven and Earth for parents, and Titan was Heaven’s first born, and we may conclude that Milton is not drawing some arcane distinction between Ionian and Olympian Gods here.

There are two types of appositives, however, that will pose problems for a semantic inclusion tactic: the first is what might be called the replacing appositive: the appositive material is to be taken as an improvement on the initial formulation:

(17) a proof of what—or of a part of what—

[James, WOD, I. 117]

(18) a proof of their wisdom, their success, of the reality of what had happened—of what in fact, for the spirit of each, was still happening—

[James, WOD, II. 314]

Note that James in these two examples offsets these appositives heavily with dashes and some extra marking (or, in fact). He does not always do so, however: in the next example he teases the reader, who is uncertain whether to substitute 'musical' phrase for 'verbal' phrase:

(19) the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine, florid voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging unfinished, into no words, no notes at all.⁵

This kind of double statement is typical of Faulkner as well:

(20) that day and himself and McCaslin juxtaposed, not against the wilderness but against the tamed land, the old wrong and shame itself, in repudiation and denial at least of the land and the wrong and the shame, even if he couldn't cure the wrong and eradicate the shame....

[Faulkner, p. 721]

(Faulkner repeats the same appositive land/shame and wrong again later in the sentence.) The effect in these passages is to leave the reader uncertain whether one phrase is to replace the other ('the tamed land—which is to say really the shame and wrong [?slavery]') or to be equated with it on a higher, analogical level ('the tamed land—instance and symbol of the shame and wrong'). The latter option allows the two to be two and yet one. It is interesting, by the way, that James evidently repented of the playfulness of (19), since the New York Edition reads “... say even a musical, that dropped first into words and notes without sense and then, hanging unfinished, into no words nor any notes at all” (WOD, 1.4).

The notion of replacement introduces a certain slipperiness into the application of these categories. Even with the specifying and generalizing types, the final appositive has the last word—that is, it comes at the end of what often appears to be a process of getting it just right. With the replacing type, the final statement not only succeeds but supersedes the others—but this is perhaps a matter of degree: a writer may essentially develop his thinking about something through a string of appositives. We will examine some illustrations of this in Wordsworth in the next chapter.

The notion of higher or analogical identity brings us to the second problematic type of apposition. In its nature, it is a mix of coordination and apposition, since the terms are on one level referentially distinct, but their being apposed forces the reader to see them as identical—to perform, in most cases, some sort of inference. This sort of apposition may involve relatively obvious and 'local' inferences, as with the first set of examples to be cited where the inference in some sort of summation, usually a 'total impression':

(21) Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

[Milton, PL, I. 255]

(22) some glimps of joy, to have found thir chief
Not in despair, to have found themselves not lost
In loss it self;

[Milton, PL, I. 524-26]

(23) He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat, and doom.

[Faulkner, LA, 426]

(24) She worked—and seemingly quite without design—upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her associates....

[James, WOD, I. 116]

(25) She exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because they were so far from great.

[James, WOD, I. 117]

(26) To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense at least of neither shirking nor lying.

[James, WOD, I. 4]

(27) The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches;

[James, AMB, 145]

Typically the whole is an impression: different things are perceived as one or may be regarded as one in the context. Sometimes there is an explicit statement of the generalized whole, in which case we have a generalizing appositive:

(28) It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immense theatre, the pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,

[Stevens, CP, 510]

(29) It had in fact, as he was now aware, filled all the approaches, hovered in the court as he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted, sounded in the grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of which Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatlykept tassel; it formed in short the clearest medium of its particular kind that he had ever breathed.

[James, AMB, 146]

Notice that the in short signals a generalizing statement to follow. The “summation” interpretation is as it were an easy inference: the harder ones arise when “outer” is juxtaposed to “inner,” or the link is some sort of moral analogy which must be inferred: James’s appositives are frequently of this nature. The following example from the beginning of The Wings of the Dove is typical of his appositional linking:

(30) Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up....

[James, WOD, I. 3]

Her physical turning in, that is, is the 'outer' equivalent of her loss of patience. Faulkner also uses apposition to establish this sort of equivalence (here it refers to the land):

(31) Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of it, arrest at least that much of what people called progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its ultimate fate.

[Faulkner, p. 724]

Characteristic of this type of appositive is its direct thematic relevance—in context, the reader is not without guidance as to why the terms are apposed (and equated), though he must of course correctly apprehend the exact nature and scope of the identity.

