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B-A,, Simon Praser University

THESIS SUBH1S"WD IN PARTIAL FULFILLHEW!' OF

THE REQUIREWE#PS FOR THE DEGREE OF

XASTRR OF ARTS

in the Department of

Bnglish

@Glenn Hurray Isaak

Sirtron Frasez University

November, 1991

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APPROVAL

NAME Gfenn Murray Isaak

IEGREE Master of Arts IEngfish)

TITLE OFTHESIS The Liminal Text T S Eliot's Evolving Poetics and The Pa,-&land

Examining Ccrmmittee-

rhair, Chin Banerjee

---

Assistant Professor of English

David Stouck Professor of English

r - 8

Peter Quartermain External Examiner

Professor of English University of British Columbia

December 2, 1991 Date Approved;

. * &I

PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE

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w i thou t my w r i t t e n permission.

Author: -

,y(s i gna tu re )

Abstract

This thesis undertakes to re-examine T . S . Eliot's early

prose and letters in an effort to create a context in which

to read his poetry- It is shown that critics, generally,

have overlooked this important wterial, but that this

material reveals Eliot's struggle to articulate a poetics of

what might be called liminality--occupying the threshold at

which two or more things join without merging and becoming

indistinct,

This poetics is shorn to grow out of Eliot's own view

of the individual human subject as liminal: an intersection

of social winfluencesR and pre-logical ni13apulsesn in

constant flux. Eliot's conception of art as a collaboration

between the audience and the creator, between tradition and

the individual talent is also demonstrated, The work of art

is shown to occupy a threshold wbich conflates the real and

the ideal, thus creating a unique aesthetic experience.

From within this context, a reading of The Waste Land

is attempted, This reading argues that the self-conscious

poetics of liainality and collaboration--both substantive

and foamal--are articulated in poetic form in The Haste

L a d . Arsd, trsing tbfs poetics, the poem gives form to the

ertrerslely complex co-ination of "odds and ends, in constant

flux, manipulated by desire and fearR which defines Eliot's

conception of the Hodern mind in particular, but also of any

given state of mind in general,

iii

For Spencer and Shannon

,,,any state of mind is extrenely complex, and chiefly composed of udds and ends in constant flux manipulated by

des3re and fear. When, therefore, we find a poet who neither suppresses nor falsifies, and who expresses complicated

states of mind, we give him welcome.

--T.S. Eliot (on John Donne)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the resourceful, efficient, and

personable staff in the Inter-Library Loans Division of the

W.A-C Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University, without

whose assistance this thesis would have been impossible. I

also wish to thank the staff in the Contesporary Literature

Collection in the W-A- C, Bennett Library for their expert

advice and assistance.

Thank-you, also, to Professor Kathy nezei for

assistance in both academic and practical matters, to

Pxofessor David Stouck for initially steering me fn the

direction of this thesis, and to Professor Ton Grieve who

snqgested not only the plan, but a good deal of the

incidentals of this thesis.

Chapter 1

The Facts in the Case of Ur- Eliot:

Context, Early Critics, Early C~iticism

When I first read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land I found it to

be at once an irritating parade of pretentions and a

meaningless babble of gibberish. It remains for m e one of

the most incoherent and incongruous poems in the language.

There seems to be no context; to account for its ludicrous

juxtapositions. Stick-fiqure marionettes seem to perform a

3erky song and dance at the instiqation of some -drunken

helotm= puppeteer, It is as though a "jumble of stage

proper tie^,^^ and two-dimensional characters were let loose

on a dreamscape that makes Alice in Wonderland seem banal

and predictable- But can such a monstrosity be nightmarish,

as it is so often depicted, or is it merely ridiculous?

The mste Land seers to toy with the very idea of

context. To transform the voices of drunken bar patrons into

the voice of Ophelia sets up problems of context which no

amount of detached scholarship can thoroughly explain." A

1- In the November 1317 number c ~ f The E g o ~ s t E z r a F-'cctnd ref tit^^ a Hr. Waitgh's .judgement c ~ f E l iclt as a "di-urikerr he1 at. " 2, T. S. E l iot , " T h e Educat ion o f T a s t e , " A t h e n a e u m f J u n ~ &>7, 1 9 5 9 ) : 520-1, 52f-J.

3. T.S. E l i o t , The U a s t e Land in 7.5- E l i o t : C~ilected Poems, 1409-2 962, CNew Y o r k: Harcour t Brace J r ~ v a n o v i c h , 1363, 19715:53-76, 55, l i n e s 71-2. A l l subsequent references to t h i s poem w i l l be tcs t h i s e d i t i o n . L i n e numbers w i l l t~ given p a r e n t h e t i c a l 1 y i n t h e t e x t .

certafn excess always prevails. Do we, for instance, see

this scene as a serious condemnation of the bar patrons, or

do we feel that they have been elevated by their

association, more sinned against than sinning? Or, do we

feel that Ophelia9s terrible sadness is made light of? Who,

or what, functions as the wHappletR in this scene? What

context applies? The aNotesu to which I turned so often on

first reading the poem remain completely silent on this

issue, They frustrate and undermine, rather than provide,

context. Such notes as the one where Eliot tells us that the

*dead sound on the final stroke of ninea(63) is "a

phenomenon which I have often noticedu4 do not help as with

context at afl. How fa such an observation even vaguely

zelevant or important? Such categories as irportant and

trivial, central and peripheral, relevant and irrelevant,

even sacred and profane, lose their meaning.

In "What the Thunder Saida a number of questions seem

to get asked, except that there are no question marks.

What is that sound high in the air nnrmz of mternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stambling in cracked earth Qfnged by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mantains Cracks and reforw an8 barsts in the violet a S r Falling towers Jerasaler A t h e n s Alexandria Vienna London IFareal(357-7771

4. "Nodes an The Waste Land," 71. Inote to line L8j. Subsequent references to the notes will be designated "notes" r . Page numbers will be given parenthetically in the text.

Sentences begin with interoqatFves but the questions never

get asked. And the apparent placement of this scene, t h e

"where* is so protean as to be aunreal.m The real question,

which never gets asked, fs -whya?

The lotes also provide ns with snch chireras of context

as extens ive quotatrans from Wid--in the original Latin--

for aanthropologicaf interestw fnWotes," 7 2 - 3 ) . Or, they

provide us with such purposeless, yet detailed contextuaf

information as =the currants were quoted at a price *cost

insurance and freight to London*; and the Bill of Lading,

etc-, were to be handed to the buyer upon payrent of the

sight draftRfmlotes,= 7 2 ) . How does this informtion help us

w i t h the =demtic Rencba invitation to a %seekend. at the

?&&ropolew? And, despite providfng such detailed and

reaaingless informtfon in aorre spots, t b s lotes provide no

wcontextm at a l l for such lines as "1 think we are in rats'

alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones." The LSotes t e l l

as that Tiresias is *a mere -11 almost everyone

im the paer is a spectator, or a relayer of inforratfon,

which is w s t l y goss ip , rurour, and myth.

Bupfte a c-lete -cnc=e of riarzatfve tissoe, t h e

csnsfsts aflrnst estlrely ei saxrated btts radosfy

arramged. The xesult of all this layering of mediations--the

aarratiom, the mates, the fortme telling, the literary

allmsioas--is to ensettle the reading process itself, Zhe

werbaf , sluface of the text is sach dense a d anpredictable

texrain that the reader becomes acutely conscious of the act

of reading itself, The p o e m is unmistakably a reading

experfence which ansettles and strips away layers of

Witnat ion , both in reading and wexperiencing." Hat even

the unexpected is allowed to hcom predictable. For all

that f t is a profonndly mediated poem, it will nevertheless

became abruptly and i i a t e l y raw, the twitching, bare

aezve-end suddenly exposed, addressfng us directly, sayir,~,

[Come in nnder the shadow of this red rock), A d f wf3tl show you something different from either Xour shadow at wrniag striding behind you Or yoar shadow at evenimg rising to meet you f will show you feaz in a handful of dust.(26-30)

Explectatians are continnally thnarted- The poem fiddles

whisper msic--which continually creeps by us--and seems

abont to aglow into wardsa but then becomes savagely still,

so that the children, for instance, who are evoked with such

w~t~flogaial beautp as they stand in the choir loft, axe

lllrade to sing gibberish:

T b camtext shifts so rapidly aad anexpectedly that it

dmmlvts into a sacccssion of individual bits oZ verbiage

deouiU of contexts, iilbat is waatinq 3is sore larger context

referring to the face that the words used are the W G Y ~ S of another, earlker poet= Verlaine.

in which to place these w n y underminings of the very idea

of context itself, a context in which the reversals,

contradictions and irregularities can be located, and

thereby grounded, and given ~aeaninq.

Context is also important, both to Eliot, and to a

study of Eliot, because, as he observed in wThe Three

Pro~incialities,~

every literature has two sides; it has that which is essential to it as literature, which can be appreciated by anyone with adequate knowledge of the language, and on the other hand it has that which can only be enjoyed by a particular group of people inhabiting a particular portfon of the earthe

It is not so much the suggestion that one of these contexts

is more profitable than the other that makes this statement

provocative, as the acknowledgment that there are different

contexts, and that it is important to keep context in mind.

Bliot clearly modifies and qualifies the Hodernists'(or at

least the modernist critics') exclusive focus on the text.

me mste Land, see= to merge these "two sidesw of context

to which Blkot refers: many of its references are specific

to a pirrticnlar time and place and yet they are essential to

it as literature; it requires adequate knowledge of a nu-er

of languages, Bat that knowledge fails to unlock the poem.

The terms universal and permanent, which Eliot suggested

6. "The Three Provincialities," T y r o , r1322): 1 1 - 1 3 , 11.

elsewhere w e r e relative terms lose their meaning,

The context continues to elude, but the early criticism

reveals Eliot's o m concern with context, and as such offers

a possible source for the absent one. Since the essay in

which these words appear was published by Eliot in the same

year as The Waste Land, it seems reasonable that e

concerns it raises formed part of the mind-set from which

the poem was mitten, and might help to restore some of the

context which time and distance has obscured.

In examining that early criticism we find that Eliot

offers his view about how literature should be taught and

studied, In an assay entitled "The Education of Taste,"

Eliot succinctly expresses his opinion about the best way to

teach, study, or discuss literature: "point to good

literature and then be sifent," he says. Rather than

menunciatern easy generalities, the instructor, or critic, or

literary historian can and should

select and present the necessary and interestfng facts (only he must be quite positive as to what is a fact, a hard one), and then he can indicate what work is good, and what is good in a different way. a

As EZiot phrased it elsewhere, =there is no such thing as

the fnterpnetatLorr of poetry; poetry can only be

7 , "John Donne, " The Hation and The Athenaeum (June 26, 1923): 332-3, 332. 8- "The Education uf Taste, " A t h e n a e u ~ i3une 27, l9l9j ~520- 1, 520.

tran~mitted.~" This leaves the critic, the instructor, and

the literary historian with the job of simply observing and

presenting the relevant facts. Facts provide the context in

which the student, the audience and the reader can

profitably read the literature, Facts do not presume to

supply the profits of literary study; facts provide a

context in which the literature can be profitably studied.

The early essays constitute precisely such a body of

facts, which help establish the context in which Eliot's own

poetry was written, And in fact, Eliot again stresses the

importance of context in "The Education of Taste," Written

as a review of J.W, Cunliffe's Bnglish Literature During the

Last Half-Century, "The Education of Tastew becomes a

critique of the standard text-book style, and of the

pedagogical method Cunliffe demonstrates. Eliot's x j o r

abjections are not to the book's proposed project of

providing a context in which the literature to be discussed

can be appreciated, but rather to its failure to accomplish

that stated objective, According to Eliot, the "backgroundw

Cnnliffe provides, and which he declares is crucial to

%ystemtic study," is a "jumble of stage properties,= and

"a circus procession," because Cunliffe does not =bother his

headff with the mlabour of very great pains and infinite

critical subtletyu required to provide an adequate

background.

3- "The Duchess af Ma1 f i at t h e t y r ic: and Poetic Drama, " A r t and L e t t e ~ s , i i i . 1 {Winter 1313/1420? 3G-34, 37.

It is a curious fact of Eliot criticism, however, that

very few critics have bothered their heads with the very

great labour of uncovering Eliot's own background, and

pointfnq to the relevant facts as a way of better

understanding the poetry, These early statements clearly

show that the picture of Bliot which has been filtered

through received opinion is overly narrow and reductive; and

hence distorted,fo When all the relevant facts are taken

into account, a picture of Eliot begins to emerge which is

complex, at tiaes unexpected, and suggestive of new

possibilities in reading his poetry. What becomes clear is

that Ezra Pound's dubbing of BP3ot as ffPossuara has been

"preserved in ambers even thouqh Pound himself meant that

Eliot was "PLAYIN

It is, perhaps, this inattention to the factual context

which has given rise to the storm over The Waste Land, and

the debate over its conscious design, that has raged

virtually unabated since the poem's original publication.

1 0 , Two critics w h o have attempted a kind o f New-Histcwicist approach are E r i k Svarney C T A e Men of 1 9 1 4 : T , S , E l i o t and E a r l y Moderniss CPhiladelphia: Open University Press, 1988:) I and Jc~hn Xiras C~x~peu C T - S - Eliot and the P o l i t i c s o f V o i c e : T h e ArjunenC o f "The Wasee Land." (4nn firbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1383)l. Csc*perFs work is very good, but his title alone indicates an approach to The Was2e Land with which I cannot agree. A s Eliot's early prose makes clear, poetry has nu "argument." Svarney's work is also excellent, but his attempt to place all the "men of 1314" into a mure c o m p l e t e histor ical c o n t e x t dominates his approach, and leaves a great deal to be said about the individuals he is forced tc~ discuss as a group. 1 1 . V a l e r i e E l i d e d . , The Letters of T , S , E l i o t v o l u ~ e 2: 1898-2922 ilondon: Faber and Faber, 1388) : 583, ( 4 Nov. 1-33.? 3 .

&a. .

Some critics would deny its place in the canon altogetherx2,

or suspect that it is a massive hoax.== Stiff others create

ever more fantastic systems of structuration and cohesion in

order to give unity to the most persistently, obstinately

and self-consciously fragmentary poem in the language,

proceeding, it must Be assumed, from the belief that without

unity the poem is without meaning. The numerous systems of

structure which have been proposed include not only the

tantalizing chimeras of structure which Eliot himself

tentatively proposed, but also such systems as afragmenta~y

wholeness,n14 collage,=3 parataxis,le "mythic structure,Rx7

and many more.

12. K a r l S h a p i r o , "The D e a t h o f L i t e r a r y J u d g e m e n t , " i r ~ S t o r m O v e r The U a s t r Land, e d , R o b e r t E. n l l il::hicaqc~: P a c a t t , Fo r esman a n d Company , 1'364:j : 1 3 G - 1 5 4 , 143. 63. Graham Wouqh, " Imagism a n d I t s I h n s e q u e n c e s , " i n Knell 1 , 2964: 98-i2l. 14, I r e f e r t m Mar i a n n e Thormahl e n p s e x c e l 1 e n t s t u d y " 7 ' f w Hasee Land": rJ F r a g m e n t a r y #hf .s leness , ILund: C : . W . K. G l ctcrup, i W 8 3 . 15. C r ~ l l a g e as a r , t r u c t u r a l mode q o e s a l o n g way ti- war d p r o v i d i n g a ccu-ttercrt, a n d h a s b e e n propclsed by 51Kh p e o p l e a s H a r r y Levin [ "The Waste Land: From U r t c ~ E c h t , " o r i g i n a l l y pub1 i s h e d i n P l u r a l , 1372; r e p u b l i z h e d i n M e m o r i e s o f th~? Moderns ( :New Ycwk: New D i r e c t i o n s , 1982:): 35-463. 16. J e w e l S p e a r s E r s o k e r and J o s e p h B e n t 1 cy [ R e a d i n 3 The Waste Land: Modern i t~ an3 t h e L i m i t s of In t e r p r r ta t i o n , <Amhers t : U n i v e r s i t y o f M a s s a c h u s e t t s P r ~ z i s , 13.33:): 2143 , among u t h e r s , r e f e r t o p a r a t a x i s a s the poem's "main method . " P a r a t a x i s Ci.e, t h e s i m p l e . ju : . ; tapi is i t i o n o f image:; w i t h o u t c u n n e c t i v e ur n a r r a t i v e t i s s u e ) b e a r s c l o s e a f f i r i l t y ti3 c02 lage and has been a s t a n d a r d ccmcept ion of the p o e m ' s p r a c e d u r e f rom n e a r l y t h e f i r s t , 5 d i s a g r e e w i t h B r o u k e r and bentley, however , who c l a i m t h a t E l iot uses p a r a t a x is to d e m o n s t r a t e " l u s t c o h e r e n c e , " I w i l l a r q u e t h a t i t is i n precisely t h e s e ' p a r a t a c t i c s T t h a t E l iot f i n d s t h e c o h e r e n c e , the voice, and t h e p o e t i c s h e seeks. 17. Grover S m i t h , "The S t r u c t u r e and M y t h i c a l Method o f The Waste Laird," in 7 - 5 - Elio t ' s ''The Waste Land, " e d . H a r o l d BLasm (New Y ~ r k : C h e l s e a House P u t l i ~ h ~ r ~ , 1 3 8 6 ) : 37-114.

Rising and falling in the currents of critical opinion,

The W s t e Land has had its bones picked in whispers by two

main stream of criticism, which on closer examination turn

out to be tributaries of the same stream of abstracting

philosophical enquiry: that which imports current critical

theory and vocabulary into the poem in order to talk about

it, and that which attempts to find new source material from

which to build a reading of it. Those who import current

critical theory have tended, like Cinderella's step-sisters,

to force the heavy foot of theory into the delicate shoe of

the poem, and the shoe won't quite fit. They use current

theoretical vocabulary either to make somewhat anachronistic

claims, or to make statements which say old things in new

ways, and do not provide significantly new readings.

Calvin Bedient's He Do The Police In Different

V o f c e ~ , ~ ~ an excellent study and well worth reading because

of its careful line-by-line study of the poem, nevertheless

cones within this group. His reading of The mste Land, and

in particular hls use of the critical terminology of

Bakhtin, depends for its success on Bedient's assertion that

the poem is aventriloquistr,n and hence the product of a

single conscioasness, rather than the product of a n&er of

coopeting voices, But, as Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph

Bentley observe, this position is indeed shaky since the

p o e m defies any sense sf the underlying unity implied by

18, He Do the Police in Differen* Voices: "The Waste Landf' and i t s P r o t a g o n i s e . [Chicago: University a f Chicago Press, 1987 :! ,

this assertionz". As Graham Hough observes, in a different

context, The Waste Land mconspicuously forgoesa any

Bedient does resist the unfortunate tendency in some

current criticism to use superficial and often trivial

features, either of texts or their titles (or some equally

marginal textual element) in order to ascribe anachronistic

theoretical prineipfes to texts. Despite obvious virtues,

this is the failing, it seems to me, of both Ruth Nevo, who

described The mste Land as an wUr-Text of

Deconstruction,az~ and of Gregory S. Jay, whose

deconstructive reading is G marvel of contemporary jargon,

yet ultimately argues the time-honoured notion that The

Clraste Land is an hermeneutic riddle for the detective-critic

to solve-22 In the end, though, Bedient also uses current

critical vocabulary to say the same old thinqs and atterspts

to force the foot of theory into the wrong shoe.

Superficially, he recognizes that The Waste Land does not

simply fit Bakhtints theory, and he appears to avoid the

usual tendency of seeing Bakhtinvs various ideas--the

dialogic, carnival, heteroqlos~ia~~--as operative in every

13- B r o c & ~ r and Bentley, G . 26. Haugh, 1 1 5 . 2 1 . Ruth Nevo, "The Waste Land: Ur-Text of Deconstruct i c tn ," i n Hodern Critical V i e w 3 : 7.3, E l i o t , e d . Harold bloom (New Yor k: Chelsea House Put 1 i sher s, 13855 35-1 02. F C

A!. G r e g o r y S. Jay, "Discover i n g t h e C ~ r p u s , " i n #oi?e~ij

Crieical I n t s r p r e t a t i c m s : T ,S, E l iat's "The Waste Land," ed. Harold 811>um ( N e w York: Chelsea House Pub1 i s h i n g , 1'38GI 1 15- 136. 23. I t is n o t within t h e scope of t h i s paper t o o u t l i n e and evaluate t h e works of Mikhail bakht i n ; however, i t i s w o r t h

text which Bakhtin himself did not explicitly eliminate. But

finally, he requires The mste Land to conform in a kind of

reverse to Bakhtin9s model, and on slim evidence. By

penetrating analysis of the poem's original title, Bedient

comes to the conclusim, to which the poem is then required

to conform, that there is only one voice in the poem, and

that voice calls the same familiar tune.

