A Deconstruction of T.S. Eliot The Fire and The Rose - William James Austin - Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 140, Lewiston NY

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A DECONSTRUCTION OF T.S. ELIOT
THE FIRE AND THE ROSE
SALZBURG UNIVERSITY STUDIES

SALZBURG UNIVERSITY STUDIES
IS A PROGRAMME OF
THE INSTITUT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK
PARIS LODRON UNIVERSITY, SALZBURG

A DECONSTRUCTION OF T.S. ELIOT
THE FIRE AND THE ROSE
by
William J. Austin
Lt
THE EDWIN MELLEN PRESS,

LEWISTON, NEW YORK /SALZBURG AUSTRIA
1996
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‘ SALZBURG STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

POETIC DRAMA & POETIC THEORY
Volume 140
EDITOR: JAMES HOGG
INSTITUT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK
UNIVERSITAT SALZBURG, A-5020 SALZBURG, AUSTRIA
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Table of Contents
supplement: an introduction
ite The Word ade
2 The Word Without a Word 59
Be The Word Within a Word 94
4. The Word in the Desert 143
5 The Silent Word 214
play 267
Endnotes 278
Bibliography 295
SFP
2 4 1996
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professors Donald Pizer and Barry
Ahearn for their incisive comments and suggestions, and
to Vicki Oliva for her exemplary effort in preparing the
manuscript. I would also like to thank my wife, Reyna,
whose love and support kept me working during difficult
periods. My special thanks and deepest appreciation are
reserved for the late Professor E. P. Bollier without
whose unswerving direction, encouragement, and patience
this project could never have been brought to completion.
A portion of this study was delivered at the 1991
Christianity and Literature Conference at King's College
in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and appears in the
published proceedings of that conference.

supplement: an Introduction
In Of Grammatology,
SV, Jacques Derrida comments that of
"the essential nothing on whose basis everything can
appear and be produced within language, .. . spirits as
diverse as Delacroix, Balzac, Flaubert, Valéry, Proust,
f.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and many others had a sure
consciousness."!' The purpose of the following study is
to examine the deconstructive themes and methods
whitch wuantomm TS GElVoetlsy proseu and) spoeiny 7 Mandmto
demonstrate that, long before Derrida intervened in the
area of literary analysis, Eliot had already developed
the principles now "enshrined" as deconstruction.
For more than a decade western literary criticism
has been the site of philosophical and methodological
Crisis: on one side of the conflict, the traditionalists
and/or New Critics who cling to critical methods and
assumptions rooted in orderly metaphysical systems; on
the other side, the "renegade" deconstructionists whose
claims for the irrational structure of language mirror
what quantum physicists have discovered about the
physicai- wo“ld.-i.e., .that the order. of the universe
breaks down at the sub-atomic level.
il
2 The Fire And the Rose
Without exception, New Critics and their near
relations have assumed T.S. Eliot as one of their own.
Scholars such as Hugh Kenner, Grover Smith, Cleanth
Brooks, and Allen Tate, though diverse in their critical
styles, have each contributed major studies whose aims,
more or less, are to read Eliot's ironic stances in the
light of fixed poetic structures. Their general method,
that of the "close reading," involves as much as possible
the isolation of the literary work:from the influences of
other disciplines, and the discovery of meaning already
"centered" in primary images. im@theia hands p shlaotvs
poems become aesthetic "machines" whose assemblies yield
definitive statements, stable, im the sense» of
Usestwveted; Sapo Imes or Wwvew .
Recent analyses of. Eliot's prose and poetry,
however, suggest that such confidence may be misplaced.
A new generation of analysts, loosely formed under the
BVioiser "poststructuralism," has applied Derrida's
critical methods to Eliot's oeuvre with varying degrees of
efficiency, co-opting the twentieth century's most
celebrated poet for their own cause. Of the recent book-
length studies of Eliot those by Gregory Jay, Richard
Shusterman, and Michael Beehler most successfully read
Eliot as the modern poet most aware of language's
essential indeterminacy. Gregory Jay's T.S. Eliot and

supplement: an introduction 3
the Poetics of Literary History, though in the main an
analysis of Eliot in the light of Harold Bloom's "theory
of influence," nevertheless incorporates many of the
tools and terminology of deconstruction to account for
Eliot's problematical relationships with his precursors
as well as with an ultimate logos, or poetic "father."
Similarly, Richard Shusterman's T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy

of
Criticism has as its aim to
enable us to perceive and profit from those aspects of his

bErotkiss thought which are especially relevant and
therapeutic for criticism today, but which are typically
ignored or misunderstood, since overshadowed by an exaggerated
perceptionof enormous differences between Eliot's outlook and
our own postmodernist perspective. Yet Eliot himself.
anticipated some of the directions and dangers of today' s
post-modernist theories. 2
Neither of these studies, however, is satisfactory
as a sustained Derridaean analysis of Eliot's prose and
poetry: Jay mixes Derrida with Harold Bloom, a sometimes
awkward marriage since Bloom is firmly rooted ina
Romantic/metaphysical aesthetic; and Shusterman, while
including detailed readings of Eliot's essays, barely
confronts the poems. Michael Beehler's 7.S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, and tve Discourses

of Difference comes closest to providing
a complete analysis based on the principles of
deconstruction. But even here, the analysis is divided
between two poets, and so much of Eliot's work is
necessarily passed over. Though Beehler

4 The Fire and the Rose
performs a lengthy Derridaean reading of Four Quartets, for
example, Eliot's other poems, including The Waste Land,
receive only the briefest of mentions.
This study seeks to remedy what up to now has been
largely a partial and fragmentary approach to
deconstructing Eliot's prose and poetry. The process,
though generally following Eliot's chronology, does not
always restrict itself to that approach. Eliot's own
INAGIGY Ole WreeWelicsleig), selene jeelene and current literary works
are synchronically "present," each commenting on and
altering the meaning of the other, as well as Michel
Foucault's celebrated a-chronological method, amounts to
mores than | enough justifications. for = thas ecrudy!s
occasional "slippage." It is also worth noting here
that, in keeping with post-structuralism's emphasis on
the polysemous nature of the text, this study may seem at
times to circumvent Eliot's intended meanings. But
again, Eliot's .own theory of .tradition.makes such
readings not only possible, but plausible. Never one to
succumb to the intentional fallacy, Eliot creates a
literary language full of "Cunning passages," a poetry
which, while ostensibly progressing toward faith in the

absolute, simultaneously chips away at the underpinnings
of that faith, working against its "author's" own desire
for a transcendent experience. In the context of

supplemenm: an introduction %
deconstructive methodology, the writings revesl what
previously may have been concealed from older critical
gethods--perhaps even from Zlict himself. In any event,
the process of interpretation is always marked by the
Wguess,” the stab in the dark--nowhere is this more
evident than in 2 critic’s reconstruction of authorial
intentions.
Bs Richaré Shusternman points out, post-modernist
critics have generally perceives “enormous differences”
between their ovn perspective and Elict’s- The
establishment within the discipline of literary studies
of new and dominant pedagogy, i-e-, of deconstruction,
however, represents 2 “new valuation” (to use Eliot's ovn
from “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) of

language
post-moternist views. What once seemed “enormous* has
stestily diminished, to the point that we may now

been
f£lict’s literary theories and methods as
understand
‘comfortably in line with post-structuralist concerns.
Rilthough the proponents of deconstruction are quick
a “0point out Zlict’s philosophical relationship with F.H.
|‘Bradley as a gateway to Llioct’s commection to Derrida,
this focus barely takes into account the fact that both
position and Derrida’s vis a2 vis the
Elict’s
,
nature of metaphysical “certitudes” have
woblematical
in Classical and Romantic theories of

ix roots
language and biterature:? idee sie imeye ‘acl ‘yeh Aelsiehe
theorists such as Plato, Aristotle, and later Pope,
Wordsworth, and Coleridge, are essentially in agreement
with Derrida, for surely they are not. Nevertheless,
within the dominant Classical, neo-Classical, and
Romantic perspectives of their times lie the seeds of
deconstructive thought. Plato's assertion that "[{True
knowledge resides] in our minds, not in words or bodily
shapes," * as well as Aristotle's stress on the necessity
for rules of style and composition, evinces concern
regarding language's potential for missing the mark, for
producing the indeterminate.
In a related vein, Shelley writes that poetry
is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of

things and perpetuates apprehension, until the words that represent them,
become, through time, signs for positions or classes of thoughts instead of
pictures of integral thoughts; and _ then if no new poets should arise to create
afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be
dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.>
What is striking, of course, is the similarity between
Shelley's emphasis on relations and renewal, and Eliot's
own by way of F.H. Bradley and the theory of succession
found in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Equally
important is Shelley's suggestion that what contains the
potential for disorganization, namely language, also
creares, the "apprehension" of that which theoretically
escapes disorder, namely the absolute. As this study

makes clear, shelley's point that the absolute is
conceptually possible only within the relational
structure of language expresses precisely a position that
Eliot and Derrida share.
By the time of the Modern Period in literature and
literary criticism, the indeterminacy of human experience
takes on new import as the self's capacity to control its
discourse comes increasingly under fire. Perhaps the
most far reaching incursion into the self's domain
arrives in the form of a quasi-scientific treatise on
neurosis. Sigmund Freud's’ The Interpretation of Dreams
accomplishes something wholly new = and intensely
disturbing: it fractures the self into parts, conscious
and unconscious, whose aperceptions are largely the
result of an endless effort to integrate. Seness and
frustration replace the unity of "I" as the axis around
which meaning revolves. Meaning itself becomes
preblematical since it is not. so. much a controlled
product as the residue of the mind's struggle for
ConcLol .
Freud's semiotics extends from ordinary language to
the unspoken signs of social behavior and the images of
dreams. All are devious, concealing as much as they
reveal. With the mind always more or less divided
against itself, language, expressing the highs and lows

of that struggle, is therefore useful in the quest for
"adjustment." It is at least implicit in all of Freud's
writings that the object of analysis and interpretation,
and therefore the repository of meaning, is not the
psyche but the sign, and primarily the word. Even the
dream/image is co-opted by language in that the focus of
analyst and patient is on the "cunning passages" of
language which are both the site of psychic disorder and
the workplace for whatever recovery is possible.
Despite the fact of Eliot's wen) known resistance to
Freud's theories, Freud, Eliot, and Derrida share a
suspicion of experience's "cunning passages." In the
first paragraph of Civilization

and its Discontents, Freud sums up
his view of man in the following manner:
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false

standards of measurement--that they seek power, success and wealth for
themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of
true value in life.®
Freud here joins Derrida and the Eliot of The Waste Land in
elevating self-deception to the level of a first
principle.
There are no doubt many other examples of
deconstructive "tendencies," sources too numerous to
examine or even list here. Derrida's own insistence that
the quest for origins produces a seemingly endless series
of provisional starting points, each dissolving into yet

more structures, encourages us to limit our search. We
may, however, add a few of the more obvious and notable
figures who have influenced Eliot and/or Derrida.
Certainly Eisenstein's theory of indeterminacy represents
an important touchstone in relativist thinking. In
addition, Martin Heidegger's radical philosophy and
rhetorical style opens yet another line of textual
communication between Eliot and Derrida. Harriet
Davidson's J7.s. Eliot and Hermeneutics offers a more than
adequate analysis of the similarities which connect
Heidegger Lee. Eliot (They were, after all,
contemporaries.). Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology,
maps out his own indebtedness. However, a more direct
comparison of Eliot and Derrida is not only possible,
but, considering the latter's unquestioned dominance of
recent critical directions, advisable.
In order to perform our task, it is first necessary
to explicate in some detail Derrida's ideas. The initial
chapter is therefore devoted to an in depth analysis of
Derrida's major texts, those collections of essays which,
in sequence, develop the principles and methods of
deconst suction. Once this groundwork is laid, chapter
two begins the analysis of Eliot. Here the dissertation
on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley is revisited with
particular attention to those theoretical pronouncements
that not only frame the dissertation's major themes, but

also anticipate the direction of Derrida's thought.
Chapter three then forges a link between Derrida, the
Gissertation, and Eliot's essays on literature and
culture. Chapters five and six extend our analysis into
the troubled landscape of Eliot's most celebrated poems:
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The
Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday,"" and Four Quartets. The study
"concludes" with several comments on Eliot's two best
plays, Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, and with a
brief assessment of deconstruction's present and future.
In sum, The Fire and the Rose suggests that Eliot's
ambivalent quest for the absolute culminates not in any
metaphysical assertion, but in his acceptance of the
indeterminate world. It further suggests that the
"father" of deconstruction, Derrida, is simultaneously
the "son" ~ born “of” Eliot's “strugqgqie. ines “cypicaliy
Derridaean conflation of identities, and like Tereus of
The Waste Land, the father devours the son.

Chapter 1: The Word
The scholar most responsible for modern language
studies is, of course, Ferdinand de Saussure. For
Saussure, word and reference correspond only by virtue of
a larger system of verbal structures which always grounds
meaning in its own interrelatedness. Although Saussure
admits to the existence of sign systems exclusive of
language, he nevertheless privileges language within the
range of semiotic possibilities:
Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore

comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes,symbolic
rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important
of all those systems. |
Language enjoys a privileged position because of its
reciprocal relationship with speech which in turn
provides a unity of meaning, issues we will shortly
address in their complexity, one at a time. for the
moment, it is worth our while to note that several of
Saussure's followers have clarified what in the Course

in
General Linguistics remains undeveloped. Whereas Saussure
seems content merely to advance language as the most
Vital of semiotic systems, Roland Barthes and Tzvetan
Todorov hold that language permeates all other systems
and is in fact their source. «According to
ua
Barthes, it is impossible for hand signals or musical
notes to mean without first passing through a pre-
existent linguistic system. 2 Jonathan Culler, in On
Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, explains for
the initiate Barthes' analysis in the following manner:
If a cave man is successfully to inaugurate language by making a special grunt

signify "food," we must suppose that the grunt is already distinguished from
other grunts and that the world has already been divided into the categories
"food" and "non-food" that allows food to be signified, or the contrast between
signifying elements that allows a sequence to function as a signifier.°
Language grounds all meaning, and therefore lies at
the center of all semiotic systems. In other words, the
system of interrelated linguistic "elements" must be in
place before any sound or signal may mean. In the case
of both Saussure and Barthes, language is understood as
a hermetic system, self-referential in its method of
producing meaning.* Because meaning results from the
opposition of linguistic signs, and is therefore never
the property of the single, isolated phonetic or visual
phenomenon, the object of linguistic investigation
becomes the process of interrelatedness, or, as Saussure,
Barthes, and later Derrida “term the process, ois
"difference."
The thrust of Saussure's analysis of "difference"
begins with the function of language and with the nature

of the linguistic sign. As Saussure makes clear in the
The Word 13
Course in General Linguistics, language does not transmit
meaning already in place in the world of sense
experience, but rather determines it, a function
previously reserved for God and the self, and excluded
from representational theories of language.° Kant's
"greet “goggles” “are,” ‘for’ Saussurep-linguistic: But
whereas Kant held that primary interpretations of sense
data are fixed (e.g., space and time), Saussure posits
language as an arbitrary cultural system not permanently
attached to a series of references beyond its own
grammatical and syntactical borders. "Language is a
convention," Saussure writes, "and the nature of the
sign that is agreed upon does not matter."® The
constituents of language, signs, are divided into
signifiers and signifieds. But--and this point is
crucial--the signified does not escape the domain of the
word; it is not an empirically found object, but rather,
like the signifier, an abstraction which depends for its
cogency on the interplay of all the signs in the system,
and never on the integrity of any isolated element within
or without the system:
_ in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference

generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in
language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the
signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed
before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that
have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign
contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.’
Both the signifier and its reference, the signified,
represent arbitrary choices since meaning does not issue
from individual elements in the system but rather from
the interplay of all the elements in the system. What
matters is that there exist elements in opposition, or
relation. *What does not matter is that any one element
attach itself forever to any one concept. In Saussure's
words, "The bond between signified and signifier is
arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole which results
from the associating of the signifier with the signified,
I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary .® Meaning, no
longer perceived as lodged in the world of empirically
validated sense objects, now finds itself part of an
arbitrary system. A gap opens up between the sign and
the world, and the effect is the seemingly endless
displacement of the center or source of meaning, since it
can be located in no one "immovable" object. Meaning
itself becomes the result of shifting relations, and not
the product of a one to one correspondence between word
and thing. If the sign remains essentially fluid,
Saussure nevertheless admits certain limitations on the

free-flow of meaning. The first of these interpretations
involves his consistent description of language as

"convention" and "code," and his division of the whole of
language from its individual manifestations

The Word 15
as speech. The whole of language Saussure terms
"langue." "Langue" represents
. .a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their

active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in
each brain, or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For
language is not completein any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a
collectivity.?
S4Paroie, sors Speaking,..\,on the, contrary,..is an
inaividual act. It is wilful [sic] .andvintellectual. .
the combination by which the speaker uses the language
code for expressing his own thought. '""° "Langue"
continually affected and altered by speech, evolves
idLacrrercally, “i.es, through time... Nevertheless, 1t is
Er’xea ““synehronically," 2.6.4, at. any one, point in time.
This seeming fixity is present not so much from the point
of view, but rather from the point of view of the
community and individual speaker. For the thing which
keeps language from
being a simple convention that can be modified at the whim of interested

parties. . .is rather the action of time combined with the social force.
.Language is no longer free, for time will allow the social forces at work to carry
out their effects. This brings us. . .to the principle of continuity, which cancels
freedom. But continuity necessarily implies change, varying degrees of shifts
in the relationship between the signifier and the signified. |!
Here Saussure seems to suggest that the community's
desire, its need for the communication of meaning (in
effect the community's desire to be a community),
restricts the velocity at which relations shift. Earlier
in the Course in General Linguistics

Saussure had already
pointed to the possibility that perspective determines
reality:
Far from it being the object that antedates the viewpoint, it would seem that it
is the viewpoint that creates the object; besides, nothing tells us in advance
that one way of considering the factin question takes precedence over the
others or is in any way superior to them.
Accordingly, language both encompasses an endless series
of fluctuations and presents a stable set of rules by
which meaning is generated.
However, the more one examines Saussure's exegesis,
the more one realizes an unbridgeable gap between
language and meaning on one side, and the empirical world
on the other. No unity exists between word and thing
Since the word, the individual sign, depends for its
Signified on its position in the total sign system, and
not on any reference to an external object which is
absolute and exclusive. Because of the arbitrary nature
of the sign, meaning is determined via the synchronic
stability of the system but flows back to no absolute
origin.
The reciprocal relationship which obtains between
language and speech is thus established. Though Saussure
continues to insist that "langue" and "parole" are
essentially different, the former a system or code
possessed only by the community at large, the latter an
individual and intentional use of the code, the two are
nevertheless grounded in each other. "Langue" is "both

The Word 17
a social “'product )of! the» faculty of speech and a
collection of necessary conventions that have been
adopted by a social body to permit individuals to
exercise that faculty." It goes almost without saying
that any "wilful" [sic] language act suggests the
existence of an intentional self. But as Saussure always
implies, and later theorists such as Barthes, Todorov,
and Michael Foucault have made explicit, the self or
subject does not exist apart from the sign system. The
self occupies no privileged position from which it can
manipulate language to pre-formulated ends. Rather the
self, like "parole," is always dependent on the sign
system for its own meaningful existence.
This emphasis on interdependency places Saussure
firmly within the modern tradition. It is in this area
of the lack of essences that Saussure's linguistic
theories find their relevance to the disciplines of
philosophy and literary theory. If signs mean by virtue
of their differences from other signs, and not due to any
natural nexus between content and form, thought and
thing, inside and outside, then the logcentric bias on
which all of the “social sciences" are based is
threatened, and scholars must re-evaluate how man finds
himself in a world of meaning--a world which includes a
cosmology as well as works of art. Modernism, in fact,

may be characterized in part as that movement in which
attention shifted from essences to relations. Certainly
Saussure's theories, coming as they do during the period
when T.S. Eliot was composing his dissertation on F. H.
Bradley and confronting many of these same issues, stand
in retrospect as hallmarks of modernist, relativist
hemi tae.
Or so it seems. Jacques Derrida, the leading
exponent of post-World War II relativist philosophy, has
indicated that at the heart of Saussure's project lurks
an essentialism which Derrida terms "logocentrism."
Derrida's project has always been to expose the
logocentric bias in western metaphysics. This bias,
according to Derrida, has prevented western thinkers from
exploring all the possibilities of a sign system driven
by relations, or, in Derrida's terminology, differance, from
the French word "differer" which means both to differ and
to defer. Differance, as Derrida utilizes the term,
suggests not only the differences which obtain between
elements in the sign system, but also, and paradoxically,
the "essential" difference at the core of the system.
Derrida accuses Saussure of bad faith on at least
two levels. First, the theoretical, synchronic stability
of "langue" which apparently fixes meaning at any one

The Word 19
point in time seems to conceal a residual attachment to
a western metaphysics of absolutes and essences.
Particularly in the area of literary/critical discourse,
the followers of Saussure, referred to most often as
"structuralists," hunt for structures that are original
and primary. Thus, if man is no longer cradled by God
and the self, language may be relied upon to produce a
rational experience and to infuse it with purpose. This
mistaken idea of language, Derrida claims, derives from
the structuralists' failure to relinquish a concealed
essentialism. For Derrida, no structure is inviolate and
language is not rational.
The second level at which Derrida conducts his
attack, and the most telling for Eliot scholars, is that
of the two ways "langue" manifests itself as human
discourse: speech and writing. Saussure, according to
Derrida, retains the priority of the spoken word, and
thereby fails to disengage from western metaphysical
tradition, an escape Saussure seemingly wishes to effect.
The privileged status of speech hinges on the notion of
"self-presence," or the presence of the speaker's
intentions behind his words. For Derrida, phonocentrism
merges with the determination through history of the meaning of being in

general as presence, with all the sub-determinations that depend on this general
‘form and organize within it their system and their historical linkage (presence
of the object to sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence
(ousia), temporal presence as the point (stigme)
of the now or theinstant (77),
self-presence of the cogito, consciousness
subjectivity, co-presence of the self and the other, intersubjectivity as an

intentional phenomenon of the ego, etc.). Logocentrism would ius be bound
up in the determination of the being of the existent as present.
As Jonathan Culler explains,
to claim, as in the Cartesian cogito that the "|" resists radical doubt because it
is present to itself in the act of thinking or doubting is one sort of appeal to
presence. Another is the notion that the meaning of an utterance is what is
present to the consciousness of the speaker, what he or she "has in mind” at
the moment of utterance.”'°
it; tormeSaussure, and also for sthe early Barthes) che
system of relations that compose "langue" are responsible
for meaning, the various elements nevertheless derive
their individual material identities as separate elements
for theire character as phonetic constructs. they are
differentiated and therefore placed in relation by virtue
of their sounds." Derrida suggests that for Saussure,
and for the structuralist project at large (before
Derrida intervened), the system of signs ("langue") is in
fact grounded by the intentional speech act of the
speaker. Put another way, structure, which grounds
meaning for structuralists, is itself grounded in speech,
which Derrida defines conventionally as seeming to kink
word and intention. Instead of eliminating subjectivism
from the equation, structuralism has inadvertently
divined yet another method of privileging the self, and
of inhibiting the free-play, the truly arbitrary nature
of language. Saussure's "gap" between language and
world, his assertion that the signified is as "free-

The Word 21
floating" as the signifier, is undermined by his locating
of the signifier both in a system of differences and, at
the same time, outside of the system in the intentional
self.
This nearly unavoidable privileging of an essence,
or primary structure, claims Derrida, drives western
thought in its seemingly unending quest for ultimates. As
with any teleological enterprise, what is to be proven is
always and already assumed as underwriting the entire
argumentative structure. THesOrdeics CO Drove, s Om TCO
attempt a proof of the existence of God, for example, one
must initially reserve discursive space for the
privileged term, a space not to be occupied by any
"fallen" term, an absence that is therefore already a
presence since the term's absence is already occupying,
by virtue of the term's reserved position, a place in the
discourse. Descartes'cogito is one of the more obvious
examples of this sort of circular reasoning. To
establish the existence of "I" as a psychological origin,
Descartes already assumes that thought is predicated as
the action Of a “primary agent: The: “search Form va
foundation is driven always by the assumption that a
foundation exists. Even Descartes' "doubt" positions
itself as predicated, and so points to that space which
may be occupied only by doubt's agent. Doubt, the

absence of belief, is in fact an expression of self-
presence. This, of course, is the point Descartes wishes
to make. But what he fails to take into consideration is
that the structure of language forces the quest in only
one d@irection, and in doing so conceals its own
rhetorical, manipulative power. As Derrida writes in
POSitiONnS :
We can extend to the system of signs in general what Saussure says about
language: "The linguistic system (langue)is necessary for speech events
(parole) to be intelligible and produce their effects, but the latter are necessary
for the system to establish itself.
.,. There is a circle here, for if one distinguishes rigorously langue and
parole, code and message, schema and usage, etc. and if one is to do justice
to the two principles here enunciated, one does not know where to begin and
how something can in general recognize, prior to an dissociation of langue and
parole, code and message, and what goes with it, as systematic production of
differences, the production of a system of differences--differance among whose
effects one might later, by abstraction and for specific reasons, distinguish a
linguistics of language from a linguistics of parole, '7
By locating the origin of “Tangue" an “parele™ and
One parole! in 'Niangque, "Saussure: talls to aurrerent

ia ce
between them in a manner that would isolate each as
Object for study. Derrida's solution involves a
rejection of the concept of origin, and an acceptance of
the "method" of differance, the function by which language
continually defers the source, the origin of meaning:
[Differance] is a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the

basis of the opposition presence/absence. Differance is the systematic play of
differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements relate
to one another. This spacing is the production, simultaneously active and
passive, ... of intervals without which the "full" terms could not signify, could
not function.'®
The Word 23
Although Saussure struggled against logocentrism in
his Cours de linguistique generale, his failure, according to
Derrida, hinges on his misreading the relative positions
of speech and writing in the total sign system.
Saussure, like Derrida after ham, defines the
intelligible linguistic act as a product of the
differences between signs which constitute the system.
But, as we have seen, Saussure, according to Derrida,
undermines this critique of logocentrism by privileging
the speech act. Derrida, on the other hand, locates
speech within the general system of writing. As Jonathan
Culler explains,
The concept of the sign itself, from which Saussure starts, is based on a
distinction between the sensible and the intelligible; the signifier exists to give
access to the signified and thus seems to be subordinated to the concept or
meaning that it communicates. . . . he explicitly inscribes his analysis within
logocentrism. This emerges, most interestingly for Derrida, in Saussure’s
treatment of writing, which he relegates to a secondary and derivative status.'?
Speech, as we have already seen, suggests an
intimate and stationary relationship between word and
intention.
Again Culler:
If writing, which seems inescapably to involve impersonality, distance, the need

for interpretation and the possibility of misunderstanding, is treated as a mere
technical device, secondary and derivative, irrelevant to the nature of language
itself, then one can take as the essence of language an ideal associated with
speech: in particular the experience of hearing oneself speak, where signifier
and signified seem immediately joined in a sign, where expression seems bound
to the meaning it arises to express.
This is precisely what Saussure seems to do in the
light of Derrida's analysis. "Langue," that system of

differences which permits "parole" to mean, is
nevertheless said to evolve out of the individual speech
acts of a community. As a source of "langue," "parole"
occupies a privileged position in the hierarchy of
linguistic acts. Saussure prioritizes speech both in his
emphasis on the "sciences" of phonetics and phonology,
and through his relegation of writing to secondary
status. Saussure's distrust of writing leads him to
claim even that any system of written signs is at least
unnecessary to the formation of linguistic systems, at
most a cancer which interferes with the healthy
functioning of those systems. On the misleading
convenience of writing, Saussure has this to say:
. .the graphic form of words strikes us as being something permanent and

stable, better suited than sound to account for the unity of language throughout
time. Though it creates a purely fictitious unity, the superficial bond of writing
iS much easier to grasp than the only true bond, the bond of sound.?!
And this on writing's threat to the purity of the
system:
. writing obscures language; it is not a guise for language buta disguise..

But the tyranny of writing goes even further. By imposing itself upon the
masses, Spelling influences and modifies language. This happens only in highly
literate languages where written texts play an important role. The visual images
lead to wrong pronunciation; such mistakes are really parhological.*?
Writing, as Culler restates Saussure's point of

view,
consists of physical marks that are divorced from the thought that may have
produced them. It characteristically functions in the absence of a speaker,
gives uncertain access to a thought, and can even appear as wholly
anonymous, Cut off from any speaker or author. Writing thus seems to be not
merely a technical
device for representing speech buta distortion of speech.
The Word 25
Saussure, while seeking to establish the priority of
differences within the sign system, simultaneously warns
against "the tyranny of writing" which often disrupts the
"natural" communication which obtains in speech and
fosters errors in pronunciation and misread intentions.
Derrida's point is that Saussure cannot have it both
ways. A theory which attacks essentialism should not
reserve a place for an essential structure. Derrida's
SOLUENOn eLSe peor da cSolvelyrspeech win, Swiriiting), (stoset reat
speech as a manifestation of writing, rather than the
other way around. Although it may seem at first glance
that Derrida is merely reversing priorities, this is not
the case. Speech, no longer privileged as an essential
phenomenon within the linguistic system, relinquishes its
seemingly intimate contact with the speaker's intentions,
and does not conceal its arbitrary nature. Writing, for
its part, is never privileged because there is no other
form sort. languilstice® behaviory ito wopposem it . Tity Lirs
important to emphasize that Saussure defines speech as
that which depends on the differences between linguistic
Umit Seon Com \COGSNCY.. The problem, as Derrida
articulates it, is that in differentiating between speech
and writing, Saussure inscribes a hierarchy within the
sign system and thereby restores at least the desire for
the logos:
The privilege of the phoné. . . corresponds to a moment of the system (let us

say, of the "life" of "history" or of "being-as-self-relationship”). The system of
"hearing /understanding-oneself-speak” through the phonic substance--which
presents itself as a non-exterior, non-worldly and therefore non-empirical or non-
contingent signifier--has necessarily dominated the history of the world during
the entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of
word-origin, arising from the difference between the worldly and the non-
worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and non-identity, universal and non-
universal, transcendental and empirical, etc.74
Derridasismnotethespurstecritsie "telchamactersuzeurhec
history of western thought as primarily Romantic, i.e.,
as seeking nearly always to posit a natural nexus between
word and thing, word and thought, based on the underlying
concept of self-presence. The method has always involved
a view of writing as "fallen," and of speech as the purer
form of communication. Plato in the Phaedrus views
Winltinguayas ta distorelont Of sspeecheawhiehs fin etinicines! Seed
distortion of the soul's dialogue with itself; speech
remains closer than writing to that moment of pure self-
presence. And Vico's assertion that language begins as
a passionate, spontaneous utterance prefigures the
privileged status accorded the spoken word by the
nineteenth century Romantic poets.*® This yearning after
a "central “structune ™ preduces the: kind wsof serrcular
reasoning which locates the source of "langue" in
"parole" and the source of "parole" in "langue."
The quest for foundations, Derrida reveals, leads
always to contradiction, to a continual displacement of

the origin, and ultimately to the true nature of
The Word 27
language, i.e., to the open-ended £ree-play of signs
which privileges no structure within its amorphous
borders. Derrida's project is not to break the circle,
except in those instances when we must posit one or
another supplement (provisional starting point) as a
beginning in order to study various aspects of the total
Sign system. Rather he insists that we accept the
irrational nature of language, and that we comprehend our
quest for origins as ultimately futile. More than one of
Derrida's contemporaries have characterized this view of
language as nihilistic. If there exists no "final cause"
within language, and if language is largely responsible
for human experience, how then may that experience be
understood as purposeful?
Although it seems fair to characterize Derrida as an
ontological atheist, i.e., as one who does not believe in
an absolute ground for intelligible reality, the term
does not preclude a belief in the possibility of
meaningful experience. Meaning, for Derrida, does not
reside in privileged structures waiting to be discovered.
Pather it is a function of the total sign’ system, 4
product generated by our very failure to locate an
Giese alae In other words, the quest itself becomes the
proliferation of meaning. Human experience is
intelligible, not because it is underwritten by a

privileged structure which grounds a hierarchy of values,
but because it isn't. If, as Wittgenstein claims, the
game of language "is [merely] there--like our life,"
the rules of the game are, for Derrida, constantly
shifting--meaning and the context which permits them are
finally indeterminate. Yet the very "deconstructive"
process that unravels ostensibly foundational structures
accepts that these structures exist and mean for
practical purposes, if not absolute ones.
Unlike Hegel, who views negation as a force whose
ultimate goal is to reveal itself apart from concrete
experience, Derrida's deconstruction both displaces and
replaces, moving from structure to structure, supplement to
supplement, in an obsessive search for an ever
retreating horizon. Meaning results not from the
discovery of an absolute truth, but from the continual
exposure of falsehoods. in other words, the
deconstructive process itself, which Derrida insists is
always functioning in language whether or not there
exists a critic to point it out, is responsible for the
continual process of breaking down seeming wholes into
their conflicted parts, both permitting meaning and
refusing topvaligate sic:
.. the play of differences supposes. . .syntheses and referrals which forbid at

any moment or in any sense a simple element be presenr in and of itself,
referring only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no
element can function as a sign without referring to another element which
The Word 29
itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each "element"--

phoneme or grapheme--being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of
the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the
text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither
among the elements nor within the system is anywhere ever simply present or
absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces
It is important to note, of course, Derrida's claim
that the metaphysical bias which informs western history
is determined by the structure of language. We have no
choice but to communicate in terms of beginnings and
ends. Derrida admits that his own theory fails to escape
the lexicon of metaphysics. ini sac, sche method ot
deconstruction involves not so much a denial of history's
"Cunning passages," as it does the interrogation of
history on its own terms. If the process were given
theological dimensions, we might speculate that
deconstruction, while first accepting the claim made for
a supreme being, proceeds by asking how such a being
operates, and finds that the answers invalidate the
claim.
Derrida's most compelling arguments are contained in
three major texts: Writing and Difference (1967), Of Grammatology
(1967), and Dissemination (1972). Coming only six and
eleven years respectively after Claude Lévi-Strauss first
applied the series of lectures Saussure presented between
1906 and 1911 (later collected as the de linguistique

Cours
generale) to his own anthropological analyses (and in doing
so initiating the
structuralist revolution of 1960's in France), Derrida's
texts quickly followed at the heels of a movement which
had yet to settle down anywhere but in its Parisian
center. The first text, g

and Difference,
Writin effectively
laid the groundwork for the deconstructive enterprise by
both defining terms and characterizing the
western metaphysical bias which Derrida considers his
main target. It is obviously impossible within the scope
of this study to conduct an in-depth analysis of Writing and
Difference, mach less the three major texts as a primary
continuity. Each of the three texts is extremely long,
and Derrida's writing, even in the hands of its most
caring and diligent translators, is often convoluted and
obscure. Nevertheless it is possible to focus on pivotal
sections in each collection and to come away with a
viable understanding of Derrida's message and method. In
Writing and Difference, three important essays cradle the
entire text and contain most if not all of the theorizing
Derrida offers in between.
The first essay, entitled "Force and Signification,"
concerns itself with an analysis of formalism, and
involves a critique of traditional philosophical concepts
some of which were, at the time, considered quite
"modern." Derrida begins by positioning structuralism
outside of the control of western metaphysics, for "by

The Word 31
virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions
about language, structuralism escapes the classical
history of ideas which belongs to the province of
language and propounds itself with it."* structuralism
then "contains" western history in that it is less an
addition or addendum to that history as it is an analysis
of how that history exists and means what it does. But
structuralism, in its emphasis on form, on product, on
something finished and intelligible links itself with
that tradition which valorizes presence, and itself sets
up a hierarchy of values which is characteristic of
metaphysical thought. Derrida explains that
"Form fascinates
when one no longer has the force [a Derridaean euphemism
for "desire”] to understand force from within itself. . .Criticism henceforth
knows itself separated from force, occasionally avenging itself on force by
gravely and profoundly proving that separation is the condition of work, and not
only of the discourse on the work.”29
Already Derrida has begun his own criticism of Saussure's
project, albeit indirectly. The focus on structure
reveals, for Derrida, not Ey “Sistine delies joialeis
configuration which grounds content and meaning, but
precisely the absence of such a configuration. The
structuralist's duty, often abdicated or misinterpreted,
is to confront that which structure seeks to conceal:
the desire for form, for structure, which is itself an
essential absence since desire always points to the
object or product which is not present:

The universe articulates only that which is in excess of everything, the essential
nothing on whose basis everything can appear and be produced within
language. . .this excess is the very possibility of writing and of literary
inspiration in general. Only pure absence--not the absence of this or that, but the
absence of everything in which all presence is announced--caninspire, in other
words, can iwork, and then make one work.°°
The origin, for Derrida, is never a privileged
structure which resists deconstruction, but rather a
conceptualization which occurs after desire, the
essential absence, the very lack of origin as a presence
has done its work, for "the origin is possible and
conceivable only in disguise."*!
As the essay proceeds, Derrida utilizes examples
from painting, literature, philosophy, and criticism to
clarify his point that the origin is discovered only as
the absence of origin, an essential emptiness which
therefore drives the system's search for its own
fulfillment. The traditional quest for meaning grounded
by a context fixed in place is thereby threatened since
context, or primary structure, merely disguises its own
failure to resist deconstruction:
., .the meaning of meaning. . .is infinite implication, the

indefinite referral of signifier to signifier? And that its force is a certain pure
infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest, but
engages it in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs???
As Johnathan Culler reads this difficult passage,
Derrida's point is that "The combination of context-bound
meaning and boundless context . - makes possible
proclamations of the indeterminacy of meaning. "3

The Word 33
Because structuralism, like traditional metaphysics,
seeks a rational experience and so positions the origin as
inviolate and foundational, refusing to interrogate its
function as context, "It will not be able to exceed
itself to the point of embracing both form and the
movement which displaces . . . nor to. the point of
embracing force as movement, as desire, for itself...
LO MtEhne point of embracing 1t as writing. "34 Here Derrida
introduces what later will become a major issue in his
theorizing: metaphysics' demotion of the written sign to
a second class status among language acts, and the
subsequent repression of the free-play of language. The
privileging of speech over writing, Derrida never tires
of pointing out, disguises the endless deferring of the
source of signification. But for the moment, Derrida is
most concerned with form's relation to force (desire),
and the differance which obtains between them:
The divergence, the differance between Dionysus and Apollo, between ardor and
structure, cannot be erased in history, for it is not in history. It too, in an
unexpected sense,is an original structure: the opening of history, historicity
itself. Differance does not simply belong either to history or to structure.?°
There remains, for Derrida, no joining of form and
content at either the transcendental or teleological
planes. Nowhere does structure finally unite with
meaning as fixity to ground the rational process. For in
the place of seeming unity one finds configurations which
point only to the desire for unity. This desire, this

absence, drives an unbreakable wedge between form and
content, stands in the place where form and content would
become one and the same, and in doing so provides "the
opening of history" or the need to "configure" as an
endless quest for the end of configuration.
To sum up the major theoretical points in "Force and
SilCjail iesieves!) 2 Derrida accuses structuralism of bad
faith in that it unwittingly and carelessly inscribes a
metaphysical bias within its criticism of metaphysics.
BY privileging "structure “as” the stable Vcontexe ier
meaning, structuralism ignores that "force" which
undermines the stability of context, thereby restoring
the very hierarchical system it seeks. to subvert.
Criticism in general, Derrida says, avenges itself on
desire (creativity) precisely because it sees itself as
separated from that desire, banished, so to speak, to the
Qe Che Ieee suecl josioewiee- In order to conceal its
banishment, criticism erects a "rational" system grounded
by one or another privileged structure which may then
determine meaning. Put another way, fox Derrida whe
privileged structure exists only as a disguise; it is
never truly present as self-contained but always carries
the traces of other structures which in turn lead to more
structures. What drives, or "centers" (the system is
nothing else but the desire for an origin, never the

The Word 35
origin which exists in, of and for itself.
That all teleological and transcendental
philosophies in one way or another consider the written
sign a debased representation of speech becomes, in Writing
and Difference, a crucial” observation™ ‘for ~ Derrida's
deconstructive project. In a second essay, "La parole
souffle," the relation of speech and writing is
investigated. The essay focuses primarily on Antonin
Artaud, whose poetics so privileged speech that they
sought "to reduce this difference between force and
form,"*> leaving only the purity of intentionality in
place of the public and tainted utterance. Artaud's
quest is for a speech which resists interpretation. [In
Derridian terms, Artaud's conflict is with writing, that
public sign-making which is to be read and interpreted by
others and whose meaning is determined by a overall
system in which both author and reader participate. For
Artaud, speech as it is commonly understood in its
communicative function, also behaves as a kind of
writing, since communication between speaker and listener’
also depends on the overall system. Whatever intention
engenders the utterance is therefore never delivered in
a pure state. As Derrida explains Artaud, the listener's
"understanding" always intervenes between intention and
utterance, even if that listener is no one else but the

36 ‘The Fire and the Rose
speaker himself:
As soon as | am heard,as soon as | hear myself, the | who hears irself, who
hears me, becomes the | who speaks and takes speech from the | who thinks
that he speaks and is heard in his own name; and becomes the | who takes
speech without ever cutting off the | who thinks that he speaks. Insinuating itself
into the name of the person who speaks this difference is nothing, is furtiveness
itself.27
Artaud, frustrated at the possibility that his
speech is already stolen at the moment it is pronounced,
searches for that utterance which does not submit to the
system according to which language acts are given
meaning. The (result. “for “Aistaudi 01s, —atce times ara
tortuously obscure "writing" struggling always to avoid
interpretation. The point. Here Gh Course, m TSmatnat
Artaud wants to rescue speech from writing, or put
another way, for the essential difference which Derrida
claims lurks at the center of all discourse.
As Derrida explains,
| am in relation to myself within the ether of speech which is always spirited

away [soufflé] from me, and which steals from me the very thing that it puts
me in relation to. Consciousness of speech, that is to say, the moment when,
and in the place of where, | proffer my speech. This consciousness is thus also
an unconsciousness. . . in Opposition to which another consciousness will
necessarily have to be reconstituted; and this time consciousness will be cruelly
present
to itself and will hear itself speak.°8
That Artaud believes he can escape a consciousness which
is "cruelly present" into a realm of pure speech, pure
intentionality (that which is not "spirited," and

therefore, paradoxically, is intentional without being
formulated: merely the intention to speak, perhaps)
places him firmly within the metaphysical tradition. He

The Word 37
begins by likening the rift between pure speech and
public speech to that between soul and body. As soon as
man finds himself in relation to his body, i.e., as soon
as he is conscious, he understands himself as something
other than his body. He finds himself alienated from
that which he is. Who, Artaud asks, is responsible for
this division? His answer is that the culprit must be an
Other who intervenes at the moment of birth, initiating
the process by which man is separated from his body as
05 ee Artaud goes on to claim for this Other the
designation of God within the western metaphysical
tradition: in Derrida's words, "God is false value as
the initial worth of that which is born,"%? dividing soul
from body and privileging the former. But Artaud would
rejoin with his "body" (of work), that which is he, and
reject the difference which banishes him to alien status.
In order to accomplish this, Artaud invents the
Theater of Cruelty whose purpose is to expose and reject
debased difference and to restore the original unity:
But to reject it is not, here to refuse it but to retain it. To keep my body and
my speech, | must retain the work within me, conjoin myself with it so that
there will be no opportunity for the Thief [God] to come between it and me: it
must be kept from falling from my body as writing. For "writing is all trash”
[quoted from Artaud’s Collected Works 1:75).*°
To reject something in the conventional sense is to
admit a separation and to play into the hands of that God
who thrives on division. Rather, in order to restore

man's unity with himself, that which is separated from
him (in effect, his body, his text) must be retained
while it is simultaneously debased as that which is
differentiated and alien. To effect such a unity, Artaud
attempts to destroy within his' theater all of: the
privilege which adheres to God, religion, proper society,
ana “all of “the “other ‘products’ and guardians ‘sof
difference. But as Derrida ultimately suggests, Artaud
MUStesinal bywsubms texto that switch! he tcalicwiienasis ene
must admit to the overriding power of differance even as he
yearns for unity. If "Artaud initially dreamed of a
graphism which would not begin as deviation, of a
nonseparated inscription," he nevertheless settled for
a system of non-representational shouts, masks, and
gestures that themselves function by virtue of the
differences between them:
Having always preferred the shout to the text, Artaud now attempts to
elaborate a rigorous textuality of shouts, a codified system of onomatopoeias,
expressions, and gestures-- . . . a grammar of cruelty.?4
"How," Derrida asks,
are this liberation [of man from the shackles of the "I!" which separates him
from his body and this raising of the repressed possible? And not despite, but
with the aid of a totalitarian codification and rhetoric of forces?*
The answer Derrida provides might very well have
been artaud's: "It is that by prohibiting chance and by
repressing the play of the machine, this new theatrical
arrangement sutures all the gaps, all the openings, all

The Word 39
the differences." Buty andsthisspointeis crucial ,
Only through writing made flesh, only through the theatrical hieroglyphic, could
the necessary destruction of the double take place . . . Discourse can now be
reunited with its birth in a perfect and permanent self-presence.*
In seeking to restore a pure speech uncorrupted by
writing, a speech which restores the unity of man and
utterance, Artaud is forced to inscribe this unity within
a system of codes which is nothing else but that play of
differences he terms "writing." dnfact, against all-his
intentions, Artaud had to reintroduce the prerequisite of
the written text into 'productions.

