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Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research

Vol. 3 Issue 6, June 2014, ISSN 2278-0637, pp. 1-12


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A FOUCAULDIAN-DERRIDEAN CRITIQUE OF T.S. ELIOTS
TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT: A RECONCILIATION
OF CRITICAL THEORIES

NOORBAKHSH HOOTI, ALI GHADERI

Associate professor in Dramatic Literature, Razi University, Faculty of Arts, English Department, Kermanshah,
Iran.
MA Student of English Literature, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran.


ABSTRACT
This study is an attempt to shed light upon the common trends in the ideas of T. S Eliot, known as
the spokesman of modernism, with those of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida who are both
influential figures of poststructuralism. In Tradition and the Individual Talent (1921), which
is a hallmark of New Criticism, Eliot calls for a particular attention to cultural traditions and the
essentiality of such traditions in different eras. Moreover, conceiving literary tradition as a
colossal machine to which the individual talent is a cogwheel, one can harshly summarize Eliots
critical standpoint. Transcending to postmodernism, many concepts which echo metaphysics of
presence, got obsolete after Derrida delivered Structure, Sign and Play in the Human
Sciences (1967). While Derrida's attempt has undermined the authenticity of structures
regarding the alleged integrity of their centers, Foucault picked up a rather different path: that
of archeology. Terming such cultural forms as discourses, he tried to recover an episteme for
every era as the smallest power/knowledge distribution unit and the historically-based role of the
name of the author. For Eliot, specifically in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1921),
tradition would be a grand scale in which many voices could be heard, a larger discursive
ground for the play of signifiers. Therefore, in the light of a Foucauldian-Derridean reading of
Eliot, it could be asserted that since for Eliot tradition would be a grand scale in which many
voices could be heard, he resisted a totalitarian, authoritative, monophonic presence in the
literary discourse of the mind of Europe. Likewise, Foucauldian discursivity and Derridean
deconstruction dismiss totality in literary discourse. Ergo, despite the radical divergence of these
theories, at their pivotal concepts they all come to a fundamental reconciliation.
KEYWORDS: tradition, individual talent, depersonalization, pastness, episteme



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Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
Vol. 3 Issue 6, June 2014, ISSN 2278-0637, pp. 1-12


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INTRODUCTION
There is a vigorous spirit tangible in Eliots varia, even in his great poems such as The Waste
Land or the Song Love of J. Alfred Prufrock, of dismissing the concept of what one may call
Romantic authorship or individuality. This would be even more discernible if one could grasp a
perusal understanding of his culminated critical concepts in the outstanding Tradition and the
Individual Talent. Nonetheless, by Romantic authorship it must not be inferred that here
Romanticism is opposed to Eliots Classicism regarding only subjective, prophetic, individual
visionaries, emotional turmoil, or private, dream like ecstasies. Taking a deeper insight of his
critical argument as well as Romanticism, there could be explored a whole complex set of
integrated views on tradition, cultural forms, literary canon, and authorship; moreover, their
interrelatedness toward one another. This quick sketch upon Romanticism and Eliot will serve us
to concentrate and rediscover concepts of individuality and subjective authorship in theories of
Eliot himself (belonging to Modernism) and Derrida and Foucault (spokespersons of
Postmodernism and Postsructuralism).
Considering Eliot, he advocates a particular attention to cultural heritage of western discourse
through most of his paper Tradition and the Individual Talent supporting it when comes to
notion of the poet, by implying the metaphorical cogwheel role. In addition, this understanding
of poets role anticipates, as he continues in his paper, the catalyzing personality of poets; that in
return, the depersonalization of the poet while composing poetry is concluded. He does not
perceive tradition as a static status to which the poet must be witlessly, dependently bound, yet
he calls for a great labor to achieve a thorough understanding of a dynamic, discursive entity.
This entity, tradition, would not have been debated and perceived properly unless the particular
occasions arrived on which its presence should have been undermined. In English writing we
seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence(T. S.
Eliot, 1932:13).