The other main tendency in recent Eliot criticism has

been to exhume and resuscitate his early writings and, for

the w s t part, this performs a very valuable service to

Eliot scholarship. The publication in 1974 of the early

drafts of The Waste Landz4 provided a variety of new

insights into the genesis and metamorphosis of this most

elusive and enigmatic of poems. The Facsimile Edition

brought to light a number of new critical issues--including

such troubling ones as Eliot's misogyny in some of the

wsuppresseda sections, and such or at least

irrelevant conjectures as Eliot's alleged ho~sexuality~~--

n o t i n g that many of El i c ~ t ' s i d e a s b e a r r e m a r k a b l e s i m i l a r i t i e s to t h e i d e a s b a k t h i n h a s d e v e l o p e d i n such landmark works a s R a b l a i : - a n d His World, The D i a l o g i c Imagination, and P r o b l e m s of D o s t o e v s k y f s P o e < i c s . The main idea o f the C a r n i v a l esque is mc& t h~ztr~z~ughl y wur ked o u t in R a t e l a i s a n d H i s Uor fd , w h i l e t h e c o n c e p t s o f heteroglossia and the d i a l o g i c , among a number sf other v e r y i n t e r e s t i n g ideas are worked o u t i n T h e Dialogic I m a g i n a t i o n , and *ro&f e m s of D + ~ s & o e v s k y p Poetics. 24. Valerie E l i o t e d . " T h e Waste Land,": facsimile and Transcripts of the O r i g i n a l D r a f t s <London: Faber a n d F a b e r , 137.1). 25. J a m e s E. M i l l e r J r . has w r i t t e n what in my view is a spur i o u s and h i g h 1 y q u e s t i o n a b l e a n a l y s i s of The Waste Land e n t i t l e d T - S - E l i o e - * s P e r s o n a l H a s t e Land, which u s e s w i l d conjecture and v e r y f anc i f u l hermeneut i c s t o s u g g e s t t h a t t h e p o e m is a " l u v e p o e m " t i 1 E l i d ' s a l l e g e d hcmosexual

but the actual contents of those suppressed sections

provided very few answers to the questions, which still vex

critics today, about the poem and its poetics. Furthermore,

the transcripts aterely validated the uncanny prescience of

Hugh Kenner's guesses about the poem's origins.z6

Then, in 1973, Anne Bolgan began a resuscitation of

Eliotfs doctoral dissertatfon with the publication of What

the Thunder R e a l l y Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Waking

of "The Waste Land. " Bolgan * s discovery, some years ear 1 ier ,

of this document which had been previously thought lost was,

of course, a major contribution to Eliot scholarship, even

if Eliot's philosophical argument mentirely overwhelmN

Bolgan, as John Xiros Cooper suggest^,"^ and distorts her

resulting reading of the poem. Cooper argues compellingly

that Elistfs philosophical accomplishments are over-rated by

literary critics, and that Hugh Kenner's Notherwise finem

l c w e r , J e a n Verdena l . M o r e ob.jec t i u n a b l e even t h a n t h e methfid o f t h i s e n q u i r y is t h e s u p p o s i t i m n t h a t this c l a i m is r e l e v a n t . Miller 111f f e r ~ rrct s i g n i f i c a n t l y new r e a d i n q o f t h e poem, p r e f e r i n g r a t h e r to e n g a g e i n a k i n d o f homophubi: name c a l l i n g . 26. I n h i s essay, " H ~ ? J t h e F'cem was C w i s t r ~ ~ c t r d , " CSl.oi..n O v e r t t ) e Haste Land, e d . Rctbert E. KnoI 1 ( C h i ~ r a g ~ j : 5cc1t k , Foresrnan a n d Company, l%Jj : 2 - 7 3 repi- i n t e d f rom Chapter 1 1 1 , "The Death o f Europe , " i n The lnv.isit,le P o e t ( N e w York: IvCm 001ensky , 13595 Hugh Kenner f o r e s a w and a c c u r a t e 1 y p r e d i r t e d m o s t 13f t h e r e v e l a t i o n s t h a t t h e o r i g i n a l m a n u s c r i p t s w e r e abf e t o reveal, Kenner a n t i c i p a t e d mcts t o f t h e ' r e v i s i c m a r y ' r e a d i n g s o f t h e psem t h a t h a v e r e s u l t e d f r o m t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n o f t h e i deas o f s u c h r e c e n t t h e o r i s t s a s D e r r ida, Lacan, Foucault and t h e many w r i t e r s whose own woi- k borrows h e a v i l y from thctse t h r e e . 27. Cooper , 38. The comment a p p e a r s i n h i s fwsrtnc&es t o chapter me. I t reads: " I t [ E l i o t ' s p h i l o s o p h i c a l work3 e n t i r e l y u v e r w h ~ l m s less r e s c ~ u r r e f u l c r i t i c s 1 ike Anne b ~ l qan. "

book on Eliot [ T h e I n v i s i b l e Poet) is marred by *an

amateur's overestimation of Eliot's philosophical

However, other recent critics, lfke Lewis Freed, Piers

Gray, Richard Shusterman, Harriet Davidson, and the tandem

of Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentleyz9 have found that

Efiotfs philosophical accomplishments were indeed impressive

and sophisticated. Richard Shusterman and Cleo nclelly

Kearns, for instance, have eayphasized the hitherto ignored

or misunderstood importance of Bertrand Russell's Logical

Atomism to Eliot's philosophical thought.3o Kearns has also

re-examined the influence of Indic tradition on Eliot during

his pre-conversion periodax in the light of contemporary

theory. Piers Gray has unearthed an important link in the

chain of Eliot's development by incorporating the suggestive

data from J o s i a h R o y c e ps Seminar , 191 3-191 4: As R e c o r d e d i n

the N o t e b o o k s of Harry T. cost ell^,^' which Eliot atteniied,

28. fbid. 23. Lewis F r e e d , T - S , Eliot: The Critic as phi lo sop he^, {West L a f a y e t t e , I n d i a n a : P u r d u e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1373:); P i e r s Gray, T -5, El i o t f r In6ellectual and Poetic Fewelupmen t: 1904-1922 Crl t lavt it: H i g h l a n d s : H a r v e s t e r Press, 1'382:); R i c h a r d S h u s t e r m a n , T , S , E l i ~ t and T h e Philosophy of Criticism ( N e w Y ~ x k : Cc:lumbia U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 8 8 ) ; H a r r i e t Davidson, T - S , Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and I n t e r p r e t a t i o n in a T f w i4ast.e Land" CBat~llrn Rouge: Louisiana Sta te U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 13855. 30- Shus te rman , 17-24: Cleo McNelly K e a r n s , " E l i o t , Russell and Whitman: R e a l i s m , P o l i t i c s , and L i t e r a r y F'ersuna i n T h e Waste L a n d , " i n S l ~ x m ed . 1'386: 137-152. 31. C l e a McNelly Kearns , T - S , Eliot and Indic Traditions: A S t a J y in Poetry and Belief <Cambridge: Cambridge U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1'387 3 , 32. I a m o n l y a c q u a i n t e d w i t h t h i s w o r k t h r o u g h Gray's d i s c u s s i o n o f i t ; n e v e r t h e l e s s , i ts o r i g i n a l p u b l i c a t i o n and

and in which he participated rather prominently i t would

seem. Gray also thoroughly and carefnlly examines Eliot's

unpublished graduate essays. Harriet Davidson has attempted

to show that Eliot's philosophical ideas were remarkably

similar to those of Martin Heidegger and were profoundly

anticipatory of recent theory such 3s that of the two

Jacques, Derrida and Lacan,

The difficulty that emerges from Davidson's otherwise

fine work is that she too is required in some senses to

force the current theory in ways which don't quite fit. As I

will show, her insistence that Eliot radically, and

prophetically, denied the existence of the autonomvs

individual subjecta3 is clearly contradicted by Eliot's

early poetry and criticism. Davidson, like numerous others,

is misled because of her concentration on Eliot's

philosophical work. Aside from the downright erroneous

assertions these philosophy-oriented critics make, these

reductive analyses siarply fail to account for the

complexities and nuances of The Waste Land. There is more in

Fhe W s t e Land than is dreamt of in their philosophy, or in

their interpretations of the poetry.

Valuable as these various studies are, and of course

there are many more in the sane vein as Davidson's, they

Gray's discussicin of it r e v e a l i t r irnp~srtarice to a s t u d y o f El iot . 33. Davidson, 55. Says Davidsun, "the key tct [ E l i o t ' s ] thought, particularly in this pu~-c~mvr-rsi~m pe-rilsd 1 5 hi5 complete r e j e c t i o n of t h e idea o f a sel f , a r e . j e c t i c m based, net as some ccmmentatsrs i n s i s t , mi psychol~sgicaf gr-~:~i..rnds, but on philosophical graunds. "

could have been more useful and comprehensive had they mined

the important ore of Eliotvs own writing about poetry and

poets/ writers during the early period of his career. The

importance of the philosophical material is undeniable, but

to clair, as most crftics to varying degrees have done, that

Eliotls poetry and poetics can be *e~plained,~ even must be

explained, in terms of his philosophy is to ignore Eliotls

own observations a b u t the nature of the philosophical

enterprise and its clear differences from the poetic as well

as critical practice, Lewis Freed, for example, makes the

extremae clair that Eliotls early writing is munintelligible*

without Bradley,f* a claim he is perhaps only able to make

because he almost completely ignores Eliot's early published

criticism. Granted Freed is being delliberately polemical,

and granted he beans the philosophical writing, but had he

(and the others) read Eliot's whole corpus during this

period they would have discovered Eliot refuting them

himself. The philosophy-oriented criticism, in particular,

which ignores these ignores also that these facts

stubbornly resist both philosophy itself and philosophical

criticism- Theories and readings of Bliot*s poetry generated

out of his philosophical writing sisrply donet fit the facts

as they are revealed in his non-philosophical prose,

In " [A Review of1 Theism and Hu~anism~ Eliot n k e s the

frank observation that many of the inquiries and beliefs of

philosophers are mlirited by the reaning which the terrr

33. Freed, sv.

have fn pnactice." B l f o t 3s reacting rather erasperatdiy to

t h e entire philosophicaf enterprfse wherein someone could,

in a l l apparent seriousness, prove or argue for the

existence of the external wor'd as having **that highest

degree of probabiliLye which is 'ine~itabiffty-~~ Far from

being a *probabifityW at aff, says Eliot, such a befief is

*sotaethinq only a madman mufd doubt or a pkifosopher would

assert.wsb Eliot, in other wards, dismisses things

philosophical as largely irrelevant beyond the purely

intelfectual game-playing sphere. Tellinqly, Eliot's most

hostile reaction is to m. Balfour's (the author of the book

he is reviewing) discussion of art and his theories about

waesthetics,w wherein he clafms that *&en we f r e n l

explfcitly face the problea, we become deeply conscious af

the incongruity between our feellngs of beauty and a

mterialistic account of their origin." As one who does most

explicitly face the problem, Bltot says "1 fail t o f i n d , . ,

any such incsng~nity in arteW3* glfot gfves the real rmzld

of lived experience primacy, not only over philosophy bat in

art, where =feelings of beautyg rust have theSr oxfgin in

the materialistic mrld,

Of recent crftfcs who have taken tbe pbllasoghical tack

with Blfot, only William SLaff hius attempted to integrate

all of Eliot's wlnterestsm into a discpsslon of Blfot's

poetics. Skaff, xiqhtly I thfmk, m i n t a t n s that Ellat's

=, "CA Review of 3 Theism and H e r m m i s m , " I n t e r n a t ~ m i a l Jownai af E t h i c s , X I V I . 2. [Jan. 2 ' 3 l G i : 2434-9, 293, 3G. f h i d . , p.Z€S,

developing poetics were heavily influenced by such other of

Bliotts interests as psychology, anthropology, and science,

and in so dofng, Skaff provides a necessary corrective to

the heavily philosophical treatises which have dominated

recent Eliot scholarship. Without presenting any

rwd~ttionary tbesis, indeed by re-asserting what was well

known and well accepted, Skaff seeks to produce a view of

Eliot's developrent in which all things cohere. But Gkaff

canclades, nrongly f think, that Eliot attempted to

elfrinate the mopposition between the idea d lifea and,

like a *modern snrrealist poeta attempted to *portray the

camtent of the unconscious directly in the work of artoWs7

kgatn, the earfy prose clearly xefutes Skaff. According to

Blht, the work of art tramsforrs life, shows the awful

separatfon between life and the idea, and ma3ces something

-liar ta art, ikt uses the anconscious and the conscious,

the 'ideaa and *life,* but does so in such a way that the

worL p r d ~ c e d is a thing nnto itself, Skaffss concern to

formliate an easily expressfble interpretation of Eliot and

Bliotes poetics results in an overly reductive assessment

tall assessments are necessarily somewhat reductive) of

Eliot- VSrtaally lqnoribg Bliotss poetry, Skaff fails to

aeermt for its full colrplexily, Reading the criticism

selectfvely, he fafla to accortat for all that Eliot

tbcorlama,

Had the philososophy-oriented critics read Eliotfs

eazly prose about poetry, they would have seen that it is

laced with generous doses of dismissiveness toward

philosophy and even to "ideasm in terms of their usefulness

or value for the poetic enterprise. Eliot once declared, for

instance, that =the *historicalg critic and the

*philosophicalt critic had better be called historians and

philosophers quite simply,m3e and that there was no point

referring to their work as literary at all. In "Kipling

Redivivnsn Eliot remarks that philosophies and -ideasn axe

-not material which emotion can feed long upon.m3* Given the

importance for poetry that Eliot ascribed to aemotion,w this

is tanta~aount to saying that poetry will find no nourishment

in philosophy. In praising Henry James, Eliot paid him the

compliment that his mind was "so fine that no idea could

violate it,"4m and that he was wtoo intelligent to court

ideas.w4x "The poet," Eliot says elsewhere, "knows that it

is no good, in writing poetry, to try to be anything but a

poet.

The most damning denunciation of philosophyfs relevance

to his own practice cows in Bliotts letters. From at least

as early as 1925, his fetters n h e deprecatory reference to

philosophy in terms of its actual impact on "the mechariistic

universe," In a long letter on matters philosophical to

Norbert Weiner, dated 6 January 1915, Eliot observes that

h f s "sympathies" incline toward a "relative materialism,"

and that "the mechanistic world is that to which one would

tend to conf~rrn.~ He tells Wiener that

In a sense, of course, all philosophising is a perversion of reality: for, in a sense, no philosophic theory makes any difference to practice.

and

I am quite ready to admit that the lesson of relativism is: to avoid philosophy and devote oneself to either real art or real science. (For philosophy is an unloved guest in either company) ... The only reason why relativism does not do away with philosophy altogether, after all, is that there is no such thing to abolish! There is art and there is science, which would never have occurred had not many people been under the impression that there was p h i l ~ s o p h y . ~ ~

The real world is the final referent for Eliot. uArtm and

"sciencea are the realities which "occuru when people act

out of the millusiona that there is philosophy.

Hone of this is ta suggest, however, that the

philosophy-oriented criticism is of no relevance whatever.

Indeed, even Eliot's denunciation of it suggests that

philosophy, or the illusion that it exists, is an important

43. V a l e r i e Eliot ed,, The ietkerr of T , S . Eliot, V f 3 l u m e i : f SP8-f 922, London: Faber- and Faber , lW8> : 80-81.

catalyst. In "Theism and H~manism,~ after discounting the

primacy of philosophy, Eliot goes on to suggest that wour

interest in art cannot be isolated from the other interests

of life, among them interests of philosophy and religi~n."~~

But while this appears to contradict his other claims, two

important features of Eliot's poetics surface in this brief,

and somewhat off-hand, statement. First, art itself is given

primacy over Eliot's *other interests.* Second, Eliot's

recognition that art cannot be isolated from *other

interests of lifeu must be read in the context of his rather

cavalier dismissal of the philosophical enterprise in

general, and his assertion of the prinracy, once again, of

lived experience--not as it is theorized, but rather as it

is alivedm and *experienced,*

Eliot observed in *The Function of Crfticismm that "art

may be affirmed to serve ends beyond itself; but art is not

required to be aware of these ends, and indeed performs its

fnnction, whatever that may be, according to various

theories of value, much better by indifference to them.R43

Even more to the point, Eliot acknowledged that "even the

purest literature is aliaented from non-literary sources,

and has non-literary consequences," and that "pure

literature is a chitaera of sensation; admit the vestige of

44. I t i d , 45. "The Function of Criticism, " The C : r i t e r i o n , vol . 2 no. C ral=t. 13231: ~ - J Z

an idea and it is already tnansfons~ed.~~~ Horesver, in *A

Brief Treatise on the Criticism of P ~ e t r y , ~ Eliot declared,

there are a variety of points of view from which a thoughtful and useful study of poetry can be made. Poetry I s also a social document and may be made use of by the historian, the moralist, the social philosopher or the psychoanalyst.

Eliot's comments on the philosophies of poets, particularly

the Romantic poets such as Blake and Coleridge, also

indicate that Eliot does not entirely discount the place of

philosophy in poetry. What he says instead is that poetry

which is overtly philosophical results in a marriage which

is not only not mfelicitons,* but also "too much occupied

with i d e a ~ . ~ d ~ He goes on to say that when a poet is

philosophical "in the derogatory sense" of =courting ideasR

then the poetry produced is not of the first intensity.

The overwhelming impression one gets from that early

prose is that the writer is talking about himself most

surely when he appears to be talking about someone else, and

that, even without his necessarily being aware of it, Eliot

used those early essays as a testing ground for developing a

poetics which is considerably =re subtle and complex than

the few generalizations that are his legacy can possibly

convey. Late in his life Eliot admitted that in his early

4 5 , "The Idea Of a Literary Review," The Criterion, v. 4, rich, I [Jan. 1'326:):l-7. 47. "The Naked Man," The jlthenaeua, 4685 (Feb. 13, 1920:l: 208-3.

criticism: "1 was implicitly defending the kind of poetry me

f s i c l and my friends and with that as a sure guide

lto discovering what kind of poetry that actually was, it

seems a matter of scholarly integrity to examine that early

writing. In the s a w essay, though, Eliot also expressed his

exasperation with those critics who presumed that he (Eliot)

had "sketched out the design for a massive critical

structure, and spent the rest of this1 life filling in the

detailsow In fact, what a careful reading shows is that the

critical pronouncements were often after-the-fact attempts

to explain what had been done unknowingly. In a very

suggestive observation, though, Eliot accounted for this

dependence of theory on practice, saying "the instinct for

tidiness compels us to try to do consciously what we

pe~ceive to be haphazard and unconscious.~~s

There is one very salient feature of Eliot's early

statements which must still be accounted for. He does not

seem to have been able to articulate h i s poetics fully in

the prose. Often, Eliot deliberately and consciously stops

short of saying precisely what he means, as else he seems to

be struggling to articulate s o ~ t h i n g which is not quite

clear. Even his cryptic observations about *truthw and

'factsu betray this inability to articulate his thoughts:

"if anyone complains that I have not defined truth, or fact,

or reality, I can only say apologetically that it was no

48. "To C r i t i c i z e t h e C r i t i c , " i n T o Criticize the C r i t i c ( N e w Ym-k: F a r r a r , Strauss and Giroux, 1365): 21. 43. "The Function of C r i t i c i s m , " 32.

part of my purpose to do so, but only to find a scheme into

which, whatever they are, they will fit, if they exist.Rs0

Given Eliot's insistence on the importance of fact in

particular, this admission clearly shows that, although

Eliot Rkneww hard facts when he encountered them, he could

not define the term. Still more telling are the numerous

occasions when he resorts to analogy in an effort to

articulate an idea, It is as though he cannot find the

language or the vocabulary for what he is thinking, and is

forced to approxiasate. It is only in the poetry that Eliot

finds ways of expressing his %hole of tangled feelings,*

but because there is that about poetry which prevents poetry

from speaking for itself, Eliot's poetry enacts the poetics

without articulating them.

Taken as a whole, however, the isolated strands of

thought in the early prose do begin to form a web for a

poetics which the poetry, at least figuratively, completes.

Eliot's critical statements--famous and forgotten, infamous

and ignored--reveal his opinion that the individual exists

in fzux between the social discourses which inform society

in general and the central core of the self. We will see

that not only the individual subject but the work of art as

well exists in a kind of half-way state, conflating, but not

uniting, disparate and often conflicting elelirents; yoking,

but not merging. The earlier critical statements also reveal

Eliot's belief that the work of art hovers betneen the real

C - d). ;Did,, 41.

and the ideal, or the actual and the imagined,

simultaneously exposing and closing the gap between them- We

will see that Eliot's ongoing concern with the relationship

of individuals (either persons or works) ko uthe wholeu

(either society or tradition) resolves itself, or rather

refuses to resolve itself, in this sense of liminality, or

of uthrobbing between two lives." Eliot seeks to brinq

disparate things into juxtaposition, but at the same time he

always maintains the distinctions between them; he conflates

and compares rather than merges.

The Waste Land's own curiously liminal position in

relation to things canonical can be better understood in

light of Eliot's liminal poetics, The poem's many, varied,

and even conflicting effects, which no critical approach

seems able fully to account for, also begin to be

contprehensible in the full light of this recurring concern

with liminality, By reading the poetry in the context of the

early prose we can see Eliot's early groping toward a

poetics of liminality. This poetics was never fully

articulated in the prose; it was, however, enacted both

substantively and formally in The Waste Land, By proceeding

somewhat liminally; that is, by straddling Eliot's critical

and creative writings, we can chart this development. If I

have not yet fully defined or articulated this poetics of

lilkinality which informs The B s t e Land, I hope I have

demonstrated the difficulty of doing so , It is only, after

all, with the development of a post-dern critical

vocabulary, designed specifically to describe Hodernism,

that this poetics can even begin to be articulated.

Obviously, ideas which are called post-modern, are actually

only attempts to describe and explain modernism. Poets like

Eliot, who operate at the edge of, even ahead of, language,

have forced new ways of thinking, and new ways of talking

about things, upon our awareness. Post-modern critics have

then provided the vocabulary and the theoretical frame-work

which is necessary for any attempt to explain Modernism. It

is therefore no surprise that only now has it become

possible to understand, let alone articulate the full import

of what Eliot was theorizing in the early prose.

And, in an ironic and admittedly accidental way,

Eliot's ear3y prose even anticipates the problems we have in

talking about him. What Eliot saw as the major problem to be

overcome in studying Ben Jonson applies equally to Eliot

hfmself:

He has suffered from his great reputation as a critic and theorist, from the effects of his intelligence. We have been taught to think of him as the man, the dictator....as the literary politician impressing his views upon a generation; we are offended by the constant reminder of his scholarship. We forget the comedy in the humours, and the serious artist in the scholar. [He1 has suffered in public opinion as anyone must suffer who is forced to talk about his art.31

51, "The Comedy of H u m i w r s , " Athenaeum i N i g ~ . 1 4 , 1'313) : 1180- 1 Il80.

This ironically prescient vision of his own ultimate Fate

serves as a useful guide through the bewildering mazes of

Eliot criticism and scholarship, both his own and that of

others. Rather than concentrating on the ever-lengthening

shadow of Eliot the man, the dictator, and rather than being

offended by the constant reminder of his scholarship, it is

time to pay attention to the serious artist, and, I wiff

argue, to the Rcorsedyn in Eliot, by paying attention to what

Eliot said when he talked about his art through his

discussion of other artists,

Chapter 2

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT:

ORIGINALITY, INDIVIDUALITY, PERSONALITY

More than any other single fact about Eliot, his view of

personality and the individual subject has been

misrepresented, misinterpreted, or misunderstood- This has

been especially the case with the critics who focus on

philosophy, either post-modern or Eliotic, Neither his

philosophical writing nor his more famous pronouncements

account fully for the subtle nuances of Eliot's fraught

concept of the human subject. The problem with the

philosophy-oriented criticism is that it conveniently

ignores the statements eliot made about the subject in his

early critical prose, statements which stubbornly contradict

the pronouncements of his philosophical analyses, The early

critical prose outlines a complex view of the individual

sub3ect as partially constructed out of social influence and

partly essential, The statements in the early critical prose

also significantly inform Eliot's understanding of the

relationship between the individual and society, between the

individual and the tradf tion.

Eliot was raised as an American, with the strong

emphasis on an Emersonian belief in the individual which

that implies. Yet, as Peter Ackroyd convincingly argues,

Eliot was conditioned by his Unitarian up-bringing to feel a

deep responsibility to his community-x Given these

conZradictory impulses, it is not surprising that Eliot's

comatents on individuality, and its corollaries of

*personalitym and woriginality* appear initially to form a

bewildering tangze of contradictions and qualifications. The

complex of ideas surrounding this issue is further

complicated by El5otWs separation of the critical, the

poetic and the philosophical enterprise. The philosophically

oriented critics have relied on Eliot's philosophlcal

discussions of the subject. Keeping this in mind, and

keeping in mind the significant fact that Eliot himself

rejected philosophy because the terms used are limited by

the meaning which they have in practice, it is nevertheless

necessary (and interesting) to begin where those critics

have begun in order to see the disparity between Eliot's

V h e ~ r y , ~ or philosophy, and his *practicea or his literary

writing, both critical and creative,

Harriet Davidson follows the recent trend of

wphilosophicalm critics in asserting Eliot's nthoroughgoing

I. Peter Ackroyd, T - 5 - E l i o t <Landon: Wamish Hamilton, I%%>. This aspect of El i c h p s bac kyrc~und underscores and informs all of Ackroydps biography, beginning immediately in the f i r s t chapter, " O r i g i n s , " where he says, "The pervasive and dominant presence in the CEliotI household,..was that c ~ f his EEl iotrs3 grandfather, Mill i a m Greenleaf Ef i d , who had died the year before El iut w a s born. El iot, even in o l d age, remembered his influence as that of one who 'rules his son and his sanrs sons from the grave, a MOSES upon whose tablets w e r e ~ n g r a v e d the l a w s of public servire*"dl€J. According to Gckroyd, El i d still embodied "the Unitarian ethic of leadership and service,' long af te r he had supposedly abandm-ted Unitarianism--the faith w h ~ s h characterized Christ as "a sort of super ior Emerson. "

non-~ubjectivity,~~ and argues that =the key to Eliot's

thought, even in the pre-conversion period, is his complete

rejection of the idea of a self.w3 Eliot's wcritique of the

self ,..is central inn all of Eliot's tho~ght,"~ according to

Davidson, and such other previous commentators as William

Skaff, Piers Gray, and Richard Shusterman who all claim

Eliotas dissertation denies the existence of the subject, or

the individual self, In a similar vein, Brooker and Bentley

assert that Eliot had formulated a concept of the human

subject which bears close resemblance to that conception

which traces its line of descent from Heidegger through

Gadarser to Derrida--a conception of subjectivity as rooted

in language.

Harriet Davidaon enlists John D. Hargolis' aid in

making her case that Eliot's writings are -rooted in doubt

about the self," but she tries to make that doubt mean

something it does not attempt to Paean- Margolis claim that

Eliot's non-philosophical writings reject the idea of

subjectivity. Nevertheless Xargolis admits (and Davidson

admits the admission) that Eliot's skepticism about the

value of the individual self is based on his sense of the

einsufficiency of the a u t o n o ~ u s individual-*e Doubting the

2 , Davidson , 74. 3. l h 3 d . . 55. 4, I & - i d . , 77. 5. E r o o k e r and Bentley, 6-7. 6 . I am arguing here with Davidscm9s use o f Maugulis, based an her o w n quotat i a l n f r o m his work. He is quoted in Davidsun, p. 77, and c i t e d a5 John D. M a r g ~ l i s , T , S I E l i s 3 t f s Intellectual D s v e l o p a e n t , 2422-2939, Chicago, 1372: 26.

sufficiency of the antonowus self should not be confused.

with doubting the existence of the self- The term become

fuzzy when they are ualimented,u to use an Eliotic word,

with contemporary critfeaf, jargon, but the basic plremise

being proposed by contemporary critics is that Eliot held

the view that the individual human subject has no central

core, and is xather just a ratrix s f social discourses, the

soluces of which are tmknowable.

