The "New" Tradition of Eliot

This satisfying collection of fourteen essays looks back at Eliot's seminal notion of tradition in the refracted light of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Eliot's 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," proposed a new way of looking at tradition as a rigorous reencounter with the "whole literature of Europe," which was to be felt as having a "simultaneous existence" and composing a "simultaneous order." Eliot's authoritatively announced formulation of tradition's "ideal order" did not fare well when his reputation faltered in the wake of postmodernism. Identified with the religious orthodoxy Eliot endorsed in his later cultural criticism, "Tradition" became the rallying cry for a critical conservatism suspicious of avant-garde poetics and the politicization of literary studies. No wonder then that Terry Eagleton, in a well-known parody of Eliot's signature concept, declared that "a literary work can be valid only by existing in the tradition, as a Christian can be saved only by living in God."

It is against this backdrop of suspicion toward Eliot that Cianci and Harding's collection of essays offers its revaluation of his signature concept. The essays do so in a variety of ways: by revisiting Eliot's notion of impersonality; by recuperating the immediate, avant-garde context of literary and artistic debates to which the essay contributed a unique and decisive argument; by tracing the "volatility" of tropes, analogies, and rhetorical argumentation in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; and by offering three case studies that pair Eliot's thoughts on tradition with those of other artists and intellectuals (Duchamp, Ford, and Benjamin). In contrast to the "old" version of Eliot's tradition as conservative bulwark against relativism and source of absolute literary judgment, the "new" tradition articulated within the collection is radically innovative, transhistorical and international in character, not static but dynamic, "fluid and evolving": "a kaleidoscope with a constantly shifting pattern; something to be argued for"; not a canon of accepted classics or "values in need of reassertion," but a potentially disruptive reservoir of "'something rich and strange' coming from far below conscious levels of thought and feeling."

For anyone reading the collection chronologically, as a reviewer is apt to do, its effect is cumulative, with each new essay returning to and modulating insights offered in earlier chapters. The book is well conceived, so that as readers we begin with the more familiar literary perspectives, revisiting arguments that have shaped the reception of Eliot—among them the vexed question of poetic impersonality—until we reach new grounds such as the history of art and anthropology. One does not mind the inevitable repetitions, first and foremost the repeated references to the "Magdalenian draughtsmen," whose cave paintings in a prehistoric rock shelter near Les Eyzies (la Madeleine) Eliot may have seen firsthand during his walking tour in Southern France with Pound. Strikingly indifferent to middle-class notions of high culture, Eliot counts these remnants of prehistoric art among the "monuments of western civilization," whose "simultaneous existence," achieved in the mind of the poet and conveyed to a larger reading public, can serve as crucial defense against barbarism and the catastrophe of global wars.

This new version of tradition as both a restorative and transgressive, even countercanonical, space is first proposed in the opening essays of Aleida Assman and Stan Smith. Emphasizing the systemic, rather than organic, nature of Eliot's tradition, Assman links it to Russian formalist notions of literary history as a system, in which components coexist not "on the basis of equality," but in terms of a struggle between elements, resulting in the changing "pre-eminence of one group of elements and the resulting deformation of others." Eliot's tradition, she contends, works like a cultural memory "that lends itself to creative deformation," not like a "canonical tradition that enforces veneration." Smith recognizes in Eliot's enigmatic proposition "to halt at the frontiers of metaphysics or mysticism" evidence for the poet's indebtedness to Romantic notions of the poet as...