T.S. Eliot Materialized

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

Swaddled with darkness.

—T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”

Despite the sameness of concerns, with the reiteration of familiar topics, ideas, and words, “Little Gidding” feels different from “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” and “The Dry Salvages.” Most readers apparently prefer it, considering it the best of the poems making up Four Quartets. The popular and influential Norton Anthology of English Literature is a case in point; the editors chose, unwisely in my view, to print only “Little Gidding.”

As we had ample occasion to observe in the previous chapter here, “Little Gidding” ends with treatment of the practice of writing. All four poems treat writing, of course, but “Little Gidding” offers the most concrete and particular representation of writing (which feels all the more distinctive, given that “The Dry Salvages,” just before it, treats writing only obliquely, in relation to “false” forms of communication). But “practice” is precisely Eliot’s focus in “Little Gidding,” and the essential difference from the other poems. This all feels right, appropriate, for he has ended “The Dry Salvages” with a clear, straightforward statement of the thematic and rhetorical center of Four Quartets; to turn, then, from theory to practice strikes the right, indeed the necessary, note.

“Little Gidding” also feels the most literary of the four poems, despite poetic achievements everywhere else. The opening is a brilliant description of “Midwinter spring,” itself an instance of the “impossible union” that is manifestly the chief concern of Four Quartets.1 The first verse paragraph, strikingly figurative, leads immediately to a representation in “may time,” which Eliot proceeds to contrast with “May,” evincing his concern with clarity as he establishes what he is discussing in the preceding paragraph: “spring time / But not in time’s covenant.” The second paragraph then features a scene at the specific setting of “Little Gidding” that is intersected with both King Charles’s visit there in 1642 and the birth of Jesus in a lowly stable, the unexpected Incarnation. “Little Gidding” proceeds to the first developed scene in Four Quartets with the poem’s speaker encountering another “personage,” that of the “familiar compound ghost,” met with in the early dawn on the bombed-out streets of London during World War II.

Among other striking achievements of this last poem is the (characteristically) lyrical fourth section, with its totally surprising union of Love and the dark “dove descending” that is the Luftwaffe delivering its devastating, relentless bombs. There is nothing else close to all this in the Four Quartets. Thus, we may conclude, “Little Gidding” brings to the reader’s awareness and understanding the relation of the literary and practice.

At least by the time of the enigmatic appearance of the “familiar compound ghost,” in the second section of “Little Gidding,” personal conduct has emerged as matter. Ethics now replaces epistemology and ontology as the focus: the practice of living in the world, among and with other persons. Thus the “ghost” urges the speaker to let bygones be bygones: “let them be,” adding, “So with your own [mistakes, injustices], and pray they be forgiven / By others, as I pray you to forgive / Both bad and good.” Forgiveness becomes a central theme as the “ghost” proceeds to “disclose the gifts reserved for age / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.” The entire effort of the “ghost” seems directed, in fact, toward urging the poet to forgiveness, but also to self-recognition, notably of his own weakness and failures, including “the shame / Of motives” recently revealed and “awareness / Of things ill done and done to others’ harm,” a stinging (if understated) indictment. The lesson appears to “take,” for the speaker almost immediately becomes more understanding and sympathetic: “Sin is Behovely,” he begins, quoting Dame Julian of Norwich, and he goes on to echo the “ghost,” affirming that “We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum,” temptations that earlier in his career sometimes had their way with Eliot.

What can we learn from Four Quartets that applies to, and helps enrich, our ability to enjoy, appreciate, and understand, and thus benefit from, the reading of literature and the writing of commentary about it? That is the large question I pose in this chapter and end this short book with.

I start with this reminder from Barry Spurr, in his recent book “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity: “practice [is] the incarnation of belief.”2 Incarnation thus reminds—or teaches—us, as we have just seen “Little Gidding” do, that understanding counts for little, may ultimately be selfish, in fact, if it does not lead directly to action worthy of its insights, in keeping with and analogous to them. In the words of the old saying, you should practice what you preach. Failure to do so probably accounts for a great deal of the current and perennial disenchantment with organized religions. There is little more off-putting, and discouraging, than hypocrisy.