Sore of Eliot's criticism appears to bear this out, Far

Bliot, tbe personality--even of Bradley himself, whose own

rejection of the self Eliot is safd to be emlating--seems

to be -re important than alwst anything else- Bradley's

personality is graaifested fzP h i s style.7 XikhaIl BaStbtln

said that in novels, styles masquerade as characters; Eliot

says style reveals personality. In other words, the

language-rootedness of identity, or personality is such that

7. E l i o t fe l t at the t i m e the dissertation w a s being published that its only real value oas to s h a w the extent to which his prose style had been influenced b y Bradley. In "To Criticize the C r i t i c , " t h e t i t le essay cvf his l a s t essay ccrllection CTo Cri&icire the C r - i t i c ( N e w Y w L : Farra t , Strauss and Giuoux, 1 9 € i 5 j : 2 3 3 , Eliot o b s e v - , ~ - s

I spent three years, when yuung, in the study o f philosophy, What remains to me of these studies' The s ty le of three phiios~phers: 8radleyss English, Spinoza's Latin and P l a t o P s G r e e t .

T h i s fullaws ca, the heels of Elkat saying he w r o t e his best cr it ic ism when he was wr it ing about someerie whose st $1 e had influenced his own, Bradley, tt-trmgh not a poet , "affected" h i m U p r ~ f ~ d l y , " he says, but it w a s Bradley" sslyle, and the "personality as manifffit& in his narks," rather than the philosophy itself which interested him,

one's personality is revealed in one's langnage, But, since

language is sorethfng ubPch is externally located and

acquired, and which is by definition fundamentally communal,

the personality revealed in this way cannot be said to

constftnte a centra l core of identity. As such, Eliot's

~ m x k that style reveals personallity does seer to suggest

tbat the sabgect has no central core.

Bot i n h i s essay on Blake Eliot makes clear claims for

the ex i s t ence of a central core of the self:

Zt is irportant tbat the artist should be hfghly educated in his own art; but his education is one that 3s hindered rather then helped by the ordfnary processes of society which constitute education for the ordinary ran, For these processes coasist largely in the acquisition of fvrsonal ideas which obscrue &at we really are and feel, what we really want, and what really excites oar interest- ft fa of course not the actrtal inforntiaa acquired, bnt tho conforlaity which the ace~l~lation ;rf knowledge Is apt to irpose, that is harrful. Tennyson is a very fair e m l e of a poet alwst wholly encrusted with pamsitic opinion, a l m t wholly merged into his cnvironuent- B l a b , on the other hand, knew what Ilnterestd him, aad he therefore presents only the essatfal, only in fact, what can be presented and meed not be explained. ... He was naked and saw man ~ @ ? i i 8 a d from the centre of his o m crystal-*

?%as quote is crmclal becapse it elacfdates the whole

cemtro of his own crystaln tnl~nld s o d very mwh like an

sxprclssion of a belief in a centla1 core of persuaality even

if ft were stripped of the sorpeo'~:t of sarronnding

essential entity very clear. Eliot argues that education is

likely to Rencrnstu that central core with "parasitic

opinion," and that *the accumulation of knowledgew is *apt

to impose conforaity" because the "impersonal ideasw will

mobscure what we really are and feel." Significantly, Eliot

makes this stateaent in an unguarded moment, so to speak,

when he is concentrating on a s p e c i f i c task. Surely then

these comments on Blake reveal Eliot's actual belief more

truly than do statements made in the deliberate and

calculated process of sonstructfng a philosophical treatise:

the terms here are those of npracticew rather than "theory."

A d the belief expressed is that there is a "realw self

which knows what it thinks and feels, a self which is taught

conformity by the usual leethods of education. A seeming

paradox arises, Eliot, who stresses often t h a t order exists

outside of any one individual, nevertheless resists

conforrity as it is created by the imposition of knowfedge.

Far a solntion to this apparent contradiction, however, we

can turn again to the early prose, and particularly to

Eliot's discussion of Romanticism versus Classicism-

Late in his life, Eliot remarked about the wrecurrent

teere of C l a s s i c j i s a versus Bo.~id~~ticism*~ fn his early

k ~ f f ; f ~ g , ibis ~ p f t f ~ ~ i is predicated on underlying

ass-ions abopt the relationship between individuals and

c-nurfties, at least in Eliotls discussion of that theme*

3, "To C r i t i c i z e The C r i t i c , " 17,

These term, then, form the parameters within which Eliot

himself envisioned the conflict, and as such form a useful

starting place for an examination of Eliot's various

attitudes to and utterances on the subject.

Classic ism/Roiaanticism

In brief we can see that, for Eliot, Romanticism

connates a solipsistic self-expression which is

fnndamentally narcissistic, and fundamentally concerned with

the individual, In a review titled "A Romantic Patri~ian,~

which Eliot m o t e of Bssays in Ro~lantic Literature by George

Wyndhaa, Eliot goes so far as to link Romanticism with

Iqerialism, suggesting that the typical Romantic (namely

Hr. Wyndham) thinks the world is "an adventure of himself."

George Uyndhamls ucuriosityw was employed nromantically,w

s a p Eliot, "not to penetrate the real world, but to

complete the varied features of the world he made for

We have seen questions xaised by Eliot's

denrcatfon of a =reala world, that is a natural versus an

abstract, philosophically constructed world. Here we see

Bliotts clear deprecation of Romantic individualism as a

belief' system characterized by an unwillingness to face the

real world: wRoranticism is a short-cut to the strangeness

[of a lffel wSthont the reality; and it leads its disciples

only back on themselves-" He continues: "the only cure for

Romanticism is to analyze it.nxf

Eliot believes that Romanticism is inherently hostile

to comunity because the Romantic constructs a philosophical

universe without acknowledging its material origins. This

belief led Eliot to describe the Romantic generation f w i f it

existedeaz) as chaotic, to criticize the poetry of the

Romiintic poets as overly philosophical, and to denegrate the

philosophies of the Romantic poets. The wehaorrn of

Romanticism prompts Eliot to dismiss the Romantic age as

~ineffectualw and incapable of exerting ninfluencea on

future generations. But this dismissal is problematic in at

least two ways, First, Eliot is certainly aware that the

writers in question have had a profound influence, so

profound that in trying to eke out a new niche for himself

he is virtually required to react fiercely against them.

Second, he accuses the Romantic of creating a world for

hieself or even of himself, and yet those are the very terms

he uses elsewhere to praise the great writers. A further but

less provocative contradiction is raised, of course, by the

notion of the wineffectual imperialist." Basically, though,

11, L a c . cit, 22- "The Rumant i r Generat ion, I f It Existed, " Athenaeum U U Z ~ la, 19193 :GIG-7. 13. "The Comedy of Humours," Athenaeum {Nuv. 14, l313i: IlBO- 1. Ef iut makes the point i n the context of an attempt t o differentiate between creating characters which are "feal" because they came f r o m the authorps actual experience of the

major fault, according to Eliot, was his self-absorption.

His virtue--mpersonalityw--~as also his weakness, because

philosophy, like his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was his own. And accordingly he was inclined to attach more importance to it than an artist should; this is what makes him eccentric, and makes him inclined to formlessne~s.~~

Apart from the important ways in which this statement

reiterates Eliotrs distinction between poetry and

philosophy, between art and "ideas," this assessment of

Blake shows how Eliot can find Romanticism 'chaotically

ineffectual.' The naked Romantic, for all his narcissistic

will-to-power, can have no effect on society, because he

does not proceed from an understanding of conditions in the

real TOO egocentric to recognize either the value,

or the best means, of borrowing, of building, from what has

gone before, Romanticism produces a very ineffectual,

because formless, self-construct. The personal point of

view, which Eliot will stress as crucial to both the critic

and the creative writer, g e t s short shrift in Eliot's

wcw f d, and s h a r a c t e r s j which are mere r e f 1 e c t i o n s t:~f t h e a ~ t t h i w himsel f w i t hc*ut an a~ttonomats e x i s t e n c e . t S . "The Naked Man," 209. 15- Many r e c e n t c r i t i c s have shawn t h a t E l i c ~ t ' s Judgement s f E3fai.e a s d i s r e g a r d i n g the m a t e r i a l c o n d i t i o n s o f t h e world i s pr obab 1 y e+ r o n e ~ x ! s . I d o n o t c cmc ctr w i t h El i ot ' s Sudgement, but f i n d i t impartant a s a demons tra t i o n c ~ f what E l iot bef ieved ahou t Rcmant i c i s m . Whether h e w a s r i g h t o v ~ ~ ~ z n g is, t f I m a y u s e the t e t - w , i m m a t e r i a l .

analysis of Blake, and of the long poem. Blake's longer

poems and *poems requiring structurew fail because they rely

on a personal, individual point of view. For Eliot,

something sf the self, something personal must be given

over, or surrendered, in the name of structure.

According to Eliot, this eccentricity and formlessness

in Blake "is most evident, of course, in the long poems--or

rather the poems in which structure is importantn because

you cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into vaxious personalities.

This essay (1920) shows Eliot worrying one of the problems

he is already encountering in the writing of his own long

poem tathe longest poem in the English langwidqe Csiclw

Pound saidx6). What we learn from this discussion is that

the apparent formlessness of The Waste Land con•’ orms

perfectly to Eliot's concept of structure, particularly as

it relates to the long poem. What we might call a relational

structure emerges in The Waste Land which is consistent with

Eliot's concept both of the self and of the social structure

of which the self is a partial expression. Eliot's own

apersonalitya is surrendered to the work; the work consists

of a number of smaller and seemingly disconnected fragments,

and is, on the surface, formless, But the formlessness

itself mimics the age to so= extent, and even a cursory

16. Valerie El i r s t ed,, Leeters, 497. The l e t t e r f r a m Pound is dated "24 Saturnus fin I (24 December 1321 I .

glance at the criticism will attest that the poem as a whole

has an almost infinite range of formal structures. More

importantly, the poem exhibits such a deep consciousness of

its age that it has been accepted as the quintessential

expression of the age.

In "The Function of Criticism," written for The

Criterion in 1923, Eliot expresses his views about automatic

writing and the people who believe they can hear, and should

listen to, an "inner voice," saying they ignore the

relational nature of humanity which makes an order outside

of any individual, For Eliot, the individual is only

knowable through its relationships to other individuals. But

Romanticism ignores the relational structure of society. The

Romantic creates a world "in his own image, and is

therefore, by definition, too "originalw to be effective.

Proceeding from the self rather than the world, and turning

only back upon the self as a result, the Romantic can

connect nothing with nothing.

Having said all of this, though, Eliot makes an

apparent reversal when he says, "the Arts insist that a man

shafl dispose of afl that he has, even of his family tree,

and follow art alone," The Arts, he says, "require that a

m a n be not a member of a family or a caste ox of a party or

of a coterie, but simply and solely himself-wx7 George

WyMhan is a Romanticist precisely because he -plants

himself firmly in a caste.* But this apparent contradiction

1'. " A R ~ z t m a n t i c Patrician, " 267.

in reality begins to delineate precisely what it is that for

Eliot constitutes the subject- Eliot's criticism of Wyndham

stems from the realization that to ignore the pervasiveness

and the anxiety of influence is not to shed them or divest

oneself of them, but rather to be molded "firmly in the

castew of them. Eliot's objection to Romanticism is not to

any particular age, but rather to that attitude which

ignores, or believes itself free from, influence. The best

writers of the Romantic period, for Eliot, were those who

were conscious of their age, the wcompletely awakened

intelligenceu which can Vegister and absorbu the

"vibrationsm of an age and give them "articulate voice.wxe

The consciousness of one's age which allows one to be a

permanent representative of that age is only possible for

the person who recognizes the influences and trends which

have produced that age. To "dispose ofw one's in•’ luences is

only possible once those influences have been perceived with

a =true cold hardnessu and acknowledged. Wyndham is a

-Roarantic, riding to hounds across his pzose, looking with

wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland,Rxg because he

does not acknowledge the influences which constitute the

materiality of his own existence. wBetter and more unca~llaran"

than the R o ~ n t i c , says Eliot, is "the Indi~idual.~ And this

individual, according to Eliot's discussion of Classicism,

is the person who knows the importance of recognizing the

stzucture outside of any one person.

Eliot's discussions of Classicism proceed by negative

definitions: Classicism, for instance, is not a simple

alternative to Romanticism; neither is it a reverence for

the great works of the past in place of an obsession with

novelty. In wUlysses, Order and HythnW Eliot observes that

one can be *classicals in a sense by turning away from nine-tenths of the material which lies at hand, and selecting only mummified stuff from a museum. 20

Obviously, this is not the kind of Classicism he values. He

is at pains to assert the essential difference between a

simple exhumation of that which is old and the more relevant

historical method of Ezra Pound. Eliot's assertion that

"the job of the poet should be to educate himself in poetry

in order to be implies that one cannot be new

without knowing what has gone before, which is another way

of saying that to know one's own influences and wpoint of

vieww is the only way of being anholly oneselfm or original.

As Eliot phrased it,

Pound's skill is to use his erudition to capture for contelsporary readers a sensibility from another ti- and place, He finds in them what it is that we want,"

Findinq what is useful for the modern world is the

purpose of discovering the old, but to find what is useful

for the modern world entails more than simply discovering

the old. After all, as Eliot also said, *Classicism loves

novelty.*23 Classicism is -doing the best one can with the

materials at hand.wz4 This definition of the Classicist as

bricoleur is not the only, but probably the most succinct,

definition Eliot gives of his conception of Classicism. The

important distinction is that the Classicist has a

consciousness of the age- It is insufficient either to

select mummified stuff from museum or to assume one can

make the world in one's own image. One must use the

materials at hand to produce something which is recognizably

new--recognizable because it demonstrates its own knowledge

of what has gone before, what lies at hand, and what time

and place it occupies, Eliot -prizedw both Dryden and

@•÷allarm6 precisely because they did this; they made what

they could of their material,23

Eliot's conception of the Romanticism/ Classicism

conflict answers questions too about the apparent

contradiction between typical definitions of the two.

Classicism wis not an aiternative to Romanticism,-ze It is

nothing peculiar to any time or place which accounts for

24, "Ulyss~s, Order and Myth," 4232.

the difference, but rather a peculiar relationship to that

ti= and place, Romnticisn, versus Classicism, as Eliot

conceived it, depends upon a particular theory of the

fndfvfdual subject or, rather, on a theory of that subjectSs

relationship to coaarunity. The distinction between a

Romantic and a Classicist is not even necessarily fixed or

consistent. Any one writex can be Romanticist or Classicist

at different tines, One of Eliot's definitions of

Classicism, as "a goal toward which all good literature

stlives, so far as it is good, according to the

possibilities of its time and place," requires even Eliot to

acknowledge that Austen, Blake, Byron and Goethe were all

Classicists at various The difference between the

Classicist and the Romantic, though, does not lie in the

possessfon or failure to possess personality. Rather, it

defines a relationship to the mterials-to use the terms

Derrida borrowed from Claude Levi-Stranss-- the bricoleur

over against the engineer.2e The Romanticist does not accept

what lies at hand, and thus dissociates himself from

society, whereas the Classicist tries to nse *at is

available to make sowthing new or better, The Classicist

acknowledges his relationship to traditZon and to coimmnity

without accepting it as it is; the Romanticist simply

27, "The Romantic Generation, If It E x i s t e d , " A*benaeur:GIC- 17, 28, Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the D i s r ~ ~ u r s e of the Human Sciences," in Modern critic is^ and Thecry: A Reader edl David Lodge CNew Youk: Longman, 13883: 108-122.

rejects influence out of hand, and is therefore o~iginal

only in a negative sense, a mere product of unacknowledged

and unconscious influences.

Influence/ Originality

Eliot's finely tuned sense of influence, which many

observers have agreed appears to have significantly

influenced the views and theories of Harold Bloom,2b is

inextricably tangled up with his ideas about the individual

self, In an essay ostensibly concerned with Henry James,

whose own influence on Eliot is manifest, Eliot explains how

James escaped the anxiety of Hawthorne's influence. Henry

Jaws' "tendernessff toward Hawthorne is

the tenderness of a man who had escaped too early from an environment to be warped or thwarted by it, who had escaped so effectually that he could afford the gift of affection.30

Eliot goes on to say that "the soil which had produced

IHawthornef with his essential flavour is the soil which

produced, just as inevitably, the environment which stunted

himma Bliot seems to be forming a picture of indlviduala as

deeply affected by =the soila which breeds them. In a

sirilar vein he says, for instance, that

There could be written a very instructive account of American Purtanism, with its interesting transition to Transcendentalism; but this would be a history not of American but of Boston Literature, and it would turn out to be not so much a history of the brahminical canon of Boston litexature as of Boston S ~ c i e t y - ~ l

Interestingly enough he would seem to be emphasizing that

American literature, with all its reverence for the

individual, is deeply influenced by the social context out

of which it springs; so much so in fact, that close enough

scrutiny of the literature would actually turn out to be a

history of the society which produced it. Eliot re-inforces

this poetics, in mAnrerican Literature," when he argues that

The lack of intelligent literary society is not responsible for their €Hawthorne's, Poets, Whiteaantsl shortcolaings; it is much Btore certainly responsible for some of their merits. The originality, if not the full mental capability, of these Isen was brought out, forced out, by the starved environment in which they found theflc~elves.~~

Starved environs force the individual to originality (the

italics are Eliotts), Originality, by this definition, is

created by influence; or, to be more precise, the lack of

influence.

W e have seen Eliot denigrate originality which results

from ignoring influence, How we see originality of a

dffferent kind also being depfcted in, at best, an

ambivalent light. At feast as early as 39&7, in a review of

The Letters of J - B - ye at^,^^ Eliot seem to be af the

opinion that originality is of minor impartance, saying that

-a poet seeks the truth, not o~iginality.~ In the cases of

Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman originality seers to be

desirable, but not in itself essential to good art, In

saying that their originality was "forced outa by the

starved environment he implies that they r~onld probably have

been better off with less originality and a more fecund

environment, There is, howevex, something unique in each

artist, Influence is really only half the story, According

to Eliot, the artist also has mpassionsa and illpulses which

lllnst be satisfied and that

the ways in wh5ch the passions and desxres of the creator piiiy be satisfied ia the mrrk of art are co-lex and deviows, In a painter they may take the f o r m of a predilection for certain colours, tones, or lightiags; ia a writer the original impnlse may be even more strangely transmtd-a*

ihis statement is rich with ramifications, What is relevant

to the present discnssioo is that, for Eliot, the creative

artlst has apassionsa a i c h anst be satisfied, and those

passions agakn suggest the existence of a central care of

identity. The artist acknonledges these passions and

ivlsea by r e a m s of what Elfot admixes in Hawthorne as

' h o e cold hardness,uf3 what Eliot calls Donne's adifficult

consciuadness and ubich m k e s Donne so appealing

to the rodern audience.

Indivldnality and Personality

Eltot prabed the -great writersa precisely because of

their personalfty- UadonbtdXy, Bliot describes the great

writers--that fs, the ones he thinks are great--- having

*created a world,- and as having mpersonality,u Jonson and

Shakespeare in particalar axe singled out in thfs way. Eliot

says af Jonsones criticism, that he "not unnaturally laid

down in abstract theory what is in reality a personal point

of view," H e gaes on to say that

It i s in the end of no value t o disc~ss Jonson*s theory and practice -less we recognize aad seize this p i a t of view, which escapes the fanolae, and which ks what makes bis plays worth reading. Jamson behaved as the great creative rfrd that Be was: he created his ava wutr&.LgTf S t a l i c s rcinel

Fur Eliot, then, to create oneSs awn wurld is the wark of

tbe greatest creative m i a d . He reiterates this same

cainrvictfon over a@ over, atmat Shakespeare, about

Rkmtaigne, abagt Dante, In hSls essay on Phflsp )lasslinger,

o r l g i ~ l l y tftled 'The Old Coredy,* S l i o t remarks that

*great literature* is "the transformation of a personality

into a personal work of art.Asm Since Hassinger's

personality "hardly exist^,^ he does not, "out of his own

personality, build a work of art as Shakespeare and narfowe

Idol.* Clearly this statement gives primacy to that

personality which is necessary in order to create great art.

At the saw time, though, Eliot criticizes lesser

writers fox precisely the fault of wpersonality,w Balzac

arouses Eliot8s ire because "the fantastic elementm in

Balzac "is not an extension of reality," as it is fn

Ibstoevsky, but rather is "an atmosphere thrown upon reality

direct from the personality of the miter.= The result of

this interference of personality is that *we cannot look at

it [the atneosphexel as we can look at anything in

Dastoevsky; we can only see things in it, we are plunged

into it ourselves.a3) In "Kipling Redivivus," Eliot accuses

both Kipling and Swinburne of the defect of personality,

while simultameonsly revealing the solution to the apparent

problem: Kipling and Swinburne, he says,

are personal: not by revelation, bat by throwing themselves in and gesturing the emotion of the rraent, The -tion is not stheres sipply, coldly independant of the author, of the audience.w4o

3% "The O l d Comedy, " Athenaeus 4702 C June 11, 13203 : 761. 39. "Ereyle and Balrac, AtAenaeus <May 30, 13135:332-3, 332. 4-0. %ipl ing Redivivur, " Atkrrnaeur (May 3 , I 3 1 3 j : 297-51, 298.

What this statement reveals, and what %umanist, Artist,

Scientist," reiterates is that personality is a prerequisite

for the artist, but that personality must be distilled or

transformed in the work- Distinguishing between the

humanist, the scientist and the artist, Eliot maintains that

the humanist has personality; often, we might think, more than the scientist or artist, But the hueraniat's personality throws out the idea, centrifugal, without so much entering into it....In the man of scientific or artistic temper the personality is distilled in the work, it loses its accfdents, it becomes, as wfth Hontaigne, a permanent point of view, a phase in the history of mind,.=

The trick, as it is formulated here, is to have personality

without being personal. Somehow the artist must *enter intow

the idea being expressed. Whe creation of a work of art,*

he says, nconsists in the process of transfusion of the

personality, or, in a deeper sense, the life, of the author*

into the work. He argues elsewhere that

The creation of a wort of art is like some other form of creation, a painful and unpleasant bminess; it is a sacrifice of the span to the wurk, it is a kind of death.'?

fbe agassions,* the central core of self, are transforered

h t o something coldly independent of the authoz. By acting

41. "Humanist, A r t i s t , Scientist," Athenaeum 4567 COct . 10, 191 9j : 1014-15, 1015. 42- "Eeyle and Ealzac," 393.

as a *medi urnea3 between social in•’ luences and *passions,

and by a kind of sacrifice to the work, wherein the author's

own personality is both extinguished and transformed, the

great artist produces a point of view. That point of view

"loses its ac~idents,~ is transformed into something which

is sirnply there, coldly independent of the author; the

author has forgotten about having personality in the process

of cultivating "true cold hardness," in the act of

concentrating on being *honestm and *conscious of the ageff:

No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his personality. He expresses his personality indirectly through concentrating upon the task which is a task in the same sense as the making of an efficient engine or a turning sf a jug or table leg.44

me artist must possess personality, and that personality

will reveal itself in the work produced, but only

Eliot repeatedly insisted that a critic, to be

effective, should also have personality, a point of view, He

felt that Robert Lynd's greatest =ault as a critic was that

he did not eHpose =his biases, his pre j ~ d i c e s , " ~ ~ This would

$3, This is, ef C S S U ~ S ~ , t h e term E l l ~ r t use5 Irt "'Tr ad l f , l c : r , and the Individual Talent," perhaps the w t ~ : ~ s t ~nfluential essay he ever wrote, t m f a r t u n a t e l y , s o m e of the qua1 ificati~ns and parameters ijf the idea ~n t h a t essay h a e been 4wer-looked ss that the impersonal theory as presented there ha5 been distorted and taken m~t , o f ~ t r , c w - r i ; t l c t , .

44. "FQW Elizabethan Dramatists," C r - i t e r z u n =J. 1 1 , r110- 6 fFeb. 19242: 115-23, 121, 45. "Criticism i n England," Atheneaun, 4650 'June 13, 13t93:3SG-7, 957,

have made him interesting if nothing else. "One must

criticize float some point of view and,.,it is better to know

what one's point of view is," Eliot said in The C r i t e r i ~ n , ~ "

and "to understand anything is to understand from a point of

Works of art, as well as commentary and criticism

of art, are only possible from some =point of view."

