Impossible Modernism: T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason by Robert S. Lehman (review)

This volume contains many interesting aperçus but they all tend to get overridden by the larger idea that remains missing. Should the consolidated object we take into our hands in the form of a book not correspond to a coherent and even consistent whole that we might weave up in our minds as we read it? Putting the pieces together constitutes the challenge to which we rise as readers and it also establishes a collaboration with the writer. But what if the writer declines his or her side of that challenge? In this case, the two halves, one dealing with Walter Benjamin, the other with T.S. Eliot, do not make a whole.

The initial expectation would seem clear enough—there has been no effective critical construction of a relationship between these two enormously important figures. Walter Benjamin and T.S. Eliot emerged through approximately the same definitive years of history in their productive lives. They came of age just as modernism in the first years of the 20^th century had developed its familiar disdain for the modernity of the last decades of the 19^th century. But in the end, the author neither finds lines of correspondence in their transections through modernism or avant gardism, nor constructs a significant relationship of opposition. Without development of that shared background, the project merely accentuates the effective isolation of the two figures from one another. Not merely in isolation from one another, in fact, but also closed off within their own individual situation in an identity oddly dissociated from history by its limited assemblage of textual material. It is, of course, the responsibility of the bricoleur to test and resist received perspectives, but without the common interest in consistent philological evidence shared between reader and author, the author's inventions leave his readers with the choice either of submitting in passive assent or resisting these impositions.

Two simple examples indicate a larger philological problem, though a more substantial one in the material on Benjamin because of the project's larger ambitions regarding his work. It is more or less a commonplace that Eliot's work employed his brilliant technique to establish a diction that cut poetry off from the suppler spontaneities of living experience—or in the phrase quoted from Hart Crane, its being "good … but so damned dead" (104). That still leaves much to be decided about Eliot's achievement and its limitations within the context of literary history. Instead, the presentation puts too much weight on an inadequate Latin etymological link confusing the various meanings of caedo. This takes suicide to read as though it were suicision and thus supports a theme of "self-cutting" (36). Similarly, the image of Benjamin offered here uses up the potential in the term "perverse" (124) to consider a progressive development in Benjamin's thinking from stage to stage across time perverse merely because Benjamin himself assails the notion of progress. It is surely so well established by now that both Eliot and Benjamin stood against themselves and their times as to make that standpoint, available to the critic, a source of light that each might reflect on the other. Certainly this is potentially most helpful with an œuvre like Benjamin's that embarks on a program of contradictions. Eliot and Benjamin each approach the fundamental context of representation as fraught with perversity in its essence. Developing this shared context, however, is exactly what Impossible Modernism is at pains to treat as impossible.

That is why the arrangement of the volume strikes one as so emblematic of its turning against the logic of a book. The first part consists of three chapters under the general heading of "Gathering Dust, T.S. Eliot." This half of the project does not just sunder itself from the second half, but imposes a further incision by dismembering the poet's...