According to the Cambridge
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Tradition means a belief, principle or way
of acting which people in a particular society or group have continued to
follow for a long time, or all of these beliefs, etc. in a particular society
or group. Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes ‘Tradition’ an ‘inherited,
established, or customary pattern of thought, action or behavior (as a
religious practice or a social custom)’. Eliot commences his critical essay Tradition
and Individual Talent with the general attitude towards ‘Tradition’.He
points out that every nation and race has its creative and critical turn of
mind, and emphasizes the need for critical thinking. ‘We might remind ourselves
that criticism is as inevitable as breathing.’Interestingly enough, Eliot’s
contemporaries and commentators either derided his idea of tradition as
irrelevant, conservative and backward-looking stance or appreciated the idea
and read it in connection with Matthew Arnold’s historical criticism of texts
popularly known as ‘touchstone’ method.
At the very outset,
Eliot makes it clear that he is using the term tradition as an adjective to
explain the relationship of a poem or a work to the works of dead poets and
artists. He regrets that in our appreciation of authors we hardly include their
connections with those living and dead. Also our critical apparatus is
significantly limited to the language in which the work is produced. A work
produced in a different language can be considered for a better appreciation of
the work. In this connection, he notices “our tendency to insist…those aspects”
of a writer’s work in which “he least resembles anyone else”. Thus, our
appreciation of the writer is derived from exhumation of the uniqueness of the
work. In the process, the interpretation of the work focuses on
identifying the writer’s difference from his predecessors. Eliot critiques this
tendency in literary appreciation and favours inclusion of work or parts of
work of dead poets and predecessors.
Although Eliot attaches greater importance to the idea of tradition, he rejects
the idea of tradition in the name of ‘Blind or Timid Adherence’ to successful
compositions of the past.
By subscribing to the
idea of tradition, Eliot does not mean sacrificing novelty nor does he mean
slavish repetitions of stylistic and structural features. By the term
‘Tradition’, he comes up with something ‘of much wider significance”. By
‘Tradition’, he does not refer to a legacy of writers which can be handed down
from a generation to another generation. It has nothing to do with the idea of
inheritance; rather it regrets a great deal of endeavour. He further argues,
“It involves... The historical sense... and the historical sense involves a
perception, not only of the pastness of the past but its presence; …” This
historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal
and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer
traditional.” By this statement, Eliot wants to emphasize that the writer or
the poet must develop a sense of the pastness of the past and always seeks to
examine the poem or the work in its relation to the works of the dead writers
or the poets. To substantiate his point of view, Eliot says, “No poet, no
artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and the
artists.” As he says this, he is perfectly aware of Matthew Arnold’s notion of
historical criticism and therefore distances himself from such the Arnoldian
critical stance. He identifies his approach to literary appreciation “as a
principle of aesthetics and thereby distinguishes it from Arnold’s “Historical
Criticism”.
Thus, Eliot offers an
organic theory and practice of literary criticism. In this, he treats tradition
not as a legacy but as an invention of anyone who is ready to create his or her
literary pantheon, depending on his literary tastes and positions. This means
that the development of the writer will depend on his or her ability to build
such private spaces for continual negotiation and even struggle with
illustrious antecedents, and strong influences. Harold Bloom terms the state of
struggle as “The anxiety of influence”, and he derides Eliot for suggesting a
complex, an elusive relationship between the tradition and the individual, and
goes on to develop his own theory of influence.
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