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[174]
conscious "system
of representations," a notion probably more appropriate but which
also entails a large epistemological problem. It is not at all evident
what sort of "truth is produced by a critique of ideology, except
that such truth aspires to overcome the philosophical antitheses between
fact and value, the scientific and the emotive, or knowledge and intereest.
(3) At the least the critique of ideology discloses the complicity of
interest in nearly any discourse whatever; and if the process of canon-formation
is not excluded from the system of ideological production, it should
be possible to move beyoned the massively resistant tautology of literary
history: that works ought to be canonized because they are good.
Canon-formation
is nevertheless not an obvious production of ideology; the "interests"
of Eliot and Brooks -Eliot's Christian authoritarianism or Brooks' association
with the neoagrarian movement-are elsewhere expressed quite openly.
Though I will glance at some rather more opinionated texts, I want to
argue that such texts have not been nearly so effective as those canon-making
essays whose serene judgments upon poetic careers or complex close readings
seem far removed from the realm of interest, indeed whose very claim
upon our admiration is their detachment, their disinterestedness. At
the moment, however, I am not concerned with proving that such essays
are not disinterested (that proof will take care of itself) but only
'with pointing out that group whose interest is aroused and expressed
b), the evaluation of literature; this group is what we know as literary
culture, a marginal elite.
The authority of
the culture, what maintains it as both marginal and elite. is not to
he distinguished from the authority of the canon. For some reason sortie
literature is worth preserving. We would not expect this or any other
conception of authority to have escaped the vicissitudes of social hierarchy,
but this is just the claim of the canonical text. which is assumed to
be innately, superior. Indeed we refuse (and this refusal is grounded
in much critical theory) to think of the literary work as good or bad
for some extrinsic reason; such a possibility can be conceived only
as propaganda or censorship. the hot areas of ideological production.
When I say. then, that it seems unlikely that the formation of canons
is wholly removed from the field of ideological conflict, not much is
being asserted. The claim to judge intrinsically, as though the value
of a literary work were not mediated by any other concern. has always
been suspect. If it were possible to form a canon of texts with the
easy assurance that only the best literature survives. such a canon
would flare a structure and genealogy like that of aristocracy in its
idealized form: the "rule of the best."
[175]
While the social
form of aristocracy has declined, the canon has retained its self-image
as an aristocracy of texts. It would be hard to give up this image,
as the pure authority of great literature may be the only image of pure
authority we have. Yet we can "modernize" canon-formation
in just the way that aristocracy was transformed from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth century, by all the varieties of persuasion that are
supposed give us a rationalized authority. If we must be persuaded of
a work's authority, then it follows that we can be wrongly persuaded.
The possibility of error is just the precondition of literary culture,
which defends the canon and defends itself.
The question I
would like to pose about the canon of Eliot can be stated in terms that
make unambiguous the ideological burden of canon-formation. For Eliot
told us nothing less than that we had been wrongly The rediscovery of
a marginal elite standing in an apocryphal to the established canon
marks a shifting of authority within the literary culture, as it adjusts
to the instabilities of its marginal position. But this hypothesis necessitates
an inquiry into the principles of Eliot's anon-making criticism.
2. Orthodoxy
Eliot'scanonical
motives are of course most visible where his judgments are revisionary.
Consider, for example, this very typical evaluation of John Dryden.
whose virtues are displayed by contrasting them with Milton's defects:
The great advantage
of Dryden over Milton is that while the former is always in 'control
of his ascent, and can rise or fall at will... the latter has elected
a perch from which he cannot afford to fall, and from which he is in
danger of slipping.(3)
Eliot's image of
flight implies an ironic revision of normative values, because it is
not actually the works of the two poets which are being compared but
the choices which precede composition, the 'perches" from which
flight is undertaken. The momentary irrelevance of the works themselves
discovers a system of value which is already more broadly based than
any putative ;aesthetic" and which will underlie much more than
an attack' on Milton.
The effect of the
evaluative system can be measured by the deceptive lucidity of Eliot's
critical prose:' "[Dryden's] powers were. we believe, wider, but
no greater, than Milton's: he was confined by boundaries as impassable,
though less strait"(SE, p. 273). Does this/mean Dryden's powers
were as great and wider than Milton's? The neoclassical-sounding rhetoric
can be said to do the revolutionary job of displacing the axis of
[176]
evaluation from
the vertical-greatness, height-to the horizontal-width, breadth. The
latter figure calls out to its negative image-straitness, narrowness-but
with a gesture of reconciliation. Poetic ambition is certainly limited
(the sense of Eliot's impassable boundaries}, and it would seem to be
the ground of Dryden's superiority that he accepts these limitations.
His poetry is an art of "mak[ing] the small into the great' (SE,
p. 269). Eliot'sdiscrimination recapitulates the conventional language
by which the canon is divided into major and minor poets and at the
same time reverses the polarity of value. He cannot say that Dryden
is a greater poet than Milton, but he can suggest that in valuing Milton
we have perhaps been valuing the wrong thing. The problem is much larger
than the relative status of Milton or Dryden, because it liberates what
may be called the canonical engine of Eliot's criticism: the impassable
boundary between major and minor.
Impasse is an overdetermined
concept in Eliot's career; and I would like to untangle here the several
strands of this determination, beginning with a historical example of
lifelong interest to Eliot--the decline of poetic drama since the seventeenth
century. (4) The existence of the impasse gives Eliot his darker version
of literary history, the essay titled "The Possibility of a Poetic
Drama," which can be set against the better-known "Tradition
and the Individual Talent." I quote first two familiar sentences
from the latter essay, with the object of calling attention to the rhetoric
of canonization:
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'(5)
The idealization
of the very order of the monuments means that what the new poet threatens
is disorder; he must present himself to his predecessors with a demeanor
of conformity if he is to have any chance of altering them or of being
admitted to their company. Few writers of our century seem more oppressed
than Eliot by the feeling that the canon is by its very nature closed
and that it can be reopened only by the most elaborate and even covert
of strategies? I read the famous doctrine of impersonality as one such
strategy. a sacrifice demanded upon the threshold ,of the temple. The
"continual self-sacrifice," or "extinction of personality,"
is a preliminary stance on the way to a more subversive posture of ironic
modesty, a posture which both contains and expresses quite a violent
revisionist impulse.
[177]
Once Eliot formulates
the doctrine of impersonality, he points out of his argument: "There
remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation
to [the first subject of the essay] the sense of tradition." Then
follows the analogy of the catalyst, which accomplishes just this reconnection.
The mind of the poet is merely the shred of platinum in the larger container
in which two gases are mixed; but this mind contained is shortly presented
as the container itself: 'The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for
seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain
there until all the particles which tan unite to form a new compound
are present together" (SW, p. 55). The reader is intended to understand
by this analogy the way in which the deliberate puzzle of tradition
and the individual talent is being solved. The impersonal mind is emptied
of content (mere emotion, personality), and it thereby becomes only
'form, the colorless beaker in a laboratory of art. Form has already
been monumentalized in "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"
because it is essentially what the dead poets have become, what Eliot
calls "ideal order." What they demand is conformity, which
surely has a charged relation to that other word for the poem-as container.
The analogy is geometrically scaled, for the form of any. one poem is
a small version of literature itself; but in relation to that whole,
it is a figure for the mind of the poet-both the container and the shred
of platinum which has been surreptitiously placed into the otherwise
stable mixture. the ideal order of the dead poets. Form and content.
container and contained, have just this predictable tendency to exchange
places, and Eliot's approach to the sealed canon is wholly dependent
upon this useful ambiguity.
