[Richard Wakefield]

This is from a chapter titled "Resistance in Itself," from the book "The Renewal of Literature," by Richard Poirier. His claim here fits pretty well with my own sense of what lifts a poem or story above the ordinary. Toward the end of the passage quoted Poirier goes boldly where his assertion leads him. I hope it will provoke some discussion. (His reference to "Emersonian antagonism" picks up one of his themes, that Emerson's often frustrating manner arises from his struggle against all the ways his words have been used by writers before him.)
Richard Wakefield

"Literature is unique among the arts both because of its dependence upon language and because it exhibits an acute sensitivity to language's own dependence on the history of its usage. I would say then any poem, novel, play, or essay can be of lasting interest only if it reveals a thoroughgoing inquisitiveness about its own verbal resources; it must let itself discover as much as can be known about the previous uses of words. Shakespeare in "Romeo and Juliet" had to know Petrarch in order to distinguish the artificial from the true expression of love, but he had also to know the Old Testament, so that when Lear sounds like Job there is no danger of our confusing the two. Literature's preoccupation with the past is of its essence, as is directly acknowledged by writers like Spenser and Milton and Pope, like Hawthorne and Proust. By allusions and echoes and mimicries, by punning and parody and mastery of lingoes, literature makes the indentured state of its language into a recurrent subject... Unless writing is alive to its inheritances, it cannot of course do anything with them; it cannot transform them in a way that enhances their value... This means... that only a very small portion of all that is written deserves to be called literature, though to say this will offend various factions who want to modify the term by putting racial, national, sexual, or political adjectives in front of it. To claim a literature for oneself is to acquire cultural power and conspicuousness, but first the literature has to have been written. In its absence, any group which aspires to have a literature will first have to assent to the fact that its production depends on literary traditions in large part the creation of writers who have unapologetically identified themselves as male, patriarchal, and patriotic. I am not approving but merely describing a situation which must be accepted by anyone who proposes to change it. And there is only one way to change it; by acts of writing which are designed to become a part of the tradition which the writing opposes. I am recommending an Emersonian antagonism to literature as the best, indeed the only, way to create it."

[Tim Murphy]

Richard, I agree with about 90 percent of this, but let me demur on one matter. If you are a patriarchal, patriotic male, you can make literature your own and make your own literature not by opposing your great predecessors but by joyfully embracing them.

[Richard Wakefield]

Tim:
Well, an embrace can have elements of antagonism, too. RWE was himself patriarchal and patriotic, and he certainly is in many ways aligned with his forebears, but he is a writer most dramatically involved in trying to tear away from them. By imagining that those adjectives accurately delineate a writer we fall into the trap that Emerson tries so hard to climb out of, the trap of received definitions. One of my great pleasures in reading, as in life, is discovering that something or someone doesn't fit the terms imposed by history upon it or him or her.
Richard

[graywyvern]

this is an interesting topic, & i mostly agree with all of the preceding. i would add, however, that the body of existing "lore" (forms, utterances, themes, ktp) no longer exists as individuals to agree or disagree with, but as material for reflection, modification, & transformation--for our own purposes, which may (--indeed, must) be radically different from those of our predecessors. in that respect writers today are all in the same boat, whether they identify themselves with the media-machine or not. we all are born, pretty much to the same degree, INTO ignorance of our past culture & the palpable absence of a present one. while i much sympathize with those who choose a subcultural stance in the "politics of identity", i think they take entirely too much for granted in assuming that salvation exists in the recovery of their original ethnicity. such a subculture is going to be synthesized out of fragments & a lot of new material, quite as much as for someone who wants to recreate a quasi-European Classicism; & we might as well join hands in our searching & not look down upon those whose manner of lostness differs from our own.

[This message has been edited by graywyvern (edited June 29, 2001).]

[Alan Sullivan]

Unless you believe in genetic memory, gray, we are born entirely in ignorance.

I agree with Poirier until the end, when he reveals his real purpose. Then I can only sigh at the follies of our time. Literature as an instrument of social change. When will they ever learn? Must everything be tainted by this poisonous obsession with power?

