LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

AN AGE OF IMPRECISION (ORDER DENIED)

The early years of our century were a restless age. They were haunted by the urge to innovate, yet also afflicted with bitter dissatisfaction with the consequences of each innovation in turn. A mistrustfully innovating age, we may call it. Its mood was innovating. Its brain was however realistic enough to keep radical reversals at arm's length. When our century was only beginning, Virginia Woolf remarked that the ever more complicated machinery which the age was (and is) producing would not necessarily imply an improvement of the literary mind as well. The author of The Waves would be turning in her grave if she heard any of the more technically minded literary critics intimate that the better we build, the better we write. On the contrary, she keenly sensed that, in such a fickle age, literature could not be spared the anxiety, the dread of possible failure. A failure caused by the very restlessness of the age; an age whose literature, at the peril of its own life, would not stay still. Whose words, as Eliot so memorably put it in one of his Quartets, ‘strain/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/ Will not stay still’ (Burnt Norton).

From a literary point of view, the first decade of this century of ours, which is now drawing to an end, opened an era of imprecision both in fiction and poetry. It would be risky to point at the exact writer who set up this gunpowder plot which was meant to blow up that beautiful (though apparent) precision, that obvious clarity which had been queen of most previous literary works. Fact is that sometime around 1922, when both Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land were published, accompanied by Virginia Woolf's novels (this is to name only very few of the literary rejuvenators), a distaste for previous ways of writing books had already spread among European writers of literature. It was like a very violent catching disease. All arts (and sciences) had it almost at the same time. Some have not yet even wholly recovered from its side-effects. It must have been as if writers were taking in this innovating zest together with the air they breathed, and could not help letting it oxygenate their minds. As for the readers of this literature, that was an altogether different story. They got lost in the mazes of novelty, cursed freely and some (more and more of them as time went by) finally managed to find their way out. They were coming out victoriously but (should we confess that?) exhausted. Literary critics  themselves were not spared this grumbling disarray. Eliot was ruthlessly charged at. The critics' guns were repeatedly aimed at him (until even as late as the 1960's) and they used picturesquely shaped bullets filled with venom. Charles Powell, for instance, hurried to let everyone know there and then (no time lost) that The Waste Land  was nothing more than just as much ‘waste paper’. An anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement slyly remarked that the poem existed largely in the state of ‘notes’. He was obviously mocking at the bulky set of pages, which at first Eliot did not mean to print at the end of his poem at all. As the poet confessed much later (in a volume of posthumous essays, To Criticize the Critic), these notes had appeared only for printing purposes: he had been asked to enlarge the size of his poem so that it might constitute a volume by itself. These famous  Notes  explain most of the sources of the quotations from other (innumerable) authors freely used by Eliot in his own text. He later admitted, in fact, that he was sorry for having sent literary researchers on a ‘wild goose chase’. No philosophical or any other kind of explanation in other terms than those of the poem itself could make any difference to the understanding of  The Waste Land. These Notes, Eliot repeated, could safely be ignored. It is perfectly true that those Notes  could not exactly clarify the poem as some may have expected. Eliot made a point of defacing every borrowed word. He made those words fit into his own text, become his own, as it were. The original contexts and meanings were not only ignored but, most often than not, ironically contradicted. On the other hand, these  Notes  have a peculiar innovating importance. They are the Magna Charta of cultured poetry. A poetry which was treacherously humming tunes of literary memories, echoes of other works, other minds, other times – in such a way as to focus their light on their shadowy sides, thus enhancing ambiguity, their main poetic resource. Now, when the above mentioned reviewer protested against the lack of clarity in Eliot's poems, he blamed it on the fact that to him the whole poem looked like a bunch of disconnected and unfinished notes. He was indirectly and unconsciously acknowledging the very birth of this associative, cultured (though not bookish, as the critic might have intimated) poetry. A poetry which inaugurated a long line (that still pursues its echoing tune) of book-loving, or rather (like Proust) memory-loving poets. A tradition of remembrance of books past. The reviewer meant that Eliot's poem was fragmentary, unfinished, lacking all connecting explanations, full of stifled voices which breathlessly spat out incoherent little stories. It was strewn with ugly, disgusting images. In short, the poem in question was no more than a heap of raw material. It consisted of merely random notes which the author alone was able to decipher or enjoy. To the reading public, this reviewer intimated, the text could only end by being an utter disappointment. He plainly added that Eliot's poem almost reached the ‘limits of coherency’. It was hardly intelligible, if at all. Readers were warned they would hardly find it worth while wasting their time on  The Waste Land.