Confronting this, one might ask few questions. While Neoclassicists were attempting to gain the
knowledge of the past through the great labor and elevated style and subject, the succeeding
Romantics apparently tried to break with the past and to author more individual, past departing
works of literature. Is tradition an authority, source of authentication, and an inevitable structure
to which the poet is bound, or a presence whose abolition would provide the possibility of the
genuine talent? If criticism is as inevitable as poetry, will one be able to regard and read Eliots
paper both as a critique and work of art? Is he reconciling the pastness of past with the presence
and involvement of the whole European heritage in a single canon of a poet? Finally, as dwellers
of Poststructural Psyche, inheriting Derridas dismissing of any stable centers and Foucaults
labyrinthine discourses and knowledge distribution, should we reconsider Eliots concepts in
the new light of theories or establishing a reconciliation based on a completely different reading
of Tradition and the Individual Talent is possible?
Before tending to answer these questions or any other that may follow, sketching upon some
critical point about his works with the help of his own critical approach will be beneficial in a
better understanding of this matter at hand: a new reading of Eliots essay. A year after
composing his poem the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he added some parts to it, but he had
them deleted as a result of advice from a colleague and friend at Harvard, Conrad Aiken: I am
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Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
Vol. 3 Issue 6, June 2014, ISSN 2278-0637, pp. 1-12


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grateful to Mr. Aiken for having perceived at once that the additions were of inferior quality
(Letter). The consequent inquiry is why. According to Nicholas B. Mayer (2011:182-183)
Prufrock has received considerable critical attention since its publication in Prufrock
and Other Observations (1915), but only a handful of critics have commented on the
clammy detail of the Pervigilium, its context in the rest of the poem and,
motivating this article, why Eliot might have deleted it. John Mayer, for example, argues
that the Pervigilium turns the poem prophetic at its very center, and that clearly . . .
the effect of the deletion is to emphasize the social element . . . as decades of
commentaries confirm.
Not enough heed paid to this point on one hand and the act of deletion itself by Eliot on the other
hand could raise more problematic questions. As a poet Eliot is a part of the cultural tradition,
simultaneously, he is also the critic who had established the tradition as a center around which a
whole structure was formed. He perceived those omitted par to be too personal that would
deprive the depersonalized spirit of the poem, yet his decision and judgment to delete them could
also be a subjective, personal act. Eliot was merely a catalyst through the composition, or at least
he believed so, then why would he be able to stand outside the tradition to make the judgment of
these parts to be of social element or prophetic nature? Was he creating a separate structure, with
himself as the center, from that of European heritage to deal with the decision? Or is he acting as
a self-aware catalyst capable of making amendments to the tradition? Of course, the deletion he
made was to make the work a better literary work, there is no doubt about it; the problem is the
justification. Eliot, as the leading critic-poet of his age and the age after Robert Browning and
Alfred Lord Tennyson, claimed that since the epoch of the Metaphysical Poets, English verse
had been suffering up to time of Browning. However, it is vague to none that at his time
Tennyson was enjoying a much more appreciation and recognition as a poet than did Browning.
If Eliot had been living at the time of Browning and Tennyson, would he have been able to make
such standpoint or it could have been possible only through a discursive, dynamic pastness of
history making such views as Eliots? That is a Foucauldian question. What he suggests of his
theory is interesting; according to Cianci and Harding (2007:4):
In his late essay To Criticise the Critic, T. S. Eliot reflects on his critical career with
particular attention to his early theoretic formulations, including his concept of tradition:
they have been accepted, they have been rejected, and they may soon go out of fashion
completely: but they have served their turn as stimuli to the critical thinking of others.
