It is bad enough that bus stations will distribute schedules with a paragraph or two on "How to ride the bus."; or that the self-enclosed envelopes of fund appeal letters will carry a message explaining that the post office will not mail a letter that doesn't have a stamp affixed to it. I have used bathrooms in Youth Hostels which post a message above the roll of toilet paper: Use fewer sheets. Save a tree! Nor will I easily forget the notices on the trash cans on Dublin's streets. To paraphrase: Litter is disgusting. So are the people who make it !
Likewise it is possible that a novelist or author could include a section in the preface of his narrative entitled : "How to read a book.", or even "How to read my book!", but it would be as outrageous as it is nonsensical.
It is with this perspective in mind that I assume a critical attitude towards the ubiquitous technique of introducing obscure, erudite and unattributed phrases from dozens of writers, past and present, often in the original languages and left untranslated, by the 3 paradigmatic writers of so-called "modernism" in English: James Joyce, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot. I do not deny, indeed I enthusiastically endorse the dictum that artifice, pretense and posturing lie at the heart of all literary activity; with the proviso that one must allow the reader the same basic right and degree of leeway.
One has a good idea of where such writers pick up bad habits like these. I would surmise that all of them passed through in schools of secondary and higher education where the instructors in English composition gave the highest marks to students who peppered their weekly essays with classical allusions and learned quotations from Latin, Greek, Gaelic, Chinese, Provencal, what have you.
Still, if I, as a reader, come across a string of Chinese characters in a poem by Ezra Pound, or a phrase in Finnish in a work of James Joyce, or a Sanscrit word in TS Eliot, I claim the right to deal with this phenomenon in one of four ways:
Joyce, Pound and Eliot all being great writers must have understood that all 4 of these reactions are equally valid. If not, well, they were woefully misguided by their educators.(That all of them are great writers I readily concede, not because someone told me so but because I have read them.)
However I also entertain another very strong objection to the employment of this technique. You see, it has been claimed by some, that what these authors are doing by such devices is part of a grand project to "rescue civilization" from the devastation of World War I; that TS Eliot with his "heaps of broken images" , "shored up against his ruin" , is redeeming or at least gathering up the pieces of the "botched civilization" so eloquently invoked by Ezra Pound; that, as Joyce gazes inyo the "cracked looking-glass of Irish art" he is forging, from the great hoard of the world's mythologies, visions that will unify the shattered world-mind.
This being the case - and I am not disrespectful of the enormous ambition driving this goal, nor am I unwilling to acknowledge its occasional successes - I have to wonder why these authors consistently ignored a great, immensely important and vast repository of writings that has powerfully shaped everything around us, yet are far more obscure to even the educated reader than quotations in the original languages from Wagner, Li Po, Sappho and others. I am speaking of the fundamental texts and treatises of science, starting with Euclid, Hippocrates and Archimedes in the Ancient World, Al-Khwarismi and Omar Khayyam in the 11th century, then Copernicus in the 16th, and accumulating exponentially with Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leeuwenhoek, Huyghens, Lavoisier, Mendel, Euler, Carnot, Maxwell, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Poincare, Lyell, Hutton, Boole, Lord Kelvin, Lobatchevsky .... all of which were written before Joyce, Pound and Eliot set about plundering the literary classics.
Certainly the brilliant collage techniques of Eliot and Pound could have accommodated the insertion of a page or two of equations, say from Poincaré's Celestial Mechanics, or the meticulous chemistry records of Lavoisier. Indeed, Eliot might have appreciated - for collage purposes - the association of Lavoisier with Joseph Priestley who, in addition to isolating oxygen, founded the English version of Unitarianism. Talk about connections: T. S. Eliot's grandfather was William Greenleaf Eliot, the midwestern conservative Unitarian minister established the First Unitarian church in Saint Louis!
Why not a phrase or paragraph from Carnot's Treatise on Heat, or Galois' 60 page memoir written just before his death, that continues to set the world of mathematics on fire? Why did these "hunters and gatherers" not hunt and gather their booty from the great scientific classics, as much in danger of perishing in the breakdown of civilization, as their counterparts in world literature? Recall that only a single copy of the De Rerum Naturum of Lucretius, survived the break-up of the Roman Empire! Yet this treatise was crucial in Dalton's restoration of the atomic hypothesis;(which of course led to the atomic bomb and other even more potent metaphors of the wreckage of civilization...)
Why did the modernist writers shy away from this huge body of literature of boundless relevance and limitless potential benefit to mankind? If they were on the lookout for obscurity, they could not have found it in a better place! Even today the general reading public is so mystified by mathematics that , so it is claimed. a single equation in a popularizer will reduce its readership by 50 %! Yet it is the works of science that have created the modern world, in all its splendour and horror. Furthermore they are sometimes filled with profound wisdom.
One can only regret that Eliot and company did not lift a few phrases from the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae of Gauss, or the treatises on non-Euclidean geometry by Lobatchevsky (in Russian, without attribution of course) and Bolyai, or the textbooks of George Boole. It is because these authors central to the modernist tradition abdicated their clear responsibility, that English majors, teachers and scholars still consider it quite respectable to do the same. Are not the sciences they so smugly dismiss as much a part of the "broken images" of the "botched civilization" that Pound and Eliot were dedicated to saving, as Petronius or Dante? Imagine how even a few pages out of the Principia Mathematica could enliven Mr. Appollinax!
Of course one is well aware that their high school and college professors would never have given them high marks for quoting from Gauss or William Harvey, Ostwald or Hadamard's proof of the Prime Number Theorem! In fact they wouldn't have had the least idea of where these things came from!
By a consistent policy of shunning the sciences while engaged in their search for obscurity, these paradigms of modernism guaranteed that our civilization will continue to become more and more fragmented and alienated, that is to say, the opposite result from what they were trying to accomplish.
Or is it just because Dante, Virgil and obscure writers of modern and medieval French poetry, were easier for them to plunder, thereby throwing the burden of researching the sources onto their readers? Certainly they felt no pressing desire to attempt to understand even a few of the great classics of science, that is to say, taking part of the burden onto themselves....