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RICHARD POIRIER
idiot habit of designating the "best" of every year. Perhaps there is no
"best," perhaps none of them is worth the discrimination, perhaps the
imaginative energies in a culture are, for a time, going not into litera–
ture at all but into other things.
Since World War II, as never before, there have been abundantly
satisfying reasons for the turn of energies into forms other than literary
ones. The measuring of culture by standards of literary production
makes even less sense now than formerly because the generations since
1945 have had more options, when it comes to modes of expression,
and have been less stylistically constrained than any previous genera–
tion. Film has been elevated, as was the novel not very long ago, from
the category of mass to high culture; electronic media in the form
of video and audio tape have brought into articulation areas of life
that were before silent or invisible. Partly because of these develop–
ments - the most important challenges to the predominance of literary
culture since the invention of printing - we are in a period where it
is obtuse to ask the same questions about cultural accomplishments
that even up to World War II made only some sense. So great is the
dispersal now of artistic energies that some of the results simply cannot
be seen by those who keep straining their eyes only for novels or poems
or plays. But the evidence is there for anyone who will look and listen
to it, anyone who dispassionately considers the cultural opportunities
provided by hand cameras, portable video tape machines, or the most
rudimentary recording devices. What is being produced by these means
in an amateur way is often far better than the stories I had to read as
a teacher of what is called Creative Writing, and any new film by
Truffaut or Godard is more inventive, more intelligent in what it
does with its materials, more nuanced, simply worth more of one's time
and attention than is any new novel of recent years. As for an evening
on or off Broadway, is it, live performances aside, as good as a T.V.
series like
The Virginian?
And surely the interviews taped by Robert
Coles and Studs Turkel suggest that the powers of imagination and
the capacities to shape experience in original and compelling ways are
marvelously alive in people who would never dream of writing.
Meanwhile, in all areas of the culture, and by virtue of these same
media as well as of increased mobility, each of us has available an un–
precedented variety of styles. They have become mixed before anyone
chooses to mix them, and this has caused an irreparable break in cul–
tural continuities based on stylistic decorums, on conventions, and the
integrity of forms. Necessarily, these developments have resulted in an
increased dependence of artistic production on technology and the
commercial arrangements necessary to pay for it. You do not expect
to produce a film the way you write a poem; you cannot by yourself
produce the songs of Bob Dylan even when you are Bob Dylan. In
sum, there is necessarily a kind of cultural displacement going on. It
waits only on candor and is opposed only by fear. I think it is now
incumbent on anyone seriously interested in culture to become a swinger.
One could do worse, as a great poet tells us, and after all it is always
possible to swing back again to the great classics, the old things, with
eyes and ears made not less but more expectant.
