BOOKS
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urn, a specimen of fulfilled intent that could tell you all you wanted to
know about it-or at least all ye need to know. Then came-what?–
Woodstock? Derrida? The gyres! the gyres! May we alter Yeats and say
that this is also tru e, "Things taught too long may be no longer taught"?
My generation was brought up in Tate's wake
(Essays of Four
Decades
was first published the year that 1was born; Tate died in 1979).
Which means that, for me, Tate has been conspicuous largely as an
absence, th e corpse in the kitchen while postmodernity has wheeled
away with champagne and cigars in the family room. It's been quite a
party. Empedocles and all. We've very nearly burned down the house.
But did anybody notice, through it all, how strained, how superficial it
has felt? Although the old family portraits had their faces turned to the
walls-those grim-visaged countenances of yore-and could no longer
spook us, still one couldn't get over the sense that the parents were just
around the corner in the car. That the soiree was on borrowed time.
That, like it not,
there was a corpse in the kitchen.
Ding-dong. Tending–
time has come.
"We lack a tradition of criticism," Tate writes in 1928, at the age of
twenty-nine. "There were no points of critical reference passed on to us
from a proceeding generation." How many grad students in how many
English departments could say the like today? Looking back, one finds
a gap of thirty years, a lacuna the dimensions of the book I am review–
ing. Tate was about establishing such a tradition, a coherent, indige–
nous, critical continuum in which he and we could locate
ourselves-not a "method," not "theory," but something living, inte–
grated, coming out of life itself:
[ am not upholding here the so-called dead hand of tradition, but
rather a rational insight into the meaning of the present in terms of
some imaginable past implicit in our own lives: we need a body of
ideas that can bear upon the course of the spirit and yet remain
coherent as a rational instrument. We ignore the present, which is
momently translated into the past, and derive our standards from
imaginative constructions of the future. The hard contingency of
fact invariably breaks these standards down, leaving us the intel–
lectual chaos which is the sore distress of American criticism.
Marxian criticism has become the latest disguise of this heresy.
Marxian criticism or, what he calls elsewhere, "the effluvia of France."
Both herald "the dark ages of our present enlightenment," a symptom,
for Tate, of his central theme, what he labels in his preface to
R eason in
Madness
(1941)
"the deep illness of the modern mind." This mind he