!"*
It is this sense of speech as bearing the very
impersonal nature, the very arbitrariness which is so
often reserved in our minds as characteristic only for
writing which leads Derrida to claim no privilege for
speech. Speech is, in all events, subject to the larger
system, and the concept of self-presence is just that, a
concept which depends for its cogency on its own non-
existence.
For Derrida, then, Artaud represents an important
example of one who, in assuming that salvation rests in
a pure, unmediated speech and that damnation lies in
speech infected by writing, inadvertently and inevitably
inscribes even what may pass as pure speech within the
domain of writing. The opposition between speech and
writing which Artaud assumes as a point of departure

effectively disappears.
The final essay in Writing and Difference, entitled
"Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences," is perhaps the best known essay in the
collection. Originally presented at a symposium on
structuralism in 1966, the essay immediately prophesied
for those in attendance a new and critical director for
language studies. It may be said that "Force and
Signification" proposes an essential absence at the
center of discourse, and that "La parole souffle"
presents one method by which metaphysics has concealed
that absence, then the final essay now before us concerns
itself primarily with that which is offered by
metaphysics in the place of absence, that illusory
presence which Derrida calls the "supplement." Within
the metaphysical tradition,
. Structure--or rather the structurality of structure--although it has always

been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of
giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. . . Thus
it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique,
constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the
structure, escapes Structurality.
But this notion of the center, for Derrida, strains the
bounds of logic (cf.7, my text). Since the origin cannot
be ‘both “within “and ‘without "the “structure, “of the
structure and yet unique, "the entire history of the
concept of structure, . . . must be thought of as a
series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked

The Word 41
chain of determinations of the center."*® If the true
origin is not possible in that it cannot be structural,
western metaphysics is left with the option, always
concealed in absolutist metaphors and metonymies, of
providing a provisional center which operates as starting
point from which rational experience may be deduced.
"Henceforth," Derrida continues,
it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center,that the center
could not be thought in the form of present-being, that the center had no
natural site, that it was nota fixed locus but a function . . . in which an infinite
number of sign-substitutions came into play."79
While every provisional center is practical in that it
allows for coherent discussion, the pure center (absence,
desire, etc.) is nevertheless always deferred in
substitution:
"One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign
which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center's place in
its absence--this sign is added, occurs as a surplus,
as a supplement.”°°
Whatever the sign which stands in for the true
center, be it God, logos, the self, it is a substitution
for what evades rational discourse. As such it
represents a presence, an immediacy, only if we refuse to
Gesee tes LUNCELOnL. Interrogation of the provisional
origin always reveals that the origin is not self-
contained and self-determined, but rather points away
from itself to a central absence which not only
structures meaning, but drives the quest for origins,

leaving its own trace in every provisional stopping
point. Derrida's summation of "Structure, Sign and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" may be applied to
all of Writing
and Difference:
There are thus two interpretations, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks
to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and
the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile.
The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to
pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that
being who, throughout the history of metaphysics, . . . throughout his entire
history--has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and
the end of play.>!
The former is quite obviously that of Artaud whose search
for logos in the form of an unmediated speech required
that he relegate writing “to am secondary, — “fallen
position. The latter is the stance Derrida and
deconstruction assume. Since all forms of discourse are
ultimately manifestations of writing, there remains only
relativism, equality, and the production of meaning
without end.
Of Grammatology, Derrida's second major collection of
theoretical essays, extends his criticism of metaphysics
into the various areas staked out by the Romantic
movement in Europe, early Existentialism, and finally
structuralism itself. Derrida's celebrated interrogation
of Rousseau takes up a major portion of the volume.
Since the most thorough analysis of Derrida on Rousseau
is provided by Paul de Man in his Blindness and Insight, it is

The Word 43
worth our while to follow de Man's argument, particularly
since Of Grammatology easily stands as the most cryptic and
verbose text of Derrida's career, and since my own
limited study would be necessarily burdened by the
quotation of extremely lengthy passages in order to
compel support for points that de Man neatly paraphrases.
De Man begins with an overview of various
misreadings, the most important of which is, for the
purpose of reading Rousseau, the concept of the unified
Sere:
The category of the self turns out to be so double-faced that it compels the
critic who uses it to retract implicitly what he affirms and to end up by offering
the mystery of this paradoxical movement as his main insight. . .it seems
impossible to assert the presence of a self withoutin fact recording its
absence.
The treatment of Derrida on Rousseau begins properly with
a brief comparison of Derrida's starting point with that
of Jean Starobinski, another critic of Rousseau. As de
Mann reads Starobinski, the latter attributes Rousseau's
conflicted attitude towards writing to a "psychological
ruse."*> Rousseau seemingly renounces the possibility of
ADlUnthiecd "sels Diem marwsel?® inetactawhich menges ow vtn
the "other" as plentitude, choosing instead to substitute
the fictional recovery of plentitude via the self which
is produced by writing as its controlling subject.
Already Rousseau relegates writing to fictional and
therefore secondary status. But, as de Mann paraphrases

Starobinski,
_. .this renunciation is hardly in good faith: it is a ruse by means of which the

actual sacrifice, which would imply the literal death of the subject, is replaced
by a "symbolic” death that leaves intact the possibility of enjoying the ethical
value of an act of renunciation that reflects favorably on the person who
performs it. . . The blindness of the subjectto its own duplicity has
psychological roots since the unwillingness to see the mechanism of self-
deception is protective.”
Immediately Derrida diverges from Starobinski. For
Derrida, the deception has its roots not in psychological
conflict, although that conflict may be symptomatic of
the real cause but in the metaphysical tradition which
Rousseau inherits:
In his relationship to writing, Rousseau is not governed by his own needs and
desires but by the tradition that defines Western thought in its entirety: the
conception of all negativity (non-being) as absence and hence the possibility of
an appropriation or a reappropriation of being (in the form of truth, of
authenticity, of nature, etc.) as presence. This ontological assumption both
conditions and depends on a certain conception of language (écriture) in terms
of presence and distance: the unmediated presence of the self to its own voice
as opposed to the reflective distance that separates this self from the written
word,°>
So Rousseau, like Artaud, privileges speech over
writing, and in doing so is imprisoned within the
metaphysical bias toward purity, the origin, the
absolute. Rousseau's "assertion of the primacy of voice
over the written word, his adherence to the myth of
original innocence, his valorization of unmediated
presence over reflection"**--these, according to Derrida,
are the true causes of Rousseau's conficted text.
Derrida further demonstrates that Rousseau's attempts to
locate a moment of original utterance lead inevitably to

The Word 45
the discovery of second moment, prior to that of the
supposed "origin," which invalidates the privileged
status of the "original." In order to reconstruct, even
on a fictional plane, the unified self free of the
scatological nature of writing, Rousseau must in fact
resort to the very process he despises. As de Man
articulates Derrida,
. .language is being smuggled into a presumably languageless state of

innocence, but it is by means of the same written language that it is then made
to vanish: the magic wand that should "conjure" the written sign out of
existence is itself made of language. . . only by language can Rousseau conquer
language.>”
De Man then focuses on two points which Derrida
makes concerning Rousseau's strict adherence to the
western metaphysical tradition. The first point involves
Rousseau's submission to a representational theory of
language, particularly that of mimesis. Language as
representation, Derrida claims, is an ambivalent process
in that one may assume that while something absent is
"represented," the initial absence may or may not be
contingent upon the sign, i.e., one may understand
"representation" as including and even creating an
absence, as the signifier's creating its signified.
Mimesis, however, never questions the existence of that
Which 1S imitated. One always assumes that the
reference, if not immediately present for viewing, is
nevertheless present somewhere and someplace. This link
between presences suggests a natural and determined

connection between art and object, theoretically
grounding, for example, the claims of supposed 'non-
representational artists that they can objectify pre-
existing emotional states. In the eighteenth century,
the belief among artists that the imagination could be
given concrete form was commonplace. Rousseau's
privileging of music as an objectified inwardness places
him firmly within this framework. And here, at last, is
Derrida himself on the matter:
Rousseau remains faithful to a tradition that is unaffected by his thought: he

stays convinced that the essence of art is imitation (mimesis). Imitation
duplicates presence: it is added to the presence of the entity which it replaces.
It transposes what is present into an “outside” version of this presence.°°
Rousseau stays convinced even though, as Derrida deftly
points out, the desire to produce the imitation fills a
need, and that need is to recover a lost presence. In de
Man’s* words; ".9°) © there’ never would be al’ meed for
imitation if the presence had not been a priori pre-
emptied."°?
The “second point which de® Man wishes! stomotresce
involves Derrida's reading of Rousseau on the subject of
music. And here, since Derrida's ‘analysis is "fairly
concise, I will turn directly to him, as well as‘toe ‘de
Mann's commentary. Why, Derrida asks, is it necessary
for Rousseau to treat the difference between speech and
writing before approaching the subject of music? The

The Word 47
answer is that
There is no music before language. Music is born of voice and not of sound.
No prelinguistic sonority can, according to Rousseau, open the time of music.
In the beginning is the song.©°
Music, like all speech, is born in passion. Here
Rousseau is in complete agreement with Vico on the origin
of language. Furthermore,
If music presupposes voice, it comes into being at the same time as human
society. As speech, it requires that the other be present to me as other through
compassion.®!
But, for Rousseau, speech as it exists in society,
oriented towards meaning and relationship, communicating
across the distance that separates self from other, is
contaminated. Like writing, it acknowledges distance and
separation, and is therefore removed from its own origin.
hm BOGaderm EOu restone ~speech Lo aGts= original" status,
Rousseau begins where all Romantics begin, with Vico.
According to Vico, language began as speech which arose
out of man's passions, an instinctive expression of man's
pleasures and pains as he first encountered the world.
As such, Rousseau insists, original speech was one with
music in that the first words stressed open rather than
closed sounds. Thus Rousseau can say that in the
beginning, speech and song were one and the same.
However, as language developed, became more
sophisticated, more meaningful, the original sense of
song was lost, and with it the intimate connection of

speech to the passions.
As support for this notion, Rousseau offers the
distinction between the animal (noble savage) and the
human (man separated from his origin). The animal is the
site of the passions: the greater man's capacity for
meaning, the more disenfranchised he becomes. Another
analogy, that of the north versus the south, is now added
to the equation. The south, Rousseau says, has always
spoken a language which is more primitive, more
passionate in its stress on vowel sounds, than that
spoken in the north. The proliferation of consonant
sounds in the north signals a more advanced society, but
at the same time a society whose language is less like
song and therefore at a greater distance from its
origins. Likewise, the child's speech is less concerned
with meaning and closer to that original passionate
expression than is the adult's. The child is less a self
in the conventional sense in that he is less in relation
to the world outside of him than he is united with that
world. Rousseau then seeks a speech which expresses the
unity of self and other--in other words, a speech into
which self and other dissolve into a perfect, passionate
unity. As Derrida reads Rousseau, the latter is after
that moment of pure connection to life, or rather pure
life without connections, i.e., of full presence without

The Word 49
difference. Rousseau wants a speech that is
an inarticulate speech, a speech before words [and before meaning], alive enough
to speak, pure, interior and homogeneous enough to relate to no object, to
gather into itself no mortal difference, no negativity; it is a charm and therefore
a song. 62
Put another way, Rousseau wishes "To speak without
knowing how to speak,"% since knowledge assumes an
object of knowledge and so a relationship, a distance, a
separation.
But as Derrida reveals, Rousseau's text consistently
avoids confrontation with what it itself has said,
seeking instead for the false origin. Rousseau writes as
if speech contaminated by difference were added on to the
origin as corruption of that origin--as if difference
were not itself the origin. He rhetorically denies what
he has already admitted, i.e., that the difference which
fractured the origin, that which is decadent (what
Derrida terms "writing"), is always already in place, and
that music cannot precede or transcend that which
produced it. Again, Rousseau acknowledges at the outset
of his quest that the original unity of speech and music
(song) is conceptualized only after they are divided. To
sum up, I now quote Derrida at some length:
This then is the story. For the history that follows the origin and is added to is
nothing but the story of the separation between song and speech. If we
consider the difference which fractured the origin, it must be said that this
history, which is decadence and degeneracy through and through, had no
prehistory. Degeneration as separation, severing of voice and song, has always
already begun. We... see that Rousseau’s entire text describes origin as the
beginning of the end, as the inaugural decadence. Yet, in spite of that
description, the text twists aboutin a sort of oblique effortto act as if

degeneration were not prescribed in the genesis and as if evil supervened upon a
good origin. As if song and speech, which have the same act swe same
birthpangs, had not always already begun to separate themselves.
De Man, we may note, takes issue with Derrida on the
nature of the original signified which Rousseau wishes to
recover. For Derrida, that signified is
indistinguishable from its signifier in an original
moment of passionate life, a full presence. De Man, on
the other hand, reads Rousseau as positing this passion,
this merging with animal needs and desires, as a
submission to the void, to a complete absence. Derrida
and de Man agree that Rousseau seeks a language as free
of its own substance as language, a speech as transparent
aS possible. But they disagree on the reason. According
to Derrida, Rousseau fears the substance of language,
including its meaningfulness, obscured the full presence
of the origin. De Man, however, believes that Rousseau
does not want speech to substitute its own substance for
ele, Ndeniel jwhesikcke jon? wie. This quibble hardly matters,
since both men concur that Rousseau's privileging of
speech represents a commonplace in the history of western
metaphysics. Crucial, however, is Derrida's observation
that the complex issue of language is never as Simple as
the simple opposition of presence and absence. LoSvs
never merely a matter of filling a space waiting to be

The Word 51
filled. Differance , always operating in language,
establishes identity (presence) by pointing to absence,
i.e., each word carries within it the trace of what it is
HNO, OFF Ovher Swords rn in order eto. mean» what. at does.
Since the meanings, this presence of words, are
contingent upon what they don't mean, the absence of
other words, identity is simultaneously produced and
erased. Deconstruction always suggests this tension,
unlike traditional metaphysics which, in privileging
speech (self-presence) over writing (the absence of the
speaker), persists in its either/or thinking.
Phe) constraintseof shiswestudy, prohibit = lengthy
expositions of Derrida's dealings with existentialism and
structuralism (in the person of Claude Levi-Strauss, the
scholar who is credited with the first systematic
application Saussure's theories beyond linguistics).
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, following the same
process he applies to Rousseau, Derrida reveals the
metaphysical bias at the heart of both movements. In
both cases, speech is privileged over writing; in both
cases Derrida demonstrates that these "philosophies"
inevitably and unintentionally assign to speech the same
corruptive properties they would reserve for writing, and
in doing so invalidate the initial privilege.
Before we turn once again to Derrida's explicit

criticism of Saussure, let us briefly apply our attention
to the third of Derrida's major volumes, Dissemination.
From this text comes the important discussion of Plato as
themit athersonr. Ene logos ,"® and therefore the patriarch
of the western metaphysical tradition. The inherent
irony in any confrontation between Derrida and Plato
should not escape us. Here the "ruthless deconstructor"
of origins interrogates the origin of the concept of
joyrgalte/alin’c
Derrida's weapon. in the case of Plato's Phaedrus is
etemology. In the Phaedrus Socrates
compares the written texts Phaedrus has brought along to a drug (pharmakon).
This pharmakon, this "medicine," this philter, which acts as both remedy and
poison [and etemologically contains both meanings], already introduces itself
into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this
spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be--alternately simultaneously-
-beneficent or maleficent. ... Operating through seduction, the pharmakon
makes one stray from one's general, natural, habitual paths and laws. Here, it
takes Socrates out of his proper place and off his customary track. The latter
had always kept him inside the city. The leaves of writing act as a pharmakon
to push or attract out of the city the one who never wanted to get out, even at
the end,to escape the hemlock.®®
Phaedrus, concealing a text beneath his cloak, seduces
Socrates to leave the city with the promise of revealing
what is hidden. Socrates himself then makes the
connection between drug and writing, saying to Phaedrus,
",.. you seem to have discovered a drug for getting me out... . if you proffer
me speeches bound in books | don't doubt you can cart me all round Attica, and
anywhere else you please.” (quoted in Dissemination)®
Already the sense of writing as pharmakon, as that which

The Word 53
remedies or fulfills the desire to know, and as that
which simultaneously poisons (Gorrupts) Socrates, oi
separates him from his "natural" abode, is in place.
"Already: the pharmakon, the going or leading astray," since
only words that are deferred, reserved, enveloped, rolled up, words that force one to wait
for them in the form and under cover of a solid object, letting themselves by desired for
the space of a walk, only hidden letters can thus get Socrates moving. If a speech could
be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up in person its truth, without the detours of
a signifier foreign to it, if at the limit an undeferred logos were possible, it would not
seduce anyone. It would not draw Socrates, as if under the effects of a
pharmakon, out of his way.®?
Like Artaud and Rousseau, Plato in the guise of Socrates
views writing as a debased, distanced substitute for
speech which carries the property of immediacy, of self-
presence. Speech, Socrates suggests, would not remove
hi srome Has Clcy . his shome,. | himselt. ime, als
anticipating the reactions of his critics, Derrida admits
that the etemological strategy he uses may be construed
as beside the point, that the secondary and repressed
meaning of pharmakon as "poison" may be understood as
contingent, accidental, drawn into play for the sole
purpose of serving a specious argument. He therefore
turns to the place in the dialogue where Socrates and
Phaedrus discuss of the myth of Theuth.
Socrates initiates this discussion by “posing a
question: "But there remains the question of propriety
and impropriety in writing, that is to say the conditions
which make it proper or improper, isn't that so?" (quoted

."
in Dissemination) As is the case of nearly all of Plato's
dialogues, here the central issue is morality. What is
moral, i.e., pure and unmediated; what is immoral,
corrupted, unnatural? The myth of Theuth now
insinuates itself into the discussion as the very seam
which binds writing and the pharmakon as comparable
poisons. According to the myth, Theuth, a demigod, is
speaking to the king of the gods, Thamus ["Thamus
represents Ammon, the king of ute gods, the king of
kings, the god of goas."]"! Theuth--who, Socrates says,
invented numbers and calculation, astronomy, and dice
(suggesting, of course, ambiguity and chance) --now brings
before the king a new invention, writing, for the king's
approval. The point here is that value, morality,
rightness and wrongness, is to be conferred on writing
not by the script itself, but by an outside agent, by the
king of “kings, by “that which. 1s "divine sand) seur—
contained, by the Jogos. Writing itself bears no value
except that which is conferred:
...god-the-king . . . experiences the pharmakon as a product, and ergon, which

is not his own, which comes to him from outside but also from below and
which awaits his condescending judgment in order to be consecrated in its
being and value. God the king does not know how to write, but that ignorance
Or incapacity only testifiesto his sovereign independence. He has no need to
write. He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices. . . . The
pharmakon is here presented to the father and is by him rejected, belittled,
abandoned, disparaged. The father is always suspicious and watchful toward
writing.
The Word 55
As is Socrates.
It is here necessary to note that one of the more
important reasons for Socrates' disdain for writing is
that writing is a substitute for what one should know by
heart, for what should be the province of speech. He
accuses writing of repeating without knowing, of
corrupting that which is of the heart, that utterance
which is one with its speaker. Writing, like the
pharmakon in its sense of "poison," entrances, distances
man from himself, is occult. But--and here Derrida's
argument achieves resolution--in order to position
writing as a corruption of speech, Socrates has resorted
to. myth eto thacewhieh, according @tomDerridayeis by.
definition a repeating without knowing. The very
function of myth is to recover a lost origin within the
framework of a "writing" which is characterized by its
essential distance from that origin. It is this distance
which requires the existence of myth. Once again,
Derrida demonstrates that the origin is forever at the
mercy of differance. The origin is never, in fact, natural
and primary, but rather a supplement, a provisional
configuration which conceals its own source in the
relational operations of system. The priority of logos,
of God the king, of speech, is again undermined:

[Socrates] thus begins by repeating without knowing--through a myth--the

definition of writing, which is to repeat without knowing. This kinship of
writing and myth, both of them distinguished from logos and dialectics, will only
become more precise as the text concludes. Having just repeated without
knowing that writing consists of repeating without knowing, Socrates goes on
to base the demonstration of his indictment, of his Jogos, upon. . . structures
that are readable through a fabulous genealogy of writing. As soon as [and not
until] the myth has struck the first blow, the logos of Socrates will demolish the
accused,’?
Derrida's analysis of the Phaedrus as an intregal
component of the Platonism "which sets up the whole of
Western metaphysics in its conceptuality nl surely
"grounds" an astonishingly comprehensive attack on the
western philosophical tradition, an attack which
threatens the dualism (soul vs. body, speech vs. writing,
God vs. Satan) on which the tradition is founded. ite
must be said that Derrida's purpose is not so much to
demolish these divisions as it is to put them in
question, thereby "foregrounding" the tension (differance)
which drives meaning without erasing that tension. To
return now to Saussure, it becomes all the more clear
that the linguist, in privileging speech over writing,
also smuggles into his theory a "logocentrism" unsullied
by his criticisms of traditional linguistics. Saussure

writes that "every literary language, being the product
of the culture, finally breaks away from its natural
sphere, the spoken language." Here it is Saussure's
intention merely to explain the crucial relationship

which obtains between language, its system of
The Word 57
differences, and culture, that "The culture of a nation
exerts an influence on its language, and the language, on
the other hand, is largely responsible for the nation."
Nevertheless, in claiming that the literary development
of language is closely tied to the development of
EnSELcutions such as the church, the school, etc.,
Saussure's use of the word "natural" indicates that he is
not quite free of the tradition he wishes to subvert.
More explicitly, Saussure claims that
Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for
the sole purpose of representing
the first. The linguistic
object, i.e., the object
of linguistic studies is not both the written and the spoken forms of words; the
spoken forms alone constitute the object. But the spoken word is so intimately
bound to its written image that the latter manages to usurp the main role.
People attach even more importance to the written image of a vocal sign than
to the sign itself. A similar mistake would be in thinking that more can be
learned about someone by looking at his photograph than by viewing him
directly.’7
For Derrida, of course, a usurpation has occurred in
Saussure's discourse. Saussure, in separating speech and
writing in terms of their functions and values, has
concealed speech's own belatedness, its own "corrupt
ikeVeioiesneyan els) teeth eulielere
Derrida's "correction" of the metaphysical tradition
involves a shift in attitude as much as in method.
Whatever synonyms we use for the origin--center, source-
logos, presence, immediate experience, God--Derrida would
have us remember that these are conceptual conveniences
rather than ontological verities. There is "in truth" no

a priori structure in Derrida's method. It is on this view
of the center as a mere term within the philosophical
system, driving interpretation rather than arresting it,
that Eliot. and? Derriday partially converge. Like
Derrida's, Eliot's view represents an attempt to
reconcile the search for unity with the admission of
endless change and difference. Eliot's accomplishment is
all the more admirable in that coming several decades
before Derrida's own struggle marie relativism, it
anticipates sso much of whateuss temiol low. Alsoniat 2S
highly unlikely that Eliot was in any way aware of
Saussure's linguistics, for though the two men were
contemporaries, Saussure's theories remained fragmented
and unavailable for public consumption until 1961.
Still, the debate over origin and language was in the air
as» early “as ols when’ Eliot =began sineseannest. hie
dissertation on the work of F.H. Bradley.

Chapter 2: The Word Without a Word
Eliot's early tendency to confine much of human
experience within the boundaries of language is nowhere
better evidenced than in the dissertation on F.H.
Bradley. The dissertation, initially entitled Experience
and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley and
composed between 1913 and 1916, was edited by Anne Bolgan
and finally published in 1964 under the title Knowledge

and
Experience
in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. In his preface to the
published version, Eliot comments that "Forty-six years
after my academic philosophizing came to an end, I find
myself unable to think in the terminology of this essay.
Indeed, I do not pretend to understand ites! ee
Bradley's lexicon had by the time of the dissertation's
publication become enigma for Eliot, the world view which
engendered it had not. Throughout his career Eliot
formulated poetical and critical structures which bore
the mark of Bradley's influence.
In Appearance
and Reality Bradley's project was to
ag
interrogate German Idealist philosophy as well as
psychologically and empirically based theories of
reality. The Germans, Kant in particular, claimed that
experience is structured by the mind, that there obtained
between reality as ding an sich and the structural
categories of the mind an intimate correspondence.
Kant's emphasis on this correspondence as the source of
meaning was echoed by Romantic poets such as Wordsworth
and especially Coleridge whose "primary and secondary
imaginations," as I. A. Richards demonstrates in Coleridge
on the Imagination, mirror theoretically Kant's "green
goggles."
Eliot's dissertation is divided into six major
chapters plus a conclusion. The first two are devoted to
the nature and function of a theoretical absolute, while
the next three take issue with theories of knowledge
based on psychological and empirical belief-systems. The
scope of this study does not permit an in depth analysis
of the dissertation in its entirety. For my purpose, a
fairly brief examination of major sections from chapters
one, two, and four will suffice. Chapter one, entitled
"On Our Knowledge of Immediate Experience," begins with
Bradley's concept of immediate experience, or "feeling."
According to Richard Wollheim, the ideal of immediate

experience is crucial to Bradley's world view because it
The Word Without a Word 61
constitutes the foundation upon which all higher forms of
knowledge or consciousness are grounded. At no point do
we ever get beyond what is given. Everything that we
know, oF will, or feel, is already implicit in the
condition of immediacy, and moves into prominence as this
condition breaks up or resolves itself into different

2
elements." Immediate experience, as apriori, pre-exists
ql sdavasvons, all temporal, and spatial realities. In
Eliot's words,
We must be on guard. . .against identifying experience with consciousness, or

against considering experience as the adjective of a subject. We must not
confuse immediate experience with sensation, we must not think of it as a sort
of panorama passing before a reviewer, and we must avoid thinking of it as the
content or substance of a mind.°
Neither subjective nor objective, immediate
experience transcends the particular; it represents an
absolute unity analogous to what Husserl, Sartre, and
Heidegger termed "Being." Being/immediate experience is
real, because to be real, these writers agree, means to
be free of contingencies. All temporal and spatial
entities are real to the extent that they find their
source in a self-contained unity; they are less real,
mere appearances, in that their separate identities
depend on their relations to other entities. The system,
Gf) course,” begins ‘with one Sof "the *many ‘possible
transcriptions of the concept of "presence," as Derrida
defines that concept (see previous chapter). And like

Saussure's theories of langue and parole, the temporal
world, as Eliot understands that world, forms a
background of interrelatedness within which individual
objects acquire meaning for man. On the other hand,
immediate experience, Eliot says, represents "a timeless
unity which is not as such present either anywhere or to
anyone"; it involves "the general condition before
distinctions and relations have been developed, and where

4
as yet neither any subject nor object exists."" In other
words, it is impossible to know the whole of immediate
experience, although any one of its constituents
represents an aspect of the whole and is available to
consciousness. Eliot further describes the relativism of
the temporal world in the following manner:
There is immediate experience, contrasted with ideal construction; which is

prior, and in some sense, certainly prior in time, to the ideal construction. But
we go on to find that no actual experience could be merely immediate, for if it
were, we should certainly know nothing about it; and also that the line between
the experienced, or the given, and the constructed can nowhere be clearly
drawn. Then we discover that the difference in no instance holds good outside
of a relative and fluctuating point of view. . .And although immediate
experience is the foundation and the goal of our knowing, yet no experience is
only immediate. There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal
can be finally separated and labelled.®
Immediate experience does not escape the relational
world since, as idea, as something which can be known or
inferred, it has meaning:
. .although we cannot know immediate experience directly as an object, we

can yet arrive at it by inference, and even conclude that it is the starting point
of our knowing, since it is only in immediate experience that knowledge and its
object are one. The fact that we can to a certain extent make an object of it,
while at the same time it is not an object among others, not a term which can
be in relation to anything else: this throws our explanation into the greatest
embarrassment.®
Eliot cannot escape here the contradiction which Derrida
claims lurks at the heart of all logocentric systems. On
the one hand we are to understand immediate experience as
non-relational, i.e., as a self-contained unity which
exists prior to the temporal world. On the other hand,
as soon aS we conceptualize immediate experience, it
becomes a term, an object of knowledge, and so enters
into relations with other objects as one term among many.
As we say in chapter one, Derrida criticizes all
metaphysical systems for positing a /ogos which operates
both inside and outside of the relational fields, a
Mogreal impossibility. Unlike Saussure, whose
privileging of speech leads him unwittingly into this
contradiction, Eliot in his dissertation seems very much
aware of the problem, and it is no doubt this awareness
that moves him ultimately in the direction of faith.
Immediate experience is then "a timeless unity"
preceding distinctions and relations. But the original
unity breaks down into various constituents, appearances,
the major divisions of which are subject and object.
Depending on their relations with other subjects and
Objects for “their very ‘existences for man, ‘the
constituents of the original unity are both contingent in

that they are not self-contained, and self-transcendent
in that they reach beyond themselves to form relations
with other entities, something the original unity does
not do since it is all-inclusive. Furthermore, as
aspects of unity, their existence is co-extensive with
that of the whole reality. Immediate experience at once
precedes its divisions and is inferred only through those
divisions. Furthermore, the divisions of subject and
object are not fixed. Any one point of experience may be
understood as either subjective or objective, depending
on the point of view from which it is attended. "on
other words, what is subjective is the whole world--the
whole world as it is for me--which, because it is (for
me) the whole world, cannot be contrasted with anything
else "objective'; and) equally stauliye) nothing, ges
subjective."" An emotion, for example, may be understood
as subjective from the point of view of the person
feeling the emotion; but it may also be attended to,
observed, as "emotion" and thereby objectified as
something to be studied, for example.
Eliot's own interrogation of the concept of a fixed
and authorial subject/self certainly comports with the
views of later structuralist and post-structuralist
thinkers. Perhaps the major contribution by
structuralism and post-structuralism to the study of

human experience remains the displacement of the self and
subjective aspect from the center of human experience,
and the elevation of language to that nuclear position.
The study of man has become no more or less than the
study of his word, and particularly of his written word.
Humanity, we are told, does not create a discourse so
much as it is created by discourse. Eliot's own
investigation of the self in his dissertation represents
an important and necessary step in his aesthetic
development. In Knowledge
and Experience Eliot agrees with
Bradley that the self/subject, one aspect Ge iene
fractured unity, is as much "appearance" as the object it
ostensibly perceives and knows, and "is not given as
@irect experience > f © °P"fhe self-is*ayconstruction.
Because it exists by virtue of its relations to other
selves and ultimately to all of the relational aspects of
experience, the self remains restricted by its "point of
view." Eliot agrees with Bradley's exchange of the
concept of a psychological self/mind which contains ideas
as objects of knowledge separate from their references
for that of a "finite center" of experience, or the
subjective aspect for which experience is focused.
"There is no absolute point of view," Eliot writes, "from
which real and ideal can finally be separated and
labelled."’ In other words, the independent reality that

is immediate experience can never be known by the self
apart from the division of appearances which suggest is
existence.
Once immediate experience develops its constituents,
once there is knowledge, point of view, the original
unity is absent for the subject. The self cannot know
the original unity, although and because the self is an
ASPeCCENOL Ver Even the infant, Eliot says, possesses
thought and reflection, though at a low stage, and is
therefore removed from what is timeless and hole.” TS
clarify a difficult concept, Eliot provides a welcome
example. In the original unity of immediate experience,
the color "red" exists without the normal categories of
perceiver and perceived. There is merely "redness,"
which may not be defined as an object since it is not
present
for a subject. Once immediate experience develops
into subjective and objective categories, the color
"red," now perceived, becomes objectified. "Redness," we
may say, is now translated as the color "red," which is
present as subject and object. Only in this sense may
the color truly be described as an object. However, at
the theoretical moment when "redness" divides as a

subject/object relationship, it finds itself thrust into
a world of relations. The existence of "red" as an
object depends in part on its being perceived by a

subject; similarly, the existence of the perceiver is
contingent upon the perception of objects.
This necessarily reciprocal arrangement precludes
any experience on the self's part of the original unity.
We must not here assume, of course, that the self-for
Eliot is merely a euphemism for the subjective aspect of
experience. As a "construction," the self also appears
as a subject/object complex, i.e., it is a conglomeration
of consciousness, personality and other aspects which
straddle simultaneously the subjective and objective
sides of experience. The self, then, is much more than
the mere subjective aspect. Yet immediate experience
remains, according to Eliot (and Bradley) at the root of
the self's knowledge of an object (which may, of course,
be the self itself) since both the self and the object
develop from that unity. However, as Eliot writes,
If this whole of feeling [i.e., immediate experience] were complete and

satisfactory it would not expand into object and subject with feelings li.e.,
sensations, perceptions, emotions] about the object; there would, in fact, be no
consciousness. But in order that it should be feeling at all, it must be
conscious, but so far as it is conscious it ceases to be merely feeling. Feeling
is merely an aspect, and an inconsistent aspect, in knowing; it is not a separate
and isolable phase. |!
Again Eliot acknowledges the "inconsistent aspect" that
is immediate experience. "Mere feeling," he writes, "is
something which could find’ no” place. in a world of
objects. It is, in a sense, an abstraction from any

actual’ situation’ .\). « The» feeling, isneither herejnor
anywhere."'2 It becomes clear as Eliot proceeds through
Bradiey that the former is not at all prepared to assume
the "real" existence of immediate experience, especially
since any assumption is likewise an objectification. For
the self/subject, then, there is only the inconsistency.
Unable to experience "mere feeling," never one with the
whole of experience, the self/subject is left with the
“inference™ that
One the one hand, feeling is an abstraction from anything actual; on the other
hand the objects into which feeling is differentiated have a kind of union which
they do not themselves account for; they fuse into each other and stand out
upon a background which is merely felt, and from which they are continually
requiring supplementation. In order that these developments--thought, will,
pleasure and pain, objects--may be possible, feeling must have been given; and
when these developments have arrived, feeling has expanded and altered so as
to include them.'?
The self at no time constitutes a primary source of
meaning; at no time does it stand outside experience,
inviolate and in control. Rather its existence, like
that or every "appearance," wall ber thie misuNmren | cles
effects upon other entities--and this sum must form a
system, must somehow hang together.""
This inference of a whole which underwrites the
parts so that they may "hang together" is, from Derrida's
perspective, in error. As we have already seen, that
which appears to supplement fragmentation with the
curative powers of cogency is the operation of differance ,

or that conflation of difference and desire which leads
men both towards and away from completion. Eliot's own
position at the time of his dissertation is certainly
close enough to Derrida's to astonish. Perhaps, Eliot
seems to be saying, there exists a subliminal unity.
However, such a unity is hardly apparent:
But within experience we always find relations, and in this sense, we may say
that non-relational experience does not exist. These relations, however, are not
experience, and while they are experienced and therefore real, they are not real
as relations. Yet, just as relations they seem to be essential to reality. In this
way acontradiction has “broken out’. “Feeling has a content, and this content
is not consistent within itself’... [Eliot quoting Bradley's Appearance and Reality
407]. This situation it is which prompts us to pass on by new construction to
a larger felt whole in which the same puzzling terms and relations appear. No
experience is self-consistent, because of the ideal aspects with which it is shot
through. Yet these ideal aspects are likewise real, and themselves issue from
a felt background.'®
Here, in what is certainly one of the more puzzling
passages from the dissertation's first chapter, we have
Eliot confronting the structuralist and post-
structuralist issue of presence vs. absence head on,
albeit in other terms.
We have already determined that for Eliot, as well
as Bradley, only immediate experience, the original
unity, may be said to be thoroughly real, having defined
reality as that which is self-contained, self-identical.
The constituents which develop from the original unity
are therefore more or less real depending on the scope of
their relations with other constituents. The more
relations an entity maintains, the more of the original

unity it encompasses, the closer it is to the original
identity which is, in any case, absent. The movement
towards unity, identity, is then a matter of extensive
relational activity. In the terms which Derrida prefers,
the identity of any entity is contingent upon its not
being something else, i.e., is a product of the
differences between terms. The thrust towards identity
is created by the absence of identity, simply enough.
Likewise the relational activity which informs Eliot's
"experience" is driven by the absence of the original
unity which is the sole expression of self-containment,
of Pdentity. Elvot writes that "2. . experience 1s non—
relational. Relations can exist only between terms, and
these terms can exist only against the background of an
experience which is not itself a term."'© He means here
by "experience" the whole of experience, or the original
unity which underwrites the relational world. he goes on
tO “say, Quite rightly, “that "relations ane sanG aon
themselves are not real since, in fact, they are never
"in and of themselves." But "while they are experienced
and therefore real, they are not real as relations.""”
Since relations, like all of the constituents of
immediate experience, issue from the original unity, they
are real to the extent that they participate in the
original identity. Yet as relations, as the premiere

sign of the absence of the original unity, as the mark of
difference, they are removed from what is self-identical
and real (We may also note that once relations are
identified, i.e., once they become points of attention
and so objectified, they become objects in relation, and no
longer relations in and of themselves. In this sense
also relations may be real as objects, but not as
relations.) "In this way a contradiction has 'broken
vout.'"'® We infer from the “presence o£ absence” that
there exists a presence, an identity free of difference,
and yet everywhere we look we find only difference.
"This situation it is which prompts us to pass on by new
construction to a larger felt whole in which the same
puzzling terms and relations appear. 116 In Derrida's
terms, each discovered structure which seemingly claims
originating status, i.e., self-identity, leads instead
and upon inspection to yet more structures similarly
constructed out of the process of difference. This
process as something which can be known is, in Eliot's
terms, "ideal" and itself issues from the original unity
which, of course, is nowhere to be found. And so the
interrogation proceeds without resolution.
If the subjective aspect of experience seems upon
inspection to be mere "appearance," what is objectified

for the subject can be nothing more or less. That the
world appears to us in all its distinctions is the result
ope lhe Ferengi) (ene WaLEN/: And even that explanation
expresses a point of view; one the original unity has
broken down, there is no escaping the relativity of all
knowledge. thesontacns of knowledge, dependent for their
Status as objects on their status as known, move
simultaneously toward and away from self-identity. Put
in the simplest terms, each object (and Eliot defines an
object not merely as a material entity but as any point
of attention) qua object maintains relations with other
entities. In doing so it strives to be one with the
original unity, while simultaneously forsaking that very
possibility. In this sense, knowledge, meaning, results
from what Derrida terms differance," or, in Eliot's terms,
the absence of "mere feeling" in the world of experience.
Derrida, in fact, does not seem at alll at odds with the
Eliot of Knowledge and Experience. The conflict, should one
exist, would have to involve the positing of immediate
experience as an all inclusive unity in which differences
are resolved, “1eG., “asa “presence, But! Eliot himselé
questions such a possibility, and in doing so indirectly
interrogates the concept of Being as presence:
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves. By
the failureof any experienceto be merely immedia
by te,
its lack of
harmony and cohesion, we find ourselves as conscious souls in a world of

objects. We are led to the conception of an all-inclusive experience outside of
which nothing can fall. If anyone object that mere experience at the beginning
and complete experience at the end are hypothetical limits, | can say not a word
in refutation for this would be just the reverse side of what opinion | hold. And
if anyone assert that immediate experience, at either the beginning or end of our
journey, is annihilation and utter night, | cordially agree. 2°
What Eliot calls "hypothetical limits," Derrida terms
"supplements." In both cases Aristotle's certainties,
his first and final causes, are put into question. Only
faith may "grant" to the absolute an existence, a
presence beyond the nebulous boundaries of temporal
experience. It is hardly surprising that, for a poet who
seemed to require a reality which transcends the world of
the senses, faith became the primary mover of Eliot's
late life and career.
Eliot's comments in his dissertation on the nature
and function of language begin with chapter two entitled
"On the Distinction of 'Real' and 'Ideal.'" The function
of language, as Eliot reads Bradley, hinges in large part
on the difference between idea and object, and between
idea and concept. An object, we have seen, achieves
"identity" only through its effects on other entities.
In the development of immediate experience into its
subjective and objective aspects, ideas naturally fall on
the subjective side. That to which ideas seem to refer,
from the point of view of the thinking subject, falls on
the side of the object. Eliot stresses that these
divisions are essentially arbitrary since, as we have

already pointed out, one person may experience his own
emotions as subjective while, from another point of view,
perceiving those same emotions, or the emotions of
another, as objective. WE time. EMiOtuw writes an
chapter one, "there are the two sides, subject and
object, neither of which is really stable, independent,
the measure of the other. In order to consider how the
one came to be as it is, we are forced to attribute an
artificial absoluteness to the other. Again, like
Derrida, EIMoe “postts” only “the” most jprevisrenaL,
"artificial" absolute within the framework of time where
a subject may be said to perceive an object.
Chapter two of the dissertation initiates Eliot's
argument against psychologism and empiricism, an argument
which he continues in chapters three and four. Both the
psychologist and the empiricist, Eliot demonstrates,
construct theories of knowledge which proceed by assuming
the. stability . of ~ the. subject ..and . object - ssides
respectively. Like Derrida, Eliot allows for no fixites
within the world of temporal experience. The
psychologist's "idea" as a phenomenon independent of its
reference and contained in the mind and the empiricist's
landscape of stable sense objects, are equally consigned
to the category of provisional and shifting terms. In

