The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Poirier's "The Performing Self" The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life by Richard Poirier Review by: Blanche H. Gelfant Contemporary Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1973), pp. 253-259 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207657 . Accessed: 10/03/2014 05:56
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Wisconsin Press and The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

POIRIER'S

THE

PERFORMING

SELF*

Are we to deal with Richard Poirier's The Performing Self lightly for what it is or are we to criticize it seriously and severely for what it claims to be? It is a hash of warmed-overoccasional essays served up as a new dish. The passing occasions that promptedthem, that seemed to Poirier portentous, are forgettable. A rock-and-roll festival, a new Beatles release, a Modem Language Association confrontation, a supercilious Time article-to be recalled these occasions should have consequences that time has denied them. Time has brought only cancellation: the group Poirier eulogized is disbanded, MLA reassembled, the magazine recycled. To Poirier, however, time has brought the discovery that his "pieces" are inherently connected, and that revised and rearranged they have coherence as a book. As a book The Performing Self is "into" everything chic from affective criticism, structurallinguistics, existential psychotherapy,popular culture, and educational reform to neo-Marxist politics. As a performance it dramatizes the perils of eclecticism. Trying to put everything together, it falls apart; and the pun in Poirier's word "pieces" is arresting. Pieces they were and pieces they are; and as pieces, mainly for Partisan Review, they served a useful purpose in giving immediate reactions to immediate events. How useful they are as a coherent and comprehensive critique of our culture-the claim Poirier makes for
* Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971. 203 pp. $6.50. XIV, 2

CONTEMPORARY

LITERATURE

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

them in his immodest introduction-is another matter. Naturally, the collected essays have in common the point of view, sensibility, and style of their author. Unfortunately, the limitations of that view and sensibility and the monotony of that style, apparent in the pieces, become quirky and irksome in a book; so does the blowing up of occasions. It takes rare wit, passion, and perspecuity to lift the occasional essay above its occasion and make it worth rereading and rethinking. These are not the qualities that draw us to The Performing Self; but something important does-its theme. The Performing Self is about cultural revolution, the most ambitious revolution of all. Political revolutions redistribute power; economic ones, wealth. Cultural revolutions change a vision of life. They alter the collective consciousness-or rather they are the alterations of a collective consciousness. They have taken place when basic and shared views of the world have been challenged and overthrown for new "waysof seeing, imagining, and describing."This is the kind of revolution Poiriercalls for in essay after essay no matterwhat the occasion: "we must learn to know the world differently";we must "make a radical change in [our] historical, philosophical, and psychological assumptions"; we must "try out new styles, new tones, new movements of mind." A call to revolution must be clarion and stirring-and specific. While telling us to rise and lose our chains, it must distinguish oppressedfrom oppressor,us from them. In The PerformingSelf not only are we indistinguishable from them: we are one and the same, all teachers and critics of English literature. We teacher-critics have enslaved ourselves because we ourselves have formulated ways of thinking oppressive to us and to literature. We must free our subject, English studies, from humanistic critics who want a chaste literature that avoids intercoursewith the world, and from radical critics who insist 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're in danger of becoming like the Germans before the war." Beyond this threat lies that of holocaust. Unless we change our world it will "explode," and we will be forced to know it anew "in the act and at the moment of breakdown." Our revolutionary models are to be the rebellious young and the blacks, exactly those, I should add, who are rejecting us. If we were cynical, we might see Poirier's message as the homely expedient, "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em." Not an easy matter, because as Marxists,
254 |
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