Yet there is a dimension to the poetry of Eliot that if we could demonstrate its presence also in
his critical theory, the reconciliation with Postmodernism will be more at hand; that is the
freshness of his poetry: The perpetual freshness of Prufrock is a surprise each time I return to
the poem. Actually, reading Prufrock (preferably out loud to oneself) is never quite the
experience I expect it to be (Harold Bloom, 2011: 1). Also Bloom remarks some points on his
colleagues poetry and criticism both:
One can fight a long war against T.S. Eliots criticism and still confess a lifelong
fascination with his best poems: The Waste Land and a group that certainly includes The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, La Figlia Che Piange, The Hollow Men, and The
Journey of the Magi. Probably one could add Gerontion and Little Gidding to any
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Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
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short list of Eliots most lasting poetry, but the five poems initially listed can be called his
essential achievement in verse. (ibid)
As for the social dimension of his poetry about which he was so concerned that he made the
deletion discussed above; in this sense, the taxi driver encounter is a good example, according to
Harold Bloom (2011: 12):
Eliots impish mind would not have missed the analogy between the taxi-driver and the
Quester of The Waste Land, who in Jessie Westons rescension of the myth finds relics in
a ruined chapel and wants to know what they are: whereupon the heavens open and rain
falls.
Although in the taxi driver encounter Eliot tried to be anonymous, and it is said that on being
recognized on a London bus he would crisply get off at the next stop he chose not to make a
scene (ibid), he was concerned to make such analogies as the matter of depersonalization.
ARGUMENT
SKETCHING UPON FOUCAULT AND DERRID
For Foucault a Refutation of the idea of language reflecting a pre-existent reality or expressing a
human intention is of vital important. Language being and entity controlled and directed by the
interaction of signifiers themselves than anything else of exterior referential existence, or even
firmly center-based interior structure. However, for Foucault the reciprocally interactive relations
between language (whether it be that of literature or science) and social and historical context are
undeniable as well as inevitable. This Impossibility of dissociating language from social living is
originated in Bakhtin School. That is the moment at which the idea of language in use would
emerge, the idea of discourse. The close affinity between history and literature, as they are both a
discourse, of the same nature, is what mostly he is concerned with. And this is where his attempt
to evaluate the whatness of an author begins, according to Leitch (2001:1622):
In proposing this slightly odd question, I am conscious of the need for an explanation. To this
day, the "author" remains an open question both with respect to its general function within
discourse and in my own writings; that is, this question permits me to return to certain aspects of
my own work which now appear ill-advised and misleading. In this regard, I wish to propose a
necessary criticism and reevaluation.
Even for Foucault, at some points, the heed attended to the notion of author would be elusive
when dealing with discursivity:
my objective in The Order of Things had been to analyze verbal clusters as discursive
layers which fall outside the familiar categories of a book, a work, or an author; But
while I considered "natural history," the "analysis of wealth," and "political economy" in
general terms, I neglected a similar analysis of the author and his works; it is perhaps due
to this omission that I employed the names of authors throughout this book in a naive and
often crude fashion. (ibid)
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According to Foucault, composing a literary work can be a process engaging to which is to
become the murderer of the author. In the argument, the further elaboration will be provided on
his concept of authorship.
Another concept of great use in this paper is Foucaults concept of episteme, introduced
by him in The Order of Things. An episteme, the prevailing order of knowledge particular
to a historical period, accounts for the understanding of how things are connected in the
overall "field" of understanding or knowledge; it describes the conditions under which
what is taken to be knowledge is possible (Dianna Taylor, 2011:68).
Yet this concept also is in close affinity to the matter of authorship. Considering the way in
which episteme should be recovered in the semi-archeological methods, he implies that episteme
related to each era could be best recovered by the generations succeeding them. In the interest of
evidence, most of John Donnes farfetched metaphors were not to be discovered until
generations have passed. It was Eliot who remarkably noticed the presence of association of
sensibilities in Donnes poems. This has established Donne as an authorial power in English
literature canon. In another example, Milton discourse in Paradise Lost enabled Lady Mary
Chudleigh and Lady Mary Astell to trigger a vogue called Proto-Feminism. These two employed
Miltons discursive dispositions against tyranny and his remarks upon the Excellency of women
to build their ideas upon Miltons authorial power; or in Eliots term, Miltons inherited tradition.
Now is the time in which the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought. According to
Derrida, all that structuralists, trotting in the path paved by Saussure, were concerned with had
been to analyze cultural account based on structures shaped around an exterior presence, as the
center, out of the system. This metaphysical presence allegedly provided a safe ground on which
coherence and structurality was possible; according to David Lodge (2000: 90):
The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure
one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure -- but above all to make sure that
the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the
structure.
