The Ideology of Canon-Formation:
T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks
John Guillory
From Critical Inquiry 10 (Septemeber 1983)
The canons are falling One by one
Including “le celebre’ of Pachelbel
The final movement of Franck’s sonata for
piano and violin. How about a new kind of hermetic conservatism
And suffering withdrawal symptoms of same?
—John Ashbery, “The Tomb of Stuart Merrill”
1. Ideology
It would be difficult to deny that ideology traverses even the higher regions of textual production, including literature itself; yet the monadic text has offered an impressive resistance to traditional critiques of ideological content. I propose in this essay to shift the attention of such critiques away from the individual text or author and toward that organization of texts known as a “canon.” The particular canon to be examined here emerged in T. S. Eliot’s earlier criticism, was presented as a canon by Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn. and has since been institutionalized to a greater or lesser extent in the curricula of university English departments.
The recognition of ideology is usually expressed as an accusation: the ideologue speaks out of his “false consciousness,” his state of illusion. Recently it has been possible to conceive of ideology rather as an unconscious “system of representations,” a notion probably more appropriate but which also entails a large epistemological problem. It is not at all evident what sort of “truth” is produced by a critique of ideology except that such truth aspires to overcome the philosophical antitheses between fact and value, the scientific and the emotive, or knowledge and interest.(2) At the least the critique of ideology discloses the complicity in nearly any discourse whatever; and if the process of canon-formation is not excluded from the system of ideological production, it should be possible to move beyond the massively resistant tautology of literary history: that works ought to be canonized because they are good.
Canon-formation is nevertheless not an obvious production of ideology; the “interests” of Eliot and Brooks -Eliot’s Christian authoritarianism or Brooks’ association with the neoagrarian movement—are elsewhere expressed quite openly. Though I will glance at some rather more opinionated texts, I want to argue that such texts have not been nearly so effective as those canon-making essays whose serene judgments upon poetic careers or complex close readings seem far removed from the realm of interest, indeed whose very claim upon our admiration is their detachment, their disinterestedness. At the moment, however, I am not concerned with proving that such essays are not disinterested (that proof will take care of itself) but only ‘with pointing out that group whose interest is aroused and expressed b), the evaluation of literature; this group is what we know as literary culture, a marginal elite.
The authority of the culture, what maintains it as both marginal and elite. is not to he distinguished from the authority of the canon. For some reason sortie literature is worth preserving. We would not expect this or any other conception of authority to have escaped the vicissitudes of social hierarchy, but this is just the claim of the canonical text. which is assumed to be innately, superior. Indeed we refuse (and this refusal is grounded in much critical theory) to think of the literary work as good or bad for some extrinsic reason; such a possibility can be conceived only as propaganda or censorship. the hot areas of ideological production. When I say. then, that it seems unlikely that the formation of canons is wholly removed from the field of ideological conflict, not much is being asserted. The claim to judge intrinsically, as though the value of a literary work were not mediated by any other concern. has always been suspect. If it were possible to form a canon of texts with the easy assurance that only the best literature survives. such a canon would flare a structure and genealogy like that of aristocracy in its idealized form: the “rule of the best.”
While the social form of aristocracy has declined, the canon has retained its self-image as an aristocracy of texts. It would be hard to give up this image, as the pure authority of great literature may be the only image of pure authority we have. Yet we can “modernize” canon-formation in just the way that aristocracy was transformed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, by all the varieties of persuasion that are supposed give us a rationalized authority. If we must be persuaded of a work’s authority, then it follows that we can be wrongly persuaded. The possibility of error is just the precondition of literary culture, which defends the canon and defends itself.
The question I would like to pose about the canon of Eliot can be stated in terms that make unambiguous the ideological burden of canon-formation. For Eliot told us nothing less than that we had been wrongly The rediscovery of a marginal elite standing in an apocryphal to the established canon marks a shifting of authority within the literary culture, as it adjusts to the instabilities of its marginal position. But this hypothesis necessitates an inquiry into the principles of Eliot’s anon-making criticism.
2. Orthodoxy
E!iot’s canonical motives are of course most visible where his judgments are revisionary. Consider, for example, this very typical evaluation of John Dryden. whose virtues are displayed by contrasting them with Milton’s defects:
The great advantage of Dryden over Milton is that while the former is always in ‘control of his ascent, and can rise or fall at will... the latter has elected a perch from which he cannot afford to fall, and from which he is in danger of slipping.(3)
Eliot’s image of flight implies an ironic revision of normative values, because it is not actually the works of the two poets which are being compared but the choices which precede composition, the ‘perches” from which flight is undertaken. The momentary irrelevance of the works themselves discovers a system of value which is already more broadly based than any putative ;aesthetic” and which will underlie much more than an attack’ on Milton.
