DYNAMICS OF TEXTUAL SPACE: T. S. ELIOT IN PERSPECTIVE

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637    DYNAMICS OF TEXTUAL SPACE: T. S. ELIOT IN PER...
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SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

DYNAMICS OF TEXTUAL SPACE: T. S. ELIOT IN PERSPECTIVE DR. PIKU CHOWDHURY* *Assistant Professor, Satyapriya Roy College of Education, Kolkata, India.

ABSTRACT The word and the world are no longer coeval. The modern world, near anarchic and totally absurd, emerges like a formidable fortress with complex labyrinths. The poet, the manipulator of words, struggles with the words themselves in quest of a possible exit. The verbal artifice erects a distinct world - confusing, abstract, and volatile; the entrapped intellect reacts in a desperate attack. The gaps in the discursive structure constitute a presence embodying a space that dramatizes the variegated processes of configuration, disfiguration and re-configuration that characterize the unending dynamics of the text. An exploration of the intriguing spatial dynamics of Eliot’s works remains a challenging and rewarding prospect, with evolving new perceptual profiles emerging in the process. KEYWORDS: text, space, vacuity, intensity, combinations, poetry. ______________________________________________________________________________

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INTRODUCTION We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations , resulting from a thousand sources of culture. Roland Barthes O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, .......................... I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you... As in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away............................. So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Four Quartets The gaps and vacuity in the discursive structure constitute a presence; they embody a space that dramatizes the variegated processes of configuration, disfiguration and re-configuration that characterize the unending dynamics of the human life. This space is created by the very presence of the varying elements of statements, questions, utterances and images that gain contour against the necessary backdrop of the empty space, and continually generate a complex and motile matrix of meaning that emerges not as essential absolutes, but contingent products of myriad permutations in the given space. The words participate in myriad relations and conjunctions that grant new contours to the evolving ambient connections and their signification. The crux of the entire enquiry about the validity of the logos as a mode of communication lies in the evolution and transference of contextual meaning and this meaning seems to evolve continually at nodes of an immense network of interconnections. A pre-verbal domain identified by Plato in Timaeus in the form of a fertile receptacle resembling a complex matrix had long back appropriated an idea of space central to signification; the space or receptacle itself defying any particularity of form, but continually deconstructed and reconstructed by the elements that swirl in infinite new combinations in it:

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We must start our new description of the universe by making a fuller subdivision than we did before; we then distinguished two forms of reality – we must now add a third...In general terms, it is the receptacle and, as it were, the nurse of all becoming and change...it continues to receive all things, and never itself takes a permanent impress from any of the things that enter it; it is a kind of neutral plastic material on which changing impressions are stamped by the things that enter it, making it appear different at different times...We may indeed use the metaphor of birth and compare the receptacle to the mother...and we may notice that, if an imprint is to present a very complex appearance, the material on which it is to be stamped will not have been properly prepared unless it is devoid of all the characters which it is to receive. For if it were like any of the things that enter it, it would badly distort any impression of a contrary or entirely different nature when it received it, as its own features would shine through...we shall not be wrong if we describe it as invisible and formless, all-embracing possessed in a most puzzling way of intelligibility, yet very hard to grasp...space which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be, and which is apprehended without the senses by a sort of spurious reasoning and so is hard to believe in – we look at it indeed in a kind of dream and say that everything that exists must be somewhere and occupy some space...(p.70)

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

What is interesting in the Platonic perception is the fact that he conceives of this space as an active entity in continual movement unlike a passive dead receptacle that witnesses the dramatization of the endless permutation and combination of the various elements that revolve in it. He conceives of the space as a shaking receptacle: My verdict, in short, may be stated as follows. There were, before the world came into existence, being, space and becoming, three distinct realities. The nurse of becoming was characterized by the qualities of water and fire, of earth and air/and by others that go with them, and its visual appearance was therefore varied; but as there was no homogeneity or balance in the forces that filled it, no part of it was in equilibrium, but it swayed unevenly under the impact of their motion, and in turn communicated its motion to them. And its contents were in constant process of movement and separation, rather like the contents of a winnowing basket or similar implement for cleaning corn, in which the solid and heavy stuff is sifted out and settles on one side, the light and insubstantial on another: so the far basic constituents were shaken by the receptacle, which acted as a kind of shaking implement...with the result that they came to occupy different regions of space even before they were arranged into an ordered universe.(p.71) The very notion of an element’s situatedness in space appears as an ancient anticipation of the theory of space and the essential fluidity of space asserted by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