New Left radicals give priority to economic and political revolution, while Poirier, as an intellectual, sees cultural revolution as "the necessary prelude .. . [to] political reformation." This difference in timetables may have us middle-aged professors sitting around and changing ourselves while the young and blacks change the world to one which finds us expendable. Poirier presents the young and adults alike as coming dazedly out of a pastoral retreat. The young have had pastoralism forced upon them by adult expectations and laws, while "the middle generation and parents of the young" have been schooled by World War II to think in "extraordinarilysimplistic terms about politics and history," to be strangely "apolitical and ahistorical."By their rebelliousness, an aspect of their self-transformation,the young are making us question whether anything in our "adult world" is "necessary"or "makes sense": "Before asking questions about the propriety and programs of young militants who occupy buildings, burn cars, and fight the police, let's first ask what kind of world surrounds these acts." I think there is no dispute here if Poirier means that we should ask practical questions about our institutions.How well are they working? Are they meeting the demands placed upon them in the past? Can they respond to those of the present? But Poirier seems to be talking about a vision of life, as though it were possible to make metaphysics a basis for cultural reform. Life is a whirl. Nothing is stable, fixed, or permanent; nothing is inherently necessary or true; nothing is absolutely authoritative. Everything is questionable, certainly the self. For Poirier identity is not merely in crisis: it can never be, despite what Erik Erikson tells us, achieved and stabilized. And despite what we thought T. S. Eliot was telling us, the past and its traditions are also mutable, changing as we "invent" them anew. We must invent Eliot anew and see him as does "anyone of genuinely radical sentiment," as does Poirier, as one who "disowns any notion of the past or of literature as a fixed thing, any notion that an achieved order is ever more than provisional." This vision of life as flux is as old as Lucretius and as new as Einstein. Seventy years ago, this vision made Theodore Dreiser despair. Dreiser saw then the implications Poirier evades now: that to say that nothing is "necessary"or "authoritative"or "stable"or "true,"but that everything is "arbitrary"and "contingent" and fictive is to flirt seriously with nihilism. Not by chance, then, is Poirier drawn to John Barth and Thomas Pynchon while he dismisses Saul Bellow disdainfully in a footnote. Poirier's hero, Norman Mailer, tells us bluntly that
THE PERFORMING SELF

255

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

he has "built his philosophical world on the firm conviction that nothing was finally knowable" (Of a Fire on the Moon). Is there, however, anything to be known, if we could know it? This question takes us to the brink of the abyss of nothingness where Poirier skates cheerfully blindfolded. Perhaps he is overdazzled by the dance of molecules as they combine and separate, create and decreate, compose and decompose (note his subtitle). But what may be good for molecules may not be good for people, and if life is chaotic, disorderly, anarchic, and unstable, 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 find design and meaning in a literarywork. His new New Criticism focuses on the transmission of energy rather than meaning from writer to reader: "We must begin to begin again with the most elementary and therefore the toughest questions: what must it have felt like to do this-not to mean anything, but to do it." Poirier appropriates the vocabulary of physics to literary theory: literary tradition is "a line of force"; a book is "a manifestation of energy"; and he concludes that "if English studies is not in command of a field of knowledge it can be 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 one synoptic statement from Barthes that tells us Poirier's revolutionary thesis: "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 call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning 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 manifestations of energy one might call [and Barthes clearly did call] ecriture." Instead of a work, we have a performance, for which the appropriatecritical question is simply, Is it "fun"? I wish Poirier's book were fun, but it is laborious reading. Its unrelenting high moral tone becomes oppressive and finally insulting; and the final insult is the mystificationof ideas. Even the key term "performance"is protean-though I suppose we might consider that fitting in a book that insists that nothing is stable. Robert Frost, Poirier tells us, considered himself a performer: "My whole anxiety is for myself as a performer. Am I any good?" Frost means by performance poetic execution-being able to do as a poet what he wants to do
256
[
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

within the poetic restrictionshe has placed upon himself: for instance, the demands of an interlocking rhyme scheme and a triple rhyme in a four-line stanza. This performance can be appreciated by formalistic criticism; and whenever Poirier acts as literary critic rather than theorist, that is as exemplaryreader, he engages in formalistic and semantic criticism. Notably he does so best when he says he is not, as in his demonstration of the ambiguities of language in the Beatles-"trip" means journey and guess what else? But the performing self is not, as Frost's question would imply, a self who performs. Rather it is a self created by and emerging through performance, a self that cannot, does not, exist prior to expression. The tenuity of the self-the subject of almost every modem social discipline-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 continuous reliable identity. Like the sculptor who shapes a human form out of marble, the writer shapes a self out of the recalcitrant material at hand-language. Language is the medium of the writer, as the body is of the dancer or the instrumentof the musician; language allows him to perform in a "self-discovering, self-watching . . . self-pleasuring" act. At the same time, language is opposing and intransigent, resisting his attempts to shape a self through its built-in conservative pressures, the "inheritedstructuring"that imposes upon him its own forms, would mold him to its own persistent stereotypes. Thus the problem for the moder writer is that of "organizinga self and a destiny for a self within the contexts that impose a self and a destiny." Performance entails the struggles of the writer against these contexts-the imposing structures of language; the energies of his performance should vitalize and exhilarate the reader; the infusion of the writer's energy should be the reader'smeaning and release. The romantic notion of a suppressedself underlies Poirier's thesis, as it does all revolutionary texts; only now the suppressive agent-and also the only potentially liberating oneis language itself, at last autonomous. Looking always for the same struggle within the creative act, and asking the same critical question about writing, Poirier finds that writers as apparently different as Norman Mailer and T. S. Eliot, or as John Barth, Henry James, and James Joyce, have so much in common as performing selves that they seem almost indistinguishable. If for nothing else, I recommend Poirier's book for his transformationof the elegant figure of Eliot which becomes more and more unfamiliar and yet strangely familiar as it becomes more and more inseparable from the stalwart, raffish, moder figure of Mailer. Mailer is the paradigTHE PERFORMING SELF 1 257