Eliot's “own words ieee othe apparently fundamental
separation between the real and the ideal is but
tentative and provisional, a moment in a process." Any
history of experience, of "truth," which is grounded in
such makeshift, albeit practical, "centers" must be
necessarily relative and partial. Ideas, whether they
are of material entities or of emotions, are never truly
separated from their references on the object side.
Although point of view suggests that ideas remain somehow
self-contained, ideas are in fact one with their
references in that they are those references (objects)
limited by point of view. Put another way, every object
in becoming an object, i.e., a point of attention, [".
- an object is simply that to which we attend, and we
cannot attend to process and idea without making it to
that extent an object."]®% maintains an ideal aspect as
something perceived and known." Consciousness, for its
part, must be consciousness of some object. Thus Eliot
may say, as he does in chapter one, that from the point
of view of the subject/self, the entire world is
subjective.
The provisional distinction between real and ideal
becomes, then, for Eliot, the genesis of a traditional
philosophical else, one that includes the
misappropriation of language. He begins chapter two of
his dissertation with a brief description of that error:

The ordinary view of the relation of real and ideal | take to be this. We
are given in ‘experience’ something called fact which is real because
independent, and independent because real. This fact is not necessarily fact of
sense perception, or of physical reality, but the fact may be itself an idea from
an external point of view, an idea placed in reality. And the objection that a
fact is always an objective, i.e., and not simply a thar, does not in the popular
view militate against its independence. The fact may appear with its fullest
development of definition, with innumerable stipulations of relationship, yet we
‘apprehend’ it as independent, and proceed to erect between it and its
percipient an abstraction called thought, the existence of which is its reference
to reality.2*
Thought, the conventional wisdom has it, maintains an
existence independent of the fact, the object, and serves
to communicate the object to consciousness. Thought is
ideal; the object, given as self-contained, is real.
"The first point to be made;™ Ellot writes, “is that the
difference between real and ideal is in a sense an ideal
difference. It is created within a limited sphere of
meaning and recognizable only within the sphere."
Eliot continues:
First, the reality which we have intended is an ideal construction. It is not

reality as a whole, but the radiation from a particular and indefinable point; a
field of quite uncertain extent, assumed and selected. And second, the idea
with which this reality is qualified is itself real, though of a reality which we
cannot possibly define; for, though its existence as a fact is another thing from
its meaning, yet its meaning is inextricably involved in its existence as fact.
The idea is something real, or it could not even be ideal . . . Without the ideal
aspect of the real the distinction would be impossible And unless the
idea were itself real it would be unable to relate itself to reality.2°
Let us try this again in terms with which we feel
comfortable. What, in the "ordinary view," is given as
real is actually only a part, "assumed and selected," of
the whole reality which is the whole of experience, i.e.,
the original unity. The given object is both objectified

in that it becomes a point of attention, and subjective
in that ‘it’ is* perceived. Thought then becomes not
something separate from its objects, but rather the ideal
aspect of those objects. Every idea, in order to be
ideal, must have an objective aspect. Likewise, every
object is ideal. The distinction then is merely
manufactured by point of view; no object is, in fact,
independent and self-contained beyond its ideal aspect.
For in order to be objectified, an entity is already
removed from the original unity, the whole reality, and
functioning in a world of relations. Meaning, or the
ideal aspect, is then "inextricably involved in its [the
object's] existence as fact." Them extent or | san
object's relations, i.e., how much of the original unity
is" appropriated by any object, is "a field of quite
uncertain extent, "8 since, as we have already seen, the
relational field, informed in large measure by point of
VilcCw PeLSeadne ae constant state vob eilux
Having established that the real and the ideal are
not separate phenomena, but rather two aspects of the
same phenomenon (the breaking up of the original unity),
Eliot now takes up the issue of idea vs. concept, and in
doing so begins his explicit discussion of language. We
may note at the outset that Eliot himself is not free of
reservations concerning his own definitions of idea and

concept. "team not ’contident.! she weites weEhatathese
definitions are valid ones." Nevertheless, the
definitions he does provide seem sensible enough and do
little more than to restate Plato's and Aristotle's own
distinctions between the abstract and the particular.
Here then is Eliot:
The fact that words are always used in the expression of ideas, and are
remembered and placed by attachment to a more or less indefinite group of
ideas in which they have been used, may lead us to regard ideas as the
meaning of words. Now there is a decided difference. . . . A Word, it is true,
may mean or stand for, an idea. But there will never obtain an identity between
the meaning of the word as concept,
and the meaning of the word as idea.°°
In order to fully comprehend Eliot's meaning here we
might be wise to first review the theoretical "cosmos"
into which Eliot has placed us. Immediate experience, we
have seen, is one with reality in that it is independent
and self-contained. In the world of temporal experience,
this reality does not present itself. Instead we find
ourselves thrust into a world of relations, the major
divisions of which are subject and object. This world of
relations represents the breaking up of immediate
experience into its constituents. These constituents are
informed by both subjective and objective aspects. Each
object, in order to be objectified, must also and
simultaneously maintain an ideal character. All objects
are in this sense ideal; all ideas intend their objective
aspect. When Eliot writes that ". . . until the ideal is

recognized as real, it is not even ideal,"*' he refers to
just this necessary co-presence of subjective and
objective aspects. He adds that his use of the word
"recognize" requires the following qualification: ".
the idea as idea (as meaning) is neither existent nor no-
existent, and could we consistently keep to this internal
view it would not be real."** In other words, and as is

the case with relations as relations, aspects of the real
are in and of themselves merely aspects, abstractions.
We may say, of course, that the idea, its meaning, exists
and so is real. But once we have made such a statement,
once we have made the idea a point of attention, we have
called into play the objective aspect of the real as well
as the idea as merely meaning, and so consider the
"complete consort," so to speak. We have the idea as a
"real" idea. This we must inevitably do; however, if it
were possible to "keep to this internal view," to
experience one aspect of the real in isolation, then it
may be said that the idea is not real. Aspects, like
relations, are "methods" by which the real is inferred.
They are not in and of themselves real unless and until
they acquire object status. However, in acquiring such
status, they are no longer mere aspects, mere relations.
The distinction Eliot draws between idea and concept
proceeds along similar lines. The word as idea "is
predicated of reality, assigned a place in a system--more

or less complete--which is assumed as real. "33 However,
"The concept--greenness, or triangularity--does not as
such qualify) realityhat) all. Itds7 in ateels, neither
real nor unreal." The word as idea represents a
division of the original unity, a qualification of
reality. The meaning of word as idea is therefore
intimately bound up with the real. The meaning of the
word as concept, on the other hand pretends to isolate one
aspect of the real, i.e., the subjective aspect, and so,
as is the case with relations as relations, fails to be
either real or unreal. "Greenness," for example, is
purely an abstraction sans specificity. In this sense
"The meaning of a concept always exceeds the idea, and is
of virtually indefinite extension . . The ideal is the
total content which we mean about reality in any
particular presentation. . . [The concept] exceeds all
actual and possible content or definition. Nothing can
secure you against the possibility that new experience
may add to the meaning by extending the use."*°
All of this becomes clear when we recast Eliot as
IPA heweye The meaning of the word as concept may be
translated to suggest Plato's ideal abstraction, or form.
The meaning of the word as idea is then the particular,
or set of particulars which constitute the "real" world

in which we live. Nowhere do we actually experience
"greenness" except it its particular manifestations in
experience: a green chair, for example, or green paint.
We are in actuality surrounded by particular objects, not
by abstractions. These particular and objectified
phenomena are, of course, and from the point of view of
the thinking subject, ideal. As actual ideas/objects of
experience, they represent the constituents of the
original unity which has broken down. The concept, on
the other hand, is general, abstract, and as concept does
Noe esepresent ays pacttcular iivasion or, “the, toriginal
unity. "And properly speaking," Eliot adds, "a concept
cannot be defined at all, for to define it is to restrict
HeMEOnegdehinite .cincle of adeas. So ,far asuit isathus
identified with these ideas it ceases to be a concept."
In other words, the more particular a concept becomes,
the less abstract it remains. The concept, therefore,
exececdsar clout decams (nultchaAtmit esl SP nOtempartacular,) Jor
restricted; its meaning may shift depending on what new
particulars (ideas) are introduced into the mix.
Furthermore, concepts are in large measure inferred from
particulars, while at the same time they are intuited, or
Neoltie Mee Whatawe: haves tinaldy, .1Sea CURTOUSEMIxturesof
Plato, Aristotle, and Bradley, for the concept seems to
behave in much the same manner as does the original unity
which also is inferred and felt. Here is Eliot on the

matter:
In a sense, concepts are omnipresent, and in a sense, they are never known at
all. We have, in the simplest case in which a concept appears, an intuitive
knowledge of it (if one likes to talk of intuition), and on the other hand as | say,
beyond intuitive "knowledge" we know the concept only through ideas--through
its appearances. And we must not confuse the development of the language
with development in concepts; for it would, | think, be more apt to say that the
development of language is the history of our exploration of the world of
concepts. The goal of language is in this sense unattainable, for it is simply
that of a complete vocabulary of concepts, each independent of the rest; and
all of which, by their various combinations, would give complete and final
knowledge--which would, of course, by knowledge without a knower.°?”
A complete vocabulary of concepts, EP Leno imere
experience at the beginning, .° . . [then] complete
experience at the ena, "38 represents the recovery of the
Cmnlgiinaljeauint cy. ASs* such pie Jexists @ioutsiGde sory aes
subject/object divisions and so constitutes the
obliteration of the thinking subject. As long as there
is language, the original unity is lost.
"The idea," however, as Eliot stresses, "though
largely dependent for its existence upon the forms of its
expression [words], must yet not be confused with these
forms. The idea is that reality which I intend, and the
identity is only the assumption of one world; it is not
the characteristic of it as idea, but as world."*” We
must beware of Eliot's own language here. He is not
suggesting that authorial powers adhere to the
subject/self/I. Rather, as he has already made clear,
the "I" is as much a construction, a product of the
relational process, as is any idea/object. Every idea

"intends" its object in that every idea, to be idea,
maintains an objective aspect. That words and ideas are
separate phenomena, ac Glieast from ~a theoretical
standpoint, Eliot has already made clear by suggesting
that language is "placed by attachment to a more or less
indefinite group of ideas."* A word may "stand for" an
idea.» "Yet it is a mutilation of connections to say that
one word stands for this 'idea.' For it does so only by
virtue of its close connection with a number of more
primary ideas."*' Eliot's example of the "wolf-eating-
lamb" serves to clarify. Here we have a combination of
words which yokes together three idea complexes. As
knowledge and language develop, the word "wolf" alone
comes to express the previous three word term, not
because the total idea complex adheres to the single
word, but because the single word maintains relations
Wath the weprimary,acEuder tern. Put another way, as
language becomes more abstract, relations which were
previously explicit are sublimated, though never
obliterated. "The idea, and its predication of reality,
may exist previous to the articulation of language. It
is not true, "Eliot continues, "that language is simply
a development of our ideas; it is a development of
reality as well."** Since words express idea/object
complexes, they bring to light the constituents of the

original unity and are largely responsible for the
thinking subject's experience of his world, a partial
experience to be sure, but one that "intends" by virtue
of its relational character the whole experience, "the
assumption of one world. "43
Again, since word and idea are separate phenomena,
the idea may pre-exist the word. This sequencing,
however, seems less temporal than it does logical. For
in the realm of actual experience’, the two are virtually
co-extensive. In chapter four entitled "The
Epistemologist's Theory of Knowledge," Eliot clarifies
the relationship of word, idea/object:
The object, you will say, is now known as independent of the word, though like
enough without words we might not have come to know objects. It is true, |
reply, that when we mean an object with a word we mean the object and not
the word, and we might mean the same object by a different word... But the
object which we denote in this sense is the object gua object, and not the
bundle of experiences, but the bundle would not be a bundle unless it were held
together by the moment of objectivity which is realized in the name. | am very
far from meaning that it is the act of naming which makes the object, for the
activity does not proceed from one side more than from another. Objects
cannot arise without names, and names never spring up without objects, ready
to be applied to the first objects to which they seem appropriate. Nor do |
mean that the object did not exist until it was known, but only that it has not
the character of objectivity until it is known as an object.*4
This sound very much like Kant. The divisions of
immediate experience are given shape, objectified only
when "known" as divisions, much as Kant's basic phenomena
are focused by the mind. The difference, of course, is
that for Eliot it is not the mind which shapes phenomena
as a creative act, but rather language which breaks out

of the original unity along side of the thinking subject,
focusing experience for that subject while simultaneously
shaping that subject for itself. If the self may be said
to exist as self only when objectified, then we have no
recourse but to declare the self a product of language.
here again Eliot anticipates what will become a major
theoretical position for structuralists and _ post-
structuralists.
RhHeucCdhE i Serie sethate nh e siname qu Si munot. eche
object,"*? the object may not exist without the name. I
again quote at length from chapter four of Eliot's
dissertation:
| should prefer to speak of the name as the moment of denotation; it is not that
which is denoted, obviously, or merely a convenient means for denoting
something which exists in complete independence, of the name. It denotes a
an object which is not itself, and yet, when we ask just what this object is
which is denoted, we have nothing to point to but the name. We do not denote
any qualities of the object, as such . . . we denote not its whatness but its
thatness [its being]. And we must not forget that even “that'is aname... Try
to think of what anything would be if you refrained from naming it altogether,
and it will dissolve into sensations which are not objects; and it will not be that
particular object which it is, until you have found the right name for ic
Meaningful experience, as it appears for the thinking
subject, is then "contained" in what Fredric Jameson has
termed "the prison-house of language." That Derrida
agrees with Eliot on this point goes without saying.
For our purposes within the scope of the present
Chapter of our study, it remains to make explicit the
astonishing similarities which obtain between the views

of language held by Eliot and Derrida. Both Eliot and
Derrida agree that the meanings of words are not the
result of one to one correspondence between thought and
thing. Eliot's own comments on this matter are somewhat
LEDUC ARAN On ‘the one“hana “he warns’ that “'. 7. ~¥ "you “quite
underestimate the closeness with which particular words
are woven into our reality, "47 .which, of course, is not
the same as positing a one to one correspondence. On the
other hand he admits that ". . . we might mean the same
object by a different word, "48 which certainly echoes
Saussure's own declaration that words are arbitrarily
attached to things and meanings. At most Eliot seems to
be claiming an affinity between certain words and things,
an attraction between entities which nevertheless does
not function as a determinant. FLOM El vOtrs= pol emmod
view, ideas are ideas by virtue of their being a
relational world Words point to ideas, express ideas,
and so necessarily express relations. Their meanings are
therefore the result of relations (differance) since
ideas/objects are the results of relations. Though faith
may grant that language intends an original unity which
may be intuited/inferred from language, in actuality
words lead only to other words, structures to other
structures. In Derrida's terms, what Eliot describes in
Knowand
ledg
Experience
e is nothing less than the process of
difference which produces "identity," or focuses meaning
for man. Furthermore, despite the very obvious fact that
Eliot is working in other terms, he nevertheless
implicitly undermines what western metaphysics has
historically privileged, i.e., the concept of presence
and the prioritizing of the speech act. Speech, if we
may recall Derrida's definition, has conventionally been
understood as that process by which thought and intention
direct meaning. Meaning for Eliot, we have seen, is a
PEOducey Ofp (relationalgesteldsy Wand (ein /=thi's? besense
impersonal, the result of the operation of differance, and
so the domain of writing.
Finally, Eliot's view of language owes a good deal
to the philosophical theories of Charles Sanders Peirce
Whee maracain the ssingullar distinction of note ronily
providing insight into Eliot's poetics, but in addition
binding Eliot to Derrida in a distinct and direct way.
We have thus far established a sympathy which reaches
across decades. Both Eliot and Derrida question the
existence of absolutes that underscore man's
epistomological quest through experience. But we need
not rely solely on the crossing of considerable temporal
distances to establish such a _ smypathy. Eliot's
discussion of Peirce in Knowledge and Experience provides
another and more direct link since Peirce's ideas in turn

have been a source for Derrida.
The connection between Eliot and Peirce occurs
during the former's discussion of the symbol, and has
been partially mapped out in Michael Beehler's recent
book length study, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of
Difference. In his dissertation, Eliot says the following:
"I mean . . . by symbol both what Mr. Peirce calls by
that name and what he calls an eicon; excluding the
index. "‘9
According to Peirce,
a sign... is something which stands to somebody for something in some

respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that
person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which
it creates | call the inrerprerant of the first sign.°°
Ideally, the sign and its inierpretant refer to an object.
Peirce further asserts that "All words, sentences, books,
and other conventional signs are Symbols"?! in that they
determine and control their interpretants according to
convention, i.e.,’ according to cultural consensus.) The
Similarity which holds between Peirce's "sign" and
intrpretant, on the one hand, and Saussure's signifier and
signified must not go unnoticed. In both cases that which
is defined by the sign is not the object per se, but

rather a conceptualization which intrudes between the
symbol/sign/signifier and the object to which it

supposedly refers. Furthermore, this conceptualization
is not a fixed reference but rather a product of
culture, and as such provisional and shifting. As
Beehler explains,
The proliferative nature of the sign (or symbol) constitutes its being a
sign as such. To itself, the sign must be replicated by an interpretant that, as
another sign, is necessarily different from it. The original sign exists only in this
differential relationship with another sign, for [and here Beehler quotes Peirce]
"no Representamen [symbol/sign/signifier] actually functions as such until it
actually determines an Interpretant.” Because of its relational nature, the sign
sets off a differential chain of signification that is presumably closed at its
origin, the indifferent [self-identical] object. And yet, as Peirce points out, the
presence of the object is not essential to the functioning of the chain of
significations, for the "Representative Quality . . . lof the symbol/sign/signifier]
. Is not necessarily dependent . . .upon its actually having an Object."°?
In other words, the process of signification relies on
the relations between signifiers and signifieds and not on the
actual presence of an object as grounding force. In
fact, Peirce continues, the very presence of an object
may itself be a sign which, while ostensibly exposing the
object, rather intrudes between cognition and the object,
banishing the? pj ect ,“ if tone’ wactually—exists ; tor ta
netherworld of the unknown. Signs therefore produce
other signs, ad infinitum.
That Eliot agrees in his dissertation with Peirce's
evaluation of symbols is beyond debate, since Eliot
himself acknowledges consonance. What is particularly
striking is Eliot's rejection of Peirce's idea of
index. Whereas an "eicon" may refer to an object
merely by virtue of its own characteristics "which it
possesses .. . whether any such Object exists or

not,"°> and a "symbol" functions in much the same way,
with the exception that the symbol refers to an object
via the imposition of a culturally determined law, the
"index" maintains a direct one to one correspondence with
the object due to qualities which the index and the
object share in common. TLEOWS this sth carlevel wor
signification, that “of "thes! “index! twhich wb vot
explicitly excludes from his own analysis of signs. In
doing so, Eliot accepts from Peirce only those levels of
signification which stress cultural, differential "cores"
as the instigators of meaning. "Symbol" and "eicon"
(Peirce's terms), though seemingly inclined towards
certain objects by virtue of their relational power or
through cultural coercion, nevertheless remain
independent, essentially free floating signifiers in that
they do not rely on the presence of objects to convey
meaning, nor do they mirror objects by virtue of some
organic connection with said objects.
Moreover, Peirce's assertion that a
symbol/sign/signifier cannot function as such "until it
actually determines an Interpretant"™ finds its
theoretical equivalent in Eliot's early conception in
Knowle
and Experience
dge of the relations of words to objects.
We need do no more than recall Eliot's claim that an
object cannot be said to exist until we have

found the proper name for it. For until the word focuses
the object for cognition, we have merely an unbundled
series of sensations.”
That this bundle of sensations, so focused, may be
understood as yet another sign is made clear when we
consider again the nature of objecthood for the Eliot of
Knowledge
and Experience. Objects like words are relational
and so point to other objects. Only immediate experience
may be understood as in relation with nothing beyond
itself the reality of being previous to the relational
nature of meaning. But since the existence of immediate
experience may be inferred only after it has been
"transcended" and abstracted as the constituents of the
relational field, the problem for man in time is that the
absolute, though theoretically underwriting the
relational system of signs which permit meaning, is
always already absent at the point when the inference is
made, "not as such present either anywhere or to
anyone. "°° What remains is the term and meaning of
immediate experience, in Peirce's lexicon an "eicon" that
derives, ,its. power from its . participation in the
relational field.
What we have ultimately in ge

and Experience
Knowled is
Eliot's own evocation of Derrida's differance at the center
of human experience. Nowhere is the self-identical unity

to be found. We are left instead with the idea of
immediate experience, a term among many and dependent for
its cogency on its relations with other terms in the
Giacritical field. Furthermore, immediate experience
itself, since it can be said to exist only after it has
developed diacritically, is the’ site: not of a .self-
identical unity, but rather of an originating difference
which fuels the production of yet more signs, more
mediations, more differences. For in order to be, an
object must mean. The "whatness" of an object represents
its own difference from itself, Gee fronw eS
"thatness." HOt Saeet 11s iOnwent ba Smematicers - With
reference to Bradley's half-hearted hedge against
relativism, Eliot insists that "Whether there is a stage
at which experience is merely immediate, Bradley says, we
have agreed to leave doubtful. But here, I feel sure he
has understated the case, and we may assert positively
that there is indeed no such stage. ">"
At least as early in his career as Knowledge and
Experience, Eliot anticipates Derrida's own claim for
differance as the original rupture which engenders the
relational world. As an idea/object divided against

itself, immediate experience finds itself firmly lodged
within the relational field, stripped of whatever

transcendent properties might be assigned to it. Of
Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, Derrida writes that
From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We
think only in signs. . . One could call play the absence of the transcendental
signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of
ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence. . . Here one must think of
writing as a game within language. °°
Two major texts, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H.
Brdley and Of Grammatology, separated by more than fifty
years, thus converge on the semiotics of Charles Sanders
Peirce.
Chapter 3: The Word Within a Word
Unlike the poems which in their totality, trace a
steady development of deconstructive principles, Eliot's
essays represent a potpourri of ideas, a series of hits
and misses, into which theory is woven not as logical
progression, but as tapestry. Most often concerned with
the works of particular poets the craft of poetry, and
the life of religion and culture, the essays nevertheless
contain statements crucial to any understanding of Eliot
as an early proponent of deconstruction. Because of the
"scattershot" positioning of these ideas, several of his
comments in the later essays must be placed alongside of
those in the early writings in order to effect the
completed concept or explanation. Eliot's own claim in
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the past
comments on the present is justification enough for this
procedure. With this in mind, we nevertheless begin at
the beginning.
"Tradition and the Individual Talent, perhaps
Eliot's most famous essay, first appeared in the Egoist in
the September/October issues of 1919. The essay, it is
safe to say, did much to revitalize English and
94
The Word Within a Word 95
American criticism which, since the late nineteenth
century, had either sagged into the imprecision of
impressionism or consumed itself with explorations of the
historical and philosophical underpinnings of literature
to the neglect of actual works of literary art. The
radical redefinition of tradition contained in the essay
disturbed the status quo in at least two ways: first,
along with much of Ezra Pound's writings, it threatened
to set the existing canon on its ear; and second, it
drove the long overdue "final nail" into the worn out
legacy of nineteenth century Romanticism. Both acts were
accomplished via a drastic demotion of the self and its
position visa vis the text:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance,
his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.
You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison,
among the dead. | mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical,
criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-
sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that
happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) works of art among them. The existing
order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the
whole are readjusted. |
The passage contains, in a nutshell, nearly every aspect
Gf Eliot's theory of tradition. The true literary canon
is an impersonal and flexible structure, coherent at any
one point in time, but capable of accommodating the new
work. Like Saussure's description of langue, "the

relations, proportions, values" and therefore meanings of
the "existing monuments" are fixed only synchronically.
Diachronically, the "existing order" evolves. Ties
within the context of relations that the new work finds
its place and meaning, shifting as it does the meaning of
works already in place. Much like Jangue’s relation to
parole, the relationship between the canon and the new
work is reciprocal, i.e., each is dependent on the other
for its cogency.
Misiones Bbheosy) Beot jescraduttongsepabablelee sboLn
Saussure's (and, for that matter, Derrida's) concept of
"Qifference" and Bradley's description of experience as
relational. Existing monuments, as well as new works,
have their meanings in relation to one another. In place
of poetry which represents the Wordsworthian "growth of
my own mind," Eliot substitutes the evolution of texts
whose value is adjusted beyond authorial intentions.
This process he calls his "impersonal theory of poetry,"
and it suggests
the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been
written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of
the poemto its author .. . the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the
immature one not precisely in any valuation of "personality," .. . but rather by
being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied feelings
are atliberty to enter into new combinations.
Eliot's description of the poet's role as catalyst rather
than as independent creator anticipates the structuralist
version of the author as a conduit for cultural forces.

In both cases "What happens is a continual surrender of
himself as he is at the moment to something which is more
valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-
sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."* In
other words, the poet, like the text, is valued not by
virtue» of unique character and abilities, but as a
component in an overall system that generates both his
identity and that of the text. For, "No poet, no artist
of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
Significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of
his relation to the dead poets and artists."* And lest
we confuse this statement as an early version of Harold
Bloom's theory of influence, we would be wise to remind
ourselves that Eliot's tradition is not made up of poets
andietheir, neuroses, but rather—of texts and, their
relations to one another. Though poets and artists may
die, the texts which make up the canon form a "living
whole" which underwrites the maker of new works of art.
Pilot Mme barelyiiiconcernéd) din ““Traditiony and yythe
Individual Talent" with the feelings and ideas of
individual poets. His focus is always on the work, and
on the overall process which makes use of the individual
talent:
If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see
how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any
semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the
"greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity
of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes
place, that counts . . . the difference between art and the poet has, not a
"personality" to express, but a particular medium.°®
Having removed the self and its private concerns from
center stage, Eliot positions the "medium," in this case
language, as nuclear in the poetic process.
Eliot's emphasis, even in his early essays, is on
the structure or pattern of language, the system of
relations which permits meaning, rather than on the
meanings themselves. In the terms of his dissertation,
Eliot is more concerned with the dynamics of "ideas" than
with the nebulous character of "concepts." Bel.
Bollier's comment that "By temperament Eliot desired
absolute knowledge which, while remaining knowledge, was
simultaneously being"® seems an apt description of a man
who desired the impossible. FOU, aS hla oteeclains ann
Knowledge and Experience, absolute knowledge would be
knowledge without a knower, and therefore not SGiodouiny,
knowledge at all. Eliot's dilemma involves yet another
paradox: how is it possible to assert the self's
limitations and still preserve it as a locus for the
absolute? If absolute knowledge were attainable, then it

would be possible for finite centers to embody all points
of view at once. But, according to Eliot, Bradley's

universe, actual only in finite centers, is only by an act of faith unified. Upon
inspection, it falls away into the isolated finite experiences of which it is put
together . .. The Absolute responds only to an imaginary demand of thought,
and satisfies only the imaginary demand of feeling. Pretending to be something
which makes finite centers cohere, it turns out to be merely the assertion that
they do.”
It is remarkable how Eliot here anticipates Derrida's
description of the absolute as a "Reassuring attitude"
with which "anxiety can be mastered."® Eliot's "faith"
becomes in Derrida's philosophy the "force of desire."
As Frank Lentricchia explains Derrida's reasoning, "In
something like an ultimate act of wish-fulfillment,
desire attempts to establish the center beyond fictive
status, an objective reality, the ground of all grounds,
the metaphysical truth in itself that masters all anxiety
and grants final reassurance."” And, as Bollier points
out,
even if thought could deal eventually with all the data the universe contains (an
impossibility) and "think out" the whole, truth still would not be a predication
wholly equivalent to its object, because truth like thought is ideal, depending
upon the distinction between "that” and "what" [i.e., between being and
knowledge] for its own existence. Even the whole truth as the ideal cannot be
the whole reality [since not independent of relations]. If the whole or absolute
truth is now wholly real, then any finite truth is less so. |
Both jSpil ene ies "finite center" and Derrida's
"language" remain forever distanced from Being's full
presence. Both men comprehend knowledge as essentially
interpretive (and, as we demonstrated in our previous
chapter, linguistic) and therefore a mediation of Being.
Furthermore, both men suspect the interpretive process

itself is responsible for the concept of Being,
representing the only "ground" for meaningful experience.
The initial similarities which seem to obtain between
Eliot and Saussure are thus mitigated as Eliot ponders
the srebiabilaty of "privileged" pstructires. Unlike
Saussure, Eliot does < not “ground _his’ diacritical
ueiaclcllmtene rau in self-presence, and so avoids
Goyengaiclieical ial. Eliot's "self," whether we understand
that self as an expression of thé finite center, or the
poetic "center," s always impersonal, is ser a
construction of the system (As we shall soon discover
Eliot's view of speech is closer to Derrida's than to
Saussure's.).
Eliot's dilemma is then intensified by the fact that
even if it were possible for the self to possess absolute
knowledge, that knowledge would not be one with the
whole, unmediated reality. In all events, the self is
removed from a "truth/reality" free from contradiction
and paradox.
Having reached for the stars, so to speak, in his
dissertation, and experience their rebuke, Eliot turns in
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" to the examination
of a less threatening, because less comprehensive, unity.
In a letter to Norbert Wiener dated Janvuany 6, 1915, a
period in which Eliot was still working on his

dissertation, Eliot writes the following:
The Relativism | cordially agree with . . . | am quite ready to admit that the
lesson of relativism is: to avoid philosophy and devote oneself to either real art
or real science. . . Still, this would be to draw a sharp line, and relativism,
preaches compromise. For me, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary
criticism and conversation about life; and you have the logic, which seems to
me of great value. 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. And there are works of art, and perhaps of science,
which would never have occurred had not many people been under the
impression that there was philosophy.!!
Fifty years before Derrida seriously entered the fray,
Eliot dismisses the metaphysical, logocentric tradition,
anticipating his own pending shift from metaphysics to
the arenas of poetry and literary criticism. se alas
tradition of poetry forms an ideal unity available to
cognition, to the "historical sense," then the individual
may yet experience at least a facsimile of the greater
unity. This facsimile Eliot will later term "the mind of
Europe." We may here move briefly to the other end of
Eliot's career as a critic in order to make our point:
He [the poet] must be aware that the mind of Europe--the mind of his own
country--a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his
own private mind--is a mind that changes, and that this change is a
development which abandons nothing en route.
The importance of culture's relation to language and to
the self hinges on at least two aspects of Eliot's
aesthetic: the nature and degrees of reality, and the
displacement of normal linguistic reference. To
understand the first aspect, we must first return briefly
TOMO US Cdussemtacd Ol.