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flux is reality itself, or consistency [...]. The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant.(p.361) Every identity is spatial in its dependence on a domain of flow,as Foucault and Kristeva too assure. Kristeva’s ‘chora’ posits space as a fluid matrix - individual identities emerging out of this, while Foucault’s concept of episteme projects the provisionality and essential fluidity of thoughts and utterances that are essentially contingent, producing an apparently coherent body of knowledge, accepted as ‘doxa’, but continually remaining subject to shifting rules of discursive enunciability. The Eliotian metaphor of the mind as a receptacle, a definitive space, is fraught with overt echoes of older ideas. The mind, in ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’, is conceived as a space in which the elements coagulate and rearrange themselves: The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.(p.19) There is an implicit acknowledgement of the fluid nature of the space in the projection of the mind as a turbulent sea. The various stimuli engage in a dramatic play in the space of the poet’s mind, continually entering new combinations that rise like Anadyomene from the tumultuous fluidity of the sea. Eliot asserts in the ‘Conclusion’ of The Use of Poetry and Use of Criticism:

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

The re-creation of word and image which happens fitfully in the poetry of such a poet as Coleridge happens almost incessantly with Shakespeare. Again and again, in his use of a word, he will give a new meaning or extract a latent one; again and again the right imagery saturated while it lay in the depths of Shakespeare’s memory, will rise like Anadyomene from the sea.(pp.146-147) The poet’s mind operates as a fluid medium, a space accommodating and defining unexpected novelty of combinations of “floating” feelings: the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways...balance of contrasted emotion...alone is inadequate...the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.(p.20) The essential fluidity of the bewildering variety of combinations with the concomitant fluidity of the space where the drama of perennial permutations is enacted renders literature a kinetic art, much like what is proposed by Stanley Fish in Is There a Text in the Class? : The Authority of Interpretive Communities:

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Literature is a kinetic art, but the physical form it assumes prevents us from seeing its essential nature, even though we so experience it....Somehow when we put a book down, we forget that while we were reading, it was moving (pages turning, lines receding onto the past) and forget too that we were moving with it.(p.44) The meaning of a text may alter ceaselessly, through new formulations and perceptual profiles formed by new combinations perceived in each new reading of the same text, but the mind, conceived as essentially spatial, must first be touched like a drop of paint falling into an expanse of water; several ever renewing patterns may emerge after that, but without the initial contact with the fluid space, nothing can be expected. Experiencing the charm of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Eliot refers to the importance of the first impression and the continuous evolution of new meanings over time: The enjoyment of the Divine Comedy is a continuous process. If you get nothing out of it at first, you probably never will...(p.238) Commending Rudyard Kipling’s poetic versatility and superiority in On Poetry and Poets, Eliot asserts – “Repeated hearings may confirm the first impressions, may repeat the effect, but fully understanding must be conveyed at one hearing”(p.231). In ‘Dante’, he insists that Dante’s poetry is easy to read, a fact that is “a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. The impression can be verified on fuller knowledge.” This initial contact, the initial positioning in space embodies a certain degree of intensity that proliferates into several zones of intensity in the various spatial

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

combinations and segregations of the various elements - an idea that runs through the Eiotian discourse, albeit indirectly. A first reading of the episode of Paolo and Fransesca creates a zone of immense intensity, though the possible meanings are yet to develop; the rich variety of Shakespearean discourse may even baffle the creator himself in the scintillating variety of signification that continues evolving, but several points of tremendous intensity shine forth with great luminescence and render it eternally glorious. Eliot’s reiterated references to this very ‘intensity’ in a discourse, appropriates a suggestion of the spatial dimension of the texts: we can understand the first Episode that strikes most readers, that of Paolo and Fransesca, enough to be moved by it as much as by any poetry, on the first reading. It is introduced by two similes of the same explanatory nature...We can see and feel the situation of the two lost lovers, though we do not yet understand the meaning which Dante gives it...it is a work of years to venture even one individual interpretation of the pattern in Shakespeare’s carpet. It is not certain that Shakespeare himself knew what it was...(p.245) Again, the first reading of The Divine Comedy generates stupendous and shocking “intensity” that generates a desire for a fuller comprehension:

