Ahead of their time
Richard Poirier on creativity, genius and American culture
Archived article from Oct 1, 1999
By Amy Vames
American writers, more than any other writers in the world, are ambitiously experimental in their works, constantly rejecting traditional modes of expression, says Richard Poirier, professor emeritus of English and founding editor of Raritan, a quarterly journal published at Rutgers. Poirier's new book, "Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a collection of essays about works by American authors that "manage to resist translation into formulaic meanings," as he writes in his prologue. "They want, one might say, to be always and forever ahead of the time."
"I think American literature is the experimental literature of the West," Poirier said in a recent interview. "Modernism in English really begins with Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot, who moved to Europe and were influenced by European writing and painting. In the English language, we are the leading experimentalists in this century, with the exception of Yeats and Joyce -- but even Joyce was anticipated by Melville's 'Moby Dick.' "
A major thread running through the 19 essays is Poirier's belief in an Emersonian ideal in American writing. That ideal emphasizes language and thinking as a process, rather than as a fixed, static end product. Emersonian writers are constantly re-creating themselves through language and expression, Poirier contends.
While most of the essays focus on such canonical writers as Walt Whitman, Eliot, Henry and William James, Stein, Norman Mailer and Marianne Moore, Poirier also throws into the pot two rather unexpected pieces on singer Bette Midler and choreographer George Balanchine. The Midler essay looks at the singer's 1975
Broadway show, which seemed to both celebrate and parody the nostalgic strains in popular song and entertainment. "What Midler wants to say to the audience is that she, no less than they, is in a critical relationship to her material and her performance," Poirier writes. "She is inviting us to participate in her artistries more than in her feelings."
Poirier also takes an unexpected turn with a discourse on the obscure but fascinating diarist Arthur Inman. Inman, a hypochondriacal eccentric, wrote an estimated 17 million words about his life and the world around him from 1919 to 1963, the year he committed suicide. The copious work was eventually distilled to about one-tenth its original size and published. The diary, Poirier argues, is important because it was shaped by Inman's own life, not by the formal writing structures most authors would follow. "One reason Inman's diary is remarkable is that by being essentially formless, being without the mediating effects of an elaborated style or of set patterns, it brings us flatly face-to-face with Inman the writer," Poirier asserts.
Poirier, long considered one of America's foremost literary critics, is clearly comfortable with taking risks in his own writing and with Raritan, the journal he has edited for the past 18 years. Poirier began Raritan in 1981 when Partisan Review, which he had brought to the university in 1963, moved to Boston University. Poirier wanted Raritan to be different from other literary journals. "The writing is of a highly personal nature by very learned people who at the same time are not overly bound to any given position or theory of writing," he says.
While many of the essays deal with traditional literary concerns -- such as recent pieces on "Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism" and "Ralph Ellison, Race and American Culture" -- other writers look at architecture, religion, dance, film and nature. The quarterly also includes poetry, book reviews and humorous pieces, such as the essay by Georgina Kleege in the spring 1999 issue about her struggle to evict a raccoon from her house. Through the years, Raritan has published works by some of the world's most notable writers, including Harold Bloom, Edward Said, Annie Dillard and Arnold Rampersad.
"Raritan was never meant to be read only by scholars," says Suzanne Hyman, the recently retired managing editor of the journal. "We were always aiming for a larger audience. Dick's feeling was that a lawyer or an accountant should be able to read it." Or an actor: Warren Beatty was a subscriber for a while, she recalls.
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