We have already seen that, according to Eliot, every
idea must have an object. The problem for
epistemological inquiry, of course, is whether or not
imaginary, even poetic constructions such as "golden
mountain" [Eliot's own example] refer to real objects in
experience. Eliot's answer involves nothing less than a
redefinition, with Bradley's help, of reality:
... For all objects are equally immanent and equally transcendent. The criterion
of reality, therefore, is to be found, not in the relation of the object to the
subject [i.e., whether or not the self can find a reference in the world for
"golden mountain"] .... the reality of the object does not lie in the object
itself, but in the extent of relations which the object possesses. |?
Objects are more or less real, depending on the extent of
their relations. There must be an object for every idea,
but every object is not to the same degree real. What
Hevot is suggesting is chat) >thesiecharacter of
inclusiveness largely determines reality. If it is not
possible to know the whole reality, it is nevertheless
advisable to express as many relations as the language
will stand in order to appropriate as much reality as is
possible considering the self's limited perspectives.
For Eliot, a healthy language may accomplish this
"gathering" of relations, since language develops not
only ideas but reality as well. In "Swinburne as Poet,"
Eliot claims that unlike the verses of the bad poet who
"dwells partly in a word of objects and partly in a world
of words, and. . . can never get them to fit," a healthy

language "is so close to the object the two are
identified." Although Swinburne is not a bad poet in
that his use of language is controlled, his method is
suspect in that the objects to which his words refer
hardly maintain relations at all. Object and word are
not identified in Swinburne's verse precisely "because
the object has ceased to exist, because the meaning is
merely the hallucination of meaning, because language,
uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of
atmospheric nourishment."” i Lwermwrecaliekiiotis
discussion in his dissertation of the distinction between
the word as "idea" and the word as concept, his comments
on Swinburne fall neatly into line. The word as idea
refers to particulars, to the actual divisions of the
original unity, while the word as concept is general,
abstracts The bad poet mixes concrete and abstract
language. Swinburne, while not so confused, uses a
language whose effect is not particular, hardly
Belationale. and so "non=inclusive, " VOnd yaa seman of
genius," Eliot writes, "could dwell so exclusively and
consistently among words as Swinburne. 5 5 he aalet=)
language which is more important to us is that which is
struggling to digest and express new objectives, new
groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects.'"'6
Swinburne's poetry is less important because it does not

reveal "a richness of content and intricacy of
connections."'" The objects, .if any,..referred) to ,by
Swinburne's poetry are the least relational, and
therefore the least real. Since immediate experience is
defined as complete reality in that it "contains" all
possible relations, Swinburne's verse is at some remove
frome lm tay.
thatmrea
Both "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and
"Swinburne as Poet" establish the importance of
language's diacritical nature as the ground for meaning.
If Eliot acknowledges no unity of word and Being, he
nevertheless finds in language, particularly poetry, the
possibility of a quest for a provisional unity that is
analogous to Bradley's search for a "complete vocabulary
of concepts" (As chapter five of this study makes clear,
this quest ultimately leads not to a Bradlean
perspective, but to a "deconstructive" analysis of
poetry.).
If the quest may be said to begin in "Tradition and
the Individual Talent," it finds its aesthetic ground
rule in the essay entitled "Hamlet and His Problems." I
am speaking, of course, of Eliot's much maligned
principle of the "objective correlative." Eliot writes
that
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an

"objective correlative;” in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked. '8
R.P. Blackmur claims that the principle means nothing
outside of the essay which generated it ("In the Hope of
Straightening Things Out").'? Northrop Frye considers
the principle, and the theory of impersonality in
general, as little more than figures of speech. *° More
recently, critics such as Jonathan Culler, Harold Bloon,
and Edward Said, at times moving pall-mall through the
complexities of structuralism and post-structuralisn,
have generally dismissed the "objective correlative" as
arbitrary and ultimately untenable.*' 1 No doubt partially
responsible for the rather hostile reception in some
quarters, is the unfortunate fact that the principle
appears in the context of a misguided repudiation of
Shakespeare's Hamlet. Contemporary critics, however, are
more likely to point out that the arbitrary nature of the
sign makes any notion of an objective link between word
and emotion unthinkable. But here is Lewis Freed on the
matter:
According to Bradley, everything which is given in experience, which is felt, is

subjective and personal. At the same time, feeling is transmuted into objects
of thought, and, on this side, as self-transcendent, is objective and impersonal.
In general, any particular fact, any bit of personal experience, has a character
of a certain kind (a "what" in addition to a "this”): it has, that is to say, a
content (qualities and relations), which, as ideal, points beyond the particular
fact. Its specific meaning depends on the context to which it refers--aesthetic,
moral, religious; and these spheres of reality are not subjective, but objective.?*
What is important here is the particular's
dependence on the whole for meaning, and that the whole,
the "context," is not fixed but fluid. Furthermore, if
we may use Bradley as a guide (Freed certainly does), the
context as "object" means that the whole is made up of
relations, for objecthood depends on a thing's relations
to other things. Of course, Freed is here referring to
art, morality, and religion, and not to the fundamental
unity of immediate experience or "a complete vocabulary
of concepts." But that is precisely the point. Less
inclusive structures, while grounding meaning for even
narrower structures inscribed within them, are in turn
grounded by virtue of their relations with other
structures similarly extensive. Much of what defines the
aesthetic, “all “those ‘objects that Sifalil 7 withineetes
boundaries, depends on the fact that the aesthetic is not
the moral or the religious. Moreover, the particular
object, a book for instance, maintains relations that are
aesthetic, moral, ‘and’ religious: Depending on one's
point of view when one is considering the book, certain
relations are emphasized while others suppressed. The
book may be an aesthetic, moral, or religious object.
Context is ever in process, never fixed absolutely.
This, of course, sounds much like Eliot's theory of
tradition. The point here is that, as one "tool" of the

fluctuating tradition, the "objective correlative" is

itself not a fixity, not truly a unity of word and any
one feeling, but rather what Derrida terms a supplement, a
provisional structure which functions as a center, as a
locus for shifting relations, and which, like immediate
experience, "Upon inspection, . . . falls away into the
isolated finite experiences of which it is put
together."
Let us strengthen the context into which we cast
such a statement. Bln oOrls eSources tors. the s"objwective
correlative" is, of course, Bradley, or more specifically
his own mediation of Bradley in Knowledge

and Experience. As
Freed explains Eliot,
The word is constituted of elements of sensation, but the word must be

distinguished from the sensations or images. ... Thus the word °‘sunset' is
a way of organizing ~a set of experiences,’ the sensations or images through
which we enjoy the sunset. The word directs attention to the meaning, but is
not itself a meaning.
In other words, and recalling Eliot's dissertation, "The
object gua object would not exist without this bundle of
experiences, but the bundle would not be a bundle unless
it were held together by the moment of objectivity which
is realized in the name."® As its organizing function,
the word does not maintain a one to one correspondence
with its object, but rather enters into relation with, in
this case, a series of sensations. The true object, the
sunset, is in fact a relational event, an idea, made

possible by its relation to the sign. Note, however,
that both the gathered sensations and the word which
gathers are rendered meaningful by their interplay. It
is possible, at any time, for the word to organize a
aifferent set of) jsensations! pieince, “atas snot .~4
qualification or determination of the meaning."* Eliot
asserts in Knowledge
and Experience that "No symbol, I
maintain, is ever a mere symbol, but is continuous with
that which it symbolizes. we? A link between word and
sensation and object. exists certainly but "continuous"
does not mean "fixed." "In practice," Freed goes on, "we
tend to substitute the verbal symbol for the experience
of the object [in Derrida's terms, as provisional
supplement for the experience], to handle and use
objects." This is a necessary practice for, as Eliot
assures us, "Without words, no objects. "29
What we have, then, is this: the word organizes,
i.e., sets in relation, sensations. This compilation is
then known as object, but remains something other than
the word which sets it in motion: That the "objective
correlative" is not one with the language in which it is
rendered is obvious. However, "Objects cannot arise
without names, and names never spring up without
objects, 9 The "objective correlative" is therefore
bound up in language and in the relational field which

language expresses. That certain emotions, qua
sensations/events/objects qua language, may be
"immediately evoked" formulaically

is merely an extension
of Eliot's claim in Knowled

and Experience
ge that every idea
intends its object, and that every object is real insofar
as it maintains relations with other objects. In the
light of Eliot's dissertation, as well as his description
Ot Lig oe lwedetyoortetradition, it is at Teast. unlikely
that Eliot ever intended his "objective correlative" as
an absolute unity of parts.
Saussure's own assertion that langue (in Eliot's
aesthetic "cosmos" equivalent to the tradition in that it
both generates, and is generated by, its parts) evolves
diachronically through usage, and Derrida's claim that
context itself is in a constant state of mediation seem
less innovative in the light of Eliot's remarks. But for
further elucidation of the unstable nature of words, as
that nature comments on the writing of poetry, we must
mexe turn to Bldot's! essay) of 1942, \"The) Music soft
Poetry."
Elict writes of the "music of a word” that is "so to
speak, at the point of intersection: it arises from its
relation first to the words immediately preceding and
following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its

context; and from another relation, that of its immediate
meaning in that context to all the other meanings which
it has had in other contexts: 31 Meaning, even that
which adheres to the sounds of words and escapes
paraphrase or denotation, relies on relation, difference,
context. But, as Eliot here stresses, no word is or
should be fixed in any one context. In order for words
to continue to develop ideas/objects, they must move
through a range of contexts, for words "must change their
meaning, because it is their changes in meaning that keep
a language alive."** ."In short," Freed tells us, "there
is enlargement by a synthesis of differences. And if we
try to determine the meaning by removing the differences
and leaving the identity, we find that when the
differences are all gone, the identity is gone too."
Put another way, the fewer relations words enter into,
the more they mean nothing, the more they take on the
character of "unreal abstractions." Language, it seems,
cannot be stable and at the same time function as
language, i.e., express the relational events of
experience. Ironically, the quest for immediate
experience, or to use Eliot's alternate term, for a
"complete vocabulary of concepts," requires that language
be in a constant state of flux in order to appropriate as
much of the whole as is possible at any one time. for

the whole, as we have already understood, is inferred
only through the relational activity of its parts.
The parts, of course, are understood as such only in
relation to the whole which is, in any event, absent and
abstract. Again, from "The Music of Poetry," here is
Eliot on the subject of language's necessary fluctuation:
... poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which
we use and hear. Whether poetry is accentual or syllabic, rhymed or rhymeless,
formal or free, it cannot afford to lose its contact with the changing language
of common intercourse.°*
Eliot is everywhere clear that meaning is the result of
relations rather than the pure translation of authorial
intention. He therefore, and in Derrida's terms,
dissolves speech in the larger diacritical operations of
writing. For our purposes, of course, the emphasis in
the passage above falls on the words "changing
intercourse.": Eliot is stressing that poetry, like
everyday language, eschews fixities. It is possible,
perhaps inevitable, that the word over the course of time
will carry many references, that Signifier will signature
many Signifieds, and that ultimately a word will attach
itself tO, will develop, more or less, many
ideas/objects.
As for the "music," Eliot's focus includes more than
the sounds of words:
My purpose here is to insist that ~a musical poem'is a poem which has a

musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of
the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and
one. ... The sound of the poem is as much an abstraction from the poem as
is the sense.?°
He further cautions: "TJ would remind you, first, that
the music of poetry is not something which exists apart
from the meaning. Otherwise, we could have poetry of
great musical beauty which made no sense, and I have
never come across such poetry. 036 If Swinburne's seems
to us just such poetry, we should remind ourselves that
"The apparent exceptions only show a difference of
degree. w37
This sounds very much like Eliot's
discussion of degrees of reality in Knowledge

and Experience.
Words always mean, a express and develop
ideas/objects. But in Swinburne's poetry, language
"means" an object which maintains the lest number of
relations and is therefore the least real. The meaning
of Swinburne's verse is an "hallucination" which, as
Eliot's discussion of imaginary objects in | Hs
dissertation makes clear, is an object, though it does not
enter into the series of relations which would offer it,
Say, materiality. So language maintains continuity with
objects more or less real; poetry on all levels is
sensible, meaningful, though not always accessible:
It is a Commonplace to observe that the meaning of a poem may wholly escape

paraphrase. It is not quite so commonplace to observe that the meaning of a
poem may be something larger than its author's conscious purpose, and
something remote from its origins. . . . If, as we are aware, only a part of the
meaning can be conveyed by paraphrase, that is because the poet is occupied
with sreatiors of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still
exist.
The sounds of words arranged in pattern, as Eliot will
again claim in Four Quartets, are capable of meaning at a
level "beneath" that of denotation, and perhaps even of
connotation. The meaning which is evoked by language in
oblique ways sounds very much like a property of the
unconscious mind. But that is precisely what Eliot does
not mean, if by "unconscious" mind we refer to Freud's
conception. The mind never strictly contains ideas,
oblique or otherwise, but rather is itself an aspect of
the idea/object. Even the meaning which escapes
paraphrase lies without the poet's point of view while
simultaneously finding its form for a particular subject
and saccoraing £0) aa point ‘ofs view. The sensations,
rhythms that a reader experiences when reading a poem,
EicmE Atmospnene ss sthatmmaaheres = tOmmaam DOC We abe eR Eas
meaningful for Eliot as are the denotative meanings of
its words, and are as much. a part of the "music.",. They
alse,.may function .at,.,seme. remove from the, poet's
"conscious purpose," and they may receive varying
emphases from varying points of view belonging to the
poet himself and to others. Nevertheless, all aspects of
a poem's music (Eliot cautions.that “It would be. a
mistake... . to assume that.all poetry ought to be

melodious, or that melody is more than one of the
components of the music of words"*%) are in relation and,
as in the case of tradition, make up an ideal, albeit
provisional, whole:
There may be much more in a poem than the author was aware of. The
different interpretations may all be partial formulations of one thing; the
ambiguities may be due to the fact that the poem means more, not less, than
ordinary speech can communicate.*°
Here we have Eliot explicitly in conflict with any
who would consider speech a privileged repository of
meaning.
Paul de Man in_ Blindness and Insight suggests the
possibility of "unconsummated meaning" for literature.*'
De Man has in mind the kind of direct link which obtains
between music and the emotions. Bypassing any reference
to material objects music evokes the structure of
feeling, and in doing so escapes the limitations of
meaning in the conventional sense. De Man suggests that,
like music, language is capable of displacing its normal
Signified, its denotative meaning. It is clear that what
de Man describes is very similar to the methodology of
symbolism. Perhaps the only difference, yet a crucial
one, lies in that which is proposed by de Man and the
earlier symbolists such as Yeats, Dowson, and Johnson, as
the alternate reference. For de Man, the dislocations of
conventional significds reveals what for him has always been

true anyway, i.e., that ultimately language refers only
to itself. The symbolists, however, held that language
freed of conventional reference pointed to the existence
of independent, albeit highly abstract, unities such as
beauty, truth, and other spiritual dimensions. Eliot's
desire is certainly to evoke some semblance of the
absolute, and his concept of an "objective correlative,"
"a chain of [words] which shall be the formula of
particular emotion," echoes one aspect of the symbolist
Deo, ect..
But unlike many of the symbolists, Eliot is never
convinced of language's ability to actually reveal an
absolute reality. As a medium of knowledge, of the
ideal, language is forever destined to conceal the whole
reality even as it makes possible our comprehension of
that reality's possibility. As we have already seen,
Eliot in his dissertation comes extremely close to
suggesting that ultimately language means only itself.
Because words, the expression of ideas, cannot refer to
the whole reality without, if effect, vanishing from
experience, their attempts to refer to what is
independently real (e.g., language as mimetic) thrust
them back upon themselves, on their own relational
nature. As Eliot claims in Knowledge and Experience, "We may
say, in one way, that every idea means itself; its

tdeality® «consaste)! sitiegeies ‘pointing toward’ alts
realization, or (we have found it to be the same thing)
toward its own idealization. "42 Since ideas as well as
objects exist for man only in so far as they find their
expression in language, words from the point of view of
the thinking subject are self-referential. After all,
"it [the object] will not be that particular object [and
so the idea] which it is, until you have found the right
name.for it."
In one sense Eliot's emphasis on the pattern/rhythms
of language represents a reconciliation of the different
points of view expressed by the symbolists and by later
deconstructionists such as Paul de Man. Eliot's method
involves a shift in stress from the denotative meanings
of words to the formal structure or pattern of language
as it is found in poetry. "The music of poetry is not
something that exists apart from the meaning,"** Eliot
writes. However, "the poet is occupied with frontiers of
consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings
Still exist."* The point here is that poetry may
communicate relations which extend beyond the fixed
references of ordinary discourse. In doing so, poetry
may escape the seeming hegemony of its author to mean on
its own terms. The "frontiers of consciousness" to which
Eliot refers suggest a territory at the very least on the

fringe of subjective action, and at most the place of an
autonomous linguistic event. We have already noted
Eliot's own claim that "the meaning of a poem may be
something larger than its author's conscious purpose and
something remote from its origins."** Eliot's version of
the Intentional Fallacy combined with his anticipation of
post-structuralist notions of the free-play of meaning,
suggest a view of language as an autonomous system whose
rhythms, structures, "music" generate meaning.
It is important, of course, to note that when Eliot
refers to the co-existence of "different interpretations"
as "partial formulations of the same thing, “4 he refers
to something not quite parallel, at least on the surface,
to the kind of free-play warranted by deconstructionists
such as Jacques Derrida. Derrida's hermeneutics involves
an endless process of interpretation, a continuous
turnover of meaning. Eliot advises that various
interpretations may be part of one thing, perhaps a final
unity underpinning the hermeneutic framework. Whether
that unity is the fixed structure of the single poem or
the larger whole of experience, Eliot ostensibly limits
free-play in much the same way as do later structuralists
such as Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov who posit a
"final" structure which grounds all relational activity
within the bounds of the literary work. “8

But to hand Eliot over to the structuralists without
a fight is perhaps to do him an injustice. If we take
"the same thing" to mean either the whole of the poem or
the whole of experience, we are still where Eliot has put
us in his dissertation, i.e., within the relational
field. Barring an act of faith, we find no "final cause"
within that field, and so "the same thing," the whole,
the "unity" may yet from Eliot's point of view refer
merely to the ongoing play of differences. The whole may
yet amount to nothing more than what is inferred from the
Dawes. Eliot, we should emphasize, allows for this
second view in the language he utilizes: "The different
interpretations may all be partial formulations of the
same thing.’ He is far from claiming any definitive
status for final structures, while at the same time
acknowledging without prejudice the possibility of
different interpretations.
In any event, Eliot's purpose is to establish that
words operate beyond an author's intentional control.
Speech, nearly always considered a communication of
intention, is now stressed more for its rhythms than for
its denotative character. It is quite possible that for
Eliot the sound of speech unique to a particular people
is as crucial to the rooting of poetry in time and place
as 1s what is actually said, since "The meaning of poetry

+ + + must be a music latent in the common speech of the
poet's place. m°0 We find here no conflict with Derrida
if we recall that for the latter meaning is always rooted
in context, and that context shifts from place to place,
time to time. The power of poetry is then twofold: to
valuate and validate time and place, and to link time and
place with something greater, something which might
suggest the interconnectedness of all experience.
Eliot here seems to privilege poetry at the expense
of other forms of discourse. However, it is important to
emphasize that poetry and conventional discourse, for
Eliot, do not constitute wholly separate forms. Eliot
never sets poetry against "ordinary speech," a charge
which may be levelled at Swinburne as well as at turn-of-
the-century symbolists such as Dowson. The point of view
from which we might more fully grasp Eliot on this matter
is as follows: poetry is not other than conventional
discourse; rather it is language put to its best use
(what.,is. "Best," of course.is always determined) by
context), and as such it is in relation with everyday
speech as aspects of a whole (which is nevertheless
merely a part of the theoretical whole of experience).
Eliot's insistence that poetry never lose touch with
eon speech evidences the intimate relation of the two:
So while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed

in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another; and
this is just as true if you sing it, for singing is another way of talking. The
immediacy of poetry to conversation is not a matter on which we can lay down
exact laws. Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes announces
itself to be a return to common speech. .. . The music of poetry, then, must
be a music latent in the common speech of its time.>'
Eliot does recognize poetry's ability to develop
more reality, to trigger a more extensive series of
relations than can ordinary conversation. But this
ability belongs to language proper and remains dependent
on speech which, in turn, is but one manifestation of
what Derrida terms "writing." "The poem," Eliot writes,
"comes before the form, in the sense that a form grows
out of the attempt of somebody to say something; just as
a system of prosody is only a formulation of the
identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets
influenced by each other.' "2 This is as close as Eliot
gets to defining the poem as an act of speech. Rather
than as a separate lexicon and form, poetry is understood
by Eliot as one aspect, as is speech, of the whole of
language. All words, after. all, develop/express
ideas/objects to some degree. As Eliot writes in
Knowled
and Experience,
ge “Without words, no objects."
Poetry, for Eliot, is language more deeply committed
to process. It represents a relational field in which,
under pressures from various sources (Gu0- aches authors
limited intention, the etymology of certain words), the
forms of language, from common speech to the

pronouncements of dead languages, assert their relations
as a tentative, aesthetic whole. In so doing the poem
allows us to perceive, in restricted form, that igIeNy Gust.
Of course this aesthetic unity which is the poem (which
is the whole tradition, for that matter) remains
provisional. At the very least the concept (and I here
deGine pehe.. word —atconcepe! "wast does! “hlsot inephis
dissertation) of "unity" has been inferred. Poetry also
tells us that experience is made up of different points
GE Wiew in that it opens itself up te conflicting
interpretations. In "The Music of Poetry," Eliot writes
that "The reader's interpretation may differ from the
author's and be equally valid, it may even by better."™
It may read a more extensive series of relations.
All of this is possible, of course, because words
are essentially unstable, i.e., while always pointing
towards an aspect of immediate experience, they are ina
Gonstane State or flues in rellatron sto each other wand ito
their references (which, as we have already suggested in
this chapter, from one point of view are each other). So
". | . a word can be made to insinuate the whole history
SOteavlanguagesand, a civilization .-. =.[by. virtue of )],an
allusiveness which is in the nature of words." "At
some periods," Eliot says, "the task is to explore the
musical possibilities of an established convention of the

122 ‘The Fire and the Rose
relation of the idiom of verse to that of speech; at
other periods, the task is to catch up with the changes
in colloquial speech, which are fundamentally changes in
thought and sensibility." Ordinary speech is
fundamental, rather than inferior. Poetry and speech are
components of each other, In order for either to "live,"
they must be in relation. What comes before the poetic
line ana allows it to mean, Of Course, 1s the whole” or
the poem, the context. In its turn, the poem has its
"complete" meaning only in the context of tradition.
Furthermore, all of these linguistic components represent
developments within the whole of language whose aim is "a
complete vocabulary of concepts," but whose "appearance"
(to use a second Bradleyan term) upon inspection is the
result of the process of differance.
The reproach, of course, sends us back down the
ladder. The ground, the context, for every structure is
itself suspect. Yet the individual structures are in
relation and so point to their unity. Up the ladder we
go. If we may borrow Lewis Freed's last sentence from
T.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher, “And here we find ourselves
turning in a double circle.

¥*" Se aS MEE TERS
hermeneutical process which defines experience for Eliot.

It is, despite its explanation's being scattered across
several essays, Eliot's approximation of what Heidegger
terms "the linguistic universe." Immediate experience,
EVIiGCt™ writes is "the general condition before
distinctions and relations have been developed, and where
as yet neither any subect nor object exists," but "is not
as such present either anywhere or to anyone. "8 Despite
the core of relativism in Eliot's theories, Eliot longs
For an “absolute which” as) both’ within’ and: twathout
experience. Language points to (intends) its own
completeness, and so points to the absolute. But in
order for words to accomplish this, they must remain
unstable so more fully relational. And at the heart of
the process is the contradiction: "complete and final
knowledge . . . would, of course, be knowledge without a
knower. "°9 Eliot, as much as Fredrick Jameson and
Derrida, describes the "prison-house of language."
The problematic nature of language, first addressed
at length by Eliot in Knowledge

and Experience, continues to
inform the content of his essays on poetry and culture.
Pin les tomnlexampie,, 1c the heast of his concern over
the "dissociation of sensibility." The term finds its
earliest use in the essay of 1921, "The Metaphysical
Poets," and is developed as follows:

It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time
of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning;
it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective.
...A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When
a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its word it is constantly amalgamating
disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular,
fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two
experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the
typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are
always new wholes.
We may express the difference by the following theory. The poets of
the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth,
possessed experience. . . . In the seventeenth century a dissociation of
sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered. . . . while the language
became more refined, the feeling became more crude... .
The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and
continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative,
the descriptive;
they
thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.°°
Quoting at such length perhaps taxes the reader's
patience. Nevertheless, the passage as theory and the
extension of theory is fairly comprehensive. Somehow two
aspects of language, the intellective and the emotive,
have been set at odds (Eliotin this essay blames Milton
and Dryden, but in "Milton II," 1947, tempers his view.).
On the one hand there is poetry of ideals and/or of
verbal skill which fails to move us, its feeling "crude."
On the other hand there is the poetry of sentiment which
fails to engage the intellect. Donne understood
intuitively, Eliot implies, that words strive to express
both thought and feling, the idea and the sensation. We
are reminded here of Eliot's. view of the ideal. All

knowledge has its roots in immediate experience and is in
relation with the objective (not necessarily the
empirical). Ideas as objects have their sensate aspects.
"A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his
sensibility."° As does Eliot's “objective correlative,"
Donne's poetry sets both the thought (the idea, the
words) and the feeling in relation. In other words,
Donne's poetry seeks to reconcile disparate elements,
always forming new wholes and so pointing again to the
possibility of an all encompassing unity. That such a
possibility is, at best, crudely alluded to by language
which fails "to digest and express new objects" informs
Eliot's concern in "The Metaphysicaol Poets" as well as
in his essay on Swinburne. His criticism of nineteenth
century Romanticism and its byproducts finds its most
elevated voice not in any of the essays but in The Waste
Land, a poem which takes as one of its themes the
destruction of meaning. But here, as well as in most of
the essays that follow, Eliot reaches beyond a purely
aesthetic analysis to comment on the relation of art to
life. The dissociation of sensibility is not merely an
artistic defect; it applies also to the ordinary man
whose "experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.

"%
If the ordinary man's experience is fragmented, if his
language insulates him from its own relational power,
then what hope is there for the whole of society which
depends on a people's ambition for, if not complete

achievement of, unity?
Eliot defines culture as the provisional sum of all
human behavior relative to place and time which is
expressed in language. Eliot's remarks on ideas/objects,
language and culture, if taken together, imply a view of
culture which is not, in its essentials, in conflict with
de Man's. Teese true that Metorwy flaotces culture wsnay
contain various levels or "degrees" of reality, some more
primitive than others, some ‘ conscious and some
unconscious--some, in effect, that seemingly escape the
confines of language. Yet culture remains a complex of
ideas/objects, and since no object "is that particular
object which it is, until you have found the right name
for it,"% ultimately no culture can be the culture which
Le SeeUnin leit eis) SU housed "eatin Languace. As Eliot
cautions in "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture":
. It must be remembered that for the transmission of a culture--a peculiar

way of thinking, feeling, behaving--and for its maintenance, there is no
safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it
must continue to be a literary language--not necessarily a scientific language but
certainly a poetic one.®
Why a literary language? Because, as we have already
demonstrated, poetry, in Eliot's view, may maintain the
most extensive series of relations and so is best suited
to the expression of the various "degrees" of reality
which make up a culture.
Eliot's world view is apparently erected as a series

of ever widening spirals, each leading into the other.
On the level of the individual poem, structure determines
the possibilities of meaning beyond authorial intentions.
Taken together, the major literary works which form a
canon have their value only within that "tradition."
Furthermore, the tradition itself, as the best expression
of a culture, has its meaning through intimate contact
with the particulars. of the, culture, e.g., feelings
expressed in patterns of speech. In each case the
particular is honed into meaning by its position in a
larger system of relations. Culture is perhaps the most
extensive series of codes open to examination which
determines who we are and how we think; but even culture,
like Saussure's /angue and Eliot's "complete vocabulary of
concepts,"escapes to a great extent the net of cognition.
af jongve for Saussure represents. ther sum,.of all
linguistic codes in a constant state of evolution, and if
man as an effect of language can never stand outside of
the system to know it as whole and complete, culture for
Eliot "can never be wholly conscious--there is always
more to it then we are conscious of; and it cannot be
planned because it is also the unconscious background of
ald ours planning." And of course, culture, like the
larger background of relational experience, is a product
of differences.
This "unconscious background" is to a large extent
composed of feeling, i.e., of a shared sensibility which
brings into relation thought and sensation. This
sensibility, itself a component of culture, is naturally
subject to change since the culture may undergo shifts,
extensions, truncation. The form of language most in
touch with culture, and therefore with both feeling and
its intellectual formulations is poetry. Returning
briefly to "The Metaphysical Poets," we may observe how
Eliot earlier examines the characteristics of a poetry
which truly expresses contemporary culture:
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy,

or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poetry in our
civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization
comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity,
playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.
The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more
indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his
meaning.°”
The passage suggests several points of view. It is
clear, for instance, that Eliot is again calling for the
character of inclusiveness in language and that he views
history as an ongoing development of relations which
"abandons nothing en route." Contemporary society is
therefore terribly complex. In order to express this
complexity, to give it form and order, poetry must dwell
on the connotative meanings of words, on their capacity
to relate on more than one level. The poem itself may

reach into the many corners of history, as do The Waste Land
and Four Quartets, and so seem, at least to poets such as
William Carlos Williams, less a product of place than an
academic exercise (Eliot's answer to this charge would no
doubt be that the local is always informed by the history
of civilization, and that the two can never be separated
if either is to mean.). Finally, Eliot continues here to
treat language as something apart from the ideas/objects
which it references, and yet indispensable to the
existence of its references. The metaphysical poets were
"at best engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal
equivalent for states of mind and feeling. mes For
without "the right name" the bundle of sensations which
make up a state of mind, a feeling could not even be a
bundle. We may recall that in his dissertation Eliot
claims for feeling and ideas at a primal level an
existence prior to that of language. Even if such
priority is logical and not temporal, the effect, if not
to determine levels of abstraction, is to separate
language as "thing" from its capacity to express
relational experience. mikicels: goalie if <coipie selaye)
metaphysical poets wrote a health language in that they
successfully "attached" words to feeling, the result of
which was an expression of their culture. The Romantics,
on the other hand, victimized by a dissociation of

sensibility, failed to surrender themselves to the
demands of a tradition, a culture, a greater "unity."
In his 1929 essay on Dante, Eliot makes the point
again when comparing that poet to Goethe:
With Goethe, for instance, | often feel too acutely "this is what Goethe the man
believed,” instead of merely entering into a world which Goethe has created .
... This is the advantage of a coherent traditional system of dogma and morals
like the Catholic: it stands apart for understanding and assent even without
belief, from the single individual who propounds it. Goethe always arouses in
me a strong sentiment of disbelief in what he believes: Dante does not.°?
Unlike Goethe, who like all Romantic poets valorizes the
individual, Dante in The Divine Comedy expresses a
tradition, in his case that of thirteenth-century
European Catholicism. Because he is not in the business
of creating new systems, Dante concerns himself only with
poetry, and in doing so gives expression to that greater,
albeit provisional "unity" which already transcends the
self.” Without dwelling here on Eliot's religious
convictions, we may observe that while he admits religion
and culture are not always co-extensive except in the
most primitive societies and on an unconscious level in
the more advanced, he believes they necessarily inform
one another through contrast and at time through direct
opposition, as in the separation of church and state.
The power of a common faith is, for Eliot, to pull into
relation the disparate elements of a culture, to an fact
transform them into a culture. Without such a background

the poet searches in vain for something besides himself
to which he may surrender. We may recall Eliot's comment
on William Blake that "What his genius required, and what
it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and
traditional ideas which would have prevented him from
indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated
his attention upon the problems of the poet."
Like the metaphysical poets, the Greeks managed to
express a seeming unity of thought and feeling in their
verse, a combination of both conventional reference to
the material world and evocations of more abstract
"realities." Eliot stresses in "Seneca in Elizabethan
Translation" that
Behind the dialogue of Greek drama we are always conscious of a concrete

visual activity, and behind that of a specific emotional actuality. Behind the
drams of action, the timbre of voice and voice, the uplifted hand or tense
muscle, and particular emotion. The spoken play, the words which we read, are
the symbols, a shorthand and often, as in the best of Shakespeare, a very
abbreviated shorthand indeed, for the acted and felt play, which is always the
real thing. The phrase, beautiful as it may be, stands for a greater beauty still.
... | mean that the beauty in Greek tragedy is the shadow of a greater beauty--
the beauty--the beauty of thought and emotion.’
If Eliot here sounds like those late nineteenth century
symbolists we have already named in that he seems to
claim for language a reference to a beauty beyond the
boundaries of words, we must remember that such a
reference holds only so long as the point of view which
Pees it holds. Unlike the symbolists, Eliot is not
claiming here any reference on the symbol's part to the

absolute. Rather, as Eliot says, the symbol may function
as a "shorthand" for the seeming unity of "thought and
emotion," i.e., for the "complete consort" of the
idea/object complex. In other words, the Greeks did not
suffer from a "dissociation or sensibility." In the
hands of the best Greek dramatists, the ideal always
found its reality in ‘objecthood; *whichsdsi still tobe
part of the relational field and not cut off as absolute
and self-contained.
If we recall Eliot's comments in his dissertation on
levels of abstraction, particularly his discussion of the
term "wolf-eating-lamb," his meaning in the above passage
becomes clear. The word "wolf," we recall, may
eventually come to stand for the more extensive and
explicit series of relations expressed by the three word
term, not because that series of relations is "contained"
in the single word, but because "wolf" over time "stands
for," is a "shorthand! for, the more explicit-=seraes of
relations that, as the language develops levels of
abstraction, becomes implicit. The "acted and felt play,
which is always the real thing," is so precisely because
of its inclusiveness, its relational "reach." As in the
case of the "whole" tradition at any one point in time,

the Greek tragedy approximates a seeming unity, a small
scale and provisional "system... [which] must somehow

hand together."% Again, from the appearance of such
aesthetic "wholes" one may infer the existence of still
larger unities, i.e., of systems which are even more
inclusive (maintaining a more extensive series of
relations), and so eventually infer the existence of the
whole of experience as the original unity. Of course,
and as we have already demonstrated, Eliot admits that
upon inspection, all "unities" dissolve into the
constituents out of which they are seemingly constructed.
Eliot tells us that Seneca, like Swinburne, does not
always achieve a sense of unity. Too often, "In the
plays of Seneca, the drama is all in the word, and the
word has no further reality behind it. ni Nevertheless,
Eliot reminds "that 'verbal' beauty is still a kind of
beauty."” Eliot's stress on the pattern of language as
an opening to the inference of the absolute allows him to
praise, albeit with reservations, even the verse of
Seneca and Swinburne, or that language in which the
ebject =~ (and «<I .am here referring, to, Bradley's felt-
idea/object) is nearly lost. However, here as in his
essay on Swinburne, Eliot expresses his preference for a
language that indicates a more extensive range of
relations:
lf the Elizabethans distorted and travestied Seneca in some ways, If they

learned from him tricks and devices which they applied with inexpert hands,
they also learned from him the essentials of declaimed verse. Their subsequent
progress is a process of splitting up the primitive rhetoric, developing out of it
subtler poetry and subtler tones of conversation, eventually mingling as no other

school of dramatists has done, the oratorical, the conversational, the elaborate
and the simple, the direct and indirect; so that they were able to write plays
which can still be read as poetry, with any poetry.
Again, Eliot emphasizes the importance of inclusiveness.
"The human soul," he says in "A Dialogue on Dramatic
Poetry," "in intense emotion strives to express itself in
verse."/"
It is no accident, then, that Eliot spent a good
part of his creative and critical careers practicing the
verse drama and extolling its virtues. Verse drama
ideally exhibits all of the characteristics of a healthy
language, a language which, as far as such things are
possible, reaches both into and out of time. it. A's, .a
poetry spoken, and therefore rooted in the life of the
individual. At the same time the rhythms of speech,
elevated to the status of poetry, achieve a kind of
universality in that they contribute to the distilled
voice of a culture. Against the background of a common
faith and culture, it may be possible for the individual
to transcend his private concerns. For "A man does not
join himself with the Universe so long as he has anything
else to join himself with; men who could take part in the
life of a thriving Greek city-state had something better
to join themselves to; and Christians have had something
better." Language, it seems, is capable of bridging

the gap between the isolated self, itself a pROduect of
language in so far as it is a product of relations,” and
that unity of selves we call consistencies of
deconstruction. Derrida may have long ago made a similar
eet @8of tavthe FOr, pase eboOth) Thivoter andl ©Denrida
demonstrate, only through such an act may the absolute be
taken as real.
If rigorous philosophical inquiry ultimately "throws
our explanation [of the existence of the absolute] into
the greatest embarrassment,"®°° Eliot after his conversion
is willing to retrace his steps, restating in his essays
on religion and culture the process which produces the
"inference." Eliot's quest for unities, whether they be
constituted as the interrelatedness of all experience or
the less imposing, but no less crucial, coherence of a
culture, remains the primary motive for a brilliant
career. From his early encounter with Bradley's
philosophy, to the later "sermons" on culture and
religion, the poet from America's midwest is remarkably
consistent in his view of language as indispensable to
that quest. Beginning with Knowledge

and Experience, Eliot
positions language at the heart of experience as the
articulation of the idea/object complex. Words both
permit the expression of relations and, apropos of the
Hegelian concept of the "working out" of a structure's
content, develop the relations inherent in experience.

Although Eliot doubts the possibility of "a complete
vocabulary of concepts," i.e., of complete knowledge, he
is drawn in his dissertation to the structure of language
which, like that of tradition, proposes itself as an
ever-evolving "unity" which at least intends a totality
bye vVictue or its drive towards inclusiveness.
Furthermore, as is evidenced in several of the later
literary essays, language in its function as speech may
suggest the common ground of culture while simultaneously
linking that larger unity to the experience of the
individual, of the "finite center." In this way language
preserves the perception that experience is meaningful
because it (experience) is so intended by the self, while
grounding Sthat (perceptiion!’ im the pnealaeiiees, wn
relational activities of a larger structure which "falls
away into the isolated finite experiences of which it is
put together. "8!
The absolute is inferred because it is intended,
just as a world culture is "possible" for the same
reason. In Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, Eliot again
climbs the ladder towards that most inclusive of
structures:
We have already found that the culture of a nation prospers with the prosperity
of the culture of its sever constituents, both geographical and social; but that
it also needs to be itself a part of a larger culture, which requires the ultimate
ideal, however unrealisable, of a "World culture”in a sense different from that
implicit in the schemes of world-federationists. And without a common faith
all efforts toward drawing nations closer together in culture can produce only
the illusion of unity.82
That the supplement, even that of a theoretical "world
culture," functions in the practical world as a standard
by which man may gauge his behavior both Eliot and
Derrida agree. The “possibility" of a world culture
depends on a common faith which, of course, is nothing else
but a unity of intention. So also may the absolute be
given substance as idea, and therefore as the object of
faith. Nevertheless, the absolute, like a world culture,
may be "unrealisable." Language both intends the
absolute and precludes it in that words "fall" on the
ideational side of experience and so are disenfranchised,
banished from the moment prior to relational experience
(i.e., from immediate experience), and bound up in the
activity of differance. Like Moses, words are forever
denied the promised land.
Before moving on to Eliot's poetry, we may pause
here to again defend the poet against those critics who
would dismiss him aS one more practitioner of the
philosophy of presence. It is true that Eliot begins
with immediate experience, the absolute, which he admits
may be "utter night," i.e., beyond human cognition. It
is also true that he eventually places his faith in
Christian dogma, particularly in the mystery of the

Incarnation, as a way of reconciling the seemingly
irreconcilable, and of grounding the hermeneutic circle
in something fixed and permanent. But those critics who
view Eliot's conversion as signaling a drastic shift in
his ontological thinking are mistaken. What the
conversion represents, in fact, is nothing more than a
shift in attitude. Eliot's new found faith enables him
to accept what we now understand as a Derridaean view of
experience--to accept indeterminacy, differance , the
unapproachable absolute without despair. Nowhere does he
deny that from the point of view of man in time, the only
point of view available to man, experience remains
ununified. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, for example,
Eliot reaffirms the contingent nature of experience as it
expresses itself in the formulations of societies:
It is a part of my thesis that the culture of the individual is dependent upon the
culture of the group or class, and that the culture of the group or class is
dependent upon the culture of the whole society to which that group begongs.
Therefore, it is the culture of the society that is fundamental.®?
"Fundamental" does not here mean "unity," for Eliot's
idea of society is not that of a homogeneous whole but
rather of a field in which opposing forces conflict. In
fact, Eliot's description of culture sounds quite a lot
like Derrida's own analysis of differance:
We must not think of our culture as completely unified .... And the
actual religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or purely
anything else. There are always bits and traces of more primitive faiths, more
or less absorbed; there is always a tendency towards parasitic beliefs; there are
always perversions.
A culture cannot be absolutely unified without
ceasing to be a culture. Even the degrees of difference
are bound by contexts, for "The proper degree of unity
cannot be determined for all peoples at all times."® on
the other hand, a complete lack of relations between
parts threatens meaning, value, at the core of its
existence: "A country within which the divisions have
gone too far is a danger to itself. "85 Coherence for the
converted Eliot still depends on elements in relation.
Absolutes, even that supreme unity of a world culture,
are ideal but not real, and "We are the more likely to be
able to stay loyal to the ideal of the unimaginable world
cullLurommrt “wes recognvze: sal! them dirticulltves™ =the
practical impossibilities, of its réalization."*’ Like
the wholeness of immediate experience, "The identity of
religion and culture remains on the unconscious level ,"®
i.e., beyond the bounds of knowledge and language.
If "religion and culture are aspects of one [ideal]
unity; [nevertheless] they are two different and
contrasted things"? in the world of conscious perception
and knowledge. Their unity remains a chimera. With
regard to the relationship of religion to art,
To judge a work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to judge a religion

by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing:
though it is an end at which no individual can arrive, 2°
This last echoes Eliot's claim in Knowledge

and Experience
that no one point of view can contain the whole. It is
also not very far from Derrida's analysis of the
metaphysical bias. The center, Derrida says, cannot be
both free of the contingent nature of the structure which
it grounds, and a part of that structure. In Notes Towards
the Definition
of Culture, Eliot voices much the same opinion
when he writes that "Understanding involves an area more
extensive than that of which one can be conscious; one
cannot be outside and inside at the same time."’' Much
as Saussure differentiated between /angue and parole, the
former being that which produces the individual and is
not produced by him, Eliot views culture's totality,
i.e., the "complete consort" of delimited contexts and
differences, as beyond the grasp of knowledge, for
"Culture can never be wholly conscious--there is always
more to it than we are conscious of; and it cannot be
planned because it is also the unconscious background of
all our? planninge”*
Eliot never claims for experience, for any of its
parts, a final cause observable as either logical and/or
empirical data. Tradition, culture, language are all
contingencies, what Derrida calls supplements, from the
point of view of the human. The absolute remains the
"intention" of language, the impossible fulfillment of

man within ideational experience. This impossibility
points to an object (since there is an object for every
idea) and so to the extensive dynamic of relations which
grounds every contingency in another, leaving the
assumption of an ever-present totality to faith, which
Eliot certainly comprehends as ideational and therefore
part of relational experience, never outside of it.
Eliot, like Derrida, finds man trapped in the hermeneutic
circle, and understands that the very concept of origin
involves contradiction. As Derrida frames the dilemma,
. it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique,
constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the
structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning
structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and
outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center
does not belong to the totality {is not part of the totality), the totality has its
center elsewhere. The centeris not the center.?°
According to most classical theories of rhetoric,
thought both guided and was expressed by language. It
therefore functions as the center of language, linking
language to its own intimate connection with the
thinker/speaker. At the same time, however, thought was
appreciated as something quite different from language,
as is evidenced by the writings of Plato and Gorgias, to
name only two. i Thought was understood as
simultaneously within language and independent of it.
Derrida's point is that the center of a structure cannot
be both of that structure and exclusive of it, unless of

course, we do not mind theories which grossly violate the
strictures of logic. Admittedly this contradictory view
of thought and word seems precisely that of Knowledge

and
Experience where Eliot claims for ideas/objects an
existence (at a primal level) prior to language and for
words a symbolic function. But there remains a crucial
difference, one, I believe, which separates Eliot from
Derrida's classical theoreticians. Classical theory, for
the most part, proposed for thought and word a world of
fixed references. Eliot, on the other hand, acknowledges
no such thing. Ideas, like the objects they intend, are
formed as an interplay of relations. What may precede
language is not thought as presence, i.e., as rooted in
fixities, but rather the subject/object divisions of the
original unity functioning as the dynamic of difference,
as the lack of self-identities. And, of course, the
ideas/objects are not the ideas/objects which they are
"until you have found the right name for [them],"”

though they may exist as sensations. in other words,
language follows the fundamental absence that Eliot means
by the term "immediate experience": fundamental because
by definition immediate experience is a self-contained
presence; absent because such a thing is not available to
cognition. Even if language is finally something other
than the idea/object, it nevertheless is crucial to the

meaning and therefore the existence of the idea/object
for man.
As such, language does much more than merely point
to meaning already in place. It develops relations, and
produces meaning, and from the perspective of Knowledge

and
Experience, this view is hardly antagonistic to Derrida's
or Saussure's claim that language "invents" our world.
If immediate experience as center may be said to be both
outside, or prior to point of view, while also that which
grounds experience from within, it nonetheless never
truly behaves as a positive term for Eliot; the thing
which centers human experience is always the absence of
the presence, i.e., the unavailability of the origin,
center, source, absolute to cognition.
Finally, some further words on Eliot's valuation of
"speech." It may be argued, we have seen, that since
speech is conventionally understood as the conveying of
intention, Eliot's insistence that poetry be rooted in
speech reveals an aesthetic which is erected around the
concept of self-presence. Ths concept would then
undermine Eliot's own declaration that meaning is context
bound and relational, exposing Eliot as just that sort of
Classical thinker who, Derrida asserts, lives in
contradiction. But this analysis is facile. Eliot is in
full agreement with Derrida that speech represents a

specialized case of writing, that writing does not
represent a specialized case of speech. Words, Eliot
tells us more than once in Knowledge

and Experience, develop
ideas/objects which find their “identity” only in
difference, in relation, precisely Derrida's definition
of writing. Even speech is meaningful only because it,
like poetry, is part of the relational field. The
concept of self-presence, though it may speak like a
ghost to Eliot, is never truly operative in his writngs.
Nowhere does Eliot claim that the speech act is grounded
in authorial intention or, amounting to the same thing,
in a territory of thought which is different from the
speech act in that it does not need grounding. All
thought is ideational, and so not one with the center.
The self also is a "construct" produced by relational
experience. The relationship of self and word, since
both are subject to the flux of experience, is never
immanent and absolute.
We must now turn to Eliot's poetry to discover not
merely analysis of deconstructive themes, but the
embodiment of them.
Chapter 4: The Word in the Desert
Any attempt at a "deconstructive" analysis of
Eliot's poetry must take into account Derrida's pre-
eminent concerns regarding language and experience, as
these concerns find expression, openly or latently, ina
poetry composed decades previous to the codification of
deconstruction theory. As we have established in the
first three chapters, the issues at sake encompass the
following: the nature and function of language; the
rejection of speech as the dominant model for human
discourse and its "re-placement" as writing; and finally,
the quest for absolutes and the outcome of that quest.
Eliot's use of language in his poetry owes much to
the late nineteenth century symbolists. Of these Eliot
finds the work of Jules Laforgue most useful.
The radical subjectivism which initially resulted
from the symbolist experiments of the nineteenth century
eventually led away from the self as a lone explorer of
transcendence and towards the hermetic nature of language
itself. The poems of Mallarmé, as Paul de Man points out
in Blindness
and Insight, are informed by the poet's claim of
"absolute" impersonality."! In Mallarmé's
145
words,
Impersonifie, le volume, antant qu'on s’en separe comme auteur, me relame

approche de lecteur. Tel, sache, entre les accessoires humains, it a lieu tout
seul: fait, entant.*
The idea of a text whose meaning exists by itself, and in
large measure for itself, informs not only the symbolist
aesthetic, but also Flaubert's emphasis on the value of
artistry in his often cited wish to compose a "book about
nothing." Certainly Eliot's own formalist tendencies are
evidenced as early as his youthful admiration of
Laforgue's ironies. Laforgue's poems are notable
precisely because of their ironic’ stance, their
misdirection of the conventional response. Lrony 7isy,
after all, a form of displacement by which meaning as
such resides in the deferral of normal expectations.
Form, stance, point of view take precedence over content,
subject matter. Like Laforgue, Eliot in his early essays
and poems is more concerned with the manipulation of
language than with honoring any "natural" connection
between word and thing, word and self. It is true that,
in one respect, Laforguian self-parody serves to protect
the poem from sentimentalism. But Vinworder tos attect
this rescue, Laforgue and later Eliot implicitly
interpret the self as an affectation, a rhetorical ploy.
In the dissertation, as we have already seen, Eliot
claims that the self is indeed a NCOnStruci. wonenon

