50
RICHARD POIRIER
given discussion of pplitical relevance. It's terribly difficult to find
out who one is during an act of reading or to help a student find
out who he or she is. It's maybe harder now than ever before: there
are so many assaults on human vulnerability that, to survive at
all,
we become invulnerable, and then in order to seem worthy to our–
selves pretend, again, to vulnerability. Hence the danger, dangerous
to one's continuing and fluid self-creation, in any simple effort to
attain "relevance" in literary study. What
is
relevant to what and
where do we begin to stabilize one element in order to let it some–
how feel the force of another?
For anyone teaching literature the problem is especially com–
plicated
if,
as nearly all of us have, he has been educated to see
things through the gridiron of one theory or another, especially a
theory that has been turned into a method. Take the habit of thinking
of literature organically, along with implicitly high valuations of
s0-
ciety which is
also
ideally organic.
It
is perhaps a necessary comfort
and pleasure of the imagination, a game of making oneself at home
with words and images. But it
is
an expensive game, and there are
denials in it not everyone thinks any longer worthwhile. What's
missing from the habit, of course, is yourself or, more properly, your–
selves and some true part of the will toward disorganization and
freedom from pattern. What, indeed, are patterns for, when, if tech–
nology
is
frightful, it
also
proves inspiring to the point of awe; or
when the excitements offered in forms that compete with literature
and that are dismissed by left-liberal litterateurs as camp or pop or
worse, are sometimes better, in that they do more to and for us, than
are some works set for literary survey courses; or when the brutality
and violence against which the humanities are somehow supposed to
promote a civilized abhorrence also exhilarate us to the extent that
we then look back at literature itself and wonder how much of the
best of it isn't really to some degree pornographic in its resourceful
brutality. I mean that phrase very precisely as applied, let's say, to
Shakespeare and James in their "use" of characters as merely one
of many expressive, "compositional" resources.
As
against these lib–
erating and confusing and contradictory realizations, literary study
too often
asks
the reader to
exist
importantly only when
,he
can fmd
himself in a structure, a structure which exists at times even at the
expense of some of the most exciting
writing
in a work.
Imagine, as an instance, someone saying that he admires the