If the successful
work of art represents a containing of emotion, or conforming to the
form which is tradition itself, we are told in "The Possibility
of a Poetic Drama" that some forms are inherently more capable
of this project than others and that. surprisingly, the drama is most
capable of all. it is the drama which stands both as the basic principle
of canon-formation and as the arbitrary guarantor of the open-endedness
of the canon: "Nevertheless. the drama is perhaps the most permanent,
is capable of greater variation and of expressing more varied types
.of society, than any other. It varied considerably in England alone;
bat when one day it was discovered lifeless. subsequent forms which
had enjoyed a transitory life were dead too" (SW, p. 61). It would
be very interesting to understand the "death of a form, but the
easy mystification of 'it was discovered lifeless' points to Eliot's
more immediate concern with the effects of this demise. The only hint
the essay gives us about causes is contained in a surprising sentence,
which sets the drama in opposition: to tradition: "The Elizabethan
Age in England was able to absorb a great quantity of new thoughts and
images, almost dispensing with tradition. because it had this great
form of its own which imposed itself on everything that came to it"
(SW, p. 62). This
view of tradition
[178]
is not easily reconciled
with that of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," but the
rhetoric is fundamentally the same. The Elizabethan freedom from the
burden of tradition is the gift mainly of one form, the blank-verse
drama, and this fact implies conversely that tradition in the more famous
essay is a palliative for the absence of form. The "extinction
of personality" likewise finds its counterpart in "The Possibility
of a Poetic Drama" with Eliot's reflection that the virtues of
dramatic form are so great that the personality of the poet is entirely
(and happily) submerged. How fortunate to be Shakespeare-not because
Shakespeare is great himself but simply because he is the lucky inheritor
of a form, the to see its almost limitless possibilities. "We should
see then how little each poet had to do; only so much as would make
a play his, only what was really essential to make it different from
anyone else's" (SW, p. 64)
In the next paragraph
Eliot makes an unexpected turn (though in a deeper sense, the digression
is determined) to the subject of minor poets:
Now in a formless
age there is very little hope for the minor poet to do anything worth
doing; and when I say minor I very good poets indeed: such as filled
the Greek anthology and the Elizabethan song-books; even a Herrick;
but not merely second-rate poets. for Denham and Waller have quite
another importance, occupying points in the development of a major
form. When everything is set out for the minor poet to do. he may
quite frequently come upon some trouvaille, even in the drama: Peele
and Brome are examples. Under the present conditions, tile mirror
poet has too much to do. [SW, p. 64]
The reader might
well be bewildered by the introduction of this subject, for which no
transition is provided. Surely the situation is not different for the
major poet.: Eliot is saying that 'a formless age is one in which minor
poetry is all but impossible"-but is this condition unfortunate
only for the minor poet? The situation of the minor poet has been taken
as normative, or even ideal; in the most desirable of historical circumstances,
the individual poet has less to do, and the form more and more. Ideally
all poets are minor in a world of major form, and one might argue that
this conclusion follows inevitably from Eliot's conception of literary
history after Shakespeare and Donne, a history which continues to produce
major poets while undergoing a simultaneous atrophy of major form. I
do not know how else to interpret a remark such as this from "Tradition
and the Individual Talent": "The poet must be unconscious
of the main current. which does not flow invariably through the most
distinguished reputations" (SW, p. 51). Already in 1919 Eliot is
revising the canon.
Most of these revisions
are well known, but it is not generally acknowledged that Eliot's principle
of revision is the high valuation of the
[179]
minor stance. Eliot's
revisions-his preference for the Metaphysicals and Dryden over Spenser
and Milton, for the Jacobean dramatists over Shakespeare, and his rejection
of virtually all Romantic and Victorian poetry-can be projected from
the inner argument of the early essays.(7) The influence of the essays
is incalculable, even when their particular theories may be disputed,
and despite various recantings by Eliot himself. The scope of his influence
is in part attributable to the paradoxical ironizing of the minor stance:
the thesis of minority is first conveyed by the haughty and authoritative
prose of The Sacred Wood. The discordant but revealing stance of the
early work is refined into the civilized modesty of later essays, establishing
in this transformation the dominant tone of twentieth-century criticism,
its ambivalent deference to literature.(8)
At any rate, the
grounding of Eliot's canonical principles in a reestimation of the minor
poets is a demonstrable fact. It should be possible to show that his
emphasis on craft over inspiration, his conception of wit, of poetry
as "objective correlative," and above all the idea of the
· dissociation of sensibility' are theories conditioned by his
defense of minority, devised in response to the closure of the canon,
whose monolithic enclosure is penetrable only by a strategic modesty.
In his essay on Andrew Marvell, this covert system of canon-formation
is for once made quite explicit, despite the rhetorical effort of denial:
This virtue of
wit is not a peculiar quality of minor poets, or of the minor poets
of one age or one school: it is an intellectual quality which perhaps
only becomes noticeable by itself, in the work of lesser poets. Furthermore
it is absent from tile work of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. on whose
poetry nineteenth-century criticism has unconsciously been based. [SW,
p. 262](9)
We do not know.
however. which major poets are capable of the wit here praised, and
the concept functions more as an exclusive than an inclusive principle.
The result is an alternative canon. to which Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats,
and many others do not belong. The status of this canon is not competitive
(at least not immediately); rather, it rises like a phantom structure
alongside the already finished house of literature. But this image expresses
the canon's quality as an inexplicit formulation of Eliot 's prose.
Its real status is precisely that of Donne's poetry, which circulated
among a coterie of admirers. or a marginal elite.
The long-deferred
recognition of this elite (and "dissociation of sensibility"
provides the historical explanation of this deferral) returns us to
the problem of impasse, because the marginality of Eliot's canon in
English literary history), must be what is overcome in this recognition.
In retrospect, it seems likely that the impasse of verse drama and the
related unhappy schism of sensibility are only secondarily theories
about the seventeenth century: they are primarily displacements of the
recent impasse
[180]
of English poetry
after the turn of the century. But the proper identification of that
bottleneck does not entirely clear up the constituents of the overdetermination.
We are still puzzled by the need for such a theory at all, after so
successful a break in Eliot's own early poetry from an exhausted tradition.
The continued elaboration of a degenerative literary history suggests
that a discontinuity has not been achieved, that the impasse prevails.
I return to Eliot's distinction between Milton and Dryden for some illumination
of this difficulty: one, in the whole history of English literature,
has dominated that literature so long, or so completely. And even in
the nineteenth century the language was still the language of Dryden
as it is to-day-so The subject here is really influence, about which
Eliot had usually different and darker things to say:
Many people will
agree that a man may be a great artist, and yet have a bad influence.
There is more of Milton's influence in the badness of the bad verse
of the eighteenth century than of anybody's else .... Milton's bad
influence may be traced much farther than the eighteenth century,
and much farther still than upon bad poets: if we say that it was
an influence against which we still have to struggle. [OPP, pp. 156-57]
And this would
indeed be saying much. That Eliot himself should have been influenced
by Milton seems as inevitable for him as for any English poet. but surely
not to the extent of requiring so great a struggle? One misses in Eliot's
meditations on influence any sense of having to contend with a recent
poet. as though the revolution of modern poetry had overthrown a ruler
long dead.
The charges against
Milton are dubious enough to permit me this violence against Eliot's
text: let us suppose that Milton here is the name for the effect of
bad influence; that is to say, that Eliot's trope is a kind of transferred
epithet, where the poets not named are presumably Eliot's own bad influences.
We should be able to relate this figurative strategy to the otherwise
quite contradictory literary history, dominated by Dryden, whose name
signifies benign influence:
Far below Shakespeare.
and even below Milton. as we must put him. he vet has. just by reason
of his precise degree of inferiority, a kind of importance which neither
Shakespeare nor .Milton has- the importance of his influence ....
It was Dryden, more than any other individual. who formed a language
possible for mediocrity, and yet possible for later great writers
to do great things with. (11)
Dryden clearly
represents literary history as Eliot would have liked it to be. Further,
the dependence of the essay upon the usual valuation of minority ineluctably
points to a conception of healthy influence as emanating only from minor
poets. In this light, the curious fact that Eliot's
[181]
recent major predecessors
seem to have no influence comes into view as one intention of Eliot's
revisionary canon. These later poets cannot be to have powers of influence,
except as they are the devastated remains the Miltonic legacy. The field
is cleared for poets who escaped that by not aspiring to the greatness
of the progenitor.
