Modern Monuments: T. S.

Eliot, Nietzsche,
and the Problem of History

John Zilcosky
University of Toronto

D
uring and after his formal study of philosophy, T. S. Eliot shared
interests with Friedrich Nietzsche, such as mythology, Greek tragedy,
and concerns about the future of art. However, Eliot rarely mentions
Nietzsche in his published works, and, perhaps for this reason, critics have yet
to fully investigate the significance of Nietzsche for Eliot. Nietzsche’s impact
upon the zeitgeist was unrivaled—as evidenced in the works of Kafka, Pound,
Mann, Proust, Joyce—and Eliot was well aware of this. As he wrote to his
mother in 1915, he had already read some Nietzsche and planned to read more:
“As for the book on Nietzsche, I have finished it, and now am reading some
of Nietzsche’s works which I had not read before, and which I ought to read
anyhow before my examinations.”¹ This reading bears itself out in Eliot’s later
writings. As critics have convincingly argued, Die Geburt der Tragödiee (The Birth
y looms behind both the ritualistic, “Dionysian” tragedy, Murder in
of Tragedy)
the Cathedrall (1935),² as well as the mytho-poetic The Waste Landd (1922). In
the latter, Nietzsche haunts Eliot via Tristan und Isolde, as a voice latent within
the text and its notes.³
We can gain a clue to the precise nature of Eliot’s interest in Nietzsche
through Eliot’s 1916 review of A. Wolf ’s The Philosophy of Nietzschee (the “book”
that Eliot refers to in the letter to his mother). Eliot’s treatment of Nietzsche
is even-handed, especially in light of the anti-Nietzsche mood of World War I
England.⁴⁴ Eliot censures Nietzsche for being neither writer nor philosopher, a
critique that Eliot could well have leveled against himself, but he later admires
Nietzsche’s theories of aesthetics. As Eliot writes in his final sentence, he
“regrets” that Wolf ’s Nietzschee omits any account of “Nietzsche’s views on art,”
especially of his “interesting pessimism with respect to the future of art.”⁵ The
22 Journal of Modern Literature

connection between Eliot’s and Nietzsche’s philosophical views on the future

of art and of artistic production—yet to be discussed by critics—is the theme
of this essay.⁶ Not a discussion of “influence,” these remarks will rather focus
on the philosophical “paradox” that is common to all European modernities:
the pressure of creating the “new” from the ground of the old.⁷⁷ Ostensibly
opposed in their valuations of “tradition,” both Eliot and Nietzsche, I argue,
end up at the same impasse regarding literary innovation, as exemplified in
Nietzsche’s “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben” (“On
the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 1874) and Eliot’s “Tradi-
tion and the Individual Talent” (1919). This dovetailing toward the same aes-
thetic contradiction underlines the dialectical nature of cultural criticism then
and now, especially when one opposes apparently “radical” (Nietzsche) and
“reactionary” (Eliot) poles.

I. THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY

In order to approach the problem of literary innovation within tradition, I begin
with two quotations: first, T. S. Eliot’s famous description from “Tradition and
the Individual Talent” of how new works of art make their way into the canon,
which already exists in an “ideal” state: “The existing monuments form an ideal
order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the
really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the
new work arrives.”⁸ Second, consider Nietzsche’s 1874 attack on the misuse of
history, which today reads like a prescient indictment of the tradition-based
criticism Eliot promoted almost fifty years later:
(The judges of art) cannot tolerate a rebirth of the monumental, and, to assure that
none will take place, they employ precisely that past art which has long been can-
onized as monumental. This is the method of connoisseurs, because they would
like to eliminate art altogether. [. . .] Monumental history is the masquerade in
which their hatred for the great and powerful artists of their own age appears as
a complacent admiration for the great and powerful artists of the past.⁹

