The Renewal of Literature
Poirier, Richard
rr wentieth-century critics and read-1 ers have largely consigned Ralph Waldo Emerson to a literary vacuum. Bring up the name and you'll evoke no more than vaguely unpleasant memories of sitting in...
...As an archaeology of Emerson—the uncovering of a skeptical and language-wary (if not especially lucid) writer with unexpectedly modern sympathies—The Renewal of Literature succeeds...
...After Shakespeare, after Milton, after the greats of your choice, trying to produce original works seems hubris and, worse, a waste of time, if one takes the Emersonian argument to its extreme...
...Bring up the name and you'll evoke no more than vaguely unpleasant memories of sitting in a college library in an overstuffed armchair, reading overstuffed prose for an American Studies course, or maybe a rosy-cheeked quotation along the lines of "Hitch your wagon to a star...
...Thanks to Eliot, this sort of "difficult" modernism—an elite uneasiness about the tensions and anxieties inherent in Western culture—has, as Poirier laments, served as "the bedrock of literary criticism and of the study of literature from about 1930 onward...
...Poirier likes the technique so well that his flattery tends toward feckless imitation, as in the following sentences: "Literature is a very restricted passage into life, if it is one at all...
...But literature itself constantly seeks what Poirier terms a dim and unreachable "state of naturalness, authenticity, and simplicity...
...Freed as an American from antique habits, he nonetheless had to acknowledge what Poirier calls "the ineluctable condition of all literature: that someone has been there before you and will also be here after you, and that you cannot escape the evidence of this in the language you use...
...And yet Poirier suggests that such an approach should guide writers, readers, and critics, in place of Eliot's dictums...
...They fail to realize that their favorite bugbear—modern life—threatens real creativity less than using language always has...
...ryl his launches Poirier into a case-1 study discussion of literature's squeamishness about modern life as defined by technology...
...considering that what sets humanity apart is our ability to write and communicate, it would be near impossible to let go of that which defines us...
...And if we eversucceeded, critics would find themselves on the street...
...T. S. Eliot's seminal essay "The Metaphysical Poets," in which he declared that the modern poet "must be difficult," incited modernist claims that worthwhile literature must evade the reader, via complicated structures and so many allusions that one would have to be a walking library in order to catch them all...
...he points out that transcendental optimism disguises a still-applicable "special Emersonian form of skepticism...
...Even Shakespeare did it...
...Eliot beware...
...what I always took for transcendental disorganization is to Poirier "a productive multiplication, a thickening of possibilities...
...Emerson believed that the only logic and structure behind writing ought to be a "perpetual inchoation'always beginning but never feeling obliged to finish a point...
...In To Reclaim a Legacy, a 1984 report on the humanities, Bennett took literature to be the cultural equivalent of a multivitamin, each "good book" an RDA of the best of Western civilization...
...They imagine it to be a storehouse of the values and ideals lost as the study of the humanities has disintegrated...
...Because literature, however classic and enduring, doesn't have answers to the questions that the Bennetts of today ask...
...In an Emersonian philosophy, it cannot...
...But Bennett's panacea smells like 13 snake oil to Poirier...
...Not that this tired argument has ever stopped writers—including Emerson—from writing...
...Relying on words, Emerson keenly felt the prison of language...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 49...
...Acting against language from within, it releases us from the stranglehold words otherwise have...
...Last year, Irving Howe put together a book of essays called The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson, drawn from lectures delivered at Harvard...
...Poirier writes that "no writer of genius, least of all Emerson himself, can ever wholly stifle the human complaint that he must disappear into the very things he has helped create, and all the more inevitably because he copied, borrowed, or stole most of them...
...Hence their often-caricatured optimism...
...With all the borrowings and copying that writers must do, how can writing really reflect a self...
...He begins by advancing against the conceit (held by such notables as Secretary of Education William Bennett) that "the writing and reading of literature have a culturally redemptive power...
...Only a century ago, Emerson held a preeminent place in American letters as the essayist, poet, and philosopher who shaped and gave voice to New World transcendentalism...
...Writers, egotists that they are, are happy to make believe that they are indulging in something with "historical inevitability and large consequence...
...Writers of genius—Shakespeare, Milton, and, Poirier would add, Emerson--!`create densities" with language, giving it movement, avoiding stasis...
...Poirier argues that this little-known manic-depressiveness applies to Emerson's thoughts on writing as well...
...And more than this, Poirier aims to use him as the fountainhead from which will flow a new approach to reading, writing, and criticism...
...T his, says Poirier, explains Emer- 1 son's vertiginous habit of moving "out of any rhetorical position he has just occupied into another one, as if in hot pursuit of a truth elusive of more orderly verbal and syntactic inquiry...
...Why, he asks, "may it not be exhilarating...
