T.S. Eliot's Christmas Poems

An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other "Impossible Unions"

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137485700
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137479129
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred in the Incarnation.

1

Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-même

Abstract: This introductory chapter outlines the approach to reading taken in the book. The approach involves writing-as-reading and focuses, with attention to both Eliot and his “mentor” Lancelot Andrewes, on the “squeezing and squeezing” of words, attention to words in their immediate and remote contexts, and (eventually) deep and extended meditation. Here, commentary and poems mirror one another. The poems included in the two Ariel series are read as parts of a certain whole, around the idea for which they were commissioned, Christmas. This marks the first time they have been extensively considered (together) as Christmas poems.

Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003.

Let us go then, you and I. . . .

—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

In recent books, I have said that I practice essayistic criticism. I would not now disavow that terminology, although I have come much to prefer the term “commentary” instead of the familiar, but inaccurate, word “criticism.” “Essayistic,” in any case, names but part of the approach I take. It also needs refinement, and the idea it points to needs fulfillment.

In this book, I am engaged in refining a critical practice, not in developing a (new) theory. The principles embodied in this practice represent an a posteriori approach, and I shall hope to present them in detail in another place. Here, I must be content to describe how I proceed. The subject of the commentary at this point is not so much me, or even me as commentator, but the commentary I write as intersecting and being intersected by Eliot’s poetic texts.

I do not, then, impose a way of reading. I start from reading, and the way I read is hardly new, although I have not seen it played out quite as I do. I, in fact, have done “writing-as-reading” before in commenting on essays, and I have “squeezed and squeezed” the words of texts in writing about Old Possum, T.S. Eliot. He, in particular, demands, and requires, no less. But heretofore I have not put “in other words” what the “squeezing and squeezing” of a text’s words amounts to and reveals under the direction of “writing-as-reading.” I regard my earlier essais as precursors to the efforts here with Eliot’s Ariel Poems, efforts that (attempt to) complete and fulfill what came before.

The “approach” (so-called for lack of a better term) perhaps begins from a long-held sense that the search for “meanings” can be deleterious, dangerous, and reductive. It bears “the old Platonick stink,” etherealizes, spiritualizes, and idealizes, and thus is alien to Eliot’s sensibility. It is a form of pur-itanism that he roundly criticizes and rejects; it substitutes abstraction for the concrete, the specific, and the materially textured that is literature (of whatever kind). The search for “meanings” may be appropriate for philosophy and theology, although I am not so sure, but I am convinced that it is not the primary business of literature.

At least in approaching Eliot’s poetry, the poetics of reading and of writing incarnate in the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, and put in other words by Eliot in his keen, magisterial essay on the great seventeenth-century preacher, are crucial: like Andrewes commenting on a passage in Scripture, I “squeeze and squeeze the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which you would never have supposed any word to possess.”¹ We are, obviously, back to meaning. But it is of an altogether different sort from that displayed in our contemporary search for textual meaning. In fact, Andrewes begins, and pointedly shows great patience in staying with, individual words and their meanings, which I understand as a literal and material procedure.

Squeezing and squeezing words only gets us started. There follows—is entailed, really—a comparison both intra-textual and inter-textual, a comparison of a word, an idea, a theme, an image with its “rhymes” within the work and then beyond, in other works by Old Possum. All the while, meditation is required.

The whole effort moves in time. It does not readily jump to meanings. Instead, I stay with words and their meanings and their work. The over-arching aim is to get from the first word of the text to the last.

The best—the most responsible, accurate, and efficient—way of thus proceeding is to seek to put what the text is doing as well as saying in other words. It is a way of reading, mirabile dictu, close to paraphrase, often assumed to constitute the very worst of critical sinning.

The issue is, as so often, parts-whole. Putting-in-other-words is never just a matter of immanence, or lateral recapitulation. It is also, and at the same time, transcendent, for a sense of the whole text must intersect with the part, which, of course, constitutes, along with the other parts, that whole. There is here, too, then, a to-and-fro movement, a movement of reciprocity, or what is sometimes referred to as “the hermeneutic circle.” The same essential structure informs the way(s) in which putting-in-other-words entails the active use of analysis, comparison, and meditation, never a simple (uninformed, or uncritical) effort merely to repeat.