In the well-known, posthumous collection of “occasional prose” Mystery and Manners, novelist and short-story writer—and Catholic—Flannery O’Connor posits and defines “incarnational art.” She sounds very much like Eliot: “The Manicheans separated spirit and matter”—whereas she unites “manners” and “mystery.” To the Manicheans, “all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter.”3 The novelist, she says, perhaps in extreme fashion, working with the humblest materials of human life, writes stories, which are “concrete”—you have to be reminded of Eliot’s “objective correlative” and of his emphasis throughout his criticism on the primacy of feelings:

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see.⁴

In “Little Gidding,” Eliot does the latter, much more so than in the other Quartets. Facing such art, commentary such as I am writing here turns represented sensory experience into abstract ideas.

But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.⁵

I want, now, to consider, however briefly and tentatively, some of the relations keyed by Flannery O’Connor and, before her and more elaborately, by T.S. Eliot. Let us begin, therefore, with the Incarnational pattern discernible in such a statement as “practice [is] the incarnation of belief.” Pattern is key, as we have seen throughout this book. With especially Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets in mind, I propose, with all due temerity, that as Jesus is God incarnate, letter is spirit embodied, word (lowercase) is the Word embodied, and, accordingly, literature is word embodied. Is criticism, then, literature embodied? I want to ask.

The question is hardly new, but rarely asked. (A recent instance of essaying to do so, from a phenomenological perspective, is Alla Bozarth-Campbell’s The Word’s Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation,6 the last word here referring to oral performance rather than commentary on literary meaning and significance.) The late British writer C.H. Sisson has approached the questions that drive me in his Sevenoaks Essays and his poem The Discarnation.⁷

Literature, representing matters concrete and featuring human relations and feelings, is word embodied, willy-nilly. It has truck with ideas only as they figure in, through, and by means of actions and events, incarnate in persons, that is—and even then, persons come first, not abstractions. (Such a struggle to pinpoint the place and treatment of ideas in poetry is Eliot’s concern in The Sacred Wood.) In similar fashion, letter embodies spirit.

And literature and criticism? Can we be sure that the latter embodies the former, rather than the former embodying the latter? As my writing here and now, at this moment, should make abundantly clear, commentary—at least as I am able to practice it—is ideational and abstract, a derivative from and of the prior (literary) text in all its concreteness and richness of texture. And yet, given the Incarnational pattern, should not we be about the task of making criticism in the image of literature, embodying what Pope calls “the spirit” of that work on which we are commenting?⁸

In the few pages I have remaining, I follow some hints and offer some guesses. At best, my words constitute a prolegomenon to a theory of Incarnational reading and should be taken as no more than an essai. Reading has always lain at the heart of my professional concerns—perhaps for reasons that include the fact that I have gained so much from and by it and that my father could neither read nor write. Whatever the case may be, I have been writing about little other than reading—unless it be writing itself and teaching—for nearly fifty years, under vastly different auspices and dispensations. Whether from a New Critical or a deconstructionist perspective, I have practiced close reading: tweaking inherited theories and procedures here, attempting to forge some new ones there, all the while centrally concerned with practice. I have, I think it fair to say, reported my adventures around texts, trying always to be sympathetic to “my” author but always aware of my own point of view (even if it seemed sometimes that I was engaged in something akin to hagiography). There is, I have come to see, a mystery involved in good, responsive, responsible reading: text intersects with reader. Or is it that reader intersects with texts? Perhaps an “impossible union,” “necessarye coniunction.”