This relativism, uhich pervades all of Eliot's

thinking, explicitly recognizes that the matrix of

influences and passions which constitutes any given

individual is unique to that individual, but the implicit

recognition here 5s that the influences and passions are

also universal. The particular configuration is unique but

the materials out of which that confiquzation is made are

general and common to everyone. This recognition is made

mre explicit in wThe European Hind* where he remarks that

"our categories of thought are largely the outcome of Greek

thought; our categories of emotion are largely the outcome

of Greek literature," and that "every European mind, even

when untzained and uneducated* is saturated with the

European This staterent indicates at once his

sense of the pervastveness of influence and his grasp of how

to he original in the positive sense. In another essay Eliot

argues that "the study of m r e alien fanguagesa could cast

*into bold xeliefm the extent and kind of saturation to

which a mind had been subjected.'" The very notion of being

able to cast this saturation into bold relief indicates a

strategy for discovering the individual mind, And the "mindu

itself that was revealed in a given piece of literature was

what interested him. He felt that whatever matrix of

influences produced the mind, it was the mind that he looked

for in the literature.

The problem of merging originality and conventionality

continually troubles Eliot. In a review of a Zoology

textbook by one Professor Gamble, a very interesting essay

on completely non-literary concerns in The C r f terion, Eliot

elaborates a complex theory of eugenics which seems, for

him, to have significance in other ways. The thrust of the

argument is that "highly developed controln tends to produce

uexhaustion,u which in turn leads to isolation and that

produces a renewal of activity at a lower level of

cosmplexity. The misolatedu becomes the source of fresh

individuality, but the new individual beqins to dominate,

am3 the new dominance in turn leads to rediminished

pxogress, One of the things which seems of interest to Eliot

is that isolation can produce fresh individuality.

Eliotws casual acceptance of the principles a•’

eugenics, which could be seen as rather Draconian, Is

mollified by his particular perspective on the matter. He 1s

interested in what it reveals about the processes it

49, "& C o m m e n t a r y , " C~iterion v. 3 no. $ 1 , (April 132Si: 341-4, 342.

manipulates. Hore importantly, his detached, scfentific

cnriosity, and willingness to tamper with %aturalW

processes suggests a recognition that even natural processes

deemed sacrosanct may indeed be governed by mechanistic

principles, which can be controlled and manipulated, His own

discussion of it certainly focuses on its mechanistic

aspects. Moreover, the process itself is one wbich lends

itself well to Elfot and his poetics because it is, by

deflnltion, an oscillating system, in constant flux. The

subject sf the eugenic study achieves a kind of life, or a

reality-in-relief against the backdrop of the controlling

process. Although neither polar extreme fn the process can

be thought of as grounding the process in a concrete

reality, the subject takes on a discernible shape and life

when viewed against the backdrop of the process.

This eechanistic zoologfcal analogy, then, provides a

useful model both for Eliot and for a discussion of Eliot's

view of the humn subject. Finally, the question of whether

or not Eliot believed that there is a knowable, discernible

human subject--whether he anticipated Derridean thinking or

not--becomes somewhat irrelevant in the sare way that

putative parallels with rnch of the material of conterporary

theory does- In practice, critics need not bother their

beads about such philosophical issues, because the

arechanfstic wrlda demands its due, Eliot understood the

extent to which the rheturfcal universe, a d the polar

extremes of essential subjectivity and social inscription,

for all their apparent insubstantiality, nevertheless do

their work upon us, become wmaterial,w This is not to say

that speculations of the type suggested by these critics

never walinrentedw Eliot's thinking, but rathex to reveal

Eliot's solution to the problem of identity. For Eliot, the

individual, and, in turn, the artist, exists in a state of

flux between the purely personal and the strictly social.

One of the more interesting observations Eliot makes about

Donne is that it is aiiepossiblew to "isolate what is

*conventionalf in Donne from what is individual,w50 a

merging of convention and individuality that is accomplished

through Donne's difficult consciousness and honesty. The

problem for the artist is, first, to recognize the potency

of influence, to strip away the acctetions which pruduce

only conformity rather than novelty, and second to look with

honesty and hardness at the passions and the desires which

m u s t be satisfied.

We can see, then, that a close reading of all Eliot's

statements about subject/object relationships, while

initially appearing to reveal only inore confusion,

altirately reveal his view of the individual personality as

accapyfnq the p i n t of juxtaposition between the saturatlans

of 2nfLuence and the centzal core of self, The main thrust

of his view is that, precisely because of the problems

imherent in knuwinq what is the true self and what is the

@duct of external accretions, the poet's job is extrerely

S 3 , "John Danne," 331.

difficult. His discussions of the various writers who in

some way *alienatedw themselves from their societies reveal

hfa belief that this is one of the ways in which a writer

can see more clearly the *essential.* Writers who chose to

escape the environments which bred them, like Henry James

and Turgenev, as well as the poets who were isolated by the

material conditions of their existence, are, in Eliot's

judgement, able to see life more steadily and more whole.

His own escape from the environment which spawned him can

aXso be seen in this light, But what, then, does the early

prose, In its honesty, hardness, and difficult consciousness

show us about Eliot's own msaturations,m influences and

ia~pulses? In order to complete our picture of Eliot, it is

to these questions that we now turn,

Chapter 3

A PORTRAIT OF' THE ARTIST:

Early Impulses, Early Poems and the Primitive

One aspect of Eliot which cannot be made to fit neatly into

a discussion of his poetics of liminality f s the matter of

his own influences. Paradoxically however, a close look at

those influences, although an apparent detour, proves to be

pivotal to a complete understanding of his poetry and

poetics. As we have seen, Eliot's early prose posits the

"point of view" as the intersection of all the various

social, historical, and cultural influences with the central

core of the self, This configuration is the individual

subject and the personality. The early prose, however, also

adds something to the recoxd of Eliot's own point of view,

The famous and well-documented influences--such as Dante,

the Elizabethan and jacobean dramatists, and his

*possessionw by Jules Laforgue--are a kind of official

record of inflnences, And yet, a comprehensive reading of

the early prose demonstrates that these do not fully account

for Eliot's point of view- The well known aencruatations,m

or conformities, in Bliot intersect with some rather

surprising, non-confozmist, even radical fapofses that

songht expression. It is both necessary and interesting to

show some of those predilections in Bliot whSch have gone

largely un-noted,

Efiotqs conception of the -point of viewn provides him

with a name for his conception of Identity as existing in a

state of ceaseless oscillation between diverse social,

historical, and psychological forces, temporal yet

permanent, social yet unique. The very nature of identity as

described in this way is liminal, having no fixed location--

spatially, te~kporally, psychologically or socially--yet

existing within and without all of these loci. It comes as

no great surprise, then, that &liot9s own point of view is

itseff rather lininal. That point of view consists of a

number of juxtapositions: the dour seriousness and

prudishness for which Elfot is renowned, with what Eliot

himself called *decadencea; old man in a dry -ntha with

uPrfapus in the shrubberyff; an almost vicious cynicism with

a kind of laughter that is submarine and profound. The

graesore, perverse, and somubat disturbing content of some

of the the early poetry in particular reveals Eliotvs

coq?lex response to the whole question of mrality which

cannot be entirely explained away with recourse to the usual

reductive assessheets of him as a noralizing prude. Even in

allowing that the lesson of fiandelaire is that *all first

rate pcretry is occupied with Eliot says

amempied w i t h wral;ttyQ: the gtlestitra of morality and how

It is formed fs as important as a given set of rozals.

Bliotes complex attitude toward rorality takes on profound

siqnificance, particnlarly in light of the lesser-kn-

poems, those primitive attempts to work out what I am

calling a "poetics of liminalfty,* and their place in

Eliot's oeume and his thinking.

Eliot seems to throb between two lives in the early

writing, At t i e s moralistic, at times decadent, at once

scholarly and ribald, the early poetry in particular

p~esents a point of view which attempts to straddle Eliot's

own disparate inclinations. And even Eliot's more official

and sanctfoned influences can be shown to embrace the

concept of liiainality- His fondness fox Elizabethan and

Jacobean dramatists, for instance, stems from his taste for

a particular aspect of this writing which straddles comedy

and tragedy, His simltaneous fascination with and revulsion

against the *grotesquea represents an axmost schizophrenic

sensibility. Also in constant flux are the contrary

tendencies toward public expression of *forbiddena desires

and toward pzeachinq,

In a remarkably rich, colplex and suggestive essay

called "The Beating of a Drur," Eliot offers careful readers

insight into the sonrce of, and explanation for, his

contrary tendencies, In that essay Bliot propounds a "theory

of the develapnent of tragedy and comedy on* of a common

from entanglerents with other theories and theorists of the

h i p is that m~oredy and t-raqedy are late, arrtd perhaps

Imprmanent intellectaal abstzactionsg and that =such

abstractions, a f t e x developing through several generations

of cfwilization, require to be replaced or renewed.* 'Bhis

pronouncement follows an earlier and more arbitrary one:

there JMIS~ if the Fool in *Learw be called a "comic* character, be admitted some of the same comic element in the Witches in wHacbeth.w And I see no reason why, by the same extension, Caliban should not be Included in the same category.

I am aware that my classification of Pools lay appear arbitrary- And t w o other inclnsions may appear -re arbitrary still: the Porter in Macbeth and -tony in the scene on Poapey8s galley.=

Elfot conceives of the fool as serving ends uhfch are at

once comfc and serious, of holding these wabstractions,u

juxtaposed, in flux, and credits the fool with having a very

ancient source, prhz to the recent and arbitrary

*abstractionsm of coredy and tragedy. Bakhtin used

historical data to contend that the Greek drama was

i~complete unless the tragic trklogy was copgpleted by its

fonrth part, the coredp; Eliot says the two once sprung

f r o m a corron impulse arid source. By extension, Bliot

reftltes the very validfty of generic distincthms, and for

these reasons, Eliot feels that the character of the fool is

rost affective -em ft acts in sow way comter to the genre

in whfch it appears: Sbakespearecs most renarkable

aceolpI,isbrermts in tern of the Fool and the comic servant

3. "The Beat ing of a Drum, " 11, 4- C., f - in particular the chapter, "F-ram the Prehistory of Muelistic Disccarrse ," in ?he Diafogic Irtraginaticm: Fmir E s s a y s , Hmlquist and Caryl E m e r s o n trans . (Austenr Texas ihiveussxky Press, lo3€?13.

occtu in the tragedies3; lJarivitmces fools are both comic and

tragic figures in order to attenuate the antithesis between

seriousness and comdy4; and it is in some genre that is

neither tragedy or corny that the Fool *is best observed,n7

Eliot uses "The Beating of a Drumu as a discussion of

the primitive, rZtuafistic origins of the Fool and by

consequence as a platform for discussing rftual and dantle,

There is "more than a snqqestion of the shaman ox medicine

manm about the Pool in King Lear, says Eliot, and then

"drama is essentially ritual. and rituaf is essentially a

dance."- The rhythmic, ritualistic and conventional aspects

of literature are shown here by Eliot to be a kind of deep

rimesis, Anti-mimetic in the nsnal sense, they nevertheless

trigger a deeper level of consciousness whexefn the

sensfbifity is anffied rtnd the intellectma1 abstractions

which differentiate between c o d y and tragedy, between g o d

and evil,* between one person axad another, between sob3ect

amf ob3ect are partially broken down, and at some

pllcu~~~cfons level pre-empted, Eliot saw this undercurlrent as

fandarental to the artistic kqpalse, observing of Ben Jonson

that

if we dig beneath the theory, beneath the observation, beneath the deliberate drawing and the theatrical and dramatic elaboration, there is discwered a k i n d of power, animtfng IJonsones charactersf which cores from below the intellect, and for diicfi no theory of hamars w i l l accoant, &md it is the same kind of powex which vivifies himaletrio, aad Pan.arge, and sam bat nut all of the acoric= characters in D i c k e n ~ . ~ ~

%liotcs conceptfun of the attistic impulse as springing

from sorer near involuntary, pre-rational source is farther

sabstantiated by his psre of "The Beating of a Druma as a

platform for h i s own theo.tizinq about poetry--a

chatactexistic strategy of &liotes, H i s own theories often

sod, as he hilaself noted,aa like attempts to explain h i s

own paittic practice after the fact. Eliot theorizes that art

in all its form f r o m the primitive t o the rodern begins

with an impulse whfeh is prior to the rationalization of

& pnoccupied person, finding a drm, my be aiezdl with a d e s i ~ e to beat it; but ~ 1 e s s he is an irbecile he w a l l be unable to contime beating it and thereby satisfying a need (rather than a WcesiremB, dthoot f %&ling a reason fox doinq SO * ==

8k is c u t i a g am a study of rodern dance made by W. 0. E

€&stetleg, who, says Eliot, wfslls into the CO~~DII trap of

reasons for the primitive dancer's d a n ~ i n g , ~ What Eliot is

ahjecting to is the notion tha t the reason precedes the

gesture, aft is equally possible to a s s e r t , - he says, *that

the primitive ran acted fn a certain way and then found a

reason for it.-== Action precedes explanation. What Eliot

seeks in t h e primitive consciousness is the undissociated

sensibility which knows no disctinctions between comedy and

tragedy, nor between the real and t h e ideal For Ef iot , the

primitive consciousness which does not divide things up into

mintellectual abstractionsm constitutes, partially, both the

sonrce and the qoal of modern art,

But Eliot is quack to assert in the same essay that an

imtelligent ran will need to find reasons to go on beating

the d ~ p l , and thereby satisfying a need rather than a

desire. The reasons for beating the drum, in other words,

are of equal importance to beating the drum itseff- William

Skaff fqnores this impartant caveat when he concentrates on

Eliot's fascination with the prfrftive, lLccordinq to Skaff,

Eliot -ires the *amity of the primitive ~enafbillty,~ and

feels that "we rnst recover the rhythm of pxfmitive ritual

Urat erbodies the mity of oar conscia~sness.~~~ In its

a s s e s g ~ t is clearly shorn by the early prose to be

swpexficial. What Elfot seeks is a way to cuaflate the

3 3 . "Drum," 12, 14, T h e Philosophy of 1 .5 , E P x o t fPh11adelphxa: Unldefssty of Pmnsylvania Prtzss, 1%3Gi z C S .

logical and the pre-logical. Eliot also says, elsewhere,

tbat "the artist is, in an iwersonal sense, the most

conscious of men; he is therefore the most and the least

civilized and civilizable; he is the most competent to

understand both civilized and primitive.nL3

The *drum* Efiot is beating is always already rational

because it i t s constituted in language, Poetry, fox all its

ability to c~eate stylizatims of primitive consciousness

through rhythm, conventions, ritual, repetitions, and

spectacle, mat always function within the linguistic zealra.

The pre-rational impulse of the writer does not

automatically create a pre-rational response in the reader,

thoagh. That pre-rational irpalse must fanction within the

rational to trigger the pre-rationaf responses. =The idea

simply cores,m for Eliot, %nt upon arrival it is subjected

to prolonged manip~lation.~ If *the ideas becow wre

autorzlitic, come! w r e freely and are less ranipalatedm then

"we! begin to suspect their origin, ta suspect that they

spring from a shallower ~onrce.*~~ They spring, in other

wards, from the discourses which have shaped the artist

rather: than from the deeper somrce of the impulses which

This theory, then, is the deep soarce of Eliot*s

15. "War Paxnt and Feathers, * Rltbenaeus I O c t , $7, 13191: 1 0 3 5 . 16, "The Naked Man, " Rghenaeur CFeb, 13, 19203: 208-9.

and despite the fact that Eliot is usually seen as

burrourless himself, he says in "To Criticize the Critica

that his *antipathyu toward D-H. Lawrence *remainsm after

many years because of Lawrence's wegotism, a strain of

cruelty and a failing in common with Thomas Hardy--the lack

of a sense of hrr~ .our*~~ fitalics mine]. Eliot's own sense of

huwur, though, is not the kind he forcefully denigrates as

mwholly insignificant funniness without seriousne~s,~~*

Bather, Eliot values the kind of humour he finds in the

Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists which, because of its

yoking of serfousness and humour, might best be described at3

liminal- In reference to Ben Jonson, Eliot defined this

comedy as "the comedy that is serious, even so&~e.*~* One

might conclude from this deffnition of camedy, as William

Skaff has done, that, for Eliot, only comedy which is

ultintely serIuus wcounts,a and thus see Bliot, once again,

as houoarless, Bnt that too is contradicted in the early

prose, "The Beating of a Drum,* the essay from uhich William

S L a f f draw precisely this ~onclusion,'~ explicitly

precludes distingnishinig between seriousness and comedy, the

tun things whfcb Eliot called "Imperaanent intellectual

zcbbitrat~frfoas,~ itnd therefore preclutdefs vaitrfrig one of these

laore than me outex,

What Eliot considers good c o d y is comedy which, by

definition, is sirnltaneously serious and funny, yet not

really either of these. Take for exalsrple Eliot's assertion

that ?Sarlowews me Jew of M a l t a is not to be read as a

"tzagedy of blod,' but rather as a *farcem:

I say farce, bat with the enfeebled huatrour of our tires the word is a misnomer; ft is a farce of the Old English humnr, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the humour which spent its last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens.jx

The erphasis on a -savage comic humourm which is *terribly

seriousa is but one example of an ongoing and pervasive

concern. This particular observation carries within it a

nambex of tantalizing elaes, among them the suggestive

tro~tnection to Dlickens from *oar Eliot took the original

title for The lihste Land, but its most interesting hfnt

comes in its uniting of comedy and seriousness in a way

wbfch snggests a poetic progzarre to be revived, *The

coatinned popularity of Shake~peare,~ says Eliot,

has this ra?anfng, that tBe appetite for poetic &am, am3 for a peculiarly English comedy or farce, has never disappeared.z*

Wpdkm muis also wgns EIIotts approval because his work

trboaies the preservation, or perhaps the restoration, of

this type of axt. Eliot describes tewks as wholly conscious

and deliberate in his attempt to restore %he Old English

For Eliot, neither the taste for this type of humour

nor the huwur itself has completely disappeared. Eliot

finds the modern eqnivalent of this kind of humour In the

wlow-browu colaedy of the lower classes, not in the =re

supposedly respectable corrtedSes being written and produced

for the middle and upper classes. Indeed Eliot feels that

the wlower-class~ humour of the =sic-hall, which is

wmordant, ferocious and personalmzg revives, or preserves,

precisely the kind of serious comedy he values. The English

music-hall comedian usupplies in part, and naconscfously,

the defect," says Eliot, and by defect he means the aspect

of Podern hurmnz which is "pitiably dinini~hed.~ According

to Bfiot, Bnglish music-half eoredians -effect the comic

p.tugationw with this almst mythical humour, The audience

member, he says, "desires to see himself on the stage more

sdrirable, wre forceful, rose villainous, rore comical,

m r e despicable--ad -re much else--than he actually is,"

feeling ia himelf the possibility of k i n g as fumy as Imslc-hall comediansl, is purged of ttttsatjisf ied desfre, transcends himelf, and anconsci~laly lives the q t h , seeing life in the light of iraqisation, fdhat is soretimes called *valgaritym is therefore one thing that has not beem valg~uiss ;ed,~~

23. "Lsndan L e t t e r , " 689, 24. toc, c i t l 25, "The Romantic: Englishman, The Comic Spirit, and the Functim 0 5 Criticism," T y r o , 1 <13223:4.

By straddling, in a way, the closed categories of humour and

seriousness, the muslc-hall comedy allows the audience to

enter 2nto another klnd of lirinal state where the sharp and

indestructible briers between people are not so much

broken down as blurred by this thing which allows them to be

both mare thersrefves and part of something cownal.

Although the coincidence of perception has been

overlooked by other crltics, BlLiot's way of conceiving this

comedy which is seraons closely parallels Wikhail BakhtinWs

theories about *curic high seriousness* and its function in

the kind of literature Bakhtin calls %arni~afesque-~

W h t i n describes what he calls carnival langhter as having

three essential corponents, all of which are paralleled is

Biiot8s dfscnssions of coric seriousness:

It is, firat of all, a festive laughter- Therefore, it fs not am indivfdaal reaction to sore isolated mcomicu evemt, Carnival laqbtez is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is nnivexsal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, inchding the carnival's participants. The entire wexld is seen in its droll aspect, fn its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambfvaleat: it is gay, t z f ~ t , aad st tire same tlvr rmrlilag, derfdfng. It asserts and denies, f t barits and r e ~ f v e s - ~ ~ litallics mine)

Ellot, Iike iialthtin, believes that the coric pargation

ontafls a sialbeaus degradation and exhaltation. of

tho practitioners Eliot cites repeatedly as acbfeving this

26, MjkhaiX Bakhtin, R a h l a i s and His h r l d - Helene I s w l s k y trans, tBlamaingtons Indiana University Press, fp%341: 11-12.

is soewhat dgfferent from 8akhtines of course, and Wakhtin

made much mre of the material than Eliat, but the clear

resemblances cannot be wholly ignored. By partially breaking

down the otherwise aindestractible barrhrsWs7 between

people, this collaborative, serious comedy gives

participants a glimpse into -the aytb,* bat at an

unconscious level, and the myth is, at its heart, both for

Eliot am3 Babhtin, the life principle which unites, on

occupies a limhal threshold between, death and lffe. For

Eliot, this principle is ~~lilnifested in the fertility

rituals. For Bakhtin it is manifested In Carnival, which is

the saae tMng nnder a diffement gaise.

In his discussions of the wit-half c o d y , Elfot also

calls attention to another kind of llnirmlity when he

3rrst i f ies mvulgaarityu as something wholly elev~ted because

of the corwnSsn betmten otherwise isolated iadivfdaafa that

it represents, Grarrted, his description od %he rusk hall

c d y as *ferociousw and -mordanta would seer to belie its

c-1, collabotative nature. Granted, his description of

the .uaic hall core?diaa as mpittfag hfrself against a

suitabfe aadience,* an audfehce which is *qafck to respond

rrf- irppr-1 sr c~atempt~ s~gqeshs a fairfy *fcrocsioas9

krnd of collaboratioe, levertheless, for Eliot the music-

ball COIPdy has the comic serfolrrsness *ickr all- the

amdieace -x to utrasm~emd bfmelfU and live the myth.

&ml t8m too, arrcurdiag to Eliot, occaplee s 2imiaal

state because *the myth is irpagination, and ft is also

crit ic isa, and the t w o are one,azE

lerioixs comedy also operates in a liminal state between

conscious appreciation and unconscious manipulation. The

audience w i l l accept their onn ideal *only mcon~ciously,~

Hlfot argues. The comic purgation that is effected by the

mnsic-hall c o d i a n would be ineffective if its full effect

were consciously apprehended, because *the audience do not

realize that the performance ... is a compliment and a crittcisr of themselve~,~ and "neithez could they appreciate

the c~lplirent or swallow the ~riticism,~ A comedy of both

coascions and anconscious effects, it is neithez completely

a m ar the other. Bliot believes that this kfnd of comdy

aLLows audience 4 perforuer to collaborate in r k i n d of

colrrural activity-

QEwionsly collaboration is anothez kind of llunrality.

I n Loadon tetter* of Decelber Z922, Eliot reiterates

his belief in the collabrative matrue of this type of

e d y , bat bmadtas the ramifications of his argument:

The fact that this article was twice reprintedao within a

reasonabfy short period of ti- further substantiates

Eliot's conviction about its basic premise; namely that

coiedy in particular, and all art by extension, is a

collaborative experience- Less than a year later Eliot

returned to this issue, revealing again how important

collaboration is to his thinking. His articulation of th3s

insight is even wre striking in "The Function of

Criticismw:

only the ran who has so much to give that he can forget himself fn his work can afford to collaborate, to exchange, to cont~ibute~~

The paradox of this situation, though, is that this

collaborative artist, bas so arch to gfve,' is able to

take, to exchange; the man who cam "forget himselfa becomes

w r e hirself, mre individ-1,

Bliot also saw this same paradox manifesting itself at

the social and cultural level, He itXt that the history of

the EBglish language and literature itself demonstrated how

a willingness to collaborate and exchange, in effect to

iqmore dfstfnctioas camad result in greater distinctiveness.

