242
FRANK KERMOD!
In restating these familiar positions in a much too cursory way, I'm
simply trying to define my starting point. Of course Mr. Eliot's central
tenets have been modified and adapted by other people--in America,
for instance, Allen Tate and others produced a Southern version of
them. The point is that if such opinions have any substance there aren't
many people who can now think straight about the past. To be sub–
ordinate, immobile, content with ancestral habit-that's not a program
to command popular support. The new will usually seem more interesting
than the old---or, to use language acceptable to an anthropologist, we
in our time have more to do with
schism
than with
continuity.
A state
of affairs in which a particularly "fissile" society tries to assert its com–
mon values by ritual celebrations of
continuity
is not unknown to anthro–
pologists, and one way out of my difficulty might be to argue that au–
thoritarian and ritualistic assertions by poets are in fact an instance of
our society's doing this. But for the moment anyway, I think we have to
avoid such grand solutions. The question then remains: are we devoted
to schism? Do we value continuity less than we did?
History is alarming. Everybody, or almost everybody, feels better
for finding intelligible patterns in it. This is the best way of accounting
for the success of historical theories of "dissociation," even among people
who attach no particular importance to other concepts of Mr. Eliot such
as "christendom," or the traditional "organic society." Hence the con–
tinued authority of Mr. Eliot's doctrines. Yet it is a matter of record
that notions of this kind have flourished at exactly the same time, and
under the same conditions, as other opinions so different as to be anti–
thetical. On the one hand such modernists as Mr. Eliot require that cer–
tain
aspects of history should be, as it were, reduced to second-class
status, thought of as deviant; on the other hand, a more radical con–
vention pretty well rejects the past altogether.
Futurism was one instance of this, though there are many others.
There doesn't seem to be a useful generic term, so we must rather awk–
wardly call this modern rejection of the past:
anti-passeisme.
I don't
mean that it's only modern, but that there is a
c~racteristically
modem
variety of it. Painting I think provides the best examples. Sometimes
this
anti-passeisme
merges with a more traditional primitivism, as per–
haps in Paul Klee. But there is without doubt a more extreme form of
anti-passeisme
in the modem world, and not only in modern painting.
So you can say that the only sense in which the past is relevant to your
painting is the very personal one--you enact your own past as you
paint. Or, in a novel, you can disown the entire literary past and claim
affinity not with past novels but with the descriptive and analytic sci-