The violation of a previously established sense of coherency (verbal, logical, narrative, etc.) seemed the feat of a literary outlaw. Eliot defined it as ‘dislocating language’ into his meaning. Among others, the dislocation exasperated F.L. Lucas as well. The latter wailed in an essay that there had always been a sense in punctuation, in the order of words, in the clarity and the serene sky of orderly poetic utterances. All these once used to be like a brotherly hand the poet stretched out to his readers. Eliot shamelessly defied the reader's peace of mind by refusing to offer him this old type of comforting verbal precision. F.L. Lucas' anger was on the loose. He thundered:

'Shantih' is equivalent to the 'Peace that passeth understanding' – which in this case it certainly does. All this is very difficult; as Dr. Jonson said under similar circumstances, 'I would it were impossible'.

 Lucas' indignation is also aroused by another so-called innovation of Eliot's. Other ‘innovators’ had practised it in their day, as a matter of fact. More recent poets still fiercely hold on to it. The device in question is Eliot's use of the defiantly nonpoetic. Although he was not the first to do it, Eliot tried and successfully managed to discredit the poetic adornments, the peace of poetry. He chose the unusual and the unexpected: ugly city-scapes, disgusting images of muddy pools, dirty dry bones, slimy rats, whatever he could think of that was most horrifying, even terrifying. This must be the reason why F.L. Lucas hopelessly concluded: 

‘the borrowed jewels he has set in his head do not make Mr. Eliot's toad the more prepossessing’.

The Waste Land  was called many names in its time, from the hoax of the century to the sacred cow of (his) contemporary literature. A dejected journalist even loudly complained that it was an unforgivable mistake for English literature to have harboured this ‘over-educated’ American who would have made everyone happier by staying with doors bolted, back in his own home-town, ‘in Louisville, or wherever he came from’. Going along the same line, Humbert Wolfe finds in Eliot a poet who cannot write poetry because ‘spiritually and intellectually he is muscle-bound’.

It must be fairly obvious by now how weird this (to us no longer unusual) idea of cultured poetry, of bookish echoes floating freely in a poet's lines was at the time. It simply could not be separated from that of plagiarism. It was consequently despised as such. Eliot's writings, then, with their unabashed intention to irritate, to disgust (even in his criticism and drama) and their numberless borrowings (echoes of other works) could not fail to stir the spirit to rebel. Which is precisely what Eliot meant to do. He must have sensed that rage would be followed by curiosity, then by approval. Not all his readers, as a matter of fact, indicted him from at first. Joyce, for instance, noted briefly (for himself, though):

 ‘Eliot ends idea of poetry for ladies’.

Good-bye comfortable, sweet directness. Welcome inaccessible imprecision. An advertisement of this poetry should read: ‘Applicants need guessing ability’. Eliot felt that he had to pull down the old precincts of poetry and build the tower of the poem all over again. His architecture may have looked monstrous at first. Gradually the on-lookers must have grown used to it and even felt like exploring its interior. The same happened with James Joyce. This may be one of the reasons why Joyce so promptly approved of Eliot. His short, well-meaning parody to  The Waste Land  is both congenial and entertaining:

‘Rouen is the rainiest place getting

Inside all impermeables, wetting

Damp marrow in drenched bones.

Midwinter soused us coming over Le Mans

Our inn at Niort was the Grape of Burgundy

But the winepress of the Lord thundered

over that grape of Burgundy

And we left in a hurgundy.

(Hurry up, Joyce, it's time!)’