Nietzsche’s assault on the “connoisseurs,” the admirers of past “monuments,”

sounds initially like a pre-emptive strike against Eliot. But a closer look at
the two writers’ contexts reveals more similarities than differences. Nietzsche
was indeed assailing “tradition,” but he was aiming specifically at an academic
form of history that, according to Nietzsche, was stifling all creative impulse
in Imperial Germany. Eliot, conversely, argued that early twentieth-century
Anglo-American culture suffered precisely from its lack of tradition: without
a strong sense of history, young artists were deprived of a fertile, nurturing
soil on which to flourish. Despite the oppositional polemics of the two essays,
then, both circle around the same dilemma: how to break out of a contemporary
T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problem of History 23

crisis of creativity and locate a space for originality within tradition. Nietzsche
criticizes history in the name of “life”; Eliot tempers Romantic impulses in
order to nurture and shape tradition. In the end, both writers find themselves
negotiating the same area of temporal contradiction, where the apparent duality
between “modernity” and “history”—“present” and “past”—blurs. Modernity
discovers its inherent ambiguity, and both writers, approaching from different
directions, confront paradox.
Published only a few years after Eliot began, in 1915,¹⁰ to immerse himself
in Nietzsche’s works, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” begins by “deplor-
ing” the absence of tradition in England (“Tradition,” 47). So-called originality
is overvalued, Eliot claims; in actuality, the most individual aspects of a poet’s
work are precisely those “in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously.” Eliot recommends diligent study of the past,
insisting that it should lead not to mimicry, but rather to the achievement of
an “historical sense” (48–9). This historical sense, Eliot claims, strengthens the
present-day poet by reminding him of his great predecessors. From Homer to
Eliot himself, the continuum of exemplars inspires the young poet to greatness.
Eliot acknowledges the objection that excessive knowledge of history could
just as likely suppress creativity as encourage it, but he asserts nonetheless that
this historical sense remains necessary for all “serious” poets (52). If the poet
learns the tradition, his originality will not be stifled but stimulated: he will
conform precisely by not conforming, as did his predecessors, and the existing
order of monuments will be forced to readjust in order to make room for the
new work (50). Eliot’s argument—that the effect of tradition is not inhibiting
but dynamic—rests, up to this point, only on his own conviction. The young
Eliot wants to understand history as a continuum of inspiring exemplars and
even to conceive of himself as the latest one.
If Nietzsche had been a contemporary of Eliot, he would likely have used
Eliot’s own metaphor to describe him. Eliot is longing for the “monumental”
view of history that Nietzsche defines near the beginning of “Vom Nutzen
und Nachtheil”:
That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a
chain, that this chain unites mankind across the millennia like a range of human
mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for mee still
living, bright and great—that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity
which finds expression in the demand for a monumentall history. (“History,” 95)

For Nietzsche, such an understanding of monumental history, because it

encourages present action, reveals how history can sometimes be in the service
(Nutzen) of life. More often than not, however, Nietzsche writes, monumental
history is a disservice, a ponderous weapon against creativity. He criticizes his
own culture for misusing the monuments of the past: so-called connoisseurs
24 Journal of Modern Literature

wield monumental history in order to intimidate contemporary artists, and

“eliminat[e]” and “poison” art (99). With history stifling originality, modern
man cannot make art; what is more, like Nietzsche’s prototypical Hamlet, he
is unable to act at all.
Nietzsche, contra Eliot, thus begins his essay by polemicizing against
historicism. He defines “history”—especially the kind of history practiced at
universities—as that which is anathema to “life.” “Life” defies not only history,
but also history’s psychological basis: memory. In contrast to the animal, which
lives each moment unhistorically, man drags with him the recollection of his
entire past:
(Man) wonders about himself, [. . .] wonders that he cannot learn to forget, but
always clings to the past; that however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with
him. [. . .] Man says, “I remember,” and envies the animal who immediately for-
gets and sees each moment really die, lapse back into fog and night and disappear
forever. So the animal lives unhistorically. (“History,” 88)

