T. S. Eliot and the Language of Hysteria, Slides of Poetry

Download T. S. Eliot and the Language of Hysteria and more Slides Poetry in PDF only on Docsity! VrcTOR Lr T. S. Eliot and the Language of Hysteria The search for a sureness of identity relies on the disturbance of the woman to give it form. -Jacqueline Rose I N LATE DECEMBER 1925, Conrad Aiken underwent several painful operations to correct a rectal fistula. Recovering in hospital, still "drugged profoundly with morphine ," Aiken wrote to his friend and former Harvard classmate, T.S. Eliot, thanking him for his new book, Poems 190~1925. Aiken's letter is full of envious praise for the collection's homogeneity and his friend 's assured sense of liter­ ary identity: "How the devil did you manage to discover your iden­ tity so early? One imagines that you might have sat, 'hat in hand, on the doorstep of the Absolute, ' at the age of five-your mind and manners already distinct and distinguished. While the rest of us spend our lives trying to find out who we are." Eliot obviously thought the fullness of Aiken's praise rather too fulsome, some­ what excessive, for he replied, after a few days with a page torn out of the Midwives Gazette: instmctions to those about to take exams for nurseing [sic] certificates. At the top, T.S.E. had underlined the words Model An­ swers. Under this was a column descriptive of various forms of vaginal discharge, normal and abnormal. Here the words blood, mucous, and shreds of mucous had been underlined with a pen, and lower down also the phrase purulent offensive discharge. Otherwise no com­ ment. 324 • THE DALHOUSIE REVIEW Pained and mortified, Aiken replied the next day: Have you tried Kotex for it? Manufactured by the Dupont Powder Co. Absorbent, Deodorant, Antiseptic . . A boon to women the world over . ... KOTEX. Used with success by Blue-eyed Claude the Cabin Boy! The reference to Blue-eyed Claude is glossed by Aiken thus: Blue-eyed Claude the cabin boy, the clever little nipper who filled his ass with broken glass and circumcised the skipper. Aiken reports that three days later Eliot called: "a little flustered and embarrassed, a little at a disadvant;:tge, but excessively friendly. There was no reference to his communication to me, and only a passing reference by me to my suggestion of Kotex, a suggestion for which he thanked me. "1 What are we to make of this strange and unseemly corre­ spondence between two male writers which draws its imageq from the gynaecological discourse of female discharges and sanitaq nap­ kins? An answer, I will suggest, can be found precisely in the veq impropriety and excessiveness of the epistolaq exchange, an ex­ cessiveness which draws our attention to the overdetermined fig­ ure, used by both Eliot and Aiken, of the female body and its reproductive functions as analogues or images of linguistic offenses and disorder. Interpreted either as a direct rebuke of Aiken's excessive verbal outpouring which is likened to "offensive" female discharge or as a disavowal of the distinction of his own work now likened to female pollution, Eliot's bizarre response relies on a metaphori­ cal construction that finds support in contemporaq physiological and medical discourses in which woman's reproductive system is linked to her emotionality, her susceptibility to hysterical outbursts. 1 The details of this exchange between Aiken and Eliot are given in Aiken's letter to Robert N. Linscott, dated 4 Jan.1926, in Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, ed. ]oseph Killorin (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978) 109-10. ELIOT AND THE LANGUAGE OF HYSTERIA • 327 Eliot was to recall his grandfather as orie who "rules his sons and his sons' sons from the grave. "8 "The standard of conduct," Eliot remembered, "was that which my grandfather had set; our moral judgements, our decisions between duty and self-indulgence, were taken as if, like Moses, he had brought down the table of the Law, any deviation from which would be sinful. "9 His character formed by the strictly patriarchal order of his family , it is little wonder that Eliot 's writing respects the phallocentric structure of sexual differ­ ence, gender hierarchy and stable , post-Oedipal identity and dem­ onstrates an anxious desire to protect and preserve the symbolic order of language and culture made possible by those phallocentric distinctions. With troubling frequency, women appear in Eliot's early work as figures who threaten precisely to unhinge and dismantle the symbolic order of cultural, sexual and linguistic representation. Whenever disorder threatens standards . of poetic creation or criti­ cism the figure of woman is not far away. In "Reflections on Vers Libre" (1917), Eliot's defence of the discipline of poetic metre is occasioned by the skittish dilettantism of "a lady renowned in her small circle for the accuracy of her stop-press information of litera­ ture ."10 Against the lady's unthinking celebration of metrical libera­ tion, Eliot raises the necessities of limitation and form in the fol­ lowing formulation: "the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest ' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse" (187). The ghost of metre, which should no doubt alert us to the ghost of Hamlet's father, advances a law, a paternal interdiction against renegades both poetic and feminine . In another early essay, "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919), the problems really amount to one, namely, Gertrude . The play is a problem and a failure, according to Eliot, because Shakespeare could neither find a way to externalize Hamlet's feelings nor come up with objective correlatives for his hero 's emotions. And what " Eliot, in an interview with V.S. Pritchett in The New York Times, 21 Sept. 1958; cited in Peter Ackroyd , TS. