Similar to TRP's take on Eliot, do we think?

[Steven Koteff]

Off the top of my head I will say it seems to me like they are taking a
similar path in some regards though I don't know if they end up in the same
place. The density of the allusiveness, in my reading, brings to mind the
question of whether enlightenment/transcendence can be found by thought (as
in, as the answer to a problem). I haven't read enough Eliot to speak
beyond my initial impressions, formed as an undergrad, and my retroactive
(re)understanding.

They both seem to find a spiritual problem in the ultimate
rationality/materiality of the world we live in and to me, for both, it
arises out of their respective and intimidating intellects. That is, with
greater tools to understand the world of forms (and all its suffering, its
asphyxiating qualities) are they able to transcend it? Or does doing so
require death to this world somehow? And submission to it (and of the ego,
and of all that understanding)?

Or, at least, that is a question I find (found) myself asking when reading
and thinking about both of them.



On Jan 22, 2016, at 4:12 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

yeah, no soup for me, no linking....but here's my question again.
TRP very influenced by Eliot. The conservatism--called reactionary by Obama
and others-- in Eliot's vision
coated Pynchon (how?), seen as such a paranoid anti-Statist Leftist
'radical'
of the sixties and on.

"Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless
mechanistic order"--Obama
on Eliot ..& Obama on Oedipa's choice?

Discuss the 'deep fatalism' in Pynchon and compare and contrast it to the
"deep fatalism" of Eliot.



On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 7:23 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had trouble following what Mark was quoting, but he prompted me to find
> this article, which I thought was kinda fascinating:
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/04/obama-as-literary-critic/
>
> Thanks, Mark.
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 1:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Barack Obama (in a letter published in The New York Review of Books
>> <https://www.facebook.com/nybooks/>): I haven’t read “The Waste Land”
>> for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will
>> hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs
>> from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social
>> reality/order of his time.
>>
>> Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless
>> mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual
>> purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this.
>> Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four
>> Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch
>> a sense of what I speak.
>>
>> Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I
>> respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course,
>> the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism,
>> not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same
>> milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)
>>
>> And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and
>> death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A
>> fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at
>> Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence
>> yourself, Alex?
>>
>
>
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