Poirier Review

8/12/2019 Poirier Review

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The oard of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Poirier's "The Performing Self"The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of ContemporaryLife by Richard PoirierReview by: Blanche H. Gelfant

Contemporary Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1973), pp. 253-259Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207657.

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POIRIER'S THE PERFORMING SELF*OIRIER'S THE PERFORMING SELF*OIRIER'S THE PERFORMING SELF*OIRIER'S THE PERFORMING SELF*OIRIER'S THE PERFORMING SELF*

Are we to deal with Richard Poirier's The PerformingSelf lightly forwhat it is or are we to criticize it seriously and severely for what itclaims to be?It is a hash of warmed-over occasional essays served up as a newdish. The passingoccasions that promptedthem, that seemed to Poirierportentous, are forgettable. A rock-and-roll festival, a new Beatlesrelease, a Modem Language Association confrontation, a superciliousTime article-to be recalled these occasions should have consequencesthat time has denied them. Time has brought only cancellation: thegroup Poiriereulogized is disbanded,MLA reassembled,the magazinerecycled. To Poirier, however, time has brought the discovery that hispieces are inherently connected, and that revised and rearrangedthey have coherence as a book.

As a book The Performing Self is into everything chic fromaffective criticism,structural inguistics,existentialpsychotherapy,pop-ular culture, and educational reform to neo-Marxistpolitics. As a per-formance it dramatizes the perils of eclecticism. Trying to put every-thing together, it falls apart; and the pun in Poirier's word pieces isarresting.Pieces they were and pieces they are; and as pieces, mainlyfor PartisanReview, they served a useful purpose in giving immediatereactions to immediate events. How useful they are as a coherent andcomprehensive critique of our culture-the claim Poirier makes for

* Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositionsin the Languages of Contemporary Life. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.203 pp. $6.50.












* Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositionsin the Languages of Contemporary Life. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.203 pp. $6.50.XIV, 2 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREIV, 2 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREIV, 2 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREIV, 2 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREIV, 2 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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them in his immodest introduction-is another matter. Naturally, thecollected essays have in common the point of view, sensibility, andstyle of their author. Unfortunately, the limitations of that view andsensibility and the monotony of that style, apparentin the pieces, be-come quirky and irksome in a book; so does the blowing up of occa-sions. It takes rare wit, passion, and perspecuity to lift the occasionalessay above its occasion and make it worth rereading and rethinking.These are not the qualities that draw us to The Performing Self; butsomething importantdoes-its theme.The PerformingSelf is about culturalrevolution, the most ambi-tious revolution of all. Political revolutions redistributepower; eco-nomic ones, wealth. Cultural revolutions change a vision of life. Theyalter the collective consciousness-or rather they are the alterationsof a collective consciousness. They have taken place when basic andshared views of the world have been challenged and overthrown fornew waysof seeing, imagining,anddescribing. This is the kind of rev-olutionPoiriercalls for in essayafteressayno matterwhat the occasion:we must learn to know the world differently ;we must make a radi-cal change in [our]historical,philosophical,and psychological assump-tions ; we must try out new styles, new tones, new movements ofmind.A call to revolution must be clarion and stirring-and specific.While telling us to rise and lose our chains, it must distinguish op-pressedfrom oppressor,us from them. In The PerformingSelf not onlyare we indistinguishablefrom them: we are one and the same, allteachers and critics of English literature.We teacher-criticshave en-slaved ourselves because we ourselves have formulatedways of think-ing oppressive to us and to literature. We must free our subject,English studies, from humanistic critics who want a chaste literaturethat avoids intercoursewith the world, and from radical critics who in-sist on commerce.Both critics are literature'sadversariesand Poirier's.Both are also his potential allies. He appeals to them to join us; if they,or we-Poirier wants us to relish. . . confusion -refuse, then we'rein danger of becoming like the Germansbefore the war. Beyond thisthreat lies that of holocaust. Unless we change our world it will ex-plode, and we will be forced to know it anew in the act and at themoment of breakdown.Our revolutionarymodels are to be the rebellious young and theblacks, exactly those, I should add, who are rejecting us. If we werecynical, we might see Poirier's message as the homely expedient, Ifyou can't lick 'em, join 'em. Not an easy matter,because as Marxists,




