Discovering Modernism by Menand Louis;

Author:Menand, Louis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 1987-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Imagistes could be considered collectively, that is, because they were engaged on a problem that was not personal—how the writer might best express himself—but institutional—how literature might be made more effective. The analogues West cited were the American efficiency engineers Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth, whose work on “scientific management”43 belongs to the history of the professionalization of industry; it is a risky comparison, but its riskiness is an index of how drastic the avant-gardist, in one of her poses at least, meant the overhaul of the conventional notion of the literary vocation to be. And we might recall that it was in the same terms that, two years later, Pound put the case to Eliot’s father: there was a job of work to be done, and a respectable living to be made by doing it properly.

But the period of association-building was only a phase in the evolution of the modern profession, and the period of the literary group, as prepotent as the arrangement seemed for a time, was only a phase in the development of the modern writer—and for reasons that are parallel. The limitation of the professional association is that it is, in the end, too visible. It makes too easy a target, and the individual practitioner who borrows its credibility also takes on the problem of how to distance himself from those of its “official” positions he finds inconvenient or unacceptable without losing his piece of its authority. The consummation of the professional project therefore occurs not (as Larson, for instance, suggests44) when the association has achieved independence from outside control, but when the association is no longer perceived as the true source of the professional’s authority. Though we expect the lawyer, for instance, to have been certified by all the appropriate institutions, his social status derives from the sense of his belonging not to the Bar Association (a nineteenth-century requirement) but to the ancient profession of the law. Like any social perception, this is a sense that must be created before it can be taken for granted, and it is against the background of this final phase in the evolution of professionalism that some of the reasons for the effectiveness of T. S. Eliot’s early criticism become apparent.

By the time Eliot began making his name known as a critic, a reaction against the tendencies of literary collectivism had set in. Though they continued to find a market, the Georgian anthologies were attacked, along with their more avant-garde imitators, for the “corporate flavour”45 of their contents; and various alliances, notably the Imagists and the Vorticists, were beginning—with the help, of course, of the war—to unravel. And we can find, outside literary circles, parallel indications of a general skepticism about the beneficence of the organizational spirit, signs of a renewed effort to assess the social cost of efficiency. Max Weber’s famous expressions of divided sentiments about the nature of work in the modern world, “Politics as a Vocation” and “Science as a Vocation,” were delivered as lectures in Germany in 1918.

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