Modernism Undone: T.S. Eliot's Literary Revolution

I wanted to just do anyway before we really get started the first is to thank Jeff Pierce who is now our director of logistics is that logistics operations sounds like double-oh-seven yeah here at the college and he's been deeply involved in the humanities center since we started in terms of enthusiastic support and providing us with some wonderful speakers and Sookie helped to organize the event today and I hand this over to Jeff so that he can introduce our speaker mr. Wolfe I wanted to just say to my students from English 253 I if you would please take notes and then give them to me tomorrow in class it might be hard because I have to dash out of here at the end of our class period which is 1210 in order to get up over to my next class and I know some of you may have to leave too so take good notes handing it tomorrow for points and then that way we'll have some memory when we finally do get to modernism so I'll happy to introduce Jeff Pierce Thank You Joyce good morning thank you for coming a few housekeeping notes please turn off any phones or handheld devices that might disrupt the presentation this morning also if you need to sneak out early today please do so as quietly as possible I'd like to thank dr. Joyce Walker the Everett Community College humanity Center in the Everett Community College Foundation for cooperating to bring Gregory wolf to our campus today to speak on the topic of modernism undone TS Eliot's literary revolution mr. Wolfe is writer in residence and director of the MFA in creative writing from your met Seattle Pacific University he's also the founder and editor of the image one of America's leading literary Quarterly's and the author and co-author of several books including books that build character a guide to teaching your child moral values through stories and most recently beauty will save the world covering the human in an ideological age mr. wolf and his wife the novelist Suzanne mo for the parents are for children please help me get regular wolf a warm welcome to every community college can you hear me well thank you I am very grateful to Jeffrey for the invitation and I do feel a little stressed out though because I have a feeling with that open door the open doors at either end and spring finally seeming seemingly having sprung I'm just going to see eyes kind of moving to this patches of sunlight outside these doors it's okay that's all right enjoy enjoy it I'll do my best to distract you from from spring for at least another hour or so excuse me well I am I'm here to talk about revolution which I know is the theme for your Humanities Center for the year I I'm going to focus on a single writer writer named TS Eliot was born in the 1880s and died in the early 1960s TS Eliot is somebody who at least in my youth was such a towering figure that you couldn't avoid him even if you tried I'm just curious how many of you have ever studied TS Eliot in the school of any kind just raise your head all right so it looks to me like about a third of the audience now if you if you'd asked me if I was in an audience when I was in college 50 years ago I would have filled the entire class would have raised their hands because Elliot was such a towering figure at that time he'd only died you know a couple decades before and he was the kind of writer who had a huge sort of moral and cultural authority for his time it's difficult almost to really think of anybody right now that we would look at in our current day to have that kind of sort of man massive influence and sort of moral / Cultural / literary authority of TS Eliot in fact we're not an age that really looks to authorities that much we we like to subvert Authority we tend to be cynical and jaded about whether there are such people and interestingly enough Eliot has suffered a sort of huge decline in reputation in the literary and intellectual worlds and that's probably one reason why Eliot's not pop that off in these days a number of reasons for this including our skepticism about figures who have that kind of almost prophetic quality Eliot was somebody who embraced certain political and philosophical views that our time has also been very deeply suspicious about it's also been pointed out for example Eliot once called himself he rarely issued manifestos but the one time he came very close to uh during a manifesto it was almost absurd in the context of the time because his manifesto was so seemingly out-of-date and a throwback to another time he said in in aesthetics I am a classicist this is at a time when romanticism would still very much beloved by everybody and classicism seemed like dry you know hyper structured ordered stuff you know Doric and ionic columns the sort of neoclassicism that you know was fine in the 18th century but we were beyond that kind of very rational intellectual kind of approach we were emotional we were about the depth of the psyche and you know the emotions and Freud and all these things were opening up for us these rich ideas so to call yourself a classicist was really you know pretty much like Three Stooges poking poking them in a world of the electril world of you know the modern West and makin the eyeballs and then he said in religion I am an Anglo Catholic which is this sort of high church wing of pesco poor Anglican Communion and that's you know that's we're on several levels including that you still even believed in any religion at that point because this is modernity he's making this statement in the 20s or 30s I forget exactly when and you know Christianity wasn't exactly sort of winning a lot of hearts and minds at the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books at that time uh and and then he said and in politics I am a monarchist like what huh now this is an American writer he was born in st. Louis but he emigrated became an expatriate writer in London and you can't get more conservative as an American even as an American living in England Buckner witches has a queen than to call yourself a monarchist so Eliot in some ways in our progressive liberal secular era has seemingly been left behind and and discredited as as an important figure for a number of reasons I think that's you know it's unfortunate I think we should strive in our in the way we often talk about being a clue in multicultural and pluralistic in our contemporary environment we should make sure that we're not eliminating great writers and thinkers who have something to say for us and keeping them as part of the total