American Manscapes
Richard Poirier
- Manhood and the American Renaissance by David Leverenz
Cornell, 372 pp, $35.75, April 1989, ISBN 0 8014 2281 7
There is a species of literary criticism now flying high in the academy which should eventually come to roost in the Food and Drugs Administration. The FDA is that part of the United States Government charged with the labelling of products. Do they meet the minimum daily requirements of things that are good for you? Are there infectious ingredients, additives or local colourings that need to be exposed by analysis? Just the sort of thing students are being encouraged these days to ask of the literature they read. Criticism in the spirit of the FDA is intended to reduce your tolerance for golden oldies, to reveal consumer fraud going on in books that for these many years have had a reputation for supplying hard-to-get nutrients.
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[*] Stanley Cavell’s The New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein was published on 19 July by the Living Batch Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico (128 pp, £15.95 and £7.95, 945953 01 1).
Letters
Vol. 11 No. 22 · 23 November 1989
From David Leverenz
Richard Poirier’s review of Manhood and the American Renaissance (LRB, 12 October) misquotes my book so many times that his Emersonian play of mind starts to look like Jaffrey Pyncheon’s malice. He has me citing Sam Shepard as ‘Sam Shepherd’ – that’s him, not me. He says I argue that Emerson’s father bullied him ‘when the boy was eight’ – a macabre impossibility, since the father was dead by then. Another quotation looks ‘not at all clear’ and ‘fumbling’, partly because I’m raising an issue that vexes me, and partly because he changes two of the words, notably ‘presume upon’ to ‘presume from’. Later, quoting me on Ahab’s queenly personality, Poirier makes three mistakes in seven words, including an elision of ‘almost’ that lets him mock me for overlooking the infidel queen of death three chapters earlier. Yet I give her a paragraph, just a page before.
Hasty reading? Or cavalier misreading, a new post-Bloomian critical mode, to license his cheap shots? Poirier also misrepresents my book by high-lighting only my negatives. My ambivalence about the authors shows that I’m out to get them; my non-combative notes show that I’m avoiding my manhood. A double bind. Still more egregiously, he depicts me, seemingly in my own words, as an uptight heterosexual afraid of being seduced and dominated by male texts. I make such self-consciousness a mid-point in my progress toward appreciating how Whitman plays with male uprightness in Song of Myself. But Poirier has no patience with my complexities. He wants to make me one of ‘them’, the new historicists, who all look alike however much they disagree. Get to the back of the bus, he announces. Lump yourselves together with the FDA and the social historians, and leave American literature to those who can appreciate it, in all its refracted English glory.
Poirier nicely links Ahab to Cleopatra – I wish I’d thought of that – and deftly complicates a key Emerson passage. He also makes two important arguments. For him, manhood is for ever, as natural as testosterone. The only interesting issue is how writers play with their urge toward rivalrous self-display. For me, manhood is a social fiction, born of humiliation, and changing ideologically in relation to class conflicts. Secondly, for Poirier literature is intertextual, a play of voices beyond social fetters. For me, history can empower as well as constrain literary voices. Manhood and literature: not of an age but for all time, or steeped in the age they work in, like the dyer’s hand. These are real arguments. But Poirier dismisses the dyer’s hand side as ‘social brainwashing and psychic trauma’.
He says I don’t understand the stakes, implies I should have written about upscale English literary connections, insists I delight only in ideological cleansings, and twice declares I must have a deep, secret resentment of literature, like all my ilk. Others can decide whether that represents the book I wrote or Poirier’s apocalyptic vision of current critical contamination. Meanwhile, he really should have checked those quotations.
David Leverenz
Gainesville, Florida
Vol. 11 No. 23 · 7 December 1989
From Richard Poirier
David Leverenz (Letters, 23 November) wastes most of his annoyance at my long and damaging review of his Manhood and the American Renaissance on a couple of small and inessential errors of quotation and spelling, none of any demonstrable importance to my criticisms of his book, which he meanwhile fails to answer. He in fact voices agreement with most of what I say against his interpretations, his methods and the new historicist practices he finds so alluring. I appreciate, as much as he does, how slow he is to anger, but just where is the beef?
Richard Poirier
New York
