The New Old Guard

This week’s material intersects with some outside reading I am currently undertaking at work: Mark Conroy’s Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity. Conroy depicts the dissolution of the patronage system and the rise of mass culture, noting that the very industry of print media created the modern obsession with individual originality as a means of differentiation from the hoi polloi. He also observes, as many of us have in previous class discussions, that mass culture and the literary forms to which it appeals has been conventionally gendered feminine, as the more so-called “heroic” mode of pitting oneself against the commodification of art for public consumption has been gendered masculine. I suppose that the success of Pound, Eliot, and Hume’s treatises, and the very fact that we are currently studying them, marks the success of their particular struggles. Prestige, therefore, may indeed carry a cultural capital, a “soft power”, more permanent than the initial popularity of say, Pound’s rival Manelli.

Indeed, unlike the Wilcox/Schlegel dualism of Howard’s End, I ascertained that our reading instead presented the monism of the traditional modernist canon: masculine, heroic, elite, classics-inundated. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that Eliot, Pound, Hume, et. all themselves were subverting the Romantic/Victorian canon. It does not take a leap of “imagination” to on some level sympathize with their rally for a “harder, dryer” style after reading poetry that incessantly quested for an abstract “sublime” in a nature that most Londoners would never see throughout the course of a given day.

Thus, we should read Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as a rallying cry for change against prevailing Romanticist assumptions. His assertion that “criticism is as inevitable as breathing” displaces the usual favor that the “creative” or “artistic” faculty receives for its closeness to some sort of “natural” thought. Perhaps Eliot even anticipates Derrida’s critique of a Platonic obsession with “authenticity” here. Timothy Materer mentions Eliot’s binary between “Authority” and “Individual Judgment”; could Eliot be noticing the usual privileging of first-hand experience, or presence, leading us to fetishize individualism and inborn talent in literary endeavors? As we see in Hume’s polemic, the Romantic worldview also of course equates this authenticity with goodness under the assumption of an originally benevolent human nature. It is in this context that we receive Eliot’s claim that the critical faculty may be as spontaneous as the creative, signaling the need for a flowering of criticism alongside art.

However, we should, like Materer, take these Modernist appraisals with a grain of salt – far from encompassing an objective value system of literature (which would be impossible), their primary goal was perhaps to “make a place” for their “own revolutionary poems,” in other words to canonize their experiments through demoting the near past in grand Napoleonic form. Pound, for example, employs a tactic similar to his contemporaries, that of apotheosizing classical works in order to at once legitimize their own and delegitimize their immediate forebears. His references to “Caesar”, “Crassus”, and “Dante” also foreshadow the shadier side of preferring a Nuevo-traditionalism in politics and the arts: hero-worship, Mussolini-worship, and fascism.