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RICHARD POIRIER
Baraka does not deserve a seminar and neither does the novelist
Richard Wright. Surely even those who, like myself, would not want
to approve seminars devoted to Baraka or Wright must recognize that
they have at least condoned if not created historical precedents in
English Studies which make their opposition seem to a reasonable
black like the most blatant racial and class bias.
It
would be necessary to try to explain my own reluctance to
approve of these proposed courses. Without any assurance of success
I would try to demonstrate to a black student or, in a comparable case
to a woman who felt her sex discriminated against in course offerings,
that my opposition was based on the desire, long since expressed also
with respect to white literature, to call a halt, finally, to a process
which continually makes English Studies into a sham and which will
inevitably make inquiries into minority or sexual aspects of literature
poisonously trivial, debased, and quickly obsolete. But I would want to
say, by way of positive suggestion, that in the brief time any student is
enrolled in college-some 26 months, only a little over two years of
course work in all-it is preposterous to start out with the assumption
that life and literature are in any self-evident transaction with one
another. Rather, the student should start learning, for the first two
academic years, simply to read literature for the very peculiar, very
special kind of history it is, and not for insights into a history to which
it is supposed to refer. The effort should be to read literature so as to
recognize the special nature of language as it occurs in different
genres, and to see in genre not so much a criticism of life as a revela–
tion of how life, how historical forces outside literature, have helped
shape language into literary forms, forms which are if anything exclu–
sive of life, forms which in their inception and history constitute a
choice not only of what might be said but of what, at any given time, in
any given situation, has to be left unsaid.
Only thereafter can larger questions be profitably asked, and
then only tentatively. By that point any good student might have
noticed that writers work on the assumption that the language they
use and the forms they use do not really belong to them, that no one
owns these things. Noticing this might make a student sad or angry.
Or it might make him excited at the spectacle of writing as an activity,
writing not as a finished thing so much as a constant struggle with a
ma.rvelously enticing and at the same time disciplinary kind of history
