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Gunnar Arrias. Vai Tomasa Stçrna Eljota mçría korelatîvs ir obligâti vîrieðu korelatîvs?
[W]ith every fresh volume […] Frazer has withdrawn in more and more
cautious abstention from the attempt to explain […] It is a work of no
less importance for our time than the complementary work of Freud […]
and it is a work of perhaps greater permanence, because it is a statement
of fact which is not involved in the maintenance or fall of any theory of
the author’s. 17
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But Frazer is a typical representative of “positivist” reductionism regarding religion
as some sort of primitive science which has long ago been superseded by real
science! Reviewing a violently abridged edition of Frazer’s work, Eliot obviously
distorts the picture of what Frazer aimed at achieving. As Richard Wollheim has remarked,
there is in Eliot a fear of the intellect. 18 An aspect of this fear is Eliot’s hostility
towards explanation or interpretation.
There is a shyness–theory to explain Eliot’s repudiation of the expression of
personality as well as of creative interpretation. Of more general interest I find an
explanation that considers the ethical and religious restrictions on the expressing of
personality. Why does Eliot repudiate explanation or interpretation within the humanities?
Well, explanation or interpretation within the humanities tend to be projective
or expressive on a par with artistic self–expression. Interpretation or explanation
within, say, psychology, religion and ethics tend to promulgate your own convictions
in these areas. Correspondingly, and this I think is most pertinent in Eliot’s case, they
risk challenging your own convictions and ideals. Interpretation or explanation came
to represent a “modernist” threat to Eliot’s personal convictions and to his upholding
of the notion of tradition. When Eliot in 1913 started attending the philosopher Josiah
Royce’s seminar he had earlier that year produced a “paper” which concludes that
the attempt at reducing “ethics to a logical science (as well as the modern attempt to
reduce it to a biological science) must end in partial failure”. Müller, Tylor and Frazer
as well as the French sociologists Durkheim and Lévy–Bruhl seemed to Eliot to
threaten “the very existence of religious beliefs”. 19
Just as Eliot praises Frazer’s pure descriptions or statements of fact (in the same
breath as he condemns Freudian explanation or interpretation) he repudiates the interpretation
of works of art in favour of “the presentation of relevant historical facts”.
Interpretation of Hamlet would lead Eliot not only to “the inexpressibly horrible” but
to his “inexpressibly horrible”. But obviously Eliot is unable to uphold his anti–
interpretationalist stance.
What I’m driving at here has been illuminatingly caught in David Spurrs Conflicts
in Consciousness: T.S. Eliots Poetry and Criticism (1984):
Eliot’s elaborate display of objectivity [...] may momentarily divert our
attention from the strong undercurrent of fear and violence that runs
through the essay “Hamlet and his problems” [...] Eliot really wants a
better defence against the forces of madness that surface only too clearly
in Shakespeare’s play [...] Eliot offers his notion of the objective correlative
as a possible means of controlling these dark powers [...] as a
defence against his personal involvement in the struggle he ascribes to
Hamlet. 20