Criticism and the Enigma of Arrival

Abstract

A hundred years ago, the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukàcs wrote that irony constitutes the essay’s essential characteristic—he was thinking principally of the literary or critical essay. “Most people,” Lukàcs said, “believe that the writings of the essayists are produced only in order to explain books and pictures, to facilitate their understanding.” The irony, he continues, “consists in the critic always speaking about the ultimate problems of life, but in a tone which implies that he is only discussing pictures and books, only the inessential and pretty ornaments of real life—and even then not their innermost substance but only their beautiful and useless surface.”¹ A certain modesty thus attends the effort, both Lukàcs’s and the essayist’s, just as humility marks the essayist’s tone and manner, reflective, later said E. B. White, of the essayist’s “second-class citizenship.”² While I hope to write modestly and humbly, in the form that Montaigne practically created out of whole cloth, I claim no irony, for writing about—that is, approaching—T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets takes me beyond such binary oppositions as Lukàcs’s “innermost substance” and “beautiful, useless surface” to “necessarye coniunction” and, indeed, oneness that is Word in, through, and by means of word(s), timelessness in, through, and by means of time, similarly beyond such other apparent oppositions as letter and spirit, meaning and experience, literature and religion (or theology).³

The power of the poetry is such that we cannot rest until we have both “experience” and “meaningAnd it is the arriving at the meaning, not the explaining of it, that matters. Anyone who attempts to ‘elucidate’ Four Quartets must be aware that the poems themselves supply the light.

—Raymond Preston, ‘Four Quartets’ Rehearsed: A Commentary on T. S. Eliot’s Cycle of Poems (1946)