516
RICHARD POIRIER
"environment" in which people ordinarily pass their time. In
dis–
covering the nature of environment, in life or in a book, we must,
taking a hint from this passage, look not only at the way space is
filled but also at the way time is customarily measured. The propor–
tions of time authorized for any given activity, like getting drunk, are
as important as "place" to our understanding of environment.
Though James is talking about careers in life, of Philip drunk
and Philip sober, what he implies is still more decisively true of books.
In literature environment is usually discussed in terms of place, or a
social class or a historical situation. This is a convenience too pleasant
to give up. But it is only a convenience and it necessarily confuses
what the books truly offer.
As
I use the word "environment," it means
not the places named in a novel, like Chicago, let us say. Environ–
ment refers instead to the places filled in a book, filled with words
that might indeed pretend to describe Chicago, but which in fact set
a boundary on a wholly imaginary city in which the community of
language shared by reader, characters and author necessarily limits
the possible shapes that action, persons and language itself can as–
sume. Nor does environment in a book mean, except in a most super–
ficial sense, a time when events occur, be it 1966 or 1914.
As
I use
the word "environment" with respect to a particular work, I mean
the
proportions
of time that a writer feels he can give to some as
against other kinds of events. In this sense, environment is really a
derivative of such technical accomplishments as pacing and intensity,
the weight of language at some points rather than at others. Why is
it that often we remember vividly a particular scene that upon
inspection turns out to have lasted only a few pages in a book of
several hundred? From the answer to such a question we can discover
that a writer could only give to moments of greatest illumination in
his book, moments at which he seems to expend his genius most
authentically, a small proportion of time and space as against what he
felt required to give to "the rest of life."
Thinking of environment in American books as comparative
units of space and time, a reader makes an obvious and very poignant
discovery. What we remember about a book or a writer- and this is
notably true in American literature-is often the smallest, momentary
revelations that nonetheless carry, like the mystical experience to which
William James alludes, an "enormous sense of inner authority." Much