30. Donald Gallup, 7,s- E l i o t : A Bibliography Gallup*~ citation reads: "Reprinted, w i t h revzsion, as 'In M-riam: H a r i e Lloyd,' C ~ i t e r i s n , 3 . 2 (Jan, 29233: t92-5, and as ??hr ie Lloyd, @ " 3 2 , "The Function ctf Criticism," CriLerion vcrl, I I rrG. 5 C O c t . 1923): 31-42,

the more significantly it became So too, the

artist who absorbs and assSmilates influences becomes more

nnf que - Collaboration, as Eliot s a w it, is intimately tied to

individuality, to the foraration of personality and is

therefore fundamental to art- The absorption and

asafrffatston of influences helps define and distinguish the

hdivfdual, whife at the same time making tbe individual

mre representative of the comnality betwen people. The

artist is an extension of this collaborative process.

&cause art helps to break down the otherwise sharp barriers

between people, and because it blurs the arbitrary

distinctions created by intelfectual abstraction, art

fnvites its participants to collaborate: with each other,

with the work of at, with its creator, and, corring full-

clrcle, w i t h its cteatoxSs ainfZuences.a Eliot's well-known

rejection of the distinctZon between thought and feeling can

axso be seen as a consequence of this larger rejection of

arbitrary and abstract distinctions,

?be l&rinal sensibility sngqested by such a view not

anly accounts for, but virtrtally dictates, another

ompublished paems fror his letters, b w i ~ i n g as early as

1914, Eliot experimats with a prirLtive poetics which

22. "Was There a Scott ish Literature?, " AMenaertr (August I , L31.3): 68C,-1. 681.

writes across boundaries--formal and substantive, The poetry

generated out of this poetics can be seen as prototypical of

later, published poetry- During his early years in London,

around the time of the publication of "The Love Song of J ,

Alfred Prufrock," a bizarre and debauched poem called -King

Bolo and his Big Black Kweenw begins to appear in his

letters, first to Conrad Aiken, then later to Ezra Pound.

References to the poem also indicate that Wyndham Lewis was

aware of it, as well. Short fragmentary snatches of this

poem surface occasionally for many years after its original

appearance. Apart from the occasional bit of profanity, such

as Eliot's telling Conrad Aiken that *if you are in with

that crew, you might tell them to butter their asses and

bnggar themselves,* or on another occassion clasing a letter

to Pound with the %enedictionw(he frequently signed o f f

with *benedictionsa) of "Good tucking brother,@ there is

nothing else i n the Eliot oeuvre quite like this poem. What

is post interesting about it is its rejection of the easy

distinctions of =arbitrary intellectual abst~action,~

I m r a l and debauched in the usual sense, 'King Bolom 1s

nevertheless a coimplex study of mrality and the perverse.

Wmlqar* in the usual sense, the poem lampoons pedantry and

polite society.

LOext to The W t e Land, "King Bolou Is Eliot's -st

sestaiaed foray into the poetics of limi~lity. The deep

pre-logical sonrce fror whfch it appears to spring is

snbfected to complex mnipnlzations, the affecttve

consequences of which are impossible to fully delineate, The

fragments are fall of what Wyndham Lewis called wexcellent

bits of scholarly ribald~y,"~ a suggestively limfnal

expression, but as Eliot lamented in a letter to Ezra Pound

[ 2 Yeb- 1915),

-King 8010 and His Big Black Kween* wall never burst into print, 1 understand that Priapism, %arcisaisr etc. are not approved of and even so innocent a rhyme as

m.,-palled her stockings off With a frightful cry of Ha~ptbahnhof!!~

Is considered decadent.=*

The fact that these stanzas appeared off and on for years,

sad the fact they were known to a small circle of friends,

suggests that they satisfied some i-ulse for public

expressfon that Eliot had not the temerity to make truly

pnblk, As quasi-literary output mde semi-public, they

reveal Eliot's attempt both to be and not to be ribald, and

conversely, scholarly. In his struggle with conflicting and

even disturbing influences and impulses he creates a liminal

f o r m of expression in which he can safely Parent that this

ndecsdentm work will never "burst into print,' In content,

%Ssg fbQlom shorn Eliot's own savage comic hnmour, in form

ft fs remarkably sttbtle in its lirinalities.

*RauptBahnhofa mrsms central or rain railway station,

am3 thfs 'lay w e l l appear, withoat the context of the other

33. V a l e r Se E l iat ed, , Letters, 86n 34. L e C t e r i r , 8Ei,

stanzas frcr the poem, to be an =fnnor=ant rh-,* But within

that context it hardly seems innocent, In a letter to Conrad

Aiken, dated 19 July 1914, Eliot writes

%OW while Colurbo and his men Were drinking ice cream soda ln barst King Bolows big black queen That f am- old breach 1 (oader 1 . Jnst then they rang the bell fox lunch And served ap--Fried Hyenas; And Colrrrbo said = W l t l l you take tail? Or just a bit of p(enl~)?*~~

f suggest that the connotations of an *Hauptbahnhofa as a

very busy depot, a kind of * G r a n d Central Stationm are w r e

readily discernible when this excerpt comes into play.

But the interest3nq aspect of *Xing Bofom*s form1

lirinality is that nearly every time it appears Eliot

inclndes a comntary on It, written in very rock-serious

scholarly tones. easing as sorething af an Intellectual

bistoxian, he observes of the passage 3-t quoted:

The bracketed portions we owe to the rcestorattsioner of the editor, Pxof, Bagienpfeffer (Balle), w i t h the assistance of h i s tw Inseparable friends, Dr. Iians Rigger [the celebrated p e k ) aad ?iexr Sctutitzel (Ass Wein), M a w r#ch w e owe to the haxdwon fatnition of this truly great sebolart Tba! editor also justly &serves: "There seems to be a double entendre aboat t&e last tw limes, but the fiee flavuaz of the jest has not stuvived the centuriesw,--]let w e hope that such genius as his m y penetrate cnrerr t h b

for= adapted, l-t. n e s t f h g the poem proper inside the

cctrwtntary but belisg the author of both, is inherently

Ifrhal: is the c-ntary generated by the p o e m or vice

vexsa? What is the perspective of the miter?

Tksc and athex poem, acd their delightf uf

c i n t a r i e s , also show aspects of &fiotes g~rsonality,~ if

we may maw me that t e r m , which have, for whatever reasons,

remained obscnte- Yes, they sbow him to have a debaached

sfde, but they also show a considexabfy wre ltqbt-hea~ted,

aad hnmrons aide of Blfot, and show h i m to be less prudish

than both h i s detractors and h i s defenders have claimed him

to be- The gzrotesgae, earniwafesqne ambivalence created by

Wth the farm and the content cannot be e n t f r d y ignored.

'i"lrse distnrbing underpinning24 of racism and serisr

notwftbtandfng, t h e bt;iie~nror#jr aad ribald ffagmemts also

cast a mew l i g h t on Islfot*s Suecney poems anb om roch of the

swprprisssed nterfal of i"he YCirste hand,

aSI IRe~y % r e e certainly boars si- of the same

rixtmco of the scbXar1y aad tbe ribaid, with its epigram

&mot raczks agraaniag with cantinasal sr trge~,~ a d tbea

"hxbk, Xodr, msacbrxellW Tbc j o k e s rixigq *volgim* sexuality

akd exoditf am, l i k e PolypBert Ulc! mons-eyed shepherd laver,

aDdl

#?be X-ed abadaw of. a ran Its Bistory, said Purrsoa Who Baa mt s e e m the sillhmaette

Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.Is7

can be seen as a very grisly and cynical condemnation o f

physicality, but perhaps it is 3ast as p m s i b l e that the

ascholarlyw is befng paked fam at here. *Sweeney Erectm

farces its readers to x c e p t and recognize the close

piuallel between the epileptic fit, whtcB is the subject; of

tbe poem, and orqasa. llpazt from the gruesome allusion in

"this oval Q eropped oat with teeth," the description of the

hsickle wtion fror the thighm begins a passage in wbrch

the woman (lamricaa)

Jaicknffes npward at the knees men straightens oat: fror heel to hip P~shiftg the frammmzl of the bed And clawing at the pillowslip (31)

The fmqe 1s rather gruesome erotica, antt this m y Be

construed as a condematioa oE sexuality, or, even i f

ilcy=dPa;ed as a sake, c O b d ~ 9 ~ d as a tastelessly c lue1 one,

bat fn light of the %fag eColom fragments, and particularly

t b i r cummmtaurrjes, ft is also possible to see the Sweeney

poems as a progression in Eliotes goetics of lfrimallty, The

sdml;auly iud the x f b 3 d , the orttlgar poetxy and its

-tazy are mow trammted into, d fused fm, the p o e m .

Oat of the mgol results of tbia fusian is that =Smeeney

I[hcoctn farces images apon the d a r d s of its wre pradish

37. "Sueeney Ere&, " C a J l e d e d P e a s , p. 35, Subo~querrt references tu this poem vill be to page numbers, and wtll be given pareprthet;kcally in tne t e x t ,

readers which wauld scandafize t h e m , but which cannot be

censured nitboot a confession of having penetrated the

double entendre. Po acksow1edqe that the poems are -basem

and uwlqar* is to admit having seen the sexual parallel,

which I s itself an wdaissiob of the very baseness and

vtllga~ity in question, bnd Eliot also has the last lauqh on

that public w h k h sees the sexual w a l l e l as intentionally

off.-patting, as condemnatory of sexuality a d physicality,

for they speak atroot it fn solern aad sexious tomes, and

thereby fat2 right Into its interpretive trap,

Elfot is obvio~sly a w e of the shock-value of "Kkng

ltLogo,* and, fn true amtl-aotboritarfan, carniwalesqme style,

seem very much inclined to ttse it, In a letter to Ezra

Psmtd he says *I have been invited by f m l e -'flELDE ta

coatrfbnte to a readiag of ptHfFS: big wigs, OSlflSCD a d BDXnt

SBitmell, Graves ,,,19iclbols, and C#THBRSa(sic Iitalfcs

rlrael). men he asks *shall X oblfge them w i t h oar old

f r J d 4X%UWBO? or Bola, since f a r o a ~ ? ~ ~ * '9y ~ i t i q a d

*prHblia;hiagm f o ~ a very select amdiemce, aria by mimagbnimp

hfmtlX s h a c k h q aa aroiliencre of 'big wigsa B U o t seems to be

satisfyisg an iqnrlsc for public expression of forbidden

&sires iuld forbirdkdcn la~gbter--a distinctly liiinal fmplse

a i c h w&11Zf take em eweu wre sotkraurirle aad profoand forrs

X*er trt F&e libsfe &ad, The t i i d s of laqhtez a d desfre

e-essed are, of coorse, distinctly liniaal fn their

arbfwalemze, as weXl,

3% L u 6 t . e ~ ~ ~ 2C6,

It is important to keep in rind Eliot's observation

that -the ways in which the passions and desfres of the

creator may be satisfied in the work of art are conpfex and

devi~pa.~~* The point of reationing this here is t o

refterate that, for Bfiot, the creative artist had

mpassfonsu and *desfrerru which must flnd expression even if

they mst be =strangely tramswted.* Surely it is imgy~ssfble:

to ignore, therefore, tbese passions and desires which Eliot

so clearly and repeatedgy finds i t necessary to express. And

salcely he expresses them in mtrans#rtdm form In his m x e

*legitimatem poetry.

Bven Sf iot*s very early paetry, that prrb3Pslsed i n Pha

mtb dcacltemy Record, *Ah Fahfe for Feasters* in particu'lar,

Is almst Byronic in its concentration on drinlring, faaating

d revelry, in fts ambivalence toward camma mfails and the

chareh, and in its harrarous, off-hand tone that is intenddl

to cl~ire the gap b e t w e e m ttself and the rcabex, Aftex the

influence of Laforgne is felt, and after Eliot's verse

bet- conskdexabry mre sophisticated, that resemblance to

Byran vanishes besiad other facades, mt in *lCing Bola,* in

the Sweresley p6, and, f cantcadi, in TBe m t e &andi the

basic ilpalsa, altbuqb evcm wre strangely tranartited,

remias; t)re basic desire is satiaffed-

?'he *qpcatium of wrality,@ certainly, bat not a

airpXistic def- of "goad msalsw is what EfioS attains

to- ibo wgitas that Sliest described as awtal* wrat

triven that alf of these wxiters were banned at soae point in

t h t r careers on grt~nds of obscenity, it seerr safe to say

that what IrflJlut lleaat by * w x a l u was *concexaexf with tbe

issete of m s a f f t ~ , ~ w i t h hew and why wrals are formed,

rathr than wftb zr kfnd of dtdacfic moxaliiziaq. In h i s essay

rirc co8tc#plat;iaa of the horrfd or sordfd or dtsqust iq , by a m artfst, is the necessazy and aegativrt aspect of the irpolae tornard the prrusuft of k a t y , Bat not a l l saccoed as dtd Daate in cartpzessthg the corglett scale frum negative to pasitivre?. The 8egirtive: is the enre flportpaate.40

-re iuportarrtiy, though, it seems iaerety t r r force aff

these conflSct3nq attitudes and influences toqether in such

a way that the serious readlngs are no more cancelled out by

the ironic reversals, than the fronles axe by the

seriousness- W , ironically, Bliotes prescient fampooning

of scblarfy prsofes in the *Biq BoZoa frhqients is of

precisely the type that has k e n performed i n all

aerioasness upon me mste laad itself.

Chapter I

TEE LIIIltllAL 001YDITla4 OF ART:

!mfmmY MfD PILM=ZIQ&

C l e a r l y it wafd Be both oafafr aad erroneooss to snggcst

t b t E3iot ~ e s ~ i & e d an whfeh all ar t is ts wleze

t~ ~ Q ~ X O W - X l l f e e hG & i ~ d . y c-fonod -1-t

such p ~ d s ~ f : i p t i ~ ~ s , levextbelresa, he held w a y firm aad

distinct views m a t what constftpted art, abd those views

ma f-ntal to ails; PlLdexstzmdhg of what his a u ~ srt

attempts; In eEfcxtr, they set oar starrdards, even i f only i n

tBs cam arf ?&- RMot B i n e l f .

I M t smprisingly, all of 81fotes dfsc~ssiona of art are

also c ~ ~ c ~ ~ in onc m y or maother with lirinality; they

Jrr t b a a s a l w e s in a U ~ S n a l pasitfan, "mey axe caqbt op

f - "JoSm Dryden," T i r e s fiterapy S u p p l e m e n t , 1012 (June 9, 19hl)z 361-2, 36s-

on, and discassions of, the raay other issues w f t h which hfs

conception of art is aliletnted. Lirinality is crucial to

Eliotgs conception of tbe place aad the functian af the mrk

of art- In fact, his conception of the work of art is his

must thoroughly I%misaX concept.

ltFe essay, * V e r s e and Prase, a one aE the rany essays In

which Eliot discasserr technique, elaborates the basic theory

of poetry, and by extenstom, of art in general which informs

all of ElSat's tbfmkibq on tbe stabject. Beforring

spcclfically, at first, to versificatfon, he says:

Versification, ia anjf oQ the systems known to Baropean am3 other cnftmres, brings fn ssmethtnq thaf: fxor arry other poilit of view than that af w t t is a sopa?xfl~ity, a definite cuncessioa to the desire for

Bcfore caesfderfmg tite two main ideas which surface here, rse

aesd to clew up an appaulent cantradiction, Whereas Eliot

appeatl~s to be saying that poetry, i,e. versification, is

in terms of its cancession to play, he is actually

Vorsiffcatfoa is rrnlqtre to poetry, but

Ckr thc other had, prose, not being cot off by the ba~1c"ier of w~ll:srs which rnrt at tire sarc t i m e be affirmed a d diminished, cam txananute lffe ia its own weay by zafsimg it to the codition of *plap precisely because it is aot vexse.lftalics d n e P

'- 2- "Prase and Ver-, * Chapbook, 22 CApr., 1 - 1 9. 3. c i f .

la is not singling out one f o r m of expression aver any

other, Bather, the salient idea k S n g expressed aboat

artlstic expression is that, by definition, it fs predicated

aa sore *rropezfloit~ to life, or on the *cuMditlon of

play.@@ P~xtAerwre, the condition of *playa is manifested i n

a wax& sf azt as *a defftrite concession to the desire for

playca So then, there is solrethiag in art, which art alone

dacs, but which *lifew wants. Conversely, there is that i n

Xffe which art rrtst we: the writer of poetic drama and the

creative artist in gemeral,

rast take genuine and substantial emotions, such wuotfoss as ~beroxvatfon can verafy, typical d i e m s , and give them aemtbtic form.*

In other words, &rt occupies the threshold between the real

y t of necessity be aliremted by, infused by, even

governed by, the mtiams of lived experience. B9"L as real

4- "Foreign Literature: Wether Rostand Haa Something Abaut H i m , " Athenaeum CJul y 25, l 3 X W : 666.

netferttterless be transwted into art. It beccmes s o w t k f n g

epecnliar to art," In Bliotws wards, art is -a mans of

co-icatinq those feelings peculiar to art, which range

from ;rrtr%esent to ecstasy,wb

Eliotss d i ~ l ~ r ~ s s f o n of prose and verse also calls

attention to a different kind of lilinality, which

exemplifies the way tbis concept ftutt=tions 1n his poetics,

What be calls the *barrierw of verse st be, he says,

sirnltaneously *affirmed and diminished.* The simultaneous

affirmation amd dieination of barriers, of boundaries, of

differences, is, fdauentally, what Eliot's poetics in

geaeral attains to. The dual movement here is crucia3 to a11

of BXiot9s tbintieg- Haxaover, the refereace ta *the barrier

of versem shamld not be seen as identifying soae special

amstrafnf. of poetry- &y art ftmct;fona through alEfirring

and dirinfshing barriers. Prose, which has its ows abillty

tu raise life to the condition of play, Is eqnally subject

to barriers of diEferent types,

Eliot said -that the real failare of the rass of

cogteaprary Prerse is the failare to draw il~ything new from

life into are,* amil ttbt 'the labnr of ~ h l l a r d w a t b the

Remch Bangstage* 591 *sl~lletbinq very importantu because

* e s e ~ y bt t l e be f-t with syntax ~eprereents the effort to

triuiizimte lead iata gold, ordinary lampage into poetry.*a

T h poetic8 adumbrated by such a prapoaition, wbich seen

5. "A Ebief Treatise an t h e Criticism sf Poetry," Chapbook, i i . 9 ( M a r . 1 3 2 0 3 1-SO, 6- "Pruse and Verse, " Chap-& Clt321i s 3-20, 9,

prfrarffy concerned ufth taking lived experience *up into

art," w l t h the prob3- of transiutinq the personality into

a work of art, and of *raking a world,* produces a

carbination of the real and the imagined which neither quite

m@rqes ther nor keeps ther separate. In fact, this arediatfon

repzasrrents precfseZy the kfnd of strbddling of the

fngfaatfvr and the actual uhtch Eliot vaxues, *The great

artists do not unfte iraqlnation and obse~vatfon,~ he says,

because the great artfst the isagination...becores a

fine a d delicate tool for an operation on the sensfble

world.*7 The fmqinatfon AS employed as a mans of takfng

life up into art. And, when this delicate operation is

parformed on the semsfble rworld, the artist creates a m i o n

of the actual and the wpotentiala in the very act of showing

&Be mWfdgeab3e dfstaace Between the tu6, =lt Is this

intensity, precisely, and consequent discontent with the

c9pacityRa wbich gdzives the great artist to art and to

This awfnl separatioa bet-= potential passion asad any

achrafizatiaa ~oautible ia life, ncvexthelerts only tells piut

of the story. In an essay on Turgenev, written for the

Bgoist in 1917, Bliot expressed his admiration for

Turgenev's ability to acorrect the seriousness of life w j l t h

the se~fousness of art-= By this formulation art functions

as a corrective to fife, and as such i s clearly a thing unto

itself,

Turqenevns technique is responsible for another type of

lirinality as welt, In the same essay, Efiot Irrakes what

seers at first to be a contradictory observation about

Turgenev, saying Turqenev deronstrates "the universal

sameness of men and and shows the difference between

people to be only "snperficial difference^,^^ In light of

Eliot's references to athe indestructible barriers between

pecrplem this abaervation wonld appear ccontradictory; haw can

people be universally the same with only snperrficial

differences, and yet be divided by indestractible barriers?

Significantly, the t w o generalizations are Eliotes, not the

niteres to whom he refers, m a t does solve the dilemma is

that Eliot s a p hugenev emphasizes the fpportance of the

%mperficial variationam between one hnman being and

another, me variations, no mtter thef r superf iclaiity,

as socially d e e m e d is more or less tloiversally the same.

Wrrt the sopcerficlal differences which resoft frol rimer

9. 'Turgenev," Egoist, I V , 11 < k c , 13173: 167.

warfations in point of view or perspective place an

unbridgeable gap between then.

Here again we see Eliot merging while keeping distinct.

The work of art shows, fn the very attempt (and its

inevitable failure) to unite, the awful separation between

actual l i f e and passionate potential, and the superficial

yet indestnsctible barriers between people. They are all the

s-, and yet they are irrevocably different. The work of

art exploits, or at feast explores, this disjunction between

the univezsal and the particular, and between the real and

the ideal. The wort of art simultaneously bridges and opens

these gaps, and coaseqaently occupies a Urinal locus. Like

Dcrrida's differgnce, it hfghlights *at both is and cannot

be- Phe personalit;y, arad the passions rast converge in the

w o k oof art itself, not to create a mere record of those

thfmqs, bat rather to transform then into a new experience

wbfch is both entirely i t s own and entirely cuntained within

the reax and the ideal--anather kind of liminallty-

hamsformtion, tltiutilmmtattion, distillation--thes*s

term ream thro9ghoat the early prose, Eliot tells us again

aad again M a t the great witex transform personality,

withoot befmg personal, inta a Sn,~ld,~ or a wlbrk of art,

'ItBa "passions sad desires of the creatolt* constitute a very

s l g n r l f i ~ i i ~ t priut of tBc c q ~ t i o n fox an art -tion, bot

thsy are satisfied in dcvtoaa uam, amd are 9stxaqely

view sor yctt the inpalse fur expression. The point of view

and the passions and desires are necessary to art, b w t not

sufficient for art- Eliot's criteria for art include the

'true cold hardnessm required in order to know one's point

of view, and the -having of passionrr, ar desires

from which the artist wishes to be ~ n b u r d e n e d , ~ ~ but art

itself i~ fundamentally a m r k of transformation,

k c o r d i n g to Elsot the stricttaxes on the creation of a

separate aesthetic experience are a t once alwst inffnltely

varied and rigidly controlled by the concept of organic

nnity, Eliot allowed that a pet's techniqae both could and

should vary, seeing -no reason uby a considerable variety of

verse forms [coaldl not be employed within the ifrits of a

single poem," bot at tbe same time he denigrated verse which

%inned against unity.*z= Unity, in other wards, has very

little to do with rigid adbereace to specific formlae,

Instead, nnity describes the su~cessfnl distillation oZ

diverse external sources into an olrganically generated

whole; it is an internal qualfty af the work which m y draw

from aa al-t infinlte variety of external and structutal

suruees. At the same time, kowver, Eliot was not as opposed

to rhetorfc and literary convention as this formla right

srnggest*

SO. "Tradjtion and the Individual Talent,H This essay f i r s t appeared in t w o parts in The Egaist between Sept. and Dr;c, , 1928, I t has been reprinted many tzmes. I will quote CYFM Selected P ~ o s e of T , S , E l i d CLondm: Fabw and Faber, 1975): 37-44, i f , "Prose and Verse," 5,

In Whether Rustand Had Something About His,a12 gliot

argues for a way of expressing both artificial and direct

speech in what he calls "a rhetoric of the staff it~elf.~

Eliot defends the use of wrhetorica by defining It as,

essentially, the use of the most appropriate manner of

expression, regardless of what rules, fashions or

conventions it either breaks or adheres to, This type of

rhetoric he calls -a rhetoric of content, not a rhetoric of

langnageu: a syntax and gr- of structures and verse

forms rather than of words, which is 'dictated' or

deterrfned by the content. Gerard Genette has shown that the

novel can be seen, at the narratoloqical level, as a

seatencex3; Eliot believed that each such narratological

sentence could find its own grammar and syntax. He is saying

that rhetoric is as useful and necessary to artistic

expression as "the direct, conversational speecha which he

perceives to be favoured by wrfters of his own day.