The relationship between literature and criticism—the inexact term by which commentary on literature is familiarly known—has always been complicated, and poorly understood. I have long taken the position that a reader, any reader, must be at the very least sympathetic toward the work or works he or she is discussing: neither identical with nor opposed to and antagonistic toward. In this, I join with such illustrious figures as Virginia Woolf and C.S. Lewis. In “How Should One Read a Book?” Woolf goes so far as to instruct her reader: “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him,” and Lewis, similarly, writes, “The first demand a work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no use asking first if the work before you deserves such surrender, because until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”9

None of us means that a reader must always agree with his or her author, for judgment and evaluation follow, but sympathetic engagement comes first, enabling—despite the recent claims being made for oppositional and even antagonistic readings that go “against the grain.” The reader occupies a position akin to that which Yeats describes in “Leda and the Swan”: the word, or text, comes and gives, and the reader receives, which act of receiving the critic repeats in responding in writing.¹⁰

I cannot, of course, speak for Lewis or Woolf, but I for one believe that the critic, who is, after all, different from the reader, being a reader and more, must in his or her writing, which is what turns a reader into a critic and is the difference that reading makes—must in that writing engage in what Pope finely calls “Gen’rous Converse.”¹¹ The critic need not work in a particularly imaginative mode, or indulge in what is often called “creative criticism” (which Eliot reprobated as early as The Sacred Wood). But he or she owes it to the primary—imaginative, creative—work to be responsible toward it and respectful of both it and his or her own reader alike. And just here the critic’s imagination is fully engaged; it functions, not so much in the writing that follows, but in the discovery and understanding of pattern in the literary work, determining how that work works.

The best mode for criticism, it seems to me, is that which it has historically adopted, content until the arrival of the “definite article” and all its incivilities and pretense to objectivity (which William H. Gass has brilliantly chronicled).¹² So not the “ludicrous” distance of the professional, academic misnamed essay. The best mode of criticism is the essay, pacé Geoffrey Hartman:¹³ familiar, personal, inviting, and well written, and practiced by the greatest critics in the language, including Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Woolf, and Eliot. Such an essay, despite the writer’s scrupulous attention to expression, is rarely a work of literature, for as a form, the essay “hangs between,” between literature and philosophy, between fact and fancy, almost one thing and almost another: the essay instances, in fact, “impossible union” and “necessarye coniunction.” In many ways, all too rarely recognized, the essay thus appears perfectly equipped to handle commentary on literature, which is, itself, an Incarnational art.

What commentary practiced in essay-form is, is, then, a mirror, a reflection—even a rhyme—of the work that calls it into being and without which it would not be. It must not be detached, and it should not be graceless in expression, although at the same time it should not whore after the creative, even if, on occasion, it makes use of some literary devices and techniques. As a mirror of the primary work, criticism ought, indeed, to embody the point of view, values, and texture—I almost said “spirit”—of that calling poem, novel, or play. Such embodiment would return to criticism what it so obviously lacks and so badly needs (now, perhaps more so than ever before), and that is a refreshing breath of the concrete and the sensible (in more than one sense) alongside a forgotten humility and a respectful aura of responsibility toward text, world, and reader.

Literature, I have maintained, is (already) an incarnation, a matter of belief put into practice: spirit embodied in the letter. Criticism carries (that) incarnation a (necessary) step further, giving flesh and body, as it were, to response, thus extending while elucidating.

Notes

1T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).

2Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 126.

3Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 68.

4Ibid., 67.

5Ibid., 67–68.

6Alla Bozarth-Campbell, The Word’s Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1979).

7C.H. Sisson, Sevenoaks Essays, in The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays, ed. Michael Schmidt (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978), and The Discarnation, or, How the Flesh Became Word and Dwelt among Us (Sevenoaks, Kent: author, 1967).

8Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969), line 234.

9Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” The Common Reader, Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932); C.S. Lewis qtd. in Clara Claiborne Park, Rejoining the Common Reader: Essays 1962–1990 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991), 138–39.

10See Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980), esp. 21–24.

11Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 641.

12William H. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 9–49.

13See, for example, Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, passim.