Frank Kermode
TRADITION AND THE NEW ART:
INTERVIEWS WITH
HAROLD ROSENBERG AND ERNST GOMBRI CH
When I was an undergraduate- let's say a generation ag()--–
and for some time after that, literary people talked a lot about tradition .
For one thing, T . S. Eliot had written about it and made it seem
un–
portant. His essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was a classic.
The word "tradition" wasn't at all a mere piece of conversational small
change, but a precise and indispensable critical term. It kept its bright
ring through the Marxist thirties, even for people who had small interest
in the extension of the idea into religious and sociological fi elds which at
this time occupied the interest of Mr. Eliot himself.
I think that even now, when the whole idea has been quite fully
criticized from the historical and other points of view, Mr. Eliot's tradi–
tion doctrines retain a good deal of their authority. Of course they still
haven't had much success outside the arts. This is something of a prob–
lem, in fact, because Eliot's teaching on tradition is really all of a piece.
The past makes sense, he says, only on a Christian view of it.
If
Eliot
calls tradition "a continuity of habit and custom in people of the same
blood, living in the same place," if he's right, then it's certainly lost. As
he sees it, tradition depends on social immobility and an acceptance of
the principle of subordination. On the Eliot view, you can point to
specific moments in history where the rot set in. And the psychological
consequences come out in the arts of later periods as the blight of what
he calls "dissociated sensibility"- an inabili ty to think and feel simul–
taneously.
Editors' note : These conversations are the first of a series of informal interviews
around these central themes : The Breach with the Past, The Use of the Past,
Ceremonial Survival and the Body of Knowledge, Tradition and Society. We have"
kept the spontaneous and conversational syntax to indicate that none of the state–
ments by any of the participants had been planned or rehearsed .
