RICHARD POIRIER
now about the "modern world"? One reads and writes with some–
thing less than complete integrity. Partly because I felt that Barth,
who hadn't yet been academically accepted, wasn't at
all
receiving
his proper due, the fairest thing, given the options and the space,
was to report that in reading the book I'd been witness to certain
acts of genius, both of invention .and of philosophical playfulness,
and to make altogether less of the fact that I was often a bored
witness.
It is an exasperating fact, then, that it takes such a lot of time,
a part of one's life, to discover in some of the most demanding of
contemporary fiction that its creators are as anxious to turn you off
as to turn you on, that they want to show not the decisiveness but
rather the triviality of literary structuring. Let's assume the triviality,
but only because we then can insist all the more that fiction is some–
thing that has to be
made
interesting and that "life" is exhibited in
the act of making. "We must," as James puts it, "grant the artist
his
subject,
his
idea,
his
donnee: our criticism is applied only to
what he makes of it." On performance, on the excitement of doing,
on what literature creates by way of fun - that's where more of the
emphasis should
be.
Lawrence was right -
if
it isn't fun don't do it,
and so, too, as I tried to show in
The Comic Sense of Henry James,
is the Preface to
The Golden Bowl:
"It
.all
comes back to that, to
my and your 'fun' - if we but allow the term its full extension; to
the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that
of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not richly
pertinent."
Instead of hearing such standards from critics who now imagine
themselves in the advanced guard, we mostly hear only irritable ver–
sions of William Dean Howells. It's charming as well as amusing
that Howells' standards are especially in vogue, without acknowledg–
ment or awareness, .among the self-proclaimed champions of "what's
happening." The only difference between Howells and them is not in
critical standards, but in decisions about the shapes of American reali–
ty. Substitute the word "underground" for "smiling aspects" of Ameri–
can life, and Howells will seem out of touch only in his concept of real–
ity, not in his literary criteria. In any case, he expected that reality, as
he conceived it, would become dated. He knew it would be changed
by time, and he was naive only in believing that time would change it
for the better. Maybe the best clue to what he was up to - and to
