Ambitious Scheme

A World Elsewhere.
by Richard Poirier.
Oxford. 257 pp. $5.75.

Richard Poirier’s ambitious essay is another in the sequence of interpretive schematizations of American literary and cultural history appearing over the past fifteen years. These books—some now established as the common wisdom of academic criticism: Marius Bewley’s The Eccentric Design, Charles Feidelson’s Symbolism and American Literature, R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam, Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, Roy Pearce’s The Continuity of American Poetry, Charles Sanford’s The Quest for Paradise, Loren Baritz’s City on a Hill, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, Edwin Fussel’s Frontier—present a phenomenon worth considering at large. They constitute a distinct class and contemporary symptom.

For one thing, they are the product of different circumstances from those supporting the comparable books of an earlier generation, like Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age (1915) or Constance Rourke’s American Humor (1931). Then the determining impulse came from new movements in art and letters, during the anni mirabiles of high modernism, and from the related surge of progressivist hopefulness in politics and social action. The provenance of these more recent critical syntheses has been much more narrowly academic. What has brought them into being is, basically, a set of academic circumstances: first, the encouragement to a closer reading of individual works given by the so-called “new” criticism; second, and more important, the accidental separation in most universities of the study of American literature from the rest of the curriculum and the emergence of something called “American studies” or “American civilization” as a separate subject, creating courses of study, granting degrees, and defining a field for professional inquiry and advancement. And through the postwar spread of grants and fellowships this development has reached foreign universities, producing in the 1960’s a second run of syntheses by English and Commonwealth scholars: D.E.S. Maxwell’s American Fiction, Tony Tanner’s The Reign of Wonder, A.N. Kaul’s The American Vision, Douglas Grant’s Purpose and Place.

The establishment of such a field should have been intellectually liberating. It suggests a positive will toward a wider critical truthfulness and the breaking down of artificial boundaries; and the potential virtue of the books issuing from it is precisely in their effort to see American literature in organic relation to American culture, as a body of expression in which the major forces and issues of the national experience are imaginatively defined and dialectically probed.

Paradoxically, however, to judge by the books in question, this effort of scholarship has led to a blurring rather than a refinement of perceptions and distinctions. Perhaps it is because work by American scholars on American themes is more vulnerable to aberration and fantasy. Perhaps American literature is, very simply, not an organic or dialectical whole. In any case one feels that the grasp of these books has exceeded their argumentative discrimination. There is at once an inflation of the subject matter actually treated and a reductiveness in the hypotheses advanced. This is especially noticeable when we begin comparing. Nearly all, we observe, are about the same limited number of authors and titles—the contents of a year’s course in the American classics—yet though each presentation aims at completeness, each seems indifferent to the others, if not positively denying the alternative syntheses they propose.

Each, moreover, in its major thesis, is haunted by its antitype, the sum of its exclusions. Reading Frontier, we are reminded in what degree American literature has always been a city literature, dominated by visions of the redeemed community, the reconstituted polis. The American Adam is shadowed by an unwritten but hardly less central work on the American Cain—and leaves unmentioned one literary Adam, the tragic exile of Coleridge’s dream, whose relevance to American experience is arguably greater than those discussed (“Dec. 6. 1803—Adam traveling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origins of the world; and treating him as a Madman killed him. A sort of dream, which I had this night”). The Continuity of American Poetry demonstrates nothing so clearly as discontinuity and fragmentation; The Reign of Wonder, the long nightmare of some perverse reign of torpor, exhaustion, spiritual deadness.

And so forth. All of these books, in short, are more or less anti-diagnostic and, in a methodological sense, anti-historical, collating symptoms rather than seeking out root causes. (To extend the metaphor, they are homeopathic rather than etiological.) By the very intensity of their concentration on their chosen evidence, they exaggerate its distinctiveness, yet evade some of the key questions it ought to raise. For all their breadth of purpose and intelligence of incidental comment, they suffer as a class from the same failings that have afflicted American politics, on all sides, for the past twenty years: the same inflation of limited evidence to the end of selling some comprehensive package-conception of the order of things, the same evasiveness as to real historical causes and parallels, the same well-meant but potentially blinding wishfulness of generalization. The question must be asked: have they really added much to our general understanding of our national literature? Would not a reader concerned to know how American books come into their imaginative life, and what relation they bear to common experience, still learn more from D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature of half a century ago? Would he not come away with a truer estimate of their actual weight and bearing?

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A World Elsewhere is characteristic of the class of books I have been describing—though it differs in approach from any of its predecessors and begins by implying a criticism of them all as too much concerned with substantive matters. Mr. Poirier’s book is at once more minutely attentive to verbal particulars—its subtitle is “The Place of Style in American Literature”—and more wayward in general argument. “America” figures here as an almost completely unanalyzed historical integer, and American literary history floats in a strange isolated medium where only English is heard or spoken and, except for the odd preachment by Emerson or Whitman, only novels and stories are written.

Liberated from history, Mr. Poirier can arrange his materials very freely. He writes, “we can think of the sequence of American literature almost novelistically.” Of course we can, and it makes for livelier surveys and more dramatic course syllabi. But argumentative convenience is no proof of truth. We have fair warning about this method from the start: “I shall treat books and paragraphs as scale models of America.” What could such a statement possibly mean? And, to take a particular case, what way is there of understanding the claim that Huckleberry Finn is “a kind of history of American literature” or that “the raft is like America itself”? Of course Huckleberry Finn is full of events, and speaks with a voice, and moves (or lurches) to a narrative rhythm, that are all intimately expressive of American conditions. But Mr. Poirier’s ways of saying so are exactly what one means by describing a critical method as at once inflationary and reductive. The actual relationships, the asserted significances, remain to be defined.