package of of the literary cultural inheritance that we need to learn from in order to face the issues of our own day but he was a revolutionary in his own time he was definitely pretty hip and his revolution the revolution that he began with was something called modernism what I want to suggest today you know in the time that I have is that as a revolutionary TS Eliot began in the thick in the heat of an exciting new movement are a sort of brand new creative explosion in the early 20th century that he came to be one of its greatest exemplars and live in the same literary Pantheon as such other great writers as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf but that in a strange way he came to see the very flaws of the very revolutionary movement that he had belonged to and then in his own writing he points the way toward post-modernism so he is a revolutionary who in some ways went against his own revolution in the long run but what I want to suggest what I want to mess around with your minds a little bit is sometimes a revolution is not a permanent elimination of what it seems to be negating but a new synthesis is looking for a way of getting away from the immediate past and breaking away from the immediate past which is become boring and stultifying and expected and trying to nonetheless ultimately unify itself with a larger tradition that revolutionaries are often people who care about the tradition but they believe that what is the most immediate past has become dead lifeless and I think that's what Elliot's story tells us in many ways now there are people of course who look at Elliott's career and say guy was a traitor he turned his back on us and of course that's something that works free to think Eliot was somebody who definitely was a controversial figure then as well as now others in the past have been similar though and we should be cautious before we condemn for example I don't know if any of you are in love with romantic poetry but if you are and you read anything about say we have Wordsworth Wordsworth was very much considered a revolutionary at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was the avatar with work with coverage of romantic poetry which was a response to classicism remember and he was a man of the people he wanted to write poetry as he said in his preface to lyrical ballads in the language really spoken by then he wanted to get away from artificial diction the way that artists can create this little enclosed world and he wanted to get real he wanted to become a democratic poet and in many ways somebody like walk Whitman in the u.s. would become very much a similar figure let's get away from the way art becomes this this little system this little enclosed world let's talk about real life in the words that real people use and what Wordsworth started he was a champion of the French Revolution and when he wrote his first great poem the prelude his great epic long howl about his life he said about the French Revolution you know Blissett was to be alive in a very heaven to be alive at the time on the Frenchman illusion sought to emphasize the rights of bed and the democracy in the common man against that old aristocratic order that was was oppressive and artificial and not real not real relationships but a structure imposed on reality so you can see there's both a political and a literary thing going on a desire for naturalness and freedom against the artificial and the imposed and so Wordsworth went along unfortunately what happened with the French Revolution is that they started chopping a lot of people's heads off and more and more people's heads and then you got into what was called the kind of terror of the French Revolution and Wordsworth began to change his opinion about it and he in later years turned and praised Edmund Burke the great member of parliament and great writer and or oratorical figure of the 18th century who was a critic a conservative critic of the French Revolution and then people what did Wordsworth and they said traitor you you've gone soft you've gone conservative in your old age but it's interesting that revolution is often about youth revolution is about the young you know they often talk about the need to kind of slay the fathers you know the way we have to kill the father is in order to become ourselves the sort of influence and sometimes those young people grow up and they change so let's look at the way TS Eliot does this and see what we think of it and of course there many different ways different kind of takes that you can have what was modernism in the arts modern m's modernism was a rebellion against a kind of late romantic bourgeois culture romanticism had started optimistically in the 19th century smell those daffodils right that's accordingly the spy could get water around okay smell those daffodils nature is what we want it's this freedom it's this organic world not this artificial world man is liberated when he is close to nature but romanticism went sour to romanticism which started with this idea of men you know free in nature began to see nature increasingly as hostile and so by late romanticism in the late 19th century you have men against it in different nature nature turns out to be not so much daffodils as shipwrecks and volcanoes or earthquakes and things that kill you and and you know and so you had either a depressive romanticism at the end or you had at what I would call romanticism and denial at the end of the 19th century romanticism in denial the end of the 18th century was romanticism that you know these paintings that you see in the Museum of like nymphs and and satyrs and gods playing by splashing pools you get a kind of very sort of decadent smarmy classical gods creep myths kind of you know painting this very soft focus how does sentimental way and so you have this these dark fog nari and romantics who see the world in in apocalyptic terms and you have these people who are saying you know look at the beauty of the female form lots of nude nymphs of course sprawl looking by those fountains and you have this kind of split personality in late romanticism pre-populate late 1900s early twentieth first few years of the 20th century and then all hell breaks loose and that world suddenly seems completely inadequate for one thing or what happens in 1914 and you know in which case you have Europe in flames blood spilt everywhere a kind of civil war in Europe and you have of course not only war but you have technological war you know war where the technology was making