Eliot

"And only those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance," this advance being "making the modern world possible for art," which Eliot establishes as the exigence for "Ulysses, Order, Myth."  So this is the essay where those famous phrases, namely these two, come from:

"the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history," and "the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter."

The former is Eliot's characterization of what the mythic method intends to address, and the latter is Eliot's definition of the novel.  Happily, we can explicate these together.

One of the most interesting things about this essay is Eliot's assumption about the relationship between art and life.  The novel was previously governed by the narrative method because, presumably, life was simple enough that a story could make sense of it.  The creative writer must try to give meaning to the present, and the present includes both some material manifestation of feeling/emotion as well as, oddly enough, history ("mummified stuff from a museum").  This Eliot identifies as classicism.  Classicism endeavors to do good by its influences as well as by "the possibilities of its time and place."  Seemingly, then, classicism is not a revival of the past but an adoption of it in the effort to order the present.  This engagement with the empirical present appears to be why Eliot calls Joyce's innovation "scientific."  To the question, "How can I re/present what I am feeling?" Joyce finds a new model.  So imagine that feeling is a kind of matter (which Eliot suggests)--just as Einstein showed the positionality of matter to be relative, so too does Joyce offer a revolutionary perspective on what otherwise appear to be impossibly complex, "an immense panorama."  The new form that Joyce finds is myth.  And myth is replicable by other artists because it is not an archetype.  Like the truth of relativity, myth is hypothetical, contingent because it's personal.  It depends on an artist working solo to win his own discipline in secret and without aid; it depends on being true to one's own perspective.

It's not difficult to see how this will feed into "Tradition and the Individal Talent."  (Or, rather, how "U, O, M" is a development of "T at IT."

Intro

I've set up this blog in order to help me navigate my way through British literary modernism into, and hopefully through, postmodernism.  And "navigate" is probably a poor choice of verb.

I've set up this blog in order to motivate my readings in British modernism.  It's going to contain less than fully-formed ideas.  It might simply sport interpretations or summaries of secondary studies.

In any event, the goal is to pass my comprehensive exam in December and get something out of it.  This is important...because my problem so far appears to be retention.  I'm endeavoring to post every day.  Good luck.

Next: I begin with the canonical beginning of M--Eliot, Pound, and Lewis.