This play of structure could be serious problem for it would be able to remove, transcend, or
question the authority of the exterior central presence. Like the myths studied by Strauss which
assumed a presence that is beyond play to study the myths. One must see into the matter of
tradition of Eliot with this caution of impossibility of structurality based on the exteriority of a
coherent center.
FOUCAULT AND ELIOT: LAYERS OF TRADITION
There has been an outstanding way of interpreting the Bible. According to Abrams (2005: 139):
The typological (or figural) mode of interpreting the Bible was inaugurated by St. Paul and
developed by the early Church Fathers as a way of reconciling the history, prophecy, and laws of
the Hebrew Scriptures with the narratives and teachings of the Christian Scriptures. As St.
Augustine expressed its principle: "In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the
New Testament the Old Testament is revealed.
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Considering this method of interpretation, if we take the premise that the past could be reflected
in the future and the present and also archeological method of Foucault, it will be possible to
have the two theories of Eliot and Foucault to some extent reconciled. Firstly, there is a pastness
conceivable in Eliots paper. His idea of achieving the learned classics knowledge by great labor
is a very vital reminiscence of Alexander Popes critical theory. Popes ideas also could be traced
back to Horatian concepts of literature. Hitherto, returning to Foucault, it is possible to consider
the tradition introduced by Eliot as panoptical concept observing the discourse of literary
composition setting rules about the true and just manners of poets. Poets being Catalyst, poets
observing depersonalization avoiding too much personal originality, and last but not the least,
poets preventing dissociation of sensibility might be those epistemes by which the distribution of
knowledge and practicing of power is working through the panoptical tradition. How does power
work with discursive formations: If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did
anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?... (Foucault
1980:119). On the other hand, this distribution does not always and strictly occur from the top to
the down of a pyramid (here, the literary tradition). As Foucault suggests, individuals are more
vehicle of power/knowledge pair than their points of interest. Accordingly when a style, form or
genre is established by the tradition of literature of Europe, say, epic for example, it works
through a network bound to the one who had originated this genre, its knowledge and elaboration
are lucidly flowing through generations. Homers name designates an elaborated discourse that
signifies more a specific style of composition rather than a blind personality (Homer as a blind
person). A whole form of discursivity is formed around this depersonalized name, if applying
Eliots term. This reminds one of the metaphor stated in the abstract of this paper, that of
cogwheel working in a machine. According to Foucault and Eliot both, engaging in the act of
composing brings an imminent death for the personality of the author although it brings a
desirable immortality to the discourse encompassing the name of the author. It is now more
tangible how Miltons Discourse against tyranny (summing up in Lucifers discursivity in
Paradise Lost) and his remarks on grace of women (e.g. O fairest of creation, Last and Best of
all Gods works) could have form a both temporal and timeless power/knowledge distribution
that made the Proto-Feminism emergence possible: 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 artists. (Leitch, 2001:1193) as Foucault suggests that the role of criticism is to
concern the structures of work, not the personal author-work binds. Also, discourse allows the
poet to move through ages. Inevitable impact of Homer on Virgil, Virgil on Dante, and all on
Milton is discernible; this has created the mind of Europe. A depersonalized cultural, literary
entity that practices its own power of dicusivity from the top to the down of the network,
simultaneously, allows a flow from the downward to the upward; all happening temporally and
timelessly:
the historical sense compels, a man to write not merely with his own generation in his
bones, but with a feeling 'that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and
.within it the whole of the literature of his Own country has a simultaneous existence
arid composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense1: 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. (Leitch, 2001:1193)
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Yet another analogy can be made between the ideas of Foucault and those of Eliot. Considering
the other paper by Eliot, Modern Tendencies in Poetry; according to White (2007:365):
Central to Modern Tendencies in Poetry is the proposition that the labours of a great
poet resemble those of a great scientist. It is an analogy that is explored at some length
and which comes to inform almost every aspect of Eliots credo of impersonality as it is
there expressed.
