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Preface
- Baylor University Press
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= Preface In recent books, I have argued that the form of the venerable and protean essay exists as a site of tension between literature and philosophy; it instances more specifically, I argue, Incarnational art: truth embodied. Thus, in my book Reading Essays: An Invitation, I write about T. S. Eliot, among many others , and offer an extended reading of his most famous and influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; I suggest that he, his friend Virginia Woolf, and some others take the form of nonfictional prose they inherited from Montaigne and, much later, Wordsworth and other Romantics, and turn it in a direction in keeping with the defining Modernist principles at work in poetry and fiction; observation replaces reflection, the bugbear of the post-Metaphysical poetry that Eliot famously rejected as entailing a “dissociation of sensibility.” The present book extends my consideration of Incarnational art by focusing on Eliot and the essay: I do not, that is, quite offer a study of Eliot as essayist, as valuable as that might be, especially if pursued comparatively—as, in fact, I began to do via an undoubtedly surprising juxtaposition of Eliot and E. B. White in a new book, On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies. In the book you are now holding—really an essay in several parts—I range rather widely, focusing attention on collateral issues and eschewing the thesis-driven nature of the usual scholarly monograph. I draw particular attention, in any case, to the productive similarities and parallels between the pattern of Incarnational thinking as it variously manifests itself in Eliot’s prose and poetry alike and the ways in which the essay as form functions as Incarnational art, embodying truth. Although my main interest here is T. S. Eliot, his values, and ix x Preface those that he rejects and opposes, the result is that we learn as much about the essay as we do about Eliot by means of this particular comparison, “comparison ” representing along with “analysis” the tools of criticism, according to Eliot himself. I use the term “impure” advisedly to describe both Eliot’s adoption of via media positions and the essay’s special being. By it, I clearly do not mean “adulterated” so much as “mixed”; as I use it here, “impure” is descriptive rather than evaluative or judgmental. The essay is neither quite philosophy nor (perhaps) literature but almost one and not quite the other at the same time. Roland Barthes was right in calling the essay “a-generic.” Decades of studying essays, teaching and sharing them with students, writing about them, and sometimes writing them myself (or at least attempting to do so) have taught me that the form is no more a free-floating, transcendental, disembodied , pure spirit than it is a genre. Eliot was himself both poet and philosopher, businessman and writer, “Anglo” and “Catholic”—always, or so it seems, concerned with our plaguing way(s) of thinking and acting via dualisms, oppositions, and separations, which he set about to complicate and “problematize”—“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,” Eliot wrote in perhaps his single most important line, is “Incarnation” (notice the omission of the definite article before the last noun). “Impure,” then, takes its place alongside such analogous terms as “indirect,” “tensional,” and “Incarnational,” instances all of them of a pattern that Eliot observed in the world and revealed for our pleasure and profit. This he did in essay form, in prose, and at least once in poetry, the supremely important Four Quartets toward which the present book moves and in which it has its beginning. My own effort here, this book, participates in the impurity of which I speak. Not, however, in imitation of Eliot—even though I hope my style proves “answerable.” T. S. Eliot and the Essay is, I reckon, by definition an academic book, but I imagine my audience as more than academic. Such has been the hope with which I have been writing for many years. Years ago, flooded by recent critical theory, or at least certain conservative versions of it filtered through my own (Ancient) lens, I relished the discovery of “both/ and” thinking and analysis. “Impure,” as I intend it here and as this book reflects, is another name for “both/and.” ...