As far as Eliot is concerned, the problem is one of

prescription rather thar~ description, When a poetic ideal

like conversational style and direct speech becomes

prescriptive the very conversational style which is intended

to replace the artificiality of rhetoric *may and does

expressicm, rather tban allowing the manner to be generated

t2. "Whether E-tarrd Had Sowething About Him," 665. X 3 , Narratiue Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E, Leuin CIthaca: Cornell University PTess, 14803: 30, A s an example, Genette t i s c r i b e s The Odyssey as a m o d i f icstiun of t h ~ sentence "Uf y 5 - s ~ comes ha- $0 Ikhaca. "

out of the expression itself, is the problem. Therefore V h e

avoidance of the xhetorfcal expressions of older miters has

becare a form, or has separated into a variety of forms or

rhetorics whfch irpede as often as they assist the

expression of feeling.- The art emtion, being something

other than real ewtion, is thwarted by prescriptions of

direct speech, as in fact by prescriptions in general.

~ n t ~liot 1s not specifically opposed to nrhetoricsw

either. He is, partially, opposed to the idea that "the feww

have control over the ideas of the many, and believes that

*of messianic literature we have sufficientax4; and he is,

partially, convinced that the so-called artificialities in

language serve a very valuable fanctlon in literature. In

attempting to find a rhetoric of the stuff itself Bliot

acknowledges that somet31.e~ the conventions and the

stylizations serve better than the direct speech.

Stylizations and conventions are, for Eliot, a form of

ritnal, hence dance, and as such they can powerfully inform

literature, by bridging the barrier between the conscious,

rational, linguistic level of signification, and a deeper

pre-rationaf, pre-linguistic source, Eliot seazches in

rfttla2, fn tradftlon, ia race consciousness, and in *the

prim5tive crmscioasnessn far the source of what is c o m n to

all humanity as a sauce for artistic expression and strives

to find ways of triggering that primitive consciousness

14. "The Idea of a Literary Review," CriEerion, I V . 1 (Jan, 1'3261 :2.

within the linguistic realm- As such, art mediates between

the conscious and the pre-conscious.

The importance of mediation in Eliotys thinking cannot

be over-emphasized, Art mediates between the author and the

audience, between the real and the ideal, between the

universal and the particular, and even between the conscious

and the unconscious. But to mediate is both to facilitate

and inhibit- Furthermore, Eliot's irrportant recognition that

forms and rhetorics of all types can both impede and assist

the expression of feelings brings us to yet another issue of

mediation in Eliotss conception of the work of art. His

definition of the creative artist as a Wmedlumw in

*Tradition and the Individual Talent* has been overshadowed

and under-valued, bnt in light of all his comments

emphasizing the lietinal, collaborative nature of the

individual subject and of the artistic enterprise, the idea

of the medium takes on greater force, As a purveyor chiefly

of words, Eliot is clearly conscious of the extent to which

Language itself has a purely mediatfve function. The

phenorenoloqical world of athingsm fs ordered and given form

by language, Langnage therefore makes @thingsm accessible.

Bat imgnage itself is predicated on difference, and

therefore acts as a k r i e r between things. And of course

language miates--both impedes and assists--communication

between individuals over both tinre and space, sirrtuftaneously

closing and widening the gaps between addresser and

addressee.

Contrary t c z the pronoancemmts of recent critics, and

to corrent wisdom on the sublect, Bliot held the view that

writers ought to try to connect words and things. He says in

h i s essay, uSwinbnxne,m that -the world oE wordsw and the

aworfd of objectsw must be made to "fitw together, and that

the gxeateat ~ i t e r s are those who can dwell ~Setnltaneously

in the mrld of wrds and of thfngs, but yet "are struggling

to digest and express new ob3ects, new groups of objects,

new feelings, new aspects-"f3 A purely rhetorical universe

fa no aore desfrabfe than a world of ob3ects, and even

making these two fit together is not enough. The artist must

mahe something entirely new which unites a11 of these things

while still keepfng them distinct.

Ellotfs predilection for serious humour also stems, in

part, from his concept of the rediative nature of art. He

recognizes that the type of caricature which makes this kind

of humour possible allows the writer to tap pre-linguistic

sources, and to dig beneath the abstractions of comedy and

tragedy. We have already seen that Eliot believes the

irpulse for expression is pre-rational, pre-logical, that is

pm-wlagos,u prfor to larrgnage, as well, But poetry must

fenction from within language, even though it attempts to

f 5. f l f f 3 e n a e u ~ i Jan. 16, 19201 : 72-73, 73. El iot censures Swinburne far creating what in csntempuravy parlance wuuld be called a free play of signifiers, saying "Language in a healthy state presents the object , is so close tct the object that they are one thing, They are une thing in Swinburne siarply because the object had ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucinatisn of meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted it sel f to an independen* life of atmospheric nourishment."

stimulate effects beyond, outside of, or prior to, language.

The technique of caricature, bnt =re precisely, the

technique of "hesitating at the edge of caricaturenf*

provides one way of accomplishing this. From withln language

this type of haroar, as we have seen, partakes of the

common, the collaborative, the ritualistic, But because it

is a technique which is itself liminal, it also unsettles or

undermines the boundaries normally restricting an

interchange of this kind: caricature within language is a

way of breaking down the nindestructible barriersm between

people without merging the separate identities of those

people, Eliot expressed a vehement dislike for complete loss

of selfhood, either in the pre-ratioml stage prior to

subject/ object separation or in the so-called transcendent

absorption into Bradley's uabsolute.ax7 The liminalities

that caricature and conventions can create are crucial to

Eliot's poetics, therefore, because they allow the creative

IG. I t w i l l be r e c a l l e d f"The Old Comedy"3 t h a t c a r i c a t u f e , is accumpl i s h e d thrcaugh such d e v i c e s as "a f l a t d i s t o r t rorr i n t h e d rawing-" E l i o t p r a i s e s Wyndham LewisT u s e of c a r i c a t u r e and feels t h a t LewisT d e s i g n 1 5 at i ts g r e a t e s t w h e n it "apprijaches t h e bo rde r of satire and c a r ~ r a t u r e . " C"London L e t t e r , " May 1921, p . G 8 3 3 T h i s description o f Lewis bears d i s t i n c t p a r a l l e l s tc* &EitotF5 d d e s r r ~ p t r c m rlf Marlowe as " h e s i t a k i n g a t t h e e d g e of c a r i c a t u r e . " 17, H a r r i e t D a v i d s m ' s e x c e l l e n t s t u d y o f E l iot $ 5

d i s s e r t a t i o n s t v e s s e r t h i s point and qu~tes the relevant passage, Speaking i n t e r m s of "immediate e x p e r i e n c e " a s c o n s t i t u t i n g bath %he b e g i n n i n g o f ems luurney- - the p r r - cansciuus s ta te - -and t h e end of our ~ o u r n e y - - t h e a t t a i n m e n t sf t r a n s c e n d e n c e i n %he Absolute--El iat says, " i f anyone assert t h a t immediate experience, a t e i t h e r t h e b e g i n n i n g or end of our -journeyt is annihilation and u t t e r n i g h t , I cordially agree, " b#na~Iedge and Experience 3n the Ph2 losapby of F - H . Bradley, p. 31. Quoted in Da-vidson, 74.1

artist to 'hesitate at the edge," function as a waedium,w

even transform personality, and hence tap c o m n a l or

un&ve~sal sources without complete loss of identity.

Indeed we have seen that identity is tenuous by

definition, The "honest" artist with -true cold hazdnessW

experiences snbjectfvity itself as a liminal state between

the central core of self and the social inscription of

miafTuence.w The Classicist is more effective because more

conscious both of inflnence, and of the liminal state of

subjectivityl I t fs fmpcxtat to recall once again that in

-Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot describes the

artist as "a a e d i u ~ , ~ argufnq that the more perfect the

artist, "the more perfectly wilf the mind digest and

transmute the passions which are its material,wLo and the

less affected will be the individual. The work of art is

impersonal, but is nevertheless a composite of aspects of

the creator's personality, The artist, like the critic, like

the fndividual, m t retain that firm sense of identity

which Effot calls the point of view,

The point of vaew, in turn, influences both what and

how an artist will create. As has already been intimated by

Eliot's wrhetorfc sf the stuff itself," t b r e is no clear

demarcation between &at an artist is creating and the

devices the artist uses to create it. Eliot mites, without

comipletely merging, technique with content:

18, " T u a d i t i c m and The Individual Talent," 72.

15s for the verse of the present ti=, the lack of curiosity in technical ratters, in the academic poets of to-day {Georgian et cetera) ts only an indication of their lack of curiosity in moral ratters. On the other hand, the poets who consider themselves w s t opposed to Georqianisa, and who know a little French, are mostly such as could imagine the Last Judgerent only as a lavish display of Bengal fights, Roman candles, catherine-wheels and inflasmable fire-balloons. Vous, hypocrite 2ecteu~,,,~~

These words, which close Eliot's (1921) essay on "The Lesson

of Bau&elaireA disclose both an interesting link to Fhe

Cli;aste Land, published only one year later, and a faridamental

dimension of Eliot's poetics: that technique is inseparable

f r o m content, Curiosity in technical matters is equivalent

to curiosity about morality.

What I am calling liminality is not, for Eliot, a mere

dialectic, a simple fusion of t w o opposftes. Rather, it is a

fusion, without eraslng distfnctioras, of widely dfsparate

things which are not necessarily parallel or opposed. In

place of enforced fusion of polaxities, Eliot desires a

callucation of apples a& oranges- As Eliot argues in

%&ether Bostand Had Something About H i m , *

if we are to express ourselves, our variety of thoughts and feefinqs, on a variety of subjects with inevitabfe rfqhtness, we rrorst adapt our manner to the mment with infinite variations.io

13, "The Lessoa of Baudelaire," 4, m, "Wether Rastarrd Had Something kbcrut Him, " 665.

This wlllfngness to consider infinite variations of manner,

atrategfes if you will, a d nses of language, provided they

are appropriate, represents a rexnzz%ng idea in Eliot. But

behind the staterent itself and its qualifier lies another

ilplfcation: that variety of thoaqhts and feelingsw

will have infinite variations. *There are no new ewtions,*

says Slfot, woafy new aad diverse appxoaches and

presentatiana of tbe few old ones,azx but the variety of

ccmbioallctns which individual eleslli?.nts of perspective and

sensfbilfty wlll mimifeat: fs alrnrit fnffnite-

Everyone "straddlesg a pasticuLar csnfiguratitm of

influences and hpnlses, the resnlting variations of which

are infinite. Honesty and "cold hardnessa can bzi- a

paxticnlar configurathn into relief, but infinite

varfatfons of adaptation are nevertheless required to bring

tber into artienlation- Eliot dramatizes this sstaation

vivfdly in "Portrait of a Ladym:

Ind I must barrow every changing shape to find express ion. . -dance, dance Like a dancing bear, Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape,""

Thts image of the protean nature of accurate expression

fEsePf recurs d e r a number of protean guises throaghont

Eliot's early wrftinq.

2%. "The Noh and the Image," Eguist, i v . 7. (Aug. 1917) 102- 3, 102. 22. "Pm-trait of a Lady," Calfected Poems, p. 12.

The very idea of "the irage,- too, w f t h a l l its well-

known importance for Eliot, functions within a complex of

fnsions and rapid alterations. In one of hPs essays on John

Donne, Eliot observed that

the work of poetry is often said to be perforked by the use of images; by a cnmmlative succession of images each fusing with the next; or by the rapid and anexpected combination of fnqes appaxentzy aruelatetd, which have their relationship enforced upon t h e m by the rind of the author. "3

Thoughout his ono poetry Eliot menforcesm relationship upon

wapparentfy unrelateda images as a way of creating his

effects.

One of the ways he does this is explained by him in the

course of disctlssing Dostoevsky. %Ifot admires Dostoevskyes

ability to create an effect which - i s due to apparent pure

receptivity, lack of conscious selection, to the

irrelevancies which merely happen-a24 Eliot addres the way

Dostoevstry appears to offer pnre observation without

ceasurship or interpretation, According to Eliot,

Dostoevurkyss f o r m of expression is so amorphous as to appear

*pm~e,~ appearing to be based on no system of selection

unexpected combinations upon apparently unrelated imges.

Eliot E e e l s that Dmstoevsky is abZe to ase thLs f o r m of

seerringXy r tndl teb yet randor dgsclosure to pursue

observation into %potidlan extremes of tortu~e.~ For all

its appazent randomess, in other words, Dostoevsky's

%etPtodb hovers between pure disinterested journalisr, and

acute anaEysis, without becoainq one ox the othex; he

expfoita the opprtrtanfty to divulge wextremes of torturew In

the very act of apparently uncensored disclosure. The

u ~ t a r a l , a the onedited, merges with and serves the ends of

the Qartificial,u the work of art.

In Whether B o s t d Had Sorething About Himm Eliot also

makes a very suggestive stateaent about another wnaturala

liriaality; tbat between -realityw and "dr-." By this he

does nut simply waft the traditional concept of nfresis;

rather Be is camntkng on a complex a& subtfe interplay

between the artificiaf and the wrea2.w He suggests that, in

good wetic draaa, rhetoric can be nsed in such a way tha t

*characters take conscious delight in their dramatic-poetic

role,* and finds tbat such writers as Shakespeare succeed

adrlrably because they allow for characters t o @'see

theraclves in a dramatic light-uzb Eliot elaborates on this

concept :

W e are giwm plays of realism in whfch the parts are never allowed to be censeiously draratic, for fear, perhaps, of their appearing less reaf, Bnt ia actual Iffe, or in those situations in our actual life wbieh l i ~ e ealoy coasciously aad keenly we are, at t i m e s , amaxe of ourselves in this

#italics mine)

Eliot's assertion that dr-tic self-reflexivity is rimetic

in the very process of calling attention to itself as

constructed, because life ftself often seems *dramaticn and

constructed, plays havoc with the boundaries between these

exclasive categories- Be attenuates both the convergence and

divergence between art and *actual lifeff still further when

he uses as one example of this techmlqne a line from Antony

and Cl eopatra :

the old captain is inspired to see Cleopatra in this d r m t i c light:

The barge she sat

Given the interesting fact that two years later he cribbed

pzecisely this scene for the opening of "A Gaae of Chessw in

me mste Land, this reference calls specific attention to

Eliot's blurring of the boundaries between liEe and art.

Eaowing that Elio* sees the observer in that scene as

wconsciousXy and keenly enjoying* the dramatically self-

cmnscious rofe, the reader will flnd it virtually impossible

t o read the silent uutterancesa of the person recording the

scene fwl think we are i n rat's alley/ where the dead men

fost their bonesmf without at least a degree of irony and

htuom, At the very least, the significant sevelation that

Eliot equates dramatic self-consciousness with the "actual

mast surely convince us to alter oar perception of that

SCerM?.

Bot tbe blorrinq of boandaries accorplkhed here is yet

mxe corpllex, Peter Ackroyd refuttes the cfaims sade by many

critics that "A EL af Chessw is autubiqrapeical, saying

Eliot and Vivien were ffcolfaboratorsw who enjoyed, amd made

a game oat of, their mnervoas predicament,aa* This sense of

drasatfc self-carrsciousness as keenly enjoyed ironically

reverses A c L ~ a y d ~ s refutatiun, and implies tbat there ray be

an element of autobiography in the scene after all, but that

the -attitudew of the scene is not what it has always been

sopposed to be. I do not sogqest that it matters whether the

scene is autobiographical, nor that Ackroyd ris~mderstands

the scene's impart; rather that the techaiqae used here

makes the dfstfnctiartfs difffcult to track,

Those dramatists who are *afraidu to allow characters

t h i s sense of autanory wonXd appear to be acting in the

interests of preservinq i i ~ ~ ~ i s , but fox Eliot, as for

Brecht and many others since Brecht, traditional mimesis is

itself a greater 1fe than the admission of self-

consciousness- The conscPous exposure of artistic

Ironically, Eliot arqnes for draratic self-con;scioasness on

tb gmmds that t b f s type of a-eness is an aspect of real

life--that -reala life often ocempies tbe firen between

fi#ed identity and role playing. By this formulation,

draratfc self-comscionsness is ifretic,

Sach self-consciousness, however, rrrtst be seen as

jnxtaposd against Eliot's nse and discussion of the

nnconscions and the pre-logical. The supposed search for a

prinftive consciousness, which William Skaff in partfcnlar

sees as Bllotes major initiative, is nu mre the uLtibate

quest than is the search for draratic self-eonscfonsnesa.

Wt Ellot seams nltimtely to have been attempting is e way

of rendering and jart_aposing the widelLy divergent pafiible

ways of knowing, what be refers to, in refezence to John

Donne, as @a state of rid,

Donnees centrality to Eliot's thinking cannut be over-

emphasized, In his reditationa on Donne, aod DoaneSs

rightness for the d e r n age, Eliot repeatedly reveals this

fact, la the process, those reditatians disclose much of

Bfiutes o m poetic arbitgorts, We bave already seen one of

Bl5ot.s w r e hteresting observations about Donne a d

Dammess own l imhaf state a•’ rind: that it fs ailpossibfea

to "isolate w h a t fs *canventionale in Donne from rdrat is

individllal.@** Sore of Eliotes other refezewes to Donne

also explicitfy calX a43xntion to Dome's plnralistic

XfrinaZity, as is the case in tbe folliowbg:

One of the characteristics of Donme wbich wins Bfr , I E m , bfa interisst for the present age, is his fidelity to emotion as be finds It; Ibis recaqpnition of the cnmp1Lexity of feelaw ahd I t s

rapid alterations and antitheses. A change of _ feeling, with IMne, is rather the regrouping of

the same elemeats under a mod which was previously soboxdinate: it is not the snbstitutiorr oiE one wad far a wholly different one."o

Here Blfot ettplfcftly axticalates his sense of fidelity to

the flax In Dome, f l w which simultaneously contains the

-cemplexity of feelfag and its rapid afteratfoms aad

irrttf.tskeb;crt~.~ B e t Blfot was still mre expffcft. In a

staterent whish cores remarkably close to snaararizing,

s~terfactrly, 3!&e Yt-juEte Lsnd, Eliot expresses his adairation

for Danness ability to devnstrate in poetry that

any state of d a d is extremely corplex, a d chiefly carposed of adds a d ends in constant flux manipulated by desllre and fear.s=

?&is highly suggestive way of lnterpzeting Donness poetry,

wrPttea one year after me m t e Land, seems to reveal as

mch abotlt the lvtns; behind the writtng of me 1Slbste &and

as it &om about Ik,nne- The straggle betwen the unified

sermslCbilitg, whfch ultimtely cannot even know itself, and

the dissaciated sensibility, which

vfew, vven a l l at once, bnt canaot

' i i a t e experieraeg wherein the

m a t separate--this is tbe strogglte

prase aad poetry-

knows man% points of

know the ~ f t y of

self and the other are

adIlilf)xated fn Blf~t's

'Phe protean nature of the poetic enterprise as outlined

so far outstrips all attempts to confine it. This concept of

mfluxu is used by Eliot to grasp (because to "see* is

impossible) both the nnified and the dissociated sensibility

at one and the s a w time; to comprehend the various elements

from the transitional point of view wherein they are neither

one nor many, yet both--understanding them as separate and

unified, fragments and wholes, temporal and permanent. He

seeks to put into =the rhetoric of the stuff itself,* i.e.

of content rather than language, that which defies language

because "the moment you try to put impressions into words,

you begin to analyse and construct...or you begin to create

something else,a32 Eliot seeks to do both: analyse and

construct the existing data in the process of creating

sorething else, which nevertheless leaves the traces of its

own history perceptible, though not, strictly speaking,

vfsibfe, And in The klaste Land this flux, this fusion of the

linguistic and the pre-linguistic, this *rhetoric of the

stuff i t ~ e l f , ~ with all its infinite variations and its

unexpected relationships, in short, the entire complex of

lirfnalities, finds the only kind of expression it could

find, Rather than articulating it, The Waste land enacts

this pctetics of liarfnality.

52, "The Perfect Critic," E l 3 Athenaeus ( J u l y 9, l321):4Q- 41, 41.

Chapter 5

THROBBING BBTWEEN:

LIHINALITY, COLLABORATION, AND THE SUBJECT

OF THE W M l Z LAMD

The end of t h i s lTourney is tc -+rr ive a t Its beqinnPng;

namely, a reading of The Haste Land. The context adumbrated

by ~ l i o t ' s early wri t ing is one which a c t i v e l y subver t s t h e

categorlzatfans implied by t h e very idea of context. The

fndividual subject , t h e artist, and t h e work of art a l l

e x i s t in ceaseless f l u x between closed ca tegor ie s and

contexts, being "neither arrest nor m ~ v e m e n t , ~ and not

accurately called ufixity,mz W e have seen t h e basfc concern

with col laborat ion, mediation and what I, m o s t inclusively,

am c a l l i n g l i m i n a l i t y i n rSliotCs e a r l y wr i t ing , These

concerns become even mre at tenuated i n rhe mste Land. The

complex of ideas suggested by t h e t i t l e , The Waste Land,

alone makes this LiWmality clear: a m w a s t e landff is l iminal

by definition because it hovers between death and r e b i r t h ,

ba t is stuck between them. The Bste Land also suggests t h e

wail cycle, which, in tu rn is virtually burst ing w i t h

l i r i n a l f t y : t h e Fisher King, for instance, is both (and

n e i t h e r ) f e r t i l e and sterile, yanng and ofd; the waste land

of t h e qrail legends is, in t h e end, both ferti le and waste;

the quest is a partial success, because t h e f e r t i l i t y cyc le

is necessarily half snccess d half failare; t h e qnester

and the Fisher King must collaborate; the quester seeks

identity, but finds it when he abandons the search, becoming

something between the one and the other; the Fisher King is

both one and many; the fertility ritual which is

allegorically represented by the grail cycle merges the many

(the folk) with the one (the dying god). And this list by no

means exhausts the ways in which this one source, i.e. the

grail cycle, or at least dessie Weston's treatment of it,

aranifests liminality. The stages of youth and age and the

condition of being neither living nor dead to which the poem

refers, either by allusion in the case of the Fisher King,

or by direct articulation in the case of the quester,

correspond to this sappe sense of liminality. The allusion to

Dantegs limbo--another liminal state--also tells half the

story. And none of this begins to provide an exhaustive

account of the protean ways that liminality functions both

at the levels of form and content throughout The Waste Land.

The Canterbury Tales, to which the opening alludes, are

explicitly collaborative, Chauceris pilgrims collaborate,

taking turns telling stories, both to create the work of

art, and, within the fiction, to make their journey, their

quest, more enjoyable, They are responsible for meaning-

making not only as auditors sf the tales, but as tellers as

-11, And the stories they tell are all ascribed to previous

sotlrces, to a tradition from which they borrow, and with

which they collaborate, The brrowings are modiffed,

embellished, and deliberately mis-represented by the

borrowers. The Waste Land, in turn, embellishes and modifies

wttat it borrows Erom The Can-iTerbury Tales, by inverting the

seasonal headpiece with which it begins.

At the level of f o r m also The Waste Land is, like The

Gmterbury Tales, pervasively collaborative. It is a

collaboration between the poet and the reader. Obviously all

writing is such, but in The Waste Land the recognition of

the need for collaboration is foregrounded, obvious and

pervasive, Just as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrockw

begins with the invitation *Let us go then, you and 1," The

iClffaste Land continually addresses its reader and requires the

reader to colfaborate in the construction of the poem. The

must complex fnstance of this is when the poem uses an

instance of collaboration--with Baudelaire--to draw the

reader directly into its discourse: -You, hypocrite

lecteuri--mon selablable,--son Erere!" (76) The miter of The

#i&ste Land is both a reader and a =writeru of Baudelaire.

BaudeLairefs imaginary reader (the one Baudefaire addresses)

becores Stetson in a sense, who in turn merges with The

Haste Lmdts reader/writer of M e l a i r e , and with the

reader of The Hkiste Laod- Evexy participant, or

cellahrator, in the p o e m is an 'hypocrite fectem,* sharing

corrpl icgty as -11 as the responsibility for =king meaning-

This type of colfaboration exactly mimics the nay art

is always a collabQration between the creator aatd the

amdience. W e have already descried Sfiotss insight into

cemnality in his analysis of the comedy of the music-

halls2 but here the idea takes on greater force. The work

itself is neither the creator nor the audience, and neither

is it only the work- It is, simultaneously, all of these

things. It rtterges the audience and the creator, while

simultaneously coming between them, The mediator, or, to use

Eliot's own term, the %ediunP creates a thing which is none

of these things, yet all of these things without

extinguishing the differences between them. The

indetersnfnate identity of the speaker in the opening stanza,

for instance, creates this type of mediation. The absence of

quotation marks makes it unclear who actually says, *In the

mountains, there you feel free," and "1 read, much of the

night, and go south in the ~inter.~(l7-18) Bither we accept

that Marie speaks these words, that she is being quoted by

the poet, or we understand that the poet speaks these words.

