58
RICHARD POIRIER
and meaning. Otherwise English studies may go one of two ways:
it
can shrink, hopefully in a manner as distinguished and health–
giving as that which accompanied the retrenchment of Classics de–
partments; or it can become distended by claims to a relevance
merely topical. Alternatively, it can take a positive new step.
It
can
further develop ways of treating
all
writing and
all
reading as an–
alogous acts, as simultaneously unfolding performances, some of
which
will
deaden, some of which will quicken us. This
will
not
sound like a simple prescription to anyone who has given much
thought, as I am now trying to do, to the mysteries of performance,
even why we think some and not other acts belong under the head–
ing. There
will
be a need, at the more advanced stages of such
study, to ask questions that are essentially anthropological in nature -
about ideas of beginnings, about what Frank Kermode calls "the
sense of an ending," about pacings and their relation to different
concepts of time, about bulk and foreshortening, about "fun" and
"excitement" and how such notions change over quite brief spans
of an historical period.
Once on its way, this activity can
be
applied to performances
other than those occurring in language - to dance and sports, as
much ,as to film or popular music. English studies must come to
grips with different languages of popular culture, with newspapers,
political speeches, advertising, conversation, the conduct of the class–
,room itself. Until proven otherwise, none of these need be treated as
if
it were necessarily simpler than any other or than literature. The
same hard questions for all, as Richard Hoggart would have it.
Far from meaning that English studies would thereby slight what it
calls literature in order to extend operations, what I propose would
give literature real fighting chance to prove, if intensely enough en–
countered, not its cultural superiority, whatever that might mean,
but its superiority as a training ground for
all
other efforts in the
struggle for expression. English studies need only become happily,
consciously limited in what it sets out to do with literature instead
of, as now, an unhappy pretender. We are a long way from the
day hoped for by Emerson when we shall see at last "that t,Jle most
private
is
the most public energy."
