The Negative Theology of Wallace Stevens’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”

The supreme fiction is the one that cannot be said or represented at all. Like a negative theologian, Stevens starts from a position of critical reflection that can no longer naively believe in the myths of the gods. They have become fiction rather than revelation. And yet this supreme fiction, now become nameless, nevertheless animates all his desire: “For what, except for you, do I feel love?” These myths or fictions bring him peace of mind in vivid transparence, even though he can assign them no definite reference in reality. What becomes transparent in this late age of critical reflection is that the world we see and talk about is an “invented world,” the product of our own imagination and language. This destroys our naive belief in the myths projected by our language. Our gods die. Yet precisely this realization can open us to that “heaven/That has expelled us and our images,” the heaven that we do not perceive and cannot conceive—since it is beyond the reach of language.