This study examines the meaning of “decreation” in Wallace Stevens' and John Ashbery's poems with the help of some classical arguments on ‘the sublime’ and ‘schizophrenia.’ If it is not possible any longer to restore such a breakdown caused by the encounter with the unnamable in the name of God or ‘ideas,’ how can such a epistemological crisis be overcome in modern times ‘the uncanny’ strides instead of ‘the sublime’? This question is what we will examine in this paper focusing on Stevens' and Ashbery's poems.Walllace Stevens' “desire without an object of desire” can be said to indicate well the moment we encounter the unnamable and fail to represent it. Instead of refilling the epistemological gap with such transcendental terms as God or ‘Ideas,’ Stevens presents a peculiar way to overcome this crisis, which is called “abstraction” or “decreation” by the poet himself. Like “nothing” in “The Snow Man” or “empty” in “American Sublime,” Stevens presents “the nothing that is” as the moment we can have a sublime encounter with something like “the sun” to reestablish new order in this waste land.John Ashbery's “decreation” is differentiated from Stevens' one in that he presents “emptiness” or “nothing” as not a sublime and central signifier such as Kant's “ideas” or Stevens' “nothing,” but a theater various emotions can pass freely. That is, Ashbery's “emptiness” indicates an empty space to make it possible that “irrational” and formless emotions, which originally resist being named, repeat appearing and disappearing, or “being emoted on.” In this empty space, self come to have a presentiment of the noises the bus will make over streets instead of seeing “the nothing that is.” Soon, our mind or “desiring-machine” will clatter along these schizophrenic streets and “the empty space” be filled with violent emotions, which moment is often called “rapture” by Ashbery.
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