them in his immodest introduction-is another matter. Naturally, thecollected essays have in common the point of view, sensibility, andstyle of their author. Unfortunately, the limitations of that view andsensibility and the monotony of that style, apparentin the pieces, be-come quirky and irksome in a book; so does the blowing up of occa-sions. It takes rare wit, passion, and perspecuity to lift the occasionalessay above its occasion and make it worth rereading and rethinking.These are not the qualities that draw us to The Performing Self; butsomething importantdoes-its theme.The PerformingSelf is about culturalrevolution, the most ambi-tious revolution of all. Political revolutions redistributepower; eco-nomic ones, wealth. Cultural revolutions change a vision of life. Theyalter the collective consciousness-or rather they are the alterationsof a collective consciousness. They have taken place when basic andshared views of the world have been challenged and overthrown fornew waysof seeing, imagining,anddescribing. This is the kind of rev-olutionPoiriercalls for in essayafteressayno matterwhat the occasion:we must learn to know the world differently ;we must make a radi-cal change in [our]historical,philosophical,and psychological assump-tions ; we must try out new styles, new tones, new movements ofmind.A call to revolution must be clarion and stirring-and specific.While telling us to rise and lose our chains, it must distinguish op-pressedfrom oppressor,us from them. In The PerformingSelf not onlyare we indistinguishablefrom them: we are one and the same, allteachers and critics of English literature.We teacher-criticshave en-slaved ourselves because we ourselves have formulatedways of think-ing oppressive to us and to literature. We must free our subject,English studies, from humanistic critics who want a chaste literaturethat avoids intercoursewith the world, and from radical critics who in-sist on commerce.Both critics are literature'sadversariesand Poirier's.Both are also his potential allies. He appeals to them to join us; if they,or we-Poirier wants us to relish. . . confusion -refuse, then we'rein danger of becoming like the Germansbefore the war. Beyond thisthreat lies that of holocaust. Unless we change our world it will ex-plode, and we will be forced to know it anew in the act and at themoment of breakdown.Our revolutionarymodels are to be the rebellious young and theblacks, exactly those, I should add, who are rejecting us. If we werecynical, we might see Poirier's message as the homely expedient, Ifyou can't lick 'em, join 'em. Not an easy matter,because as Marxists,254 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE54 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE54 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE54 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE54 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE



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New Left radicals give priority to economic and political revolution,while Poirier, as an intellectual, sees cultural revolution as the neces-sary prelude .. . [to] political reformation. This difference in time-tables may have us middle-agedprofessorssitting aroundand changingourselves while the young and blacks change the world to one whichfinds us expendable.Poirierpresentsthe young and adults alike as coming dazedly outof a pastoral retreat. The young have had pastoralism forced uponthem by adult expectations and laws, while themiddle generationandparents of the young have been schooled by World War II to thinkin extraordinarily implistic terms about politics and history, to bestrangely apoliticaland ahistorical. By theirrebelliousness,an aspectof their self-transformation, he young are making us question whetheranything in our adultworld is necessary or makes sense : Be-fore asking questions about the proprietyand programsof young mili-tants who occupy buildings,burncars, andfightthe police, let's firstaskwhat kind of world surrounds these acts. I think there is no disputehere if Poirier means that we should ask practical questions about ourinstitutions.How well are they working?Are they meeting the demandsplaced upon them in the past? Can they respond to those of thepresent?But Poirier seems to be talking about a vision of life, as though itwere possible to make metaphysicsa basis for cultural reform. Life isa whirl. Nothing is stable, fixed, or permanent; nothing is inherentlynecessary or true; nothing is absolutely authoritative. Everything isquestionable, certainly the self. For Poirier identity is not merely incrisis: it can never be, despite what Erik Erikson tells us, achievedand stabilized.And despite what we thought T. S. Eliot was telling us,the past and its traditions are also mutable, changing as we inventthem anew. We must invent Eliot anew and see him as does anyoneof genuinely radical sentiment, as does Poirier, as one who disownsany notion of the past or of literature as a fixed thing, any notion thatan achieved order is ever more than provisional.This vision of life as flux is as old as Lucretius and as new asEinstein. Seventy years ago, this vision madeTheodore Dreiserdespair.Dreisersaw then the implicationsPoirier evades now: that to say thatnothing is necessary or authoritative or stable or true, but thateverything is arbitrary and contingent and fictive is to flirt seri-ously with nihilism. Not by chance, then, is Poirier drawn to JohnBarth and Thomas Pynchon while he dismisses Saul Bellow disdain-fully in a footnote. Poirier'shero, Norman Mailer, tells us bluntly that





