192
RICHARD POIRIER
issue even more from mythologies about the nature of continuities,
as Frank Kermode has been showing, of order and sequence.
So
that instead of asking about the motive of "so and so," perhaps the
better question would be how "so and so" is used, as if persons in
literature were like chemical compounds or like particles of energy
in movement propelled from the ingredients of the initial chapters.
To borrow a metaphor from
M oby Dick
where Captain Ahab
complains that the great whale "heaps him," it can be said that
Joyce and Eliot, Melville of course, and such later writers as John
Barth, Pynchon and, with a difference, Mailer, predict how we are
all to
be
"heaped" by history, by literature, by the accumulations
of myth and allusions, by technologies, cant styles, articulated modes
of being which are the world's semblance of logic, its pretense
to
solidity, its projection of nature. The Homeric analogies in
Ulysses,
the historical notations in
The Waste Land:,
are not organizing prin–
ciples, any more than are the Biblical patternings in Lawrence. They
belong to the problem posed rather than to its solution; they are a
taunt. So, too, with the analytical rhetoric of
M oby Dick:
the overt
symbolic talk, the analyses, the allusiveness. These don't envelop or
clarify or organize the other elements of the book. Rather, they are
a part of the "heap" which
~fuddles
every effort to locate a stab–
ilizing reality.
Americans can take some pride in
Moby Dick
not because it
is
in a way like
Ulysses,
but rather because
Ulysses
is like
M oby Dick
and other classics of American 19th-century literature. Gertrude
Stein was right when she said that America is the oldest country
in
the world because it was the first to enter the 20th century. And
in our subsequent accumulations of waste are hidden the images
which still excite us in our acts of self-creation, the now mixed and
reverberating voices out of old radio programs, old movies, new re–
cordings, comic
books,
boy-and-girlhood books.
The situation is new because of its extraordinary and inescap–
able intensity, but it of course has precedents. Somewhere in the
middle of the last century, long before
Ulysses
or
Middlemarch,
American writing began to discover something counterassertive,
something even retaliatory about the world we were and are still
making. Hawthorne, Melville and even Thoreau would not have
recognized themselves or their country in Whitman's happy con-
