56
RICHARD POIRIER
don't know of what they consist or how they could fail or succeed,
and neither do the champions, disappointed or expectant, of re–
levance.
Locating the relevance of a literary work to any life or to any
issue is an extraordinarily difficult and precarious job, even for those
who have shown some talent for it.
As
a motive for English studies
it is becoming perhaps insurmountably difficult. The reason
is
that
in every area of expression there is now at work an accelerated de–
terioration of language - the very assertion itself has become banal
- a nearly
total
cynicism about the adaptation, in the pursuit of
power and profit, of any vocabularies, even antagonistic ones, that
suit one's purpose. The speeches of Vice President Agnew are a
brilliant example of this willingness to appropriate the rhetoric of
your enemies in the act of defeating them. His talk on media could
have been, with only a few changes, a New Left position paper; his
talk on universities made me wonder, paranoically, if the remarkable
lady who does his research and helps with his speeches, hadn't adapt–
ed some things I'd said about youth and universities in a piece called
"The War Against the Young." I wasn't surprised by his credits to
George Kennan or Irving Kristol or Walter Lacquer or Arnold
Beichmann - and apparently neither were they - but it was gen–
uinely frightening to note how language so nearly one's own, and of
a quite other political complexion, could be adapted to an argu–
ment so pernicious as Agnew's and so remote in intention from mine.
Herein is a lesson for those who like to imagine the power of the
word or of literature: power as a property, power of the kind at
Agnew's command, can do what it wants with language, and lan–
guage can do pathetically little to it.
What, then, is anyone to do who thinks of himself as a custo–
dian not so much of language in the abstract but simply of his own
language? How can he begin to dislocate language into his own
meaning? I am conscious, in adapting a phrase from Eliot, that
literature has always been in some sense a struggle to do this
~
which is why the pastoral elements of "Lycidas" could, by the way,
be made to seem quite relevant to contemporary problems of expres–
sion. No one can think, however, that the problem has become any–
thing but desperate in the last twenty years. The "struggle for
verbal consciousness," Lawrence insisted, "should not be left out of
art." It should now
be
the central concern of the study of writing
