"Flirting with shadows".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. By Hugh Kenner. McDowell, Obolensky. $5.00.

One strategy of Professor Kenner, which he may have assimilated from F. R. Leavis, is plain in the opening sentence of his preface: "We may assume that everyone by this time knows who T. S. Eliot is, that it is no longer necessary to testify to his lucidity, that there are as many handbooks as needed...." This is a strictly contemporary note by which a writer dissociates himself from the job-holders and indicates that there is a well-defined body of awareness which constitutes a live core of vital culture in our world. Now this seemingly arrogant assumption would be excellent strategy even if there were no such core of people of trained sensibility. Even the most sedate and complacent of job-holders is perturbed by this note and assumption of avante garde intuition. The young are exhilarated to see the irritation of their seniors and at once enlist under the rebel flag.

But there is a more serious and admirable aspect of the strategy in question, and it concerns the concept of relevance, which has dominated art and letters for a century. "Relevance" is the antithesis of "perspective." Any static position yields a fixed point-of-view. Anybody having a pointof-view was justified in the past so long as he was steady and consistent about it. But when ideas of relevance began to resonate there grew the suspicion that points-of-view, no matter how fixed or lucid, could be quite irrelevant to the actualities of a time. With regard to the point-of-view idea, anybody was justified in giving testimony by a species of "self-expression." But the concept of relevance in the arts insisted upon art as having a job to do for its time, and the duty of self-expression came to be felt as quite irrelevant.

Hugh Kenner is probably the first academic writer to abandon the cause of perspective for the sake of relevance. A few years ago it would have been a precarious gesture simply because the academic perspectives in letters were firm. After twenty years of the "new criticism" the academic world is scrambling onto the critical bandwagon, and the relation of letters to the older academic patterns of scholarship is quite indiscernible.

What will ten more years of the new media do to formal instruction in literature in school and college? It might be well to find out the answer to that question before a total flux occurs. And the answer to the question is contained in the very forms of expression into which Eliot and his contemporaries were led fifty years ago. Poetry will remain, but literature will not. Eliot was led at the outset of his career to express a preference for an illiterate audience. This was neither perverse whim nor wishful thinking. Were an adequately literate audience available, Eliot implied, that would be best. But a semi-literate audience was intolerable, as Gerard Hopkins earlier had found, to his discouragement.

Kenner begins with Prufrock in order to get on into Laforgue and others. He does not do an adequate job with the French, but it is well to have them "placed" with regard to the oeuvre. More important is the chapter which follows on E H. Bradley, the Oxford philosopher, about whom Eliot wrote a doctoral dissertation. "One of the most important deposits of Bradleyism in Eliot's sensibility is visible in the disarmingly hesitant and fragmentary way in which he makes a point or expresses a conviction, doubting that he is quite the man to undertake the job in hand, or devoting an entire volume to 'notes toward the definition' of a single word."

"In feeling the subject and object are one," states Eliot flatly in his 1916 thesis, paraphrasing Bradley's description of "immediate experience." "At anytime," writes Bradley, "all that we suffer, do and are forms one psychical totality. It is experienced altogether as a co-existing mass, not perceived as parted and joined even by relations of coexistence. It contains all relations and distinctions, and every ideal object at that moment exists in the soul."

What Bradley refers to here is auditory and simultaneous and organic order of inter-penetrating entities, and he is at pains to distinguish it from visual order "parted and joined." Bradley was congenial to the young Eliot, as was Husserl. And all three were in varying forms challenged to understand and to process the new world of forms that come into play in the Western world after the telegraph and the submarine cables. It was no longer to be a world of subjects and predicates assured of definite certainties, nor of images standing in simple sequential relations on single planes.

"One function of the epigraphs," says Kenner, "is to blur the beginnings of the poems; they open not with the eclat of some syntactic gesture--'of man's first disobedience ...'--but with an awakened dubiety about the scope of a quotation."

The reader of this book will have a thorough and expert tour of an exciting author with many new aspects revealed: "Murder in the Cathedral, the drama of a solitary man, retraces in specific terms the zone traversed by Ash Wednesday." Again, "the Eliot character feels that he needs sympathy from others whom he cannot reach and who cannot decorously reach him. Shall we surrender decorum?" Of course, what lends excitement to this comedy is Eliot's metaphysical doubt whether there is any self beyond that tenuously constituted by decorum and social fictions. Kenner ducks out of that issue altogether.

H. Marshall McLuhan

University of Toronto

"FLIRTING WITH SHADOWS" (9)

(9) Renascence 12.4 (1960): 212-214.