In Nietzsche’s system, humans can learn from animals. They, too, can learn to
forget if they deny history and embrace “life.” Forgetting in the name of life,
or, as Nietzsche writes, “active forgetting,” is a necessary prerequisite for both
happiness and the production of anything great, of anything “truly human.” In
direct contrast with Eliot, Nietzsche insists that humanity surpasses itself only
after severing itself from its own history: “We must [. . .] regard the capacity for
a certain degree of unhistorical awarenesss as the more important and primordial
capacity, since it provides the only foundation upon which any just, healthy,
great, or truly human enterprise can develop” (91, my italics). In his opening
argument, then, Nietzsche sets himself firmly against the type of traditional
knowledge espoused by Eliot. Whereas Eliot demands that any serious poet
(“anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year”) pos-
sess an “historical sense,” Nietzsche insists that this same “historical sense”
(der historische Sinn) is the greatest single enemy of creativity (“Tradition,” 49;
“History,” 88; “Vom Nutzen,” 242).
This opposition, centered on the concept of “history,” begins to dissolve
when “history” proves to be closer to its opposite (“modernity,” “life”) than
both writers had admitted in their confrontational openings. For Eliot, “the
historical sense” denotes not merely an understanding of history as that which
occurred in the past, but also a sense of history as presence: “the historical sense
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”
History, then, is not the opposite of “the present,” but rather part of a temporal
extension, a continuum that extends all the way to today. Eliot blurs chrono-
logical distinctions even further in the next sentence, when he claims that the
conceptual categories “temporal” and “timeless” actually overlap: “This histori-
cal sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the
T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problem of History 25

timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And
it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place
in time, of his contemporaneity (“Tradition,” 49). Eliot’s “historical sense” is an
understanding of what is timeless and of what is temporal, existing as separate
entities, but also of the two terms existing together. The endless stretch from
past to present condenses in the living poet’s mind, but this poetic present
simultaneously dwells within the otherness—the pastness—of the past. This
present past does not tarnish the poet’s newness, weighing him down with the
burden of history; rather, this historical sense makes him contemporary, makes
him modern.
Eliot blurs past and present at least five times in this essay, each time posit-
ing the apparent paradox as perplexing yet matter-of-fact (“Tradition,” 49, 50,
59). In an insight prefiguring Borges’ claim that Kafka influenced his precursors,
Eliot asserts that the present is in fact capable of changing the past: the past
is “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (50).¹¹
This temporal reversal culminates in the final sentence of the essay, in which
Eliot complicates the relation of past and present so thoroughly that he virtually
effaces his earlier, more conservative distinction between the “traditional” and
the “new”: “(The poet) is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives
in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless
he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (59). As J. P.
Riquelme points out in his close reading of this sentence, Eliot achieves “dis-
sonance” by correlating pairs of apparently incompatible terms and creating
unresolvable double meanings. In the parallel dependent clauses (structured
according to “unless . . . but”), “present” and “past” in the first clause occur at
the same respective positions as do “dead” and “living” in the second.¹² This
discordant alignment of “dead” with “present” and “living” with “past” results
in a temporal disorientation. To complicate the chronological problem further,
“the present moment of the past,” a key phrase to understanding the sentence,
conveys a double meaning: on the one hand, it denotes the moment in which
the past was itself a present; on the other hand, it refers to the continuation of
the past into the present moment of writing.
This dissolution of the apparent opposition between past and present occurs
also in Nietzsche’s essay, albeit from the reverse direction. After opening with
the polemical claim that humankind envies the unhistorical animal its ability
to forget, Nietzsche immediately begins to undermine his own “history”/“life”
duality. He claims that humans can never really exist outside of history, as
“unhistorical” forgetters. Rather, “life” both engenders and is engendered by
history. “Life” is unavoidably historical: “Human existence [Dasein
[ ] is merely
an uninterrupted past tense [ein ununterbrochenes Gewesensein], a thing that
lives by denying and consuming itself, by opposing itself ” (“History,” 89; “Vom
Nutzen,” 245). “Life,” the term Nietzsche initially opposes to history, is itself
26 Journal of Modern Literature

therefore only a future past. Every present, even the radical “now” of human
activity, is part of an historical continuum, an uninterrupted “Gewesensein.”
Nietzsche thus begins his argument inside an apparently unsolvable dilemma.
Modern man must learn to live unhistorically, he claims, but true “unhis-
toricalness” is impossible in the self-conscious chronology of human existence
(“History,” 89).
Even within this double-bind, Nietzsche insists that there are ways for
“life” to gain victories over the suffocating “historical sense.” Previously humans
only brought “history” to “life” (to life’s detriment), but now—so Nietzsche—it
is time to bring life to history. Whereas historians claim that one needs to
understand history in order to comprehend the present, Nietzsche asserts that
one must first know the present before the past can become intelligible: “Only
from the highest power of the present can you interpret the past. [. . .] The past always
speaks with oracular voice. Only as master builders of the future, who under-
stand the present, will you comprehend it” (“History,” 118). More radically than
Eliot’s model poet, who is keenly aware of both his “place in (present) time”
and his own “pastness,” Nietzsche’s master builders understand the past only
because they are so firmly rooted in the here-and-now.
Nietzsche’s temporary solution, in which master builders confront the past
from the “highest power” of the present, does not, however, completely resolve
his historical impasse. As actors in the present, the master builders still remain
part of the very chain of history they are attempting to break. Because present
and past are joined in a continuum, even the most courageous of critical think-
ers—those who serve life by destroying history—are unable to smash a chain
in which they are links:
Men or ages that serve life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are
always dangerous and always endangered. For since we happen to be the prod-
ucts of earlier generations, we are also the products of their blunders, passions,
and misunderstandings, indeed, of their crimes; it is impossible to free ourselves
completely from this chain. (“History,” 103)