it so that killing on a mass scale was possible and not only that what was really disturbing about this was not just the amount of bloodshed but the way that these technological engines of destruction took away anything that was recognizably human like the famous thing about the landscapes of world war one this trench warfare was that it destroyed all the trees it tore up all the grass it was one big muddy battlefield with stumps and debris everywhere in other words the world was changed from what it looked like normally with grass and trees to literally a kind of abstraction the technology had taken the normal and abstracted it to this kind of gray canvas this money and of course this was deeply traumatic to this time period and those nips sporting around or those self-involved vogue myriads who are like oh you know nature is against us but they were basic they even they looked navel-gazing and narcissistic and self-involved to this group of young people in the early 1900s who said this is all flatulent self-indulgent denial of what is true about the world we live in a world of terror we live in a world of machine we live in the world where if we want to get real we have to help talk about not nips and satyrs but people going to work in Subway's and living in little single furnished rooms in the city we need once again revolution as a way of trying to get a real revolution as a way of trying to speak honestly about the way things are if this is the Machine age if this is the world of factories and automobiles and subway trains then we need to write about that and we need to celebrate it in a way we need to not pretend that being an infinite satyr in a pastoral world of fountains and Gardens is good enough it's not good enough it's not the world would we live and so modernism celebrates this world of technology this world of the urban concentration the way that people were all coming to the cities to find work and doing so in ways that disrupted all of the traditions of the way the human beings had related to the world so what are some of the hallmark works of modernism things that you may have at least come across in some class or some art history book that you you know glanced some Museum you walk through here are some of the of the classic works of modernism Picasso's Lake Demoiselles d'Avignon I don't know if you've ever seen this picture but it's a famous painting it's iconic of modernism it shows for nude women in various poses standing in front of you you may recall that it's of course one of the first paintings where the you know like two eyeballs are on one side and a nose is sticking out here you know that kind of weirdness that Picasso did right but more important is not just the rearranging of facial features on the on the head but the fact that a couple of these figures have African masks on instead of human faces and these are not little nips to sporting around the fountain these den was L these young women are prostitutes there are prostitutes this is reality these women are are not innocent nips this is the world of desire and human grub enos and you know darkness that is the truth about the world that those nips are are in denial about so Picasso puts them literally in our face and by getting a couple of them African masks he gives them a kind of sacred power he gives them a kind of dark energy because they become almost like sort of goddesses of of the flesh of lust of frankness about their bodies and this is one of the characteristics of modernism that it rejects the kind of bourgeois Christianity of its era which these people also felt was a kind of religion and denial a religion that was merely a prop to the power structures of the day that was merely a social thing that there was not really a thing of deep faith or philosophical vision and they turned increasingly toward ancient myths and primitivism there's a GoGet exhibition right now at Sam Wright there's a guy who is the same era a little earlier than the group I'm talking about buddies here's what they call post-impressionist so it's only a couple decades before what I'm talking about with modernism go again leaves what he thinks to be this blase France at this time to go to Tahiti to meet these simple people in touch with nature in touch with their bodies etc now of course that's a whole new can of worms there I can go into because is he discovering freedom or is the objectifying women in the colonial you know imperialistic kind of metallic well I can't go there today but you see the environment which I'm talking about the modernism comes out so like demos of every note by Picasso in music the Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky staged in Paris with with modern art as the background before it was even finished people were leaving their seats and storming out of the theater and throwing stuff at the orchestra in the stage because what is the Rite of Spring but an ancient fertility Rite that becomes the source of this music and it has this driving beat this kind of driving rhythm to it which is again the kind of TomTom of the primitive man was in touch with these realities of who we are as Deniz in literature you have things like James Joyce's Ulysses which chronicles a single day in somebody's life not like those 19th century novels it took you like David Copperfield that took you through an entire person's life it's thought to give you a structure an own structure of reality but someone in the modern era of modernist writer writes about one day in the life just a slice just a tiny slice of a human beings life and tries to see in that very mundane day going around Dublin doing his thing and pop it into the pub talking to his wife going to the store that there is meaning again in this in this mundane real world around us and then you get TS Eliot with poems like the love song of drea alfred Prufrock and the wasteland showing a world that is so fragmented that the lines of poetry are full of fragments sentences that don't even end little tiny snippets either of overheard language saying at the pub or perhaps snippets from the literary classics that are really have forgotten because the modern era doesn't care anymore about the classics of the wood of the Western literary tradition and we've forgotten what they are and so we get with these these modern modernist artists a number of key features let me just review what some of those are they're interested in the urbanization in the way that modern industrial society brings people into huge conglomerations urbanization