Temporal, Mnemonic, And Aesthetic "Eruptions": Recontextualizing Eliot and the Modern Literary Artwork (T. S. Eliot) (Critical Essay‪)‬

When a theory of art passes it is usually found that a groat's worth of art has been bought with a million of advertisement .... A mythical revolution will have taken place and produced a few works of art which perhaps would be even better if still less of the revolutionary theories clung to them.--T.S. Eliot, "Reflections on Vers Libre" Although revolutions in art and art theory do indeed occur on a "mythical" level--they are inevitably naturalized, they posit truth in a version of history, they manifest what is "new" in the landscape of what is "known"--they tend to be formed, as most explanations are, in retrospect. In T.S. Eliot's critical essays and in his poem, "Gerontion," he problematizes any such retrospective explanation, grappling with the subjective experience of time, the relationship of the artist to the past, and the creation of the "new" in the realm of what is already known. In this examination, "Gerontion" will serve as a basis of exploration for the mediation of memory (individual and cultural) in our conceptions of the past and future, as well as in the creation of literary artworks. These concerns are also foregrounded by Eliot in his critical works, where he seems to postulate an "ideal order" of art whose very existence must depend upon an act of valuation. (1) Of course, the evaluating force in this "ideal order" is never fully conceptualized, and the reader is left to ponder how new works of art are to be integrated into Eliot's standing notion of "tradition." It thus becomes important to consider how Eliot's notions of memory and time are made manifest in his poetry and criticism, how they disrupt those of the past, and how any act of evaluation concerning a work of art involves an act of recontextualization.