This image of a chain accurately illustrates Nietzsche’s temporal contradiction:

each link exists individually but always only within an interlocking series;
severing the chain is impossible without simultaneously destroying a unique
link.
Whereas Eliot seemed relatively comfortable with this conundrum (it
gives birth, after all, to the virtuosic poetic paradox of his final line), Nietzsche
remains perpetually dissatisfied with life’s inability to escape historical con-
tamination. Nietzsche extends this increasingly troublesome duality into the
final chapters of his essay, where he once again attempts to overcome the past
in the name of the present. Since history cannot simply be avoided or forgotten,
Nietzsche decides that the only way to conquer it is to turn it against itself:
T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problem of History 27

The origin of historical culture—its intrinsic and absolutely radical inconsistency

with the spirit of a “new age,” a modern consciousness—mustt itself in turn be
historically understood. And the problem of history mustt also be solved by history
itself; knowledge mustt apply the goad to knowledge. This triple mustt is the spiritual
imperative of the “new age,” provided that this age genuinely contains something
new, powerful, original, something that promises life. (“History,” 126)

In this, Nietzsche’s clearest description of a possible resolution of the contradic-

tion, history can only be overcome through history. Modernity, or the spirit of
a “new age,” is engendered through its opposite: through history, conquering
itself.
As Paul de Man notes in “Literary History and Literary Modernity,”
Nietzsche’s hope that a genuine modernity will issue from history is at best
a “gamble.”¹³ Nietzsche’s optimism rests, as does Eliot’s, on the conviction
that the past will be used productively (for Eliot, to create “the new (the really
new) work of art”) (“Tradition,” 50). Unlike Eliot, however, Nietzsche rigor-
ously questions the grounds of his own hopefulness. History’s life-negating
force, Nietzsche warns, is omnipresent; it contaminates all modern impulses,
no matter how genuine. As Nietzsche worries toward the end of his essay, his
own project might even suffer from the very historicism it denounces: “And
I would not deny that this essay itself, in its excessively critical spirit, in its
immature humanity, in its veering between irony and cynicism, from pride
to skepticism—evinces its modern character, its characteristic weakness of
personality” (“History,” 139). This self-consciousness exemplifies the dilemma
of Nietzsche’s modernism: the desire to be modern repeatedly reveals itself as
an historical desire. As de Man writes, Nietzsche’s work is most authentically
modern at precisely this point: where it “discovers the impossibility of being
modern.”¹⁴

II. WRITING AND DESTRUCTION: THE PASTNESS OF PRESENCE

De Man demonstrates how genuine literary modernity is aware of its own
destructive impulses, how the act of writing eradicates, self-consciously, a living
past. He uses the example of Baudelaire, who, at the end of “Le peintre de la vie
moderne,” proposes to describe a carriage, but instead describes only the process
of writing about a carriage. This carriage, which is the point of origin for the
writing, disappears as Baudelaire represents it. “Allegorized into nothingness,”
the carriage has only a “linguistic existence.”¹⁵ Baudelaire’s text literalizes, for
de Man, the problem of literary modernity: it generates the object (the carriage)
but only as something that has already disappeared, is already lost in writing.
Eliot similarly describes modern writing in his description of the already lost
“poetic embryo” in his later work “The Three Voices of Poetry” (1953):
28 Journal of Modern Literature

(The poet) has something germinating in him for which he must find words but
he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words; he cannot
identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the
right words in the right order. When you have the words for it, the “thing” for
which the words had to be found has disappeared, replaced by a poem.¹⁶

