Came upon this on the train this morning.
In the Puritan morality that I remember, it was tacitly assumed that if one was thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating social conventions, one ought to have a happy and “successful” life. Failure was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the decent man need have no nightmares. It is now rather more common to assume that all individual misery is the fault of “society”, and is remediable by alterations from without. Fundamentally the two philosophies, however different they may appear in operation, are the same. It seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.
T. S. Eliot’s introduction to the second edition of Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood.
Amen! This even extends to canine society.
That last sentence needs a massive amount of explanation before this quotation makes any sense. Unless he’s seriously trying to collapse left and right wing under such a banal point as “well, we all die anyway”?
Guess so. Well, I’d say he’s addressing the inadequacy of certain explanatory systems (I’d say religion vs social science rather than right vs left, though obv there would be overlap on those categories in practice) to deal with the fact that all people – rich, poor, dumb, clever, needy, spoiled, perceived-deserving and perceived-undeserving – feel pain. I wouldn’t say the universality of suffering (or even death) is banal, certainly not in a literary context. It’s a massive conundrum and one storytellers have wrestled with at length since there has been literature.
Eliot goes on: “To regard this group of people [the characters of the novel] as a horrid sideshow of freaks is not only to miss the point, but to confirm our wills and harden our hearts in an inveterate sin of pride.”
It’s rather morose and comes from dated positions – naturally, as it’s Eliot writing nearly 80 years ago – but in essence it’s an urge to identify. Or that’s how I read it.
The problem though is that the fact that suffering is universal does not alter the fact that the way in which that suffering manifests itself, and the causes behind it, vary dramatically from one individual to another. That’s where those two philosophies step in and gain explanatory power. You’re right though that it’s nice that he’s pleading for empathy over our different explanatory philosophies. It just feels like the last sentence comes across as a non sequiteur. I do feel that psychoanalytic theory does much more to elucidate the relationship between “created objects” and universal suffering – this, to me, just sounds like a 1920s Everybody Hurts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that
Absolutely they do (step in, that is), and didn’t mean for a sec that they lack explanatory power. But if your goal is not to explain but to invite contemplation and fellow-feeling – as you say there’s nothing wrong with that, and I’d argue there is a lot right with it as part of a balanced cultural diet, and I’d quote that Gramsci bit about the interplay of the emotional and political life Billy Bragg put on an album sleeve if I could remember it – non-sequiteurs aren’t a bad thing. In fact I positively demand them from my poets.