leads to mass culture mass culture which is something that people didn't have the means of communication to have we live in a mass culture now that we take for granted we're memes where every you know latest trend is instantly available on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere we go but in an era before this kind of concentration people lived in isolated pockets information didn't flow you didn't have brands back then there were no brands there were no trends there were no fads by beginning in the early 20th century you find a series of trends that Elliot's fascinated with where people become subject to mass advertising and and sort of the early means of modernity things that people are trying to sell you and it becomes a consumerist culture and the modernists are frankly fascinated by this the way that modernity affects people is that it changes the way that they relate to the world it changes the way that they actually take in information so for example prior to this Industrial Revolution how do people move they moved around by foot they moved by horse and they move by those slow moving chugging trains that would puff their way through the countryside even with a train with it which is a piece of modern industrial still had a link to the countryside we looked out the window you can see that the passing country's Elliott becomes fascinated with the subway the underground in London because for the first time you start in one place you go into darkness and you end up in a different place there's no organic relationship there's no transition it's one thing and it's suddenly another thing you see what I'm saying it was actually curious out the way that changed our perception of things then how about the telephone the telephone again something we take for granted in the early days you know how people answered the telephone they didn't say hello in the earliest days of the telephone people would pick pick it up and say are you there are you there because there was this sense of the disembodied voice not personal presence not me talking to you not me relating to you seeing your body language smelling your fear of moans knowing your history but a voice coming out of nowhere a voice abstracted from its context Eliot was fascinated by that and his famous poem The Waste Land is known as a poem of voices a poem where there is no single voices of this it's two dozen different voices telephone itself change it's the way that we perceive information The Critic you can ER says the wasteland is so to speak a telephone pole it's multiple voices preferable to a massive short-circuit at the central exchange so urbanization mass culture fragmentation I've already talked about the way that warfare and Technology fragment are experienced and cause it to be chopped up and and a non-continuous I talked about primitivism the search for something beyond the bourgeois authoritarian culture and I've talked about them in the mundane the everyday all of these things are evident in Eliot's poetry Eliot's famous beginning of jail for Prufrock starts out let us go then you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table that's his famous modernist metaphor that the evening sky is like a patient in a hospital under anaesthetic it's dark it's disturbing it makes you think it lose to technology modern medicine and it very much takes down the notion that high art is about elevated things and it puts us flatly in human experience at its most raw and fallible with the other masquerades the time resumes one thinks of all the hands that are raising dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms Eliot again is fascinated by the way that urbanization takes people makes them cogs in an immense wheel leaves them in little apartments so that they lost connection to history to family and they become alienated and alone Eliot said that the internal combustion engine changed the rhythm of modernity and that's why you get Stravinsky and others using this driving pulsing rhythm the piston engine becomes the new rid of modernism and that's why modernism sought the energy of the machine that's why all those great Modern architects celebrated not the natural curves of the landscape of the you know of the earth of the natural but the sharp right angles of the constructed world the sharp right angles of made things Geoffrey's poster for today's talk with its horizontal and there's not an illusion to tic-tac-toe it's an allusion to the famous modernist artists cape mandra whose paintings started off realistically and after World War one became abstracted into these right angles and these colored planes of primary colors yellow blue well-read ill blue red thank you exactly why because this is to get at the essence of reality this is to get at the deep structures of reality and that shined well with the intellectual ideas of that age we wanted they wanted to get down to the bedrock Freud helped people to get down to the bedrock of the human psychology of the psyche Marx help people to get down to the bedrock of how does actual labor and production work how do these power structures get may darwin helps us to get down to the bedrock of nature itself of the biosphere of evolution and these modern thinkers are embraced and their ways of accounting for the world were embraced by the modernist the way critics have put this is that the modernist embraced what are called master narratives master narratives these big overarching schemes that account for so much of reality because they were they had defeated the old master narrative of the judeo-christian prequel roman system that had been part of Western said before then because that tradition a tradition of Plato and Aristotle and Agustin and Aquinas and all that that tradition had brought about this rule of oppression this role of the bourgeois super so modernism embraced secular master narratives as a way of defeating this discredited older theological philosophical master narrative and it was trying to get down to the bow down to the essence of things and Eliot embraces this himself think about the wasteland if you look at that pole you see that it's got all of these elements in it it's it's it's fascinated by the way that people cannot connect to one another in this modern era their prey to these Freudian urges but they cannot connect and you get this you get these different scenes of sort of fumbling failed sexual encounters in this poem and ironically these these like dates gone these dates from hell getting narrated by an ancient figure from classical myth Tiresias you may recall the tiresias was a character who became believed that he could tell the gods who had the more profound sexual experience man or women who had more pleasure who had a richer sexual experience but when he answered he answered that women did he was cursed by Zeus we didn't like that at all and and given the sexual characteristics of both men and women so he was a hermaphrodite so Tiresias is this figure of the and woman he becomes a prophet he becomes a seer he can see all of experience Elliott has tiresias this blind prophet and nobody listens to prophets tell us these stories of these these sad failed connections now it sounds depressing right it sounds you know unhappy but to that era it was the breath of fresh air to that era it was writing that did not go in to deny it was writing to told it like it is life is hard people don't connect we're all cogs in this large industrial machine were separated from another our experience is fragmented we start here we go into a dark tube we come out there we hear disembodied voices this is who we are we don't connect um Forster the famous novelist maintenance motto just a few years after this only the only connect only connect was his was his model because he was responding to this alienation in the wasteland Eliot writes of his own experience of mental exhaustion he goes to a seaside town because he's had a nervous breakdown and he says on Margate sins I can connect nothing with nothing margit sins I can connect nothing with nothing and it continues and this is typical of the way the poem works the fingernails of dirty hands my people humble people who expect nothing la la to Carthage then I came burning burning burning burning Oh Lord thou cast me out o lord thou cast burning so what do we have we've got the fragmentation going on here we've got these allusions to different sources all jumbled together this doesn't make sense these aren't even whole sentences the poetry itself is fragmented the way human experiences but at that very point where it may seem like all is lost and there's no hope and this doesn't mean anything and it's just random there is the possibility of something profound and regenerative and meaningful because if you study these poems carefully what you see is that Eliot increasingly looks at a fragment and says this is the world we live in it is fragmented but the fragment points toward a wholeness a fragment is always making us wonder what completes it what makes it whole and this is the essence of modernism at its best because modernism at his best says I am the artist I'm not going to do all the work for you I'm not going to just tell you what I think I'm not going to lay it out art is interactive art is is processed by which you the reader complete the meaning of the work I come part way but you have to come part way toward me no longer is the notion that the artwork is something you just sit there like in front of a TV screen and take in that's part of that whole bourgeois hero modernism says no I am NOT just not opening your brain pen ladling in a little something art is about your interpretation of what I'm putting out there and here at this moment of seeming you know lostness a brokenness and fragmented this eliot finds hope Eliot finds hope because he thinks these fragments point towards what we longed for you can you can blow people up on the battlefield you can shove them in subways put them in cogs and we'll put the PEGI apartments but they still have hearts they still have human curative for meaning and for connection and so Eliot's fragments when read properly point towards completion and what we do as readers then and sometimes we resent this because it's like wait you want me to do some of the work like I have to look at a footnote I have to think I have to think about you know everything that I've ever seen in museums and read and in historical context yeah yeah this is you know artists for grown-ups artists artists are people who you know are not just sitting there saying impress me artists are people who want to do some work so think about this this fragment I just read on Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing the dirty finger the thing I nails of dirty hands my people humble people who expect nothing lava to carthage that I came burning burning burning burning Oh Lord thou pluck us me out o Lord L pluck is burning what's going on in here well you can figure out what some of these illusions are some of them for the readers at the time would not have been difficult to pick up so I mean again I know we live in a different culture so this is not about that is better now it's worse alone some ways tend to be a little crusty that way myself but for example to Carthage then I came Carthage being the ancient city in North Africa that was you know fought over you know wars with Rome but it was also famously the place where say to Gustin described in his famous book the confessions that a you know along his own journey his own path through alienation and through confusion and through struggles with lust and and who he was as a human being he came to to Carthage which was him for him the big city so Carthage keeps the city metaphor which is at the heart of the wasteland and he says and of course if you know the rest of the line you know to Carthage I came that city of boiling with unholy lusts it was the big city it was the it was you know it was a world of Picasso's prostitutes it was the world of of the sort of dark desires of the human heart it was a place where on his journey he got lost in Carthage agustin got lost he lost sight of who he was as a human being he lost sight of meaning why throw this into the wasteland why to cart with Carthage then I came because it fits it fits with what Eliot's doing it's precisely an allusion to one of the great thinkers of our tradition who ended up telling a story about how he went on from Carthage to discover God and his way is if you would be you may not agree with it it may not be your personal faith but a Gustin story is a story of self-discovery of meaning and a rejection of mere bestiality animality and it is part of our literature part of our cultural heritage with that clue of to Carthage that I came agustín's story it's not that hard to think that Oh Lord thou flexed me out where does that come from that's also from the confessions that's also that's just a world translation in the Victorian thousand these kind of translation o Lord thou flexed me out god you pulled