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if from your first deciphering of it there comes now and then some direct shock of poetic intensity, nothing but laziness can deaden the desire for fuller and fuller knowledge.(p.238) Both desire and intensity are significant pillars of the concept of spatiality of text, and the referential nuances of the Eliotian discourse are indeed intriguing. What is this “shock” that he is referring to? What is the significance of such intensity in appreciating a text, especially for an intellect that continually advocates an absolute emotional detachment? Subtle anticipations of the text as a site and moment of change, a point of modulation from one way of being to another, propelled by strong desires, are discerned. The signs are agents of such intensity that erupt with a force against the backdrop of a space, rendering redundant any quest for a perpetually elusive perfect signifier, for the moment; they with all their intensity enter strange combinations that, despite their fluidity, touch the realms of some sort of communication. What Eliot’s ‘direct shock of poetic intensity’ faintly suggests, appears to get a complete and developed expression in Deleuze’s discourse on ‘writing’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: The recordings and transmissions that have come from the internal codes, from the outside world, from one region to another of the organism, all intersect, following the endlessly ramified paths of the great disjunctive synthesis. If this constitutes a system of writing, it is a writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real: a strangely polyvocal kind of writing, never a biunivocalized, linearized one; are transcursive systems of writing, never a discursive one; a writing that constitutes the entire domain of the ‘real organization’ of the passive syntheses, where we should search in vain for something that might be labelled the Signifier.(p.39)

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

Such zones of intensity, crystallizing around certain images or events described in the text, are generated by intense desire; a desire that is paradoxically formed by a vector produced by proximity of two forms. The encounter of the two forms drawn closer to each other leads to the dramatic emergence of the text for the moment. Against a backdrop of a space where the various discursive elements in the form of the conversation between Ivy, Amy, Charles, Mary and the family physician coagulate and separate, creating ripples of multiple combinations, a moment of tremendous intensity is generated in the dramatic encounter between Agatha and Harry. Agatha’s recollection of union with Harry’s father is another moment of such intensity of desire, folded within the projected discursive intensity of the communication between her and Harry. At both the levels of intensity desire operates like the forceful movement of a shoot towards the sunlight, the yearning of the root for water deep beneath the soil, a strong force coeval with the force of life. Such desire attracts elements to each other, to a common space of understanding, generating connections that are spatially dramatized with the signs assuming new evolving forms: Agatha.

There are hours when there seems to be no past or future, Only a present moment of pointed light When you want to burn. When you stretch out your hand

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To the flames. The temporality of the ‘moment’ melts into the spatiality of the intense flames and the stretched hands. Such zones of tremendous intensity are generated in certain portions of the body of the text in the form of the yearning of hands of blinded hollow men rising in intense prayer in the vast expanse of the sterile desert, parted lips quivering in intense yearning in ‘Marina’, the sudden gushing forth of fountains and the force of thousand whispers from the yew trees after prolonged silence in ‘Ash Wednesday’, to name a few. These are luminous zones of tremendous intensity against the textual space, shinning with the potential of approximating a communion. There are enthralling moments of intensity that transform the entire space into an intensified zone transcending the contextual and temporal constraints, rolling onto a higher level of communion. In ‘East Coker’, the words arrange themselves in such a way in the space of the text that the intensity touches the reader with its movement towards some sort of luminous signification - some probability of a different level of communication, against the backdrop of vacuity and darkness: Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment... Here and there does not matter

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For another union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and empty desolation