(Quoted by T.S. Matthews, in Great Tom,
Harper and Row, Publishers Inc., New York, 1973)

On reading the first chapters of Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf had predicted it would be the masterpiece of the age. Funny to think that, once finished, she labelled it as a glorious catastrophe. The fact that she disliked it is hard to account for. Her own novels, the same as Joyce's, smash the narrative (the plot) into pieces. Many other writers in England and on the Continent were doing just the same. They all refused to picture an orderly personality, a well-rounded and clearly unfurled character. These non-traditional novelists still had a narrative in mind, though. Neither had the characters deserted these narratives. Only the writers would not surrender their meaning to the readers for free. The authors refused to reveal their plotting. They made it very difficult for the reader to suspect there might be a plan behind the texture. Those readers had to sweat in order to get at the inner pattern, because such authors broke all mirrors that might betray their presence. They suppressed all clear order: of words in a sentence, of moments in time, of parts of the narrative. The subject came in between the predicate and the adverbial. The future was known long before the past had been revealed. The end of the story was announced from its very first pages. Was it, people were wondering, a really new way of illuminating experience? Or just an inability to equal a Tennyson, a Dickens or a Galsworthy in clarity, in order, in accessibility?

What more can we say except that the unpredictable fascination of this piecemeal literature looks like the spirit which has been conjured out of its abode, the safe bottle? He cannot be squeezed back into it. Not for a while, that is; until a trick against him has been found. So, for the time being, this wicked yet exhilarating spirit being at large, readers look in vain for explanations in the text. All clarifying link, all that was orderly and all that we had been trained to expect has been thrown overboard. Here we are then, enclosed ourselves in the legendary bottle, our minds floating and floating over the waves sent out by a ‘heap of broken images’ (The Waste Land, I). The waves of a text which looks, at least at first, like an incoherent, incomprehensible mass of incidents, of words. What reason on earth can an author invoke for writing a piece of literature that (he suspects) might fail to be understood? Does a writer willfully sever his ties with his readers? Or is there some underground pact with the reader still working, but only in the dark? In this age of imprecision we are talking about, the denial of obvious coherence, the denial of order can be exposed. An underground road may indeed be found, that leads to the core of the work and reaches there the old unities (of plot, of character, of time) untouched.

Eliot, for one, felt that a coherent, largely explanatory poem was far too long. The same as his literary friend and early adviser, Ezra Pound, Eliot was possessed by a verbal impatience. It so happened that impeccable, orderly sentences made him feel unbearably restless. For the same reason, because of the same impatience, Virginia Woolf violently refused to be associated with Galsworthy's predictable flow of plots, characters, incidents. It seemed to these (now dead) innovators that the precious narrative order had become an ineffective convention. They felt urged to replace it by a more noticeable (which meant opposed) manner. Of course the denial of one convention might very well (actually did) turn into another convention itself before long. The Stream-of-Consciousness technique could not escape this fate. It began as a shockingly concentrated device, both in fiction and poetry. Eliot dropped the explanatory lines between images. Joyce created a character out of amalgamated bits of tomorrow, yesterday, today. Literature (like all other arts) fell desperately in love with disorder. What was the meaning of the name they gave it, the Stream-of-Consciousness technique? In her volume of essays, Modern Fiction (1919, The Common Reader), Virginia Woolf advanced the idea that life had long before begun to leak out of her predecessors' flawless narratives. The novel could, it was even imperative that it should be reshaped. Her view of this change sprang from what she called a new need for verisimilitude. Why should we feel compelled, she wondered, to construct a believable plot, a believable character, a believable world? Life itself is not believable, it is most often felt to be disorderly and absurd. Why not restrict this verisimilitude, in order to convey exactly the writer's own experience? The author's deep belief in what he is saying ought to be enough for the reader. In this way all of them (Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, etc.) allowed us to share their inner landscape, provided we took it as a secret. It was obvious that this inner world mirrored the outer. Virginia Woolf was perceptive enough to realize that verisimilitude could not be banished from literature without leaving it empty handed. Verisimilitude was merely interiorized and, consequently, it became somewhat less accessible. Life, Virginia Woolf explained, was neither coherent, nor symmetrical, nor orderly (those were her very words). She perceived life as a ‘luminous halo’ (see Joyce’s idea of ‘epiphany’), which could not be approximated by orderly chronology or by an explanatory sequence of thoughts. The theory of relativity had, as can be seen, its literary counterpart. The feeling of disbelief, of uncertainty, which resulted in growing interiorization of the narrative, was the mark of the age. From Virginia Woolf's impressionistic, therefore imprecise manner we may conclude that the knife of clarity and firm story-telling was at the moment dulled. She meant to arouse the reader's anxiety by pointing at him a freshly sharpened edge. In fact, this stream-of-consciousness, this approximation of the workings of a mind laid bare in front of our eyes implies a very precise, ruthless tyranny of the reader by the author. Dickens did his best to lure us into pursuing the exciting stories of his characters' lives. Joyce's insufficient stories do not entreat; they abruptly toss and turn our understanding, claiming at the same time that they free us from the servitude of order. The effort we must make to piece up his hints and bits (which may seem, but are not amalgamated at random) shows that we are not in the least free. On the contrary, we are enslaved. We cannot find our peace of mind until we have stolen from the author an order, a plan (more intricate than a Dickens or a Thackeray had ever dreamt of) that has been willfully hidden. An enthralled reader roams through the maze of this thrilling disorder. When the reader has finally managed to leave the disorder behind, he has the late realization that it all amounts, in fact, to an order concealed.