In passages of narrative, we are rarely uncertain as to whether the apposition is based on complete identity or partial identity, since actions and things are obviously referentially distinct. Usually the higher unity is one of impression or significance embracing the distinguishably different things. In passages lacking this relation to a ’scene', we are on more uncertain ground. This is one source of difficulty with Wallace Stevens, as in the following examples:

(32) They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,
New senses in the engenderings of sense,
The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root.

[Stevens, CP, 527]

(33) The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango’s rind.

[Stevens, CP, 528]

In “The Rock,” which is a late but typical poem about metaphor and imagination, there is little or no ’scene' being described—rather, a mysterious entity or entities are said to be other things. A network of identification is set up, but no one term is more 'literal' or perspicuous than another. The concrete terms (rock, leaves) are in fact usually metaphors for something abstract—they do not give a referential anchor to things, so that the equivalences established are between metaphors, and the reader must judge in what respects the metaphors are equivalent without being able to check the things they refer to. (We will return to “The Rock” below.) Note in this connection that in (III.22) Stevens 'cheats' on the apposition: the bed, books, etc. is written as an appositive but referred to by these, indicating they remain as separate entities. This is another source of abstractness in Stevens: the things or images are treated as 'mere instances' which could be multiplied indefinitely.

There is one type of participial that stands in an essentially appositional relation to a sentence. The so-called 'absolute' participial is one in which the Subject has not been deleted (or ellipsed) under coreference to a noun phrase in the main sentence—there is no noun phrase, that is, to which it is attached; the clause as a whole 'attaches' to the main clause. The 'attachment' is usually of an adverbial nature (cause and effect, temporal sequence) as with other participials, but Faulkner uses them as specifying appositives:

(34) [His house] was still kept for him by his dead wife’s widowed niece and her children, and he was comfortable in it, his wants and needs and even the small trying harmless crochets of an old man looked after by blood at least related to the blood which he had elected out of all the earth to cherish.

[Faulkner, p. 722]

(35) He seemed to see the two of them—himself and the wilderness—as coevals, his own span as a hunter, a woodsman, not contemporary with his first breath but transmitted to him, assumed by him gladly, humbly, with joy and pride, from that old Major de Spain and that old Sam Fathers who had taught him to hunt, [₁the two spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space, where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both—] [₂the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, [₃falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns.]]

[Faulkner, p. 724]

Here I take the first two appositive clauses as appositive to the main clause ("see the two of them as coevals"), but the second appositive clause could instead be regarded as appositive to the end of the first clause ("the untreed land would find ample room for both"). This could be diagrammed:

The final (Subjectless) participial either attaches to wild strong immortal game (falling and rising...) or is appositive to moving again ...., in which case the men are also falling and rising phoenix-like—which is in fact the way I read this the first several times, although I would now say that the semantic link between immortal game and falling to the soundless guns is tighter. But of course the point is that the men and the wilderness are coevals and so, in the vision, both are eternally renewed.

2. DELAYED APPOSITION

When a writer uses a number of complex appositives, as Faulkner did in the passage just cited, the possibility of garden paths again arises. The appositives in the second stanza of (36) are not hard to link back to an over-human god since the nearer alternative is we, which is plural. In the third stanza, it is not too hard to see that a constant fellow of destiny is not appositive to woe ... since fellow looks for a human referent, and Stevens does not otherwise engage in personification:

(36) The fault lies with an over-human god,
Who by sympathy has made himself a man
And is not to be distinguished, when we cry

Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer
Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord,
Who has gone before us in experience.

If only he would not pity us so much,
Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great
And small, a constant fellow of destiny,

A too, too human god, self-pity’s kin
And uncourageous genesis....

[Stevens, CP, 315]

Distinguished in the third line cited makes a slight problem for me: I tend to look for a complementing from phrase (something like from us) but eventually must give up the search. There is a mild pun here: to be distinguished can be read as a one-place predicate ("will not have distinction—i.e., greater dignity"). The next example, also from Stevens, is a little more difficult because ruin is semantically attracted to misery, but the appositive following clarifies the meaning of afflatus so that the phrase can be recognized as appositive to it (= grandeur)—again, reading ahead helps to solve the problem:

(37) Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead....