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984) 16. 9 Eliot, "American Literature and the American Language ," To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: Faber, 1965) 44. 10 To Criticize the Critic 183. 328 • THE DALHOUS fE REVIEW prevents Hamlet (and thus, by extension, his creator) from convey­ ing his feelings objectively in the symbolic order of language is his mother, who occasions an excess of emotion but is unable, argues Eliot, to provide "an adequate equivalent for it." In the patriarchal world of Shakespeare's play, Gertrude 's name is frailty; less than her male c,ounterparts , she is , as Eliot puts it, "negative and insig­ nificant." But, at the same time, she is a figure of excess arousing "in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing."11 The problem of Gertrude is thus the problem of the play, Hamlet; the dissociation of her character, both excessive and inadequate, is written across the body of the play, which is itself split into feelings that remain inexpressible and expressions that can only inadequately represent emotions. What we have in Eliot's analysis of Hamlet's dissociation is nothing less than a description of hysteria which in its most rudimenta1y form has been characterized by Freud and Breuer as "the splitting of consciousness. "12 Woman, dissociation, hysteria--these terms are interchangeable in Eliot's writing and to­ gether they issue a warning clearly sounded in his reading of Hamlet: the problem of femininity, its hysterical dissociation of fee ling from meaning, is contagious and responsible for Hamlet's hysteria as . well as that of the play itself. If hysteria is a disturbance of the symbolic order of meaning­ ful language, then in Eliot's only published prose-poem, the aptly named "Hysteria ," we see an aggressive defence mounted pre­ cisely against such a threat. 13 We are told that the woman's laugh­ ter not only threatens to involve the narrator in hysteria but also to engulf and devour him. The threat of castration, that is, the dis­ memberment of identity and rational speech, is felt acutely in this work. But, as Tony Pinkney has pointed out, the text's anxiety is mastered by a brittle intellectual wit: The ego's terror of dispersal is here held precariously in check .. by the desperate virtuosity of its imagery: "until 11 Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," The Sacred U7ood (London: Methuen, 1920) 101. 12 See Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. James and Ali..'\: Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 62-63. 13 Eliot, "Hysteria ," The Complete Poems and Plays of TS. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969) 32 ELIOT AND THE LANGUAGE OF HYSTERIA • 329 her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad­ drill. " The potential destructiveness of the teeth goes mercifully out of focus as the text parades its own stylis­ tic brio , and the image achieves on a small scale whar "Hysteria" aspires to overall by bringing the scattering energies of its accidental stars back into the centripetal discipline of the parade ground. 1 ; The male writer's best defence against female hysteria lies there­ fore in the very order and style of language, that is , of Lacan's symbolic order itself. A similar mobilization of linguistic resources to fend off hys­ terical involvement is also evident in "Portrait of a Lady. "15 The narrator of the poem seeks, like Henry .Tames's Basil Ransom, to escape from a "feminine, ... nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age. "16 Neurotically precious, visibly nervous ("slowly twisting the lilac stalks") and verbally discomposed (her speech is obsessively circular and repetitive), the lady of the poem attempts to win the friendship and confidence of the narrator only to end up, unknown to her, objectified as a portrait and one, moreover, that is "cruel," as Marianne Moore justly observed. 17 Fearful of becoming a part of the lady's feminine and nervous world, the narrator uses the sub­ ject position opened up by the world of language (a position guar­ anteed, we will recall, by the Name of the Father or phallus) to turn her into a subordinate third person, an object, an other for his active appropriation. "Sitting pen in hand," a writing subject to her portrayed object, he can utilize irony to unveil her "velleities" and simile to expose the hysterical quality of her longings: "The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune I Of a broken violin on an August afternoon. " Like "Hysteria," "Portrait of a Lady" seeks to master the disturbance of the woman by literally immobilizing her and containing what is perceived as her hysterical energy. If the 1 ' Tony Pinkney, Women in the Poetry of TS. Eliot: A Psychoanalytic Approach (London: Macmillan, 1984) 19. 15 Eliot, "Portrait of a Lady,·· The Complete Poems 18-21. 16 Henry James, The Bostonians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) 290. 1 - See Marianne Moore, "A Note on T.S. Eliot's Book," Poetry 12 (1918): 36-37; reprinted in TS. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Grant (London: Routledge, 1982) 1: 90. 