It is in this context
that we should read the essay "What Is Minor Poetry?," which
seems so harmless and reasonable a production of Eliot's workshop; it
is truly a text that Eliot has been writing all of his life. The essay
does largely negative work, demolishing the notion that t is "failed
great poetry; and this evaluative impulse is nothing other than Eliot's
stance as a critic of English poetry."" We find, for example,
that "Milton I" gets under way only by taking up the predictable
defense:
There is a large
class of persons, including some who appear in print as critics, who
regard any censure upon a "great" poet as a breach of the
peace, as an act of wanton iconoclasm, or even hoodlumism. The kind
of derogatory criticism that I have to make upon Milton is not intended
for such persons, who cannot understand that it is more important,
in some vital respects, to be a good poet than to be a great poet.
[OPP, p. 157]
The figure of the
minor poet cannot be detached from the problematics of influence, and
it is this recognition that Eliot achieves in his second .essay on Milton:
There are two
kinds of poet who can ordinarily be of use to other poets. There are
those who suggest. to one or another of their successors. something
which they have not done themselves, or who provoke a different way
of doing the same thing: these are likely to be not the greatest.
but smaller. imperfect poets with whom later poets discover an affinity.
And there are the great poets from whom we can learn negative rules:
no poet can teach another to write well, but some great poets can
teach others some of the things to avoid. [OPP, p. 176]
Eliot has chosen
his precursors carefully--Donne, the Jacobeans. the French symbolists-but
I suspect that these names are rather after the fact, that they represent
a stance that has been adopted toward the major precursors, who need
never be named because they are lost in the darkness into which Milton
plunged English poetry.
Lost in that darkness
are not only the major precursors of Eliot's poetry but the recognition
of an ideological force in the making or remaking of tile canon. And
so I would like to call from the shadows one of the influences upon
Eliot's poetry--Tennyson--and permit him to testify about his exclusion
from the Eliotic canon. He will speak, of course, in
[182]
Eliot's voice,
as he would in no other way be able to comment on the meaning of his
exclusion. The essay to be considered here is "In Memoriam,"
written in 1936, but I should remind the reader that, in "The Possibility
of a Poetic Drama" (1920), Tennyson is said to have been "a
master of minor forms," who took to turning out large patterns
on a machine." This early opinion is partially retracted, but the
praise of the later essay is reserved for In Memoriam, while other works
by Tennyson are still found deficient. Both the praise and the condemnation
are immediately relevant to Eliot's career as a poet, as it is evident
in the course of the essay that "In Memoriam" is the occasion
of displaced commentary upon the critical reception of The Waste Land
itself:
Apparently Tennyson's
contemporaries, once they accepted In Memoriam, regarded it as a message
of hope and reassurance to their rather fading Christian faith. It
happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses
the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing
a mood of his own which is quite remote from his generation. [SE,
p. 291]
The Waste Land
was believed (mistakenly. according to Eliot) to express the "despair"
or "disillusion" of a generation. precisely the opposite of
what Eliot says Tennyson's poem was believed to express.(11) Eliot's
attention is then drawn to the question of religious belief, which might
have been a spurious criterion in .judging the achievement of Tennyson
but which becomes crucial for Eliot, again because it is crucial in
his career. Eliot argues that Tennyson never recovered from the disillusion
of his poem; and this is to turn (brilliantly and deviously) the misreading
of The Waste Land against In Memoriam. The real Tennyson is said to
be 'more interesting and tragic" than his contemporaries knew (SE,
p. 292). This must mean that Tennyson's career failed after and because
of In Memoriam. The analogy to Eliot's own career is therefore inverse:
Eliot did recover from the despair of The Waste Land, did recover a
religious faith denied in the end to Tennyson. and therefore moved beyond
the impasse at which Tennyson was stuck. But this dangerous identification,
even for the sake of a necessary difference. has perhaps a more moving
effect than Eliot in. tended. since it gives us the finest of his reflected
self-portraits: 'Tennyson is not only a minor Virgil. he is also with
Virgil as Dante saw him. a Virgil among the Shades. the saddest of all
English poets. among the Great in Limbo. the most instinctive rebel
against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist"
(SE, p. 295). We know. of course, that Eliot's poetic scene/s limbo,
the place of those neither saved nor damned. Limbo is both a paradise
and a prison. the embodiment of the ambivalence of limits. yet resolves
that ambivalence by voiding the pain of the negative image, the circle
of the undamned outside of Dante's hell.
[183]
The strength of
identification is great enough at this point to compel a more vigorous
effort by Eliot to distance himself from what might have been his future-which
future would be quite evident if we were to substitute "Eliot"
for "Tennyson" and "The Waste Land" for "In
Memoriam" in the following passage:
Tennyson seems to have reached the end of his spiritual development
with In Memoriam: there followed no reconciliation, no resolution.
And now no sacred
staff shall break in blossom,
No choral salutation
lure to light
A spirit sick
with perfume and sweet night,
or rather with
twilight, for Tennyson faced neither the darkness
nor the light in his later years. The genius, the technical power,
persisted to the end, but the spirit had surrendered. [SE, p. 295]
The upheaval of
elegiac emotion is nothing less than the lament for a poetic career-but
not Tennyson's. The poet of twilight, the 'violet hour," must say
these things about Tennyson and so say them, and not say them, about
himself. But the displacement of meaning here is vastly more consequential
than even this impasse, the decline of Eliot's poetic career after the
composition of The Waste Land. The quotation from Swinburne redirects
us by its very obliquity to the historical transitions, or failures
of transition, over which 'Eliot is brooding. The elegy encapsulates
the mythologies which are the substructures of Eliot's history, as the
prelapsarian associated sensibility can be seen as nostalgia for a world
in which such a miracle as the blossoming staff is more than an elegiac
allusion. The meaning of his canon discloses itself to Eliot as the
impasse which marks, like a gravestone, that other passage.
Nostalgia is only
the beginning of a recognizably ideological discourse. The way through
to the ideological sense of Tennyson's 'failure," beneath the phenomenal
glow of Eliot's nostalgia, lies in the entanglement of minority in this
complex of meanings, the determination that Tennyson is properly placed
when seen as a "minor Virgil." The diffusion of a major talent
in minor works suggests that what Tennyson or Eliot might have been
was another Virgil, and for Eliot that means simply a "classic."
In "What Is a Classic?," we are told that English literature
has no classic poet who would exalt, as Virgil or Dante did, the truths
of his age.(14) The absence of a modern classic reflects not an individual
failure but rather the absence of a universal truth. which has been
hidden in the minor works. Here is the reason both for the ambivalence
Eliot expresses about the fact of minority (a valuing of the right things
and yet a deferral of greatness) and for the peculiar, and certainly
not necessary, association of poetic minority with a marginal elite.(15)
[184]
.
It is the latter point to which I now want to turn. If it has been shown
that the canon Eliot legislated in his early career was not merely an
arbitrary set of aesthetic preferences, we have not yet fully determined
that one way to reconstruct Eliot's canon would be to list those "minor"
poets. But the essential quality of their minority, what drives them
away from the "mainstream" of English literature, is what
Eliot approved as their fidelity to 'tradition.' Such a concept of tradition
must be exclusive as well as revisionary, because it implies that the
major poets of English literary history cannot also be "traditional."
Eliot finally understood that his canonical principle was the literary
reflection of a more fundamental evaluative norm, extrinsic to literature,
which he identified as 'orthodoxy.. So he tells us in After Strange
Gods that he is rewriting 'Tradition and the Individual Talent"
by substituting 'orthodoxy" for 'tradition,' and this is unquestionably
an ideological correction. ,s In the same way, the canon of minor writers
is established retrospectively as determined by the rule of orthodoxy.