[Stevens, CP, 509]

Part of the difficulty in this last example has to do with the relative semantic distance between afflatus and grandeur. The effect of 'distance' can readily be seen by reading down the following list of detached appositives taken from James’s fiction. In the first two examples, the antecedent is repeated in the appositive phrase. In the third, marks and tokens are closely related, but in the fourth example (principle/fruit) and the fifth (abruptness/policy), the semantic distance increases and the coreference is a little harder to make out:

(38) They were mysteries of which her friends were conscious—those friends whose general explanation was to say that she was clever,...

[James, WOD, I. 5]

(39) It was the name, above all, she would take in hand—the precious name she so liked and that....

[James, WOD, I. 6]

(40) The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric.

[James, AMB, 146]

(41) The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive—the fruit of a sharp sense that....

[James, AMB, 17]

(42) the wisdom of the abruptness to which events had finally committed him, a policy that he was pleased to find not at all shaken as he now looked at his watch and wondered.

[James, AMB, 68]

Locating the antecedent of a detached appositive is frequently a source of difficulty in Faulkner. One very problematic appositive (two threads ...) occurs in a passage from “The Bear” cited by Richard Ohmann:⁶

(43) the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and ginned and sold (two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on)....

[Faulkner, p. 290]

Ohmann identifies the antecedent of two threads ... as the trickle and the cotton, but a little more precisely it would seem to be the outward trickle and the inward trickle—i.e., debits and credits. Here there really is no noun phrase referring to two things to which two threads is appositive (the trickle which returned is one thing)—the reader must construct one, much as he must with a sentential antecedent of a pronoun. As noted at the beginning of the chapter, this construction of an antecedent is not usually necessary and reflects an unusual looseness in Faulkner’s use of appositives.

Another sort of difficulty, and for once not a garden path, occurs in the following passage where the ’semantic distance' between the appositive noun phrase (the old bear ...) and its antecedent is great (as in [42]), and the linear distance from it is also great:

(44) It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with ploughs and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, [men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indominable and invincible out of an old, dead time,] [a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old, wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;]—[the old bear, solitary, indominable, and alone;]]....

[Faulkner, p. 229]

Strictly speaking, the old bear ... is appositive to anachronism ... and to phantom ..., but it may tend to float back to that doomed wilderness, gathering all of the previous material into itself as a kind of generalizing symbol. Faulkner encourages this identification by cross-linking bear and wilderness through the phrase apotheosis of the old wild life. We can diagram this cross-link with dashes:

I will return to this fusional effect of complex apposition again shortly.

3. MULTIPLE APPOSITION

Suppose now we have two appositives at the end of a clause. If the main clause ends in a noun phrase, several connections are possible. We can diagram the possibilities as

That is, both appositives could be coreferential to the same noun phrase (either Subject or final noun phrase), or the second could be appositive to something in the first, or the first could be appositive to the final noun phrase and the second appositive to the Subject noun phrase. In analyzing example (37) from Stevens, we have already made use of a tactic that takes two appositives occurring together to be coreferential. This is in general a fairly good strategy—when it fails, the passage becomes hard to perceive correctly. Consider, for example, the following stanzas from Stevens' “The Rock,” which begin easily because the appositives are coreferential but end uneasily in that, I suspect, the last line is an elliptical rendering of “and a particular of being was׀became that gross universe”—that is, the last four phrases are not all directly coreferential:

(45) As if nothingness contained a métier,
A vital assumption, an impermanence
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired

That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,
That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

In a birth of sight. The blooming and the muck
Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
A particular of being, that gross universe.

[Stevens, CP, 526]

The next example, which consists of the lines immediately preceding (45), is also difficult because the appositives 'criss-cross': an embrace ... (1) is not coreferential to invention but to meeting ..., but a theorem ... (2) does seem to be appositive to invention:

(46) The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like

An invention, [₁an embrace between one desperate clod
And another in a fantastic consciousness,
In a queer assertion of humanity:]

[₂A theorem proposed between the two—
[_3TWO figures in a nature of the sun,]
[₄In the sun’s design of its own happiness]....

