Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections.
Myerson, Joel
Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections
(Yale UP, 1988), 244 pp. Paper, $9.95.
In recent years, the debate over what has been termed
"cultural literacy" has claimed a good deal of time and
attention. Many of those who lament the loss of shared cultural
assumptions in today's world--and particularly among contemporary
youth--point to literature as one of the most important means for
possible salvation. This suggestion is, of course, not new, as anyone
who has read Matthew Arnold will recognize. The Renewal of Literature:
Emersonian Reflections (first published in 1987) is Richard
Poirier's contribution to this on-going debate, and his villains
are not MTV and William Bennett, but modernism, Matthew Arnold, and T.S.
Eliot.
The title of Poirier's book suggests its approach, echoing as
it does two key Emersonian concepts: Renewal/rebirth and
reflection/seeing. Like Emerson, Poirier is in an optative mood, and,
also like Emerson, he sees our intellectual heritage from the previous
generation as being undemocratic and divisive.
Poirier defines "literary modernism" as "the
systematic pressing of a claim ... that many of the anxieties which
Western culture has often associated with the human condition have been
immensely intensified by contemporary life." These anxieties were
"once manageable within habitual discourse," but under modern
conditions "such talk has become increasingly meaningless"
(97). This has led to two related developments: "First, in the
effort by a particular faction of writers to promote the idea that in
twentieth-century literature, difficulty is particularly necessary and
virtuous, and, second, in the complicit agreement, by a faction of
readers, that the act of reading ought to entail an analogous degree of
difficulty attributable, again, to cultural dislocations peculiar to
this century" (98). The high priest of this modernist
sanctification of literature is T.S.Eliot, who write in his 1921 essay
"The Metaphysical Poets" that literature "must be
difficult" because "Our civilization comprehends great variety
and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined
sensibility, must produce various and complex results" (101).
The net effect of Eliot and modernism is to make the writing and
reading of literature a closed shop: "Great Literature" must
be of great difficulty and it can only be interpreted by people who have
had a great education. In this scheme of things, there is a direct line
of descent from the conservative Unitarians of Emerson's time
arguing that they, by virtue of their theological education, were the
only people qualified to interpret the Bible, to today's Ph.D.
degree as investing the same rights to professorial readers of secular
works.
Poirier uses Emerson to stand in opposition to this modernist trend
just as Emerson himself stood against the conservative forces in his own
day. As Emerson called upon his contemporaries to discard the past by
relying upon the self within, so does Poirier argue against
modernism's historical baggage and for a literature that is always
in a state of becoming. Poirier uses social constraints as foils, which
can be approached by troping or punning, linguistic methods of
transformation rather than acceptance, and ones that renew the writer
and reader rather than trap both within a static linguistic and
intellectual domain.
As I've suggested, Poirier re-invents Emerson as a means to
oppose those who resurrect Arnold. He does this by placing Emerson at
the head of a literary tradition extending down through William James to
Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. By reading their works with
sensitivity and grace, Poirier demonstrates how they take up
Emerson's call for renewal--how they both make literature new and
prepare for their own disappearance from it in the next generation, when
new writers must make literature new again.
Each age, Emerson wrote, must write its own books, and
Poirier's fine work is a book for our age. It should be left out in
a conspicuous place during faculty meetings.
Joel Myerson
University of South Carolina
