Is it perfume from a dress,/ That makes me so digress?

I'm expanding on the small burst of anti-Eliot sentiment two posts ago. Eliot, by the way, went to my high school where he was abused because of his St. Louis accent.

It is somewhat ironic that Ryan makes two allusions (three names) in his denunciation of Eliot's allusiveness (admittedly I liked his quotes, and just as most people, save Ryan and myself of course, would not understand Eliot's references to Hesiod's Works and Days, I did not have any sense of the context with which Ryan's quotes were originally spoken). I also happen to find Eliot's poetry rather irritatingly learned, but maybe we can apply a little dialectical thinking and say that there is a reason for his ostentations, a method to his madness, or nonsense as Ryan puts it (which for some reason reminded me of how John McWhorter calls the chorus of "Rapper's Delight" nonsense -- it seems to me to be about the boogie, don't it Johnny?).

Standard criticism, if I'm not wrong, has it that Eliot's plethora of allusions refers to the disorder with which Eliot finds society -- the fact that we can't understand all of his allusions points to the loss of an understanding of the classical roots of literature, and to the gradual fragmentation of society. You've heard this rhetoric before, of course. Modernism seeks to eliminate the past in favor of the new, even though it ("somehow, some way, [critics] keep coming up with funky ass [theory] like every single day") can't really function without reference to a past.

And here's where I cut and paste two sentences from my thesis:

The Wasteland posits that a return to religious roots and restoration of Christian culture would remove humanity from the halfway house between order and disorder, away from the conflict between spiritual and the material that Eliot sees as fundamental to his city (London). His conservatism and religious poetry that dominate the later stages of his life again point to his frustration at a city that was alienating, and a society he viewed as morally and spiritually degraded.

The funny thing I've always felt about the experience of reading Prufrock is that it's more fun to gloss over the allusions than to look at the 8pt Norton Anthology font (since that's about the only place that we seem to read Eliot these days -- in high school English classes). But this is of course the same experience we get when we enter any modern city -- the general occlusion of the high rise, the teeming masses that disturbed Wordsworth so much in Book VII of The Prelude. If Eliot's poetry mimics the experience of the modern city-dweller, and I'm saying it does, then aren't we still not very far removed from the sound and sense of that ugly deformed man, Alexander Pope, a near contemporary to Dryden?

But if some people want to apply standards, I say go ahead. I just believe that what's important in literary analysis is that when we take the "patient etherized upon the table," the literary text, we can balance two possible outcomes: first, that we try not to rewrite our own knowledge on top of the writing in our analysis, and second, that we still can derive something productive that will aid us in how we view the world.

A sidebar commentary:

Poetry, moreover, as Milton said but did not always follow, is "simple, sensous, and passionate." The learned obscurity of the modernists is only a small step to the illiterate obscurity of the postmodernists.

Since I'm counting Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein among my list of modernists (not to mention Ibsen and many more), I would say that modernism is not centrally concerned with "learned obscurity," but tries to make sense of the world not through a genuine connection (objective reality has an original meaning) but through symbolic works of art that strive for that meaningful relationship but ultimately fail because they are only fictitious renderings, shadows that touch nothing in the world except the reader, a failure of modernism that Lukacs noted in his Theory of the Novel. Miller seems to be more concerned with the mechanical nature of his numerous sexual partners and his dissatisfaction than at impressing the reader with his obscure knowledge. Stein is crazy, etc.

Posted by Jon at 3:38 AM |