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T.S. Eliot: From Many to One
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14592 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1988 |
4,139 Words |
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Michael D. Aeschliman
Michael D. Aeschliman teaches English literature at the
University of Virginia. He is the author of The Restitution of
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T.S. ELIOT AND INDIC TRADITIONS
A Study in Poetry and Belief
Cleo McNelly Kearns
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988
286 pp., $34.50
Some of the greatest works of the literary imagination in the twentieth century can be seen as vehement satirical attacks on the secular faith in collective progress to utopia that had been more and more widely and confidently believed and proclaimed in the West from the late eighteenth century up until the First World War and even beyond. The messianic faith in "Prometheus Unbound," mankind "come of age" with no master save himself, making use of technological tools and political reform or revolution to make a paradise on earth, dispelling the fogs and forces of impotence, ignorance, superstition, and exploitation, is one of the master motifs of Western intellectual history--and political history. Yet in the hands of many of the masters of modern literature this belief, in light of the disappointed hopes of our cruel century, has been held up as an object of derision and hatred, a classic example of self-deluding and self-destructive folly, of culpable intellectual flaccidity and negligence.
Consider August Comte's confident nineteenth-century view of man's ascending collective progress, from the superstitious "theological" stage, through the still quasi-mythical "metaphysical" stage, to the final, modern, scientific, "positive" stage of a utilitarian utopia lying within our grasp. Of this optimism, history since 1914 has made a cruel mockery, and so did T.S. Eliot, precisely alluding to Comte's phases, but evaluating them in a completely opposite way:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
("The Rock," Chorus I, 1934)
Orwell's 1984 and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago are bitterly ironic comments on progressive political messianism, and so too is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which grows more relevant to America with each passing year, as Neil Postman recently and usefully pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Huxley's trivial pornotopia is a world where Comte's dream of a thoroughly materialistic, scientistic ideology and regime has become reality; it is a world that has
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