524
RICHARD POIRIER
instances, has supposed that we can get along being more rather than
less ignorant than we were under a predominantly literary dispensa–
tion. I doubt that anyone who is ignorant of technology can know
what is going on in a great writer like Thomas Pynchon.
It
might help
in reading
Gravity's Rainbow
to
have read Rilke, but to understand the
form of that novel, the movements and intensification of its style, one
has to have a feeling for the movies, know something about their
development out of still photography, and be able
to
see the relation
of all this to principles of acceleration that are essential both to film
and rocketry.
What had been called for, of course, was not the mere documen–
tation of how styles combined one with the other, but a sense of
wonder at the results, a surge of concentrated critical attention and
care, the kind of attention which prompts the simple question "what,
in the face of these new combinations, is happening to
me?"
Rock
music, as a phenomenon of performance, simply needed and still
needs to be inquired into. There was a rumor, for example, that I was
teaching a course in rock at Rutgers.
It
was reported back to me as an
accusation, when in fact I'd never have taught such a course simply
because I'm not capable of doing so. I knew at least that much about
it.
It
proved impossible, but it was necessary nonetheless, to wonder
whether or not what is called "rock" could even be described. Was it to
be done by an analysis of lyrics? or by an analysis of music? the latter
being, in certain inst<1nces, as complicated in its sources, derivations,
and traditions, as any lyrical or musical text very well could be. And
what did amplification have to do with it? And how much was "rock" a
matter of performance in concert with an excited audience, or at a
festival, or at home, and what about the kind of equipment it was
played on? What, especially, about the technicians whose function, in
many instances, was as decisive as the men and women playing the
instruments and singing? Very often a piece heard on a record turned
out to have been the product of most elaborate splicings made from
perhaps ten or fifteen playings of the piece, and sometimes the in–
struments were recorded separately so that any guess' as to the effect
of group activity on individual performance could be no more than
wild speculation.
If
"rock" was something in which students were natively in–
terested and could show some expertness, then here was an opportunity
