RICHARD POIRIER
My disagreement with Marcuse is two-fold-with his conception
of literary works and, consequently, with his idea of the necessary
antagonism between them and society, including that social unit,
ideally operative, which is a class studying a book.
As
for the first,
literature in Marcuse is a kind of "world elsewhere." And (as I've
already tried to suggest in a work of that title) it never can be. Given
the nature of language and its deterministic social forms, no book
can, for very long, separate itself from this world; it can only
try .
to do so, through magnificent exertions of style lasting only for the
length of the exertion. Weare left to admire the effort, to lament,
if we
wish,
the evanescent achievement. So that I would have to
argue also against Marcuse's theory of the dangers of the assimila–
tion of literature and of its antagonistic contents. The dangers
are
the glory; they are inherent in the very shape and materials of literary
works. The alleged "assimilation" is the prior condition of the existence
of the work of art, the very act by which one man tries to address
another: the prior assumption of the whole exchange being a shared
need for the forms in which they communicate, or think they do.
This condition of literature opens the way to a vigorous form
of literary study. Admiration for, exploration into the effort which
is literature, the act which is writing-these are what is mostly now
missing from the study of literature. Literary works only provisionally
constitute what Marcuse calls "another dimension of reality." They
should be construed more properly as merely another dimension of
action, of performance with language as its medium. Thereby we
escape the contradiction that the ultimate logic of thinking of liter–
ature as a form of reality, with an exonerated status, is that it
shouldn't be taught at all, that teaching only assimilates it into
life as presently arranged, democratitizes and thus degrades (and
deradicalizes) it. However, it still is taught under the assumption of
its being "another dimension of reality";
it
is meddled with, made
available through all sorts of cheapening and mechanical devices, as
if its integrity could only be perserved by violating it. In a perhaps
crude shortcut to clarification, let me suggest that no man proud
of deflowering a virgin would continue, unless he were mad, to in–
troduce her as one. English studies cannot do what it most often
does to literary works and pretend that these works still belong unto
themselves or to English literature. They belong, all marked up, to