Reformulating Eliot’s statement in terms of the famous final sentence on

“history” from “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” we see that the poet’s
relation to history is not merely to monumental literary precursors, but also to
language itself as an historical process.¹⁷⁷ Language, Eliot claims, exists first as
non-language, as a germinating embryo—the “thing”—not yet expressed. By
naming the embryo and bringing it to life, language transforms the embryo
and, in so doing, obliterates its original form. Language, then, is for Eliot at
once generative and destructive. As Eliot proclaims elsewhere, the act of writ-
ing produces something “new,” but only in a certain sense: writing engenders
that which can only be stillborn.
As in Baudelaire, the “thing” that is brought to life is always killed in the
process. Re-presentation annihilates its object. As Maurice Blanchot writes in
“Literature and the Right to Death,” loss is intrinsic to utterance: “For me to
be able to say, ‘This woman’ I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality
away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the
being, but it gives it to me deprived of being.”¹⁸ Speaking brings memory into
the present, but only as a being bereft of being. When the speaker recalls “this
woman,” he loses her.¹⁹ Blanchot’s statement addresses the same dilemma con-
fronted by Baudelaire and Eliot. Blanchot’s “woman” is spoken and simultane-
ously destroyed, just as the earlier “carriage” and the “embryo” disintegrated
in the process of writing. The central paradox of literary modernity is thus
rooted in writing’s “ambivalence”: modernity creates and destroys its own his-
tory. In Walter Benjamin’s and, later, de Man’s terminology, authentic literary
modernity is allegorical; that is, it “signifies precisely the non-being of what it
represents [das
[ Nichtsein dessen, was es vorstelltt].”²⁰
Nietzsche’s text exemplifies this acute sense of writing as allegory, espe-
cially in its use of a series of mixed metaphors to describe the great people and
deeds of the past. Nietzsche begins by substituting the term “monumental” for
these people and their actions. Then, he immediately replaces this metaphor
with another, the “chain.” Before the end of this same sentence, the chain is
superseded as well, and we see our great predecessors as a “range of human
mountain peaks” (“History,” 95). Finally, these human mountain peaks prove
to be no more enduring than the chains and monuments they once displaced.
Nietzsche’s last metaphor for the human past is an ocean with a few islands that
illustrate his theory of history as an uninterrupted loss: “Large portions of [the
past] are neglected, despised, and washed away on the grey, monotonous tide
T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problem of History 29

of oblivion, out of which a few richly embellished facts emerge like islands.”
History is always a history of misrepresentation and of mourning. The past is
either forgotten, or, if it is remembered, it is “damaged” in the process (98).
Nietzsche’s essay demonstrates as much. He destroys the great men of the past
by re-calling them as metaphors: monuments, chains, mountain peaks, islands.
Nietzsche’s text thus stages the very problem of human history it describes: it
“liv[es]” by “denying” and “consuming” itself; it takes form by transforming,
allegorically, into modern ruins (89).

III. ELIOT’S MIXED METAPHORS: OF MONUMENTS, ACIDS, AND CANONS

Contemporary critics of Eliot’s “Tradition” generally view the essay as cultur-
ally reactionary. Indeed, even in the light of my more progressive reading, one
could argue that—despite the “modernity” of “Tradition’s” final sentence—the
essay attempts, ultimately, to recoup all forms of historical loss. In contrast
with Nietzsche’s eroded mountain peaks, Eliot’s “monuments” seem to remain
firm and solid, enduring throughout his text and throughout history. As Eliot
writes, these monuments simply re-adjust from time to time in order to make
room for newcomers.²¹ The resultant imagery is, as one critic points out, pre-
posterous: “The great and sturdy existing monuments [. . .] suddenly start
shuffling and nudging each other about so as to accommodate the new work.”²²
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” viewed from this perspective, con-
structs history not in terms of a Nietzschean corrosion, but rather as an endless
accumulation. Eliot’s monuments appear to deny their precarious allegorical
status. Unlike Nietzsche’s eroded human mountain peaks, Eliot’s monuments
neither crack nor are worn away; his system welcomes new monuments while
discharging none of the old. Tradition, Eliot writes, is part of a “development
which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shake-
speare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen”
(SW
W 51). In Georges Bataille’s terms, Eliot’s “economy” accumulates without
any “expenditure.”²³
But Eliot’s metaphor of accumulation is itself always caught up, perhaps
unconsciously, in an allegorical structure of loss. As Eliot already acknowl-
edged, the “poetic embryo” necessarily disappears the moment it is expressed.
What is more, the poet himself, the producer of these metaphors, recedes
into what Eliot calls “impersonality”: engaging in “continual self-sacrifice”
and a “continual extinction of personality” every time he writes (“Tradition,”
53). Even the poet’s “mind”—which, unlike his personality, should remain
“unchanged” over time—is not completely stable. Eliot describes this “mind”
in post-humanist terms reminiscent of Foucault’s “author-function”: it is a
“medium” in which “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and
unexpected ways” (56). Reacting to historical-material stimuli, this medium
30 Journal of Modern Literature