‘Do not dictate to your author’, Virginia Woolf demanded; ‘try to become him’. Quite an interesting experiment, the one she suggested in her essay How Should One Read A Book?. If we are to understand a piece of literature thoroughly, she said there, we ought first to try our hand at writing ourselves, and see what it felt like to produce something orderly and believable. Why not start by merely remembering some incident we once experienced? Several details that accompanied it will presently come to our mind: two people talking, a tree swaying in the wind, a street lamp... We feel that all these together make up a whole. Yet, when we start narrating it, suddenly its wholeness is lost. Its meaning, which we felt to be coherent, breaks into a myriad contradictory sensations. Thus, indirectly, she admitted that the ordering force of the 19th century writers failed those of the 20th. It may not have died, but it certainly changed its ways. As Virginia Woolf warned us, ‘facts’ (mere chronology, the evolution of incidents from cause to effect) had become the lowest stage of a narrative. The plain story was no longer sufficient, she meant.

These once innovating novelists seemed to need a salutary complication of the whole thing: a more abstract narrative pattern, a more intricate one. In short, they preferred a contorted story, willfully turned upside down. Eliot, too, amalgamated his super-ambiguous words into puzzling images. Then he also openly urged us to take them in like music, to let them find their own way to our minds, to take our time before we actually began to think. Can a poem really be enjoyed before it has been understood, as he once declared? Or was this statement of Eliot's rather a defense than an explanation of his whirling, confusing poem? The same defensive statement was made by Virginia Woolf. She prompted her readers to ‘wait for the dust of reading to settle’. She also advised the author himself to let the atoms of life fall upon his mind, and preserve in his writings the random air of this chance fall. These impatient writers needed very patient readers, as it seems.

All the theories ever forwarded by various representatives of this age which waved the banner of the stream-of-consciousness technique amount to an appeal to the reader to slow down his reading and ponder over the fragile flow of the narrative. The literary movement (innovation) as such could not have lasted for too long: it was too much of a good thing, as they say. The writers involved in it delude their readers that they are actually taking part in a do-it-yourself story. By urging the reader to solve the puzzle of a (pre-arranged) fragmentary, elliptical sequence of images of incidents, such writers have in fact a much stronger hold over the reader's mind than any previous author ever had. These are demanding writers. The reader may have chosen to ignore Dickens' too moralizing and bossy, direct intrusions into the narrative. But when the writer professes to be absent, to efface himself totally in order to offer you the naked mind of his characters (who are supposed to be real, to be life itself), whom can you oppose? The trick was efficient for as long as it lasted. It brought a certain seriousness into the mood of the reader: it made the idea of a hardworking reading imperative. It would not do to read The Waste Land or Ulysses on a trip or a little while before falling asleep. They upset your thoughts. They tamper with your feelings, making them hopelessly restless. Your mind is ill at ease, because of the strain put on it. All these stream-of-consciousness works require a meditative reading at the end of which, Virginia Woolf assures us, the narrative will float like oil in water to the surface of our minds, towards the explicit area of our understanding. We shall then realize that this explicit area of our consciousness is not the only one that we can use. This implicit narrative wholeness will not come as a gift to us, and we shall never feel inclined to take it for granted. Quite the reverse: constantly deprived of the explicit flow of the story, we shall have to fight to the bitter end, until we have pieced up every random detail, every chance word. Only then shall we feel that we do not leave the novel or the poem empty handed. Then we shall have caught up with the author, compelling him to come out of his hiding and meet us.