332 • THE DALHOUSIE REVIEW attempt to distance himself verbally from the lady's tortured repeti­ tions and tautologies fails, as his own speech begins to resemble hers. Thus when he finally asks, "Would she not have the advan­ tage after all?" we must, I think, answer in the affirmative. By writ­ ing about the lady, he had hoped to distance himself from her deficienci~s and position himself solidly in the symbolic order, the male world of public action and significance. But instead of secur­ ing such an advantage, his writing, shaken by bursts of instinctual drives, slips into the lady's near hysterical speech rhythms and intonations . As the poem develops, the lady's portrait begins un­ cannily to resemble the young man's. Reflecting on the failure of his own writing, the young man wearily remarks: "This music is successful with a 'dying fall ' ." The hitter-sweet pathos of his remark can, however, be turned around. For it can be argued that "Hysteria" and "Portrait of a Lady" suc­ ceed as literary texts precisely because they fail to stem the hystericization of writing, the semiotization of the symbolic. Eliot himself, especially in his later criticism, seems to have understood that what is condemned as the disorder of hysteria may in·fact be "a form of making the unconscious conscious."23 Thus Eliot admits that poetic writing sometimes occurs with "the breaking uuwn of strong habitual barriers"2 " and that "the pressure of some rude unknown p~;ychic material " 25 can direct a poet's composition. These remarks by Eliot use the metaphor of a force breaking through a barrier and can be recast in Kristevan terms as the breakthrough of the semiotic into the symbolic. 26 Moreover, Eliot's affirmation of 23Dianne Hunter, "Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna 0.," Feminist Studies 9 0983): 485. 2" Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933) 145. z; Eliot, "The Three Voices of Poetry," On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957) 101. ' 6 Eliot's hysterical first wife, Yivienne, certainly understood the power of semiotic irruption in writing. Talking about how her material came from some "very over­ grown and hidden inner spirit, .. she goes on to say: "When this begins to spu rt, it is intolerable to choke it up, & will lead to my going mad. It is agony either way, of course, bur I think at first, until one has got the spout of this long disused fountain clear, it is better to let the water burst out when it will & so force away the accumulation of decayed vegetation, moss, slime & dead fish which are thick upon and around it." Cited in Lyndall Gordon, Eliot 's New Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) 58. It is interesting to compare Yivienne Eliot's remark to Helene Cixous's EUOT AND THE iA.t'IGUAGE OF HYSTERJA • 333 the poet's "auditory imagination," a "feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feel­ ing"27 resembles Kristeva's description of the pre-Oedipal, pre-sym­ bolic articulation of sounds and rhythms that constitute the semi­ otic. Despite these intimations of hysteria as the irruption of crea­ tive semiotic protest, Eliot persisted in advocating a poetics of or­ der that dismissed whatever was not within the bounds of the symbolic as deviant, disruptive, hysterical in the bad sense. Part of the reason forthis insistence on order might be due to Eliot's anxi­ ety over his position in the phallocentric scheme of gender, an anxiety that manifested itself as misogyny. Brought up in a house­ hold of women who nurtured and comforted him, yet made to be aware of the Law of the Father, Eliot as a young man must have had to struggle to repress the feminine and the poetic in him and aspire to those roles of civic leader, educator or responsible busi­ nessman assigned to all the Eliot men. Under these circumstances, the pre-Oedipal modality of the semiotic with its lack of gender distinctions must have been disturbing to the young poet. The hysterical irruption of the semiotic can therefore only stimulate an aggressive, misogynistic reaction whose violence, as we have seen, cannot, however, completely conceal the traces of its own repressed femininity. The cost of this repression can be felt, I think, in Eliot's disavowal of the accomplishment of his early poems in response to Aiken's praise for their distinction. But where Eliot sees their instability, their feminine hysteria as a cause for concern and criti­ cism, we might see in their verbal slippages and phonic drives the creative triumph of the repressed. The loss involved in Eliot's re­ pression of his own femininity can be best measured, however, in the last letter Eliot's oldest sister Ada wrote to him before her death. Favourably commenting on a remark of Eliot's in "The Music of Poetry" (1942) that a poem "may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words,"28 she valorization of the eruptive force of ecriture feminine in The Newly Born Woman, especially on 88 and 91. For an analysis of Vivienne Eliot's published writings, see Victor Li, " 'And still she cried': Vivienne Eliot's Pseudonymous Prose Contribu­ tions to The Criterion," Prose Studies 10 (1987): 72-84. " Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 118-19 'B Eliot, "The Music Of Poetry,·· On Poetry and Poets 38. 334 • THE DALHOUSIE REVJEW recalls, in an almost maternal way, a scene of pre-Oedipal har­ mony and semiotic reciprocity Eliot had lost in becoming the Pope of Russell Square- a scene he was perhaps trying to recapture when he wrote "The Music of Poetry": When you were a tiny boy, learning to talk, you used to sound the rhythm of sentences without shaping words­ the ups and downs of the thing you were trying to say. I used to answer you in kind, saying nothing yet convers­ ing with you as we sat side by side on the stairs at 2635 Locust Street. And now you think the rhythm before the words in a new poem! .. . Such a dear little boy!29 29 Ada Eliot Sheffield to T.S. Eliot, 13 April 1943, in The Letters ofTS. Eliot 1898- 1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber, 1988) 1: xxxi.