Literature and Theory

Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys

Sk Sagir Ali

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000591323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría de la crítica literaria

Literature and Theory is designed to assist students to apply key critical theories to literary texts. Focusing on representative works and authors widely taught across classrooms in the world – Joyce, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Beckett, Eliot, and Octavia Butler – it picks up different aspects of studying literature in an accessible format. The volume also brings together chapters that represent major modern literary schools of thought, including structuralism, poststructuralism, myth criticism, queer theory, feminism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and critical theory, as well as culture studies.

Part III PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

6 THE WHORE AND THE VIRGIN

Sexual Non-Rapport in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Dialectics of the Obsessional Subject

Deeptesh Sen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003043942-10

If James Joyce faced censorship after the publication of Ulysses, T.S. Eliot faced it before his publication of The Waste Land, thanks to Ezra Pound’s excisions from the original draft in the manuscript version. This censorship came about because of Eliot’s foray into the obscene boundaries of the human body as his verses were as much an exploration of abjection and human waste as explicit sexuality.

In this chapter, I argue how waste and courtly love become two strategic tropes for positing the sexual non-rapport in Eliot’s poetry. I will be focusing on the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s teaching that there is no sexual relationship in the speaking being. By focusing on this dual strategy of instituting the non-rapport, I would also like to argue that Eliot’s poetry embodies the dialectic tendencies of the obsessional subject.

Lacan said the sexual relationship does not exist which means that what the speaking being gets out of such a relationship is subjective satisfaction and there is a hindrance to enjoying the body of the other. One can, therefore, only ever enjoy the enjoyment of one’s own body. In other words, what one enjoys in a sexual relationship is one’s relationship with his/her fantasy.

Focusing on the Lacanian theory of sexual non-rapport, I will try to read Eliot’s bawdy verses and some of his more famous later works where his poems assumed a more serious religious fervour. I will argue that Eliot’s representation of women is mostly dualistic – while he equates women with waste in his bawdy poems, in his later works they are represented as the Virgin Mother. Both waste and courtly love thus become strategic devices of positing the non-rapport in Eliot.

Eliot’s little-known bawdy verses were a part of the private papers and the archives until they were published in The Inventions of the March Hare Poems and the recently published two-volume annotated text of the collected and uncollected poems edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. This huge collection of Eliot’s bawdy poems is interesting because they present Eliot to us in a more frank and rugged poetic candour before he attained fame and fortune. Though many of the raw sexual impulses of these poems were repressed in his later works, it is by no means absent and runs as an uneasy undercurrent beneath the surface. These poems have received active scholarly interest since their publication, but the amount of research done on them so far is relatively scant.

In fact, Eliot’s scatological imagination as portrayed in his Columbo and Bolo poems would have put Joyce to shame. The reason why it has been actively overlooked so far is that unlike Joyce, whose fame rests firmly upon his novel Ulysses, Eliot’s verses written before or around 1910 are rarely studied or admired with such gusto as the rest of his work.

In the period from 1909 to 1922 when Eliot was writing and publishing poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “Portrait of a Lady”, “Preludes”, and “The Waste Land” – poems that firmly established his reputation as one of the major poets of the century – he was simultaneously composing a long cycle of intensely sexual, bawdy, pornotropic, and satirical verse that has only recently come to light. Centred on the seafaring adventures of an explorer named “Columbo” (Eliot uses an Italianate version of Christopher Columbus’s name) and his encounters, inhabitants of Cuba, “King Bolo and his Big Black Bassturd Kween”, these poems comically portray the history of early colonialism in the Americas as an orgy of uncontrollable desire and deviant sexuality. Columbo’s voyages and his first contacts with the King and Queen of Cuba take place by, through, and for sex, as Eliot figures sodomy, masturbation, miscegenation, scatological rituals, and rape as the modus operandi of imperial conquest (McIntire 10).

The poems form part of an extensive cycle as though Eliot had started writing them early in his life; he continued to work on them throughout his life. Most of these were shared privately with a homosocially arranged coterie of male writers, including Conrad Aiken, Clive Bell, Bonamy Dobre´e, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. These series of untitled poems, McIntire argues, have a common concern with Eliot’s “nascent reputation as a poet, his anxious desires for publicity, his exile from the United States, and his uneasy relation to race, sex, and colonialism” (11). But the common thread that runs across almost all of these poems is bawdy sexuality and Eliot’s scatological imagination.