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

matic performing self; Poirier's autobiographical criticism suits him perfectly and was perhaps fashioned with him in mind. Self-advertisement is Mailer's art, but surely Eliot, Joyce, and James should be conceded some of the impersonalitythey valued. "One had to learn to distinguish. To distinguish and distinguish and distinguish"-so thought Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler; but then, as I mentioned, Poirier seems little 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 of Poirier's style to end up with murky versions of ideas that once were crystalline. Even a partial list of contemporary thinkers to whom Poirier is indebted would read like an honor roll: Erikson, Lifton, McLuhan, Marcuse, Chomsky, Leavis, Frye, Mailer, Barthes-not to mention Kenneth Burke who should be acknowledged for his germinal ideas on language as action. Most of these writers do not scold us as much as Poirier does, and perhaps this is his contribution-to be highminded, monitory, and polemic. Out of all his ideas on our cultural crisis, I wish he would have developed that on the paranoic style in American life and literature, a subject broached in differentways by McLuhan and Mailer. Why are we so paranoic, our literature so dominated by characters who feel themselves menaced by sinister, if not always definable, forces that threaten their autonomy? Poirier speaks of early "implantationsin our heads" of stereotypes-mainly those of mass media; when we think we are acting freely we are merely paying "humiliating obeisance" to someone else, to something else, that has moved in on us and taken over. This is not a peculiarly modem notion having to do with technology and the strange powers in our world: charactersin Hawthorne and Poe were as subject to haunting influences as Mailer's Steve Rojack pursued by the Moon and the Mafia. Was it our vast wilderness full of unseen lurking menace, then our uncontrollable cities-our physical environment-that generated diffuse fear? Or was it the possibilities for freedom? Characterswho think they are free are susceptible to paranoic fears when somehow they are never free enough. Implied in the convoluted matters of The PerformingSelf is a question I would like to ask bluntly: How free is free? The romantic aspires to unconditioned, unconditional self-determination; ideally we should always be self-creating performing selves. In Poirier's world vision, that is all we can be if all the stable props are pulled out-not even selves but only energies for shaping a temporary protean self. Is this freedom or
258

CONTEMPORARY

LITERATURE

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

a terrible and maybe impossible burden? A final word on cultural revolutions. They are not to be had on demand. Cultural revolutions occur when we are not looking. When we start talking about them, they have already taken place. Poirier is calling for a change in sensibility and world view that has occurred, though there are stragglerswho can be enjoined to jump on the bandwagon. Poirier'sbandwagon is too heavily freighted and is going everywhere at once, and for this reason it may be a dangerous vehicle. "Go with the flow," the young chant, and the flow is dissolution. Things fall apart, and Poirier tells us our moral responsibility is to help "dismantle." To look for a design in a poem, or a person, or an institution, is going against the tide of our times. We should let the loosening tides sweep us along. Poirier is all for energy and flow, but when "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"-exciting and energizing as it may be-the tide may be blood-dimmed. Yeats should not be our authority on revolution, but neither, I think, should Poirier until he takes a more responsible position towards the value of meaning and the meaning of value. I am concerned not only with the agility, fun, and energy that creates a self, but also with the self that is created. Blanche H. Gelfant Dartmouth College

THE

PERFORMING

SELF

I 259

This content downloaded from 152.78.38.253 on Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:56:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions