We are living through a post-liberal shift in the times, and much is written about this rupture in social and cultural terms – the transition from an era marked by individualism, open borders, de-Christianisation and belief in progress – but rarely in literature.
The autonomy of the liberal subject and its belief in its own capacity to master and control itself and the surrounding world is, according to post-liberal thought, greatly overestimated. Added to this is the distrust of elites and technological alienation, as well as a critique of the experience society’s superficial cultivation of the present.
The poet T.S. Eliot wrote in the first half of the twentieth century what one would today call a post-liberal diagnosis of crisis, long before the concept existed. In his lyrical oeuvre – the most important within modernist literature – there is a mood of civilisational exhaustion and a scepticism towards the individual voice, as well as a poetry that opens itself to the mythical, to tradition and to Christianity.
This poetry is worth revisiting. Recently I wrote specifically about “The Waste Land” from 1922, so allow me to broaden the perspective in this essay.
The mythical method
When Eliot in 1923 reviewed Joyce’s “Ulysses”, he formulated a thought that was to become the very key to his own poetic project. By allowing the novel to draw parallels between the present and antiquity (the Odyssey), Joyce demonstrated a method that could bring order to a dissolved and directionless modern culture.
The mythical method is, Eliot writes, “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance” to the bewilderment and decline of the modern epoch. Myth was thus not primarily to serve as ornament or learned allusion, but as an instrument for giving a fragmented contemporary age a form it lacked.
This idea is central to “The Waste Land”, where the Grail myth, the blind seer Tiresias and a long series of literary and religious allusions are interwoven with images from modern city life – office workers streaming across London Bridge like shades in Dante’s realm of the dead, a typist’s mechanical, loveless lovemaking, a lonely fisherman by the riverbank.
Man cannot comprehend or find his way in his own time without a framework that extends beyond it.
The living order of tradition
Behind the mythical method lies a broader concept of tradition which Eliot elaborates in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” from 1920. Tradition is here not a museum-like inheritance which the individual poet is merely to imitate, but a supra-personal system of norms to which all individual utterances must subordinate themselves. At the same time, tradition is not static. A genuinely new work alters, according to Eliot, retroactively the very relation between the already existing works in the literary canon.
The experience of modernity consists of a whole series of simultaneous shocks. The technological and economic upheaval that transformed the very conditions of life, the political division that followed in the wake of the First World War, and the fragmented, dissolved subjectivity of the metropolis, in which the individual could no longer orient himself in a coherent world.
Faced with this multifaceted experience of bewilderment, Eliot – the form-breaking arch-modernist who met the chaos of his age with a deeply conservative solution – sought to inscribe both the bewilderment and a new unity of consciousness and culture through the overarching forms of control and organisation of myth and tradition.
Eliot wished not merely to express the dissolution, but actively to overcome it by subjecting it to an older, more comprehensive order.
Poetic impersonality
Eliot’s poetics is, as one sees, rather radical.
Poetry is not to be an expression of the poet’s private feelings or biography, but a place where heterogeneous experiences fuse into new, impersonal wholes. The individual poet’s experience has, after all, only a partial and contingent connection to the true universe of meaning and values. Herein lies a direct rejection of the romantic conception of poetry as the expression of the authorial genius, a conception that lies deeply buried in what we today understand by a free, creative and autonomous individual.
The literary theorist Terry Eagleton has, on Marxist grounds, praised Eliot’s renewal of literary devices while at the same time warning against the anti-liberal aim of this poetry.
Eliot’s scandalous avant-garde techniques – the ruptures of syntax, coherence and narrative form that shocked the readers of the time – were, Eagleton maintains, used for the most reactionary and tradition-bound purposes.
The formal violence of the poetry, its tearing asunder of habitual, routine-bound consciousness, served not, as one might suppose, to liberate the reader from the past, but to the exact opposite: to revive a sense of common identity in the reader, an identity which Eagleton describes as rooted right down in “blood and guts”, in the body itself and the instinctive, in the bonds of blood rather than in rational, argumentative consciousness.
It is this combination of formal radicalism and substantive restoration that makes Eliot’s project so disquieting and interesting at once. He uses modernity’s own most advanced artistic means to turn against modernity’s own image of man.
The Italian literary historian Franco Moretti has, in a manner similar to Eagleton, described what happens when this principle of impersonality is translated into poetic practice. “The Waste Land” simply renounces the traditional, individualised lyrical voice – the first-person pronoun itself disappears as a continuous, unifying instance – in favour of a multiplicity of impersonal voices, quotations and mythical figures.
Here one also finds an expression of Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative. In “The Waste Land” it is the drought, the barren land, the broken, dusty roots that carry the poem’s despair, not a narrator who says “I am despairing”.
Moretti calls this poetics a sacrifice of individuality: a dethronement of the personal self, which is no longer permitted to stand as the poem’s centre and measure, precisely because individual experience has only a partial and contingent connection to the true universe of meaning. In the long poem there is, in Moretti’s formulation, a question of a mystically tinged absorption into a deeper meaning-laden, yet also closed, whole.
Naturally to the great indignation of Marxist and liberal critics, who here see an attack on boundless liberation.
Self-surrender and the grace of God
All this culminates in what is Eliot’s deepest concern: the conception that the individual’s self-surrender is the very condition for redemption and transformation. The poet’s ascesis – his renunciation of private expression in favour of tradition, myth and impersonal form – is a secular parallel to the believing person’s submission to something greater than himself.
This movement becomes explicitly religious after Eliot’s conversion to the Christianity of the Catholic Church in 1927. In the groundbreaking poem “Ash Wednesday”, written shortly afterwards, he formulates this prayer to let go of himself – “Lord, I am not worthy” – and to receive grace from without:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
It is a startling sentence to write in an age that otherwise cultivates self-realisation as the highest virtues. The poem ends in the strong lines with the prayer that God may hear the seeking and suffering one: “And let my cry come unto Thee.”
The same movement is completed in “Four Quartets” from 1943, where Eliot abolishes the very linear, progressive character of time in favour of an eternal now, the meaning-saturated midpoint of the Incarnation, where past, present and future melt together – “at the still point of the turning world”.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
To read Eliot today is to place oneself in the midst of the very tension around which our entire contemporary post-liberal turn revolves. Between the almost monomaniac self-absorption and the promise of a deeper, more binding fullness of meaning.