The Word in the Desert 147
those bundles of sensations, ideas/objects focused for
the finite center."
invany event, the Lferguian self falls far short of
the transcendental position occupied by its Romantic
counterpart, and as an idea/object comlex is bound by the
relational field of experience. A product) of
differences, the self, like any other series of
ideas/objects, exists in so far as it is named. As
product, the self is one result of language's distancing
itself from what is self-identical and therefore real
(see chapter two of this study for a discussion of
degrees of reality in Knowledge

and Experience). The self,
born of relations, is thus less real than the whole of
experience, and so as much an affectation generated by
language as it is a sliver of reality.
Eliot's interest in language's capacity to affect, as
well as effect, meaning characterizes his entire poetic
output. As Hugh Kenner suggests in Invisible Poet, an early
line such as "Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground
. ° . 1 " from the files of the Harvard Advocate, reveals
Eliot's concern with the artistry involved in simple
perception, even in that of gruesome "reality." The
Wn@rmeale! emotional response to the "Blood" is
interdicted. In a psychological context the speaker's
psychic stability would be questioned. But in the

context provided by the line, the emphasis is on "Blood"
as an aesthetic object rather than as an effect produced
by some violent action. Furthermore, the ironic punning
on the words "looks effective" draws attention to the
rhetoric of the line ("Blood" as affect, rather than
effect) as its true focus. Unlike the typical Romantic
line in which images clearly intend to unite an exterior
world of objects and events with the interior or
psychological man, Eliot's line suppresses both the usual
associations which adhere to "Blood" and the expected
psychological reactions. It is not so much the actual
event of death which is referenced by the line as it is
the possibility of rhetorical negation, of death and life
as aesthetic constructs circumscribed by language.
Hldoetts, use forse uirony,) 1.64, sem that whch sderers
conventional intention and expectation, reflects in part
the view of language put forth in his dissertation.
Words, we will recall, though theoretically grounded in
the whole of experience, from the point of view of the
human subject acquire meaning only via their relations
with other entities, all of which depend on language for
their existences for man. Words, rather than referencing
the fixed and unified, instead point to other words,

producing yet more relations, more differences. The
meanings of words are therefore the result of the

essential differance within language, its distance from
itself. In order to be, words must mean, and so call
forth what they are not so that they may be what they
are. Irony functions in much the same manner, displacing
language's "intended meaning" in order to affect new
associations which interfere with language's "self-
sdentity,” i.e., its closure ‘on fixed references. It!) is
just this sense of closure, what Charles Sanders Peirce
terms "index" (cf. chapter two of this study), that Eliot
rejects both in his dissertation and in his use of irony.
In Eliot's scheme of things, all seeming fixities,
whether they be conventional references or the authorial
power of selves, are problematical, self-contradictory
within time, within language.
Eliot's interest in the aesthetic character of
language informs his entire poetic career as poet,
inscribing within his poetry the displacement of
language's conventionally representational function,
while simultaneously evoking the absence of fixities such
as the permanence of psychological and/or empirical data.
In this way Eliot "exposes" language as an inventor of
world for man, and not merely as a carrier of meaning
already authored and set in place. Like Laforgue's
irony, Eliot's de-emphasis of the self as trascendent
author suggests a shift away from the notion of self-

presence, i.e., the unity of intention and language, and
toward a view of the text as self-generative, a field of
differences constantly at play. In other words, Eliot
takes as his model that which Derrida means by "writing,"
and eschews the paradigm of speech as a singular instance
of self-presence, an expression of self-identity. If the
self, like all ideas/objects, is itself subject to shifts
within Gthessimelational siteta; these ‘can be mowselr
identity. As in the case of immediate experience, the
self, to be a self, must be inrelation and so dependent on
what is not itself for its existence for man. its
therefore "contains" within its identity the deferral of
that identity. What the self is is what the self is not.
The illusion of self-identity is always and everywhere a
product of difference. It is no wonder that Eliot shares
Laforgue's interest in irony.
How the process of differance insinuates itself into
the poetry “of TS. Elret now becomes ollie Eocus. We
should note at the outset that Eliot's poetic career,
like much of his criticism, evidences a shift in attitude
vis a vis the issue of unity, if not an inversion of
theoretical positions. Whereas Eliot seems satisfied

with relativist analogues in his dissertation, the poetry
suggests a conflict between Eliot the philosopher and
Eliot the man of emotions. As Eliot develops as a poet,

the need for some absolute ground for experience
increasingly moves to the forefront of his poetic subject
matter. We find in the poems a man in conflict, on the
one hand yearning for the security absolutes provide, on
the other hand unable to rationally eliminate from the
scheme of experience the originating difference which
insinuates itself into every attempt at self-identity,
self-presence. Because of this study's limited scope, I
have chosen five major poems through which I will trace
Eliot's quest for a unity free of difference: "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Waste Land,
"Ash Wednesday," and Four Quartets.
The early poetic works evidence the beginnings of
just this sense of language as the cradle of absence,
i.e., as the place where all unities are mythologized.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," composed between
1910 and 1911, two years before Eliot began his
dissertation, represents one of the poet's first attempts
at giving voice to the philosophical conflicts which
inform his graduate training. iio UiereubeieereicY jadhikere
implicitly confronts the hegemony of the authorial self,
end. in. doing so implicitly (uncovers \the essential
contradiction at the heart of Prufrock's search for
psychic and sexual unity. Grover Smith's summary remarks
in T.S. Eliiot’s Poetry and Plays will suffice for an

overall view of the poem:
Eliot's Prufrock is a tragic figure. Negligible to others, he suffers in a

hell of a defeated idealism, tortured by unappeasable desires. He dare not risk
the disappointment of seeking actual love, which, if he found it and had energy
enough for it, still could not satisfy him The plight of this hesitant, inhibited
man, an aging dreamer trapped in decayed, shabby-genteel surroundings, aware
of beauty and faced with sordidness, mirrors the plight of the sensitive in the
presence of the dull. Prufrock, however, has a tragic flaw, which he discloses
in the poem: through timidity he is incapable of action . . . one might call
Prufrock's idealism the "curse” which co-operates with his flaw to make him
wretched. Alone, neither curse nor flaw would be dangerous; together, they
destroy him.®
Prufrock's idealism is "sentimental instead of ethical.
His values are inherited from the romantic-love
tradition, a cult of the unreal and consequently of the
inapprehensible." ° In other words, what we find in

"Prufrock," albeit in poetic rather than philosophical
terms, is a situation which prefigures Eliot's evaluation
in his dissertation of the nature of absolute knowledge.
Such knowledge, we will recall, even if possible as "a
complete vocabulary of concepts," would nevertheless be
ideal and therefore not one with the whole reality which,
by definition, precedes all ideal constructions. The
Romantic vision of love as a self-supporting unity beyond
the fragmentations of Prufrock's and our world is
"unreal" and "inapprehensible" precisely because Prufrock
lives in a world constructed out of differences. The
couplet, "In the room the women dome and go/Talking of
Michelangelo,"’ suggests just this sense of irony at the
core of Prufrock's society. In their attempt to link

themselves intellectually with a great artist, the women
instead demonstrate their inferiority, their distance
from that which forms the central subject matter of their
talk. The irony is affected via Eliot's use of a simple
couplet and a rhythm not unlike that of the nursery
rhyme.
The opening lines of the poem establish the
disjointed nature of Prufrock's world, to the point of
interrogating Prufrock's self-identity:
Let us go then, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .
Olive doOsnoOt askee What as tie?
Let us go and make our visit. (CPP 3)
As Grover Smith sensibly asserts,
By a distinction between ‘I’ and * you,’ he [Prufrock] differentiates between his

thinking, sensitive character and his outward self. . .. Prufrock ... is
addressing, as if looking into a mirror, his whole public personality.®
i ata cmpnesdesireuoL Prutrockwissinnerm sell, athe. lion
hen) Mamet Vvom, that Prufrock act to change his
circumstances, it is nevertheless that private self whose
passivity eventually secures his fate. A unified self is
characterized in part by a single and coherent will. In
the case of Prufrock, that will is dissipated, divided
between the yearning yet passive private self, and

complicated by a public mask/mirage for the benefit of
social propriety. As a poetic construction, Prufrock has
his own expression for the reader as a play of
aifferences, as a divided ego which achieves, perhaps, a
semblance of unity, i.e., an aesthetic whole, only
through the operations of the aesthetic object, the
complete poem. Moving through the sordidness of the
city's underbelly, "the half-desserted streets,/The
muttering retreats" Prufrock observes another conflict,
that which obtains between his idealized version of love
and the sexual realities which sometimes characterize our
world, between the ideal and the real. Put another way,
and, -ing stems i0Of s.blrvoGls t wea

.dissentaton Epockw aas
tormented by conflicting points of view.
Prufrock's impotence in the face of required action
has been well documented by most of Eliot's critics,
Grover Smith and Hugh Kenner among the most notable.
Kenner in particular suggests, however implicitly in
Invisible Poet, that Eliot deliberately stages Prufrock's
impotence through the use of poetic effects which serve
to provide the appearance of sense rather than the real
thing. As a result, the language of the poet is isolated
as aesthetic object from the world of seemingly rational
events it ostensibly references. Kenner, in making this
point, singles out the following passage from the poem:

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
there will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of toast and tea. (CPP 4)
"What 'murder and create' may mean," Kenner comments, "we
cannot tell, though it is plain what the phrase can do;
the words have lost their connection with the active
world, lost in fact everything but their potential for
neurasthenic shock."? What Kenner means, of course, is
that the conventional references which may adhere to the
words "murder" and "create" are displaced by Eliot's
line, leaving in their stead the sounds/rhythms that
appeal to a sense of floating dread, much as Poe's
phantom heart beats beneath the floorboards of cogency.
Kenner continues:
"Time for you and time for me” is as hypnotic and as meaningless as a phrase
onthe “cellos. The yellow smoke rubbing its back upon windowpanes Is a half-
realizable picture; the detail about the hands and the plate has the air of being
a picture but in fact isn't, the thing thatis dropped on the plate being "a
question,” and the hands--blurred by the phrase "works and days” which is a
fusion of Hesiod and Ecclesiastes (Ill: |-8)--being not quite those of God and not
quite those of a butler. |
Kenner concludes that "these gravely irrational words
evoke a nervous system snubbed by the Absolute without

committing themselves as to whether that Absolute is the
moral rigour of an implacable Creator or the systemized
social discomfort of a Boston tea party. "11 In terms of
Derrida's discourse, Eliot's language, while ostensibly
finding a fixed reference in the exterior world, a cogent
Wiel Ghee in fact produces another’ series of
differences, of associations which interfere with
conventional reference. Tf, as Eliot claains 32n° "The
Music of Poetry," a complex poetry is required to express
a complex world, nevertheless in order to accurately
portray the complexity of world, language simultaneously
produces more complexity, more differances, and in doing
so subverts its own move towards accuracy since every
attempt to "fix" the world merely produces more world.
As we have already demonstrated at the outset of this
chapter, both Eliot and Derrida agree that the
referential function of signs does not unveil a world
already set in place so much as it produces more signs.
If Hugh Kenner in 1959 understood Eliot's early
attempts to suppress the denotative power of words in
order to release language's ability to "digest and
express new objects," ™i.e., to emphasize the
associative power of words, contemporary structuralists
and post-structuralists should have no trouble

appropriating "Prufrock" for their own purposes. Since,
as Lewis Freed reads Eliot, a work of art may mean more
or less depending on the context in which it is set, we
are certainly within our rights when we view "Prufrock"
as a mini-discourse on the quest for authorial power, for
the kind of authorial control which may transcend the
play of differences that guides meaning.
As Kenner demonstrates, the language of "Prufrock"
is Often obscure in that its effect. is to create an
atmosphere rather than a conventionally cohesive
narration. Words such as "tedious" and "insidious" in
the first stanza quite obviously serve as sound, rhyme,
rhythm--exactly how streets may be compared to "a tedious
argument" and in what way may such a argument be termed
"insidious" are two questions whose ansers are only
hinted at in the poem. The function of the first stanza
is not that of simple and clear communication. In fact,
there poem as a whole is in large measure "about" the
difficulty of achieving such communication, and the first
stanza offers a sense of Prufrock's impotence in the face
of his own desire to author his world according to his
intention. Put another way, Prufrock wishes fospeak, to
enjoy the security of self-presence in its assurance of
an intimate link between intention and word, as that
self-presence is traditionally assigned to the speech

act. He wishes to locate the source of world and meaning
in himself. But Prufrock begins his "quest" as a divided
consciousness, a "you and I," and so enters the arena of
the poem already a product of difference, a creation
rather than a creator.
The second stanza, a simple and telling couplet,
defines Prufrock's belated status: "In the room the
women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo" (CPP 4). As
we have noted above, the rhythms of the lines suggest a
nursery rhyme which in turn suggests Prufrock's view of
the society in which he moves. The women are simple
minded, perhaps, their understanding of the artist
restricted to the trivial. Nevertheless these women are
PEUL ROCK! s acquaintances, and “thea interest in
Michelangelo defines by implicit comparison his own
inferior status. Unlike the legendary sculptor of David,
Prufrock has thus far failed to control his materials.
We imagine him among the cocktail crowd, his speech
equally lacking in authority.
The "yellow fog" has often been understood as an
image’ .for “Prufrock's s passivity, ande.certainiy: at
partially serves that function. »)But the linking of the
fog to the image of a cat prowling about the house
suggests more. Cats (obviously a life-long passion of
Eliot's) are also conventionally perceived as

duplicitous, inscrutable creatures whose stubborn
independence resists the usual efforts to control their
behavior. If it may be said that duplicity is
"insidious," then Prufrock's own attempt at a unity of
self seems full of self-deception, not merely because he
lacks “the right stuff" for the job, but also because his
desizve Sfor unity. is only half felt. His argument, no
doubt played out many times before, is "tedious,"
perhaps, precisely because Prufrock suspects his own
intentions. As a product of the universe he dare not
disturb, he risks self-annihilation, "murder," at the
very moment he would "create" himself anew. If Prufrock
is what his divisions have made him, then unity, even
that of the sexual coupling of man and woman, threatens
his existence, however unsatisfactory that existence may
be. It may be true that, as Ralachandra Rajan reads the
poem in his The Overwhelming Question, "Prufrock's fate is to
fall short of definition," but only if we fail to

consider the full implication of Prufrock's desire to
speak. Rajan's point is that the "Love Song" is never
actually sung, since Prufrock never confronts the "one,
Settling a pillow by her chead!= (CPP 6): . "To, sing is to
achieve a definition,"” Rajan writes, and so Prufrock
remains undefined. But if we assume the traditional
Romantic linking of song and speech, and Grover Smith's

comments quoted above suggest that we must, we begin to
understand that much more is at stake besides Rajan's
over-simplification. Prufrock does indeed fail to
achieve definition if by "definition" we mean the unity
of self. But Prufrock is already defined as a play of
differences. Furthermore, as we shall shortly see, his
desire to speak and be defined threatens everywhere to
produce not unity, but rather the exposure of identity's
dependence on difference.
The anxiety which Prufrock attaches to the quest for
sexual union, amply displayed throughout the poem via a
series of punning images, suggests not only the fear of
embarrassment, but perhaps also the fear of a "little
death." Gregory Jay in his T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary
History comments that "Eliot will often associate six with
the dissolution of identity, with the loss of stable,
understood differences. nwi16 More than twenty years after
the composition of "Prufrock," Eliot himself writes in
After Strange Gods, and with reference to Thomas Hardy's
preoccupation with emotional/sexual matters that
This extreme emotionalism seems to me a symptom of decadence; it is a

cardinal point of faith in a romantic age, to believe that there is something
admirable in violent emotion for its own sake, whatever the emotion or
whatever its object. But it is by no means self-evident that human beings are
most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in
themselves differentiate men from each other but rather tend to reduce them
to the same state.!”
I do not mean to suggest that the poem "Prufrock" was

written with an eye towards a discourse twenty years down
the road, or that After Strange Gods is meant as a direct
commentary on the earlier poem, we may note, however,
that Eliot's respect for the value, perhaps of necessity
of differences to the preservation of the self, couched
in explicit terms in the later text, already finds poetic
expression in the conflict which informs Prufrock's
quest. Prufrock's desire indeed seems reductionary,
particularly with regard to its gravitation toward
faceless, impulsive "creatures," the "lonely men in
shirt-sleaves, leaning out of windows .. ." (CPP 5), as
well as the "ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of
silent seas" (CPP 5). Both passages suggest the conflict
that tortures the speaker. The smoke "that rises from
the epipes/of Lonely--men «~ a )»«", (CPPo-5)s images. the
"burning desire" of the phallus while simultaneously
suggesting the insubstantiality of "smoke," a combination
not unrelated to Coleridge's own "incense-bearing tree"
from "Kubla Khan."'®
The quest for unity, the desire for completion,
might require the annihilation of the self, leaving only
the most primitive, grasping structure "Scuttling across
tne’ £P6ore SF “sitent seas” (CPPS) % Part of Prufrock
wishes to order to his world according to his desire, and

a Sg Clifey aba) (2) so erase any and ear
differences/misunderstandings which may obtain between
the aspects of his personality as well as between what he
and the "one" he considers opening himself up to might
understand by his action. Jay, after Harold Bloom,
refers to this desire for authorial power as the desire
to establish the genius loci:
Eliot stages the disappearance of the romantic genius loci as a variation on the
theme of the death of the gods. In place of Wordsworth and Shelley come the
tutelary spirits of Laforgue, Baudelaire, and Henry James as geniuses of the
haunted city. Prufrock's lack of spirit represents the dethroning of Romantic
genus. ... [The] "overwhelming question,” deprecatingly hemmedin by
jingling rhymes, is still Shelley's question. Will he have the power to make
himself the genius of the place to fill the vacancy with his own imaginings? lf
he did, would they turn out like Orsino’s, "high fantastical”?'?
Although it is no doubt irresponsible to claim for
Prufrock the desire for "a complete vocabulary of
concepts, he does wish to exact from the world via his
own "“efforts* an epiphany ‘of Wsorts, 9a “pillending Wor
understandings and the erasing of differences. The
problem, of course, is that he simultaneously suspects
that this "ideal" is unreachable for him. He is likely
to be rebuffed by the object of his affection, and
thereby thrust back into a divisive world, even his
fantasies undone. Since he has thus far "lived
only in his imaginings, might not the attempt to make

those imaginings real yield disappointment so severe that
it may be regarded figuratively as "utter HIG ee 1. ous

as the complete undermining of the fragile self (-esteem)
via the obliteration in the real world of the beauty of
the dream as dream?
Prufrock's hesitation is amply displayed in the
sixth stanza:
And indeed there will be time

To wonder. "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. (CPP 4-5)
Here, and elsewhere in the poem, Prufrock's attention is
occupied with details, fragments of bodies--his world is
one of parts rather than wholes. ian My Paiwcs as My:
signs, my surface details," he seems to say. Several of
these details indicate the extent of Prufrock's impotence
in the face of his own demand for action. The "bald spot
in the middle of my hair" suggests not only the thinning
crown of an aging man, but also one of the outward signs
which signal he who has chosen the monastic life, who has
opted for a life of contemplation and celibacy rather
than action and sexual union. There is time, Prufrock,
Prufrock registers, "Time to turn back and descend the

stair," to reclaim the comfort which adheres to inaction
and’ ‘a eLite: free ‘of risk taking- The reference to
decaying limbs ("But how his arms and legs are thin!")
likewise contributes to our image of a man not in the
least physically imposing. What we have then is the
following conflict. On the one hand, Prufrock wishes to
approach an unnamed woman. On the other hand, he is
already defined, not only for that woman and the company
they both keep but also for himself, by the existing
structure/society of signifiers (his ample pin, the
taking of toast and tea, etc.) which all in relation form
a world of interrelated parts, a "writing," which in turn
provides a place for him. When Prufrock asks; ) "Does
dare/Disturb the universe?" he of course exposes his own
perhaps exaggerated sexual anxiety. But, from another
point of view, we may understand the truly serious
outcome of such an action which the poem as specimen for
POSS true tuica ince analysis inscribes within
interpretative possibility. For the universe must be
understood as just this collection of signifiers in
relation, as a Derridean colloquy, if the power of speech
is such that it may undermine all that is, including
Prufrock's own self-stability such as it is (a delicately
maintained balance, to be sure). Prufrock's world indeed
hangs in the balance.

And indeed Prufrock knows his place, and so
understandably doubts his ability to re-shape, re-
structure. He is, he admits, one sign among many, and
authored by their relations to each other:
For I have known them all already, known them all--

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume? (CPP 5)
As merely one among many, Prufrock is one fragment of the
knowledge that formulates his world. His repetition of
"I have known," "I know," suggests not only the comfort
of the familiar as opposed to the veiled threat of the
unknown, but also finds its philosophical echo in the
dissertation's analysis of the structure of knowledge,
i.e., in the necessary divisions of immediate experience,
of what is only theoretically whole.
The dichotomy that Prufrock faces slowly takes its
shape. On the one hand, the unities of self and sexual
union are linked in Prufrock's mind with the thoughtless
"ragged claws" and the impulsive desires "Of lonely men
in shirt sleeves, leaning out-of.windows ...". On the
other hand, knowledge of self, of world, even of one's
desires "to escape personality" requires that these
things be "identified," and so demands a tribute to
difference. "To be or not to be," Hamlet's dilemma,

presents a simple either/or issue only if we understand
"pe" as existence. But "to be" in human terms, as Eliot
makes clear in the dissertation which is roughly
contemporary with "Prufrock," always entails meaning,
whatness, aS well as mere existence. To be a "what," an
identity, requires that Prufrock accept difference and
forego his quest for epiphany. And if, as Eliot makes
clear in his dissertation, being’

as mere existence does
not really exist until it is also being as meaning,
Prufrock's seeming desire for the self-present unity of
desire and action, for the simplicity of "ragged claws,"
references little more than an essential absence, both in
the world and within himself. As Martin Scofield
observes in his recent book length study, T.S. Eliot: The
Poems, Eliot's use of verb tenses throughout the poem
suggests just this sense of a man forever disenfranchized
from what is present sans mediation:
“For
| have known them all already .. .'.: Prufrock’s
thoughts move from the
future tense to the past, back to the future (~Shall | say . . .?') and to the
conditional (*Should |. . .?') and to the past conditional (* And would it have
been worth it. . .?'), The tenses are the proper medium for memory,
deliberation, indecision, speculation. Very rarely does Prufrock's mind come to
rest in the present, the time of statement, assertion, command or action; when
it does briefly, it is merely to question his own mental processes (“Is it perfume
from a dress/That makes me so digress?') or to describe a circumstantial detail
(* And the afternoon, evening, sleeps so peacefully!'). So when he says, finally
coming to some conclusion,
No! | am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

part of his meaning is that he was not mean 10 be,in the present tense, but
only to inhabit the twilight tenses of the past, the future and the conditional,2°
That Prufrock indeed seeks after some experience of
at least a quasi-absolute is made clear in his
invocations of Biblical figures. He ultimately denies
his capacity to speak in the way of John the Baptist the
coming of the Word:
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald]
brought in upon
a platter,
1 am no prophet--and here's no small matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the Eternal Footman hold my coat,
and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid. (CPP 6)
Prayer, certainly one of the more elevated forms of
speech, has failed Prufrock. Likewise, the speech of
revelation, rather than uniting two souls, may result
only in the reinforcing of their differences:
Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
Mhatisnorit. aval. (CPP 6)
The heartbreaking emphasis on the last two words of the
stanza focuses our attention on Prufrock's "pathetic"
desire to summon all differences into himself, to squeeze

the universe NTT eO a balls manageable, whole.
Prufrock's fantasy of telling "all" (of appropriating a
complete vocabulary of concepts may "after all" reveal
the essential differance which obtains, not just between the
lady and himself, but also between fantasy and the real.
To achieve unity, epiphany (in the Romantic sense of self
as author of world), Prufrock must speak a self-presence,
a unity of thought, word, and revelation, which
transcends difference. But to speak entails the exposure
of how different he really is, whether that difference be
understood as his divided self, his secretive psychic
life among trivial lives, or as the one among many who
knows "all," but to know and speak all must be one among
many.
Prufrock suspects that the epiphany is impossible.
The "one" has meaning only among the many. He retreats
to his fantasies. Grand speech, "full of high sentence"
(CPP 7), as in the case of Polonius, is more likely to
reveal the fool rather than the prophet. Revelation,
ultimate exposure, instead of providing the Word, is
likely to "[throw] the nerves in patterns [relations] on
a screen" (CPP .6) + "It, igcimpossible sto jway.just whatel
mean!" (CPP 6), Prufrock complains. He is, after athdly.
a product of his divisions, a writing, "a formulated

phrase,/ . .. sprawling ona pin [pen]" (CPP 5), at the
mercy of the phallic, authorial power of writing rather
than the author of it.
Prufrock's "knowledge" of the fantastical nature of
the Romantic ideal of unity leaves him even further
removed from whatever faith he may have had in the dream,
a voyeur listening to "the mermaids singing, each to
each "VW sGGhP jae Unlike Hamlet, he may not author the
Mpiay" "of this, bife!sidivistons: He remains at their
mercy, submerged in the essential contradiction which
generates his and our world, "Till human voices wake us,
and we drown" (CPP 7).
The poem "Gerontion" might very well be spoken by a
Prufrockian character at the end of his life. Certainly
the sensibilities of the personae are similar. If
Prufrock is not Prince Hamlet, Gerontion (we may call the
speaker of poem "Gerontion" since the name refers to an
old man)
. . was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, parched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces. (CPP 21)
Like Prufrock's, Gerontion's life has been "no great
matter" (CPP 6). And also like Prufrock's, Gerontion's
world is one of details in relation amounting not as an
answer to some “overwhelming question," but rather to the
seemingly ceaseless production of yet more hellspawned
details (e.g., the blistering, the goat, the gutter). As
Gerontion makes clear by poem's end, his life ends ina
fracturing rather than a closure upon the transcendental
signifier, the Word. Many of these details, as Grover
Smith points out, function in an allusive capacity,
referring not only to the present circumstances of the
speaker of the poem, but also to past events, such that
Eliot's prescription for a tradition in which present and
past comment on one another in fulfilled.?'
Bergson's observation in Creative Evolution that all
direct perception "is the continuous progress of the past
which gnaws into the future and which swells as it
advances"* is relevant here. If, as in the instances of
immediate experience and also Prufrock's desire to speak
"all," that which proposes to be self-present, self-
identical, is actually riven, then Eliot's use of
allusion is one more example in poetic terms of the

process of differance. In the case of "Gerontion," as well
as The Waste Land to come, present consciousness is in fact
constructed out of what is past, i.e., presently absent,
its (consciousness') whatness ever interfering with its
thatness.
Although Smith does not conduct his analysis of
Eliot's allusions strictly in terms of Eliot's
dissertation, and, of course, Derrida's terminology is
not yet available to him, his summary of Bergson's
influence on Eliot nevertheless makes our point: "There
is thus, in fact, to the Bergsonian no purely present
consciousness: most of what one imagines one sees as
externality is really memory. "23 In other words, the
clear distinction which appears to obtain between
subjects and objects is never a product of two self-
identical entitles, but rather that of interdependent
points of view set into motion by the relational field of
experience. Secneim sthic a ligntyaathe fi1nst. stanza
suggests much more than an old man confronting his
memories. He is these memories of his past, and these
memories are all negatives, a listing of what he is not.
As in the case of Prufrock, Gerontion's "identity" rests
on crucial absences, both that of the present which is
actually the missing past, and that of the past which

itself is a series of non-events. It is no wonder that
Gerontion refers to himself in terms of the vacuous, "A
dull head among windy spaces" (CPP 21).
The "real" wonder, of course, is the self-contained,
self-identidal nature of the logos, the center, the
absolute, the Word. Gerontion reveals his, and perhaps
Eliot's yearning for such a possibility in the second
stanza:
Signs are taken for wonders, "We would see a sign!"

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ
the tiger. (CPP 21)
The reference here to some symbol of absolute authority,
source, center is immediately undermined by the second
line's description. Within language, the theoretical
transcendental signifier lies dormant, concealed, unable
to Speak a self-presence that might root the language of
time in a primary structure. Grover Smith's suggestion
that the image of "Christ the tiger" may find its source
in William Blake, via James Joyce, is worth our notice.
After establishing that the imagery of "Gerontion" echoes
Ulysses. (an argument I will not rehearse here since a
litany of literary sources would do nothing to tighten my
focus), Smith observes that "Ulysses seems to lend color
to the conjecture that Eliot's phrase alludes partly to

Blake, for Stephen thinks of Blake while sitting in the

classroom." Recalling for a moment that Blake's
"tyger" is a symbol for imaginative power, we come again
to the conflict between Romantic ideal vs. time's
frustrations. Even a wrathful Christ is cast in Romantic
terms, ready to punish those who, like Gerontion, have
strayed into doubt, demanding "signs" of proof and
finding only "a wilderness of mirrors" (CPP 23), and
those who, like Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fraulein
von Kulp, "weave the wind" (CPP 22).
Set against Gerontion's desire for the rescue
promised by Him whose purpose is "To be eaten, to be
divided, to be drunk" (CPP 22) in such a way as to create
a unity out of division is the groundless maze of history
which his desire has in fact produced. in cimer
Gerontion has lost his faith in the absolute:
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

(CPR eZ.)
It is worth our while to note here Eliot's obscurity, for
surely the above lines, while rhetorically cogent,
nevertheless apply to no perceptible set of events. The
entire passage is general, abstract in the way that many
modern and postmodern practitioners of the art of poetry
would find deplorable. Precisely what issues, ambitions,
confusions are referred to here remains beyond the scope
of the poem to name. The language gathers rhetorical
power while never once settling on a concrete reference.
However, as in the case of "Prufrock," Eliot's use of
language does compel our assent that the word in time may
float free of empirical linkage, that there exists no
necessary one to one correspondence between word and
exteriority, but rather that the object/reference, any
bundle of sensations, may be focused by language as
language's own phantasmagoric creation. As Hugh Kenner
observes,
. . the uniquely specifying rhythms,the richly explicit verbs, the syntactic

muscularity of a sequence of declarative sentences, all these specificities of
gesture expend themselves in weaving the wind, their intimate narrative energy
handling only ambiguities, phantoms, footless metaphors. We are not in a
world where statements handle facts.2°
We may set aside the conjunction of history and
woman in the passage from the poem quoted above, and

thereby leave to other critics the issue of Eliot's
personal life as it may have been concealed in his
poetry. What most concerns us now is the play of
differences, the essential differance, the central
contradiction which the passage suggests lies at the
neart Of History. We should note at the outset that,
like Prufrock, Gerontion describes knowledge in terms
which suggest its diacritical nature. The knowledge
which may prohibit forgiveness may amount, on the one
hand, to sensual experience, that which informs sexual
behavior, certainly--but also to that myriad of
perceptions which, set in relation, make up the world of
experience existing in lieu of the absence of the
original immediacy (cf. Eliot's remarks on the breaking
up of immediate experience) .* We have already observed
Prufrock's concern with knowledge as that which evidences
his world of differences. Gerontion also uses
"knowledge" to suggest sensual experience that has been
infused with a whatness as well as a thatness, i.e., an
essential differance wnich prohibits unity. In Gerontion's
world, events produce their contraries, and in doing so
dislocate all self-identical possibilities. Heroism
produces vice; crime creates virtue. The arena of
experience never rests in self-identity, but rather
fosters an endless series of displacements, each

"element" depending on its contrary for its own cogency
(cf. Saussure's notion of binary opposition). Gerontion,
of course, comes very close to suggesting that the
"elements" of experience are always already corrupted,
that they find their existences only in so far as they
maintain their differences from themselves (Unnatural
vices/are fathered by our heroism."). In the words of
Grover Smith, "The futility of a world where men blunder
down the blind corridors of history, guided by vanity and
gulled by success, asserting no power of choice between
good and evil but forced into alternatives they cannot
predict--this is the futility of a labyrinth without an
end. "27
In terms of the poem's relation to the process of
deconstruction, Derrida's own view of history is nearly
a perfect echo of Gerontion's. As Jonathan Culler in his
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism observes,
One of the principle effects of deconstructive criticism has been to

disrupt the historical scheme that contrasts romantic with post-romantic
literature and sees the latter as a sophisticated or ironical demystification of the
excesses and delusions of the former. Like so many historical patterns, this
scheme is seductive, especially since, while providing a principle of intelligibility
that seems to insure access to the literature of the past, it associates temporal
progression with the advance of understanding and puts us and our literature
in the position of greatest awareness and self-awareness. .. Deconstructive
readings characteristicaly undo narrative schemes by focusing instead on
internal difference.2®
The reference in Culler to the seductive powers of a
romantic historical mythology of course echoes

Gerontion's own couching of the historical process in
feminine terms. If deconstruction's function is to de-
mystify (expose) the logocentrism of romantic historical
mythology, Derrida might well have been reading
"Gerontion" when he formulated his approach. But here is
Derrida himself on the matter:
What we must be wary of, | repeat, is the mezaphysical concept of history. This
is the concept of history as the history of meaning. . . the history of meaning
developing itself, producing itself, fulfilling itself. And doing so linearly... in
a straight or circular line. This is why, moreover, the "closure of metaphysics”
cannot have the form of a dine, that is, the form in which philosophy recognizes
it, in which philosophy recognizes itself. The closure of metaphysics, above all,
is not a circle surrounding a homogeneous field, a field homogeneous with itself
on its inside, whose outside then would be homogeneous also. The limit has
the form of always different faults, of fissures whose mark or scar is borne by
all the texts of philosophy.
The metaphysical character of the concept of history is not only linked
to linearity, but to an entire syseen of implications (teleology, eschatology,
elevating and interiorizing accumulation of meaning, a certain type of
traditionality, a certain concept of continuity, of truth, etc.) .. . 1 very often use
the word "history”in orderto produce another concept or conceptual chain of
"history": in effect a "monumental, stratified, contradictory” history; a history
that also implies a new logic of repetition and the trace, for it is difficult to see how
there could be history without ie
Derrida's notion of the "trace" of course references that
difference which is inscribed within any "element" of a
system, €.g., the identity of "virtue" depending on its
relation with "vice" and carrying always the trace or
Mark or “Ehatiwhich it 2s) not. Certainly Gerontion's
description of history as a series of deceptions which
lead us through "cunning passages, contrived corridors"
violates the romantic view of history as a linearity
pointed toward truth. The essential differance (i.e.,-the

ongoing desire for fulfillment, rest, unity, whose jronic
function is to drive the endless production of
differences) lurking at the heart of history is aptly
described by Gerontion and, perhaps not accidently,
inserted at the center, the heart, of the passage on
knowledge and history quoted above. Gerontion's
observation that "the giving famishes the craving,"
however theoretically satisfying to the followers of
Derridean logic, is no less heartbreaking.
The play of differences continues into the next
stanza where "The tiger springs in the new year. Us he
devours" (CPP 22). In a trope which will reappear in
other words at the opening of The Waste Land, Gerontion
(and, Ofm Courses Eliot) EUurNS «On. wits. head the
conventional understanding of spring as recreation,
rejuvenation. Instead of procreation, the tiger brings
destruction. Ironically, the usual "sacrament" is
reversed. Christ the tiger devours us. Even the mystery
of the eucharist is here appropriated by differance which
suggests that our participation in the body and blood,
our salvation, produces also our destruction. Despite
Gerontion's yearning to believe that "I have not made
this show purposelessly" (CPP 22), the language/ imagery
of the final stanzas continues to undo the hope for

absolute reconciliation. Andp irass sin): the. case: .of
Prufrock, Gerontion's desire for authorial power, his
wish to. make “this. show" “a purposeful one, ° ‘is
underminded, "adulterated." In his T7.S. Eliot and the Poetics of
Literary History, Gregory Jay makes this point most
forcefully:
Why "must" something "kept” be "adulterated," unless it has already been

possessed by another? Or unless the preservation of ecstasy in a world of time
always means adulteration, its involvement in nature and its imperfections? "|
have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch;/How should | use them for
your closer contact?” The experience of adultery, now designating the
decentering of any logos (history, literature, sexuality) into a geneology of
disseminations, emasculates hyperbolically Gerontion's entire sensual being.°°
If later in Four Quartets Eliot will test the waters of a
unity made up of time and the timeless, here in
"Gerontion" the division between time and eternity
remains hard and fast. Even inference of the absolute,
based on one's experience of the relational field and
entertained as possibility in Eliot's dissertation, is
here barely a possibility since Gerontion is not at all
sure that the machinery of experience, including that of
has senses may, Grant) ham, "closer contact. U
In speaking for himself, Gerontion speaks for man
who is inevitably imprisoned within the relational maze
of "a thousand small deliberations" (CPP 23). At least
from the point of view of the thinking subject, De
Bailhache, Fresco, Mrs. Cammel, and of course Gerontion

himself end "in fractured atoms" (CPP 23), the quest for
salvation, reconciliation, unity yielding yet more
fracturing, still more difference. This sense of
fragmented experience reaches its apogee in Eliot's
masterpiece, The Waste Land.
Nowhere is the cross-temporal sympathy between Eliot
and Derrida more in evidence than in The Waste Land. This
cultural milestone may now be understood as a major force
behind an ongoing inkerrogationtor absolutes. Though
Eliot's own conversion to conservative Christianity in
1927 seems to suggest a personal resolution for the poet,
the issue of radical indeterminacy raised by the poem
nevertheless has dominated philosophical/aesthetic debate
Since the poem's publication.
In Eliot's poem Derrida's concepts of differance,
supplement, and indeterminacy are prefigured by images of
infertility and by the poem's diacritical structure. In
her 1982 essay entitled "The Waste Land: Ur-text “of
Deconstruction," Ruth Nevo claims that, despite all
efforts by the New Critics to co-opt the poem for the
metaphysics of unity, efforts which include various
appeals to the Grail legend and/or the linking of present
and past through the examination of allusions, "The Waste
Land, that seminal modernist poem of 1922, can now be

read aS a postmodernist poem 3 - ats ys}
deconstructionist Ur-text, even as a Deconstructionist
Manifesto.">! Nevo's summary of New Critical approaches
to the poem attributes to Cleanth Brooks a pivotal role:
In the heyday of New Criticism it was customary to attempt to unify Zhe