loses much of its autonomy and even becomes machine-like (recalling Eliot’s
earlier reference to “machinery”) (52). What is more, Eliot reconfigures this
“mind” three times in his essay, mixing metaphors in a style reminiscent of
Nietzsche. The poet’s mind is a “receptacle,” a suitable site for collecting “feel-
ings,” “phrases,” and “images” (55). Just before this, it is, in quick succes-
sion, a catalytic “shred of platinum” and then a stomach-like “digest[er]” (54).
Like Nietzsche’s mountains and islands, Eliot’s metaphorical receptacles and
platinum-shreds seem to feed off each other, thus hinting at a lack of sturdi-
ness in Eliot’s central image. The message of this allegorical substitution is
similar to Nietzsche’s: all linguistic works, even poetic “monuments,” “digest”
(Eliot) or “consume” (Nietzsche, sich verzehren) themselves (“History,” 89;
“Vom Nutzen,” 245).
Because Eliot accords special attention to the metaphor of the “shred of
platinum,” mentioning it at the end of section I and the beginning of section
II, it deserves our further attention. The mind of the poet, he argues, is like a
shred of platinum that, when introduced into a chamber containing oxygen
and sulfur dioxide, catalyzes sulfurous acid. The oxygen and sulfur dioxide,
in Eliot’s model, are the “passions” that make up the “material” of poetry. The
sulfurous acid, more important, is the work of art (“Tradition,” 54). Eliot’s
curious metaphorical slippage—the work of art changes from a “monument” at
the beginning of his essay to sulfurous acid here—suggests a further rhetorical
instability within Eliot’s text. The “monument” proves to be a shaky vehicle,
replaceable by an acid, and the acid that Eliot chooses (sulfurous) is, like Eliot’s
metaphors, (chemically) “unstable.” What is more, although this acid does not
have the corrosive qualities of its sulfuric counterpart, it is a transformative
“reducing agent” capable of altering other chemical structures.²⁴⁴ Thus, this new
vehicle does more than just figuratively endanger Eliot’s old vehicle (“monu-
ments”). Although not as brutally as the wrecking balls threatening Wren’s
churches in Eliot’s London (a reality perhaps explaining his post-1916 “reac-
tive” tone), Eliot’s sulfurous acid initiates a process that transforms objects over
time. Moreover, acid is traditionally the greatest enemy of the paper on which
Eliot’s great poetic monuments are stored. “Acid,” then, becomes more that just a
metaphor for Eliot’s monumental work of art. It functions within this otherwise
“acid-free” essay as a (perhaps unconscious) figure of modern poetry’s destructive
genesis: as the rhetorical force threatening all monumental programs. In this
acidic spirit, we might rephrase the opening sentence of Eliot’s 1916 Nietzsche
review, which reads, “[Nietzsche’s] philosophy evaporates when detached from
its literary qualities,”²⁵ to: “Nietzsche’s (and Eliot’s) philosophies materialize and
evaporatee precisely because off their literary (rhetorical) qualities.”
With such rhetorical slippage in mind, what conclusions can we draw about
the stability of Eliot’s model of a monumental literary history? Do Eliot’s shift-
ing metaphors ultimately, like Nietzsche’s, undermine his theory of a literary
T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problem of History 31