Neither they nor the young Eliot need be orthodox Christian for this
rule to have enabled their productions. It is precisely Eliot'smeaning
that these elite, like the "elect' before them, may come at some
point to a conviction of their election, yet they were always the elect.
In this sense. Eliot's conversion to Christianity was the recognition
that he alreadv belonged to a marginal elite, whose membership had been
polemicallv foreshadowed by the construction of an alternative canon.
Orthodoxy is "true
opinion" or, as Eliot calls it, "right tradition," but
what is the content of this doxa?(17) What does it teach us? It would
be a mistake at this point to identify the doxa wholly with the truths
of Christianity. Eliot does not make this mistake because he senses
that orthodoxy is what functions as an effective ideological concept:
"A Christian education would primarily train people to be able
to think in Christian categories and would not impose the necessity
for insincere profession of belief. What the rulers believed would be
less important than the beliefs to which they would be obliged to conform.''(18)
The ideology defines its antithesis as 'heresy," a word which is
habitually opposed in Eliot's later writings to 'tradition," 'conformity,"
and "orthodoxy." I touch here upon The Idea of a Christian
Society, and Eliot's other atavistic programs. not to deplore them.
or to refute them, and certainly not to claim that a preference for
Eliot's canon makes one vulnerable to the seduction of Christian belief.
I rather take Eliot at his word (perhaps not entirely in his spirit}
and say that the beliefs do not matter. What matters is that the dissemination
of the alternative canon has an effect which can be described. The 'readjustment'
of literary history, the ordination of a new canonical principle, makes
no difference at all to the marginal community of conservative Anglo-Catholics
but quite a lot of difference to the marginal elite to which Eliot belonged
as a poet and critic. to literary culture.(19) The complete
[185]
revision of "Tradition
and the Individual Talent" should then read "Orthodoxy and
the Literary Elite."
It is possible
to understand by this translation the double consequence of that impasse/
passage when orthodoxy was transferred from the major to the minor tradition,
and heterodoxy passed from the minor to the major cultural register
(this might explain, too, why Eliot revised the theory of dissociation
to redeem Dryden, shifting his attack in the 1930's to Milton).(20)
It is not the minority of literary culture which is to be lamented,
after all; it is rather the decline of that elite which delivers orthodoxy
to the rulers and to the poets. It is the marginality of the clergy
which Eliot eventually identifies (with an odd but, I think, quite interesting
historical insight) as the origin of that deprivation of 'right opinion'
in literature, and so of the proliferation of "sects"(21)
The literary phenomenon of dissociation was only the consequence of
the protracted divorce of church and state; the hypothesis might seem
too reductive as an account of history, but it is the motivating force
behind the regeneration of Eliot's poetic career and gives him both
Murder in the Cathedral and the Four Quartets. The rift between Thomas
and Henry, between the first estate and the second, between Dryden and
Milton-these are the determinations 0f history, factual or mystified,
behind the remaking of the canon.
If it is so desirable
to seal these divisions, and that depends upon the restoration of authority
to a clergy, then we might fairly say that Eliot's canonical reformation
embodies only a wish-fulfillment fantasy. 1 have argued, on the contrary,
that his canon. as the central thesis of an ideological discourse, has
successfully represented to the agents of literary culture a mutation
in the life of that culture. This success can be measured by the influence
of one form of Eliot's canonical principle. advanced in his polemic
against the Arnoldian substitution of poetry for religion? That literature
is historically related to religion seems an unavoidable observation.
One might think of this relation as constitutive of the 'Romanticism:
broadly defined, of most literature produced since the sixteenth century.
Eliot centers his resistance to a usurping or 'vulgar' Romanticism (espoused
by Arnold and condemned by Babbitt) in his valuation of the minor stance,
which can be understood as a demand for the subordination of poetry
to dogma. While this does not mean the deference of poets to clergymen.
the structural subordination can be described as reinstated within literary
culture, a homology we are now able to demonstrate.
What is the function
of a clergy? As Eliot sees it, the clergy maintains the continuity of
orthodoxy, of right tradition. This it can do only by first maintaining
itself, so that it has an instrumental motive to act in accord with
a ruling elite. Orthodoxy, as the form of ideology, must conceal its
relation to hegemonic elements by incorporating a claim to universality:
truth is truth for the whole of society. Since the elite which Eliot
has in mind can no longer make this claim openly, it disappears as
[186]
a social structure
and reappears in the mystified form of an incognito clergy:
We need therefore
what I have called "the Community of Christians," by which
I mean, not local groups, and not the Church in any one of its senses,
unless we call it "the Church within the Church." These
will be the consciously and thoughtfully practising Christians, especially
those of intellectual and spiritual superiority.(23)
Eliot's 'Community
of Christians," as an invisible power, is surely not even a distant
possibility, but neither does the clergy any longer conceive of itself
as the transmitter of a surviving universal tradition. All remains of
this function has been appropriated by literary culture, now produces
what Edward Said rightly calls "religious criticism.""
As a spiritual elite, the culture is disinclined to recognize that it
has any other interest than the transmission of a valued tradition,
one which aspires to define value for the whole of the society. I am
arguing, then, that Eliot's description of a "Church within the
Church" describes nothing but literary culture, which functions
as an incognito clergy-not literally but ideologically, in the mode
of unconscious representation. The difference between that representation
and the world we live in is a world of difference, a world in which
people differ from one another, physically, culturally, and ideologically.
This fact is covertly admitted in the very repression of the clerical
function, because no literary orthodoxy can present itself as such-it
is just the resistance of literature to right tradition that recalls
us to the historical complexity of the relation between the canon of
literature and that other sacred and original canon. There must be as
many canons as there are clergies, and so, after the long decline of
the first estate, as many canonical principles as there are possible
ideologies of literary culture.
Nevertheless, literary
culture has aspired to canonical consensus, an illusion reinforced by
the cognitive silence of the literary work, the silencing of difference.
Very simply, canonical authors are made to agree with one another; the
ambiguity of literary language means nothing less than the univocity
of the canon. I now want to examine this rule of canonical self identity
as it governs the institutional dissemination of literature. Eliot's
fantasy of orthodoxy passes into the university both as an ideology
of the marginal elite and as an instruction in the' marginal relation
of the poem to truth.
3. Paradoxy
I do not imagine
that since the establishment of Eliot's canon, his judgments upon individual
poets have been handed down without
[187]
qualifications
to our students. I do believe, however, that the rule of the canon has
governed our instruction. Eliot is not a teacher, except in the more
generous metaphorical sense, but Brooks is in every way a theorist of
pedagogy. The latent meaning of canon, as a rule of conduct, can be
activated again; indeed, this is the meaning of the canon's dissemination.
Let us say, then, that in teaching the canon, we are not only investing
a lot of texts with authority; we are equally instituting the authority
of the profession.
.
That Brooks takes over almost entirely the canon of Eliot's early is
obvious to any reader of his Modern Poetry and the Tradition.
himself has remarked recently upon Eliot's germinal influence:
I was particularly
stimulated by two paragraphs in one of his essays on the metaphysical
poets. In this brief passage, he suggested that the metaphysical poets
were not to be regarded as a rather peculiar offshoot of English poets',
but had a deep, hidden connection with its central line of development.
This, to me [was a] new way of looking at the tradition of English
poetry?(25)
Brooks is perhaps
as orthodox a disciple as Eliot created and given this orthodoxy, it
is surprising to discover that he is responsible for one very consequential
revision of Eliot's dissociation theory. According to Eliot, the dissociation
occurs between "thought" and "sensation" (or sometimes
"feeling"). For this event Brooks provides an additional historical
cause: the rise of science in the seventeenth century. "We have
argued... that the critical revolution in the seventeenth century which
brought metaphysical poetry to an end was intimately bound up with the
beginnings of the New Science."' Now this is not Eliot's notion,
but it seems to have been authorized by the dichotomy of thought and
feeling, and, further, it had the advantage of organizing completely
the "split" which widens for both Eliot and Brooks with ever;
following century. The hypothesis about Renaissance science seems to
rest on a dubious principle of historical causation (and certainly Thomas
Hobbes does not truly have the demonic influence he emanates in Modern
Poetry). The Brooksian history should he understood in the context
of the contemporary conflict between positivism and the humanistic disciplines,
a conflict now dated but which had the significant consequence of burdening
poetic theory with large, epistemological anxieties. Critics do still
debate along formalist or antiformalist lines, the nature of literature
as a mode of proposition.