In the very first poem of the series, published together as Columbo and Bolo verses by Christopher Ricks in the Inventions of the March Hare Poems 1909–1917, Columbo’s penis is filled with muriatic acid by the doctor who is a “bastard Jew”:

The first poem, in the Columbo and Bolo series, is a narrative of how Columbo’s “prick” is turned into waste by filling it with muriatic acid, finds an exact echo in a poem much later in the series where “argyrol” replaces the muriatic acid.

The obsession with waste runs through this series of poems as we learn that the cargo onboard the ship is “forty tons of bullshit” – but interestingly Eliot continues to explore the connection between sex and shit as even the music of “The Whore House Ball” leads to “farty” accents.

Sexual relationship is impossible, and the very possibility of it induces horror as is evident from an incomplete fragment – the woman poses a question to a boy in the first line which also has a couple of words missing.

When Columbo and the queen do engage in sexual intercourse, it comes after a heated exchange of words during which the abuses deal with dirt and shit. The affair is terminated by having intercourse – while it suggests a peaceful resolution to the conflict, the interesting choice of diction by using the word “affair” also strongly hints at the termination of their relationship.

The very next poem comes back to the theme of faeces as a bullet passes through Columbo’s anus which makes him almost shit in the process.

Yet Eliot’s later poetry, after his conversion to the Anglican Church in 1927, is filled with images of another kind of women who are not equated with waste and faeces. They are not prostitutes like the women in the Columbo and Bolo verses, but the Petrarchan lover of the Virgin Mother. Courtly love in these later poems becomes the reason for the sexual non-rapport.

In Seminar XX, Lacan attributes the invention of courtly love to a heroic effort to circumvent the natural impasse between the two sexes. Since the non-rapport is caused by the sexual difference between the logic of the whole or all on the masculine side of the sexuation and that of the particular or not all, the impasse becomes the third term of sexual difference out of which arises human culture. The heroic effort to circumvent the impasse that led to the invention of courtly love thus gave birth to art and poetry. The woman in courtly love, elevated to a spiritual ideal so that she embodied a feminine essence, became the cause of love poetry.

Courtly love also became the perfect way to institute the sexual non-rapport, according to Lacan, as man pretends that the obstacle is being put up by him to deny the fact that there is no sexual relationship. As Lacan writes, it is a completely refined fashion to supplement the absence of the sexual rapport by feigning that we are the ones who put up the obstacle to it (Lacan 65).

Feigning a rapport by creating an obstacle to it is for man “the only way to withdraw himself with elegance from the absence of the sexual rapport” (65). The interruption of the sexual relationship gives rise to poetry and desire according to Lacan. But after his conversion in 1927, Eliot’s belief in the Anglican Church is absolute as he believes it is the church and one’s belief in God that can only save mankind in times of adversity. This was an emphatic transformation in Eliot’s religious faith as it was religious devotion that gave a newfound meaning to his existence. This belief is expressed in Eliot’s choruses from “The Rock”.

Living in an era of war-torn historical turmoil through the excesses of fascism and communism, religious faith for Eliot became his only hope and strength for survival during the trying times. He decried the “decay of Protestantism” in After Strange Gods in 1934 and secular humanism for him was, as he wrote in For Lancelot Andrews, “in fact, a product – a byproduct – of Protestant theology in its last agonies”.

Eliot’s religious imagery that went beyond the desires of the flesh ensured that the woman in these poems became a representation of the Virgin Mother who has the divine power of bestowing blessings and mercy. She cannot be desired as she is the woman of courtly love and in ideal situations, she embodied the Anglican Church itself.

Thus, in Eliot’s later poetry after his conversion in 1927, there is a repeated trope of renunciation of desire and seeking mercy from a figure of divine grace. The representation of the woman in these poems as a God-like figure is interesting because it clearly shows a split in Eliot’s perception of women – they are either the whores who are the embodiment of waste and are associated with the sinful pleasures of the flesh, or the Lady of the courtly love through the figure of the Virgin Mother who is not to desired but worshipped: “[There is a] divergence in Eliot’s representations of women into virgins and whores, into exalted images of divine women whose apotheosis is Dante’s Beatrice, and into depraved, carnal women whose nadir is Fresca in the drafts of The Waste Land” (Ramos 82).

