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RICHARD POIRIER
cntlClSIn. Very roughly, the distinction is between a (to me)
dis–
credited but still dominant criticism that trusts in
a priori
standards
of life, reality and history, and a criticism that finds no support in
these terms. So far as I am concerned, the terms point to nothing
authoritative and refer instead to constructs as tentative as the fic–
tions they are supposed to stabilize. Especially in America, and nearly
without exception among Americanists, the great majority of critics
still operate as
if
articulated forms of life or reality or history were
not as much the product of human invention as literature
is,
as if
they were uncontaminated by human contrivance and could thus be
a measure for such obvious contrivances as literature and literary
criticism. In loyal opposition while fancying itself at odds, a much
smaller group would claim that literature creates a reality of its own,
that literature is itseH an act of history and not a reflection of the
history put together by historians, that it can give us while we read
a consciousness of life just as "real" as any accredited to daily living.
But
this
admirable minority
is
still bound by the essential supposi–
tions of the majority: it, too, depends on a radical differentiation
be–
tween literary shapings of life, reality and history, and analog–
ous shapings in presumably nonfictional sources like news-reporting
(preferably on-the-spot), documents (especially hidden ones), socio–
logical and anthropological researches (constituting to my mind the
most interesting novels and stories now being written) and of course
history (meaning history books, the best of which are usually written
by people who object to William Styron's idea that they are less
novelistic than he is).
Literature, in which I'd include literary criticism and, in an–
other argument, nearly everything in print, is in a realistic and ration–
alistic trap. And it will escape only when more than a very few
endorse a position which to many will seem obstinately inhuman,
a position which denies to all expressed forms of life, reality and history
any status importantly different from the status usually given to
fiction. To talk or to write
is
to fictionalize. And, more than that,
to talk or to write about novels or poems or plays
is
only to re-fic–
tionalize them. These propositions are scarcely new, but they are
generally accepted only as part of some larger acknowledgements
about language: that it
is
often felt to be inadequate to the pressure
of something needing to
be
expressed, that to say anything
is
not
to