Of the several
ways to argue this issue (along a spectrum. say, from i. A. Richards
to Gerald Graft), the stance of Brooks has been most easily assimilated
in the American university. I quote here one typical statement of that
position in The Well Wrought Urn:
The position
developed in earlier pages obviously seeks to take the poem out of
competition with scientific, historical and philosophical
[188]
propositions.
The poem, it has been argued, does not properly eventuate in a proposition:
we can only abstract statements from the poem, and in the process
of abstraction we necessarily distort the poem itself.(27)
The problem which
gives rise to Brooks' statement (and I must enormously simplify its
genesis here) seems to involve a lack of distinction between doxa and
episteme, with the consequence that doxa vanishes from the realm of
discourse altogether. All discourse becomes either epistemic or nonsensical.
Whether or not we wish to accept a Platonic valuation of episteme over
doxa, it is clear that, in the absence of any concept of doxa, we might
only be able to say, trivially, that a poem does not express scientific
truth. Brooks can say more than this because his aphasic poetry is given
the capacity to point in some other direction. The poem becomes an ostensive
act, beyond which lies a conceivably recoverable doxa. I believe that
"pointing without saying" is what we mean now by New Critical
formalism. The pedagogical device of close reading as well as the prohibition
of paraphrase relate to the perceived muteness of the literary work,
which is imitated by the gestural aphasia of the teacher. He or she
can only point to that truth which must not be spoken. I will borrow
the Brooksian term "paradox" to name these relations, where
the doxa standing alongside or beyond the poem is to be identified with
the "rule of conduct"' the law to which the canon directs
us.
The text in which
all these problems converge is tile first essay of The Well Wrought
Urn, "The Language of Paradox," which offers a reading of
Donne's poem, "The Canonization." Brooks does not pun on the
title of this poem, though I intend to make the various puns quite explicit;
he is however more than willing to acknowledge that his book is a series
of canonical readings, a reinterpretation of great works of English
literature in the light of Eliot's canonization of Donne.'" It
is even possible for Brooks to waive the question of whether Donne or
Yeats (the first and last poets discussed in the book) belongs to "the
central stream of the tradition" (WWU, p. 192): but this piece
of largesse reflects ironically upon those who have not experienced
Eliot's revelation of canonical error. who do not know that after Donne
and before the modern poets, the "stream" of tradition had
become "hidden." I take it as obvious. then. that "The
Language of Paradox" is not just an exemplary close reading, and
I think it would be very helpful now to show how heavily determined
is Brooks' choice of this poem, whether or not the extent of the determination
has been evident to Brooks or his readers.
Brooks sets out
first to define "paradox, or the nature of poetic language and
this entails the usual contrast of poetry and science:
There is a sense
in which paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry.
It is the scientist whose truth requires a language
[189]
purged of every
trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be
approached only in terms of paradox. (WWU, p. 3)
The problem which
gives rise to Brooks' statement (and I must enormously simplify its
genesis here) seem s to involve a lack of distinction between doxa and
episteme, with the consequence that doxa vanishes from the realm of
discourse altogether. All discourse becomes either epistemic or non-sensical.
Whether or not we wish to accept a Platonic valuation of episteme over
doxa, it is clear that, in the absence of any concept of doxa, we might
only be able to say, trivially, that a poem does not express "scientific"
truth. Brooks can say more than this because his aphasic poetry is given
the capacity to point in some other direction. The poem becomes an ostensive
act, beyond which lies a conceivably recoverable doxa. I believe that
"pointing without saying" is what we mean now by New Critical
formalism. the pedagogical device of close reading as well as the prohibition
of paraphrase relate to the perceived muteness of the literary work,
which is imitated by the gestural aphasia of the teacher. He or she
can only point to that truth which must not be spoken. I will borrow
the Brooksian term "paradox" to name these relations, where
the doxa standing alongside or beyond the poem is to be identified with
the "rule of conduct," the law, to which the canon directs
us.
The text in which
all of these problems converge is the first essay of The Well Wrought
Urn, "The Language of Paradox," which offers a reading of
Donne's poem, "The Canonization." Brooks does not pun on the
title of this poem, though I intend to make the various puns quite explicit;
he is, however, more than willing to acknowledge that his book is a
series of canonical readings, a reinterpretation of great works of English
literature in the light of Eliot's canonization of Donne.(28) It is
even possible for Brooks to waive the question of whether Donne or Yeats(the
first and last poets discussed in the book) belongs to "the central
stream of the tradition" (WWU, p. 192); but this piece of largesse
reflects ironically upon those who have not experienced Eliot's revelation
of canonical error, who do not know that after Donne, and before the
modern poets, the "stream" of tradition had become "hidden."
I take it as obvious, then, that "The Language of Paradox"
is not just an exemplary close reading, and I think it would be very
helpful now to show how heavily determined is Brooks' choice of this
poem whether or not the extent of the determination has been evident
to Brooks or his readers.
Brooks sets out
first to define "paradox," or the nature of poetic language,
and this entails the usual contrast of poetry and science:
There is a sense
in which paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry.
It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every
trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be
approached only in terms of paradox. (WWU, p. 3)
This tells us not
what paradox is, only that it is a sort of language antithetical In
taking over some of the characteristics of scientific language, it is
as though paradox had foreclosed any definition that would locate it
in the realm of feelings or emotions: This gambit is played against
Richards and the positivists, and, successful or not, it determines
that the method of analysis (of a metaphor, of a poem) is the method
of reconciling contradiction. This is. what happens both in a poem and
in a critical essay. So the analysis of Wordsworth's lines
It is a beauteous
evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration ...
fixes upon "Breathless"
as the focus of the contradiction between the state of calm and the
state of excitement. Brooks concludes: "There is no final contradiction.
to be sure: it is that kind of calm and that kind of excitement. and
the two states may well occur together" (WWU, p. 9). Not all contradictions
can be so resolved: it is possible to be both calm and excited. but
it is not possible that it should be both raining and not raining. The
rhetoric borrowed from Coleridge. of the "reconciliation of opposites,"
might lead us to suppose that a logical contradiction had been "reconciled."
but this can never be the case. Paradox is a kind of semantic confusion,
where the two terms in supposed contradiction are not really commensurable.
Hence there is no necessity to conclude that if opposing meanings are
jammed into one semantic unit, a word or a phrase, those meanings are
reconciled?
Nevertheless, there
is a great pressure in "The Language of Paradox' to read paradox
as the epitome of poetic language, and the reconciliation of opposites
as the effect of a poet. Let me ask, then, what needs to be so reconciled
for Brooks? ! think that all the antinomies concerning Brooks the teacher
or Brooks the ideologist have been generated from the situation of conflict
in the poem by Donne, which is described as follows:
The basic metaphor
which underlies the poem (and which is reflected in the title) involves
a sort of paradox. For the poet daringly treats profane love as if
it were divine love. The canonization is not that of a pair of holy
anchorites who have renounced the world and the flesh. The hermitage
of each is the other's body; but they do renounce
[190]
the world, and
so their title to sainthood is cunningly argued. The poem then is
a parody of Christian sainthood; but it is an intensely serious parody
of a sort that modern man, habituated as he is an easy yes or no,
can hardly understand. [WWU, p. 11]
The opposition
of sacred and secular, or divine and profane, is indeed one premise
of "The Canonization," and it is the transference terms which
constitutes in part the wittiness of the argument. But what does it
mean to take this transference as paradoxical? The conspicuous rhetorical
strategy is of course not paradox but parody, as Brooks acknowledges,
and the relation between these two devices is by no means a logically
necessary one. The difference between the two terms recapitulates the
difference between terms that merely oppose and terms that contradict
one another, although it is now clear that something much greater is
at stake. There cannot be for Donne, nor for Brooks, any 'final contradiction'
between the sacred and the secular, but it is not so much the ultimate
harmony that Brooks gives us a feeling for as it is the lament that
'modern man" cannot understand this harmony. This problem is not
Donne's but our own, and the poem thus alerts us prospectively to the
possibility of its being misunderstood (religion is not the object of
parody).