Space thus opens, difference in the same. Tact is required, as Alexander Pope insists, so as not to veer too far from the original text(s) nor, at the same time, to offer but “crabbed . . . Faithfulness.”² There is room—indeed, there is the necessity—that you as reader and text meet, intersecting.

The “just” is not enough, by itself. The “lively” is not enough, by itself. They need each other.³

Eliot’s Christmas poems explore the implications and the effects of the “new dispensation,” of the Christian religion, and especially of Incarnational understanding. Although the Ariel Poems do not foreground the issue, in them Eliot releases Incarnational understanding to represent an alternative to the later challenges to binarism mounted by the likes of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, who come at the issue, of course, from a decidedly non-Christian, or even anti-Christian, point of view, and of René Girard, whose point of view is problematically Christian (and centered in notions of mimetic rivalry and reciprocal violence). Take, for instance, Barthes, writing in the lecture course at the Collège de France posthumously published as The Neutral (delivered in 1977–78, first published, in French, in 2002, in English, 2005):

. . . the paradigm [in other words: the opposition of two virtual terms from which, in speaking, I actualize one to produce meaning] is the wellspring of meaning; where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning … meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.⁴

In this situation, Barthes offers “the idea of a structural creation that would defeat, annul, or contradict the implacable binarism of the paradigm by means of a third term,” which he variously calls the “amorphous, neutral term (phonological neutralization), or zero degree.”⁵ In related fashion, Derrida points to “the trace” and the play of différance (the difference between the letter “a” and the letter “e” making all the difference). You might remember that, in the final section of The Waste Land, Eliot offers the following representation of the risen Jesus speaking to His disciples on “the road to Emmaus”:

Who is the third, who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?⁶

The “third” here is related to that other “third”—Tiresias, once woman, now again man—who appears in “The Fire Sermon,” observing the “young man carbuncular” and “the typist home at teatime” engaged in meaningless sex. The “third” may be related, as well, to the encounter with the “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding,” where the speaker “assumed a double part” and then “heard another’s voice”: “I was still the same, / Knowing myself yet being someone other— / And he a face still forming.”⁷ Eliot was, thus, all along, very much concerned with differences, oppositions, relations between and among apparent oppositions, parts, wholes, fragments. In the Ariel Poems, his response appears in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees in the form of the decorative angel that is an angel, and, to go from the end to the beginning, in Journey of the Magi, in the form of the Magus’s realization that “Death” and “Life” may not be “different.”⁸ In this fashion, too, in the Christmas poems, Eliot (thus) plays with, confronts, analyzes, and explores “end” and “beginning.”

It helps, I maintain, to bring reading and writing together, making them essentially one act, which thus “privileges” the present moment, and so is to be distinguished from reflection, which, in best Wordsworthian fashion, interrupts and violates the temporal movement and nature of understanding. You write as you read, and—this is the novel part—you read as you write: the reading occurs in the writing. We have long recognized the need to write it down in order to be precise, in order to get it right. There may be no other way. Writing about reading fulfills the reading (and potentially completes the work of the primary, “calling” text).

This “approach,” I am only outlining here, a point that I cannot overemphasize. Questions are bound to arise, refinements need be made, corrections rendered, and gaps filled in. I hope, in time, to do just that. I will, at that time, flesh out the principles drawn from the practice that I here merely describe. In so doing, it is important to state, I will be paralleling, and offering an analogue of, what actually occurs in the making of comment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-mme
• 2  The Gift Half Understood, or Eliots Ariel Poems: Beyond the Old Dispensation
• 3  Triumphal March: The Problem Lies in Our Perceiving
• 4  The Cultivation of Christmas Trees: Through the Eyes of Children (and the Child-like)
• 5  Journey of the Magi: A Fable of Commentary: With a Second Coming to the Inexhaustible
• 6  Animula: What the Simple Soul Knows, or Living first in the silence after the viaticum
• 7  A Song for Simeon: The Difference the Letter Makes: Prayer, Self-Criticism, Validity
• 8  Marina: Living to live in a world of time beyond me: Recognizing, Perceiving, and Understanding
• Bibliography
• Index