514
RICHARD POIRIER
is from such arguments that American writers and critics have made
the by-no-means necessary extrapolation that Americans of genius
were forced to write romances rather than novels.
The categorization of American fiction into novels, and, more
numerously, into romances, even when the categories are made subtle
by Richard Chase in
The American Novel and Its Tradition,
has
tend–
ed to obscure the more challenging questions: are not certain kinds of
experience much harder to put into language than other kinds? Are
there not some states of consciousness that resist dramatic formulation,
regardless of the genre in which the effort is made, because in dialogue
or in actions they automatically become "like" some conventional
states of consciousness that are less transcendental than perverse?
When scenes occur in American literature that by standards of ordina–
ry life are foolish, preposterous or sexually irregular they are usually
interpreted in one of three, all relatively unsatisfactory, ways: they are
translated into psycho-sexual terms with the implication that because
we have thereby discovered something covert we have therefore
revealed "more" than the obvious, idealistic or ideological reading.
Or they are discussed merely as metaphoric expressions of one or an–
other recurrent myth in romantic or American literature, with little,
usually no attention to the fact that the expression of
this
myth often
does
unwittingly raise questions about sex and psychology. Or they are
much more simply disposed of with the observation that after
all
they
belong to a romance, since of course they could not have occurred in
a novel.
All three procedures, but noticeably the last, have the same basic
deficiency: a tendency to treat experiences in fiction as
if
somehow
they existed independently of the style which creates them and which
creates, too, the environment in which these experiences make or do
not make sense.
It
is as though we apprehended these experiences
not through the media of language at this particular point or at that
one, but within the baggy categories of "romance," or "myth," "real–
ism" or "naturalism." The crucial problem for the best American
writers is to evade all such categorizations and to find a language that
will at once express and protect states of consciousness that cannot
adequately be defined by conventional formulations even of more
sophisticated derivation from Marx, Freud or Norman O. Brown.
The problem is stylistic. Quite locally so
in
the sounds and shapes of