[Stevens, CP, 525]

However, fantastic consciousness in (1) does seem roughly coreferential to invention and theorem—I will dash this coreference. Further, (3) (two figures...) appears to go back to the meeting..., but as (4) explicates a nature of the sun, this phrase links up to the 'fiction' set (invention, theorem, fantastic consciousness). Diagramming the coreference, we have:

What we have then are two sets—event and the understanding of it—so cross-linked by apposition as to fuse fiction and reality: the lilacs of imagination do indeed cover the rock. This effect is similar to that of the final example in the previous chapter from Faulkner (30) and is one that Stevens and Faulkner strive for. Consider the stack of three appositives from “To An Old Philosopher”:

(47) And you—it is you that speak it, without speech,
[₁The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,]
[₂The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains], [3the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained vaults.]

[Stevens, CP, 510]

The first appositive (1) is coreferential to it (= “the tragic accent of the scene”), the second (2) is appositive to you, and the third could be appositive to either you (he is the naked king) or it (the tragic accent of the scene):

The third appositive thus achieves a fusion: the old philosopher, as imagined by the poet, is the meaning of the scene, the poem beyond speech or the falsification of metaphor. Helen Vendler notes an ambiguous reference in the last lines of the poem, which contributes to the general fusional effect (these lines follow those cited in [28]):

(48) Total grandeur of a total edifice
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
And if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.

[Stevens, CP, 510-11]

She says, “we are no longer sure whether this is the threshold of heaven mentioned earlier in the poem or whether it is the threshold of the 'total edifice/ the construct of Santayana’s life and work, now combined into a perfect whole, as one exemplifes the other”⁷—and, one might add, the threshold is also the end of the poem where Stevens stops, so that the poem is also the edifice.

The following passage from Faulkner’s “The Bear” again gives non-coreferential appositives, but this time the second is appositive to part of the preceding one:

(49) the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that... had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man:—[the long legend of corn-cribs broken down and rifled, of shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured, and traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and shotgun and even rifle shots delivered at point-blank range yet with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a child]—[a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before the boy was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape.]

[Faulkner, pp. 228-29]

The long legend is coreferential to name, and the corridor is a summarizing appositive to part of the preceding, but is linked loosely to legend via long:

Again, the effect is to merge the historical events and results with the interpretation of them recorded in verbal legend. It is interesting that the notion that reality and its expression are inseparable is worked out through the same grammatical device in Faulkner and in Stevens.

To say that it is done this way, of course, is not to say that it is rightly done. In a series of very close readings of passages from Stevens, Helen Vendler argues that the sort of blurring and fusion of reference Stevens cultivates is not always esthetically successful—sometimes they are evasions or false resolutions—and she finds Stevens at his best when he controls or restricts his virtuosity in this respect (see especially Chapter Seven of On Extended Wings). Her comments on his use of “marriage” as an image of union without fusion of identity in the following lines form a kind of coda for this chapter:

(50) Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.

[Stevens, CP, 392]

She describes “a tentative and gradual merging of polarities, in which dependency becomes embrace, embrace becomes bringing-forth, and these partial or willed unions finally become necessary and intrinsic, as the opposites no longer consciously embrace but rather are clasped together and become a verbal identity in a dual noun—a couple, a plural” (Wings, p. 182).

We have reached in many of these last examples the limit of propositionally oriented reading. In fact, in describing cross-linking, we have gone beyond pure comprehension of scene and reconstruction of propositional content and into the area of imagery and associative nexes which constitute a distinct level of structure. It is interesting, however, that when writers press the devices of syntax (here, of apposition) to such extremes, processing becomes easier in terms of sets of 'images' than in terms of phrases and predicates: that is, rather than build from sentences and propositions to a larger sense of constructive intention, we may find it easier to grope toward the constructive intention by other means and then try to work out some sort of sentence and propositional structure which will approximate what one has already decided the passage must be saying. I do not mean to imply that the task of setting up clusters of images and inferring their relation is simple or easy—indeed, one could not do it without some knowledge of Stevens' (or Faulkner’s) typical images for imagination and reality and a sense of the kinds of thematic oppositions likely to be operating. It happens that these passages are fusional in nature—that is, the cross-linking attempts to break down distinctions which the syntax postulates (but just barely). Given some familiarity with Stevens and Faulkner, one can suppose that they are trying to achieve the romantic symbol or apprehension of a wholeness beyond all distinctions. Another way of achieving this apprehension is to make propositional content so difficult to comprehend that the reader is virtually forced into following other structures, and the most radical way to do it is to write sentences that are ill-formed any way you parse them. In the next chapter we will examine claims made by critics that certain writers should not be read with the consciousness of sentence structure that we have been at so great pains to cultivate.