Alan Sullivan

[Nigel Holt]

Agreed, GW,Alan,

I think literature does far better as a tool of repression viz a certain tome in my part of the world and its opposite number in the west - but then, some people argue that this isn't literature at all but the word of something higher.

I'm often reminded of The Name Of The Rose, by Eco in matters of this type, and how the medieval church used control over the written word to control the faithful - interestingly, the one here literally means "a recitation", because it was never meant to be written down, and the oral tradition here kept it alive, until it was finally written down (in accord with local political taste) under the A's in Damascus in the C10 - despite what the orthodoxy like to tell the masses.

[Kate Benedict]

Speaking personally, I am always and ever aware that as a poet I belong to a long continuum. I revere the "tradition"; an awareness of it burns like a pilot light whenever I pick up the pen. So why do I find this statement of Poirier's to be so pompous and deadly? Did our literary forbears really define themselves as male, patriarchal and patriotic? Tell that to Sappho. Tell that to Sophocles, some of whose work criticized the state. Dickinson in her attic, patriotic, patriarchal? Li Po a flag waver? You might think I'd bristle mostly at the word "patriarchal" but it's "patriotic" that's buggin' me. Who is more a citizen of the world (not the nation state) than a poet?

And what does it mean to declare that the only way to fight this strawman definition of tradition is by "acts of writing which are designed to become a part of the tradition which the writing opposes"? In other words, the only way to write literature is to write in the tradition of literature -- unless you don't.

[Richard Wakefield]

Kate:
That "patriotic" seems strange to me, too, but so do the other adjectives. The more I think on this, the more I agree with the idea that much (if not all) literature will be aware of itself as language, but the less I agree that there is but one line of it. Why might there not be a line of, say, Cajun literature, rich with allusion and fully engaged with the resources of the language? And from there, how about any subset of the English speaking world? I suspect that Poirier can't see beyond the anthologies that he was assigned in college. The problem for those of us raised in the tradition (or The Tradition)is that we're pretty much blind to the other intricate strands of language and literature. Of course, ours is in some ways privileged, does dovetail pretty well with the language of various other prestigious and richly remunerated professions, so there's probably still a good argument for some degree of emphasis upon it in education. But in terms of its potential for drawing upon and continuing the richness of experience, it is surely not unique.
Richard

[SteveWal]

Surely, there's also a sense of their being more than one tradition, leading to a real mix in any particular writer's development? I know that in my development, American poets have been more important than English ones (I hardly ever read Hardy, for instance): and their are European writers such as Holub and Appollinaire that mean a lot to me.

Ashbery's recent prose book, Other Traditions, has detailed his interested in neglected parts of the tradition: poets who are perhaps not "great" and never will be but who are somehow still of interest. My particular interest is in the neglected English modernist, Nicholas Moore, for instance. Or writers such as WS Graham, Basil Bunting and others who do not follow the Hardy/Larkin line.

This may, of course, be because I'm resisting the usual definition of "English" empiricist poetry, and trying to find an alternative, one that runs equally deep: that of a much more "romantic", haunted kind that runs from Blake, through the 40's poets to the present, but which is much less documented and critiqued, and therefore effectively "unplaced."

I suspect that in a country like America, there isn't simply one tradition of literature, but several. Even if one ignores the "PC" categories like African American, Hispano-American - American literature would still be drawing on far wider traditions than just the English tradition.

But I'm still working out where I am - somewhat askance, I suspect, as usual.

------------------
Steve Waling

[graywyvern]

Originally posted by SteveWal:
Surely, there's also a sense of their being more than one tradition,
(snip)

i concur. or, to put it more historically, there are many
strands of influence, & literary politics is what determines at any one time what is most generally esteemed. nowadays,
i see "Poetry" (in english) balkanized as seldom before, with three mutually-ignoring, self-aggrandizing factions,
Language Poetry, NeoFormalism, & Zeeps (free verse lyrics
in the first person about mundane eventicles--aren't you glad this has a name?); with their immediate "godfathers"
being Stein, Frost & Williams. (myself, i follow Mallarme
if anyone, which puts me under the radar. so i guess there
is a fourth group: STEALTH POETS...)