Waste Land. Cleanth Brooks himself took the lead with one of the most
distinguished and valuable essays of this kind. "Most of its critics," he says,
"misconceive entirely the theme and the structure of the poem. There has been
little or no attempt to deal with it as a unified whole.” He thereupon marshals
the whole battery of New Critical exegesis to show that the thematic "contrast
between two kinds of life and two kinds of death,” the parallel symbolism of
fertility cults and resurrection, and the juxtapositional structure which ironically
reveals the dissimilarity in surface similarities and the fundamental similarity in
apparent dissimilarities all work toward the buttressing of a masked and indirect
but unequivocal statement of Christian belief.?7
But Nevo's point that the fragmentary structure of the
poem finally resists and undermines all attempts at
unification is compelling, particularly in the light of
Derridaean critical machinery which was unavailable to,
or ignored by, Brooks and other critics of his
persuasion. Rather than rehearse Nevo's argument here,
an argument that, admittedly, confines itself to general
statements on structure, let us plunge directly into the
poem's text.
The Waste Land is introduced via a quotation from the
Satyricon of Petronius (1st century A.D.) which when
translated reads as follows: "For once I myself saw with
my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and
when the boys said to her 'Sibyl, what do you want?! she
replied, 'I want to die.'" Most famous of the Sibyls,

the Cumaean Sibyl, who had guided Aeneas through Hades in
the Aeneid, has been granted immortality by Apollo. But
because she neglected to ask for eternal youth, she
withers in extreme old age, her authority diminished. In
the image of the Sibyl, we have the horror which may
adhere to the yoking of time and eternity. Natural
death, while certainly partaking in eternity, has the
added benefit of curtailing the endless yin and yang of
the seasons which the Sibyl must now face in endless
number. This implicit rejection of time and the process
of differance (i.e., of endless desire, mutability, and
disunity) finds explicit expression in the opening lines
of the poem proper, in the section entitled "The burial
of the Dead" (from the Anglican burial service):
April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (CPP 37)
Emphasis at the ends of the first three lines on past
participles suggests structurally the ongoing process of
regeneration. Immediately the perspicacious reader
senses that he is bound within a structure, unable to
position himself either at its beginning or its end. (As
we shall soon see, the overall form of the poem, which in
effect rejects conventional narrative progression through
the use of collage and episodic fragments, continually

interferes with notions of absolute genesis and
fruition.) The initial allusion to Chaucer's "The Wife
of Bath," while invoking that tale's celebration of
regeneration at the same time it offers one possible
"source" for The Waste Land (one conventionally located in
literature's past and so seeming to reinforce the
hegemony of chronology), in fact rejects both celebration
and source. Here April is cruel precisely because of its
regenerative properties. The tension introduced in the
first few lines of the poem is that between death from
life, in that all life must eventually be undone, and
life
from death, or spring's rebirth which, coincidentally
or not, recalls from "Gerontion" the image of Christ as
He who is resurrected (Eliot initially planned
"Gerontion" as part of The Waste Land) .
This seeming reciprocity may easily be cast in
Derridaen terms. Life (Lilacs) is constructed out of
death, filled with absence in that all seeming presences
are the product of differance. The quest for a resurrection
free of process, for the transcendent, leads always again
to, death, and so contains within its’ idéal the
undermining of that ideal. Death, or the absence of
life, as a necessary and inevitable "element" of the
cycle of life, defines life as its contrary. The speaker

of the first stanza is thus torn between his desire to
escape the cycle and his knowledge that desire itself,
mirrored in the struggle of the seasons, represents the
deferral of an inviolable presence. That "presence," or
present moment, in any event appears as an absence, for
it is constructed out of the past and future, “memory and
desire," and so is never self-identical and free from its
relational function, from differance. What is the point of
being "born again," the speaker implicitly asks, if life
contains within it the properties of its own undoing?
By way of a sudden metonymical shift, the poem
mounts a first assault on its own potential unity. The
speaker now is ostensibly a young girl recalling a past
escapade. The effect is that the reader finds it
difficult to center himself, to maintain a fixed point of
view on the text. This structural vertigo is mirrored by
the content of lines which question the integrity of
identity:
Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour,
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
(CPP a7)
The speaker of the first three lines longs for the stasis
provided by winter, i.e., for an existence largely free
from mutability, interaction, and the quest for recovery
which informs the changing seasons, and so sets the
comfort of "A little life" against the disturbing energy
of desire which produces a seeming endless cycle of death
and rebirth. In Romantic/metaphysical terms, the poem at
this point reconstitutes the conflict between process and
transcendence, time and timelessness, best described,
perhaps, in Keats' sad and lovely lines,
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.*?
In terms of Derridaen Discourse, differance characterized by
"memory and desire," past and future, confronts the
comforting illusion of a self-identical present of
"forgetful snow," free from the interrelations of past
and future. This "present," of course, is always absent,
a death, and both Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale" and
Eliot thus far in The Waste Land suggest as much (We may
also note that, as we have already demonstrated, a
similar conception of transcendence informs "The Love
Song .cof J. Alfred,»Prufrock.").
The issue of identity is further interrogated by the
imposition of the line, "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus

Litauen, echt deutsch." Here the "fact" of ancestry (of
origin?) becomes problematical. We have, then, a
dichotomy: on the one hand, warmth, comfort, concealment
and the resulting coalescence ("covering/Earth in forgetful
snow"); on the other suspicion, difference, and the
frightening yet exhilarating possibilities which adhere
to play, energy, and even exposure ("he took me out on a
sled,/And I was frightened./ . .«. .« there you -feecL
free."). The conflict is further complicated by Marie's
"present," which appears to be one of passive avoidance,
an eschewing of that time in her life characterized by
fear and exhilaration. "I read, much of the night," she
says, "and go south in the winter." Marie's is "A little
life," “to be ‘sure; but her own) "burial"=an "forgetful
snow" nevertheless carries the memory, the trace, of the
escapade with her cousin--at least the structural
jJuxtapositon of events opens up the text to such a
reading. Marie's passive, aristocratic lifestyle remains
haunted by a desire that steadfastly refuses to be
extinguished. She reads "much of the night," certainly
a pastime which suggest a lack of intensity. But why, we
want to ask, is Marie not safely asleep? What "memory
and desire" haunt her evenings. The’ “intimation; ‘of
course, is that Marie is troubled by sexual longings, the
very desire which thrusts her back into that seasonal

cycle of hope and disillusionment.
The initial stanza then ends on the same note with
which it begins. The paradox of the seasons, mirrored in
Marie's experiences, is that the desire to escape desire
ensures the continuation of the cycle. "Forgetful snow,"
symbolic of an emotional death as a self-identical point
in the process and simultaneously outside of process, of
the fear/freedom which adheres to memory and desire, in
fact conceals within its own borders the very thing it
"desires" to escape.
Eliot's method of conveying this sense of differance at
the heart of experience thus involves not only what is
said in the poem, but alsofhow the structure of the poem
makes possible what is said. On the surface of the text,
the drastic divisions of point of view, the
juxtapositions of scenes and speakers, seem to suggest
for the hapless reader an unbridgeable gap that separates
the poems's fragments. But these very juxtapositions,
overlapping in ways evident to the serious reader of
poetry, suggest interpretative possibilities which, due
to the very fragmentary nature of the poem, its
"differences," "identify" meanings which may adhere to
those fragments. Structurally, then, this unity remains
a product of differences--much like the possibility of

immediate experience, an "inference" which, upon
inspection, falls apart as its various and divided
constituents. Searching for the self-identical whole, we
find only parts in metonymical relation. Examining what
appear as mutually exclusive fragments, we infer the
whole. At every stage we find the seemingly self-
identical divided against itself, even as the desire for
the rebirth which sheds once and for all the machinery of
seasonal cycles, of process, of differance, reveals the
necessary absence of the transcendent at the heart of
experience.
The rest of "The Burial of the Dead" continues to
map out a world in which the hope for rebirth constitutes
its own degradation. Contemporary man, disenfranchised,
far removed from any potentially unifying origin, knows
"only/A heap of broken images." Eliot's lines suggest
that meaning itself is problematical. The "Son of Man"/
- . Cannot say, or guess," at least not in any absolute
way. Yet this is precisely how differance operates to both
produce meaning and simultaneously undermine its
determinacy. And the diacritical function of world does
not, finally, depend on absolutely determined elements.
The point is that this indeterminacy, this "essential"
negation, lurks at the center of both poem and world.
Eliot, in a series of brilliant images, makes the point

clear enough:
And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (CPP 38)
The quest for the ultimate resurrection, conducted
in a world of "broken images," is shadowed by its own
impossibility. The lines, while claiming a difference
between death and process, between the timeless and the
time bound, nevertheless conflate via their imagery what
is ostensibly at variance. The conventional use of
"shadow" as a trope for death hardly requires
demonstration. That Eliot here substitutes a "handful of
dust" for the wished for resurrection certainly suggests
that the latter might be all we may hope for--hence the
sense of despair which permeates not only the opening
lines, but the entire poem. In sum, therefore, death
shadows life, is life's "reflection." Where life is, so
is death. And just as the existence of the shadow
necessitates that of a figure casting the shadow, so do
life and death require each other for their own meaning
and integrity. When we admit differences, we discover
rdentity sewhéen= we? analyze) identity; / we “attend to
aifferences. This not to say Eliot's claim that "I will
show you something different . .. " is intended tongue
and cheek. Rather we are meant to accept what is said at

face value. To borrow some of the language, of Eliot's
dissertation, "from one point of view" life and death are
different. But is also the case that the difference, in
order to be perceived as such, requires that each
"separate" structure carry the trace, the "shadow" of the
other. In other words, each structure bears within
itself and as an integral part of its own identity what
from another point of view seems its contrary. Opposing
structures do not invade one .another; rather they
constitute each other's necessary internal function. To
him who desires absolutes, such a scenario is indeed a
Waste Land, for "After such knowledge" of the inclusion
of the one in the other, the quest for a self-identical
and so transcendent structure certainly seems futile.
The penultimate stanza of "The Burial of the Dead"
strengthens our reading. The tarot is generally
understood as a methodology for predicting events. The
fact that the tarot is considered mysterious and
unacceptable to the great majority of western peoples
further emphasizes a sense of suspicion which in the
context of the poem adheres to all structures.
Particularly interesting is the poet's reference to the
"one-eyed merchant" (easily enough understood, on one
level, as a criticism of the capitalist's restricted
vision) "and this card,/Which I am forbidden to see. I

do not find/The Hanged Man." The Hanged Man may be
understood by those who read the tarot as either a trope
for simple death or as a warning of the sort of violent
death that is applied to criminals, suggesting that he
whose cards are being read may harbor a secret guilt
(again strengthening the poem's atmosphere of suspicion).
But within the context of the poem, and encouraged by
Eliot's appended "Notes," The Hanged Man suggests even
mores forcefully “the [Fvsher® King sand! the god of “the
vegetation myth whose sacrifice engenders the renewal of
life which constitutes the spring season. George
Williamson's presentation of this reading provides a
summary, albeit lengthy, entry into this aspect of the
poem:
We have already noticed how Eliot accommodated the Tarot pack to this myth,
since the Tarot is his chief means of exploiting it. Hence this myth, as
implemented by the cards which appear in the fortune, should provide the basic
reference for the parts of the poem. In this myth we have noticed that the
Waste Land owes its condition to the disability of the Fisher King, who thus
resembles the vegetation god. But Eliot has introduced both the Fisher King and
the Hanged God into the Tarot pack, and hence wishes to keep their roles
separate.
In fact, though both were victims, the Hanged God, whom the Madame
does not find, represents in the poem the final cause of the Waste Land and its
possible restoration. In legend he was sacrificed in order that nature might be
renewed. Now "The Burial of the Dead” relates primarily to him, and the state
of the land is an effect of his death. Any change in that state is contingent
upon his revival. ... The Fisher King's role is to represent man’s fate as it
originatesin sex but cannot transcend it; without this transcendence,
which is
figured in the Hanged God, he is doomed to death. . . . Hence the first part of
the poem develops the death theme,
for god and man, and relates the fear of
it to sex, as in the myth.°4
The Fisher King, as Jessie L. Weston elucidates in

her discussion of the Grail legend in From Ritual to Romance,
is a symbol of reproductive nature, and so extends its
symbolic function to sexuality in general. In The Waste
Land, the maiming of the Fisher King, like the death of
the vegetation god, suggests the point of infertility in
nature's cycle. The restoration of the Fisher
King/Hanged God via a ritual which involves immersion in
water (in Christian terms, a Baptism) effects, or at
least symbolizes rebirth in the fora of fertile spring.
As Williamson points out, Eliot may use the allusion to
the Fisher King to comment in particular on human
sexuality. Our discussion of Marie has already
indicated the problematical nature of desire, including

a
sexual desire, as a mode of transcendence. Likewise the
restoration of the Hanged God leads only back into the
cycle of life and death, and seems never a pathway to a
state of rest which is also eternal life. The line, "I
see crowds of people, walking round in a ring," certainly
points to the futility of modern life. Furthermore, the
situation is compounded in the poem by the fact that the
speakers, the inhabitants of the Waste Land, prefer near
obliteration ("Forgetful snow'"') to the endless
disappointment resulting from a fruitless quest. And
Madame Sosostris' comment that she "[Fears] death by
water" serves to emphasize the impossibility of a

totalizing rebirth, i.e., of a resurrection which, like
Christ's, exorcises from its own structure all trace of
degradation and death. Water, the agent of creativity,
and so the instigator of the futile quest, is therefore
suspect. That the Madame does "... not find/The Hanged
Man" suggests a reading which makes use of both
conventional uses of the card and the specialized use of
myth which the poem encourages. In sum, the client who
perhaps represents not only the poet but man in general,
can count on neither death nor on the possibility of
rebirth. His future, then, seems characterized by
fruitless agitation, devoid of hope, of the possibility
of both obliteration and eternal life.
Whether we read some of the other images (e.g.,
Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks") as references to
Eliot's personal life, in particular his relationship
with his wife, or we combine that reading with another
which focuses on the desire for the resurrection of a
dead culture finally free of its own potential for decay,
this section of the poem makes clear that more is
concealed than is exposed. The blank card represents
something in the client's future that Madame Sosostris is
"forbidden to see." in Lace ethis = tarot. beading,
piaeosealy a guide to the future, actually produces very
little. The client remains in the dark regarding what

appear to be important matters. The sense of "walking
round in a ring," of getting nowhere, is thus woven into
yet another "process" (the tarot reading whose ostensible
purpose is to validate a belief in purposeful continuity.
When a search for the "central" crime, the "essential"
disordering event, we come upon Eliot's "theft" of the
following line from The Tempest: "Those are pearls that
were his eyes. Look! The line, of course, references
another from Ariel's song: "Full: fathom five thy father
lies." The death/absence of the father, or "logos," lies
at the center of the Waste Land which is the modern
world. Yet, as Eliot suggests in the opening section of
the poem, the "cruelty" of this absence mixes "Memory and
desire," i.e., past and future as the present, and so is
intimately, perhaps necessarily, a function of human
experience.
Though Eliot in The Waste Land seems to mourn the loss
of an overriding absolute, while Derrida does not appear
so encumbered, Eliot's view of human experience in his
most important poem consistently achieves precursory
import in the light of Derrida's theories. Again and
Again in The Waste Land, Eliot's lines turn on themselves,
inverting every thrust toward affirmation and
determinacy. The closing of "The Burial of the Dead,"
for example, commingles potential criminal activity,

shared guilt, and death, with rebirth:
"The corpse you planted last year in your garden,

"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh, keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable,--mon frére!
(CPP 39)
The continuing fear of rebirth is evidenced in the
caution. We may suggest that the capitalized "Dog"
evokes the word "God" in reverse, an evocation that would
not have been unknown to Eliot, having read Ulysses. The
emphasis on "nails" also supports such a reading, calling
to mind the nails of the crucifixion, that event which
supposedly opened the gate to eternal life. But here we
have a reversal. Life, sprouting from the corpse, seems
less a hoped for finality than a reconstitution of the
futility which adheres to the cycle. This resurrection
is to be avoided; this God as "Dog" must be kept "far
hence" to prevent a rebirthing. Once again Eliot inverts
traditional views, exposing the "trace" within the
structure which, while necessary to define the structure
as it is nonetheless interferes always with that
structure's purity. AS ith eheecasee On JPralescas 2ne
cruelest month," simple dualities are undermined.
Resurrection and eternal life, in order to be meaningful
as such, carry within and as a necessary function of

their meanings their own impossibility as pure, self-
identical, non-contingent forms. Recalling Eliot's
explanation in Knowledge and Experience of immediate
experience as that which may be inferred only within a
world made up of contingencies, and his theory of
tradition as that which is never fixed but rather in a
constant state of flux, we see that in The Waste Land the
poet has not strayed from the mark.
The final line of "The Burial of the Dead," taken
from Baudelaire's Fleurs

du Mal, joins author and reader in
complicity for the crime--perhaps murder--perhaps the
murder of Christ and by extension that of a culture in
which absolutes went largely unquestioned. The acts of
giving and receiving, of creation and consumption, become
problematic ina distinctly Derridaean fashion in that
author and reader share in the guilt, in the creation
which leads to undoing, in the writing and interpretation
of a text which evokes poetic unity and a coherence of
meaning through the devices of fragmentation and
negation--a creation which is simultaneously and
necessarily a destruction.
Derrida's view of writing as a constant play of
contingencies is played out forty-two years before the
onset of his own problematic fame in a poem composed
largely of fragments of old writing, fragments whose

meanings are provisionally determined by context. In
"The Burial of the Dead" Eliot "borrows" several lines
from Triston
and Isolde, lines which, set in their "original"
context, refer to a longing for love and unity. But set
in the context of The Waste Land, and surrounded by the fear
of creativity and rebirth, the longing for love appears
suspect as merely one more exercise in futility. Early
in "A Game of Chess," Eliot follows a reference to Anthony
and Cleopatra with one to the Aeneid. The latter is a
description of the banguet hall in Dido's palace at
Carthage. Eliot's lines, "In fattening the prolonged
candleflames,/Flung their smoke into the laquearia" (CPP
40), recall from the Aeneid the following: "Glowing lamps
hang from the gold-panneled ceiling and the torches
conquer the darkness with their flames." As in the
case of Cleopatra's passion for Antony, Dido's obsession
with Aeneas culminates in her own suicide. The irony
within the frame of Eliot's poem is that what appears as
the conquering of darkness in fact leads inevitably back
to obliteration. Love, particularly with regard to its
sensual component, delivers death in the very act of
revitalization.
Fliot's reference to the nightingale's ' song,
traditionally the song of heaven (cf. Keats' "Ode to a

Nightingale"), further compounds the quest for the pure
ana self-identical. The song is described as the
"inviolable voice," that which resists contingencies,
Metamorphoses alteration. But the allusion is to Ovid's
and to the rape and dismemberment of Philomela. Her
metamorphosis into the nightingale is a response to a
destructive act, and her integrity as "inviolable voice"
is mitigated by the existence of the other birds (Procne
is changed into a sparrow). All are saved, and so the
nightingale finds her meaning as the one voice within a
context which features the many. Salvation adheres to
the many even as it locates its symbolism in one portion
of the many. It is not surprising that Eliot finds the
story of Philomela interesting, since he has already
acknowledged in his” “dissertation = “that immediate
experience, once inferred, becomes a part of our
knowledge and thus contingent, merely one term among many
even as it stands for that which transcends contingency.
Furthermore, Procne's revenge, that of feeding her
husband the dead flesh of his own child, inverts not only
the creative function of the Fisher King, but generally
all traditional views of the father, the logos, as
progenitor. What the father here creates he consumes,
thus invalidating the creation. The logos, hardly pure
and self-identical, is tainted from within,

metaphorically internalizing the creation, i.e., that
which is less than logos. In Derrida's terminology, the
"source/father/logos," the one which supposedly gives
birth to the many, is itself composed of the many and so
never pure, never self-identical.
The references to language which in The Waste Land
immediately follow the allusion to Ovid strengthen
Eliot's precursory relationship to Derrida. The poem
claims that ". . . under the brush, her hair/Spread out
in fiery points/Glowed into words, then would be savagely
still" (CPP 40). Here activity produces stasis, and this
stillness is reflected in the silence which follows: "My
nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me./
"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak" (CPP 40).
When the response at last comes, it serves merely to
emphasize once again the overriding sense of futility
that pervades the poem: "I think we are in rats' alley/
Where the dead men lost their bones" (CPP 40).
In sum, the brushing of the hair, suggesting desire,
culminates in language and returns to a "savage"
stillness, a primitive state of inactivity which no doubt
indicates the eternal return of the cycle. Similarly for
Derrida, language leads nowhere but into its own function
of differance, that activity by which the quest for

origin/logos/final cause, i.e., ultimate sense, is made
futile via endless displacement and deferral. In
producing the quest for origin, as in the cases of the
fertility/rebirth legends woven into the fabric of the
poem, language produces more language, devouring as it
proceeds each provisional supplement or origin in the
process of exposing that origin as merely linguistic,
merely provisional. What language says is that we are
“in rats' alley," devoured by our own desire for
salvation. Meaning, "essentially" linguistic, is "bound"
by language's structure that leads nowhere but into
itself. What apparently goes out in fact turns inward,
as the child is devoured by the father, as spring and
summer are consumed by winter. In this sense, even from
Derrida's point of view, language does seem to represent
both endless activity and stasis. Le WS, in, Lack,
futility which drives the activity. It is death which
gives meaning to rebirth. From the point of view of The
Waste Land, of course, this is not enough.
The tavern scene with which "A Game of Chess" closes
offers several evocations of this sense of futility. "I
remember/ Those are the pearls that were his eyes" (CPP
40) repeats again the death of the father. A reference
to Ophelia's tragic end, linked by Eliot's "note" to the

initial allusion in "The Burial of the Dead," recalls the
death of Polonius, Ophelia's father, and suggests again
the absence of knowledge/meaning:
--Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing .. . (CPP 38)
"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

(CPP. 42)
This is followed by talk of an abortion, recalling the
story of Philomela and of Procne's revenge. The general
conversation which characterizes the tavern scene is
kinetic, but like the lives of the speakers and their
children, aborted in the sense that it amounts to little.
In all cases what is created is undone within the
Structure of the creator. The devouring of the child
Signatures Tereus as the tainted father, as he who
ironically is nourished by his own progeny. The inane
talk in the tavern degrades the speakers. In the case of
language, the pronouncement of logos is always already
aborted.
The subtitle, "The Fire Sermon," refers to Buddha's
sermon in which he asserts that
" _. . all things are one fire, . . . with the fire of

passion, . . . with the fire of hatred, with the fire of
infatua-tion; with birth, old age, death, sorrow,
lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on
Teen ore Elrot' Ss note SCrres3)
To be free of the fire, Buddha continues, is to eschew
desire and all of its objects. The image of fire, of
course, suggests not only passion but also destruction.
Once again Eliot provides his reader with the image of a
structure which contains the process of its own
obliteration, for what the fire burns for, it burns away.
The world of time is driven by human desire in all of its
various manifestations, and so carries at its roots the
agent of its destruction.
Eliot opens with a chilling image of obliteration:
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. (CPP 42)
Even the waste of human activity, of human sexuality is
absent. An allusion to The Tempest evokes again the
absence of the father:
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king by Brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him. (CPP 43)
In Shakespeare's play, Ferdinand describes himself as
"sitting on a bank,/ Weeping again the King my father's
wreck./ The music crept by me upon the waters."*© The
image of the Fisher King, of him whose resurrection marks
the season of rebirth, is thus again evoked. But the
hoped for resurrection does not occur in this landscape,
for "White bodies naked on the low damp ground/ And bones
cast in a little low dry garret,/ Rattled by the rat's
footsonly, yearubecyear’ (CPP 43)».
The whopeu™tfor rebirth, corrupted’ at’ its* roots * tis
imaged by the scene at Mrs. Porter's:
But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la couppole!
(CPP 43)
Sweeney's version of love is, of course, that of
vulgar, thoughtless sexuality, a corruption of the
creative urge. The reference to Verlaine's Parsifalis to
the irony of Parsifal's conquering some forms of fleshy
temptation, achieving what may pass for purity, only to
discover new forms of temptation which continue to haunt
him. Purity is thus illusory, never self-identical but
rather a comparative state which carries always the "sin"
which it seeks to banish from its structure.
At this point the song of the nightingale is
reintroduced. But the reproduction of the mode
which Elizabethan poets indicated the song is tainted by
the double entendre which adheres to "Tereu," recalling also
the name of Philomela's ravisher, Tereus. A second and
like sounding name, Tiresias, represents yet another

violation of the unity represented by the nightingale.
Though in the figure of Tiresias, according to Eliot's
note, "the two sexes meet," and Tiresias sees "the
substance of the poem" (CPP 52), whatever unity is
ostensibly provided by the figure of "an old man with
wrinkled dugs" (CPP 44) is undermined by the fact that
Tiresias is blind (recalling Eliot's own suggestion in
Knowledge
and Experience that absolute unity may very well be
Ubnenaeie inaliejoney "37 suggesting that what he sees may in fact
be the "essential" absence at the core of experience. In
addition, the possibility of a unity of differences finds
itself corrupted by a scene filled with examples of
mechanistic sex. The typist and her visitor, those whose
differences are commingled in Tiresias, unite not in any
transcendent manner but rather in a masturbatory, self-
satisfying, loveless collision, a coupling which serves
only to indicate the absence of unity, the domination of
difference. As the subsequent allusion to Goldsmith's
The Vicar of Wakefield

makes clear, "The only art her guilt to
cover,/ To hide her shame from every eye,/ To give
repentance to her lover/ And wring his bosom--is to die"
(cf. Eliot's note, CPP 53). In the context of The Waste
Lund, obliteration alone may function as antedote to the
fragmented, deconstructed modern world.

"The Fire Sermon" closes with several discontinuous
images of inversion. The lines, "'My feet are at
Moorgate, and my heart/ Under my feet" (CPP 46) may call
to mind the Hanged Man, here offered in the upside down
position. If the first reference to this tarot card
suggests | thes person of | Christ, tthen this ~second
occurrence may be reach as a Satanic image, that of the
Savior! jsimverted) ‘on, ¢the, ‘cross. Samcempone aot
deconstruction's principles is that every sign carries
themtrace: Of gits (contrary, of that which corrupts the
purity of the sign, then the testimony of the Crucifixion
finds itself inverted within the context of the poem. "T
can connect/ nothing with nothing" (CPP 46), a Thames
maiden says--a curious negation of conventional
grammatical affirmation. Connections are, in fact,
suggested by and between the fragments that constitute
the poem. But these links serve only to identify
difference, to establish the fragmentary character of
various citations and events. As isolated references out
of context, the fragments have altered their meanings
over time since their "original" contexts, particularly
in the case of literary allusions, no longer function in
the modern world. If, as Derrida says, the indeterminacy
of meaning results from differance, i.e., the "interaction"
of signs that are meaningless without such interaction

(precisely Eliot's point in Knowledge and Experience, as
Chapter two of this study makes apparent), then the world
of experience is the product of the linking of essential
absences, i.e., "nothings." Meaning itself conceals its
own indeterminacy, just as in their original contexts
certain antiquated texts which ostensibly claim for
experience a metaphysical presence are uncovered through
the excavating process of The Waste Land as disfigured,
discontinuous, disenfranchised. The final three lines of
"The Fire Sermon" suggest the futility of metaphysical
promises:
Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning (CPP 46)
The commingling here of Buddha's and Augustine's
representations of asceticism, that state of mind free
from the degrading thrust of desire, presents itself in
the form of a prayer, i.e., a desire, and so-.represents its
own undoing (cf. "The Burial of the Dead"), culminating
not in the clouds but in the fire, "burning."
In the very brief and penultimate "Death by Water,"
the image of water appropriates seemingly opposing forces
in that it suggests both death and life, or rather the
death that lurks within life's corrupt structure:

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool. (CPP 46)
Here the rising and falling, the stages of life--those
events which conventionally adhere to the nurturing
properties of water--are presented as the activity of a
dead man. Rather than life sustaining, water becomes the
agent of a drowning. The image of the whirlpool is, of
course, apropos within a poem that seeks to express the
futility of escape, the improbability of the quest, and
the swirling, fluid nature of experience. This confusion
of the representational function of the water "sign" is
carried forward to "What the Thunder Said" where water,
at least initially, seems again an agent of life:
Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses (CPP 47)
The landscape presented here is one of near complete
negation. Except for "infernal" images of sneering

faces, there are not Signs’ of life. But perhaps more
important is that there are precious few signs of death,
for even silence and solitude fail to constitute this
landscape. We seem to have entered a geography
antithetical to the cyclical activity of the seasons.
From this point of view, the longing for water may he
read as a longing for the return to cyclical existence.
However, elsewhere in the poem, as we have just seen in
the case of "Death by Water," water finds its expression
as an image of death. The contradiction is, perhaps
intentionally, not resolved. If the "Drip drop drip drop
drop drop drop" that represents the "water song" of the
hermit-thrush recalls in its monosyllabic repetition the
song of the nightingale, then once again we have an image
that turns upon itself, suggesting simultaneously life
and death, life that is death, death that is life. The
point, of course, is that all istructures, all events in
the poem carry the potential for a plurality of meanings
which are often if not always potentially in
contradiction. Hence the futility of the quest since
every object of every quest contains and yields up its
undoing.
As the poem proceeds, "identity" continues as

problematical; suspicion and mystery seem to dominate the
Landscape: "Who is the third who walks always beside

you?" (CPP 48). "Who are those hooded hordes swarming/
Over endless plains . . .?" (CPP 48). And there can be
no firmer poetic expression of Derrida's concept of
differance and Eliot's own view in his dissertation of the
necessary contingency of human experience than the
following: "What is the city over the mountains/ Cracks
ance LerOrms and |bUESES sin) thes violet, aja" (CPP 48).
Nothing in The Waste Land is fixed and or absolute.
Conversation, prayer, the integrity of literature--all
are "so rudely forced" into meaning by context, by the
landscape of the poem. And since this landscape is
itself "fluid," variable, fragmented, the polysemy of
signs which makes up the poem's individual details is
uncovered. Multiple and contradictory interpretations
inform the character of this quest through past, present,
and future experience, yet the very "presence" of
polysemous signs casts into suspicion the possibility of
the "Word," of a transcendental sign free from
difference, from the need to interact with other signs in
the system.
The image of the inverted hanged man may he
associated with the bat that "crawled head downward down
a blackened wall/ And upside down in air were towers/
Tolling reminiscent bells" (CPP 48). The bells perhaps

tool for a fractured and forgotten past. But even this
sense of coherence, of a present which identifies itself
as the site of loss is undermined, for these towers are
inverted. As Eliot writes in "Ash Wednesday," everything
in the realm of time turns and turns again. In
Derridaean terms, the constant "turning" suggests the
polysemy that characterizes language and experience.
Eliot himself in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
points to the contingent nature of meaning, for the past
is always interpreted anew each time a new work is added
to the tradition. Thus what the present mourns is its
own coming into being since it is itself the agent of the
destruction of old interpretative stances. Presence
carries always the trace of loss, or absence. The Waste
Land suggests that what constitutes the contemporary
modern world, the present, is nothing else but the
fracturing of the past, that which in its own right has
in its time performed the same operation. Presence thus
becomes problematical, never self-identical, always the
site of an essential absence. No? clearecurt dual ity,
exists. Much as the seasonal rebirth signals its own
undoing, and the contradictory notions of nurture and
destruction cohabitate the water sign, the quest through
the past for fixity, for an unmediated final cause,
ensures the impossibility of the quest's object. "There

is the empty chapel, only the wind's home" (CPP 49).
What may ostensibly appear as the antidote to the
Waste Land, the sanskrit commands, "Datta, dayadhvan,
damyata," does not in fact escape the indeterminacy that
rules this landscape. In a general sense, the sanskrit
is translated to mean"give, sympathize, control." But
the Upanishad from which these commands are taken makes
clear that these "translations" are actually three
different interpretations of the letter "Da." The gods
understand "Da" to mean that desire should be restrained.
Men take "Da" to mean that they should be liberal. The
demons hear a command to be clement. In each case
Prajapati who is the father of gods, men, and demons
answers that they have interpreted correctly. We have
what seems a unity of differences, an plurality of
meaning rooted in a single letter, a single
transcendental sign. But as Ruth Nevo cautions with
reference to "Da" and the final prayer, "Shantih Shantih
Shantih,
Like dreams this text has no beginning or end. It could begin anywhere and end
anywhere because it has no inception and no center and no closure. If "Shantih
Shantih Shantih” sounds like an end, both in the sense of telos and
of cessation, it also and at the same time is only one fragment in the plethora
of dissociated fragments--"these fragments | have shored against my ruins"--
with which the last section terminates, its first person indissolubly
interentangling past and present, outside and inside.
That which represents transcendence, like the term and
concept of immediate experience a unity of differences,

finds itself meaningful only within a landscape ruled by
contingency and difference and only as one term among
many. With reference to the poem's closing stanzas Nevo
further comments at some length that
Extra - or intertextually, this section alludes to the Fisher King, Isaiah, an English
nursery rhyme, the story of Arnaut Daniel in The Purgatorio, The Pervigilium
Veneris or Ovid's Metamorphoses, de Nerval's "The Disinherited,” The Spanish
Tradegy, The Upanishads. Intratextually it picks up the themes of
fertility/infertility, prophecy, apocalypse, sexuality, homosexuality, spring
renewal and its inversion, violation and flight, life-in-death and death-in-life,
loss, grief, passion and madness, plays within plays, appearance and reality,
and redemption or nonredemption.
But which? Does "Shantih
Shantih Shantih"
bring us, ironically,
back to base, to the forgetful snow of "The Burial of the
Dead,” irremediably unredeemed, or does it not? Does it open to a
transcendent world and close a fallen one, a prison in which each, thinking of
the key, confirms the prison? Shall these bones live? Or shall they be only
picked in whispers by the sea? or rattled by the rat's foot? Shall these bones
live, does the poem say, or shall only the corpse in the garden sprout and
bloom???
To Nevo's own and understandable confusion we may
add several details. Eliot's epic of inversion, of
constant "turning," finds further expression of the
deconstructive process, i.e., what Derrida claims is
continually operating in every text, in the following
lines:
We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, ethereal rumors
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus (CPP 49)
It hardly seems necessary to belabor here the manner
in which the first two lines echo the futility of the
quest. What is more interesting at this point is, of
course, the last two lines which, on their surface, seem

to hold out some hope for reconstituting a "classical"
past, and hence metaphysically sound version of
experience. For a moment, at least, fragments of an
originating context are brought together. The past is
seemingly recovered as it was. But the irony of even
this "moment" barely conceals itself. For the tragedy of
Coriolanus is that of a great man who destroys himself by
attempting to be too self-sufficient. The moment of
seeming unity, of seeming purity yields a "moral" which
suggests the corruption of the moment. Without
contingency, there can be no greatness. At the same
time, contingency prohibits greatness in its transcendent
sense as adhering to that which depends only on itself.
If the poem concludes with a prayer (a desire for
desire's absence?), that prayer is preceded by a single
line from The Spanish Tragedy in which the deconstructive
process of the entirety of Eliot's poem finds expression.
Hieronymo's madness results from the murder of his son.
As the poet fits together the pieces of his own literary
ancestors to form The Waste Land, Hieronymo fits the parts
of his play in order to exact revenge on his son's
murderers. But ironically, just as Eliot's poem comes
together only to expose the "essential" process of
differance, the father's revenge repeats the destructive act
at the root of his own incoherence. Poet and precursor,

son and father--all discover at the "end" of the quest
for resolution only a repetition of the original
violence, the original destruction of unity, the original
loss which set the quest in motion in the first place.
Finally, although for the sake of convenience The
Waste Land is said to issue from a single source, the poet,
even this "quest" for authorship is problematic. As is
well known, Ezra Pound's "red pencil" has as much to do
with the final form of the poem as “does Eliot's
imagination. The very collaborative effort that produced
The Waste Land pulls against any notion of the poem as the
realization of one man's intention. (As late as 1937,
and long after his conversion, Eliot commented that
"every individual is himself a field in which the forces
of the Church and the world struggle," continuing to
view the individual as a conflicted process rather than
as aunity.) Rather the poem in its entirety opposes the
idea of speech as a privileged linguistic activity,
expressing the unmediated "presence" of intention. The
snatches of conversation that appear in the poem's
various sections never bind themselves to their speakers'
intentions, if such intentions can be understood. In
fact, this "speech" always turns against itself, saying
both more and less than one might expect it to say in
conventional contexts.
In true Derridaean fashion, and long before Derrida
intervened in the area of literature, Eliot unveils a
poem that in large part is a writing about writing, i.e.,
a structuring of fragments of past literary works
revealing their diacritical function as well as their
propensity for polysemy. If, as Derrida claims, meaning
is "essentially" indeterminate, providing only
provisional centers of gravity, points of view, supplements
on which to stand, then the various attempts by critics
to unify the poem into a single message, e.g., hope or
despair, must be understood as temporary salves destined
to deconstruct themselves by the time of the next close
reading. As Ruth Nevo points out, even Eliot's Notes to
the poem, concocted as a printer's convenience, and often
incomplete, misleading, subjective, deconstruct "the
advstinetions between critic and author, ~'fiction™ and
'fact,' presentation and representation, origin and
supplement."*' There can be no better summation of The
Waste Land than Derrida's description of his own work that
iewexhibits
a certain strategic arrangement, which, within the field and its own powers,
turn[{s] against itself it own stratagems, producling] a force of dislocation which
spreads itself through the whole system, splitting it in all directions and
delimiting it through and through. 7
Chapter 5: The Silent Word
The general impression among critics of Eliot is
that his 1927 conversion to Anglo-Catholicism signalled
in his view of human experience a major shift toward
philosophical absolutism and away from relativism. Even
deconstructionists have, for the most part, steered clear
of Eliot's later work, assuming that the poet's position
in these texts is at odds with their own world view. In
fact, Eliot throughout his career as critic and poet
steadfastly adheres to relativist principles, i.e., he
never sways from the view that the rational process leads
inevitably to relativism. What is "new" for the post-
conversion Eliot is his willingness to make a leap of
faith, to maintain a belief in some absolute coherence in
the face of evidence that contradicts such coherence.
This leap of faith is not unlike that which drives
Kierkegaard's own Christian existentialism. And Eliot,
even in his later stages as a poet, is never so convinced
as to be dogmatic. The leap of faith is arduous, always
liable to interrogation. In "Notes Toward the Definition
of Culture," Eliot makes clear that
216
The Silent Word 217
. . one of the features of development [of civilization], whether we are taking

the religious or the cultural point of view, is the appearance of Scepticism--by
which, of course, | do not mean infidelity or destructiveness (still less the
unbelief which is due to mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and
the capacity for delayed decision. Scepticism is a highly civilized trait. . .!
Furthermore, faith's object, qua object, is not free
of the relational process, and so the envisioned absolute
unity may very well be merely the result of "having to
Gonstruct Something/ Upon which to rejoice" (CPP 61).
All of this ElLVoOt takes into consideration.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that for Eliot, as for
other intellectually motivated believers, faith proves
all the more valuable in the light of its object's
improbability. Without debunking the view of a fractured
world propagated by The Waste Land, Eliot is "Ash Wednesday"
and Four Quartets goes about the business of construction
and rejoicing. Deconstructionists therefore should not
be deterred from interrogating these texts. The
deconstructive themes which characterize Eliot's early
poetry persist into the later works, and share time and
space, perhaps, with merely an admitted fabrication, an
attempt on Eliot's part to "Supplement" a central absence
with an aesthetic totality rather than a dogmatic
assertion of the absolute's empirical nature.
The close reader of "Ash Wednesday" must be struck
by the poem's assault on the concept of duality.
Derrida's own criticism of western metaphysics involves

the unraveling of dualities, e.g., the simple opposition
of body and soul, time and the timeless, thought/speech
and writing, presence and absence. In "Ash Wednesday,"
Eliot provides a poetry the prefigures Derrida's own, and
frankly belated, concerns.
With regard to tone and structure, Hugh Kenner
points out that "Some withdrawal from individual speech
has occurred, which resembles [my italics] a loss of vigor,
though the vigor is rather dispérsed than evaporated. "4
This sounds not unlike Derrida's claim for the energy of
differance, that which is dispersed throughout a text. Like
The Waste Land before it, "Ash Wednesday" dispenses with the
illusion of the immanence of intention to language
maintained in Eliot's dramatic monologues. Of course,
The Waste Land and “Ash Wednesday" accomplish this
dispensation in somewhat different ways. The former
utilizes a fragmented and polysemous structure to violate
intention's immanence, while the latter, in Kenner's
view, also "is related less intimately now to the
speaking voice than to renovated decorums of the
impersonal English language. Its substance even becomes
to some extent its own decorousness,"* which is not too
far from saying that, like The Waste Land, "Ash Wednesday"
in part takes as its subject language itself. This

