*

3In his Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Cleanth Brooks writes of the complex composition of Eliot’s The Waste Land: Eliot ‘works in terms of surface parallelisms which in reality make ironical contrasts, and in terms of surface contrasts which in reality constitute parallelisms. [. . .] The two aspects taken together give the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole’ (Brooks 167). As a matter of fact, the notion of assembling diverse realities into a new whole is a thread running through the fabric of Eliot’s poetics.

4‘The poet’s mind’, as Eliot stressed, ‘is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’ (Eliot 1975a, 41). Eliot continued to expound the idea of the poet’s ability to ‘form a new compound’ elsewhere:

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. (Eliot 1975b, 64)

5There are two points of great import here. First, Eliot seemed to agree with the philosophers of his day that real experience is disorderly and fragmentary; second, the poet’s ability to combine manifold experiences into a new whole is the very technique of (synthetic) Cubism. These two points are actually two sides of one coin.

7Therefore, we see that much of modernist art concretizes the notion of the fragmentary nature of real experience: ‘Scepticism about the traditional notion that objects are unified and independent [. . .] becomes perfectly visible in the earliest canvases of the Cubists and Futurists where fragmentation, multiple images, interlocking planes, abstraction and lignes-forces imitate, not the appearance of objects, but their status in reality’ (Korg 34). Simply put, Cubist painters sought to paint objects as one perceives them in the mind rather than as they appear before our eyes. As Picasso once said emphatically: ‘I paint objects as I think them not as I see them’ (qtd. in Golding 60).

8The modernist notion of real or immediate experience has much to do with the modernist notion of time (and space). A representative philosopher of the notion of time is Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France Eliot attended while staying in Paris in 1910-11, and whose theory of durée or duration (the passage of time), as we shall see, nurtured the Cubist ‘multiple viewpoints’. Although by 1913 Eliot started to deviate from and even railed against many aspects of Bergon’s theory (Skaff 25), he began ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935) with something of a paraphrase of Bergson’s idea of pure duration:

Time present and time past
Art both perhaps present intime future,
And time future contained in time past.
[. . .]
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. (Eliot 1963, 175)

9That which Eliot describes here is in fact a state of temporal disorder or chaos, namely, the Bergsonian ‘pure duration’. In Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson writes:

In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize them in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity. [. . .] [F]rom the moment when you attribute the least homogeneity to duration, you surreptitiously introduce space. (Bergson 1960, 104)

Now, if some bold novelist, tearing down the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego, shows us under this appearance of logic a fundamental absurdity, under this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named, we commend him for having known us than we knew ourselves. (Bergson 1960, 133)

12Bergson believed in the power of avant-garde art to break through the orderly and ossified world of consciousness and thereby lay bare the chaotic nature of our being or real experience. His philosophy of art finds an echo in Eliot’s view of the use of poetry:

Poetry is of course not to be defined by its use. [. . .] It may effect revolutions in sensibility such as are periodically needed; may help to break up the conventional modes of perception and valuation which are perpetually forming, and make people see the world afresh, or some new part of it. It may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate. (Eliot 1975c, 95–96)

13In other words, poetry may lead us, to use Bergson’s terms, ‘to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate one another’ (Bergson 1960, 231). To put it further, for Eliot as well as Bergson, it is new wholes, or collages, born of the fusion of various inner states that enable people to see the world afresh, to become aware of the inter-penetration of manifold experiences.

14In visual art, the first ‘bold’ painter in the twentieth century is the Cubist painter. In their Cubism (1912), Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger manifest that no one but the artist has the faculty of discovering and disentangling reality, thereby creating new form with which to unveil reality or the inner life to the crowd whose eyes have been clouded by conventional images or convenient signs: the artist attempts to contain ‘the quality of this form (the unmeasurable sum of the affinities perceived between the visible manifestation and the tendency of his mind) in a symbol likely to affect others. When he succeeds[,] he forces the crowd, confronted by his integrated plastic consciousness, to adopt the same relationship he established with nature’ (Gleizes and Metzinger 190). The centrepiece of Cubist new form is the breach of the Renaissance vision of three-dimensional space and closed Albertian or linear perspective. Spatial construction built on orthogonal perspective in a Renaissance painting is the very product of traditional Euclidean geometry. For Gleizes and Metzinger, according to Robert M. Antliff, Renaissance space and perspective is the pictorial parallel of the space of ‘science’, which is based on proportional, quantifiable measurement. In contrast to scientifically proportional space, Cubist space is nonscientific, unmeasurable, qualitative, or heterogeneous (Gleizes and Metzinger 343). Cubist space, Gleizes and Metzinger have implied, is the product of non-Euclidean geometry. This geometry, Guillaume Apollinaire explicates in The Cubist Painters (1913), brings to Cubist canvases ‘The Fourth Dimension’ (Appollinaire 116), which, Timothy Mitchell has circumspectly concluded, refers to the fusion of space and time (Mitchell 176). In other words, time flows into Cubist spatial construction down the aqueduct, according to Mitchell, of Bergson’s theory of duration (Mitchell 176–177).

15Both Mitchell and Antliff maintain that Metzinger’s statement in 1911—as follows—is well-nigh a paraphrase of Bergson’s conception of reality as a continuous flux, a succession without distinction:

• 8 In consequence, Cubist painting is a literal violation of G. E. Lessing’s definition of painting: ‘ (...)