me out you plucked me pal of this lostness let me get burning burning burning burning burning it's repeated again and again what is burning you know burning is burning with lust but burning can also be other kinds of burning and writers love nothing that to see multiple meanings occurring in any kind of word right so burning can be burning with lust and also can be refining fire it also can be the burning of of illumination the burning of of predation urging those lusts and trying to achieve something higher this section is in Eliot's poem The Waste Land it's called the fire sermon which is an allusion to a famous talk given by Buddha by the Buddha so what Eliot is doing is he's making Christian and Buddhist herbs together as a way of trying to see meaning in this meaning in this world he also later includes Hindu concepts at the end of the poem and this is where it interestingly happens that Elliott is already beginning to maybe turn on modernism it's a way he's already beginning to question whether those modern master narratives those stories of Floyd Marx and Darwin are sufficient they tell us that there are certain truths about who we are but do they tell us enough then they tell us enough and do they tell us enough so that we can find out the fullness of our nature so Eliot begins to doubt the power of these modern master narratives any and he says it asks himself what if religion is actually a source of truth at this point he hasn't made any decisions yet he hasn't made any personal he hasn't got down on his knees to pray he says what if we've been eliminating a source of truth and something interesting happens at this point with Eliot he says what if religion and its heart is not about oppression and power structures what if religion is about a search for meaning and what if religious the religious concept of mystery helps us to actually break away from these power structures and find meaning in our experience and so Eliot begins to do something that counters what his other fellow modernists are interested interestingly enough he was not alone in this igor stravinsky who I told you about who wrote this famous Rite of Spring with its pagan fertility ritual returns to the Russian Orthodox tradition which and composes works that are very modern but within a Christian framework and so you begin to have a questioning of the questioners the guy who is the modernist embracing the modern master narratives questions whether the monster multiple modern master narratives are sufficient to tell us the truth the fire sermon is a turning point and this is where we come to post-modernism because post-modernism is about the questioning of the master narratives post-modernism says these are always inherently oppressive structures they try to do too much they're a product of human pride so to quote some of the fancy french french thinkers they're always the fanciest those spreadsheets as opposed to the grill or SC the grand master narratives all we can really do is tell the petite east water the little stories the personal story is the intimate level any time we try to get cosmic we oppress and we fail let's tell the the intimate truth of private experience so post-modernism becomes a revolution against modernism all that confidence all that notion that you can build modernist argon-40 mark star would think about ulysses is based on homer right joyce takes james joyce takes homer to be the basis you know this great classical myth all that ambition all that confidence of modernism is questioned by post-modernism we need to tell the intimate private story and suddenly with Elliot you see that it's exactly the same this man who at one point had said I'm a classicist I'm going to I'm going to tell the world of modernity like it is I'm going to Eliot famously said emotion is the is e is the worst thing about art subjectivism is dangerous we need to be objective so he throws in all these other voices in the wasteland precisely so that his voice isn't heard he tries to escape and let this big structure exist on its own and then comes this turning point at the end of the wasteland and then you look at Eliot's later poems and again this is a major writer this is cool stuff I do know one day if you haven't tackled it that you do read Eliot his poems come next Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets and what happens in those poems he no longer is disappeared he's no longer absent he tells stories that involve himself he takes the more intimate subjective role and he says my story matters my story matters that's what Agustin's confessions were about right Agustin confessions are the first autobiography serious real autobiography in the modern sense they were they were the notion that faith in God enabled Agustin to believe that my individual story matters so Eliot begins to tell his own story and to begin to speak in his own voice so Ash Wednesday which is a poem about penitence about giving up power and control starts like this and you'll hear familiar elements because I do not hope to turning in because I do not hope because I do not hope to turn desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things why should the agent ego stretch its wings why should I warn the vanished power of the usual rain and rain up and drops falling but power of the regime the political structure here how it's repeating fragmented fragmented sentences again because I do not hope deter because I do know ho but now these fragments point more clearly to wholeness for example later in this poem Eliot's quotes this fragment and it just sits there on a line by itself and after this our exile nothing else well what the reader category doesn't know is that comes from a famous pulp a famous print called the Sun lay Regina I him to Blessed Virgin Mary in Christian tradition and the way the line is completed is and after this our exile show us the Blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus so what Eliot's now doing is he's pointing with his newfound religious faith to the way that he believes that fragment needs to be completed we forgotten this faith and we only remember it you get even comedy sake people trying to you know you get common characters or in the midst of some apocalypse and they're trying to remember how to even pray like our Father and they can't even get it right because we've forgotten these traditions that we're so deeply our history so Elliott becomes personal and intimate in his poetry he writes in the Four Quartets these four poems each of which is based