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elusion to his preface to the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass:
"The
proof of the poet
is
that
his
country absorbs him as affectionately
as he has absorbed it." Whitman was not known for his digestive
problems.
In their struggle with language and with literary form, the
writers I'm discussing become aware, and turn this awareness into
modes of expression, that what are supposed to be instruments of
knowledge do not offer clarification at all but are part of what
needs to be clarified. The chance that everything is cant or destined
to become gibberish, explains for me the energy of a "great" writer.
He
is
forever the unaccommodated man, the man continually tensed
within any use of language by which he has expressed himself. Each
of his best acts is a performance of some daring, the very success
of which moves him beyond the results of that act, producing the
discomforts which prompt the next one. The great writer learns only
that he is never finished, that what he has done will soon become
somebody else's convenience, and finally not so much caviar as waste
to the general. Perhaps that's all that need be said, supposing it's
true, about the inadequacy of literary shapings even for those who
make them.
Any account of cultural accumulation and distraction is apt to
sound like a version of Henry Adams. He was concerned with the
evident inadequacy of the individual mind trying to cope with the
accelerating productions of physical energy. The kind of energy
which now threatens to overwhelm individual minds is of a some–
what different order, though one of which he was also aware: the
energy implanted in myths and metaphors, styles and fashions, in
images that insinuate themselves in back of the eyes and ears, there
to direct, unless we consciously combat them, even our acts of silent
self-imagining. Literary people like to discuss this energy in terms
of tradition, usually making the mistake, as I've suggested, of assum–
ing that these traditions are literary ones. Not only through litera–
ture, but through all forms of popular culture, through childhood
play-acting, role-taking, movies, songs, costumes, psychological theo–
ries
and what have you-styles and formulations have accumulated
which precede us even to those experiences we think the most pri–
..ate and original. Human beings have lost themselves in the variety
and completeness of their own corporate invention. No wonder, then,