Already they [the Cubists] have uprooted the prejudice that commanded the painter to remain motionless in front of the object, at a fixed distance from it, and to catch on the canvas no more than a retinal photography more or less modified by ‘personal feeling’. They have allowed themselves to move around the object in order to give under the control of intelligence a concrete representation of it, made up of several successive aspects. Formerly a picture took possession of space, now it reigns also in time.8 (Qtd. in Mitchell 177 and in Antliff 342)

16As a matter of fact, this statement can be seen as a further explanation of Metzinger’s comment on Picasso and Braque in one brief essay ‘Note on Painting’ (1910), which has been recognized as decisive in finding a niche for Cubism in the modernist period and especially in enshrining Picasso and Braque as its leading lights: ‘Whether it be a face or a fruit he [Braque] is painting, the total image radiates in time; the picture is no longer a dead portion of space’ (Metzinger 60). Needless to say, what makes Braque’s and Picasso’s paintings radiate in time is the ‘multiple viewpoints’ technique, a corollary of which is collage, or broadly, synthetic imagery.

17With the importation of time, ‘The Fourth Dimension’, onto the canvas, Cubist painting shook off the yoke of the mimetic, or really illusionistic, nature of art that had reined over European paintings since the Renaissance. Nonetheless, Cubism is not (meant to be) an abstract art: ‘There isn’t’, as Picasso once claimed, ‘any such thing as abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of actuality. There’s no danger then anyway, because the idea of the object will have left its indelible mark’ (qtd. in Sypher 268). Rather, Cubist painting is at once abstract and concrete; it is, so to speak, the composite of the eye/the sensible and the mind/the intelligible. Gleizes, for instance, once claimed that his chief concern was a new kind of realism, which was ‘different from that of Courbet, for whom the impression of the eye sufficed’, and which aimed to ‘place these impressions under the control of the intelligence and of knowledge’ (Gleizes 128). This is why Wylie Sypher states:

Cubist painting resolves the old conflict, disturbing to Descartes and John Locke and the academicians, between the ‘primary’ qualities of an object (those features known to abstract thought—its mathematical properties) and its ‘secondary’ qualities (those felt by the senses—its material properties). For the cubist both are aspects of the object, and neither is the ground of its reality. The cubist object is a point at which thought about the object (our conception of it) penetrates and reorders sense impressions and feelings. (Sypher 268)

18In other words, Cubist painting sutures together feeling and intelligence; it is, to quote Eliot in a different context, ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’ (Eliot 1975b, 63).

19The unification of feeling and thought is the very gist of Eliot’s theory of unified sensibility, as opposed to the oft-quoted ‘dissociation of sensibility’: he defined ‘sensibility’ as a composite of feeling and thought. Since the eighteenth century, English poetry, Eliot noted, had been imbued with the expression of the poet’s subjective or personal feeling: ‘The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced’ (Eliot 1975b, 65). (Exemplary of the sentimental age would be Wordsworth, who regarded poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.) These poets, Eliot continued, ‘think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose’. Poetry of the sentimental age therefore leads to ‘a dissociation of sensibility’ (Eliot 1975b, 64), an imbalance or widening crevice between thought and feeling, the intellectual and the sensuous, the impersonal and the personal. Eliot insisted that poetry should explore the heart as well as the soul: ‘Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts’ (Eliot 1975b, 66).

20Eliot’s notion of unified sensibility is bound up with his impersonal theory of poetry. In opposition to the Romantic tendency to see poetry as the expression of the poet’s personality or idiosyncrasy, Eliot urged the poet to depersonalize himself, in that ‘the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways’ (Eliot 1975a, 42). Depersonalization, he stressed, depends on the continual surrender of the poet himself to ‘something which is more valuable’ (Eliot 1975a, 40), that is, tradition, the past and the present, taken together. Although, he pointed out, we tend to give credit to a poet for his individuality or originality, ‘if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’ (Eliot 1975a, 38).

21Hence, instead of finding new emotions, the business of the poet is to ‘develop or procure the consciousness of the past and [. . .] continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career’ (Eliot 1975a, 40). (Noticeably, this may differentiate Eliot from other modernist poets and artists: while they claim, in their essays, to split with tradition in order to make something new, Eliot tried to carve ‘a new whole’ from tradition.) For, he concluded, ‘the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past’ (Eliot 1975a, 44). Again, we find the connection between Eliot’s poetics and Bergson’s notion of duration:

Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more probably, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present, there would be no duration, but only instantaneity. (Bergson 1955, 40)

22Noticeably, Eliot’s attitude toward tradition can serve as a rationale for his frequent references to the work of the poets of the past in his own poems. In the last passage of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ in The Waste Land, for instance, Eliot portrays modern London as an ‘unreal city’ shrouded in an atmosphere of ennui and death by alluding to Baudelaire’s Paris in Les Fleurs du Mal and Dante’s Limbo in the Inferno; London, so to say, is a compound or juxtaposition of multiple layers of time and space. It is tempting to say, then, that the way Eliot used allusions—which Marcia Leveson has seen as ‘the literary equivalent of a collage’ (Levenson 135)—brings forth ‘the fourth dimension’ in his poems: the past and the present, to use Bergson’s words, ‘melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines’.

*

23In his essay on Ben Jonson (1919), Eliot commends Jonson for showing a new world with ‘a logic of its own’: ‘the worlds created by artists like Jonson are like systems of non-Euclidean geometry. They are not fancy, because they have a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it’ (Eliot 1920, 116–117). That is to say, Jonson’s new compounds that ‘have a logic of their own’ make us see the world afresh. We do not know for sure if Eliot had Cubism in mind when he referred to ‘systems of non-Euclidean geometry’, but what he said of Jonson is certainly true of Cubist painting as well as of his own poetry. And Bergson’s theory of durée, as we have seen, provided the rich loam for both Eliot’s poetry and Cubist painting to develop ‘a logic of their own’.