And yet it is surely
not Donne who is interested in clarifying this misunderstanding. the
notice of which has the effect of foregrounding the distinction between
sacred and secular. The parodic motif does actually come into the poem
until the last lines of the penultimate Stanza. where it picks up the
as yet unremarked title:
And by these
hymnes, all shall approve
Us Canoniz'd for Love.
Until this moment,
the speaker has been defending himself against the "chiding"
of his friend, who has not been complaining about any matter relating
to the speaker's religious life. The friend has been worried about the
fact that the lover has withdrawn from the world. has let everything
go. In emphasizing this point. I do not intend to offer an alternative
interpretation of the poem but rather to make opaque Brooks' transparent
reading. to read the poem written by Iris interpretation. In fact. Brooks
has not failed to observe that the opening conflict has to do with the
lovers' renunciation of the public world: "To use the metaphor
on which the poem is built. the friend represents the secular world
which the lovers have renounced" (WWU, p. 11). This is quite true
but at the same time does not achieve its desired transparency by the
tactic of reading the poem with its own metaphor. The dramatic situation
of Donne's conversation makes a legitimate demand upon us to withhold
the dichotomy of sacred and secular until the speaker introduces it.
"To call the world,
[191]
at this point,
"secular" is already to have made the climactic identification
of the lovers with saints, and so undercut the effect of the poem's
escalating rhetoric. Whether or not we wish to take the metaphoric transfer
of sacred and secular as the subject of the poem (or the parallel distinction
Brooks later makes between love and lust), this choice is not predetermined
by the title. Might not the choice be the same as that which makes possible
the ploy of transforming the love nest into a hermitage, and so shifting
the evaluative terms from the opposition of public and private to the
opposition of profane and sacred?
We might speculate now that Brooks' reading is driven by the same force
that drives Donne's hyperbole-idealism and a consequent suppression
of the conflict behind the need to idealize. What does it mean to think
of the 'world' in the poem as secular rather than public? The answer
to that question is clearly indicted in Brooks' construction of the
central paradox, which does in fact turn upon the notion of "world":
'The lovers in becoming hermits, find that they have not lost the world,
but have gained the world in each other, now a more intense, more meaningful
world" (WWU, p. 15). But even lovers must go about their mundane
business, and the poem is full of the very mundane business it tries
to void from its "pretty roomes." If I want to say that the
world outside the lovers' room is still there, that is not to be a grudging
literalist but only to acknowledge that Donne's paradox disappears when
h terms are analyzed. The world of the lovers (the reflection of the
world in their eyes) is composed, as Brooks says, of the same "'Countries,'
'Townes,' and 'Courtes,' which they renounce in the first stanza of
the poem." The sentence that follows this one is crucial: "The
unworldly lovers thus become the most 'worldly' of all." This is
not a "true proposition," of course, any more than the rhetoric
it doubles; and Brooks means just this when he puts the second "worldly"
in quotation marks. Donne's persona seeks a (partly outrageous) justification
of his initial withdrawal, which he discovers in the one precedent within
the social context of justified renunciation: the saint's. For many
reasons Brooks must understand the analogy as having the force of identity.
The idealization of the analogy is evident when he comes to defend the
'truth" of the poem on the strange grounds of its supernaturalism,
as though the unworldliness of the lovers really were the same thing
as saintliness: "What happens to Donne's lovers if we consider
them "scientifically," without benefit of the supernaturalism
which the poet confers on them?" (WWU, p. 18). This is a question
Brooks can raise only because he is at this point arguing against those
Huxleyan positivists who see only (because they can't verify anything
else) two animals. 'quietly sweating palm to palm" (WWU, p. 18).
But surely, we
want to respond, the choice between a religious and a secular view of
things is not the same as the choice between two readings of the poem,
one in which there is love and in the other only animal
[192]
lust? It is, if
the idealizations of the poem are affirmed against the world, against
business and politics, against the travail of history. The category
that goes by the name of the 'sacred' grounds the ideal in its most
otherworldly mode of appearance and designates as the precondition of
all value an act of renunciation. This act achieves an immediate allegorical
status in Brooks' reading because it governs the possibility not only
of sanctity and love but of poetry, a doctrine which is gleaned from
these lines:
And if no peece
of Chronicle wee prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The{greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,
and by these hymnes, all shall approve
Us Canoniz'd for Love:
About which Brooks
comments:
The poem is an
instance of the doctrine which it asserts; it is both the assertion
and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually before
our eyes built within the song the 'pretty room' with which he says
the lovers can be content. The poem' itself is the well-wrought urn
which can hold the lovers' ashes and which will not suffer in comparison
with the prince's 'half-acre tomb.' [WWU, p. 17]
The "doctrine"
here, that the poem is a "well-wrought urn," is not just the
proposition that the poem is an artifact-so is the prince's monument-it
is rather that the urn belongs to the world of value and not to the
world of power. It is a celebration of its own purity, its escape from
a mode of "assertion" not only of a scientific episteme but,
in a much more hidden sense, of the assertion of power over other human
beings. While renunciation expresses the rounding proposition of an
ideological discourse, it need not mean anything like a literal withdrawal.'
such as the lovers have made. Rather, the ideological function of Brooks'
reading concerns the demarcation of a spiritual realm between the crudities
of power and the crudities of fact. The spiritual realm is defined by
the audience the essay addresses: the auditors are conceived at a moment
of apostolic succession, at just the moment of transition between Eliot
and Brooks, as representative figures of literary culture. The incognito
clerk..' is relocated within a visible social structure: the pedagogical
institution. The idealized reading of the lovers' withdrawal must be
understood as symptomatic of the professional commitment to the preservation
of value: just as the Iovers institute love in their act of renunciation.
so it is the marginality of value which is both deplored and established
by the idealization of literature. There is no other place for this
value than the
[193]
mausoleum of well-wrought
urns. That Brooks is speaking now of the institution of criticism is
a fact made explicit by the end of his essay, when he openly addresses
the teachers (still mainly philologists) who are to become much more
than antiquarians: "The urns are not meant for memorial purposes
only, though that often seems to be their chief significance to the
professors of literature (WWU, p. 21). "The Canonization thus figures-as
it were. typologically-the displacement of philologist by the critic.
'
The urns into which poems have been metamorphosed resolve at the imagistic
level the epistemological problem so troubling to the early New Critics,
again by manipulating the ambiguity of the container figure. Inside
and outside are interchangeable, as the poem's metaphorical room places
the world outside, while the poem is at the same time said to be
"outside" the world. The interchangeability of the spatial
trope is precisely what makes possible the transformation of 'profane"
love into 'divine"-this marks the movement 'out' of the world,
which is defined retrospectively as 'secular." The same moment
of transcendence must happen in any canonical poem, and this signifies
nothing less than its canonization, its elevation to the plane of the
ideal. The scene of withdrawal and transcendence can then be generalized
as a repeatable canonical principle ('Beg from above / A patterne of
your love! "). Let us imagine that Donne's persona speaks here
not only to the students of love but to the students of poetry. The
pattern they will receive can be nothing other than a copy of that transcendentalizing
gesture, as the "truth" of every canonical poem retreats before
the act of interpretation; our arrival in its pretty room discovers
an empty shrine. The poem enjoins upon us the recognition of the externality
of dogma and conceals from us the fact that we are already within its
truth, that its truth/s this externality: the poem as pandogmatic text.
