Introduction

Summary

The past decade has seen Eliot's reputation recede to its lowest ebb of the century. The postmodern attack on the pillars of modernism has managed at times to spare Virginia Woolf for her blurring of traditional gender roles, Joyce for his delight in sheer wordplay, and even, in critical tours de force, the unlikely pair of Pound and Lewis on the shaky basis of their disruptive styles. Eliot, however, as the primary spokesman and symbol of that against which literary postmodernism has defined itself – modernist high culture – has been refused almost all amnesty. His claim to establish enduring criteria of value was, to pose the complaint in the language of these antagonists, a futile attempt to legitimate his narrative by reference to a metadiscourse. Further, as one of the progenitors of the New Criticism, the primary theoretical whipping boy of deconstruction, he has been systematically indicted on the related charge of being a particularly unabashed advocate of “logocentrism.” Indeed, he seems at times to have been doubly annoying to such critics precisely because he is so obviously self-indicting. Deconstructive techniques are hardly necessary to lay bare the implications of lines such as these:

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the un stilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

(“Ash-Wednesday,” V)

Superbly confident in his blindness, he lacked even the glimmer of insight that might have led him to encode his epistemological bad faith.