It can therefore be concluded that, even when the author cannot be seen with the naked eye, the author can be found. Even in the absence of explicit story-telling, the narrative survives. A more complicated architecture of the poem or novel will by no means turn it into a failure. When precision and order are defeated, the taste of life can still be suggested by a device of disorderly imprecision. An imprecision which is, in fact, only apparently accidental. It is, in truth, an elaborate disorganization which has infinite planning behind it. The canvas behind the painting is easily detectable. To make a wicked remark, we may sometimes even notice that the canvas is not even used for the first time, since the new image preserves traces of old shapes, old tricks that have not been allowed to die. For Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Eliot and the others, splitting their text implied making it more intriguing, more appealing, more exciting: giving it another kind of suspense. Yet, now that we have found out what a firm narrative iron hand in a glove of velvet imprecision this stream-of-consciousness is, we may well exclaim with victorious satisfaction: Order is dead, long live order!

As has been seen so far, the planning of a work cannot disappear, in fiction or poetry. It may try to hide and seem absent, thus appealing to us to appreciate it more, by going in search of it. They were right, those stream-of-consciousness writers: an intriguing absence goes a longer way. It is more effective than a presence we have become so much used to that we go past without noticing it any more, as we sometimes go on our daily way home and yet can never remember the houses we keep seeing. Not until a new one is built, and then suddenly we grow aware of the whole landscape being changed. Like any other literary fashion, therefore, this awareness of the fragility and inefficiency (at the time) of the traditional narrative enriched the literary landscape: it imposed the short lived reign of a more intricate order (apparently disorder) and a more elliptical precision (apparently imprecision).

The readers felt challenged. Their effort to adapt to the change was great, and at times they did not feel rewarded after making it. The old sight seemed more appealing to them, especially when the complication became too complicated, so to say. Virginia Woolf herself did not fail to notice (having Joyce in mind, not herself, though) that a literature made up of various bits of words, bits of stories, bits of sense, runs the risk of falling ill with confusion and uncertainty. It was not unlikely that some readers at some point, might abandon it. The narrative convention of imprecision, of disorder could not have lasted longer than it did, because it would have ended by becoming more demanding and less rewarding than the explicit narrative devices that preceded it. The implicit narrative, as well as poetic ambiguity were both a kind of implicit clarity. They were bound to be exposed some day. There was no question of a ‘free’ or ‘creative’ reading. The readers were ruthlessly harnessed to an invisible cart (the author's mind), and they did not take long to rebel.

It looks now as if the delight of telling an uncomplicated story and the enchantment of crystal-clear poems had returned. A reaction against another literary reaction, and so the chain will continue to grow. It may even be that we now live in an age of over-simplified precision and order, a kind of (again apparent) total lack of literary convention. Each goes his own way. No matter how things stand with us now at the beginning of a third millennium, no matter what changes the following years may bring, what false yet enthralling discoveries, nobody will ever be able to write or read again as if Joyce's, or Eliot's, or Virginia Woolf's voyages away from clarity and accessibility had never existed. Our minds have been enriched by them, the same as the horizon of science was extended by the idea of universal relativity. Once back from the lotus land of enticing complications, let us hope we shall not be of those who may feel that the defiance of precision and order was a literary dead end. We must not be fooled by difficulty. In a good piece of literature nothing is ever made without the author's hope to be understood, without a plan (which may be visible or invisible at first sight). A plan is a sign of order, of precision, of desire for clarity. Therefore, even when talking about this age of imprecision and denied order that Joyce, Eliot and Woolf belonged to, we may safely rejoice: Clarity is dead, long live Clarity.