194
RICHARD POIRIER
that such inventions and the process of their creation have partly
displaced
~ns
as the subject of literature, just as in the arrange–
ments of civil and political life those with a radical sense of the self
will be tolerated as "historical irrelevants," in the charming words of
Zbigniew Bzrezinski, while something called society moves on to the
new technetronic age where Systems will take care of everything.
The technetronic planners are properly suspicious of those
whose thinking has been conditioned by literary study; they know,
much more keenly than do most literary people, the significance of
the debate between Leavis and Snow. Three of the great and much
used texts of 20th-century criticism,
Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Waste
Land,
are written in mockery of system, written against any effort
to harmonize discordant elements, against any mythic or metaphoric
scheme that would merely historicize contemporary life rather than
show it as a force that modifies and even explodes mythic or other
organizations.
If
the dominant form of the literary imagination
is
radical in its essentially parodistic treatment of systems, then its radi–
calism is in the interest of essentially conservative feelings about
human nature and often agrarian feelings about the proper organi–
zations of social life. Writers in our own time, however much they
have escaped from the foolishness of hating airconditioning, have
not significantly changed the conservative political implications of
the earlier phases of modem literature. Melville, Joyce and Eliot,
all
differences allowed, discovered that human kind needs to be saved
from the various shaping powers even of literature: they discovered
their material already encapsulated in the history of literature, its
conventions and structures and styles (each of these weighted with
presumptions about the nature of reality), and they discovered it,
too, in the various philosophical and psychological theories by which
the experience of individuals has been codified. In other words,
the problem of organizing a self and a destiny for a
self
within the
contexts that impose a self and a destiny - this problem has, for a
line of writers going back a hundred years or more, occupied the
center of attention once occupied by the exigencies of love and
courtship.
The literary rendering of
this
dehumanizing situation has de–
veloped traditions and conventions of its own, which, as advanced
now in the works of Norman Mailer, John Barth and Thomas