on something connected to him personally his family's history people have said that if you look at the wasteland the Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets you see a sequence that is just like Dante's Inferno purgatory and Paradiso or heaven that Elliott's career is sort of mapped over that movement in Dante from the darkness and alienation through predation through this turning toward a possibility of Grayson fulfilled and what Eliot's theme is in for Cortez is how difficult it is to master to write master narratives to write as if you can take everything into account so for example he writes about the insufficiency of language to be all comprehensive words strength crack and sometimes break under the bird under the tension slip slide perish decay with imprecision will not stay in place will not stay still shrieking voices scolding mocking or merely chattering always a syllable so language itself poetry itself can no longer achieve this comprehensive master narrative so post-modernism which is questioning our ability to know and comprehend and move moves us towards the intimate and the personal is precisely the way that Eliot's poetry goes and points to our world even though you wrote these poems in the mid 1940s these last poems for quartets point toward the undoing of modernism and the arrival of post-modernism does that mean that Eliot was a traitor does it mean that he abandoned when he believed most most-holy or does it mean that he pursued a line of reasoning that was always inherit in the studies and and the vision of modernism the undertook that's a good question so with that I'll wrap it up and I'll just say that I know that it's difficult to listen to a lecture about a writer who many of you haven't read so it's not like you have a lot of references but if you care about modern poetry if you care about the history of kind of modern intellectual debates for the last hundred years TS Eliot is a major figure you may not agree with them but he's somebody who deserves respect and deserves engagement so on this nice warm spring morning thank you for letting me expound all I'll call it to a close there does anyone have any questions there's some time for questions if you like to ask it's all raise your hand and ask the microphone to you no questions too obvious too simple to anything just if you're curious about anything where you want to comment go for well this is definitely one of one of the big crises of modernism is modernist writers were susceptible to the rise of modern ideologies because they believed that they were these comprehensive world systems that could potentially remake the world and so you find people like Yeats at my being an early at my room Mussolini and you find you someone like Ezra Pound foolish like stupidly making radio broadcast during the war because in Italy where he was living at the time and where he got stuck during war that that were pro-fascist Elliot has been accused with some reason of anti-semitism because like many people of that era he you can catch him red-handed making very prejudicial remarks it's sort of like when we watch Mad Men and we see you know people saying things that make us wince today about the way men treat women for example Elliot does that you know in relation to choose it's terrible but the one thing I'll say about Elia is he never he never got tempted by by these totalitarian systems he may have had some very neat jerk and narrow ideas about Jews although he had many friends who were Jewish too he understood it as at that point a kind of pride and you know his faith at least in whether you agree with it or not that you know at least had him say this is politics trying to become God and therefore from my point of view I have to dissent and so a lot of what for quartets is about is undefined meaning in the middle more because he writes these poems during the Blitz their scenes set in the Blitz and again you get something in the four cadets you get a lot of the wasteland kind of world it's still there again that's what I was trying to didn't have time to really get into but you know his work changes but it also stays the same it's just that there are there's a different spin if you know so that you get some darkness and wartime it in for quartets but you also get the possibility that grace is available there's hope even the midst of the despair of war so he was not taken it by that in fact he was wanting a magazine and he was so depressed by by Chamberlain's caving in and all that that he just abandoned the magazine that was part of his life in that way and I just came across that fact today so he he rejected it but modernism was susceptible because it had all these ambitions that were almost godlike and of course they godlike ambitions because sometimes make godlike works I mean Joyce's Ulysses is a great great mouth right I mean it it's powerful and I'm not I don't mean to say that it's it's um you know it's it's ungodly or but there was a lot of ambition of a certain kind in that era and it became susceptible to political political systems for him that were ambitious man at the risk of seeming trade I teach yes and where my students know Elliott is from cats yes and you said a couple things about fragmentation and about value and personal story that made me see maybe away well yes for those of you don't know Elliott was fond of cats and he wrote a series of poems called Oh old possum's book of practical cats which then became a Broadway musical called cats with which I'm not deeply familiar I wish I could build much from bridge there I've never been a huge fan of those poems there there were to me there opposed that he wrote to kind of blow off steam and to be a kind of respite from his more intense prophetic you know theological wrestling was a heap that he went through but I wouldn't be cured as to buy him some of you who who could connect the dots between those two I unfortunately cannot be the guy you know it's it's difficult I don't want to make a sweeping statement that's too ambitious but in one sense you know he does embrace the subjective and the intimate and a lot there's a lot of while they're still like as I said the city is still important in Four Quartets under the Blitz it's important you get Gardens and the ocean and and nature starts to come back in his bones and so you know in one sense he does embrace a kind of romantic romantic subjectivity and his argument is that faith undergirds this because faith is the way that that our intimate story gets grafted into