...In "Plato," Emerson wrote that "every book is a quotation...
...This is Poirier's explanation for the zig-zag style of Emerson's essays, their maddening quirkiness...
...Howe then hypothesized that writers today still look for a fresh start as Emerson imagined it, a throwing off of cultural and institutional shackles...
...p oirier's aptly titled final essay, "Writing Off the Self," discusses a sort of Emersonian/Poirian utopia: a world in which the authorial presence dissolves, leading to an unimaginable but presumably better hereafter...
...Always the domain of an elite, literature now gets the shivers when it beholds Henry James's "monstrous masses," never very keen on bookish pursuits, magnified and (seemingly) glorified by mass media...
...In this stubbornly ahistorical collection of essays, Poirier, the Harold Bloom of Rutgers, tries to install the much-maligned transcendentalist guru in the pantheon of Writers for All Time...
...as a proposed alternative to the critical establishment, however worthy the aim, it does not...
...But lately there have been signs of a movement afoot among American literati to bring Emerson back from the Jennifer Howard is a writer and editor living in Washington, D.C...
...what Washington and Jefferson had enabled institutionally," Howe wrote, "Emerson would now bring into fruition in the sphere of the spirit, and therefore in the life of the culture...
...As an apologist, Howe at least had the good grace to locate Emerson on the historical landscape: that peculiar and short-lived "newness" of nineteenth-century America that shaped him...
...Poirier seems to think that a Pyrrhic struggle of this sort is the noblest thing mankind can attempt...
...void...
...In "Nature," the familiar, absurdly cherubic Emerson writes: "Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous...
...The Renewal of Literature certainly qualifies...
...But literature itself is no more than a "technology" created by humanity, as much a constraint on originality and freedom as the TV screen, whatever William Bennett might think...
...To do this, Poirier has to dislodge a number of notions beaten into us by humanistic pundits and the modernist heirs of T. S. Eliot...
...as Emerson once wrote, "by necessity, by proclivity, by delight, we all quote...
...A rereading of Emerson seems to support Poirier's view...
...But for Emersonians, this "bareness"—Howe's "American newness'!--- meant a happy freedom from the weight of tradition that crushes originality...
...Modernists, then, are to Poirier "Emersonians with a vengeance"—only slightly off base...
...But like King Canute telling the waves to turn back, the attempt goes nowhere...
...This kind of thinking "quite naturally induces the supposition that the very idea . . . of the self ought to be done away with altogether...
...But later in the same essay, the sage of Concord despairs that "we are like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox...
...But Emerson's poetry has been overshadowed by Whitman's, his prose by Thoreau's—two disciples who managed to elude their mentor's fate by seeming somehow "relevant" to this century...
...THE RENEWAL OF LITERATURE: EMERSONIAN REFLECTIONS Richard Poirier/Random House/$19.95 Jennifer Howard 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 To escape this, Emerson insisted on "troping"—twisting words like strands in a rope, to avoid being caught in rigid, inherited meanings...
...Here Poirier-as-apologist wags a finger at our stereotype of Emerson...
...An Emersonian can look at a Ulysses and enjoy the difficulty, taking the text as "a sort of battleground" in which words war against the literary technology that cannot control them (just as technology cannot control modern life, even though it puts a stamp on it...
...Here things get sticky...
...he inspired (sometimes negatively, as with Hawthorne) a generation of still-read writers...
...Better, in Poirier's view, because "we are not required to think of loss or reduction or self-dissolution as if it were synonymous with deprivation...
...In it, Howe recalled Emerson as having been something of a revolutionary in his own time...
...But perhaps they are best allowed to speak for themselves...
...Reading may be worthwhile, he writes, but even Hamlet can't be the salvation of us all...
...Not so Richard Poirier in The Renewal of Literature...
...If Emerson was correct, then writing as a creative act is paradoxical...
...So language challenges the writer to be original as much as textual difficulty confounds the reader...
...Poirier, well read but lazy enough to let others prove his points for him, has created it out of a pastiche of snippets cut from writers as disparate as Spenser and Stevens...
...What he fails to point out is that if the self feels exhilaration (or anything else), then you haven't really gotten rid of it at all...
...To readers of thick and "difficult" twentieth-century texts such as Ulysses, this sounds suspiciously like modernism—but it is modernism with a difference...
...Paradoxically, American writers in the nineteenth century evoked pity because they did find themselves in a "condition of bareness," with no cultural tradition of their own behind them...
...Or, as William James put it rather more succinctly, that "language works against our perception of truth...
...It is never even all at once everything that is sometimes literature...
...The man himself we now remember as a genial, naive, and passe gent, whose Pollyanna optimism, appropriate to antebellum America, has no place in an age of numerous crises of confidence...
...He wasn't alone in making the point...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