The versatility
of the urn is not yet exhausted by its function as a container. In fact
Brooks goes on to fill the urn/poem with the ashes of the phoenix, fusing
two images juxtaposed by Donne. The energy behind this fusion is siphoned
from Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle," which Brooks
quotes at some length in the latter part of his essay. The overt paradoxes
of Shakespeare's poem hint at the Coleridgean reconciliation of opposites
("that magic power which Coleridge sought to describe") and
prepare the reader for the moment of conflation: "The urn to which
we are summoned, the urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix,
is like the well-wrought urn of Donne's 'Canonization' which holds the
phoenix-lovers' ashes: it is the poem itself" (WWU, p. 21; italics
mine). The phoenix, as a figure for poetic content, buttresses the reading
of Donne's poem by allowing Brooks to generalize paradox as the mystery
of life and death, or rather as the possibility of resurrection: "The
phoenix rises from the ashes; or ought to rise"-but what content
is resurrected? The rebirth of the phoenix must signify the rebirth
of that doxa which
[194]
had so long lain
dormant in an ashen state, contained and preserved by the forms of literature.
A potential content is restored to the poem. As the urn gestures to
the ashes it contains, so the gestures, by its very allusive density,
to the meaning not of any one poem but of poetry: that meaning is to
make this allusion. to point to the figure who is historically emblematized
as a phoenix, who delivered the pattern of resurrection, and who first
spoke the paradoxes Brooks cites as exemplary.' 'He who would save his
life, must lose it,' and 'The Last shall be first' (WWU, p. 18). These
examples are neither random nor innocent The allusion to the resurrected
Jesus disguises only imperfectly a fantasy of power. which can be figured
also as the promise of that day when the mausoleum of urns will revert
to what it once was, a temple, and the clergy will resume its 'first
estate.' The last will again be first. The power of renunciation here
discloses itself as the deferral of power.
The elaboration
of the ideology into such allusive structures yields up the New Criticism
to the service of the liberal pluralism which is the regnant ideology
of the academy and which the pedagogy in no way contradicts. The technique
of formalist interpretation subtends the larger ideology, satisfying
within a narrower domain of practice the longing for consensus, for
a metaphysics of the same--a longing expressed by the posited 'unity"
of the literary work. But the intensity of the desire for unity is no
longer news to us, since its frustration has been marked in recent years
by the shattering of hermeneutic serenity and by the rise of a certain
dogmatism, perplexingly inconsistent with the public aims of ideological
pluralism. It would appear that we mean by consensus what Eliot meant
by orthodoxy.
The canon participates
centrally in the establishment of consensus as the embodiment of a collective
valuation. Hence it is in the interest of canonical reformations to
erase the conflictual prehistory' of canon formation or to represent
such history as the narrative of error. The canonical authority of The
Well Wrought Urn is a measure of Brooks' success in this project. So
far from merely attaching the names of Donne and Yeats to the beginning
and end of canonical history. the curricular shape of English literature
is henceforth determined as 'From Donne to Yeats.' The phoenix image
emerges from the exemplary. text as an emblem of the canonical principle,
and this is evidently why the image can be so easily transferred from
Donne's poem to Shakespeare's, and so on to the whole of literary history:
"A history of poetry from Dryden's time to our own might bear as
its subtitle 'The Half-Hearted Phoenix" (WWU, p. 20). Such a narrative
is not history at all for Brooks but rather a period during which a
certain waiting takes place, when the doxa of literature is obscured.
The assimilation of 'The Phoenix and the Turtle' foreshadows a systematically
ideological reading of the canon. a reading capable of absorbing what
Eliot's more primitive rule had excluded: the major English poets.
[195]
I have argued that
canonical choices are historically overdetermined, they do not represent
necessarily, or only, the arbitrariness of personal preference or the
evaluative certainty of consensus. Literary history, however, seldom
clearly exhibits the event of a canonical reformation; the canon of
Eliot and Brooks has been a hegemonic, though hardly an exclusive, formation.
I have not sought to account, therefore, for conflicts between canonizers
or all the possible confusions of dissemination. Certainly a work such
as F. R. Leavis' The Great Tradition, as the most aggressively canonizing
text of British criticism, would have demanded a somewhat different
analysis.
It should be possible
to understand the very divergence of canons and canonizers as a better
ground than consensus for a defense of literary culture. The disestablishment
of consensus may well have become the project of criticism, the meaning
of its new sectarian theories and canons. It can also be said of post-formalist
methodologies that they are generally de-idealizing, or programmatically
antihumanistic. In another sense, these methodologies have remained
well within the Kantian 'idealist" tradition, as Richard Rorty
has convincingly shown.(31) Nevertheless, the real effect of resisting
the idealization of form should not be discounted.
To admit the succession
of ideological defenses of the profession is therefore not to deny the
necessity of the current de-idealizing move. Ideology does not cease
to be functional, whether or not its epistemic falsity can be reduced
asymptotically to a zero degree. If the retreat of the New Criticism
is now pronounced enough for us to examine in three dimensions its ideological
discourse. it is also possible to understand how this discourse produced
the very protest against it, the lament for the silence and disenfranchisement
of literature. It is really the culture of which we speak, yet it seems
as unlikely a program to restore literary culture to a position of power
(any power it does not already possess) as it is to restore the clergy,
for the reason that no contemporary 'orthodoxy' can encompass the interests
of so many divergent groups, the lateral inequalities (of race, sex.
or culture) that have further complicated the material inequalities
of social formation. Eliot only proposed his fantasies of orthodoxy
on the quite honest premise of an exclusive society such as he hoped
to find in England. or the American South, or imagined creating by such
extraordinary measures as the exclusion of Jews-:~ If tradition (and
all the continuities that literature and religion have been empowered
in the past to teach) decays with the decay of orthodoxy, then it is
irrecoverable. It is more practical. if not inevitable. that we consider
what it means that 'difference" has become our central critical
category; at the least, this means the permanent difficulty of forming
a canon acceptable to a consensus of the literary culture. This condition
I would like to describe as the state of heterodoxy, where the doxa
of
[196]
literature is not
a paralyzed allusion to a hidden god but a teaching that will enact
discursively the struggle of difference.
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Notes
1. Several models
of canonical change have recently become current. I mention in particular
the generic system of Alastair Fowler, worked out in his "Kinds
of Literature" in Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes
(Cambridge, .Mass. 1982), and the model of the biblical canon, discussed
by James Nohrnberg in "On Literature and the Bible," Centrum
2 (Fall 1974): 5-43.
2. While itw°uld scarcelY be possible here to constructa theorvofideology,
antecedent to any use of the term, neither would it be fair to evade
altogether the epistemological dilemma. The science/ideology complement,
which characterizes Althusserian theories of ideology, seems to me in
some sense inescapable. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses," Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New
York, 1971 ), pp. 127-86. However, the terms of my argument assume only
such a conception of 'human science" as makes possible the Frankfurt
school's practice ofldeologiekritik. Perhaps it is also worth invoking
Michel Foucault's reservation about the concept of ideology in Power/
Knowledge: Selected Intervitals and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin
Gordon, trans. Gordon et al. [New York, 1980], p. 118). On ideology
and intellectuals, especially relevant is Antonio Gramsci's distinction
between "organic" and "traditional" intellectuals,
in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), p. 6. '
3. T. S. Eliot, "John Dryden," Selected Essays (New York,
1932). p. 270; all further references to this work, abbreviated SE,
will be included in the text.
4. See Eliot, 'Poetry and Drama," On Poetry, and Poets (New York,
1957): "Reviewing my critical output for the last thirty-odd years,
I am surprised to find how constantly I have returned to the drama"
(p. 75); all further references to this work, abbreviated OPP, will
be included in the text.
5. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Sacred
Wood ( 1920; London, 1960), p. 50; all further references to this work,
abbreviated SW, will be included in the text.
6. A particular passage of Eliot's is worth noting in 'What Is a Classic?:
'The predecessors should be themselves great and honoured: but their
accomplishment must be such as to suggest still undeveloped resources
of the language, and not such as to oppress the younger writers with
the fear that everything that can be done has been done, in their language"
(OPP, p. 58). Eliot does not quite say that English literary history
either exhibits or escapes this predicament.
7. I emphasize that Eliot's principle of canonical revision does not
necessarily mean to decanonize major works but rather to alter principles
of valuation. When Eliot a~tacked Hamlet in 'Hamlet and His Problems,"
he knew he could not decanonize such a work, only damage through it
the principle which had canonized Hamlet.
8. Eliot's later essays domesticate this breezy mastery over the canon
by projecting it onto his critical precursors, as in this comment on
Matthew Arnold: 'From time to time, every hundred years or so, it is
desirable that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature,
and set the poems in a new order." But this is too much like the
persona of The Sacred Wood, whose devaluation of literary, monuments
must be seen rather as a modest achievement: 'This task is not one of
revolution but of readjustment' (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
[London, 1933], p. 108).
9. There is an additional motive to be mentioned in this connection-Eliot's
unhappy feeling that religious poetry will always be regarded as minor:
'For the great majority of people who love poetry, religiousents poets,
is a variety of minor poetry ('Religion and Literature," SE, p.
345).
10. Eliot,John Dry'den: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic (New York,
1932), p. 24. 11. Ibid., pp. 5, 22.
association connected with the term 'minor poetry,' together with the
suggestion that minor belief and a common culture" (OPE pp. 61
42).
15. But at least a hint about how to make this connection is even in
Eliot's "The Classics and the Man of Letters," To Criticize
the Critic (New York, 1965): "The continuity of literature is essential
to its greatness; it is very largely the function of secondary writers
to preserve this continuity, and to provide a body of writings which
is not necessarily read by posterity, but which plays a great part in
forming the link between those writers who continue to be read"
(p. 147).
16. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A P~m~ ~ M~n H~e~ (New York, 1933), p.
22. 17. Ibid., p. 35.
18. Eliot, The Idea 4a Ch~tmn S~ie~ (New York, 1940), p. 26.
19. Eliot is by this time aware of the ideological motives of canon-formation
and indulges in a little critique of his own. He speculates that the
revolutionary politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge makes intelligible
their 'inability to appreciate Pope, and he also notes the "irrelevance
of the metaphysical poets to the interests which he and Coleridge had
at heart" (see The Use of Poetry, pp. 74-76).
20. Eliot expresses his second thoughts about dissociation in several
places, but see "Milton II" (OPP, p. 173). His attack on Milton's
unorthodoxy had the peculiar result of biasing even the defenses provoked
by this charge. The most notable of the early defenses, C. S. Lewis'
A Preface to Paradise Lost" (London, 1942), seek to bring Milton
back into the orthodox fold, and it is this stoned ~rcepfion of Milton's
~reer which is s~l ~e '~noni~ reading~ of criticism.
21. See Eliot's comment in The Idea ofa Chistian Society" about
"a state secularized, a community turned into a mob, and a cler~
disinte~ated' (p. 42). Eliot's feelings about the relation between the
cultural elite and the religious orthoxy are more clearly expressed
in Notes Toward a Denition of Culture (1948): "The artistic sensibility
is impovefished by its divorce from the religious sensibility, the religious
by its separation from the artistic" (rpt. in Christianity and
Culture [New York, 1968], p. 99). See also the interesting comments
on elites and classes in chapter 2 of this work.
22. See Eliot's comments critical of Arnold in S.E., pp. 385-93.
23. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, p. 34. Eliot goes on to
assert, as well as to distinguish, his notion from the Coleridgean idea
of the 'clefisy," but the two ~oups are so close in function that
it seems the idea must have come from Coleridge.
24. See Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge,
Mass., 1983), esp. pp. 290-92. On Eliot's elitism, see Terry Eagleton,
Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Ma~t ~t~aD· Theo.D, (London,
1976), pp. 145-51. The identity that Eliot somewhat dissimulates, Harold
Bloom addresses openly in "The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition"
(A Map of Misreading [New York, 1975]):
Our profession
is not genuinely kin any longer to that of the historians or the philosophers.
Without ~11ing ~ change, our ~eorefi~ ~fi~ have ~ome nedfive theologians,
our practical critics are close to ~ing Agaddic commentators, and all
of our teachers, of whate~.er generation, teach how to live, what to
do, in order to avoid the damnation of death-in-life. I do not believe
that I am talking about an ideolog).., nor am I acknowledging critiques
of our profession. tP. 29] an}. shade ~~hatsoever of the recent -Marxist
What Bloom is 'acknowledging- is rather more complex than can be clarified
by his denial.
Bloom's essay obviously and urgentl}. rewrites ~Tradition and the Individual
Talent," which suggests to me that Eliot's work is still the Ur-text
of critical ideology. On t~e critic as intellectual, I refer to Gramsci's
argument in Selections from the Prison Notebooks: ~Since these var/ous
categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an ~esprit
de corps" their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special
qualification, fon~ard as autonomous and independent of the dominant
social thev thus put themselves
25. Cleanth Brooks, in Robert Penn x,'earren's inten. iew, "A Conversation
with Cleanth Brooks,n in The Possibilities of Order.. Cleanth Brooks
and His grciup" (p. 7).
Work, ed. Lewis p. Simpson (Baton Rouge, La., 1976), p. 19. I refer
the reader to Brooks' "Notes toward a Revised History of English
Literature," Modern Poetry, and the Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1939), for 'the particular canonical choices·
26. Brooks, "A Note on the Death of Elizabethan Tragedy,"
Modern poetr3, and the Tradition, p. 203. For a somewhat wilder polemic
against science, see John Crowe Ransom, God without Thunder. An Unorthodox
Defense of Orthodoxy, (1930; Hamden, Corm., 1965), pp.
27. Brooks, The
Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York, 1947),
p. 252; all further references to this work, abbreviated WWU, will be
included in the text. 28. "One was to attempt to see, in terms
of this approach, what the masterpieces had in common rather than to
see how the poems of different historical periods differedmund in particular
to see whether they had anything in common with the metaphysicals and
with the rooderrs" (WWU, p. 193).
29. This point
was made by Ransom in The New Criticism (Norfolk, Corm., 1941), p. 30.
It is undeniable, especially in the wake of Frank Lentricchia's argument
in After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980), that a defense of criticism
is at stake in every new theon. or method. What has not been adequately
understood is the function of canonical choices. in critical revolutions.
Lentricchia's Presentation of the central figures of contemporary criticism
(Northrop Frye, Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom'l
might have focused upon their respective canons, which are certainly
not merely the e.Piphenomena of theory. It is not accidental that Frye,
de -Man, and Bloom are such vigorous canonizers or d;at their careers
began with such strong revaluations of devalued figures. The lesser
influence, on the other hand, of Krieger and Hirsch, while it might
be explained by deficiencies in their theoretical formulations, might
also be a measure of precisely their lack of canonical interest.
31. See Richard Rorty, "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Centurv
Textualism," Monist 64 (Apr. 1981): 155-74. '
32. See Eliot, After Strange Gods.. 'What is still more important is
unit}, of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine
to make any large number of freethinking Jews undesirable" (p.
20).
33. This subject is discussed in English Literature: Opening up the
Canon, ed. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr., Selected Papers
from the English Institute, 1979, n.s. 4 (Baltimore. 1981). There is
a welcome feeling in this volume that the canon must be opened, though
I would emphasize that this opening does not mean simply a larger canon,
that is, one with greater powers of co-optation but multiple, conflicting
canons.
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