520
~ICHARD
POIRIER
The images of housing, of possession and of achieving by relin–
quishment of one's inheritance some original relation to time and
space-all these are parts of what we recognize in the characteristic
career of American heroes and heroines. But all these images serve
equally well to describe the activities of American writers and their
relation to literary styles and conventions. Thus at the point in
Demo–
cratic Vistas
just before he claims that he "can conceive a community,
today and here" where "perfect personalities without noise meet,"
Whitman complains, in a way almost tiredly conventional by 1871,
that "of course, in these States, for both man and woman, we must
entirely recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental,
feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the
imaginative and aesthetic fields of the United States."
Whitman's critical utterances are an example of how esthetic
theories of literary independence and originality, the preoccupation of
American writers from nearly the beginnings of our literature, are an
analogue to the effort by American fictional heroes to free them–
selves from the conventions of historically rooted environments. Whit–
man in
his
poetry fashions a poetic style wherein as both writer and
hero of the poems he can be the gregarious flirt and voyeur that he
was.
His
is a style in which the "I" escapes the limited relations
permitted in environments fostered by society and expands to include
anything, which in
his
case means everything. In quite other ways, the
same omniverousness is evident in the later James. There, the environ–
ment which is James's style-an extraordinary invention in the
his–
tory of language-makes it natural for the author to have total entry
into the consciousness of all of
his
characters. James's later novels
have the quality of vast interior monologues with James playing all the
parts at will. Thoreau's
Walden
is perhaps more explicit than any
other American book about the connections between a defiant hero
literally building a world of
his
own-this is also, of course, the sub–
ject of
The Golden Bowl-and
the writer who looks upon writing as
analogous to building. Like Whitman, and like the later James,
Thoreau
is
his style. His style is itself the hero of the book: it is in
substance the writer's self, the various selves that he absorbs, and it
is a mirror of the creative originality of the hero-poet.
Significantly, in none of these books, not even when they permit
a dialogue, is there allowance made for a style that is not the charac–
teristic style of the author. And I have purposely selected very familiar