Mr. Poirier generalizes more easily by virtue of his disregard of European parallels. That what he sees may also characterize post-classical literature in general hardly crosses his mind. Take the metaphor of building, which is offered on the first page as a definitively American trope and from which the whole argument of the book develops. True enough, the familiar biblical metaphors of building, the house (whether or not made with hands), architecture, stewardship, are commonplace in American writing and have special importance in Cooper and Thoreau—though we might notice that Thoreau’s concern is less with house-building than with housekeeping (“Economy”).1 But is this metaphor uniquely American? What about Bacon’s New Atlantis or The City of the Sun, or Goethe’s Elective Affinities? Mr. Poirier speaks at length of Jane Austen’s Emma: why not also of Mansfield Park} Did Americans write Howard’s End or Castle Rackrent, Vathek or “Kubla Khan” or Jerusalem or The Master Builder, Bleak House, Heartbreak House, The House of Bernarda, Alba? “Build therefore your own world” is indeed an American commandment, but it is the simplicity of Emerson’s optimism (later radically qualified) rather than the metaphor that is distinctive. “America” is not the only “world elsewhere” conceived by the Western imagination in recent centuries, in the era inaugurated by the double triumph of capitalism and the Reformation.

Two essential things are missing from Mr. Poirier’s scheme. The first, obviously, is a sufficient concern for the historical matrix of the evidence presented. The sole causal factor admitted into this account of American literary “uniqueness” is “the prospects of a new continent,” which is too vague. Even with regard to style it may be argued that the “American” solution to the development Mr. Poirier is concerned with—the creation of new expressive modes for rendering new “imaginative environments” and “expansions of consciousness”—was first worked out within the evangelical sects, which did not find their commitment to a new truth and a new civil domain in America but brought it with them, without tarrying for any. It may even be argued that the larger part of American literary tradition consists of parodies of sectarian forms of expression: Emily Dickinson’s private hymns, Stephen Crane’s little anti-sermons, Emerson’s or Hawthorne’s relation of “evidences,” even James’s obscure interrogations of cases of fine conscience, and all the prayerful or ironic confessions and testaments that continue to form the bulk of our literary production. (Small wonder that a passage from Varieties of Religious Experience serves so well in explaining the book’s subject.) What the study of American literature needs is not another tabulation of symptoms but a historical analysis of modern sectarianism.

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The second defect is methodological. Mr. Poirier’s concern is “style,” but he does not indicate what he means by this term, and does not seem to know. At one point, comparing Jane Austen and Mark Twain, he fixes attention on character relationships (i.e., the positioning of characters in each other’s consciousness) and discusses these well, noting how each author thus presents a different vision of society. But what has this to do with “style”? Further on, he discusses “the very different values” Austen and Twain “give to the same words”—but it must be said that differences in meaning are not the same as differences in style; that is why there are the two words.

Mostly, style for Mr. Poirier is simply vocabulary. Or else it is voice, the dialogue-ventriloquism through which moral contrasts are established among characters speaking in a common social idiom. It is probably this reduction of “style” to rhetorical and vocal mannerism that underwrites the larger confusions of the book’s argument. In any event the critical distinction between “imported literary styles” (morally bad) and “naturalness” (morally good) will not do, even for Huckleberry Finn, for nothing is more artfully “literary” and “imported” than the voice—the several voices, deriving from a variety of popular conventions—given to Huck himself. So too with the conception of certain transcendent narrative “moments” which “are, as it were, pure art in being freed from the pressure of any environment but that of the mind from which they issue”: such a thing cannot be (though it is the great dream of Symbolism) so long as the writer uses language, which remains the most thoroughly collective and environmental pressure the creative mind knows.

We are driven to conclude that this critic lacks the equipment for the job he has taken on. And yet he is a good reader of individual books and authors. A World Elsewhere contains much accurate critical comment—on Thoreau, Emerson, Cooper, Fitzgerald, James, Faulkner, Edith Wharton. Best of all, I think, is the sustained passage on Dreiser closing the book; here the whole writer is brought into view and the real peculiarities of his literary character are placed and clarified—none of them more effectively, we are bound to note, than the puzzling matter of his essential stylelessness! It is when the ambitious scheme announced in the title must be served that Mr. Poirier goes astray. And it is in this respect that his case seems typical: a keen, sympathetic critical intelligence which in its larger undertakings appears poorly schooled, insufficiently counseled, and only fitfully governed, so that in the long pull its virtues are wasted. Typical, perhaps, not only of one branch and recent period of academic scholarship. Behind, I think, still stands the generic national case sorrowfully defined by Emerson a century and a quarter ago:

It seems to me sometimes that we get our education ended a little too quick in this country. As soon as we have learned to read and write and cipher, we are dismissed from school and we set up for ourselves. We are writers and leaders of opinion and we write away without check of any kind, play whatsoever mad prank, indulge whatever spleen, or oddity, or obstinacy, comes into our dear head, and even feed our complacency thereon, and thus fine wits come to nothing, as good horses spoil themselves by running away and straining themselves.

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1 We might also notice that no American writer makes more decisive use of symbolic houses and domains set apart than Poe, whom Mr. Poirier quite omits. Poe should have been proof positive of this book's thesis (that American writers create “an essentially imaginative environment” away from “the real world,” occasioning in us “extraordinary dislocations of our fixed ideas of reality”) except for one awkward fact: that Poe strikes out for his “world elsewhere” without benefit of any special new style. It is a good test of general theories of American literature whether they can find room for Poe.

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