114 J Criticism in the twentieth century
Eliot and the idea of tradition I 115
obsessions: Eliot's 'simultaneous order' depends on 'a principle of aesthetic, not merely
historical, criticism'.
Thus, for instance, in Harold Bloom's theory of 'the anxiety of influence', a writer's
development is determined by a struggle with his gallery of antecedents, his 'strong' but
alien influences, a struggle involving what Bloom calls 'antithetical practical criticism'.
Whether or not one subscribes to Bloom's theory, his example is instructive, in that he
continued the inquiry into literary history, how it is invented and reinvented, begun by
Eliot. There is nevertheless a certain irony in mentioning Bloom alongside Eliot, for,
when developing his antagonistic theory of influence, Bloom frequently derided Eliot,
either overtly or by implication. But, as Gregory Jay points out in his book T. S. Eliot and
the Poetics ofLiterary History, 'Bloom (mis)read Eliot as a believer in benevolent influence',
and was wrong to number Eliot among those who had developed, in Bloom's words,
'modern theories of mutually benign relations between tradition and individual talent'.
Eliot's version of the relationship between the individual and tradition is much more
fraught, complex, elusive even, than that. Yet, argues Jay, Bloom is worth attending to in
relation to Eliot's ideas, if only because he did to Eliot what he claimed strong poets do to
their precursors. The development of Bloom's critical principles is a demonstration of
those principles in action: his critical works 'unfold as a revision or misprision of his
critical father', who, claims Jay, was Eliot.
The argument in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' 'that the past should be altered
by the present as much as the present is directed by the past' gives legitimacy to the idea
of the text as an object of perpetual reinterpretation. Reader-response and reception
theories have elaborated on this approach. Hans-Georg Gadamer understands critical
interpretation as a never-ending process, arguing, in Raman Selden's words, that 'the
meaning of a text is not limited to the author's intentions but is continually extended by
the later readings .... Any object we study can never be separated from our subjectivity.'
Thus, every reading 'becomes a focusing and ordering instrument in a complex perspec-
tive of horizons going right back to the contemporary reading of the text'. 7 Every text
becomes the sum of all of its readings through time, and consequently there will never be
a fixed reading, or a fixed order. The order changes at every moment. In his book T. S.
Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism Richard Shusterman elaborates: 'Eliot and Gadamer
see interpretation as inexhaustible. Each generation confronts a given literary work
within a new complex of structural relations linking that work to the whole of tradition
as it currently, temporarily, stands. Understanding demands an account of this new
relational meaning, hence a new interpretation.' This process is what Shusterman
calls the 'fundamental openness of tradition's structure', or, in those words by Eliot:
'for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be,
if ever so slightly, altered'. Shusterman's summary underlines why this way of
thinking about tradition can still be so productive: 'Both Eliot and Gadamer realize
that tradition's value is as much in its open prospect as in its retrospect; its
function being to make a better present and future, not to serve futile attempts to restore
the past.'
T. 5.
Not everyone has been so sanguine about the possible renewal of Eliot's ideas. For
instance, a provocative version of his legacy has been argued by Bernard Sharratt in his
essay 'Eliot: Modernism, Postmodernism, and After'. Sharratt sees Eliot's ideas as the
precursor to some central postmodernist tendencies: Eliot's 'construction of history',
being based essentially on literary taste, anticipates 'the deeper superficialities of post-
modernism', resulting in 'a textual reshuffling of an endlessly expanding but unreliable
archive with no verifiable validity'. However sceptical Sharratt's view, his location of a
continuity between Eliot's ideas and later theoretical developments at least refuses to see
those ideas as a dead end, or to argue an easy antithesis between some sort of Eliotic
closed logocentric system and deconstructionist resistances to closure.
Legacies: poetry
One of the motives impelling 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' no doubt also
impelled The Waste Land a few years later. An American living in England, who some-
times signed himself 'metoikos' (Greek for 'resident alien'), who suffered from cultural
displacement, yet thought that the citizenry among whom he had taken up residence
were not properly conscious of what was theirs, Eliot felt the need to create, for his
adopted nation as well as for himself, a cultural synthesis, a tradition that would reflect
'the mind of Europe'. He came to Europe his mind teeming with a European past which
he had absorbed from his reading and his Harvard education; but what he encountered,
in himself and in his potential readership, was psychological, cultural, and social disin-
tegration. Near the start of The Waste Land, 'you know only I A heap of broken images',
which exist in the poem as a complex of disjointed and disjunctive allusions to a
congeries of mostly European literature, 'fragments' which, by the end of the poem,
are conjured up in the context of setting 'my lands in order'. 8 The poem thus intimates
Eliot's idea of tradition, projecting the subjective presence of a past out of which to create
some sort of order, which in this case would be the poem itself, an order perhaps
inchoate, potential, and barely discernible; but the elements are there.
By the time of Four Quartets (composed between 1935 and 1942) Eliot was able to give
more deliberate poetic articulation to his idea of tradition, as if now consciously formu-
lating what he recognizes as having been all along at the heart of his poetics. The first
quartet, 'Burnt Norton', begins with words informed by 'the historical sense' and its
conjunction of synchronic and diachronic perceptions of time, and goes on to postulate
an atemporal order, a 'What might have been', which is recognized as an unachievable
ideal even as it is being postulated: 'an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility I
Only in a world of speculation.' Nevertheless, the poetry insists on the actuality of its
imaginative presence, its deictic 'thusness': 'My words echo I Thus, in your mind.' In the
last quartet, 'Little Gidding', the encounter with the poet's past poetic self, his doppel-
ganger, in the form of the 'familiar compound ghost', whose speech is compounded of