The effect of the evaluative system can be measured by the deceptive lucidity of Eliot’s critical prose:’ “[Dryden’s] powers were. we believe, wider, but no greater, than Milton’s: he was confined by boundaries as impassable, though less strait”(SE, p. 273). Does this/mean Dryden’s powers were as great and wider than Milton’s? The neoclassical-sounding rhetoric can be said to do the revolutionary job of displacing the axis of evaluation from the vertical—greatness, height—to the horizontal-width, breadth. The latter figure calls out to its negative image—straitness, narrowness—but with a gesture of reconciliation. Poetic ambition is certainly limited (the sense of E!iot’s impassable boundaries}, and it would seem to be the ground of Dryden’s superiority that he accepts these limitations. His poetry is an art of “mak[ing] the small into the great’ (SE, p. 269). E!iot’s discrimination recapitulates the conventional language by which the canon is divided into major and minor poets and at the same time reverses the polarity of value. He cannot say that Dryden is a greater poet than Milton, but he can suggest that in valuing Milton we have perhaps been valuing the wrong thing. The problem is much larger than the relative status of Milton or Dryden, because it liberates what may be called the canonical engine of Eliot’s criticism: the impassable boundary between major and minor.
Impasse is an overdetermined concept in E!iot’s career; and I would like to untangle here the several strands of this determination, beginning with a historical example of lifelong interest to Eliot—the decline of poetic drama since the seventeenth century? The existence of the impasse gives Eliot his darker version of literary history, the essay titled “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” which can be set against the better-known “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I quote first two familiar sentences from the latter essay, with the object of calling attention to the rhetoric of canonization:
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty. the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly. altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.’(5)
The idealization of the very order of the monuments means that what the new poet threatens is disorder; he must present himself to his predecessors with a demeanor of conformity if he is to have any chance of altering them or of being admitted to their company. Few writers of our century seem more oppressed than Eliot by the feeling that the canon is by its very nature closed and that it can be reopened only by the most elaborate and even covert of strategies? I read the famous doctrine of impersonality as one such strategy. a sacrifice demanded upon the threshold ,of the temple. The “continual self-sacrifice,” or “extinction of personality,” is a preliminary stance on the way to a more subversive posture of ironic modesty, a posture which both contains and expresses quite a violent revisionist impulse.
Once Eliot formulates the doctrine of impersonality, he points out of his argument: “There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to [the first subject of the essay] the sense of tradition.” Then follows the analogy of the catalyst, which accomplishes just this reconnection. The mind of the poet is merely the shred of platinum in the larger container in which two gases are mixed; but this mind contained is shortly presented as the container itself: ‘The . poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which tan unite to form a new compound are present together” (SW, p. 55). The reader is intended to understand by this analogy the way in which the deliberate puzzle of tradition and the individual talent is being solved. The impersonal mind is emptied of content (mere emotion, personality), and it thereby becomes only ‘form, the colorless beaker in a laboratory of art. Form has already been monumentalized in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” because it is essentially what the dead poets have become, what Eliot calls “ideal order.” What they demand is conformity, which surely has a charged relation to that other word for the poem-as container. The analogy is geometrically scaled, for the form of any. one poem is a small version of literature itself; but in relation to that whole, it is a figure for the mind of the poet—both the container and the shred of platinum which has been surreptitiously placed into the otherwise stable mixture. the ideal order of the dead poets. Form and content. container and contained, have just this predictable tendency to exchange places, and Eliot’s approach to the sealed canon is wholly dependent upon this useful ambiguity.
If the successful work of art represents a containing of emotion, or conforming to the form which is tradition itself, we are told in “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” that some forms are inherently more capable of this project than others and that. surprisingly, the drama is most capable of all. it is the drama which stands both as the basic principle of canon-formation and as the arbitrary guarantor of the open-endedness of the canon: “Nevertheless. the drama is perhaps the most permanent, is capable of greater variation and of expressing more varied types .of society, than any other. It varied considerably in England alone; bat when one day it was discovered lifeless. subsequent forms which had enjoyed a transitory life were dead too” (SW, p. 61). It would be very interesting to understand the “death of a form, but the easy mystification of ‘it was discovered lifeless’ points to Eliot’s more immediate concern with the effects of this demise. The only hint the essay gives us about causes is contained in a surprising sentence, which sets the drama in opposition: to tradition: “The Elizabethan Age in England was able to absorb a great quantity of new thoughts and images, almost dispensing with tradition. because it had this great form of its own which imposed itself on everything that came to it” (SW, p. 62).
This view of tradition is not easily reconciled with that of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” but the rhetoric is fundamentally the same. The Elizabethan freedom from the burden of tradition is the gift mainly of one form, the blank-verse drama, and this fact implies conversely that tradition in the more famous essay is a palliative for the absence of form. The “extinction of personality” likewise finds its counterpart in “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” with Eliot’s reflection that the virtues of dramatic form are so great that the personality of the poet is entirely (and happily) submerged. How fortunate to be Shakespeare—not because Shakespeare is great himself but simply because he is the lucky inheritor of a form, the to see its almost limitless possibilities. “We should see then how little each poet had to do; only so much as would make a play his, only what was really essential to make it different from anyone else’s” (SW, p. 64)
In the next paragraph Eliot makes an unexpected turn (though in a deeper sense, the digression is determined) to the subject of minor poets:
Now in a formless age there is very little hope for the minor poet to do anything worth doing; and when I say minor I very good poets indeed: such as filled the Greek anthology and the Elizabethan song-books; even a Herrick; but not merely second-rate poets. for Denham and Waller have quite another importance, occupying points in the development of a major form. When everything is set out for the minor poet to do. he may quite frequently come upon some trouvaille, even in the drama: Peele and Brome are examples. Under the present conditions, tile mirror poet has too much to do. [SW, p. 64]