history without loss? Eliot’s rhetoric, I maintain, subverts his own desire for a
purely accumulative history, presenting us instead with a process of allegorical
erosion similar to Nietzsche’s—even if Eliot’s strategy is less sustained and less
conscious. Eliot’s monuments are, like Wren’s churches, in danger of destruc-
tion—whether he likes it or not. Eliot’s awareness of this surfaces unpredict-
ably, through mixed metaphors. To paraphrase Slavoj Žižek’s description of the
Freudian unconscious: there are things Eliot knows that he does not know he
knows.²⁶ When we read Eliot’s “Tradition” as I suggest, as an intertext with
Nietzsche’s discourse on history, it becomes much more than a conservative
call-to-arms. It becomes something provocatively modern. Eliot’s attempt
to “conserve” literary history in the name of innovation results, through the
figuring of that innovation, in the corrosion of tradition.
“Tradition’s” dialectical auto-unraveling offers us, in conclusion, a new
way of viewing the “reactive” and “progressive” entrenchments on either side of
our canon debates since the 1980s. Conservative desires to preserve the canon,
voiced already in 1987 by Allan Bloom, reveal themselves to be mass denials.
Disavowing the destruction inherent in literary creation—the present’s power
over the past—they refuse to mourn literary history. Progressive attempts to
infinitely supplement “major” texts with “minor” texts, on the other hand,
expose themselves as similarly melancholic programs of endless accumulation.²⁷
Literary history, Nietzsche teaches us, is and always has been structured as
loss: as a series of additions but also of subtractions. Nietzsche’s lesson—which
informs Eliot’s Nietzschean essay—is that every authentic modern destruction
must be informed by an historical sense. In other words, we need to continue
to re-read our monumental past, for only by doing so can we allow for—even
insure—its destruction.

Notes
1. The Letters of T.S. Eliot, vol. 1 (1898–1922), ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1988),
120 (18 November 1915).
2. Linda Leavell, “Nietzsche’s Theory of Tragedy in the Plays of T.S. Eliot,” Twentieth Century
Literaturee 31 (Spring 1985): 111–126.
3. For the influence of Die Geburt der Tragödie’s “voice” on The Waste Land, d see Michael Beehler,
“Eliot, Burglary, and Musical Order,” Bucknell Review 30 (1987): 117–29 (esp. 118). For more on Die
Geburt der Tragödie’s influence on Eliot (including Eliot’s use of “Oed’ und leer das Meer” from Tristan)
see F. N. Lees’ “T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche,” Notes & Queriess 209 (1964): 386–87 and Elmar Schenkel’s
“Dionysus and the Word: The Nietzschean Context of American Poetry (Cummings, Eliot, Stevens),”
in Nietzsche in American Literature and Thought, ed. Manfred Pütz (Columbia, SC: Camden House,
1995), 179–98.
4. Anti-Nietzsche sentiment in World War I England was so strong that Hart Crane deemed it
necessary in 1919 to come finally to Nietzsche’s defense: “Nietzsche, Zeppelins, and poisoned-gas go
ill together” (quoted in Schenkel, “Dionysus and the Word,” 187).
32 Journal of Modern Literature