For Foucault, the development of sciences, particularly medicine, is more the matter of
discusivity again rather than individuality. He practices an attempt to go beyond subject and
subjectivity and be lost in his discourse while proceeding in his The Birth of Clinic as scientist
always move beyond their personality and subjectivity while engaging in scientific discourse.
This also is true about Eliots interest in drawing analogy between science and poetry: as in
science every individual talent is bound to the context of scientific discourse, so is every poetry
talent. By themselves, talents as great as Dante or Galileo are remarkable and undeniable, yet
even the most personal events of their lives (e.g. their disputes with their contemporary Popes,
respectively Boniface VIII and Urban VIII) were not deprived of relations with their discursive
career as a poet and a physicist. The impersonality Eliot calls for are well depicted in his science-
poetry analogy.
One last interesting matter about Eliots Modernist tone that proves the upward circulation of
power in literary discourse from the seemingly underside parts of European mind, is the impact
of Carlyle. Being a post-Romantic, Carlyle was never been recognized by Eliot as a great mind,
on the contrary, Saintsbury nevertheless placed Carlyle as among the greatest in all literature
for his powers of mental stimulation, whereas Eliot only ever spoke of Carlyle as a bad
influence (Noel-Tod, 2013:1). Allegedly, Eliot is the spokesperson of Modernism that has
dismissed many previous ideas including those of Carlyle; however, the scientific vocabulary
and sceptical tone of Eliots early criticism drew a Modernist veil over its origins in the post-
Romantic tradition of the Victorian Sage, whose prose, valorising the poetic, draws upon
resources cognate, at least, with those of the artist in words. Following in the wake of Coleridge,
Carlyle was the first of the sages, and Arnold one of his heirs.4 Under cover of a quarrel with
both, Eliot reasserted even more boldly Carlyles vision of poetry as a heroic art (ibid). This
will not dismiss Eliots critical views on tradition, but it fortifies them in the sense that Eliot
assumed the whole European mind in forming a literary composition. Moreover, having
reconciled the discursivity of Eliot and Foucault demonstrates this claim even more firmly.
In his What is an Author? Foucault (1977) pursues two ends. First, he is to address critiques of
his own position employing authored texts, including those by Carl Linnaeus, David Ricardo,
Georges Louis Buffon, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, without really discussing the author and
his or her work. Although he admits that his goal was not so much to discuss authors and
authorship, he is to "analyze verbal clusters as discursive layers which fall outside the familiar
categories of a book, a work, or an author" (Foucault, 1977, p. 113). Second, he asserts that
thinking about particular critical questions that condition the genesis and archaeological
understanding of the author today. He particularly bans the complete abandonment of author for
this concept is useful for understanding certain structures not to mention being the site of
creative, subjective implications. In his first aim, Foucault enterprises to examine the discursivity
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formed around a text, which is beyond the name of the author. On this ground, Foucaults
disposition coalesces with Eliotian view of tradition for he asserts the tradition of a particular
literary culture rises beyond the individual names and authorship. Therefore, Foucaults second
enterprise conjugates with Eliotian remarks on the role of an individual poet and his/her
significance in the tradition and also his/her contribution to it. Bearing in mind The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock, it can be concluded, as for the relationship between Eliotian art and
personal life, that: in a broader sense, we see that the patient is Eliot the man, upon whose
emotional life his poetic mind operated and whose experience he catalyzed into Prufrock (B.
Mayer, 2011:194).
DERRIDA AND ELIOT: SIGNS AND STRUCTURES
Considering Derrida and Eliot, the first thing that comes to mind is Derrida being responsible for
calling into question the authority of centers in the structures present in the western culture since
the introduction of Platos allegory of the cave and Aristotles none-contradiction principle. That
Eliot created in his time a structure with the mind of Europe as its center (or tradition) apparently
does not coalesce with Derridas disposition. This would be the first divergence between
Derridas views and those of Eliot. Yet, as it has been suggested, one has the freedom to read
Eliot in three separate episteme: one related to the tradition of the past, one to the tradition of
Modernism, and the last one related to the tradition of Postmodernism. As a matter of fact, even
this is noticed by Eliot himself as he remarks that there is a pastness in the present, and this
pastness is not to undermine the freshness of the present. Also there could be see another aspect
of Eliot which echoes Poststructuralism than Structuralism: 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 artists (Eliot, 1932). Ergo, no individual talent can establish a center for the
appreciation of literary compositions produced in his/her life although it is the sum of all talents
that creates the tradition; then neither the tradition nor the individual are centers or slaves bound
to centers in Eliotian criticism.
Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As
center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer
possible. At the center, the permutation of the transformation of elements (which may of
course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation
has always remained interdicted (and I am using this word deliberately). Thus it has
always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very
thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality
(Derrida, 1966).
If tradition, as an Eliotian term, had ever been to be center whose authority in closing up the play
in structures was questioned by Derrida, it would never been so flexible that could allow the
individual talent to alter it lucidly through great labor or contribution of literary composition.
Speaking of great labor, Derrida asserts that the matter of alienation is even possible for the
native residents of a particular culture or language: That acquisition is less secure than we like it
to be. No one Speak their language perfectly (Penelope Deutscher, 2005, p. 18). Moreover, he
undermines a self-created authority in appreciating a cultural context. As for Eliot, the matter of
judgment is not to consider a work good, bad, better, or worse than those of generation before.it
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is a way two things are measured by each other reciprocally, based on their differences, which
are not to prove ones superiority or authority. In addition, Eliot does not imply that the native
acquisition of this tradition is a pre-condition to enter it as a part of discourse. He solely suggests
a great labor on the part of the individual talent to gain a mastery over the mind of Europe.
Moreover, there have been many non-English, or non-European talents entered the tradition (e.
g. Joseph Conrad or Chinua Achebe). Despite a slight disagreement with Derrida in the matter of
mastery, this is yet another point of convergence in Derridean and Eliotian views.
Another point, worthy of heeding attention, is the relationship between individuals and tradition.
A Parisian anecdote, narrated by Barthes in his The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, will be
a great help here: like many Parisian, Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel tower, yet he used to
eat in the restaurant on the top, when he was frequently asked upon his contradictory act, he
would answer that it was the only place where he had not to bear its presence. For Guy de
Maupassant, the tower was like the sing to Derrida. For the signification 'sign' has always been
understood and determined, in its meaning, as sign-of, a signifier referring to a signified, a
signifier different from its signified (Derrida, 1966). An authoritative sign acts like the tower, as
a presence of surveillance, a metaphysical one. In a pre-Derridean context, this kind of sign is a
center that guarantees the inalterability of a structure although surprisingly Eliotian tradition
escapes this metaphysics of presence. The mind of Europe is not to stand outside of the literary
discourse to control and regulate its alteration or to determine the contribution each individual
talent would ever make to it. The individual talent, the cogwheel to the tradition machinery,
would be a part of the grand sign of tradition able to alter it and be altered by it as restless
Parisian would feel standing upon the Eiffel tower. Not being an over structure, tradition like the
individual talent would be sign interacting with each other to author a literary discourse.
Like Foucault whose composition moves beyond his personality and mere individuality in
authorship, Derrida and Eliots play of signifiers in their critique although is originated in their
individuality, moves beyond it and contributes to the greater plays in the tradition; or in another
word the mind of Europe to an extent that the presence of their individuality could not be felt
separately from this tradition. Likewise the Lacanian view that asserts the language, as the
discourse and play of signs, is not spoken by individual, yet individuals are uttered by language.
Text referring to and external concrete meaning or truth is not viable to Derrida:
[W]riting... [is] an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the
very nature of the signifier. Moreover, it implies an action that is always testing the limits
of regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that it accepts and manipulates
(1977:116).
Likewise, Eliotian tradition would not to be referring to some exterior center or concrete entity of
meaning. Thus, the mind of Europe, the tradition whose presence is noted by Eliot is a discursive
archi-writing, to use a Derridean term. This archi-writing preexist all individuals in the discourse
transferring them to something beyond their sole names and individualities as it pre-exists speech
or even any form of writing in Derridas disposition.
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Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of
composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with
creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears (ibid).
