“두 세계 사이에” : 미들튼 머리와 T S 엘리엇의 모더니티 논쟁

“Between Two Worlds” : J Middleton Murry and T S Eliot on Modernity

This essay reads as the critical discourse of modernity the interactions between John Middleton Murry and T S Eliot in the literary journals of the Adelphi and the Criterion in the 1920s, through which approach their debate proves to be no other than diametrically different versions of modernity recognition, and then modernity project, between two worlds. Their controversies can be sorted out into two groups by topics and roughly in time sequence: in the first round of the debate, they form their own different conceptions of classicism and romanticism with the help of the other’s arguments, which serves as the frames of reference for the next one; now in the second, exploring the human soul under modernity, they seek for the possibility of a synthesis between romantic intuition and classical intelligence. Over this debate, the British empiricist Murry identifies romanticism with modernity itself dating back to the Renaissance, and then presents as his project of modernity a fuller realisation of romanticism of his own idiosyncratic understanding. Which is to say a new synthesis of intuition and intelligence into enlightened reason in allusion to the mediaeval Thomist synthesis of reason and faith. On the other hand, the Euro-centric rationalist Eliot expects much of classical intelligence for romanticism to be overcome, and for classical ideals to be restored or, more precisely, for the unified sensibility to be regained and for the integrated intelligence to be revived, which means he is in resolute and unshakable pursuit of a project of modernity. In the course of their eight-year-long interactions, it transpires, Murry elaborates on the recognition of modernity rather than on its project, and Eliot does the other way round. In other words, both of them fail to represent their contemporary stage of ever-deepening modernity fully enough in their discourse of modernity. Theirs remain as unfinished projects of modernity.