this larger theological biblical story but in some ways um you could say that he had come 180 degrees in other ways you could say he's trying to synthesize take thesis and antithesis and make synthesis that that they're elements of everything in his career that he comes up to a new wholeness that's it that's an ongoing debate I think you could really argue that either way but it's true that many revolutionaries come to embrace the thing that they fought against and often have this you know and this is sometimes you know to do with aging to like you know you're gong and everything's your absolute and it's the cause and it's you know and then you're old and you realize everything is ambiguous and you can see both sides of every argument and you start trying to bring these things together so you know I I like I started off as an either work kind of guy and now I'm like more of both and kind of guy you know where I tend us and I think Elliot went through that journey but but interment in a way he did have eat crow about some of those earlier statements you know he clearly was a lot of classicist in any real set he was ultimately a kind of Christian romantic in some sense in the end so that's a great question sir the back I understand what you're saying when you talk about Elliot modernism but really I don't really follow you when you talk about Elliot as a post modernist I mean I can't connect him to any kind of postmodern philosopher I mean I think about something like there about you know talks about the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages I just don't see as somebody who embraces kind of religious point of view as a post modernist you explain a little bit more well Ivan I can only do a kind of quick sketch but I mean the argument is post-modernism says the rora see the master narratives are oppressive and false the petit east flower intimate stories are the only place where we can find scraps of truth what Eliot writes the Four Quartets he's not trying to write this comprehensive poetry poem about modern London he writes Bert Norton East coker dry selves ages all three of those places have ties to his own personal family history the brute studies come from Missouri and Harvard in New England and and he takes a very different approach we're where he goes for this intimate voice and the subjectivity of his life rather than the wasteland which is this externalized structure my voices in which the poet is sort of you know pulling you know speaking through these microphones but are these megaphones but not actually being present in the work Eliot is very becomes very interested in the engine see and knowledge how difficult it is to know and to grasp reality and and he questions those big structures ability to know and he ends up deciding that in his opinion Christianity at its best is not about big structures trying to impose but about a search but a journey toward mystery toward a kind of unknown in which absence and presence are become the dialectic of the journey and those are terms that you know I know Derrida uses you know he uses the the whole sense of kind of how difficult it is to capture presence how elusive it is and Eliot ends up saying you know what this ancient religious search and it's best becomes a way of pursuing this difficult arduous task of finding presence and holding on to presence so I think there are connections but I'm not enough of an expert to to quote chapter adverse from Derry down else on this beautiful day when you're inside listening to some guy ranting well Elliot you know Elliot is at this point he's he's really worried is trying to he's caught up this is what I call like culture wars what you know this is culture wars early 20th century and certainly when he becomes Christian he does feel himself to be ostracized and it does feel himself to be in a real I take it mystic positioned a lot of the intellectual life at the time so he you know he sort of says monarchy is about tradition it's about organic it's about a given s to the to the political world that transcends our ability to make something the Queen exists there's the fact that the Queen exists means that we can't just chop her head off and remake society in our own way in some ways it kind of a historical rootedness to the monarchy that that precisely stands us support any scheme to just impose an external ideological structure on the world it's this it's evolved it's not imposed and it's evolved in a way that may seem trite or absurd I mean the Queen wasn't we do she cuts ribbons at nursery schools and gives an annual New Year's talk you know and stilted accents but for Elliot monarchy is a way of saying you know the modern notion that we can remake the world is wrong and you need to work with tradition and engage in a dialectic with tradition and not try to create something out of whole cloth and so in that sense it's seven it's a rejection of abstract ideologies of the 20th century but it is it is I mean he knew it would be he knew was slightly absurd to put it that way he knew would be like fight words and people would go up huh and he had the ability you know he was mostly he was not a combative type in the sense of conflict lover and confrontational but he was more like the arched eyebrow he was always like slipping a little irony that people would like do a double tank like is he pulling my leg what is it he doesn't give me that because he always loved to make people think so that's partly what he was doing here was this chain he's an American who becomes an expatriate in England from the mid 1920s and lives there the rest of his life you know with just occasional trips back to give lectures or visit family in the u.s. MA he'll like Henry James you know it was a thing back then you know I mean having way most people like much Europe at that time too much consumer society that enough space of grace and beauty that the artist needs to believe that they can do their work doesn't happen as much these days although you find you find interestingly British people like Christopher Hitchens coming coming to the United States living here so suppose you can find interesting about contrasting those two periods really patient those of you are these stalwart holdouts to your units thank you very much for coming today enjoy the great weather you

Channel: jeffpearceevcc

Views: 33,197

Rating: 4.7708335 out of 5

Keywords: Faith, Washington (City/Town/Village)

Id: hTNZu272Bw4

Length: 73min 57sec (4437 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2012