The Landscape of Soliloquy

...Indeed, the weakness of dialogue in American fiction-think of Cooper, of Melville!-is an index of the removal of that fiction from the grounds of the true novel, in which the conversations are susceptible of "dramatizing" the themes and characteristic preoccupations-i.e., the preoccupations of the characters...

...In this century, the chief contributions to the catena are James' The American Scene (1907...

...to Pale Fire...

...The central essay, "Visionary to Voyeur," oscillates from Hawthorne to James, showing how an imagination of society is variously defeated and designed: whereas Hawthorne, Poirier suggests, is at his best when he becomes the critic of what otherwise victimizes him, i.e., the distortions of reality by art or style, James succeeds most phenomenally when he surrenders to his own extravagance...

...Poirier is remarkably sensitive, in an athletic way rarely suggested by the word, to the stylistic ingenuity of our great writers...

...to explore the heroic selfishness of Henry James, "who manages to protect the imagination of pleasure from almost all moral and social categories, including 'sex...

...to exfoliate the passionate verbal commitment of Thoreau's odd form of possessionas-relinquishment...

...These juxtapositions with English fiction are never made merely to show the native works up, or off, but to insist that the American dream (the dream that we create the world we live in...

...His style is particular in every sense of the word: it is intended, as he says about the style of the "best" American works (say, The Portrait of a Lady and the first half of Huckleberry Finn), "to sustain us past the glowerings of our own knowledge about probable failure...

...Yvor Winters' Maule's Curse (1937...

...Mawr, Huckleberry Finn with Emma, The House of Mirth with Middlemarch...

...Wright Morris' The Territory Ahead (1957...

...Here the stethoscope picks up Twain precisely at the point in the book where he feels he has failed his vision and must fall back upon his veneer, upon his record of already existing surfaces...

...out of the self we can "build" a style that is the self) enforces certain consequences for American literature, consequences which make the apprehension of society, of sex, of selfhood very particular indeed...

...A World Elsewhere manages to assert its incidental insights-remarks that reveal a writer like a flash of lightning: Hawthorne, for instance, "never observes social conduct, but only the degree to which his characters are submissive to allegorical definition"-by means of an admirable and explicit structure...

...and most recently Leslie Fiedler's Love & Death in the American Novel (1960...

...He has offered a way of accommodating our teeming literature from Melville to Dreiser ("MobyDick and the works of Dreiser are in some sense about their own voracious accumulations of material"), from Thoreau to Fitzgerald, a way which illuminates without distortion the central enterprise of that literature, the great dispute between our writers' commitment to "visionary possibilities" and their obligations to certain conventions of expression that tend to frustrate those possibilities, to call them into question...

...Speaking of James' constant reference to the waste of a heightened human consciousness, Pokier says: "The consciousness, developed by seeing the extremities of pleasure or pain, in James as in the Shakespeare of King Lear, must simply be satisfied with itself...

...In all five chapters, Pokier employs a strategy of collage, confronting Deerslayer with St...

...They return them to "reality' from environments where they have been allowed most 'nakedly' to exist, environments created by various kinds of stylistic ingenuity...

...He patiently cites large chunks of prose, among them the most famous passages, to elicit, before our very ears, the complacent evocativeness of Emerson, who sounds "as if he were planning a trip to the country not with Wordsworth but with Addison and Steele...

...Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live (1941...

...and though I am not convinced by his sturdy defense of Dreiser (he insists that Dreiser belongs with Emerson in characterizing individuals "less by their relation to one another than by their relation to the conglomerations of power that fill space and determine the apportionments of time"), I think Poirier reaches deepest into our "incomparable modernity" in his study of Edith Wharton, of whom he says so sharply, "few American writers illustrate more eloquently the need in life as well as in novels for some institutional support of feelings otherwise crushed by institutions...

...But if these images of separation (Thoreau), of renunciation (James), of loss (Faulkner) do not characteristically take on, as he says, significance within a dramatic relation involving the hero with elements of society, instead getting expressed in his soliloquies, in his "communions with landscape for which he has rejected social conversation"-if they are aberrations, in other words-they are also magnificent aspirations...

...Poirier's subtitle, "the place of style in American literature," rather modestly eases in his method...

