In the positive sciences, the natural order (of chemicals,
of physics, of life) is coordinate with and dependent upon certain principles
or laws. The periodic table is a good example of something that might seem, at
first, arbitrary – the existence of certain elements – but that can be arranged
by reference to their increasing atomic number. Thus, one can find, looking at
the atomic numbers, a gap, and that gap can actually be filled in.
But how is order, in this sense, to be transposed to
literature?
T.S. Eliot, in a very famous passage from his essay,
Tradition and the individual talent, imposed an order that lacks this
underlying principle:
“The existing monuments form an ideal order among
themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new)
work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work
arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole
existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations,
proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and
this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea
of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it
preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much tradition
and the individual talent as the present is directed by the past. And the poet
who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”
His search for the underlying principle led him, perhaps, to
Anglican Christianity, or more broadly, to reverence. I might even agree with
reverence and literature being connected by a sort of capillary network, but I
am not reverent enough, perhaps, to see how this works.
I cannot put poems or fiction or essays together and see a
gap and predict the way it will be filled – as the chemist can do with the
periodic table. This is the positivist image that is affirmed, ever so gently,
in finding the new work “supervening” on the persisting order.
One might say, then: the natural order is not the only
viable example of “order”. One might also ask: what kind of order do the
“monuments” of literature form? Does it look like a library? Is the order of
literature no more than the LOC numbering system? Or are we simply dissolving
the term ”order” into the concept of “system”?
I think Eliot is clearly not doing this. I think he would
like the order to display literary value; to be, in fact, a kind of
hierarchical social order. Yet such orders are imperfect models for literature
– precisely because the literary text is “new”, and comes from an uncertain
“family”.
In an essay on Curtius (who translated the Wasteland into
German) and Eliot, Claus Uhlig speaks of Eliot’s “theoretical belief in the
simultaneous interpenetration of times”, which is expressed not only in his
1919 essay but in the Four Quartets, where beginnings and ends are simultaneous
– from a point of view that takes resurrection to be central to our temporal
orientation to eternity.
“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot
be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It
involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly
indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth
year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness
of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write
not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the
whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the
literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order.”
The idea of the “simultaneous order” – an order charged by
the consciousness of order – is very much of the age of newspaper, radio and
the movies. I do not think Eliot referred to Gabriel Tarde in his prose – but
Tarde, in the 1890s, was very interested, from a philosophical/sociological
point of view, in how simultaneities are formed. In Opinion and Crowds, which
was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1901, Tarde wrote:
“When we submit, all unawares, to that invisible contagion
of the public of which we form a part, we tend to explain it by the simple
prestige of actuality. If today’s newspaper interests us to this point, it is
because it only tells us the latest facts, and it would be the proximity of
those facts, and not at all the simultaneity of their knowledge by us and
others that impassions us by the report. But analyse this sensation of
actuality that is so strange, the growing passion for which is one of the refined
circumstances of civilized life. What is reputed to be the “news”: is it only
what is taking place? No, it is everything that inspires a general interest in
current events, even if it is an old fact. Everything about Napoleon has been
in the news these last few years; everything fashionable is news.”
Eliot would probably have recoiled at the word fashionable;
still, this idea of the simultaneous order seems cousin to what Tarde calls
“public opinion” – a nineteenth century phrase, much as literature became,
after de Stael’s essay, a way of talking about a vast collection of texts.
Tarde’s notion of a faculty of imitation at the heart of
sociability – at the heart of all sociability, whether human or animal, whether
of Greeks or of Honeybees – makes a move that is rather hidden in Eliot’s
notion of order – that is, it describes the dynamic axis of order. One notices
that order in Eliot’s early criticism is both the object of the critic’s work
and is immanent in any literary product. These are otherwise two different
domains. As an observation about culture, this confusion of domains creates
large contradictions, but as a program for work, it creates a certain spirit in
which the most radical work can go on.
This was a very fruitful idea for Eliot the poet – out of
this idea, he derived the courage to write The Waste Land. And though, of
course, the Waste Land quotes the great works, it weaves into those great works
a cinematic montage technique, borrowing effects and rhythms from vaudeville,
popular music, and nonsense poetry that makes the approach to the Waste Land
from the “great works” a dead end – which, in one of the Possum’s more po-faced
moves, he then blessed by giving us all a crossword puzzle of footnotes.
“How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot/ with his clothes of
clerical cut”- in the guise of Dr. Jekyll. Meanwhile, his Mr. Hyde side was
busy writing Sweeney Agonistes.
An important use of Eliot’s notion of order as a program, a
method of working, crops up at about the same time as the essay on Tradition
and the Individual Talent in Eliot’s essay, Ulysses, Order and Myth.
Someday I need to do a brief piece about the way in which
Joyce was received by a number of writers – Katherine Mansfield and Virginia
Woolf, for instance, both thumbs down, Djuna Barnes, thumbs up, Eliot and Pound
and Lewis, etc. Joyce’s work as allergen/Gift.
Eliot states his case right away: “I hold this book to be
the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to
which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although I’m
not a great fan of something as ambiguous as “the present age” being given an
action to perform, I am all for Eliot’s sense. I too think Ulysses is
inescapable. It is the minor, the incorrigibly philistine element in
contemporary English writers like Martin Amis that bridles at Ulysses still. Sad
for them.
Eliot’s essay, which appeared in the Dial, was, in part, a
response to Richard Aldington’s dissing of Ulysses. Eliot is struck by Joyce’s
taking up of the Odyssey as a sort of platform for his work, which seems
entirely to skip over the very title of Balzac’s Human Comedy (hint hint). So
much is in the Dr. Jekyll vein. But the Mr Hyde comes out at the end of this
brief note on order as a method of organizing perception:
"It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious.
Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious),
ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was
impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use
the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the
modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington
so earnestly desires.""
Here we have the knot that ties together the clerical cut of
the critic’s use of the term “order” (which Eliot pursued, followed by other
pursuers, into the institutionalization of English in the academia) and the
artist, that representative of the present age, that Mr. Hyde, also used (even
in the lines of the Four Quartets and especially in Eliot’s drama). The Dr.
Jekyll mode is aristocratic, but Hyde is demotic, newspaper driven and
democratic to the end of his fingertips.
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