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

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1 Pinnacle Research Journals 1 A FOUCAULDIAN-DERRIDEAN CRITIQUE OF T.S. ELIOT S 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 Eliot s 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

2 Pinnacle Research Journals 2 INTRODUCTION There is a vigorous spirit tangible in Eliot s 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 Eliot s 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 Eliot s 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 Derrida s dismissing of any stable centers and Foucault s labyrinthine discourses and knowledge distribution, should we reconsider Eliot s 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 Eliot s 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

3 Pinnacle Research Journals 3 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: ) 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 Eliot s? 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 colleague s poetry and criticism both: One can fight a long war against T.S. Eliot s 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

4 Pinnacle Research Journals 4 short list of Eliot s 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): Eliot s impish mind would not have missed the analogy between the taxi-driver and the Quester of The Waste Land, who in Jessie Weston s 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)

5 Pinnacle Research Journals 5 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 Foucault s 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 Donne s farfetched metaphors were not to be discovered until generations have passed. It was Eliot who remarkably noticed the presence of association of sensibilities in Donne s 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 Milton s discursive dispositions against tyranny and his remarks upon the Excellency of women to build their ideas upon Milton s authorial power; or in Eliot s term, Milton s 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.

6 Pinnacle Research Journals 6 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 Eliot s paper. His idea of achieving the learned classics knowledge by great labor is a very vital reminiscence of Alexander Pope s critical theory. Pope s 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. Homer s 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 Eliot s 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 Milton s Discourse against tyranny (summing up in Lucifer s discursivity in Paradise Lost) and his remarks on grace of women (e.g. O fairest of creation, Last and Best of all God s 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)

7 Pinnacle Research Journals 7 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 Eliot s 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 Eliot s 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 sciencepoetry analogy. One last interesting matter about Eliot s 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 Eliot s 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 Carlyle s vision of poetry as a heroic art (ibid). This will not dismiss Eliot s 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

8 Pinnacle Research Journals 8 formed around a text, which is beyond the name of the author. On this ground, Foucault s 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, Foucault s 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 Plato s allegory of the cave and Aristotle s 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 Derrida s disposition. This would be the first divergence between Derrida s 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

9 Pinnacle Research Journals 9 is a way two things are measured by each other reciprocally, based on their differences, which are not to prove one s 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 Eliot s 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 Derrida s disposition.

10 Pinnacle Research Journals 10 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 Foucault s 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 Eliot s 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 Dante s 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 Dante s 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 poet s task in the poetical vogue: Read in relation to the vision of the modern poet s task in Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot s furthest implication meets on the horizon with the apocalyptic hope of Santayana s closing paragraph: It is time some genius should appear to reconstitute the shattered picture of the world [...] (Santayana, 214 5). 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 would as Eliot later wrote about the scientific discovery of the mythical method in Ulysses and, implicitly, The Waste Land give a shape and a significance to the modern world (Eliot, Ulysses, Order and Myth, 177 8) (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 author s 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 Eliot s pivotal paper. In this regard, author s role,

11 Pinnacle Research Journals 11 considering Foucault s 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 Foucault s 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 Foucault s, is one of hope, understanding and change. Like Foucault, there is an emphasis on critique of totalitarian or hegemonic political rule (Calcagno, 2009:50). REFERENCES Abrams, M. H. (2001). A Glossary of Literary Terms, London: Thomson Wadsworth. Bloom, Harold. (2011). Bloom s Modern Critical Views: T.S. Eliot. New York: Infobase Publishing. B. Leitch,Vincent. Etal. (2001). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. London: Norton B. Mayer, Nicholas. (Spring 2011). Catalyzing Prufrock. Journal of Modern Literature, 34(3): Calcagno, Antonio. (Mar., 2009). Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author. Human Studies, 32( 1): Cianci, Giovanni & Harding, Jason. (Eds.) (2007). T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Deutscher, Penelope. (2005). How to Read Derrida. London: Granta Books. Eliot. T. S. (1932). Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber. Lodge, David. Ed. (2000). Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London: Pearson Education. Noel-Tod, Jeremy. (2013). The Hero as Individual Talent: Thomas Carlyle, T. S. Eliot and the

12 Pinnacle Research Journals 12 Prophecy of Modernism. The Review of English Studies. Advance Access on May 12, DOI: /res/hgt003 Taylor, Dianna. Ed. (2011). Michel Foucault: Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen. White, Peter. (2007). Traditional and the Individual Talent Revisited. The Review of English Studies, 58(235): DOI: /res/hgm018.