Ito
RICHARD POIRIER
material includes the interpretations that will
be
made of it.
And
the writer who discovers this about his material simultaneously
dis–
covers it about himself and about other selves who aspire to any
originality of expression. What does it mean when the
self
in litera–
ture gets to be little more than one expression, and not necessarily
the most compelling one, of those literary modes, conventions and
mythologies that were ideally intended only as a convenience to the
self
in its attempts at expression? "Here I am Antony; Yet cannot
hold this visible shape, my knave ..." - Shakespeare had the
good
literary fortune of not having to imagine that the knave would have
any self-projecting answer: "I know just how you feel, Antony."
No one bothers Shakespeare, as they always bother novelists,
with
questions about the final disposition of minor characters, especially
servants.
This
is
a matter of great historical consequence for literature:
everybody can now aspire to the glamour of having been
dispossessed
of a personality. Shakespeare's royal personages trapped at last
within the echo chamber of the roles assigned them by destiny and
the play have long since lost any exclusive
claim
to their plight. The
middle-class heroine - that inveterate role-player - and then the
knave himself have moved center stage, first to tell us who they
uniquely are and then, as they keep talking, to reveal that they
are
nobody in particular. Beckett
is
a realistic, historical novelist: faced
with the historical proliferation of roles and types, of formulae for
behavior and phrases for every occasion, who
is
anybody? It should
not, then, be thought peculiar, though it may be disagreeable, when
literature
assigns
less space and volubility to persons than to the
various technologies and structures of which they have become
the mere instrumentalities.
As
far back as the obvious example
of Melville,
technique
in modem literature
is
what
asks
most
blatantly for the readers' and the writers' attention. And more
often
than
not the techniques have no emanation from a discover–
able human agency. The style cannot
be
traced
back to a character,
even to some imaginable psychological shape called the author. Or–
ganizational schemes, stylistic fashions seem to blanket, to smother the
human presences which they might be expected to serve, much as the
political and
social
organizations of the modern industrial and tech-
