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Context and Plausibility Structures, or, Another Subject Heading That Does Not Tend to Edification
Paging through a historical survey like David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 is a reminder of just how much our intellectual and political choices are shaped by our immediate circumstances...we know this, of course, but we are forever believing that surely our current choices and opinions are more reality-based than the delusionally partial choices and opinions of previous generations (or of the present-day opposing political camp). It is evident (to me, at least) how, given the cramped cultural circumstances and available social evidence of Britain 1949, people of good will could come to conclusions that seem appalling sixty-some years later—appalling not least because they never quite modified those conclusions to fit the different circumstances of the twenty-first century.
This type of re-reading is a natural mark of aging (I recently re-read, literally, Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending, in which the narrator revisits a pivotal scene from his 1960s-era youth, and knows the place for the first time) but also of the ongoing task of historical re-visioning, in which it is impossible to come to any definitive conclusion except that the available evidence needs to be reassembled differently on a regular basis.
Paging through (I do a great deal of paging through rather than actually reading) A Wicked Pack of Cards again, and impressed afresh by the authors’ merciless mockery of the flimsy scrims of random word-association by which eighteenth-century occultist made the Tarot cards into a philosophical system of divination, I realized how even this could have seemed plausible in the eighteenth-century French climate of opinion (some of the key texts appeared in the last, intellectually overheated years of the Ancien Regime)...and how all of this contradictory ferment could have gone, in England, into shaping the Renaissance Hermetism of the so-called Antient wing of Freemasonry versus the rationalist Newtonianism of the Moderns. (And I wished anew that my now-deceased friend the would-be writer of Masonic intellectual history had been able to contextualize his data just a bit more clearly, and to present his conclusions more comprehensibly—a defect with which I sympathize, since I do not present my own conclusions clearly or comprehensibly.)
This chain of associations led me to realize anew that it is past time for someone to present the revised summing-up of the key texts of twentieth-century Anglo-American modernist literature—texts that seemed essential as late as the 1960s but now seem dated to the point of triviality. Half a century ago they were merely hampered by incorporating a context from the early 1920s that had already become alien to undergraduates.
“The Waste Land” is the case of which I was reminded, of course—a poem in which T. S. Eliot makes an offhand reference ("a wicked pack of cards") to the Tarot cards of the Smith-Waite pack, ancient-looking images that we now know were at that time only a decade old, and created by a Jamaican woman living in London who extemporized from instructions by a semi-skeptical scholarly occultist; other metaphysical-sounding lines of the poem were based in the facts of the extraordinary chaos created in 1915-1920 by the fall of empires, the sudden fluidity of political borders, and the forcible relocation of minority ethnic groups. The fate of the Armenian diaspora and the outcome of the Silesia plebiscites are as relevant to “The Waste Land” as the Grail legends that Eliot cites in his infamous Notes explicating the poem—such events and incidents were part of the impressions that the day’s newspaper headlines imparted to a grotesquely overqualified American-expatriate bank employee who was having a nervous breakdown over the intolerable condition of his marriage and his finances. Eliot eventually birthed a Russian-novel of a poem incorporating all of this, and Ezra Pound whipped it into shape as a commentary on the condition of Anglo-American man (“man” indeed) circa 1922, with echoes of a multicultural future that then was still far from arriving. (Pound, despite his own bigoted tendencies, having seen that future more clearly and with less anxiety than Eliot: “How you gwine ter keep the Possum [Eliot] quiet when I brings in deh chinas and deh black men?” as Pound wrote in a humorous phonetic dialect that was meant to be as offensive then as it is now.)
This could all be presented succinctly in terms that would make sense to twenty-first century sensibilities, by someone who could express it all in coherent, contemporary prose. But it ain’t me, babe.
Paging through a historical survey like David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 is a reminder of just how much our intellectual and political choices are shaped by our immediate circumstances...we know this, of course, but we are forever believing that surely our current choices and opinions are more reality-based than the delusionally partial choices and opinions of previous generations (or of the present-day opposing political camp). It is evident (to me, at least) how, given the cramped cultural circumstances and available social evidence of Britain 1949, people of good will could come to conclusions that seem appalling sixty-some years later—appalling not least because they never quite modified those conclusions to fit the different circumstances of the twenty-first century.
This type of re-reading is a natural mark of aging (I recently re-read, literally, Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending, in which the narrator revisits a pivotal scene from his 1960s-era youth, and knows the place for the first time) but also of the ongoing task of historical re-visioning, in which it is impossible to come to any definitive conclusion except that the available evidence needs to be reassembled differently on a regular basis.
Paging through (I do a great deal of paging through rather than actually reading) A Wicked Pack of Cards again, and impressed afresh by the authors’ merciless mockery of the flimsy scrims of random word-association by which eighteenth-century occultist made the Tarot cards into a philosophical system of divination, I realized how even this could have seemed plausible in the eighteenth-century French climate of opinion (some of the key texts appeared in the last, intellectually overheated years of the Ancien Regime)...and how all of this contradictory ferment could have gone, in England, into shaping the Renaissance Hermetism of the so-called Antient wing of Freemasonry versus the rationalist Newtonianism of the Moderns. (And I wished anew that my now-deceased friend the would-be writer of Masonic intellectual history had been able to contextualize his data just a bit more clearly, and to present his conclusions more comprehensibly—a defect with which I sympathize, since I do not present my own conclusions clearly or comprehensibly.)
This chain of associations led me to realize anew that it is past time for someone to present the revised summing-up of the key texts of twentieth-century Anglo-American modernist literature—texts that seemed essential as late as the 1960s but now seem dated to the point of triviality. Half a century ago they were merely hampered by incorporating a context from the early 1920s that had already become alien to undergraduates.
“The Waste Land” is the case of which I was reminded, of course—a poem in which T. S. Eliot makes an offhand reference ("a wicked pack of cards") to the Tarot cards of the Smith-Waite pack, ancient-looking images that we now know were at that time only a decade old, and created by a Jamaican woman living in London who extemporized from instructions by a semi-skeptical scholarly occultist; other metaphysical-sounding lines of the poem were based in the facts of the extraordinary chaos created in 1915-1920 by the fall of empires, the sudden fluidity of political borders, and the forcible relocation of minority ethnic groups. The fate of the Armenian diaspora and the outcome of the Silesia plebiscites are as relevant to “The Waste Land” as the Grail legends that Eliot cites in his infamous Notes explicating the poem—such events and incidents were part of the impressions that the day’s newspaper headlines imparted to a grotesquely overqualified American-expatriate bank employee who was having a nervous breakdown over the intolerable condition of his marriage and his finances. Eliot eventually birthed a Russian-novel of a poem incorporating all of this, and Ezra Pound whipped it into shape as a commentary on the condition of Anglo-American man (“man” indeed) circa 1922, with echoes of a multicultural future that then was still far from arriving. (Pound, despite his own bigoted tendencies, having seen that future more clearly and with less anxiety than Eliot: “How you gwine ter keep the Possum [Eliot] quiet when I brings in deh chinas and deh black men?” as Pound wrote in a humorous phonetic dialect that was meant to be as offensive then as it is now.)
This could all be presented succinctly in terms that would make sense to twenty-first century sensibilities, by someone who could express it all in coherent, contemporary prose. But it ain’t me, babe.