This also reminds us of Foucaults second enterprise that claims the namely death of the author
considering the nature of the term author.
Whereas Greek epic tried to immortalise various subjects, especially when we think of
how effective Homer has been with his characters throughout the ages, contemporary
views of the dead author maintain that it is really hard to say who Homer is or who his
characters are, especially if we examine the legacy of various appropriations of Homeric
writings and criticisms throughout the ages. In fact, all we have are different Homers,
Odysseuses, Eurykleias, Telemachuses and Penelopes (Calgano, 2009:37).
To cite another terms from Eliots other work on criticism and literary theory, The Sacred Wood,
which is in close affinity with this discussion about Tradition and the Individual Talent: the
vision of the present is restricted, but the method of Dante may not be obsolete. For,
Derrida the concept of now, the present, or the broader word; time, is of an impossible
possibility. The coexistence of several nows, which succeeding one another, one now is related
to the future, while the following to the future. Putting this aporetic concept of time alongside the
Eliotian terms closing The Sacred Wood, it is not wrong to claim that the nature of Dantes
method in the past is related, or in a better term, fused in the nowness of the present individual
talent. This is a fusion that makes it possible the impossibility of Dantes presence in the
tradition despite his pastness and physical demise. Finalizing the discussion at this point, it is the
following apocalyptic dimension of Eliot that is also a departure point for further debates on the
interrelatedness of the past and the present and also poets task in the poetical vogue:
Read in relation to the vision of the modern poets task in Tradition and the Individual
Talent, Eliots furthest implication meets on the horizon with the apocalyptic hope of
Santayanas closing paragraph: It is time some genius should appear to reconstitute the
shattered picture of the world [. . .] (Santayana, 2145). But this supreme poet is in limbo
still. Among the vatic shadows of The Sacred Wood, Eliot presents himself as a
scientific and philosophical dissector of Romantic notions of poetic genius. But the
Carlylean pattern of the essays reveals a prophecy beyond the wildest dreams of the
Victorian sage: the heroic ascent of the great poet who wouldas Eliot later wrote about
the scientific discovery of the mythical method in Ulysses and, implicitly, The Waste
Landgive a shape and a significance to the modern world (Eliot, Ulysses, Order and
Myth, 1778) (Noel-Tod, 2013: 17)
CONCLUSION
The common grounds between these one critic of the Modernist epoch and two theorists (both in
philosophy and literature) have been addressed. Eliotian ideas and Foucauldian concepts meet on
a common field regarding the matters of authors role, tradition as a network of
power/knowledge discourse and relation in which tradition/poet relationship regarding influence
and contribution to discursivity is reciprocal and dynamic. This assessment is possible through a
typological and archeological reading of Eliots pivotal paper. In this regard, authors role,
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considering Foucaults two enterprises in What is an Author? and Eliotian social role of the
poet, has been examined. Hence, it may be concluded that in these respects Eliotian and
Foucauldian ideas have much in common despite their appearance in two opposing era of literary
discourse. Reconciling Derrida and Eliot has been made possible through reading Tradition and
the Individual Talent in its Poststructural context with considering Derridean views on sign and
impossibility of existent centers out of structures. In this regard Eliotian views are thought of
again in a discursive sense. Hence, tradition is a discourse in itself, a scene for the play of
sign[ifiers] that makes it possible for individual talents to ascend beyond their subjectivity and
personality; this is possible in Foucaults views as well. This endeavor also has proved the
affinity of Eliotian views on pastness of the present regarding the role of author and talent with
Derridean reading of the concept of time which is aporetic. As for Eliot, this could be asserted he
resisted a totalitarian, authoritative, monophonic in the cultural discourse of the mind of Europe.
For him, tradition would be a grand scale in which many voices could be heard, a larger
discursive ground for the play of signifiers. Likewise Foucauldian-Derridean discourse dismisses
totality in literary discourse as well as political discourse: Derrida's political legacy, much like
Foucaults, is one of hope, understanding and change. Like Foucault, there is an emphasis on
critique of totalitarian or hegemonic political rule (Calcagno, 2009:50).
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