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Deleuze and Guattari show different zones of such intensity collectively constituting a “territory” that may dissolve in the fluidity of the backdrop to generate centrifugal “lines of flight”, powerful vectors that lead over the horizon of the straitjacket of social codification towards some yet unrecognized point. Harry’s or Celia’s powerful rejection of the pressure of intense territories in quest of an unknown salvation, or the sense of exile in the concluding line of ‘Ash Wednesday’ appropriate an existential ‘line of flight’ within the body of the text. Prufrock’s transient vision of mermaids or the repeated insistence on the exploratory ventures of “old men” in the Four Quartets - all portray an acute awareness of such textual centrifugal trajectories. The operative force behind such lines of flight is a strong desire as mentioned earlier. The Eliotian discourse reflects a subtle acknowledgement of the strong operative thrust of desire generating ever evolving constructs. After all what propels the words to metaphorize an entire text as an expression of an intense craving for some deeper and higher fold of communication? Heightened with an overt frustration with the inadequate words that “strain/Crack and sometimes break under the burden, /Under the tension”, what propels one to engage in “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”? What else but an intense desire - a yearning for finality, reconciliation, a shattering of restrictive opacity towards communion? The intense desire to shatter shackles towards an appropriation of that zone of reconciliation finds expression in overtly spatial terms as Harry and Agatha in The Family Reunion describe their endeavour as suffering in deserts or impatient pacing up a seemingly endless hospital corridor. Celia’s urge to reject the straitjacket of conventional discursive inanity during her conversation with Harcourt Railley in The Cocktail Party reflects the same spatial dynamics in formation of a zone of intensity through encounter between two elements brought together by strange forces at play. The animated exchange between Lavinia and Edward portray the same. Discussing Deleuze’s territoriality, Claire Colebrook in her ‘The Space of Man: On the Specificity of Affect in Deleuze and Guattari’, relates the textual dynamics of spatial intensity with the vital forces and desires of life: Life is force, the play of forces, and the interplay of these forces produce zones or sites of qualities, intensities. It is not that there is a space that is then qualified; rather, forces produce qualities and qualities produce fields or spaces, ‘blocs of becoming’.[...] The zones add up to series of spaces, but this whole is never given, for there is always the potential for further connection and production.(p.192) New folds of meaning keep evolving, each fraught with fresh possibilities of newer combinations with newer signification in the essentially dynamic textual space. As Harry says in The Family Reunion, “Everything is true in a different sense, /A sense that would have seemed meaningless

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

before.” In terms of personal identity, such intensity in the textual space refers to acquiescence to the constant reconstruction of traits that create an unpredictable, shocking, eminently creative trajectory of human existence, moments when an inner luminosity makes one realize the existential validity of an unplanned, abrupt choice, which may be obscure to the analysing consciousness. These are moments when individuals like Harry can sayWhy I have this election I do not understand. It must have been preparing always, And I see it was what I always wanted.... I must follow the angels.

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The reiterated non-comprehension and tormenting opacity constitute a framework for the peculiar intensity of his communication with Agatha and expression of his desire to embark on a pilgrimage of self discovery; a background of utter vacuity and darkness necessary for the significatory luminescence of the intense zone. The entire drama of textual dynamics seems to anticipate what Foucault described in an appraisal of Blanchot’s fictive wonder in Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside : It [the language of fiction] must no longer be a power that tirelessly produces images and makes them shine, but rather a power that undoes them, that lessens their overload, that infuses them with an inner transparency that illuminates them little by little until they burst and scatter in the lightness of the unimaginable. Blanchot’s fictions are, rather than images themselves, their transformation, displacement, and neutral interstices. They are precise; the only figures they outline are in gray tones of everyday life...And when wonder overtakes them, it is never in themselves but in the void surrounding them, in the space in which they are set, rootless and without foundation. The fictitious is never in things or people, but in the impossible verisimilitude of what lies between them: encounters, the proximity of what is most distant, the absolute dissimulation in our very midst.(pp.23-24) REFERENCES 1.

Colebrook,Claire, ’The Space of Man: On the Specificity of Affect in Deleuze and Guattari’, Deleuze and Space, (ed.) Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

2.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (trans.) Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (trans.) Robert Hurley et al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

 

SAJMR  Spectrum: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Research  Vol.2 Issue 3, March 2013, ISSN 2278‐0637 

 

Eliot, T. S., ‘Conclusion’, The Use of Poetry and Use of Criticism, London: Faber and Faber, 1964.

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Eliot, T. S., ‘Rudyard Kipling’, On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber and Faber, 1957.

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Eliot, T. S., ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’, Selected Essays, London: Faber and Faber, 3rd enlarged edition 1951.

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Eliot, T.S. The Family Reunion, Complete Poems and Plays, Faber and Faber, 1969.

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Eliot, T.S., ‘Dante’, Selected Essays, London: Faber and Faber, 1951.

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Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in the Class? : The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1980.

12.

Foucault, Michael, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside, printed in Foucault/Blanchot, (trans.) Jeffrey Mehlmann and Brian Massumi, New York: Zone Books, 1990.

13.

Plato, Timaeus and Critias, (trans.) Desmond Lee, London: Penguin Books, 1965.

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4.