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RICHA.RD POIRIER
mean by "culture." More genera1ly, by minority I mean those as–
pects of minority feeling in all of us, including the most privileged:
whatever we care deeply about but which, culturally or politically
we have been made ashamed of, including our sexuality.
I
would
even describe as a minority feeling the fascination for machines
and gadgets, the love of the rocket, you might say, which is held
~ltogether
too much in check by the close order drill, especially in
literature, against the machine and
~gainst
technology as threats to
something called the literary imagination.
Some of us were not disturbed by the likelihood that under the
pressure of these new demands for attention literature would proba–
bly come to count for something less in the scheme of things, espe–
cially the scheme of things laid down by most departments of litera–
ture. Counting for less needn't have meant the demeaning of litera–
ture, the drumming out of "Lycidas" or Henry James; instead it might
have meant, and still might, that literature was to be only one of the
artifacts, rather than the only artifact, that could be intensely read as a
clue to the state of the culture and a preparation for coping with it.
Because if literature was to be thought of as the disposition (in every
sense of that term) of the materials that culture has made available
to
us, then it had become evident, after the heady days of what is called
"lit crit" in the forties and fifties, that there were many other ways in
which some of these same materials were now being disposed of, film
being preeminently one of them, taped interviews being another, and
both of these showing signs of life in the past decade more vibrant
than any to
be
found in all but a few novels or plays or volumes of
poetry.
It
was almost immediately apparent, however, that most of those
who agreed that literature had come to count for less in the sixties
were not prepared to let it remain, in the form of its classics, what it
had demonstrated itself to be: still the most disciplined and at once
the most gregarious of expressions, and therefore the one which
might continue to offer, as a subject of study, the best opportunity for
finding our way among the signs and codes and structures of histori–
cal life. Sensing the exposure of literature to competition from other
forms of expression and the possibility that the study of literature
might in some instances prove irrelevant to an understanding of those
other forms, the radical contingent of literary people reached a pecu-
