V.V. (18) V. in Love

[jbor]

----------
>From: <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>

> The excommunication here, from the
> Catholic/Tourist Church is owed to her lordliness, her
> colonial catholicism, the inversion of the Virgin Mary and
> to the fact that Stencil, we are told by the narrator, gives
> here some humanity.

Sorry, but this is incorrect. Her "excommunication" is due to the fact that
she has fallen in love. The chapter is titled 'V. in Love'.

    The lady V., one of them for so long, now suddenly found
    herself excommunicated; bounced unceremoniously into the null-time of
    human love, without having recognized the exact moment as any but when
    Melanie entered the side door to Le Nerf on Porcepic's arm and time --
    for a while -- ceased. (409.22-26)

    Of the woman, her lover, nothing further was seen. (414.22)


                       ------------------

    T.S. Eliot, 'The Modern Mind' (1932-33)

     ... our individual taste in poetry bears the indelible traces of our
    individual lives with all their experience pleasurable and painful. We
    are apt either to shape theory to cover the poetry that we find most
    moving, or -- what is less excusable --to choose the poetry which
    illustrates the theory we want to hold. You do not find Matthew Arnold
    quoting Rochester or Sedley. And it is not merely a matter of caprice.
    Each age demands different things from poetry, though its demands are
    modified, from time to time, by what some new poet has given. So our
    criticism, from age to age, will reflect the things that the age
    demands; and the criticism of no one man [sic] and of no one age can be
    expected to embrace the whole nature of poetry or exhaust all of its
    uses. Our contemporary critics, like their predecessors, are making
    particular responses to particular situations. No two readers, perhaps,
    will go to poetry with quite the same demands. Amongst all these demands
    from poetry and responses to it there is always some permanent element
    in common, just as there are standards of good and bad writing
    independent of what any one of us happens to like and dislike; but every
    effort to formulate the common element is limited by the limitations of
    particular men in particular places at particular times; and these
    limitations become manifest in the perspective of history.

Despite Eliot's instinctual "faith" (or presumption to know) that some
universal standard exists ("some permanent element") his recognition that
this is unattainable and unavailable to mere humans takes him well beyond
Modernism. And, as he admits in his 1963 preface, the reprint of this
collection of essays "is in the faint hope that one of these lectures may be
taken instead of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1917) by some
anthologist of the future." He describes the earlier essay as "the most
juvenile" he had written, despite it being the "best known". While he stops
short of repudiating it, he does refer to it as "the product of immaturity".

Further, it seems to me that it's actually "postmodernism" and
"postmodernists" who, in this forum at least, have been (and are still
being) depicted -- repeatedly -- with those three ugly heads of ignorance,
intolerance, and "evil". The nastiness has spewed forth quite without
provocation, and there has been no substantiation of the claims at all.

best