The Silent Word 219
becomes clear when we understand by "language"
Derrida's concept of writing, i.e., that field which is
generated by differance
and includes speech as one aspect of
its diacritical nature rather than as the first term of
a duality.
"Ash Wednesday" begins with resignation. The
"speaker," like the first speaker of The Waste Land who
links his despair to an allusion to Chaucer, has decided
that the cycle of life which informs experience holds no
redemption. In his own case, old age and infirmity
prohibit rebirth. The incantatory phrasing with which
the poem opens, besides evoking "the melodic Freedom of
the Cavalcanti ballare,"* suggests the repetition commonly
found in prayer. Once again (cf. chapter four on The Waste
Land) the prayer, i.e., the desire to escape desire,
folds in upon itself, perpetuating the very activity the
speaker wishes to terminate. Thies “fairs "Stanza is
immediately followed by a characteristically Derridaean
reduction:
Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again. (CPP 60)
The redemption to which Eliot refers is here undermined
by the words "infirm" and "transitory." In the world of
the senses, man's perception of an _ absolute is
necessarily temporary; one looks and looks again, and
"there is nothing again." This tension between presence
and absence, between redemption and annihilation, is
maintained throughout the poem. In fact, the tension
serves to reduce these seeming opposites to a single
event which, depending on one's. point of view, may be
abstracted as opposition. Elsewhere in the poem, the
iteration of this reductive view involves at length the
condition of the human senses:
. . the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth.
(CPP 66)
Hugh Kenner's comments on this stanza are valuable for
our purposes, and so I quote at length:
Here every noun, verb and adjective pulls two ways. The heart is lost to the
world and lost in the world. It stiffens with life and with rebellion. The lilac is
lost in belonging to the world that has been renounced, and the heart "rejoices”
either to applaud its departure or to bring it back transfigured . . . The senses,
by the same implication of transfiguration and recovery, renew "the salt savour
of the sandy earth”; but the parallel with the delusions created by the "blind
eye” and the doubtful force of "sandy" . . . increase the tension of implicit
delusion.
The Silent Word 221
That sensibility which requires redemption seems prone to
the invention of redemption's possibility, inevitably
"having to construct something/ Upon which to rejoice"
(CPP 61). But the poem through its devices makes clear
that the construction pulls against itself--in Derrida's
terms, the text is always and already deconstructed.
Simple dualisms do not obtain here, but rather give way
to the perception that each element in a duality carries
within its structure the trace of the opposing element.
What is positive is "infirm" because in order to be
"positive," the element must be in relation and so carry
within its structure that which negates it. The images
Kenner cites "pull two ways," simultaneously constructing
and deconstructing. Purity, self-identity--these
abstractions characterize only empty forms created by
"the blind eye." The substantial is necessarily impure,
i.e., contingent and so relational.
But as Kenner points out, the speaker of "Ash
Wednesday" works his way toward an acceptance of the
relational universe. Not unlike Keats' idea of "negative
capability," the poem attempts to locate spiritual
resolution within the fact of indeterminacy. Kenner
writes that
. it is permissible for commentary to suggest that the opposite pull of the

senses and the devotional spirit--of God’s creation and God--is to be maintained
as a fruitful and essential equivocalness, not "solved" by relegating one half of
the being to the earth and the other half to heaven, nor yet, as in the Buddhist
Fire Sermon, by becoming "weary of the knowledge of the visible” and so
"empty of desire.”®
Is redemption in time simply a matter of attitude for
isiL eve % It would seem so. After abl, “29 -) ..ethe
unstilled world still whirled/ About the centre of the
silent Word" (CPP 65). The Word is silent in the world
of the senses because it is absent. At least, that is
one way to read this polysemous text. The Word's
presence within time may very well be a fabrication, and
aesthetic ploy for the purpose of rejoicing. The poem
leaves open such a possibility. The Lady of Silences,
she who is both "calm and distressed/ Torn and most
whole" (CPP 62), embodies both the sense of unchanging
eternity and the endless play of differance. “If the lost
word is lost, if the spent word is spent/ If the unheard,
unspoken/ Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the
unspoken word, the Word unheard,/ The Word without a
word, the Word within the world and for the world" (CPP
65). The unspoken word is "still" both in the sense of
perpetuity and in the sense of inactivity. Beyond the
activity of differance, Eliot seems to say, lies the
absolute. But even this seeming reconstitution of the
idea of eternal recurrence, i.e., that what never changes
is the inevitability of change itself, pulls against

The Silent Word 223
itself. It makes little sense to suggest that what is
unspoken and unheard somehow locates itself in the world
and for the world. And if Eliot does suggest such a
possibility, he immediately cancels that suggestion, for
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word/
Resound? Not here" (CPP 65).
Certainly Eliot is aware of the paradox. By the
time of "Ash Wednesday" he has stopped pursuing the
absolute through rational means, but instead opts for the
irrational power of vision while leaving open the
possibility that the contradictory nature of the object
of faith may reveal it as "purely" abstraction, purely
fiction. The vision in "Ash Wednesday" walks "between
the violet and the violet" (CPP 64). Those who pursue
the vision as well as those who do not "walk in darkness,
who chose thee and oppose thee,/ Those who are torn on
the horn between season and season, time and/ time,
between/ Hour and hour, word and word, power and power,
those who wait/ In darkness" (CPP 65). They exist,
Derrida would say, in the void of differance, for the
tension between signs is nothing in and of itself; it
becomes meaningful only when signs move into relation;
and signs cannot be said to exist as such until they move
into relation. This essential darkness, this differance,

sounds much like Eliot's Word around which and out of
which "the unstilled world still whirled." We must not,
of course, miss the brilliance of Eliot's use of sound.
"Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled" has
the effect of collapsing the phonic differences which
help to identify individual words. But this aseea
literary device evoking a unity in an aesthetic realm, a
constructions "Upen) which (to srejorce. "saat tcannot have
passed Eliot's notice that whatever expressions of the
absolute may be contained in language, language
ultimately exposes such expressions as its own product
and so liable to its relational/diacritical nature.
Finally, it is important to note that the vision
announces itself within the poem as problematical. The
Lady of Silences--she who seemingly contains and
reconciles contradictions--is associated with the "veiled
sister." The vision, even if one accepts it despite its
irrational nature, is veiled, concealed. What the
speaker has constructed in order to rejoice is itself
full of "cunning passages," perhaps suppressing its
provisional function. To pierce the veil is possibly to
deconstruct the vision. In any event, we would not be
too far off the mark to suggest that the veil may be
faith itself anointing its object, for what else but
faith may lend to its vision the integrity that adheres

The Silent Word 225
to mystery?
The four long poems which make up the whole of Four
Quartets surely can be read as a COtalvey ne. asm an
aesthetic unity, each commenting on the other. With
these poems Eliot attempts most forcefully to arrange a
career of philosophical and poetical experiments as a
Single, coherent structure. Even more so than "Ash
Wednesday," Four Quartets provides that framework by which
the fragments of a career in poetry might be yoked
together as something more than a modernist's Waste Land.
Four Quartets looks backward as it unfolds in the
present. As is the case with any strong poem that enters
the tradition, this backward glance not only shapes what
is and what is to come, but remakes our view of the past.
Present and future, in fact, become in large measure the
result of our remaking. Hence Eliot writes in "Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture" that
. . there is no such thing as complete originality, owing nothing to the past.

Whenevera Virgil, aDante, aShakespeare, a Goetheis born, the whole future
of European poetry is altered. When a great poet has lived, certain things have
been done once and for all, and cannot be achieved again; but, on the other
hand, every great poet adds something to the complex material out of which
future poetry will be written.7
The past, Eliot suggests, is both finished as past and
recreated in the present. On the one hand Shakespeare
may not be duplicated; on the other hand the texts of
Shakespeare are re-evaluated as current material for the

new talent. Snatches of Hamlet in "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock," or of The Tempest in The Waste Land, for
example, appropriate new meaning in a current context.
In this spirit Four Quartets re-creates the poems by Eliot
that precede it, shaping them now not as individual and
isolated works, but as means towards an end, stages in
the development of a mind seeking reconciliation with a
fractured cosmos.
"Burnt Norton," the initial installment of Four
Quartets, begins with a reductive image, conflating
beginnings and ends:
Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (CPP 117)
The irony of the above lines is unmistakable,
particularly in the light of deconstructive themes.
Conventional perception of time proposes a_e strict
chronology as well as explicit divisions between past,
present, and future. But here we have a view of time as
synchronic. Each chronological category--past, present,
future--bears the trace of the others. Each is contained
in the other. The purity of divisions is illusory, and
yet as we have already seen in our discussion of The Waste

The Silent Word 227
Land, the illusion of purity is contingent upon the
Giacritical nature of experience. Mite Evikike sesh: fi
eternally present," it is likewise eternally absent since
the present is the past is the future. Presence and
absence, though conceptually opposite, do not in fact
maintain their own boundaries, but depend each on the
other for coherence. This function of contingent
"elements" ensures that "All time is unredeemable" since
the future always already is. Each moment, far from
appropriating a self-contained identity, reactivates
differance, i.e., the endless displacement and deferral of
a transcendental sign or moment free from contingency.
In terms of Eliot's dissertation, immediate experience is
inferred only through the relational nature of experience
and so is contained within the function of contingency.
Similarly, the unity of time that Eliot suggests is
reductionary nevertheless is inferred only after the fact
and as a point at which differance is reactivated, i.e., the
unity is constituted by disunity.
Critics such as Grover Smith who have proposed a one
to one correspondence between Four Quartets and the
conventional absolutism of Christianity do so only at the
risk of ignoring Eliot's initial caution, that

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(GRP Av7))
"What might have been" points as well to "one end, which
is always the present." And this present is always the
site of differance, as Eliot's "play" with the words "end"
and "present" indicates. What is projected as final
cause deconstructs itself to reveal its own
relational nature.
The vision in the garden is then not one of
redemption in any conventional sense, but rather a poetic
depiction of "our first world," a world constituted by an
original divisiveness prohibiting unity. BO
accomplishes this task through the use of opposing
images, each erasing the other, leaving no room for a
reconciling sign as bridge, yet existing meaningfully as
the tension which characterizes the pattern. Are we to
understand that the vision is a speculation, a
description of "What might have been"? No doubt. For
the vision is described as "The deception of the thrush."
This section of the poem contains echoes of Keats'
nightingale as well as a seeming reference to the unheard
music on Keats' "Urn." But these suggestions of the
music of heaven are cast within the framework of

The Silent Word 229
deception, of the arena of human knowledge. These roses
have "the look of flowers that are looked at" (CPP 118).
This dreamlike landscape contains contraries. The pool
is empty, then full, then empty again. Leaves are dead
but the air is vibrant: life and death cohabitate. The
"formal pattern" is figured as a "box circle," suggesting
Simultaneously the closure and containment of "box" and
the endless progression/regression of "circle." If this
vision is deception, it is also that reality which human
kind cannot tolerate, for speculation as well as "what
has been" points to a single end. Reality and fiction
are thus reduced to their common origin, that being
differance; neither is self-identical; again Eliot rejects
simple dualities.
Eliot's "still point" is likewise an approach to the
"idea" of differance. According to Michael Beehler in his
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and the Discourses of Difference,
The "drift of stars” in "Burnt Norton ||” is similarly reflected by a drift

of words in "Burnt Norton V,” which, recalling the figure of the dance itself,
interrupts the entropic influence that their patterning into a grammar, poem, or
book always exerts. Although "words move,” a stillness is invoked by "the
form, the pattern," a cessation of motion that is nevertheless only a pretence
of stillness, since even a "Chinese jar still/ Moves perpetually in its stillness.”
... and thus it is only in the long view--in the fabricated hallucination of "Burnt
Norton |"... that stillness appears.°®
The stillness which "reconciles forgotton wars" (CP
118), which stands at the unmoving center of experience

and around which experience whirls, to eee Setar
fabrication, since like all provisional supplements, it is
constituted by differance. It is possible, of course, that
Fliot intended {us to assign to the “still “point™ “a
transcendental property, but it is not probable. Ina
series of images that each negate the other, Eliot
expresses the diacritical "essence" of the still point:
At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point
there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not
call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither
movement from nor towards
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point,
the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
(CPP 119)
There is only the dance. No fixity, the still point represents
the redeployment of relational experience, that
metaphoric space where signs come into relation as signs.
Thirty years previous to the publication of Four Quartets,
Eliot had already made this point in his dissertation.
He says there that although “objects and words “are
"different," they depend on their relations to one
another for their individual cogency, for 7 their

9
difference. Like differance, the still point is not so
much a thing as the differentiating function of

The Silent Word 231
experience. Without it, there would be no energy, no
play, nodance. At the same time there is only the dance
which conceptualizes differences for us. Like the still
point, differance is neither one nor the other of any binary
opposition, but both, and contingent as a
conceptualization upon the existence of both which in
turn are contingent upon differance. Past and future,
ascent and decline--all contraries and oppositions are
"gathered" where their fundamental absence ensures their
presence for us.
The world of experience is therefore kinetic and
full of the play of differance. "Words strain,/ Crack and
sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension,
slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision, will not
Seay ineplacer/aWidels notastayiste

| ia (CPP 221) aeBuretcom
another point of view, "Words after speech, reach/ Into
the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,/ Can words
or music reach/ The stillness, as a Chinese jar still/
Moves perpetually in its stillness" (CPP 121). Yet, as
Michael Beehler points out, this patterned stillness is
an interpretive ploy, a supplement whose purpose is to
provide stabilityto an essentially unstable environment.
Eliot surely knows this for "The detail of the pattern is
movement" (CPP 122), Eliot writes. "Desire itself is

movement" (CPP 122). And if love is unmoving, as Eliot
suggests at the close of "Burnt Norton," it may very well
be so because love, even in the sense of divine love, is
defined simultaneously as a setting in relation and thus
an identification of differences, and the reconciliation
of those differences. But even in the case of God and
man, such "reconciliation" reactivates differance, for
without the antagonism lurking within the structure of
love, the terms "god" and "man" would have no meaning.
In any event, man is caught between absolutes, "un-being
and being" (CPP 122), immediate experience and complete
knowledge, which all point to one end, and love in this
world is not "unmoving"; rather "in the aspect of time/
fie is) caught) anigthe sform ofp ldinitatien” S(GREy 122)
“Burne Norton" “closes. with “much, the Tsamerstone, that
characterizes the opening of The Waste Land. The quest
within time seems futile; "Ridiculous the waste sad time/
Stretching before and after" (CPP 122).
The opening stanza of "East Coker" suggests on its
surface a ruling determinism, but by stanza's end the
stability of experience is again interrogated and
undermined. Queen Mary's motto: "In my beginning is my
end" (CPP 123), evokes the sense of resolution, of the
circle of time closing on itself, apparently stultifying

The Silent Word 233
as the eternal return of the same while simultaneously
suggesting the open ended nature of human experience.
The images that follow, even those attributable to the
metaphysical certainties of Ecclesiastes, point both
toward and away from closure. Eliot's conflation of
time's extremities is characterized by a seemingly
endless process of creation and destruction, each leading
inevitably to the other:
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fire to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
RCRE st 23))
The "vicious circle" of life and death which informs The
Waste Land is here relived. Within the "open field" of
experience all ends are simultaneously beginnings and so
contain as a necessary function of their own identities
their difference from themselves. And if there is "a
time for living and for generation/ And a time for the
wind to break the loosened pane" (CPP 123), that time is
always already present and so marked by the antagonism of
opposites. Destruction (deconstruction) does not precede
construction; rather the two are activated
simultaneously, for at the moment when are consigned "Old

fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth" the earth ‘as
already “flesh, ‘fur and faeces™ (CPP 123). The end to
which «all things point “is ‘synonymous with) the
reactivation of differance. Whatever supplement we choose at
a particular “time to "characterize ~the ~"center™ or
activity, it is never self-identical,; never pure; but
always bears within its "flesh," its life, the mark of
its undoing, a fissure at the core of its being.
This fissure drives the production of all signs. In
reaching back through the language and to the forms of
English that characterized East Coker's past, Eliot sets
the past against the present, marrying them within a
framework of the single stanza. The past, of course, is
always married to the present since the present
Interprets Wak,” recreatesiwit. Like the "necessarye
coinunction" of man and woman characterized by the ritual
dance, this commingling of old and new language conflates
past and present even as it establishes their
separateness. For the romance of metaphysics, i.e., the
illusion of .unity, is fueled by unity's essential
absence. It cannot have escaped Eliot's notice, for
example, that his choice of the antiquated forn,
"Coniunction," places his reader closer to the word's
etymological roots, and so strengthens the word's meaning
as "juncture™ or "joint." This joine, or joining, unites

The Silent Word 235
by marking the place of difference. Likewise husband and
wife are differentiated by virtue of their union. As we
have already made clear, the fracture is "necessarye" to
the life of the romance. Eliot seems to concur since man
and woman are here "Keeping time,/ Keeping the rhythm in
their dancing/ As in their living in the living seasons"
LEPP V2A\" This union does not transcend time, but
rather roots itself in "The time of the coupling of man
and woman/ And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling./
Eating and Drinking. Dung and death" (CPP 124).
But what of the pattern, its "stillness" which both
encompasses and lies at the center of the dance? Perhaps
it, like all conceptualizations, is contained by the
mules Of Semiotics, i.e., by. the Maws) "of mecontingency
which Derrida describes as the function of writing.
Eliot at least makes possible such a reading. The
"necessarye coniunction" is expressed through ritual or
semiotic behavior, brought within the realm of knowledge
waa symbolic activity, “Two by two. .../ Holding eche
other by the hand or the arm/ Which betokeneth

[my italics]
concorde" (CPP 124). The word "betokeneth" thrusts us
into the area of representation, signifiers and
signifieds. Union here seems one more construction upon
which to rejoice, since the diacritical nature of

semiotic activity is responsible for the
conceptualization of the union, and firmly locates itself
in the antagonisms among "rising and falling," Eating and
drinking," "Dung and Death." At the heart of the sign,
or symbol, Eliot no doubt recognizes an originating
rupture. The sign, in order to be a sign, conceals its
difference from that object which it references. Yet
without the sign, or word, the object cannot be said to
exist (CPP 134). The unity of signifier and signified,
the "concorde" of man and woman, therefore, are similarly
dependent upon their essential differences. We are left
"still with the intolerable wrestle/ With words and
meanings" (CPP 125), the slippage which characterizes the
polysemous nature of language. FOr ta wasmnot ae ar
what one had expected./ What was to be the value of the
long looked forward to./ .. . Had they deceived us/ Or
deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,/
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit" (CPP 125).
The stillness of the pattern is in fact not still; the
pattern is neither at rest nor perpetual: "There is, it
seems to us,/ At best, only a limited value/ In the
knowledge derived from experience./ The knowledge imposes
a pattern, and falsifies,/ For the pattern is new in
every moment/ and every moment is a new and shocking/

The Silent Word 237
Valuation of all we have been" (CPP 125). AMewicy Geieteim
Eliot prefigures Derrida's own idea of the supplement, that
provisional starting point or center which directs
coherence, "imposes a pattern," but collapses under the
weight of ultimate indeterminacy. Polysemy lurks at the
heart of the patterning process; each provisional
structure, each pattern, "falsifies" because it suggests
stability, stillness, which ultimately fails to adhere to
any point of view.
This differance at the core of experience, and the
center of Four Quartets, endlessly reactivates the kinetic
and differentiating process of writing. We are left,
Eliot says,
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment (CPP 125)
The enchantment one risks, of course, is what Derrida
terms our metaphysical bias. Beehler's comments on this
section of the poem are worth our notice:
Since the middle is "all the way,” there is no way but the middle, the
interminable faring forward of a poetry that always risks "enchantment" by an
imposed pattern of knowledge while simultaneously eroding the illusory security
of any firm foothold that can be taken as a reconciling chart, a reading or
interpretation, of its transfigurative voyage of signs. '°
Imprisoned within the indeterminate world, the poet now
begins his turn away from the interpretation of despair

which informs "Burnt Norton." For in the face of endless
change which seems at time synonymous with the eternal
return of the same, "The only wisdom we can hope to
acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless"
(CPP 126). Eliot's "turn" towards the value of humility,
according to Gregory Jay, indicates more than simple
capitulation to what we now know as deconstructive
themes. Though Jay may indeed be guilty of the
proverbial splitting of hairs, his comments on this
section of the poem are worth our while, for they seek to
locate a difference between Eliot and Derrida--if not a
difference in the results of analysis, at least a
disparity of their respective responses to those results.
Jay suggests that while Derrida's methodology seeks only
the knowledge of knowledge's indeterminacy, Eliot's poetic
quest embodies the longing for wisdon,
which some would erase by dividing the poem into logocentric and
deconstructive tendencies and then nominating the latter as authoritative...
It [wisdom] endures the shipwreck . . . This endless humility of the
philosophical imagination repeats Keats, marking Eliot's own long awaited
arrival at negative capability. . . which undertakes the task of endlessly
rebeginning the nature of our history.!!
Jay, nevertheless, admits that even wisdom as an end is
problematical, since
Eliot does speak in the language of the elders. One traditional definition of
wisdom, as complete knowledge, meets its ancient foe and accomplice, wisdom
as the continuing discovery of ignorance. The distinction between recollection
and repetition falters, then, as do all simple oppositionsin Eliot's poem. The
repetition that alters the retrieved moment by its replacement in a new
discourse does not re-present a former experience of presence, but a feeling or
spirit of place that was already interpretation.'2
The Silent Word 239
In its offering of wisdom, of that which will somehow
serve as emotional antidote to the indeterminacy of
experience, the poem inevitably produces another impure
sign.
Nevertheless, the second half of "East Coker" shifts
away from despair and towards acceptance. The conflation
of presence and absence which suggests the futility of
experience in "Burnt Norton" now becomes prescriptive:
. . . In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not. (CPP 127)
Each affirmative is constituted by its negative. Each
negative necessarily inhabits the affirmative sign. To
accept the function of differance is perhaps to forego
ecstasy, for the transcendent song of the nightingale,
the music of heaven, provides no escape but rather
endless re-entry into the indeterminate world. "Our only
health is the disease" (CPP 127).
In the light of new acceptance, Eliot now unveils

the mystery of Christ, not as an object of reciaimelgk IN91
conflict with "the intolerable wrestle/ With words and
meanings," but as a singularly poetic expression of
indeterminacy. "The dripping blood our only drink,/ The
bloody flesh our only food" (CPP 128) -- this devouring
of the original violence, i.e., the ritual sacrament
expressing man's entry into world, signals the paradox of
the "God/man," two terms each depending on the other for
cogency yet finding in their rélation their seemingly
exclusive identities. The salvation of the cross, that
which comes as a correction of the absolute separation of
God and man in the Garden of Eden, may now be understood
as a "rewriting," a re-"valuation" of the self-identical
nature of logos. In the figure of Christ the poet finds
the conflation of presence and absence that informs the
world, for destruction, "The dripping blood" and "The
bloody flesh," is simultaneously our creation, our
nourishment, “our only drink" and “our only food." This
the poet accepts, for "we call this Friday good" (CPP
3)"
The closing sections of "East Coker" firmly
establish Eliot's shift in mood. Rooted in relational
experience, juried by the diacritical nature of signs,
the poet's quest for absolutes over a twenty year period
is "largely wasted," spent "Trying to learn to use words,

The Silent Word 241
and every attempt/ Is a wholly new start, and a different
kind of failure/ Because one has only learnt to get the
better of words/ For the thing one no longer has to say"
CCP P23) - The difference which intervenes between
intention and sign ensures that language will at times go
its own polysemous way that the sign will offer itself to
no absolute control. The process of writing remains "a
raid on the inarticulate/ With shabby abyss." But the
very necessity of the bridge signals the existence of the
gap. Far from erasing the intractable, the bridge
stresses the absence of natural continuity even as it
establishes its own nature as fabrication for those who
choose not to forget. "The river is within us," Eliot
writes, "the sea is all about us" (CPP 130). As an image
of polysemy, the sea interferes with the possibility of
the one voice, for the Word, of "The sea has many
voices,/ Many gods and many voices" (CPP 131).
Yet, "under the oppression of the silent fog/ The
tolling bell/ Measures time not our time,/ Rung by the
unhurried/ Ground swell, a time/ Older than the time of
chronometers" (CPP 131). Located somewhere beyond or
perhaps within human experience, this image of eternity
which Eliot suggests is intimately lined to the ground
swell "That is and was from the beginning" (CPP 131)

marks the event of differance, that function of experience
which, in and of itself, is non-activity “and non-
existence, yet within the world generates the "Ground
swell" of human endeavor. This, of course, sounds much
like Eliot's description in Knowledge and Experience of
immediate experience, since that "unity" also achieves
cogency only within a world of contingencies.
Those who would build bridges, whether of steel or
of poetry, necessarily work both within time and against
it. Their task is to "construct something/ Upon which to
rejoice. . . equipment always deteriorating/ In the
general mess of imprecision of feeling" (CPP 128). There
is, Eliot concludes, "only the fight to recover what has
been lost/ And found and lost again and again: (CPP 128).
The quest is perhaps its own end since "For us, there is
only the trying. The rest 1c) not our business" 3 (Grr
128). In the context of "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker,"
the sign, Wresitrsl here multiplies . associations,
suggesting at once the still point which as differance is
unapproachable in a pure state, the sense of finality
which adheres to Aristotle's "final cause," and, of
course, all that we imagine might lie outside of the
kinesis of experience. El2oGls acceptance of
indeterminacy works against The Waste Land sense of

The Silent Word 243
futility. "Old men ought to be explorers" (CPP 129), he
writes, and in doing so erases despair.
Early in "The Dry Salvages" the protean nature of
language and experience finds its expression in the image
of the river. That which is fluid, ever-changing,
"untamed and intractable" (CPP 130) defines humanity, for
"The river is within us" (CPP 130). According to Michael
Beehler,
The river. . and the differential, pulsatory energy it figures suggest a similar
declination, a "reminder/ of what men choose to forget.” Its interfering excess
can only be figuratively accounted for, charted, or spanned by "the builder of
bridges" and by the "dwellers in cities” for whom the river is "almost
forgotten.” Bridging--the constructing of a machine or artifact to span the
"intractable” and obliterate the "frontier”--almost makes its builder forget that
it emerges out of and is reliant upon the difference of which its very existence
is a sign
The point that Derrida continually stresses, of course,
is that metaphysics itself constitutes a bridge which
spans the rejoice," and so "fix" what is essentially
indeterminate. Eliot figures such activity in the
time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless. . . (CPP 131)
These attempts to untangle and calculate, however, serve
always to reactivate the ground swell, yet another image
of an originating kinesis at the center of experience.
The "silent fog" is in fact neither silent nor at rest

but rather shattered by both the sound of the bell and
the activity of unraveling, the building of bridges,
which always marks the site of the abyss. Like the
"anxious worried women, the poet must work his magic,
"piece together the past and the future," in the place
where, « "the « pasts ,i18/_,allew sdeception,"/., The, future
futureless." Where beginnings and ends merge, which is
always present, there the work of forgetting takes place.
"Where," Eliot asks, "is .there an end to the
drifting wreckage?" "There is no end, but addition: the
trailing/ Consequence of further days and hours,/ .
Years of living among the breakage" (CPP 131-132). Here
the poetic device which reflects experience is metonymy
rather than metaphor, i.e., the constant addition of
structures whose meaning is effected by their relations,
their differences, rather than by any attempt to blend
disparate objects. Eliot's point that experience is
informed by "addition" prefigures Derrida's own view of
the polysemous nature of language. That so much of "The
Dry Salvages" is formally composed metonymically does not
escape the notice of Martin Scofield who writes in 7.S.
Eliot: The Poems that
The images ... seemto be a rather random clutch. . . But the main problem
seems to be a confusion of meaning, or a hovering between two meanings. '4
Scofield's criticism, of course, reveals his own

The Silent Word 245
metaphysical bias. But Eliot is smarter than Scofield,
and possesses greater control of his materials than the
critic acknowledges.
Immediately preceding the third section of "The Dry
Salvages" which Scofield cites as example, Eliot prepares
the way for that passage's polysemous function:
It seems, as one becomes older,

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a
mere sequence--
Or development: the latter a partial fallacy,
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of
disowning the past. (CPP 132)
Here Eliot rejects simple notions of cause and effect, of
a chronology of events leading to a perceivable end.
These "Bridges" ultimately collapse to reveal the abyss,
the gap which interferes with sequencing and defines the
"bridge" as artifice. The problematical nature of
meaning seems to present itself more forcefully in the
latter stages of life, for it is -now that the poet
understands "We had the experience, but missed the
meaning,/ And approach to the meaning restores the
experience/ In a different form" (CPP 133). According
to Michael Beehler,
"Behind the assurance/ Of recorded history”--behind, that is, the

patterned hermeneutics of the closed book in which words always arrive at their
meaningful destinations--lies the difference of the ineffable that the book cannot
account for, the difference that emerges from history as a "primitive terror,”
that erodes the book's assurance of closure.
Never fixed, meaning recreates itself at every moment;
signifiers and signifieds are divided and attached to new
partners. The very quest for, the "approach Eom sii sei
redeploys differance. Like the river, even our moments of
agony have only "such permanence as time has" (CPP 133).
Never stable, never truly "still," experience is
diacritical and polysemous. "For our own past is covered
by the currents of action! (GPP 133).
Having well established the deceptions of
metaphysical "certitudes," Eliot attempts to express here
and elsewhere in Four Quartets the indeterminacy which flows
from differance. Scofield's complaint, therefore, must fall
on deaf ears if we are to be at all attentive to what the
poet accomplishes. Within the "unity" of differance as is
the case with The Waste Land, Eliot sets in relation several
poetic and prosaic styles which are not meant for
blending, but rather as expression of the polysemous
nature of experience. Prose and poetry, the flatness of
quasi-philosophical discourse and the rhythms of music--
all set in relation as both macrocosm and microcosm, the
latter representing Eliot's own many faceted career.
Meaning, then, is not so much "confused" as it is multi-
faceted and, at its core, perhaps, in contradiction.
This, of course, is precisely Derrida's view. All

The Silent Word 247
seemingly unified structures carry within themselves the
act of their own erasure. Similarly, the aesthetic unity
which is Four Quartets bears within its "complete consort!
those elements which prohibit unity. If "Fair forward,"
according to Scofield, indicates a definite progression
towards a projected destination, while "the way forward
is the way back" (CPP 134) undermines the progression,
then that is the outcome of Eliot's attempt to evoke a
sense of indeterminacy. "Fare forward" suggests not the
possibility of ultimate resolution, but rather the value
which adheres to the quest for its own sake since "For
us, there is only the trying" and "Old men ought to be
explorers." Certainly Eliot's description of the voyage
makes clear its polysemous, indeterminate structure:
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past

Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.
And do not thing of the fruit of action. (CPP 134)
As context shifts, as both signs and people move from one
place to another, they remade, re-valuated, for "The
river is within us." To "think of the fruit of action"
is perhaps beside the point in an arena marked by
constant shift, endless regeneration

The final sections of "The Dry Salvages" lead us
back to Eliot's acceptance of the relational nature of
experience, an act of faith which, farm from rejecting
differance, rather infuses it with a sense of spirituality.
Recalling the Lady of "Ash Wednesday," the poet petitions
her sympathy for the builders of bridges, for "Those
concerned with every lawful traffic" (CPP 135). Since
"to apprehend/ The point of intersection of the timeless/
With time, is an occupation for the: saint(s,)fea |Forwmest
of us, there is only the unattended/ Moment, the moment
in and out of time" (CPP 136)--"unattended" perhaps
becauses not fully conscious; ab fat. aie Nevertheless
"These are only hints and guesses," and "The hint half
guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation" (CPP
136). Once again Eliot suggests the figure of Christ as
one of radical indeterminacy. And if in the figure "past
and future/ Are conquered, and reconciled," nevertheless
what is represented is "the impossible union," "actual"
only as impure sign marking differance. Here and only here
is the impossible made possible, in a contradiction of
terms, within the sign's own self-effacing function. The
sign, always already deconstructed, is never resolution
in the sense of rest; rather it is characterized by
movement, "And has in it now source of movement" (CPP 136).

The Silent Word 249
"The Dry Salvages," Hugh Kenner concludes, offers
man a fabrication of the absolute in lieu of that
totality's absence. "This," kenner writes, "is what our
least time-ridden moments can give us, not timelessness
but a glimpse of it; hence to decide that we live for
those moments is to be content with the parody of the
real. nl6 But this is no criticism of Eliot's quest.

Sealed }within «thes Gdiacritical “world;) mani=has= no
alternative but to "construct something/ Upon which to
rejoice." Four Quartets is . one such construction, a
collection of differences proposing itself as an
aesthetic unity. Eliot accepts this, knowing that we
"are only undefeated/ Because we have gone on trying' We,
content at the last/ If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)/ The life of significant
soil" (CPP 137). Since deconstruction, while exposing
the indeterminate world, produces more and more meaning,
more and more world, perhaps our own inevitable and
personal "deconstructions" should satisfy.
Grover Smith is certainly correct when he remarks of
Four Quartets that
As Eliot's poetry repeatedly shows, history, whether conceived of as the

life span of a nation, or as a cultural pursuit like poetry, or at the simplest as the
total acts of a man, is meaningful only in the present instant where meaning is
apprehended. '7
Hence, "all time is eternally present." But Smith does

not question here the problematical nature of a present
divided against itself, composed always as a
restructuring of past events, both here and there
simultaneously. What issues from the present moment,
i.e., the past and future, is thus already inscribed
within the present as the impurity of that moment.
Whichever version of "presence" we choose to investigate,
we find that its identification, its meaning, depends on
its conceptual relation with what is absent. To suggest
that the past and future are chimeras does no good since
presence remains contingent and so never self-identical.
KiLetiicr Gidding! Gs7otssblaon's) aiiirmmat2ons o. ara
self-identical moment out of time. Rather as Hugh Kenner
Polmuse, moult, it constitutes linguistic "paradox,
metamorphosis" and not "the wistful apprehension of
invisible presences."'® "It is a place," Kenner

continues, "where intentions alter,"'? where
what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end your figured
And is altered in fulfillment. (CPP 139)
If there 1s any truth to Eliot's claim in "Tradition and
the Individual Talent" that the present alters the past,
then these lines may be justly read as Derridaen.
Intention and meaning are not unified. In the case of

The Silent Word 251
language--more to the point, in the case of Eliot's poem-
-what the poet intends, perhaps the ultimate object of
the poetic quest, offers itself as an empty sign,
something quite different from the transcendental Word.
According to Gregory Jay, "Undoing the temporal and
historical structure of figural interpretation, Eliot's
fulfillments break their
figurae, reach back and alter the purposes of signs."
Intention itself is problematical, marked by the
possibility of self-deception. The word "breaks" may be
understood as both a fracturing and a reference to the
breaking of ocean waves. The latter reading is made
possible by the image of the shell, and is reinforced by
Eliot's previous images of the sea and the river. What
is important, of course, is that both readings convey the
sense of indeterminacy. What is inadvertently achieved,
that which "you can for," is effected, "broken" (in the
sense of breaking loose), only when it occurs, signalling
the difference between indeterminate intention and
indeterminate action. Read the other way, when intention
yields, however accidentally, its object, the unity of
intention and action breaks, or fractures. This co—
dependency, inevitably read in and into Eliot's lines, is
again the domain of differance which both differentiates and
defers the sought after purity, ensuring that the cogency

of each sign relies on its contingent nature. The
language of the poem, like that of the past, continually
enters into new relations with new signs and new readers.
"The poet, then," Jay writes,
working at this actual level, accepts the inevitable transfiguration of the

authority and words by others in their interpretations, accepts the new worlds
of meaning that break, “If at all," beyond the end the poet figured, constantly
altering his text in new fulfillments.”7!
Differance , On sethatw. whveh occupies, at least
figuratively, the distance between objects/words, is then
the subject of the opening stanza of "Little Gidding":
Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat.
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense that blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and
freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no early smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's convenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero Summer? (CPP 138)
The oxymoron, "Midwinter spring," violates the strict
order of the seasons, and by extension interferes with

all regulated orders considered "natural," exposing those
The Silent Word 253
dogmatic designations as imposed on experience. LUDafoya
undoing of classifications . .. [releases] the burden of
stamping a single identity on disparate objects
[which obscures] the difference that makes possible the
abstraction producing the signifier."*? Though some may
find conflict between "Midwinter spring" and the cycle of
seasons with which The Waste Land opens, the two contend not
as contraries, but rather as different approaches to the
same result. What is pointed to in The Waste Land is here
pointed out. The poet imaginatively locates himself
"beyond" the diacritical activity of experience and
within the function of differance as the distance "between
Dole and troprc.7 2. . trost and tire, / 2... melting
and freezing." Here "Stirs the dumb spirit" as
"pentecostal fire," divided only in the imagination from
the objects of time so that "There is no earth smell/ Or
SnelimOrm ll VvVingm ching, | ands thus separated |trom athe
fire's destructive function. This spring is also winter,
an imagined paradox that finds no empirical referent,
"neither budding nor fading,/ Not in the scheme of
generation." such symbols may work within the realm of
poetry to signify differance. But diferance is finally a
function of experience and not a place to be occupied.
"Where is the summer," Eliot asks, "the unimaginable/

Zero summer?" Eliot knows that human cognition is the
antithesis of the "Zero"; our apprehension depends always
on the sign which must expose its contingency. Twenty-
nine years after the publication of "Prufrock," Eliot
still finds it "impossible to say what I mean (CPP 6).
Both "Midwinter spring" and "Zero summer," intended
perhaps to signify what lies behind signification, find
their references inscribed nowhere but within their own
diacritical structures. Twenty-three years after Four
Quartets, in his Of Grammatology, Derrida re-valuates the
fallen state of language for contemporary readers:
"Signifier of the signifier” describes . . . the movement of language: in its

origin, to be sure, but can already suspect that an origin whose structure can
be expressed as "Signifier of the signifier" conceals and erases itself in its own
production. There the signified always already functions as a signifier. The
secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all
signifieds in general, affects them always already, the moment they enter rhe
game. There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play
of signifying references that constitute language.**
So England may represent both "now" and "then,"
"here" and "there," since each signature carries traces
of the others:
If you came this way

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
The Silent Word 255
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of
the living
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always. (CPP 139)
Here "Little Gidding" undoes the terror of the eternal
return of the same as futile and stagnant repetition.
What is repeated is always transfigured, changed, re-
valuated as a relational event restructuring the past and
future. Eliot has arrived "where we started," at the
Weradition of 'Traditivon and the aindiviidualerTalent "ste
"know the place for the first time" (CPP 145). If the
language of the dead--certainly that of Eliot's absent
masters whose spirits haunt so much of his poetry--"is
tongued with fire beyond the language of the living,"
then that is due to the present's re-valuation of what is
never fixed and stagnant, to the intersection of past and
present that differance makes possible. The pentecostal
fire, that which burns without burning out, images the
necessary ploysemy, the speaking in tongues, which
evidences the endless creativity of deconstruction.
Thus time is conquered not through abdication but
through immersion. The images of oppressive cyclical
activity which partially characterize the opening of The
Waste Land now give way to a sense of freedom:

256. The Fire and The Rose
This is the use of memory:

For liberation--not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. (CPP 140)
Liberation does not involve the banishing of desire, but
rather a new understanding of what drives human endeavor.
This new understanding "encompasses" desire and so
represents an expansion. Desire, in pointing always to
some end, reaches for its own obliteration, and so
contains its contradiction as a necessary element of its
structure. The poem that wishes to occur beyond desire
is nevertheless forever marked by that which it desires to
leave behind. Without such interaction, the poem, like
the place it names "where prayer has been valid," could
not, occur at ‘alll--=and’” ats formalizations, “to be
interpreted and reinterpreted in time, participate in the
open ended field of experience which ensures ongoing
creativity and so reflects and repeats the world's
original and indeterminate making.
"Little Gidding" does not so much close on a life
and career as open them up to the diacritical world by
setting their fragments in relation, by accepting the
delimited and delimiting nature of those fragments.
The long stanza which closes the second section of
"Little Gidding" reconstitutes, in the guise of the
poet's communication with his own and absent precursors,

The Silent Word VAST
the conflation of past, present, and future:
The First met stranger in the waning dusk

I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable. (CPP 140)
Mhe> "ghost, “likes thew 'Zero,") is oth available: and
displaced by symbolic representation, sign and enigma.
"Both one and many," i.e., one signifier bearing the
traces of many, the compound appropriates the spirits and
words of Yeats, Dante, Marllarmé, Poe, Shakespeare,
Arnold, and no doubt others, reactivating all within the
contexteol Mhitule Gidding sas Lacets ofithe poet, Eliot,
ostensibly speaking the lines. Eliot's own identity
seems vague, "ghostlike," ge selavey — Aleieiohe, . “eke ies
participation in the compound. "So I assumed a double
part," Eliot writes, "I was still the same,/ Knowing
myself yet being someone other" (CPP 141).
The "Ghost , tt of course, recalls Hamlet, of
Shakespeare's tragedies perhaps the one most concerned
with the problems of identity. But this ghost approves
ef Fliot's method, ji.e., ©f a ‘poem constructing “its
present out of the past:
Last year's fruit is eaten

And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice. (CPP 141)
.258 The Fire and the Rose
What is completed, as complete, and like the "husk of
meaning," "kicks the empty pail." The bringing to life
of the past requires “another voice," and a new
interpretation. In this way the ghosts of the past, as
well as that of the present, "find words I never thought
to speak/ In streets I never thought I should revisit/
When’ I) left my body? ton» a’ ‘distant ‘shore™. (CPP.141)<
Eliot's translation of Marllarmé's line, "Since our
concern was speech, and speech impelled us/ To purify the
dialect “of the “tribe "(GPP "141) 7 recalls "ther tonmbaer
Edgar Poe" and so recovers both Marllarmé and Poe, just
as Marllarmé had revitalized the rejected Poe in his own
work. Through the processes of repetition, re-
integration, and reinterpretation, Eliot's own present is
made possible as an open ended structure available to the
future. More than an “empty pail," the voices of the
past participate in the ongoing diacritical process of
ereativity. "So with your own," the ghost remarks to
Eliot, "and pray they be forgiven/ By others, as I pray
you to forgive/ Both bad and good" (CPP 141).
Into this mix Eliot adds the "refining fire" of
Dante. The craft of Eliot's poetry,” so much ‘of ie

learned from this singular master, may reveal the open
ended nature of the one in language and experience,

The Silent Word ‘g59
whereas in the hands of the lesser poet, this "truth" is
concealed:
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.
(CPP P2342)
Yeats' "dancer," who is conjoined with the dance in the
function of differance, is here merged with the image of the
pentecostal fire that burns an eternity, at every moment
assuming a new shape, with every "new work" reinventing
the past in the present in preparation for the future.
The conflation of time makes impossible a position
"Between two worlds" (CPP 141), neither participating in
present experience. Arnold's fear is here allayed by the
ghost who ensures that through the activity of
repetition, 'two worlds become much like each other" (CPP
141)--"much like," yet not identical, for even their
Similarities depend on differance. This is made clear as
the ghost takes its leave. What Shas, occurned the
interaction of ghost and poet who at the "current" moment
sets pen to paper, takes place "In the disfigured street"
(CPP 142), both within discontinuous experience and, on
a smaller scale, the disunity which informs the "unity"
of Four Quartets. In the words of Gregory Jay,

The allusion does more than just effect a neat symmetry between the all-clear
siren [following the bombing of London] and the crowing of the cock that
dismissed Hamlet's father. . . . The street has been "disfigured" as well as
transfigured. The puns on the former term include ruination, depopulation, and
the confusion of destruction. But on this literary street, disfiguration also
means the compounding of various poetic "figures" into this "dead master.”
Language has disfigured experience and made a strange place accessible.
The act of writing violates the calm of supposed securities, marks the
whiteness of the page and moment with a darkness into which we read.
Reading starts with the illegible, and the illegible is its end. Reading repeats the
act of disfiguring/transfiguring as it produces yet another pattern of language
every interpretation an epitaph. That pattern in turn appears illegible to the
future that castrates, murders, loves, and resurrects it.*
The "empty pail," the mere "husk of meaning," perhaps
even Swinburne's "hallucination of meaning," are kept at
bay by a continuing round of interpretive possibilities.
For as Eliot writes at the close of his essay on
Swinburne, the language most important to us is "that
which is struggling to digest and express new objects,
new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects. "*
Depending on one's "point of view" (to return to the
terminology of Knowledge
and Experience, “History may be
servitude,/ History may be freedom" (CPP 142). From the
point of view of "Little Gidding," however, "The faces
and places [vanish] with the self which, as it could,
loved them,/ To become renewed, transfigured in another
pattern" (CPP 142). All self-enclosed "unities"
including that ef ‘the idea’ of self-presence, find
themselves de-mythologized by the interpretive process.