...Not by image, or symbol, or myth, but by the sound of a man addressing himself to his subject, Poirier recognizes the specific character of our literature-"character as a derivative of language and the power of language...

...It cannot translate itself into anything else...

...Since not only our poetry but even our prose literature, in fact especially our prose literature, is concerned to wage the battle of consciousness in the arena afforded by "some further created being and some other world a society of alternatives to what is actual," Poirier decided that the only actuality a critic can hold on to is an overhead identity, the self in a man's work which is his own projected presence in style...

...Not institutions, certainly, not character or history will give him the foothold he needs, not dialectic nor even dialogue...

...Then, in "Is There an I for an Eye...

...A World Elsewhere is a hard book to read...

...There is no other environment for it...

...Here Poirier works hardest with the least tractable materials...

...It is in his discussion of The Ambassadors, in fact, that Poirier reaches furthest into a wisdom of his own, earned from a scrutiny of masterpieces and lavished-there is no other word- upon us...

...The writing is never free from the burden of solicitude -Poirier is forever giving hostages for his taste, putting his preferences on the line, and is not condescending toward what he acknowledges as the hopeless quest of American literature...

...it must rest within the 'Tightness' of the people who have it...

...The book is composed, and that is surely the correct participle, suggesting a frequent reprise of themes, in five long chapters arching from Henry James Sr...

...Poirier does not stop and deride the whole enterprise merely because, for instance, "the interposition of sex between the self and its visionary goals is so rare in American literature.' He sees more inclusively into what he calls "those exuberances of imagination, those extravagances of yearning that create the objects they yearn for"-and because of what he sees, because really of the illustrative, detailed and necessarily selective way he listens, more seems to be there than ever before...

...Then the fourth essay, a close reading of Huckleberry Finn, moves in upon the second group of works Poirier distinguishes, works content to mirror an environment already accredited...

...Like all these books, Poirier's is important not because it taunts us with what American writers have failed to do-although it does not spare the weaknesses of a literature notorious for its lapses -but because it tells us what they have sought to do, because it accounts for an aspiration which produced, which necessitated precisely those failures...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry," "Partisan Review" Professor Poirier has extended by another powerful link the chain which holds together our understanding of American literature...

...First, in "Self and Environment", the theme is set forth: "I am making a distinction between works that create through language an essentially imaginative environment for the hero, and works that mirror an environment already accredited by history and society...

...Which leads to the final-though Poirier refuses to let it be a culminating or prophetic-chapter, a study of Wharton and Dreiser as victims of "Panoramic Environment and Anonymity of Self...

...I suspect, though, that he wanted to keep his text from being gorged with examples, and certainly by his astonishing response to prose (which he reads the way we are always told poetry should be read: aloud) he has offered enough...

...In American fiction, the preoccupations are those of the soliloquizing author, whose voice, Poirier suggests, from Hawthorne to Faulkner engrosses any "creation" he may propose: "We can say that American writers are at some point always forced to return their characters to prison...

...the works of the former group are explored through Emerson-"in many respects Emerson is American literature"-and Poirier shows how "the poet," as Emerson calls the American writer, rejecting explicitly all institutionalized allegiances, is forced to claim a place and function for himself almost wholly through his style...

...Lawrence's The Symbolic Meaning (1917, completely rewritten, after Lawrence came to America in 1923, as Studies in Classic American Literature...

...This novel, Poirier says of Huckleberry Finn, discovers that the consciousness it values most "cannot expand within the environment it provides," discovers that the self "cannot come to fuller life through social drama, upon which the vitality of this and of most other novels of the last century at some necessary point depend...

...What he has done, his innovation as a critic, is simply to listen to, or listen for, a tone of voice, locating intention and attitude by an author's projected presence in the rhythms and vocabularies of his prose...

...It is because he offers certain normative versions of fiction-Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence -that Poirier can account so sympathetically for the recurrent American aberration, the willed disjunction from existing social forms, social feelings...

...So discreet and unschoolmistressy is Poirier's eavesdropping that one wishes he had managed to engage our best poets, too, in his diagnosis of the American obsession: "inventing environments that permit unhampered freedom of consciousness...