On Eliot

It was interesting returning to Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” after a number of years, particularly in light of the discussions we’ve been having lately about ‘texts,’ ‘literature’ and the absence of a common body of work. Our work as students, as aspiring scholars, bears out Eliot’s point that we tend to insist, “when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work or parts of his work in which he least resembles anyone else” (14). That’s always our task, after all: we must launch a defense of our ideas. What’s different? What’s new? Why does this matter? Eliot argues, though, for a “historical sense” that “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” (14). I suspect that, as much time as we all spend researching our particular areas, still something important is lost when we lack the order that comes of sharing a historical sense--which is to say a common body of work-- or will be lost for future generations of students as literature gives way to texts. As MacIntyre claims, “every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices.”

But what of Eliot’s idea of self-sacrifice, of the “continual extinction of personality” (17) in art? “The more perfect the artist,” he writes, “the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (18). Does historical sensitivity really demand the extinction of self in art? And how might we answer this question in terms of the critical work we undertake? Like Minhao, I wonder what might be significant about our own experiences as we go about our scholarship. We may have largely dispensed with biographical criticism, consigning it long ago to the status of ‘intentional fallacy,’ yet much of what we read demands a consideration of authorship. Those of us studying autobiography this term, for example, have learned already the vastness of this genre. How do we account for its current popularity? And why do we assert, publicly and constantly, our sense of subjectivity in such realms as facebook? Has personal identity become an obsession, to the point where Eliot’s “historical sense” is no longer relevant?