The self in "Little Gidding," compounded by traces of
past masters, is swept as well by the currents of the
The Silent Word 261
river*that ‘lies "within us"; it is,oin Derrida's:terms,
marked always by the traces of what it is not, by
presence/absence, neither one nor the other. Much more
than an empirical or metaphysical "body," the self is
recreated beyond physical death in the words the poet
leaves behind, and this restructuring is repeated again
and again as the embodiment of a future already
inhabiting the self-effacing signature of the present
moment.
Grover Smith's summation of the import of Four
Quartets, though composed nearly ten years before Derrida
made his own "mark" on western literary criticisn,
nevertheless carries the trace of what is to come. Smith
writes that "all perplexities, whether social, aesthetic,
personal, or intellectual, come from a need for God. "2é
This is certainly what Derrida, and Eliot, have in mind,
for it is the quest, the desire, for the absolute, for
that which both signifies and erases the self-identical,
that continually redeploys differance, and is itself made
possible and cogent in the act of redeployment. If, as
Eliot claims in Knowledge

and Experience, all ideas must
have their objects, then the idea of God must necessarily
Geferswtoual real) object. But, as Eliot makes clear, the
reality of objects is contingent upon the extent of their

relations. The object which adheres to "God" is real, but
only because it is contingent and not self-identical. As
an idea/object complex, it finds its existence only in
the relational/diacritical field of experience. The
absolute, like the intent of past masters, appears as an
essential absence at the core writing--and all
experience, as Derrida points out, is a writing in that
it is characterized by the continual reactivation of
differance. We cannot win free of the abyss, except through
faith that the quest is its own reward:
We cannot revive old factions

We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum
The men, and those who opposed
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us--a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching. (CPP 143)
The "perfect" and present symbol is thus marked by
absence, its purification the acceptance of differance which
is, both in the sense of geographical place (the chapel
and its relation, both in myth and at the present moment,
to the quest.) and the origin of language, the

The Silent Word .263
"ground" of our prayer, our desire, our writing.
"The only hope, or else despair," Eliot says as he
begins to conclude, "Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
#10, be xredeemed from fire by fire" (CPP 144),. to be
relieved from destruction by yet more de[con]struction.
If in "Burnt Norton" this process seems "ridiculous," in
"Little Gidding" Eliot decides that Love "devised the
torment," for "We only live, only suspire/ Consumed by
either fire or fire" (CPP 144). The positioning of
"only" degrades life even as "Love" provides life's
value, ensuring the proper balance of humility.
This "humble stance" now turns its gaze towards the
field of language which, ever since Knowledge and Experience,
is acknowledge by Eliot as the vehicle of all thought,
ale: knowledge:~*’
The end is where we start from. And every phrase

and sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
The common world exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentenceis an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them. (CPP 144)
The poet of "Little Gidding," like Prufrock, knows "the

voices dying with a dying fall" (CPP 5) and does not
presume. But here the hoped for resurrection is made
possible through the reincarnation of the dead through
the reinterpretation that differance engenders. Without
history's diacritical process, without a tradition in
which the present alters and recreates the past, there
can be no life, no meaning, no value, for "A people
without history/ Is not redeemed from time, for history
is a pattern/ Of timeless moments" (CPP 144) --"timeless"
because never fixed as a determined chronology, but
bearing always the traces of "all time." A "complete
consort", [my italics] the poem unifies in the very act
of marking the place of difference, ensuring the ongoing
"dance" of interpretation.
As Hugh Kenner notes in The Invisible

Poet, “The finale
of Little Gidding fends off nothing. it. as "a: pearly
unprecedented triumph of style."*® Eliot's conflation of
the images of rose and fire amounts to an aesthetic
"unity" which nevertheless must be taken, in current
Derridaean terminology, as supplement, as provisional, as
a construction "Upon which to rejoice." What is
seemingly unified, complete, and resolved is in
fact yet another starting point. "We shall not cease
from exploration," Eliot admits, "And the end of all our

The Silent Word 7265
exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know
tne” place “ror” the “first time’ YCPP%145)) not as
completion but as the repetition of an originating
violence which interferes with absolute unity. We are
returned "Through the unknown, remembered gate" (CPP 145)
to the vision of the garden in "Burnt Norton," and so to
the possibility of deception. Furthermore, as Gregory
Jay points out,
Eliot ends reenvisioning Dante's paradisial end... . Disfigured by Eliot, the

vision incorporates an image of passionate and destructive change in the
connotations now carried by flame and fire. The fire combines the actions of
disintegration and revision in producing its transfigurations of the past.29
Dante is thus re-valuated within the tradition by the new
work, and so is offered as both closure and opening, as
end and as new beginning. The rose of poetry, its
"symmetry" perhaps, finds its articulation as symbol only
as a condition of the absence of symmetry, its
"permanence" only in the mutable, destructive,
deconstructive fire of creativity. Such is the case of
immediate experience, that "ghostly presence" whose
absence haunts the world in Knowledge

and Experience. To
recover here the words of Jacques Derrida from our first
chapter, in the light of what has been said about T.S.
Eliot, is to re-valuate them as commenting retroactively
on Eliot's method. Let us do so:

The universe articulates only that which is in excess of everything, the essential
nothing on whose basis everything can appear and be produced within language
.... this excess is the very possibility of writing and of literary inspiration in
general. Only pure absence--not the absence of this or that, but the absence of
everything in which all presence is announced--can inspire, in other words, can
work, and then make one work.?°
Our knight has indeed arrived at the chapel to find
"only the wind's home" (CPP 49). Buty Chis! Winadest ics
creativity. The "crowned know of fire" (CPP 145) that
"Closes" "Little Gidding" recalls "gifts reserved for
age/ {that] crown upon your lifetime's effort” (CPP 147)
offered by the ghost--a crown that will be again passed
alongin the open ended trading between past, present and
future. Revisioned by the final three lines of "Little
Gidding," and as the pentecostal and polysemous "tongues
of flame “are in-folded” (CPP 145), “Elist's “crowning
achievement" turns endlessly against itself to produce
this poet's finest symbol of the differance that marks all
unities, of the abyss that is also salvation.

play
the "Title of nathis o“conclusion" is,,.of:course,a
deconstructive pun. Since deconstruction cannot, in good
conscience, admit that there is an end to any discourse,
we shall "leave" our study in the capable hands of those
critics who may wish to uncover its relations with other
texts. But before we do, it is perhaps advisable to
address what has thus far been absent, i.e., the issue of
El256t*\s (playsss Considered sbymost.critics «as» artistic
failures, these attempts at verse drama remain a less
than shining addendum to a brilliant career. As both
Gregory Jay and Michael Beehler point out, following the
lead of Grover Smith and Hugh Kenner, the plays function
primarily as therapy for a poet still struggling with the
guilt of abandoning his first wife. Phough Bk vo Lesa s
hardly an admirer of Freud's theories, he nevertheless
finds himself utilizing the symbology of poetry to plumb
the depths of his own guilty conscience in an attempt to
make peace, if not with Vivienne, at least with himself.
P#nis sis not surprising since, as ~our, ~introduction
asserts, Freud's psychological scaffolding influenced
many of the twentieth century's celebrated writers. The
more obvious "students" of Freud include Joseph Conrad
267
and D.H. Lawrence. But certainly James Joyce's novels
also owe a great deal to the theories of psychoanalysis;
and Eliot's close acquaintance, Conrad Aiken, though
perhaps not possessing the literary stature of Joyce, was
nevertheless one of first novelists/poets to utilize
Freud's theories as scaffolding for his art. Eliot
cannot have escaped what had, in his time, permeated both
the artistic and scientific communities.
Depth psychology, “however; “as) /notl iouxm Biecus,
Similarly, Eliot's efforts to exorcise personal demons
Ive beyond the (scope Of Ehismstudys seiimas;,.oOfmcourse,
true that deconstruction admits the interrelation of
texts, including those of a distinctly psychological
nature. Nevertheless, our stated purpose prohibits a
fresh, and (frankly €angential » investigation. PiLiethis
aspect of the plays shall remain the road not taken, we
may still offer a quick glance down that road to suggest
whatever extensions or repetitions of deconstructive
themes wait there.
With the exception of Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot's
plays do little to advance either his reputation or his
philosophy. Even Murde

in the Cathedral,
r surely Eliot's most
accomplished play, suffers in comparison with Four Quartets
in which the theme of submission to temporal
imperfections is more fully and eloquently

Play 269
expressed. Nevertheless, Eliot's deconstructive themes
permeate all aspects of his literature, including the
plays. Two in particular, the aforementioned Murder

in the
Cathedral and The Family Reunion, like the poems simultaneously
work toward and against the possibility of
transcendence.
In Murderin the Cathedral (1935), Eliot examines the
desire for the complete sacrifice of the self to the
absolute. As Becket's response to the fourth tempter
indicates, the desire for a holy end prohibits rather
than appropriates that end, since what is willed by man
is not selfless but rather tainted by the imperfections,
the contingencies, which inform all human experience.
Becket's resistance to the forth tempter "begins the
process toward Four Quartets."' "Sin grown with doing
good," Becket says, recalling Gerontion's own complaint
that "Vice is fathered by our virtues." Each action
yields its opposite. In the temporal world, identity
remains a product of differences. Like Gerontion who has
"known them all already," Becket has tasted the
transitory pleasures of life, and has found them wanting.
He yearns instead to submit to a power greater than
himself, but this very desire falls between intention and
act and prevents the unity of the two. Whether we take
that greater power to mean the absolute, God, or the

7) The Fire and the Rose
cultural tradition which both alters and is altered by
the individual work of art, we are faced with the same
dilemma: how can we know that what we assume as
autonomous and transcendent is not merely "self-willed,"
and so contingent? Becket believes that if the true
martyr loses his will in God's will, he becomes “the
transparence of God's word." 2 The sermon which forms the
play's interlude captures the "essential" contingencies
at the heart of faith:
A Christian martyrdom is no accident. Saints ar not made by accident. Still

less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man’s will to become a Saint, as
aman by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. Ambition fortifies
the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception,
cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity. Not so in
Heaven. A martyr, a saint is always made by the design of God, for His love
of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. A
martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in
the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission
to God. 3
God's design is beyond man's control, beyond his
relational understanding. To be free is to submit. The
Saints are "most high, having made themselves most low"
(CPP 200). Becket's, and of course Eliot's, description
of absolute truth asserts that somehow, somewhere, all
differences are erased, a rational impossibility since
that would entail the obliteration of identity. Nearly
twenty years after Knowledge

and Experience was written, Eliot
is still -manipulating the concept “of immediate
experience, that "unity" which is somehow one with the
temporal world's lack of unity. The "difference," of

Play 271s
course, is that by the time of Murd

in the er
Cathedral,
Eliot comes to terms with what "falls apart upon
inspection," and takes it at its "Word."
Man is left, at least in the temporal world, with
the only knowledge available to him: that the irrational
underwrites human experience. Only faith may raise the
irrational to an object of worship. "So thus," Becket
says, “as on earth the Church mourns and rejoices at
once, in a fashion the world cannot understand" (CPP
200).
In the terminology of deconstruction, the true
martyr is posited as the signifier perfectly united with
the signified, erasing the gap between intention and act.
But in the temporal world man cannot know this unity, and
the very belief in, or desire for, such a possibility is
riven by contingencies.
Becket's ultimate response to his tempters, like
Mot. Soul ft SmmehrSown rant that God mCOontrols | wa ll
destinies. But faith, conceptualized and propagated by
man, is itself bound within human experience, its meaning
for Becket dependent upon its seeming opposition to what
is self-serving.
Most major critical approaches to The Family Reunion
view it as tracing Harry's spiritual quest to reintegrate
his psyche, and to reconcile differences between the past

and the present. The title of the play suggests "the
controllable circling of family members around a home,
the site at which their different journeys and lives can
be recovered in a moment of reunion."* Wishwood, the
ancestral homes Harry "wishes" to recover, inevitably
suggests the recovery of childhood innocence and so the
erasure of intervening time and guilt. The conversation
between Agatha and Amy in the first scene formulates the
_ struggle to recapture what has been lost:
Agatha: It going to be rather painful for Harry

After eight years and all that has happened
To come back to Wishwood.
] mean painful, because everything is irrevocable,

Because the past is irremediable,
Because the future can only be built
Upon the real past.
Adaption is hard.
Amy: Nothing is changed, Agatha, at Wishwood.

Everything is kept as it was when he left it,
Except the old pony, and the mongrel setter
Which I had to have destroyed.
Nothing has been changed. I have seen to that.
(CPPS 228)
Of course, much has changed despite Amy's conviction.
Even she has had "to have destroyed" and so marks the
difference between past and _ present. As Agatha
intimates, in willing a unity of past and present, Amy in
fact exposes their distance from one another:

Player S26
Agatha: Yes, I mean that at Wishwood he will find

another Harry.
The man who returns will have to meet
The boy who left. Round by the stables,
In the coach-house, in the orchard,
In the plantation, down the corridor
That led to the nursery, round the corner
Of the new wing, he will have to face him--
And it will not be a very jolly corner.
When the loop in time comes--and it does not come
for body--
The hidden is revealed, and the spectres show
themselves. (CPP 229)
What is hidden, in Harry's case, is his guilt over his
wife's "falling" overboard. But also hidden is the
admission of how far Harry has come from his moment of
innocence, if ever it existed. The "loop in time," where
the beginning and end join hands, is at once a unifying
process and a reminder of the distance which one has
travelled to get from there to here. Put another way,
the achieved "unity" is always already deconstructed in
that it assumes, it establishes as part of its own
cogency and necessity, the fact of disharmony. A "unity"
by definition entails more than one element, and so marks
the place where differance operates.
This undermining of seeming "wholes" repeats itself
throughout the play. "Henry's love for Mary would be
haunted by his dead wife, as each fresh start is haunted
by what it repeats in the very act of erasure."° even
Agatha's faith that to worship in the desert undoes the

.274 The Fire and the Rose
knot of family, of contingencies, of repetition,
commands little credence, for we have seen how deeply Harry's life roots down
in the family, seen that one more exile may be only a repetition of his father's
life abroad. His expiation seems a contrived escape from the play's supposed
lesson: that the burdens of the past are inescapable. The desertis his own
heart; the waste land is here and in England.®
And, in fact, Harry has already repeated his father's
crime of a passionless marriage, and the wish to rid
himself of his spouse.
Repetition, as deconstructionists continually
stress, ensures difference for if repetition is possible,
then what is repeated cannot be self-identical. This
holds most true for language. Harry insists that
language is all abstraction, that there are no words for
the non-contingent. "Everything is true," he declares,
"in a different sense" (CPP 236). But if this is true,
then language itself interferes with the family's attempt
to "commune"-icate. If everything is true ina different
sense, then language is the record of indeterminacy.
In accepting "truth" as meta-linguistic, as
mystical, Harry, Amy and Agatha seemingly escape an end
which merely repeats the beginning. Inevitably, however,
Harry's "exile" does recall the "original" division
between his father and mother on which the family is
founded. As Michael Beehler points out,
In the Eumenides is recalled not only the authority of the father, the supposed
head of the family, but also the original decapitation of that head and the
dispersal of familial authority. In Greek legend the Eumenides have their origin
in the blood of the father's severed genitals, and thus the . . "fathering root”
Play (275
ats simultaneously the story of the castrating interference that frays the
genealogical line out of which the family is originally constituted.’
Harry's "phantoms" are neither simply inside nor outside
(CPP 269). His quest is forward into indeterminacy, for
"Now I know/ That the last apparent refuge, the safe
shelter,/ That is where one meets them. That is the way
Or Spectres . . ., {CPP 280). As Eliot writes in Four
Quartets, "What we call the beginning is often the end/ And
to make an end is to make a beginning./ The end is where
we start from" (CPP 144). The "source," whether we meet
Peat the beganning (or =e the send) redeploys™* the
indeterminacy of the world for man. To begin is
meaningless without an end. To end is not to erase the
journey, but to establish it and create what is then
known to be the beginning, and know it for the first time
in the act of repeating it. Like Becket who must put his
faith in what he cannot determine, Harry of The Family
Reunion realizes that his joy is in exploring without end.
Like Harry, Eliot wields his faith in the desert.
In recent years the stock of deconstruction has been
devalued, largely due to the misuse of Derrida's
methodology by its American practitioners. Instead of
following every strand of Derrida's complex weave,
critics such as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller have
focused on literature's underlying contradictions and

‘976 The Fire and the Rose
seeming disruption of interpretive certitude, setting
deconstruction at odds with previous approaches, like the
New Criticism, and leaving the method open to charges of
nihilism. Derrida, however, never intends such a
totalization, for all summations, all certitudes, whether
they be that literature is meaningful or meaningless,
violate the deconstructive process which is never, in any
sense, finished. Meaninglessness always leads back to
meaning, since both concepts carry the trace of the other
within them. Deconstruction does not settle on one or
the other, but rather occupies the "space" between the
two, exposing their interdependence as the weave of
language.
The New Historisists have also, most recently,
criticized deconstruction for its neglect of historical
context which, they claim, limits the "free play" of
language. But this criticism is again directed at the
American version of the methodology, at those American
critics who are more likely to ignore history than is
Derrida.
In addition to attacks mounted on theoretical
grounds, deconstruction has also suffered from the
unsettling revelations of Paul de Man's former sympathies
with fascism. As was the case with Ezra Pound, whose
fascist sympathies encouraged some artists and critics to
suspect the moral consequences of Modernism, de Man's

Play 277
past similarly comments on the present of deconstruction,
as well as present, and often too convenient misreadings
of Derrida's method. In this study, by bringing the
present to bear upon the past, we have redefined to some
extent our view of T.S. Eliot. In like manner we have
attempted to rescue deconstruction from the charge of
"radicalism" by establishing its link to at least one
time honored poet. It must be remembered, however, that
to demonstrate similarities is simultaneously

to mark the
differences, for no two events may be "likened" to each
other without the admission that they are fwo events. A
continuity we have, and perhaps a "unity"--but if the
Batter cit dis .a unity that marks,-the. distance,, both
temporal and temperamental, between two men: the one who
kneels before the unknown, and the one who stands.

Endnotes
SUPPLEMENT: AN INTRODUCTION
ic Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976) 7p. 8
oa Richard Shusterman, T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of

Criticism (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd., 1899),
Wy Bs
3.3 Gerald Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Bruns' study
analyzes Classical and Romantic theories of language and
their relations to contemporary linguistic theory. See
also Jonathan Culler, Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of
Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) and
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critial
Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).
Al Quetedminy LbiGd sap. lor
Sic Shelley's Prose: or, The Trumpet of Prophecy, ed. David Lee
Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1954) 760. “278%
68 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans.

James Strachey (New York: Wo Wa) Noston and Cot, Inc ‘
TOGiA ere: Vie
CHAPTER ONE: THE WORD
is Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics,

trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
WMS) elo. Aer
De Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans.

Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang,
1968), pp. 10-11, 45-46.
278.
Endnotes 279
Ste Jonathan Culler, On Deconstructi Theory and on:

Criticism
after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982),
PeV6.
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 9.
Ibid, pp. 65-67.
Forde pes 20.
thrid, ps 120:
EDiG> p= 672
ibrlay pp. 13-14.
Tbid, pz 14.
TOPPA pewy or
Weel. Belo fis
TBlopusl isi She
Of Grammatology, p. 23.
Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 94.
Gs Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 120.
yes Positions, Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University

OheChicagosPress,, 198i) pp. 39-40%
Ow INSANE. ISISio GE)
on On Deconstruction, pp. 99-100.
ZO%e Wesel. a5. Seo
Zale Ferdinand
de Saussure (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1986), p. 140.
ER Mlsuncl. js Lc
aie Ioaeel, To, Gilby
24. On Deconstruction, p. 100.

25. Of Grammatology, pp. 7-8.
26" Thid, peers:
DY IRCSIOIES , joe “2c
28. Writing
and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 4.
20.5 Ibidy pple4-s5:
30; bideep:as:
315 ibid:
22...) Mbads yp: 25.
33. On Deconstruction, p. 133.
34. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 28.
Kony NSapis
36.4 JED10 eps eb7e.

Do Alloakely fers al7Viciehs
se Vietpia,. opie:
49. “Ihedadp ii 6s *
40. Ibiay prares
dis Ibid, p. 18%
42. Ibidwipe Poi.
AS 611d, pelons
445. Tbids
AD ea Lbidgapp. 192-935
£6 oi SI DLO). Dee toa.

47. Ibid, pp. 278-79.
46. Teta) py ue
Endnotes 281
49. Ibid, pn. 230).
50. ~ibiay p. 239".
52... .fbia@, p:- 292%
52.5 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of

Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press,
19vi Sip. IDS5<
Ba, bia, p. ire

S42. Ibid, p. 113.
65. Ibid, p.crr.
560. Phide
aes Ibid, ps. 117.

58. Of Grammatology, p. 289.
59. Blindness and Insight, p. 126.
Gilg “iilsesh
62. ibid, p. 250.
63. -16id, bp.) 247.
64. “Toid,; ip. 195.
65. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, £993). . -75-
66. Abid, p. 70:2
Gis aves!) «ise velte
68. Lbade
699i bdr
Or TW Cli is 74.
Wve ioiel;, jsye USE

Ue Wop
xe|e
73. Iowko a Weve 7/Shc
74. TbLaspwb a7 6%
Gye Course in General Linguistics, p. 21.
USS Wail Won AG.
WH 1 PP e2o— 24s
CHAPTER TWO: THE WORD WITHOUT A WORD
lire Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. Ors
Aho igono Dr LPS
Bie I seks De Way
Ioysiel p. alee
Ibid) ps vise
ioaiel- p 19%5
Ibid, p 24
Ibid, p 105.
Ibia, p 12.
Ibid.
iol; jes. Aloye
ibid pec:
Weoley, jel, POS
WSC, Fao Hole
Woyiel, ja, Qh
IBiGer ewe
Endnotes 283
eis Ibid, p. PRS
Tor Ibid.
19's Ibid.
20. Ibid, Sis
ile Ibia, 22s
22. goesle 325,
Poe Ibid, 3 Gr=
24. Ibid, 24.
PASS Ibid, 355
Bis Ibia.
Zee Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29%. Ibid, 40.
30. Ibid, BON
Swe Ibia, 37%
S2e Ibid.
33% Ibid, BO
34. Ibid.
3D Ibia, 40.
BiOr Ibid.
Bi) & Ibid, 46.
38°. Ibid, ar.
3.9). Ibia, 44,
40. rDLd, Boy

41. did, 6. 25:

We, = aMoBWEL. Gory AWhe
ING ley
44. Ibid, +pthias:

45. iis)aite|
MGa Wish.
47) HUeia, pa dacs

MEYG INowiel
49. Ebidjip. oan

50. Michael Beehler, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the
Descourses
of Difference (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1989), p. 20.
syle Towel;
aoe GSibrase os 2h.

hind Wideate) «Gee eek
54. Thid,*p. 20.
55. Knowledge and Experience, p. 133.
56.0 Ibid pp. ols

57.) Lbids puis.
CHAPTER THREE: THE WORD WITHIN A WORD
lhe The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd.,

1960), pp. 49-50.
2 opie. Jel Ue).
on Ibid, pp. 53-54.
4. Ibid, pp. 49-50.

Endnotes) 985
oe Tbid, pp. 55-56.
6« E-P~ Bollier, »"f.S. Eliotyand F.sH. Bradley: A

Question of Influence," Tulane Studies in English, 12 (1963),
(9a MSs
ers "Leibniz's Monads and Bradley's Finite

Centres," Knolwedge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 202.
8 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 248.
9. After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1980), p. 165.
1Ove tron alt otrandeh.H. bradley. =A Ouestiron Of

intluence;" ps 92°.
11. The Letter of T.S. Eliot, 1898-1922, ed. Valerie Eliot

(New York: “Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988), p. 81.
12 Pel Oty) PRE ISACTed WO00G D... Sl
14. The Sacred Wood, p. 149.
Sr iMopicebe
16. Ibid, p. -250.

17. Eliot, Knowledge
and Experience, p. 44.
18. The Sacred Wood, p. 100.
19. R.P. Blackmur, "In the Hope of Straightening

Things Out,” Kenyon Review, 13 (1951), 307.
20. Northrop Frye, RES ik Lee (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 34.
21. As we will see later in this chapter, Eliot

perhaps never intended the "objective correlative" as a
formula for a fixed correspondence, and so is not liable
to the objections raised by many contemporary CElE1cs.
22 T.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher (West Lafayette:

Purdue University Press, 1979), p. 149.
Sho Eliot, "Leibniz's Monads and Bradley's Finite

CentGresme pemcoz.
24. T.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher, p. 126.
PND Knowledge and Experience, p. 134.
26. Freed, T.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher, p. TZ 6m
2 ke Knowledge and Experience, p. 132.
EMSC T.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher, p. 126.
aS) 5 Knowledge and Experience, p : La2
30. Thies p...s4%
31. Of Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber,

1957) Si2-GOr
To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber,

1965) Cais
T.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher, p. 154.
Of Poetry and Poets, p. 29.
ioniel, Gem She
Think mo. eo.

ieakeke
ioylel. isle Sie)e
Mewes joie Ske
Toidve gw. oi
Blindness and Insight, p. 168.
Knowledge and Experience, pg. 56.

Endnotes 287
43. Tatty Prise:

44, Of Poetry and Poets, p. 29.
45, Thid, p. 30.

46. Ibid.
47. ibid. pe. 91.
48. As the work of Jacques Derrida gained in

reputation, several "structuralists" were influenced by
Derrida's arguments. Barthe was among them, and
demonstrated toward the end of his career a willingness
to question the possibility of primary structures.
49. Of Poetry and Poets, p. 31.
50. iba:
Baie £Ebid:
52. EDU paeoie
Sy 5 Knowledge and Experience, p. 132.
54. Of Poetry and Poets, p. 31.
ie Wash; VIO, BaaIs-
5G. Saat Ais! 35s
ST T.S. Eliot: The Critic As Philosopher, p. 218.
See POV, Ps (4 O.
GiOhe T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected

Essays (New Welles” “NeteWerronihqe y Usigeveley Wiereltcl, AK)SON) Vela) eke
88.
Gul lenicls, Yoe Zk s
62. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 150.
637, Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," p. 287.


65. 1.S. Eliot, "Notes Towards the Definition of

Culture," Christian Culture (New York:
and ity Harcourt, Brace,
wieneeuaveniaelol, INGE), je5 ise
66." Thidyep. 96.

67. "The Metaphysical Poets," p. 289.
68. Tpid
69. "Dante," Selected

Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode
(NewsRvorks. Harcourt, Brace, mOVanoy Leh, 1975) Dem aeer
70. Whether or not Dante intended that his great poem

express an existent tradition is irrelevant. Dante was
"occupied" with such an expression in the sense that the
tradition "spoke" through his poem--a description with
which ia ey ah Se et ee as iy ll) Sle owt. gialolss a any
structuralist/poststructuralist would quibble.
fl. the Sacred Wood, p. 158 -
72. \"“'Seneca in Elizabethan Translation," Selected

Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 68.

74. Eliot, "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,"
We ABstele
Wey Abonicle Gey “Chl,
77. “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry," Selected Essays

(London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 46.
78. Eliot, "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,"

OJ ole

$0. Mbidoe pelo.

81. Eliot, "Leibniz's Monads and Bradley's Finite
INGAAS, a. PAW Ze.
Endnotes~ -9g9
82. "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,"

Db. S35
Sie ibid, p.
84, Enid Ig
oat Ebi p.
86. Ibid, oi
Sax a tO, pe kor:
88. ER SUS he p. VADs
89. Toe Pp. 143.
90. Ibid, Dr 203.
oul iLped 5 iD ies
9299-75id, 4p... L708

93. Writing
and Difference, p. 279.
94. See Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, for
thorough analyses of Plato's and Gorgias' contributions
to the history of language studies.
95. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, p. 134.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE WORD IN THE DESERT
a Blindness and Insight, p. 68.
25 "The book when we, as authors, separate

ourselves from it, exists impersonally, without requiring
the presence of a reader. Know that, among all human
accessories, it is the one that comes into being by
pESele tts made wandsexists, by itself."
3 Knowledge and Experience, pp. 19, 29.
tie The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (London: Methuen and

Cogn WESOIee tee akshs
5 T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1956), p. 15.
6. IMeKely. jojo ey ass.
qe The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt,

Brace, Jovanovich, ue gays UE All subsequent
references are to this edition, and are signalled by the
abbreviate. Ona OrE.
8. T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 16.
oe The Invisible Poet, p. 10.
Oe IBle)iys|
Lin@Ibids por, 10-day

126 Eliot, Whe Sacred Woods p.4 250i.
13. T7.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher, pp. 150-68.
14. Balachandra Rajan, "The Overwhelming

Question,"
T.S. Eliot: A Study of His Writing by Several Hands, ed. B. Rajan (New
York: "Shaske
lal sHoulsevlo64)i pees
WS ablejaieh.
16. T7.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 93.
17. After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934),

DPe os
= oi.
18. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed.

Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University
bemctetetss, USNS. jal PCa,
19. T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, p. 95.
20. T7.S. Eliot: The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988), p. 59.
21. T.S. Eliot's Poetry and’Plays, p. 57.

Endnotes 291
22. Creative Evolution, Trans. Arthur Mitchell (New

York: Modern Library Editions, 1944), p. 4. Bergson's
influence on Eliot may be considered minor in comparison
to that of Bradley, the symbolists, and even Peirce. As
Grover Smith correctly observes "Eliot's rejections of
Bergson's philosophy . . . , Eliot went beyond Bergson in
founding his theory of tradition upon a durée of the whole
literary past, not merely upon the survival of personal
experiences in memory. His description in "Tradition and
the Individual Talent" of how a new work
of art affects the "existing monuments" supposes,
however, a concept of creative evolution for which
Bergson, aS well as Gourmont, may have been responsible"
(T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 59. See also Eliot, Selected
PxSivS 9p. 5.
23. Smith, R.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 58.
94. Ibhie, p. 60.
25. The Invisible

Poet, p. 109.
26. Knowledge
and Experience, pp. 15-31.
27. T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 61.
28. On Deconstruction, pp. 248-49.
292) POSIIONS, PO. DO-5/ s
30 T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, p. 25.
31. "The Waste Land: Ur-text of Deconstruction,"

T.S. Eliot: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1985), p. 96.
S25 Betcl, oq SO-L)7'-
33. Ihe Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 281.
34. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot (New York: Octagon

Books, 974) 7) Die sleds
35. Virgil, Aeneid, Trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New

York: Random House, 1983), I, 726.
36. dhe Tempest, i, Wake

Pp. —9S=99r
3607? “rp ie ips ese

40. "The Idea of a Christian Society,: Christianity
and
Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), p.
es

je LOZ
42 Quecedmain Lbudy yp. 97.
GHAPTER FIVEs THE SILENLT WORD
Lis Christianity and Culture, p. 102.
PD Invisible Poet, p. 225.
or, I oiela
ie Epics to. vee.

5. Ibid, pp. 226-27.
6. bide pu .o2a.
Ge Christianity and Culture, p. 192.
8. T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference,

Diwmelo2.
10. 7.5. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference ,
11. T7.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, p. 219.
AiO Us
Endnotes 993:
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference,

pr Yay?
TS. Eliot: The Poems, p. 225.
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference,

Dp. 147.
The Invisible Poet, p. 270.
T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 292.
Phi. ps 72.
T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, p. 231.
Thid, p. 234.
Fhid; *plo232¢
Of Grammatology, p. 7.
T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History,

Da 247s
The Sacred Wood, p. 150.
T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 297.
Knowledge and Experience, p. 134
T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, p. 247.
Writing and Differences, p. 8.
PLAY
Jay, T.S. Eliot, and the Poetics of Literary History, p. 202.
THid = be204.
The Fire and the Rose
Bis Beehler, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of

Difference, pA 75s
4. Jay, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of

Difference, p. 209.
5. tidy pa sie:
6. Ibid.
he T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference,
990 QUA.
294
Bibliography
Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1953
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Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971.
Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. Annette

Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang,
LIVES <
Beehler, Michael. TS. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of

Difference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1987.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell.

New York: Modern Library Editions, 1944.
Blackmuiz,, 6h... P: "In the Hope of Straightening Things

Out Ue Kenvonsheview), als) (19505) S03 —3.1 47.
Bolgan, Anne. What the Thunder Really Said. Montreal:

McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973.
Bollier, E.P. "T.S. Eliot and F.H. Bradley: A Question

of Influence." Tulane Studies.in English, 12. (1963), 87=>
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Bradley, F.H. Appearance and Reality. 2nd ed. Oxford:

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Press, 1914.
Brooks, Cleanth. "The Waste Land: Critique of the

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Davidson, Harriet. T.S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and

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in The Waste Land. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
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Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Tans. Barbara Johnson.

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Of Grammatology . Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1976.
Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University

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Speechand Phenomena. Evanston: Northwestern

Writing
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The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Ed. Valerie Eliot.

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The Poems. Cambridge:
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and Kegan Paul, 1961.
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Symmons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature.

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Wislratepa tlc The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New

York: Random House, 1985.
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Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot. New

York: Octagon Books, 1974.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle. New York: Charles

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Wollheim, Richard. “EIQOt “and F.aH. Bradley: An

Account." — Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium. Ed. Graham
Martin. London: Macmillan, 1970.
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GUMBERG LIBRARY

THE FIRE AND THE ROSE

SALZBURG UNIVERSITY STUDIES

THE INSTITUT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK

PARIS LODRON UNIVERSITY, SALZBURG

THE FIRE AND THE ROSE

THE EDWIN MELLEN PRESS,

Cataloguing information for this volume

‘ SALZBURG STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

TO ORDER: ISBN: 0-7734-4222-7

North America: The Edwin Mellen Press

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

ite The Word ade

2 The Word Without a Word 59

Be The Word Within a Word 94

4. The Word in the Desert 143

5 The Silent Word 214

I am grateful to Professors Donald Pizer and Barry

Ahearn for their incisive comments and suggestions, and

to Vicki Oliva for her exemplary effort in preparing the

manuscript. I would also like to thank my wife, Reyna,

whose love and support kept me working during difficult

periods. My special thanks and deepest appreciation are

reserved for the late Professor E. P. Bollier without

whose unswerving direction, encouragement, and patience

this project could never have been brought to completion.

A portion of this study was delivered at the 1991

Christianity and Literature Conference at King's College

in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and appears in the

published proceedings of that conference.

"the essential nothing on whose basis everything can

appear and be produced within language, .. . spirits as

diverse as Delacroix, Balzac, Flaubert, Valéry, Proust,

f.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and many others had a sure

consciousness."!' The purpose of the following study is

to examine the deconstructive themes and methods

whitch wuantomm TS GElVoetlsy proseu and) spoeiny 7 Mandmto

demonstrate that, long before Derrida intervened in the

area of literary analysis, Eliot had already developed

the principles now "enshrined" as deconstruction.

For more than a decade western literary criticism

has been the site of philosophical and methodological

Crisis: on one side of the conflict, the traditionalists

and/or New Critics who cling to critical methods and

assumptions rooted in orderly metaphysical systems; on

the other side, the "renegade" deconstructionists whose

claims for the irrational structure of language mirror

what quantum physicists have discovered about the

physicai- wo“ld.-i.e., .that the order. of the universe

breaks down at the sub-atomic level.

Without exception, New Critics and their near

relations have assumed T.S. Eliot as one of their own.

Scholars such as Hugh Kenner, Grover Smith, Cleanth

Brooks, and Allen Tate, though diverse in their critical

styles, have each contributed major studies whose aims,

more or less, are to read Eliot's ironic stances in the

light of fixed poetic structures. Their general method,

that of the "close reading," involves as much as possible

the isolation of the literary work:from the influences of