ABSTRACT
In Sweeney Agonistes , T. S. Eliot achieves a radical form of cultural critique through a complex juxtaposition of high and low culture, elegance and violence, classicism and vulgarity. The drum-saturated jungle sound that Eliot wants to recover in such texts as Sweeney Agonistes emerges directly from the nostalgic Afro-centrism of so-called race music in the Harlem Renaissance. Sweeney Agonistes does not abandon meaning but tests meaning's possibility. Rhythm signals a kind of critique, a jarring of habit or stable form and a forced recognition of the unstable primeval mess on which all acts of meaning rest. The primeval, rhythmic characteristic that Eliot takes over from jazz, its vital commonality, its universal pulse, is precisely that which Theodor Adorno identifies with mass culture, with propaganda and, finally, with a pervasive, hegemonic "musical dictatorship." Jazz presents a facade of liberation (of "getting into trouble and out again"), while insidiously reinforcing conformity, "an emphatic street-drill rhythm".
