I Think I Can See Kansas from Here!

     We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, or so T.S.Eliot would have us believe. He contends that a poet must always develop a consciousness of the past in order to be able to create anything  that can aspire to the name of art. In a way the poet must be related to the Tradition  in a parallel way that for Bordieu the critic must be related to culture. These arguments beg the same question; are you saying that it would be inconceivable for someone unfamiliar with the necessary background to achieve the desired result (art/ appreciation)? I suspect they would both resolutely answer yes and since they are writing their own geometry with their own internal rules they are correct in a limited way. But they do seem unnecessicarily limited in their definition of at/appreciation.
     Eliot’s conception of the Tadition is interesting. I picture a free floating line of artifacts, suspended in neutral space that obligingly rearrange themselves like balls in the funhouse crawl whenever a worthy suitor appears. The difficult question is how did they get there in the first place. I am guessing if we in this class were all to sit and write a list of the first 100 books to inhabit the Tradition our lists would not overlap by more than say 80%. So again where did they come from? Any assertion as to what they are is bound to be suceptible to any number of isms that could be very convincingly pressed forward.
     Still the notion that every worthy work reinscribes the works that have gone before is a very appealing premise. Eliot’s language seems to suggest that this reworking is not simply a matter of perception, but rather an editing of the thing itself. In light of Fish’s concept of reader response, perhaps there is no difference between perception and the changing of the text itself. There is still something very alluring in the notion of this grand parade of art which is in constant dialogue with itself and with us. Perhaps if we find the right giant we can march along.