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he has built his philosophical world on the firm conviction that noth-ing was finallyknowable (Of a Fire on the Moon). Is there, however,anythingto be known, if we could know it? This question takes us tothe brink of the abyss of nothingness where Poirier skates cheerfullyblindfolded. Perhaps he is overdazzled by the dance of molecules asthey combine and separate, create and decreate, compose and decom-pose (note his subtitle). But what may be good for molecules may notbe good for people, and if life is chaotic, disorderly,anarchic, and un-stable, then maybe for that very reason people need to find a design.Poirier's objection to the old New Criticism is that it did try to finddesign and meaning in a literarywork. His new New Criticismfocuseson the transmission of energy rather than meaning from writer toreader: We must begin to begin again with the most elementaryandtherefore the toughest questions: what must it have felt like to dothis-not to mean anything, but to do it. Poirier appropriates thevocabularyof physics to literary theory: literarytraditionis a line offorce ; a book is a manifestation of energy ;and he concludes thatif English studies is not in command of a field of knowledge it canbe in command of a field of energy.All of this is a garbled version of affective criticism, linguistics,phenomenology, and particularlyof Roland Barthes. I shall quote onesynoptic statement from Barthes that tells us Poirier's revolutionarythesis: Thus literature(it would be better henceforth, to say writing),by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a 'secret,'that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might callcounter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrestmeaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science,the law. Like Barthes, Poirier has learned to distinguish between a

work -a completed text that objectifies a meaning-and writing ;between a book and those manifestationsof energy one might call[and Barthes clearly did call] ecriture. Instead of a work, we have aperformance,for which the appropriatecritical question is simply, Isit fun ?I wish Poirier's book were fun, but it is laborious reading.Its unrelentinghigh moral tone becomes oppressive and finally insult-ing; and the final insult is the mystificationof ideas. Even the key termperformance s protean-though I suppose we might consider thatfittingin a book that insists that nothing is stable. Robert Frost, Poiriertells us, consideredhimself a performer: Mywhole anxiety is for my-self as a performer.Am I any good? Frost means by performancepoetic execution-being able to do as a poet what he wants to do









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within the poetic restrictionshe has placed upon himself: for instance,the demands of an interlocking rhyme scheme and a triple rhyme in afour-line stanza. This performance can be appreciated by formalisticcriticism;and whenever Poirier acts as literarycritic rather than theo-rist, that is as exemplaryreader,he engages in formalisticand semanticcriticism. Notably he does so best when he says he is not, as in hisdemonstration of the ambiguities of language in the Beatles- tripmeans journey and guess what else? But the performingself is not, asFrost's question would imply, a self who performs. Rather it is a selfcreatedby and emerging through performance,a self that cannot, doesnot, exist prior to expression.The tenuityof the self-the subjectof almost every modem socialdiscipline-is basic to Poirier's argument, and it is a commonplace.In fiction as in life we suffer a loss of self, lack substantive and con-tinuous reliable identity. Like the sculptor who shapes a human formout of marble, the writer shapes a self out of the recalcitrant materialat hand-language. Language is the medium of the writer,as the bodyis of the danceror the instrumentof the musician;language allows himto perform in a self-discovering,self-watching . . . self-pleasuringact. At the same time, language is opposing and intransigent,resistinghis attemptsto shape a self through its built-in conservativepressures,the inheritedstructuring hat imposesupon him its own forms,wouldmold him to its own persistent stereotypes. Thus the problem for themoder writeris that of organizinga self and a destiny for a self with-in the contexts that impose a self and a destiny. Performance entailsthe struggles of the writer against these contexts-the imposing struc-tures of language; the energies of his performanceshould vitalize andexhilarate the reader;the infusion of the writer'senergy should be thereader'smeaning and release. The romantic notion of a suppressedselfunderlies Poirier's thesis, as it does all revolutionary texts; only nowthe suppressiveagent-and also the only potentially liberating one-is language itself, at last autonomous.Looking always for the same strugglewithin the creative act, andasking the same critical question about writing, Poirier finds that writ-ers as apparently different as Norman Mailer and T. S. Eliot, or asJohn Barth, Henry James, and James Joyce, have so much in commonas performing selves that they seem almost indistinguishable. If fornothing else, I recommend Poirier'sbook for his transformationof theelegant figure of Eliot which becomes more and more unfamiliarandyet strangelyfamiliar as it becomes more and more inseparablefromthe stalwart, raffish, moder figure of Mailer. Mailer is the paradig-