The reader is required to allow both possibilities; yet the

reader can only do so, however, if he or she collaborates in

recognizing the indetermlnacy. In all cases, the poet

rediates the experience, A number of possible options exist,

yet no option can exclude the other options. We are called

upon to make a choice, but thwarted in our efforts to do so.

Horeover, the first-person voice closes the gap between

the reader and the writer and/or speaker, men a reader

reads the words "1 read,' there can be no doubt that this

wspestltsw for, and declares the reader, so that all three,

writer, speaker and reader, merge. Obviously, though, there

2, "The Ls~don L e t t e r , " D i a l fDec. 13223:€61.

is no sense in which the identities merge completely.

Bather, the language succeeds in speaking for all the

particfpants at once without eliminating the distinctions

between them. Mediatlion means both to facilitate and to

mftiqate, both to paerge and to separate--the perfect image

of the work of art, We experience a kind of transportation

and transcendence when we e r g e with a work of art, yet in

no way do we break down the indestructible barrierss between

ounitelves and others. We remain distinctly alienated while

at the same time participating in a colfaboxative mergfng of

identities.

The composition of The m t e Land is perhaps the most

obr%ously and consciously collaborative aspect of the poem.

Pound's well-known amidwifery,u represents one of the most

anstere arts of omission4 imaginable: so austere in fact

that the poem Pound returned to Eliot is almost a new poem

altogether. For this reason, there axe those who have gone

so far as to give credit for the poem to Pound, but that

wonld seem to go a bit over the mark. Nevertheless, Pound

and Eliot, and even Vivien, collaborated, as the records and

early drafts clearly show, to produce the poem, Even Eliot's

dedication to Pound, "il miglior fabbron ( nthe better

3. "Beyf e and bai zac , '' A6henaeus W e have seen, i n Chapter 3, thak of the "indestructible barriers" variations. "

iIMay 30, 19191: 392-" a? "'" cija=

Eliot merges this concept with "superficial

4. El iot raid EWTurgenev, " 1673 that the m e t h o d of Turgenev was "never unreal au abs trac t" and that Turgenevps art was "vigilant but never theoret ic intell igence" and an "austere art of omission,"

craftsmans) is an instance of collabsration, taken as f t is

from Dante's ~~~~~~nt to Arnaut Daniel, Harry Levin

~ i n t a i n s that the dedication is a backhanded compliment at

best in that both Eliot and Pound wouPd have recognized that

the poet Dante called the better crasftman is wembalmedwb

and imau3rtalized by the poet who realfy was the better

c r a f t s ~ n , ~ But Elfot wed this same passage elsewhere:

certainly there is no w r e useful criticism and no -re precious praise for a poet than that of another poet:

Pn miglior fabbro del parlar materno.,.

What is most interesting about this recurring reference to

the better craftsman is that it dram our attention to the

tollaborativeness and liminality of the phrase and its

context, It is the praise of one poet for another, Cast In

the form of an allusion to a poet that both Eliot and Pound

-red, the quotation itself refers t o another admired poet

who is encountered in a poem,

Provided the reader is willing to collaborate actively

with them, Lil's friend and the bartender fn =A Game of

ChessR perf orr yet amother kind of collaborative meaning

makfng, The story of Lil, which is paradigmatic of narrative

ftself, anddries and overwhelars its teller, The

5. " I s r a f e f " Nation and AiYmnaeur, x l i . 7. (Hay 27, 1327): 213. E l i o t commented t h a t Pee "embalmed a number of i n f e r i o r w r i t e r s w i t h h i s c r i t i c i s m of t h e m , " and that Poets c r i t i c i s m was t h e only t h i n g w h i c h kept their names a l i v e at a l l . 6. Harry Levin, " T h e H a s t e Land: From Ur to Echt ," i n Uemories af the Bobems (New Ysuk: N e w D i r e c t i o n s books, 1951, rpt, lC%Wiz =-46, 37.

bartendexes interruptions keep msignifying* and making

aeanfng where the narrative of Lil's friend at least did not

intend them, but which the reader cannot fail to notice. One

of the w r e hilarious examples is this enjamb~nt:

"1 didn't mince my words, I said to her myself HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIMEa(140-1)

Bot of course she didn't, and doesn't, say *hurry up please

its tfme," herself. The bartender doesn't mince his words,

either, but he also has no awareness of the meaning he is

raking. It I s the reader, finally who witnesses the

accidental. collaboration between the tm sf them.

aiihat yon get married for if you don't want children? IWRRY UP P W E ITS TI)(ZZu(164-5).

Corpfetely disconnected utterances acollaboratea in order to

create n e w meanings- That new leeaning is in sore sense a

verging of the lateral meanings of the diconnected

utterances, but at the same tfme all three meanings, or

atterances remin distinct and separate. And it is only in

coXlabomation with the reader that the collocation of

meanings can signify,

terar mc=ollorsatioit* comes from Eliot's n~tes to the

poem* a d is anotharz clearly U W n a l reference. Bllot says

hfa acollocationn of Bnddhist and Christian trsslitions in

tbe final section of * m e Fire Serwn," is anot an

accident-w This very eruioas phrase stands oat even from the

general curiosfty aE the 'Motes on l!he m t e L a . To

single this particular device out as not accidental implies

in a curious way that everything else in the poem is

accidental. But to describe it as *not an accidenta still

stops short of saying consciously produced. When the strange

implications ot this note are coupled wlth the very idea

being expressed-that "collocationm means =to locate

togethern--so= sense of the poem's extrelre liminality

begins to emerge, By making an issue of the fact that this

collocation is not an accident, Eliot manages to imply that,

at some level, it is not entirely volitional either, The

collocation is thus "locatedm in a liminality between the

conscious and the anconscions,

However, the more literal liminality is bath more

ubvions and mre significant- The collocation of two *alienn

traditions throws them both into bold relief, and at the

same t h e foregrounds theiz sameness- This lininalfty both

masks and highlights yet another liminality, too: that

existing between the *attltudesq which this section

collocates. Two representative examples of radically

different tradftions are yoked together here by their

disctissions of haram passions as ffbnrnings,ff but it is the

8addhaes Fire Sermn aad the Confessions of St, Augufstine

Imply, are collocated with the bnrninq itself, In the act of

wgth wbtuning* rather than rescae, What is mst curious,

thongh, is that afl of these disparate and confficting

sensations and perspectives are sirrply located together,

They aiwltaneoasly converge and diverge.

This sense of siauftaneons convergence and divergence

becomes immediately apparent in the collocations of the

poem's opening stanza, We are igapediataly confronted with a

ccmiplex set of linfmalitfes. V h e Bnrial of the Deada is

clearly an act of transition, The inverted seasonal

headpiece hovers at the edge of spring, calling our

attention immediately to transition. And the contrary

wvements toward death and life are immediately thrust into

co-existence, In the act of recalling Chaucezes "man that

Aprilf,a the ~cznelfest wnthu does not erase the

celebratory natnre of that passage; rather it forces the two

opposed attitudes together, and in the process of unitfng

them calls attention to the disparity between them. There is

also, throughout the passage and beyond, a tension between

roots and rootlessness, between freedom and entrapkent.

April is cruel because it stirs "dufl rootsSa Yet winter

feeds *a little life with dried tubers," Someone, whose

identity is uaclear, %temsff out of Lithuania, and soieone,

who m y be the sare pierson or m y be sowbody else "goes

south for the winterw like a migratory bird. The ewertome of

rwrtlessness in going south for the winter 3s paralleled by

the andertone of a deep connection wPth nature implied by

the riqratory birds who at least appear to follow sose

strict though unltnown lams of nature. Marie, rwho stays at

t h e Rarch-dukees,a her cous ines , f e e l s * f r eem i n t h e

w u n t a i n s , bu t must hold on t i g h t when t h e y go down on t h e

s l e d because freedom comes at t h e p r i c e of security. And t h e

f r e e d o m implied is turned i n t o r o o t l e s s n e s s (16-181, by t h e

sudden s h i f t t o -1 read, much of t h e n igh t and go sou th I n

t h e inter,^ Given t h a t we have already experienced a number

of sudden and arbitrary s h i f t s i n t h e poem, t h e poem itself

seesus r o o t l e s s , b u t t h e image of =going sou th f o r the winter

a l s o implies an e x i s t e n c e without roo t s . However, mgoing

sou thm c o l l o c a t e s t h f s r o o t l e s s n e s wi th t h e deep rootedness

implied by t h e n a t u r a l migratory c y c l e of b i rd s . Seasons

which appear so repetitive and predictable t h a t t h e y mix

w r y and desire, are suddenly t r a n s f o r d i n t o a summer

which s u r p r i s e s u s , Rain and s u n l i g h t s e e m t o co-ex is t ,

Mature, and t h e n a t u r a l c y c l e are both predictable and

randor- Fxeedom merges with, o r t opp le s over i n to ,

rootlessriess; r e p e t i t i o n and s e r v i t u d e merge with s u r p r i s e

and belonging,

What are t h e r o o t s t h a t c lu t ch , what branches grow Out of t h i s s t o n y rubbish?(l9-20)

Roots and branches whfch correspond t o memry and desire

cXateh and grow oat of t h e s t o n y rubbish of the poem,

conflating barrenness 4 f e r t i l i t y .

Sorething needs t o be safd about t h e c o l l o c a t i o n s which

~KICO-t for the parties

the csnon, Csnstituted o u t of

position ia x e l a t l o ~ h l p t o

t h i n g s almst excf usively

canonical, ilhe mste L a d is neverthefess the antithesis of

things canonical, "Stuffed with tradition to the point of

bar~ting,*~ The Maste Land is nevertheless radically

experimental and original. When Bliot uses the tradition he

does so in as fadividual a way as anyone might, The point is

that The Wste &and mkes what it can out of the materials

which lie at hand, but bet=ause it thereby demnstrates a

ClassicistQs consciousness of the age, it transmutes that

bric-a-brac into a work of pure individuality. That work of

individuality, in turn, has ftseff become a centre-piece of

the canon. The khste Land strengthens its identity in the

very process of relinquishing identity, or of acknowledging

its own %aturati~ns.~

Bliot, in other words, has used The Maste Land to enter

tnto a! collaboration with the whole of the worldes

literature, Gregory S- Jay has also comnted on the extent

to which rhe Haste Land functions collaboratfvely withfn a

curglex of cultural quotations and contexts. Jay asks, for

What do we think we mean if we say that Eliot wrote:

7, "The Lesson of Baudelaire," 4.

These lines f r o m Wagner were the Gerrranes property, bat their properties axe in ElfotQs hands now.

Virtually every word of the poem is *filteredw through other

speakers, which threatens simultaneously to ffx, however

briefly, the meres identity (the -Questa is, after all, a

search for identity) and to sabrerge all identtties into

one- me Haste Labd blatantly exemplifies RoZand Ba;rthea*

concept of all writing as %ultnral quotation,** taming

that apparent wealmess into one of the poeres strongest

vistaes, Just as 1;lngnage itself does, the act of writing

and speaking consists of improvising with o2d materials amt

patting them together in new ways, which in turn presoppoaas

a response in kind. Eliot treats poets and their poem as

individual chnnts of ~vocabularya oat af which he aspeakta a

wholly new poetic discoruse, But not without a sense af

collaboration, 'Ithe moriginafu quotations direct to s o w

extent the directions taken, while nevertheless becoring

something wholly mew, aad wbates more, nttolly dependent on

the reader, an already probfemtized whypocrite lectearPm to

assimilate, Callabration, corplicity, in the act of

cultttraL reception and prodaetion of meaning fa fondamental

to the work.

8- 6regwy S. Jay, "Discovering the Corpus," Hodern Crit~cal Interpretaeia~s: "The Waste Land," ed, Warold B l a a a C M w York: Chelsea House, 19t351, l2•˜, 9- Roland Barthres, "The Death af the Authar , " I~age-#uric- T e x t , trans- Stephen Heath d N e o Yctrk: Ncrcmday Press , 1977): t42-148,

#muever, the t ~ a x i ~ i g c01XatW~ato~s d~ ~faf c~eate

rou?tlttfag which capletely erases distinctions, The original

contexts of the quotations Sliot borrows are at once

dfatElact gram abd satkezqed Pnto me &?st@ Laad. @Wrisch

w ~ h t dex Y i m P is still distfactly the property of the

6emmztsr, w f t b &em, at least at a pnrely lingrtistic revel,

lRqmerr also was c=olltaboratinq. A t *he same t h e , Eliot has

given it a new coastellation, aod a new context- This new

co~tsxt absorbs ta smm extent the old context, and even

perhapa alters readings of the original context, but the two

eontexts remain in a state of flux between convergence and

divef~ence .. me m a t glarinqly collaborative sections of the poem

are t h e in which contemporary London coflabarates with the

eft past, anb, simitaneomsly, mites revefence and

irrererence:

Brit; at 1.y bacL, frm time to tire I hear The sOtllLb of harms and rotors, which will bring gcnremy to Ilrs. Porter in the spzing, 0 the roon shone bright on Hrs. Porter Amd om her daughter They wrzrsh their feet ie soda water %t O ces vokr doenfants, chamtat d a ~ la conpolel

dodr gwmmges as this ~rge, while calling attention to, the

myth of Actaeon, =rge with motor horns. Sweeney merges with

Actaeon, the prostitutes merge with Christ, and the popular

song about *washinga merges with a more pure and clean song,

sung by the children in a Medieval church- All these

disparate and conflicting elements are weollocatedw without

completely merging, m e n the *attitudeA which the reader

brings to this scene is not allowed to fracture into pure

disgust for the contemporary and pure nostalgia for the

past, The barbarism and the beauty of both past and present

simply co-exist.

But as we have alxeady heard, the pure and clean song

suaq by the children, as implied in t5e Jtne "Bt 0 c'est

voix d'enfant chantant dans 2a coupole,* turns to ashes in

the math, beeaffie it comes out *Twit twit twit/ Jug jug jug

j ~ g jug 3~9," The voices are both violated and inviolate-

Ihe children's voices, in the process of turning to the

gsbberish-which-is-meaningful of that scene, transmute the

voice of Philomel into something rich and strange, but the

stumps of words they utter veer back to mock the inviolable

voice, As Bakhtin stresses, mockery and satire belittle and

criticize things which are held in high esteem, bringing

them -down to earthsm** bat they masit also, in the very act

of calliaq our attention to those things, call our attention

to the high esteem itseld. In this same way, Eliot's (and

Verlainefs) childrem call

inviolable voice, a voice

10, C. f. Rabalais an8 H i s

to the mind and the Swagination an

m a t unlike Keats* *unhearda one-

#m-f 6, 21, pass~s.

In the process, of course, they also call attention to the

aawful separationa between the imagination and actual life,

The poem's Bythfc element also represents a kind of

collaboration. Wen apart from Eliot's view of comic

seriousness as chic collabo~ation, The Waste Land makes

use of the collaborative origin of myth, Eliot recognizes,

and calPa attent5on to, the extent to which myth is

collaborative. laving no actual. authors, myths have been

foxred and articulated out of the coBlsaon consciousness,

There exist several versions of most Greek myths and most

mythic figures have a variety of naaaes, The recording of

these myths, then, is also a collaborative process, and the

writers who record them give voice to something communal,

beyond or outside of any one individual. The Grail legends,

too, constitute an ongoing process of collaboration. As

jess@ Weston the grail sOories contained

within them two separate msourcesu and uinterpretations,w

which were contained within one %toryu but which voiced two

separate stories, Her solution to the mystery of the

leqeod's smrce was to posit a third aeaninq which separated

$ 3 . Jesse L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance. 1919. r p t . Garden City: Doubleday, 1957. Weston wrote an earlier b o o k ti%led The Qmzsf cf the Holy Grail (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1 3 1 3 J in which a number of these ideas , including the description of the p a r t i a l s u c c e s s sf the grai l quests, the sense sf the quest a s a search far i d e n t i t y , and t h e process by which Christian motifs subsumed pagan r i t u a l a r e much m a r e clearly del ineated, than i n her l a t e r , b e t t e r knawn book. I do not knew whether E l lot was aware of this ear 1 i er book; he w a s , hcewever, ent i re1 y capable of seeing this process in t h e later book, even though it is less obvious there .

the different sources in the process of showlng how they had

been united- She showed that the grail legends exhibit a

state of constant flux between two disparate explanations,

the so-called *Christianw and =Pagann interpretations, both

of which are simultaneous, and simultaneously wrong and

right, The "three graflsw she discovers correspond to three

Christian symbols, but also to three stages of initiation

into the fertility cults, and the poets who recorded the

grail cycle simply subsuaed the pagan symbols into the

Christian symbolism, The way The Waste Land also subsumes

diverse sources into its quest results in a similarly

dynamic occilation between convergence and divergence.

In light of Eliot's discussions of the primitive, the

pre-logical conscionsness, and the intellectual abstractions

of tragedy and comedy, it comes as no surprise that The

f&ste Land subs\laes within ft a serious humour which stems

from an equally pre-conscior~s source. The ghoulish humour

throaqhont The Rsste Laad constitutes yet another form of

resdiative liminality. When the Thames Daughter raises her

knees "Supine on the floor of a narrow canoea(295) an effect

is created in which tragedy is not wholly indistinct from

c d y , in which the tragic is also rfdiculous, The

articulation itself is both evasive and direct, both

g s t f c and vulgar: -I raised my knees/ Supinea creates

a vivid and precise inge without apparently explaining

itself- The jllXfLapositioe of h'111our and pathos anderlying

this passage is representative, and at such is responsible,

at least in part, for the elusive, enigmatic flavour of the

poem's dominant tone. 2klmfttdly, this serious humour is

cantrapuntal to the main wtif of the poem, but the

counterpoint gives shape to the main motff. Because of this

ongoing hesitation at the border between coppedy and tragedy,

between parody and seriousness, the domfnant tone of The

mste Land is itself dynauic, calling attention to itself as

flux

The sharp jnxtapositions between the sacred and the

profane generated by the mythic quester's encounter with

contemporary Lonaon causes the poem to hover at the edge of

htubur and pathos, tragedy and travesty, When the quester,

for instance, appears to have stopped in to have his Tarot

cards read by Hadm Sosostris, and she asks him to pass a

message on to dear Xrs- Eqtiitone, how can we not see the

incongrnity, and the resultant humour, even while we

acknowledge the implicit criticism? The poem tahes this

everyday life up into t ts art, while at the same tine

bringfng the hallowed tradition down to earth- The result is

to create something peculiar to art which fluctuates between

the ordinary, the actualization, and the mythic, the

mpassionate potential.a Fax fro- creating a r i d d l e ground fn

wbich the ordinary a d the rJlthica1 have been nnfted into

8-thfng half-way between, this juxtaposition calls

attention to the constant flru inftiated by the attenpt to

close the awful separation between them.

Some scenes actually hover directly between the two

extremes :

Oh City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant Whining of a nndoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Hagnus Uartyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold, (259-265)

The scene presents the actual image directly, takes life up

into art, but nevertheless has an inexplicable splendour,

The attitude is very difficult to glean from the words

themselves for they hesitate always just at the edges of

attitudes, The *pleasant whiningu does not seem entirely

pleasant, and yet we yearn for something ineffable being

expressed in almost nostalgic or elegaic tones, The oblique

backward glance at Sappho (*Motesw to line 221, p. 7 3 ) and

by extension to tBe golden past, is collocated with a very

contemporary reference to a church scheduled for dewlition.

These nostalgic i~ressions are overlaid with inpressions of

a humble sort, which are neither quite pleasant nor

unpleasant, The fusion of a disparate &ole of tangled

feelings is just perfect enough (and yet not so perfect)

that we almost fail to experience its subtletSes.

Io ilie Reiiste L a d we see that Blfot has once again

ftlsed the scholarly and the ribald, but in perhaps even more

devious wzqm than in qiag Bolo* and the Sneeaey peers, Is

it, for instance, the qaester who is propositioned by HK.

Buqenfdes? If so the lake lfes in the "inappropriateu

sexuality of the seller of wBngenics.a After all, one would

have to say that in him -is the end of breeding." Eliot

tells us in his notes that the Sayrna Merchant aaelts into

Phlebas the Phoenician sailor who in turn is "not wholly

distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naplesw: if these three

figures aconflate,w they internally juxtapose the ridiculous

and the sublime-

It is important to recognize that the a80tes,w which

are themselves simultaneously serious and mocking, add a

significant dimension to the poem's overall effect. Like the

bits of comntary which create a kind of interpretive loop

in %fng Bolo,* the notes to The Waste Land highlight and

foreground the poem's many liminalities. Their

inappropriateness, for instance, clnnot be disguised merely

by their sincerity, so that when Ellot earnestly announces,

"1 do not know the origin.,,* we are forced into a curious

k i n d of displacement, The whole purpose of footnotes is to

establish the origins of things, yet here we are being very

earnestly informed that the origin is unknown to the

borrower, And then, in the note to line 402, Eliot tells us

that a translation of the Upanishads is available "in

DeussenWs Sechzig Uparnishads des V k d a ~ , ~ We dght find it

useful to be told of an English translation. The early

~ i t i c s who indicted the poem as a pompous parade of

exudftion probably did not recognize the extent to which the

nates make fun of that very aspect of the per, There fs

real erndition being demnstrated here, bat the erratic

focus and the self-consciousness of the Motes add an ironic

reversal whlch somehow does not invalidate the serious

scholarship. The lutes, like the poem, are both scholarfy

and wck-sholar ly, reverent and irreverent,

What Eliot does, of conrse, is force both the reverence

and the irreverence together.x2 Critics usually see Elfates

=debasememtm of the Acteaon myth (The sound of horns and

motors, which shall bring/ Sueeney to M r s . Porter in the

springa) as an indictment of the modern world, but in the

process of indicting the d e r n , the passage also

undoubtedly besmirches the myth. Eliot's note to this

section provides a quote from Parliament of Bees:

When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear A noise of horns and hunting, wbich shall1 bxlng Actaeon to Diana in the spring Where all shall see her naked skin..,

In Ovides version, to which Eliot could clearly have

referred had he so chosen, the story has no connotations of

12. Once again, this mixing of the parodic and serious bears close resemblance ta one focus of the interpretive theories of M,M. Bakhtin,lThe Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, t-lolquist trans. (Austin: Texas UP, 1'38ti: 53-41. Ecakhtin says that all G r e e k drama contained "the so-called 'fourth dramaf, that is, the satyr play. In m u s t instances this drama, which follows upon the tragic trilogy, develuped the same narrative and mythological motifs as had the trilogy that preceded it. It was, therefore, a peculiar type of parodic-travestying contre-part ie to the myth that had just received a tragic treatment,. -. I t showed the myth in a d i f f e r e n t a ~ p e c t . ~ This is very analagous tu what happens in The Hasee Land. In ns sense does The #aste Land mere1 y venerate tradi t ion , but the veneration is nevertheless an unavoidable reality,

voyeurism whatever, Actaeon sees Diana accidentally and

there is no one else there to see her %aked skin*. Eliot's

mixing of reference here also mixes reverence with

frreverence, and nnderscores the cullaborative nature of the

tradition in generaf.

More than anything, then, the notes are affective

devices of collaboratfon- By their very nature they call

specific attention to the collaborations, i-e. borrowings,

that Eliot has enlisted. Their role in any piece of writing

is to acknowledge sources. But the notes to The Waste Land

mock--at once imitate and deride--the cowention of

footnotes, creating another subtle liminallty- Eliot also

colZaborates in the sense that he conforms to this

convention of scholarly wrPL,inq- By acknowledging b i s

sources in a poem, where convention does not require It,

Blfot demonstrates the extent to which lfterature nses, and

colfaborates with, soarces wfthin the literary tradition.