By the time Eliot began writing Ash-Wednesday, he was a committed follower of St. John and was on a journey which was “the way of contemplation, a way that necessitates moving through the dark night of sense and desire, and purging the memory and the will, in order to attain the divine union” (Schuchard 155).

In the second part of Ash-Wednesday, the reference is to a Beatrice-like figure whose desirous face and voice he has previously renounced. The earliest, untitled draft of the poem, sent to Stead, and in the first printing of the poem, had two conjoined epigraphs – the first from Ezekiel, “The hand of the LORD was upon me”, and the second from Purgatorio 24, “e vo significando” (he dictates within me). The former alludes directly to the Lord’s spiritual transportation of the exiled prophet to the valley of dry bones, in verses that provide Eliot with much of the narrative structure, phrasing, and imagery of the poem.¹

In his dream vision, the poet finds himself in a “dissembled” state as the three white leopards have fed on his legs, heart, and liver with satisfaction. As the poet reveals this to his Lady, we are reminded of Dante’s dream where he had offered his heart food for Beatrice.

The Lady here is not an object of physical desire but a figure of spiritual purity, one who “honours the Virgin in meditation”.

She soon withdraws “In a white gown, to contemplation”, guiding him towards a state of beatitude. True to the poetry of this period, Eliot prays for the annihilation of memory to follow her, “Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose”. Such an annihilation is necessary because he does not want to turn back again to the times past – seeking divine mercy for the sins committed, he would like to embrace divinity in this new life.

The “Lady of silences” now becomes the Virgin in his vision. This is an explication of the Lacanian idea of sublimation, which we have already discussed earlier; the woman gets elevated to the dignity of the Thing. His dry bones sing to her in devotion praising her as Rose and Mother of the Divine Garden. This litany is his “prayer for release and transcendence”, as the liturgical form betrays the poet’s torment which breaks through his defences.

This is the best possible explication of the non-rapport in the form of courtly love. The desire to forget the pain of unsatisfied love leads the poet to embrace courtly love. But he must understand that love if satisfied creates greater torment. Love must, thus, always remain unsatisfied in courtly love by elevating the Lady to the sublime Ideal, and the obstacles must be constructed to create the illusion of the sexual rapport.

The Four Quartets, in many ways, marks a culmination of Eliot’s journey starting from his dissatisfaction with his puritanical roots, his moving away from the Unitarian church, turmoil and guilt over a failed marriage, and interest in Indic mysticism, Buddhist dharma, and sceptical humanism. What is evident in this period is Eliot’s guilt over a broken marriage and the desire to move beyond it – though the resumption of his relationship with Emily Hale provided him with an opportunity to stop looking back at the past and make newer beginnings, Hale remained the purified virginal woman of courtly love to Eliot as he by then looked down upon the desires of the flesh as base and unworthy. The Four Quartets in its four movements marks this transition of experience from the plane of carnal desire to an elevated mystic consciousness where the renunciation of desire enables one to enjoy the divine blessings.

The dialectic tendency in Eliot of instituting the non-rapport by turning the woman into the “whore” or the “virgin” presents us with a classic case of obsessional neurosis. The sexual rapport is impossible for the obsessional as his primary relationship is with his fantasy, and he considers himself complete to the extent he is not dependent on his partner. Desire is impossible for the obsessional subject, or he revels in desiring only the impossible such as the virginal woman of courtly romance. Should the obstacles be removed by circumstances and the object of love become attainable, the woman would hold no further interest for the obsessive as we clearly saw from Eliot’s relationship with Emily Hale. As we have discussed earlier, this is an example of the neurotic tendency of turning the gift into shit.

For Eliot, the true obsessional, his partner in the sexual relationship is his object a which is fungible and disposable. The woman a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction - Literature and Theory: Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys
• PARTI Myth Criticism
• PART II Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
• PART III Psychoanalytic Criticism
• PART IV Queer Theory
• PART V Reader-Response Criticism
• PART VI New Historicism
• PART VII Marxism
• PART VIII Postcolonialism
• PART IX Cultural Study
• PART X Translation Study
• Index