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matic performing self; Poirier's autobiographical criticism suits himperfectly and was perhapsfashioned with him in mind. Self-advertise-ment is Mailer'sart, but surelyEliot, Joyce, and James should be con-ceded some of the impersonalitythey valued. One had to learn to dis-tinguish. To distinguish and distinguish and distinguish -so thoughtSaul Bellow's Mr. Sammler;but then, as I mentioned, Poirier seemslittle taken with Bellow.All of Poirier's ideas are derivative. This is no harsh criticism;there is little originality around. All of the ideas suffer obfuscation,and this is too bad, because we have to suffer the peculiarities ofPoirier'sstyle to end up with murky versions of ideas that once werecrystalline. Even a partial list of contemporary thinkers to whomPoirier is indebted would read like an honor roll: Erikson, Lifton,McLuhan, Marcuse, Chomsky, Leavis, Frye, Mailer, Barthes-not tomention Kenneth Burke who should be acknowledgedfor his germinalideas on language as action. Most of these writers do not scold us asmuch as Poirierdoes, and perhapsthis is his contribution-to be high-minded, monitory, and polemic.Out of all his ideas on our cultural crisis, I wish he would havedeveloped that on the paranoic style in American life and literature,a subjectbroached in differentways by McLuhan and Mailer. Why arewe so paranoic, our literature so dominated by characters who feelthemselves menaced by sinister, if not always definable, forces thatthreaten their autonomy?Poirier speaks of early implantations n ourheads of stereotypes-mainly those of mass media; when we thinkwe are acting freely we are merely paying humiliatingobeisance tosomeone else, to something else, that has moved in on us and takenover. This is not a peculiarly modem notion having to do with tech-nology and the strange powers in our world: characters in Hawthorneand Poe were as subject to haunting influences as Mailer's Steve Ro-jack pursuedby the Moon and the Mafia. Was it our vast wildernessfull of unseen lurking menace, then our uncontrollable cities-ourphysical environment-that generateddiffusefear? Or was it the possi-bilities for freedom?Characterswho think they are free are susceptibleto paranoic fears when somehow they are never free enough. Impliedin the convoluted matters of The PerformingSelf is a question I wouldlike to ask bluntly: How free is free? The romantic aspiresto uncon-ditioned, unconditional self-determination;ideally we should alwaysbe self-creatingperformingselves. In Poirier'sworld vision, that is allwe can be if all the stable props are pulled out-not even selves butonly energies for shaping a temporary protean self. Is this freedom or




matic performing self; Poirier's autobiographical criticism suits himperfectly and was perhapsfashioned with him in mind. Self-advertise-ment is Mailer'sart, but surelyEliot, Joyce, and James should be con-ceded some of the impersonalitythey valued. One had to learn to dis-tinguish. To distinguish and distinguish and distinguish -so thoughtSaul Bellow's Mr. Sammler;but then, as I mentioned, Poirier seemslittle taken with Bellow.All of Poirier's ideas are derivative. This is no harsh criticism;there is little originality around. All of the ideas suffer obfuscation,and this is too bad, because we have to suffer the peculiarities ofPoirier'sstyle to end up with murky versions of ideas that once werecrystalline. Even a partial list of contemporary thinkers to whomPoirier is indebted would read like an honor roll: Erikson, Lifton,McLuhan, Marcuse, Chomsky, Leavis, Frye, Mailer, Barthes-not tomention Kenneth Burke who should be acknowledgedfor his germinalideas on language as action. Most of these writers do not scold us asmuch as Poirierdoes, and perhapsthis is his contribution-to be high-minded, monitory, and polemic.Out of all his ideas on our cultural crisis, I wish he would havedeveloped that on the paranoic style in American life and literature,a subjectbroached in differentways by McLuhan and Mailer. Why arewe so paranoic, our literature so dominated by characters who feelthemselves menaced by sinister, if not always definable, forces thatthreaten their autonomy?Poirier speaks of early implantations n ourheads of stereotypes-mainly those of mass media; when we thinkwe are acting freely we are merely paying humiliatingobeisance tosomeone else, to something else, that has moved in on us and takenover. This is not a peculiarly modem notion having to do with tech-nology and the strange powers in our world: characters in Hawthorneand Poe were as subject to haunting influences as Mailer's Steve Ro-jack pursuedby the Moon and the Mafia. Was it our vast wildernessfull of unseen lurking menace, then our uncontrollable cities-ourphysical environment-that generateddiffusefear? Or was it the possi-bilities for freedom?Characterswho think they are free are susceptibleto paranoic fears when somehow they are never free enough. Impliedin the convoluted matters of The PerformingSelf is a question I wouldlike to ask bluntly: How free is free? The romantic aspiresto uncon-ditioned, unconditional self-determination;ideally we should alwaysbe self-creatingperformingselves. In Poirier'sworld vision, that is allwe can be if all the stable props are pulled out-not even selves butonly energies for shaping a temporary protean self. Is this freedom or258 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE58 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE58 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE58 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE58 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE



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