Bllot uses one convention, that of acknowledging sources in

sczholarly writing, to break with anothr convention, of

mfng sources without acknowledgement in creative nriting,

He uses the traditional to be revolutionary, and the

rexmlat5onarjt to be tradftional-

Very f e w modern critics seem -to remembe~ that Fhe SZiste

Laad, first and foremost, luxtaposes the traditional with

the attrsol~tely revolutionary. John Xirora Cooper erpbasizes

this aspect of the peer:

"Like all revolutionary works of art, [ The kraste Land1 S s an assault on the language of a privileged discou~se. It seeks to make visible, from inside, and thus m r e tellingly disrupt, the settled, even formulaic accounts of lived experience.wz3

But the radicalism and snbversiveness of The W;lste Land are

not wholly distinct from its conservatism and nostalgia for

privilege. What makes it truly remarkable is that it

embodies these "antitheses," producing a single state of

mind, which, to m e EliotQs extraordinaxy phrase in

describing the mind of Donne, is wextremely complex, and

chiefly composed of odds and ends in constant flux,

manipulated by desire and fear."

Cleo lfclelly Kearns is one critic who has argued that

The Waste Land is simnltaneously radical and conservat8ve.

Like Cooper, Rearns finds the poem to be radical: in her

essay uRealism, Politics, and Literary Persona in The Waste

Laailr, Kearns describes The e s t e Land as -one of the w s t

politically and culturally subversive texts of our

Bat unlike Cooper, she recognizes its

conservatism, citing Uyndham Lewis's assessment of Eliot as

*fiaff H a ~ x a d half statas g r t ~ . ~ ~ ~ Kearns* purpose is to

delppomtrate the extent to uhkh perceptions about The mste

land have changed shee the poem was first published, but in

so doing she anearths perhaps the first (Lewissa)

13. Cooper, 4. $4. Kearns, 138. 15. I b i d - , 137.

acknowledgment of the poem's limlnality. She also seeks to

dewnertrate the extent to which Eliot was influenced not by

Bradley and Dante, but by Bertrand Russell and Walt Whitman.

Her contention is that, despite Ellot's professed dislike of

natitman, and despite Bliotss discomfort with Russellss ideas

which were *new and challenging not only in philosophical

but in sexual and political terms as well," Eliot was

inflnenced by Russell's %tyfistic effrontery* and had a

*secret fascinationn with Rnssell's mpeculiarly radical and

open point of view,*2a According to Kearna, both Russell and

Whitran exemplified this openly sexual politics to which

Eliot was secretly attracted.

Reamsf observation concerning the influence of Whitman

aad Qairsell has interesting implications fn terms of Bliotfs

depiction of sexuality. Kearns shows that, in both Russell

and Clhitran, Eliot found "direct, open, demcratically

accessible and sense-affirming views which were lfnked with

an explicitly sexual politics, a pofitics of 'free

loves...or at least of tremendous sexual affirmation, which

Eliot fonnd both distuzbing and vitalW(l39), She goes on to

say that Eliot found it necessary to mmaskm in his poetry

%be overly %elf-revealingu style of both Wassell and

Whitran with -an overtone of iranyPf and *a certztfn GaLlic

we can trace in Eliot's artistic lineage not only the metaphysical and Rench Symbolist traditions

of which he so often spoke, but another, deeper line of descent, one in which the democratic, the sexually open and the philosophically realist views of his greatest mentors take on a new and potentially fruitful life.tl39)

Eliot was, in other words, both attracted and repelled by

sexuality, and by frank self-confession, and therefore

cneated a style which allowed him to explore both his

attraction to, and his resistance to, the carnal, sensual

side of life.

It is no surprise, therefore, that sexuality in The

Hbste Land often seers informed by both fascination and

revulsion, We have seen already that the Thames Daughteres

frank, yet demure confession, "'1 raised my knees/ Supine an

the floor of a narrow canoeew yokes a number of complex

responses together, The bored typist, too, is represented

arbfvalently. When she says Well now that's done: and I'm

glad it's over,'" (252) or when the narratfve tells as that

=the young 8an carbunculara W e s advances which are

wnnreproved, if ~ndesired,~ (238) the wattittadem toward them

fs by no means clear. The passage has always been seen as

conderrning both of them for engaging listlessly in

carnality, bat the bnroar in the scene makes light of their

offence, Ilsd, by inference, their supposed offence would be

eliminated, or -tigated anyway, had they engaged in that

sare carnality with fusty vigour. The attitude seems to be

that if the yaung man cazbancelar*~ advances are

*-esined,* then they should be ~ r e p r ~ v e d , ~ bmt the logfcal

conclusion then is that they might just as we11 be honestly

desired, The poem, however, hovers at the edges of all these

attftudes, never firaly coming to rest on any of them.

The sexnality in rhe Waste Land could also be

uraderstood in term of the Freudian concept of negation.

legation allows the snbject to experience the pleasure of

*the forbiddenu while nevertheless expressing revulsion for

it- In this way it broaches disparate inclinations and

hovers between extreme opposites. A constant sense of these

*urgesw lurks in the poem, The poem does indeed seem to take

pleaswe in its symbolic expulsion of sexuality. Yet , in the

very act of denouncing sexuality, the poem itselfw

to revel in %t, wBognsw as the notes no doubt are, Tiresias

does in fact wsee,a and mforesuffer,w precisely this

substance in the poem. leither sighted nor blind, and yet

both, neithex wonan nor man and yet both, neither ancient

nor wdern and yet both, Tiresias "throbbing between two

lives,* fanctioms as a urediumu in a number of ways,

Tiresias acts as a rediar, both inhibiting and facilitating

the readerss experience of the scene he wsurveys,w

mforetefls,m and, in a sense, participates in- It is

=peepinq tomw: 'And I Tiresias have foresuffered all/

Bnacted on this s m divan or bedut243-4); or "the tire is

now propitious ae he gnesses,,.eadeavors to engage he= in

(234-5) iBe Latinate usages make the scene he

describes pore ridiculous, but they alse m k e the adirty-

old-man* voyenrism sonad rather like an att- to escape

censure. Purtherurre, there aze versions of the Tirasias

legend in which Tiresfas sees Athena naked arrd saffexa t h e

fate he suffers for that reason.17 In that version the

voyelrrisr is ilplied ia the resulting punishment, sad as

such enst inform ~ f l f pefspective om what TSresizrs aim facta

sees. The passage, seen in t h i s way, move8 toward both

revulsion and voyetufstic fascination. The tension between

the two rakes the scene -throb betwen two fives,* Xost

fnteresting of all is the collaboratfve effect of this

l i d n a l i t y : the reader's attftude toward these things

determines what these things -am- The conflictlag

impressions and attractions are simply there, but the

reader" own irpnlses aad inclinations wiU defermlns b v

those existing elements are interpreted.

3tvem Eliat8s free-form mingling of characters ereatas a

sense of dynamism and flux, la the Stetson passage, as we

have seen, the Cconsciopsnessn is bath the *pum am3 the nIa

being addressed, =There I saw one I kneW(693 rodulates

gradually into ullomt hypocrite lectenrl--ran sembfable,--wn

fre~e!~(76), The consciousness of the poem i s both telling

and being told this parsbaqe, m u s e sach a polymoxphourr

consciousness mtbinirs- me lisrste &andt it huvers b e t w e e m

idemtfties, betworen sobject and objed, me diatirnietfons

17. Gregory S. Jay rentims, but does not provide a reference for, this attwnate to the m y t h in "Discower~ng the Curpus."

between subject and object appear geanfngless, and the

reader, whose position within this exchange constantly and

f l u i d l y shifts, also wexperiencesa a partiaf bxeakdown of

the abilsty to dfffereatiate between self and other, Bat of

course, the reader remains wholly separate from, even ijhfle

mrgd in, the experience of the poem, and so the experience

oE *rroe-differentiationu fs mecessarily onry a part of the

cwplex.

Amother paarsaqe wherein the difficulty of establishing

idemtity draws attentfen to it8eLf is in *What the Thunder

Said.* Bere the quester/poet seems to have merged with the

Fksber King when he says O f sat upon the shore /Fishing,

with the arid plain behind re.*( 124-5) Moreover, after the

tbander actually speaks we are told that

The sea was calm, your heart wauld have responded Gaily, to controlHmg bands.fl21-2)titalics rfnel

?here is no clear way of knowhg either wko says these

M D L ~ ~ , or to whom they are addressed, All paxticipants in

t%e aarratfve, including the reader and, p r e s d l y , the

pet, faaction both as speaker &nd as attdftor of these

1 ~ ~ .

.ot*ly, tho pocri's spsaLer lacks sky specific or

coatinaoos geader fdeskification. Sameness and difference

cm-czrist- mt evcm from BXiat*s explicit fdentification in

his ~lliote, that *all the ~ ~ l t ~ t arc one norran, aad tire twa

accxes meet in Tircr?siaa,u t h u e is a Breakdawn of clear

gender distinctions produced by the free-associative iogfc

of narration- The allusions in the first section give it a

seemingly male voice, yet virtually the whole section seems

to be spoken by a woman. *Shew d u f a t e s between Marie, the

hyacinth girl, and Had- Sosostris. However, since so much

of what is said in "The Burial of the Dead* at least echoes

the male voices of its litexary progenitors (all the

allaaions, I think, except to Sappho, are to male witers),

gender identification becomes a complex issue of

collaboration, mere are inn-rrprable echoes within the

voices, so that certainty is always difficult and identity

is finally impassible to ascertain, But this does not sinply

yield confusion: rather than a reaningZess babble of

indeterminate tongmes, Phe #&iste Land is olt f amtcly a

ceaseliess intexplay between individuality and

depersonalization.

me poem hovers continualPy between voices. The speaker

of the poem simltaneamly singles out new voices, and is

dram into new voices, so that one is never sure who is

speakiag. Even in the opening line, "April is the cruellest

rcnth, bxeedingl Lilacs oat of the dead land,- the

passibifities for who mspeaksa include Geoffrey Chaucer,

Sarie, Walt lilhiiman, a d Eliot as well as sore persona

invented by Bliot- The inverted seasonal headpiece which

recalls CBamcex*s that A@riTlW, also zecalXs -itnnes

-em filacs last in the dooryard blool*d/-.-I wurned, and

y e shall romn wit8 ever-retarninq/ s@ring,* Zbe person who

least into relfef against the backdrop of influence and

tzadition. A complete consciousness and acknowledqement of

the tiws results in a recognition of one's place within

that order, and as such locates the subject-

In The Waste Land the penultimate "scenew exemplifies

precisely this locating of t h e subject:

My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a wmentss surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms (402-9)

The *roaentts surrenderw establishes the identity, and the

"awful daringw is rewarded by giving both the giver and

receiver wexistence,w Bone of the norm1 machinations of

identity establishment can do it. The subject can not be

fixed in death becanse death's very staais prevents it from

capturing the dynastism of identity. The arersories whkh have

been failing f r o m the beginning of the poem cannot fix

identity, because we are not merely the sum total of our

memories; If we were, that too wuld be a kind of deatb-

#either can the law contain the identity, for the law, and

the will too, are a kind of stasis like death- Onlly the

dynamism of dying, of swaenderlmg the will, and the mwry

and the desixe to take a d possess result in *existencew

becaase all the other means of estab'fishing it are "empty

rooms,- of course, the image also connotes sexual surrender,

but that too represents a kind of blurring of identity

distinctions, a lileinality and a kind of flux.

Another intriguing locus of flux and transition in the

poem is in 'What the Thunder Saidff where a single sound

gives rise to difference, to language, and, sfmultaneously,

to unity. When the thunder speaks the monosyllable

identically three times, and the three different -listenersff

(who might all be one listener) -interpretff the sound as

three different "co-rids,* a number of liminalitles come

into play. In a sense the scene is paradigmatic of most of

the ways that the poem has given formal articulation to its

concern with liminality. On the one hand all the differences

of language are explicitly linked to a single monosyllabfc

transcendental signifier, which can stand in for, and be the

final source of, all expression. Conversely, the unity of

the transcendental signifier is hopelessly sundered by the

fnterpreters, Moreover, tbis transcendentaf signifier is

completely ungrounded, a completely free-playing signifier.

The scene itself contains a number of interesting

conflicts which co-exist in a state of flux:

Dayadhvarrr: I have heard the Ley turn in the door once and turn once only We thi* of the key, each in his prison ThinLing of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rnroars Revive for a lorent a broken Coriolanus (411-16)

The literal level of rpeaninq, stripped of its literary

associations, is helpful here- Thinking of the key confirms

the prison, The prison, it would seem, could be escaped if

only we could stop thinking of the key. But the key is the

H a n s of escape, What we are left with is a kind of

conundrum where freedom is only possible if it is

unconscious, which would make it unappreciable, and escape

is only possible through a complete obliviousness to it. The

indestructible barriers are the product of the most

superficial differences:

Dayatta: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invfted, beating obedient To controlling hands.(419-22)

The invitation hr ings, or uwould haveu brought, gay

obedience. -Dam is not an invitation, however; it is a

coprand. Furthermore, the command is control,^ but whether

this ream self-control or snbnission to external control is

unclear, All of this is still further complicated by the

fact that wDaw is taken as a conrand even though the thunder

allows that same comnd to be interpreted in three

different ways, Volition, and snbmission themselves are,

finally, inextrfcable from each other, despite being in

direct conflict, As we have already seen, Eliot argues that

smrender aad submission can in fact strengthen identity,

and by exteasion, volition-

Because it meant the complete obliteration of the self,

transcendence into the absolute, according to Eliot, was

"utter night,nam But The Waste Land, largely through

extensive use c f metonymy, suggests a non-totalitarian

absolute, All of the allusions to other pieces of

literature, aside from repxesenting an active collaboration,

afso function as synecdoches, or fragments which stand in

for organic wholes. "This music crept by us upon the waters*

invokes the whole of The Tempest, as is attested to by the

fact that source-hunting critics Rave launched into detailed

explications of that and other plays t~ which Eliot refers

metonymically. The title both invokes and evokes the entire

grail cycle and the twa competing traditions which that

cycle subsumes. The liberal use of these allusions, which

often l i n k several texts together, allows this one poem to

stand in, metonymically, for the whole of the literary

tradition. But in so doing, of course, it afso points to the

gaps which it supposedly bridges. By shoring fragments

against its ruins, the poem calls attention to, even invokes

uhaleness; by invoking the wholeness, however, it also

i~vokes the holes both in the text and in the tradition. Ihe

awful sepazation between the whole and the part stands side

by side, or even inside, the ability of tbe part to invoke

the whole, As fragrents, the allusions connote eamptiness,

but as allusions they create fnlfness, What we are left with

is a text nhicb merges and collocates both emptiness and

18. C - f . Harriet Davidsun, 74,

fullness to the point of bursting. The brilliant technique

developed by Eliot is to represent an organic whole, which

permits and even thrPves on difference, which observes

similarity withont being h e g e m n i ~ , ~ * and which achieves

transcendence without requiring complete surrender of the

self.

The final fmport of reading the poem in this way is

also liarinal. Two conflicting effects are generated

siznultaneously. On the one hand an wabsolutew is both

created and destroyed, and on the other hand a course of

action is both presented and undermined. The absolute is

generated metonymically, so that the poem succeeds in

ca l l ing it to mind without producing a finality. The

absolute itself is truly absolute in that it allows

difference and contradiction. An absolute which wharmonizesw

differences seeks by definition to eliminate them, but an

absolute which allowg difference to co-exist, and to exist

in constant conflict, is not hegemnic. Nevertheless, an

absolute which is called up by the fragments which stand in

for the whole brings the absolute into existence even as it

tears it down, became as we have seen it shows the gaps as

19. I am thinking here of Terry Eagletun's discussion o f "universal izat iron" in his recent study, Ideof o p y : H n fntr~ductim <London: Versa, 1930f:5C-7, As Eagletun rightly paints the current tendency t o criticize anything which smacks sf an attempt at universal izat ion as hegemonir is slightly absurd, "Universalization," af ter all, is "indeed, ultimately in the interests of all individuals. "(573 The point I am making is that, though impossible, a truly totafizing system which allows far all differences is by no m e a n s total itar ian, and is a consumat ion devoutly t o be wished.

well as the connections, and the gags overwhelm the frail

and precarious connections. The resistance to finality

represented by suggesting a wholeness that resists

totaPLtarianisre produces, in the end, a different kind of

finality--a finality which entails an inability to decide

anything ox do anything-

In this sense rhe Waste Land undermines the very

concept of the dialectic. The juxtaposition of opposites

from the opening line onward warns us to be nary of

progress. RApril is the cruellest monthm because it mixes

memory and desire- Hewry is consciousness of the past, and

desire is consciousness of the future, and between them they

represent consciousness of progress, But in Eliot's scheme

they indicate a repetitive cycle rather than a regenerative

one, April is cruel because it mixes memory and desire

without fulfilling desire and therefore making memory a

painful knowledge of repetition without progress-

Wo action, no gesture, no decision is possible in the

poem because all possibilities co-exist simultaneously. What

we are left with are fra-nts shored against ruins, both of

hope and despair, of desire and of fear- That much

i&etexrinacy produces only mabou3.&e,m2Q or -aporiaA so that

the qxmster/ king sits on the shore wondering if he should

20- c - f . Gregory Jay's "Discovering t h e Corpus," where he r e f e r s to E l i o t F % own word, "aboulie" which had been "a lifelong affliction" with E l i u t . Jay defines "abuulie" as an inability to decide anything and links t h i s phrase of E l iotT ts "la tour abciilie" in t h e final stanza of t h e paem.

at least put his lands in order. There are several ways af

reading this line. The questerl king is unable to decide on

a course of action, or he has reached transcendence and is

experiencing a last bit of nostalgia for earthly things, or

the quest is a failure and the quester/ king seeks to

salvage something from that failure. In fact, all of these

readings co-exist, indicating the simultaneity of success

and failure, of regeneration and degeneration.

Simultaneous co-existence in the poem extends even to

the poem's temporal and spatial locus. By virtue of its

allusiveness, its dream-logic progression and its non-

linearity, The m t e Lsm? occupies no specifk temporal or

spatial locus, yet displays a deep consciousness of its age.

The London locations in the poem appear to give it a locus,

and locations, generally, ab~und--~Hofgartens~ and hyacinth

gardens and NHetropolesn and nHimavantw and numerous others-

-but none of them provides the poem with a location. At the

sare time though, they provide the poem with a huge variety

of specificlty which causes the poem to oscillate between

befng everywhere and nowhere.

The temporal locus is equally liminal. We have already

seen such terporal displacerents as the W e r n Sweeney's

collocation with Actaeon and the medieval childsen in the

choir foft singing *jug jug to dirty ears.a We have seen the

W h a and St. hqas t ine coflocatea thematically as well as

spatially, spiritually and hence temporally. A variety of

seeringly specific times are jumbled together in such a way

that a l l t i m e I s redeemed and unredeemable at one and the

sane time, Specific tiaes--RApril,ff "the violet hour,* *the

final stroke of nine," "the closed car at fourm--intersect

with vague mergings of temporal loci to give the reader a

consciousness of the passing of time, the transience of the

age, and a sense of permanence. Forecasting (Madame

Sosostris, Tiresias, the Sibyl) is conflated with hindsight,

rewry, and the cyclical nature cycle which degenerates and

regenerates alternately and simultaneously in the poem. The

way up is indistinguishable from the way down; the very

direction of timeVs wveaent becomes ambiguous. Among all

tbe copious allnprlon to myth, me Waste Land exposes the

quest for progress as a myth. Decisiveness founders

intezrfnably on a shore apparently in ruins, although the

attitude toward those ruins is unclear, Even here, in other

words, there is ambiguity, because the ending of the poem

can be read efther as aporia or apotheosis, either

apocalypse or apocrypha,

Remarkable as the ending is for its seemingly

incoherent fragmentatSon--1inguistica1, cultural,

historical, qthical, referential, reverential, and much

else--the E r m n t a at tfre end of the poem are even more

remarkable for the ambiguities they house. Whoever it is

that asks, "Shall I at least set my lands in order?* would

seem to have the power to do so, yet the question can be

seen both as suggesting the w i l l to act, or as suggesting

enervation, mLondon bridge is falling down falling down

falling downb is both trivial and tragic, both a meaningless

sing-song--the source of children's amusement--and, in light

of the "undone manyu who were crossing that same bxidge

earlier in the poem, an ireage of disaster. "The fire which

~efines,~ too, is an ambivalent image, not only because of

the pain being endured in the pursuit of refinement, but

because the moment remains in flux, like Keatsws figures on

the urn, hovering in a state of arrested motion without

progress, History is conflated with myth; linguistic and

semiotic systems of meaning blend, or bleed, together, both

re-inforcing and undermining each other. A babble of tongues

sings all about the readersw ears, but the descent into this

chaos is indistinguishable from, may even be seen as

precipftating, the ascent into "shantih, shantih, shantil~.~

In fact, the copious discussion of these final

fragnents, and the indecision as to their import--whether

nltimtely positive or negative--is a result, precisely, of

the fact that all alternatives, and all answers co-exist. It

fs not sufficient to say, though, that Eliot leaves the

choice to the reader, Rather, he shows that all choices are

hopelessly tangled. m a t F ! e m t e Land enacts, ultimately,

is ~iot a partfcnfar state of mind, but the very essence of

v&st Eliot believed a state of mind to be, The poes, Tlke a

state of a n d , truly is aextrewly complex, and chiefly

cemposed of odds d ends i n constant flux, maefpulatd by

desire aad fear,'

These words, whgch Eliot mote to descvibc Donne's

poetry, do admirable double-duty as a description of the The

W a s t e Land. In fact, we have seen that Eliot's early prose,

in general, provides that necessary point of view which

enables as to understand The khste Land as the enactment of

the limknal poetics which the early prose so dynamically

develops, The neomplexity of feeling," in The #hste Land

results from this liminal poetics which Eliot, in yet

another comment on Donne, referred to as a series of "rapid

alterations and their antitheses,a2= the product ~f which is

either the ultimate impasse or the peace which passeth

nnde~standing, either the possibility of the ultimate, or

the ultimate impossiblity,

Readers occupying the 1ilr;ren between Eliot's early prose

and his poetry will see that Eliot's challenge to arbitrary

and fmeraanent intelhxtnal abstractions goes far beyond a

aexe challenge to the closed categories of comedy and

tragedy: it is a challenge to categorization itself. Eliot's

concern is ontological as much as it is epistemological.

Befng itself is shown as inseparable from knowing and as

dyalztnie, ungrounded, lirinal--a condition of flux, which for

&I1 its insubstantiality, does its work upon us; is ureal,w

me m t e Land gives poetic form and expression to a state

of and in which being and knowgnq are inextricably

connected, andi in which reality itself is a state of flux,

of dymamic interchange, between a matrfx of fozees which aze

21- "John Dcmne," 332.

themselves d y n d c . The challenge is net to the traditfsn,

or to the present age, but is rather a ~aclical challenge to

our very way of conceiving reality,. Seen f ~ o m Eliot's point

of view, the closed categories of real and %deal, tradition

and individual, conscious and nnconscious are broached and

blurred, This blmring, this consciuus confusion, is famd,

=st profoudly, ia art.

Cmen seen in the context of the early prose, The iiliurte

&and's confusions becore unde~stdable, inevitable evela,

because they are the point. The unsettling experience of the

poer enst be taken in the context of Bliot's views abaut the

subject/ &sect relationship as a dynamic state of flux, and

about art as a collaborative meaning-making prtnztss which is

never entirely grounded, neither in the creator nor the

andienee, neither in the real nor the ideal, The dyrmmic

condition of the poer is an fnevitable outcropping s f this

poetics. The poem's liminality preclrtdes a cadortable

context for the poer because to exist within the lfmen fe to

be without a context, This precarious and even danqeroas

state, which necessarily blurs the bomdaries and arbitrary

intelleetaal abstractions wbich are preregaisite to

traditional conceptions of context, is the esaewe of ?'he

EUot perform a fine and delicate operation. on the

senskble world, exposes the awful separation between tbe

actual and the ideal, abd prrrsues his ob-servatio~ fnto

quatidian extrp-rplp sf torture, bat the real effect he

eficits is to brinq into b 2 d relief the Hadern a iM. And

31Le the state af rid it reveals w i t h such true cold

hardness, The m t e Laab hovers i n constant, self-conscfons

f low, samewhere between psychology a d eschatology, between

gatter and grafl, between corfc and tragic, between desire

ilnd fear. Unfting a13 these without ierging them, it is a

failme of mmrmp?ntal pruportioxts surd an nnqnalffied

saccess,

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