5. T. S. Eliot, “Review of Wolf ’s The Philosophy of Nietzsche,” International Journal of Ethics 26 (1916):
426–27 (here, 427).
6. The critic who comes closest to making this connection between Eliot’s and Nietzsche’s concep-
tions of literary production is J. P. Riquelme. In his Harmony of Dissonances: T. S. Eliot, Romanticism,
and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), Riquelme mentions Nietzsche,
and he even compares, as I do in this essay, Eliot’s project of cultural criticism to Paul de Man’s Nietzs-
chean “Literary History and Literary Modernity” (25–44). But Riquelme misses the opportunity,
suggested by de Man’s dependence on Nietzsche, to develop fully the connection between Eliot and
Nietzsche—especially the two writers’ similarly dialectical treatment of originality and tradition.
7. For more on this and other modern paradoxes, see Antoine Compagnon, Les cinq paradoxes de la
é Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1990.
modernité,
8. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
(London: Methuen & Co, 1969 [1920]), 50. Hereafter cited in the text as “Tradition.”
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, “History in the Service and Disservice of Life,” trans. Gary Brown, in
Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 99.
Hereafter cited in the text as “History.” I have adjusted this translation slightly throughout when nec-
essary, sometimes referring to the earlier translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Nietzsche, Untimely Medi-
tationss [New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983]). I also refer to the original
“Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben,” in Nietzsche-Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe,
3 Abt., 1. Band (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 239–330 (cited in the text as “Vom Nutzen”).
10. See Eliot’s 18 November 1915 letter to his mother, cited in note 1.
11. “In Kafka and His Precursors,” Borges writes: “The fact is that every writer creates his own precur-
sors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” ( Jorge Luis Borges,
Labyrinthss [New York: New Directions, 1962], 201).
12. Riquelme, Harmony of Dissonances, 30–31. Riquelme also argues that other aspects of this sentence
render it “harmonic” (thus the title of his book): “the sense of patterning [. . .] conveys an impression
of logically coherent, concordant relations” (30).
13. Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2ⁿd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983),
151.
14. de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 144.
15. de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 160. The Baudelaire text reads: “Regardless
of attitude and position, regardless of the speed at which it is launched, a carriage, like a ship, receives
from its motion a mysteriously complex graceful air, very hard to capture in short-hand (trés dificile
r The pleasure that the artist’s eye derives from it is drawn, or so it seems, from the
à sténographier).
sequence of geometrical figures that this already so complicated object engenders successively and
swiftly in space” (Charles Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” in l’Art romantique, Oeuvres
V ed. F. F. Gautier [Paris, 1923], 259; cited in de Man, 160).
completes IV,
16. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poetss (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957), 106.
17. I follow here Riquelme, who compares this section of “The Th ree Voices of Poetry” with “Tradi-
tion,” concluding that, for Eliot, “[language] is both past and present, living and dead” (Harmony of
Dissonances, 33; for a fuller discussion, see 32–34).
18. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis
(New York: Station Hill, 1981), 42.
19. According to Klaus Theweleit’s deft reinterpretation of the Orpheus myth, Blanchot’s choice of the
object to be annihilated and deprived of flesh and blood (“this woman”) is not arbitrary. For Theweleit,
“it is not a sign of pure love that Orpheus turns round on the steps leading out of Hades to gaze fully
T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problem of History 33

into the eyes of his wife,” rather Orpheus needs her to die in order to mourn her and become the
elegiac lyric poet par excellence. Rephrasing Blanchot through Theweleit, Blanchot’s male poet gets
“being” when he sacrifices “woman” (Klaus Theweleit, “The Politics of Orpheus between Women,
Hades, Political Power and the Media: Some Thoughts on the Configuration of the European Artist,
Starting with the Figure of Gottfried Benn or: What Happens to Eurydice?” New German Critique
36 [Fall 1985]: 133–56 [here, 155]). For an expanded version, see Theweleit’s Buch der Könige, Vol. 1,
Orpheus (und) Eurydikee (Frankfurt a. M.: Stroemfeld, 1988), 16–107 (esp. 105).
20. Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiede-
mann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), Vol. I.1, 406; cf. de Man,
“Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight, 35. For more on allegory
in Benjamin and de Man, see Michael Kahl, “Der Begriff der Allegorie in Benjamins Trauerspielbuch
und im Werk Paul de Mans,” in Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem van Reijen (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1992), 292–317, and Leonhard Fuest, “Die traurige Wissenschaft: Eine Reflexion an den
Abgründen der modernen Philologie,” www.forumkulturgeschichte.dee 1 (2004).
21. “For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever
so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are
readjusted” (“Tradition,” 50).
22. Richard Shusterman, T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988), 159.
23. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939,
trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–29. Bataille further
develops his concept of “expenditure” (in relation to “restricted” and “general” economies) in La part
mauditee (1967) (Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Zone Books,
1989]).
24. The Facts on File: Dictionary of Chemistry, ed. John Daintith (New York and Aylesbury, UK: Market
House Books, 1999), 237.
25. Eliot, “Review of Wolf ’s The Philosophy of Nietzsche,” 426.
26. Slavoj Žižek, “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib,” In These Times,
21 May 2004.
27. For criticisms of such programs of accumulation, see the articles by Susan Stewart and Sara Suleri
in the 1993 issue of Profession devoted to canonicity (Susan Stewart, “The State of Cultural Theory
and the Future of Literary Form” [12–15], and Sara Suleri, “Multiculturalism and Its Discontents”
[16–17], both in Profession ‘93 [New York: The Modern Language Association, 1993]).