ESSAY: T.S. Eliot and Consciousness

T. S. Eliot and Consciousness: A Ponder

by John Kendall Hawkins

This article first appeared in Howth Castle, Issue 1. All Rights Reserved.

This is the first of two essays on Eliot's life and work. A second, focusing on the centennial celebration of The Wasteland (1922), will appear soon.

"Consciousness," Jung tells us, "does not create itself " it wells up from unknown depths. "(1) These depths include the whole range of shared and individual experiences recorded in the psychic history of the collective unconscious. These experiences, stored as symbols, become the leitmotifs of human history as it extends from the past into the future along the everpresent, but not always apparent, continuum of space and time. But access to the leitmotifs of this continuum is restricted to the nebulous condition we call consciousness, which seems to be, if not the result, the condition of man's peculiarly bifurcated nature " the subject/object schism which makes us both rational (i.e. conceptual, having the ability to posit a hypothetical event, based upon information contained in the past and extended into the future) and empirical (i.e. perceptual, having a sensory dialectic with the natural world). But access to anything approaching full consciousness is itself limited to a small group of geniuses who are the real leaders of a given generation, since the actions of most people seem to be driven by half-instinctual, half-conscious motives. It is the extra-consciousness of these geniuses (artists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, etc.) as manifested in their creative works, that is the basis of culture and the foundation of what we call civilization.

Now of the various forms of genius, art is the purest manifestation of genius because, unlike other works, it is the least guilty of manipulating the context out of which symbols and leitmotifs surge from the 'unknown depths' of the collective unconscious, and since such symbols and leitmotifs are representations of the eternally present truths of existence, art is the most faithful agent of reality, in fact, it is "a means of learning to experience reality. " (2) But all of this is just so much talk about consciousness without really saying what it is... which brings us to the purpose of this essay.

Far from attempting to construct a definition of consciousness in an essay that is to be necessarily brief, my more 'modest' goal is to look at consciousness as it is presented in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. His poetry is a good place to get an idea of what consciousness is about, because it has the unique characteristic of directly addressing the consequences of consciousness within the historical context of the revolutionary time in which he lived. Regardless of the somewhat diminished esteem with which Eliot's poetry is viewed today, the spirit of his conscious revolt against the unconscious manipulations of his time is loudly echoed in the various genres of contemporary literature.

And so, first I will discuss the historical context in which Eliot wrote and its crucial significance not only to Eliot the poetic medium of consciousness, but also to Eliot the man; second I will lightly discuss consciousness as it is manifested in poetry in general; and third, I will consider whether Eliot's poetry is faithful to that consciousness and what we can tell about consciousness as a result of his poetry. My discussion of Eliot's poetry will primarily concern itself with what seems to be four distinct phases in the development of his poetic consciousness. These phases are manifested in Eliot's four most important poems: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets. Since the purpose of my discussion of these poems is to elucidate the four phases of Eliot's poetic consciousness, rather than an attempt to discover their 'meaning,' line for line analysis of imagery, irony, symbol, etc., will be limited to the focus of this discussion.

After the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, the publication of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 is the single most important event of the last century. The implications and consequences of these two theoretical works, in conjunction with the senility of the Christian ethic and the disillusioning effects of the Industrial Revolution, were staggering to a degree that we can hardly imagine today, for Darwin's theory repudiated the primeval and deeply-felt spirituality with which man had hitherto regarded himself " far from bearing the special favor of some God, in whose image he was supposed to have been created, man was simply more highly evolved, more highly adapted than other animals with whom he shared the Earth; and Einstein's theory repudiated the wonder with which man looked at the stars and the awesome, incomprehensible cosmos in which they shone" and along with this loss of wonder at himself and the universe went all meaning, purpose, and moral culpability. At stake was the total abandonment of spiritual continuity and the repudiation of historical consciousness. But, as Karl Lowith points out in his explication of the great Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt,

Conscious historical continuity constitutes tradition and frees us in relation to it. The only people who renounce this privilege of historical consciousness are primitive and civilized barbarians. Spiritual continuity, as constituted by historical consciousness, is "a prime concern of man's existence," because it is only proof of the significance of the duration of our existence. Hence we must urgently desire that the awareness of this continuity should remain alive in our minds.(3)

The derision with which Nietzsche's Madman was greeted when he shouted "God is dead" in the marketplace of 1890 became nothing less than a prophetic self-caricature. 'Spiritual continuity' would become the nihilism of 'civilized barbarians.' Darwin's theory would help provide justification of the Holocaust of World War II and Einstein's theory would be painted on the bombs that levelled Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In between would come the ghoulishly primitive trench battles of World War I, followed by a global economic Depression. No one would ask the obvious question: "Does the workability of an equation mean that we should accept the metaphysical implication of its structure?" (4) No one would listen to Einstein's gentle remonstrances: "As far as the mathematical theorems refer to reality, they are not sure, and as far as they are sure, they do not refer to reality. " (5) But it was exactly reality that was trampled on by the 'civilized barbarians' in their rush for unlimited power that Einstein's theory promised. Gone was all spiritual 'continuity' and 'historical consciousness' of the eternally present truths of existence. Philosophers abandoned metaphysics for logical positivism and existentialism, artists turned to the abstract, psychologists bent their knees to Freud, and the people were pacified into unconsciousness with cars, telephones, televisions, machine guns, and all the other products of an assembly line oblivious to consciousness.

The poetic consciousness " the leitmotifs of human history "were repressed or perverted in the new orgiastic feast of materialism. Man was becoming a thing, more an object than a subject, and this change was more and more reflected in the products of his creativity, which are the symbolic representations of man's self-image. He had lost his poetic conscience, by which he had caught glimpses of the fleeting reality of the eternal present contained in and yet outside of the continuum of the past's extension into the future, and, as a result, he had lost his 'supernatural' identity contained in the faith of poetry which is

that everything in life is an expression of the fundamental condition in life, and thus it becomes a thread, a clue through the labyrinth of phenomena, which are only the products of man's dreams, though they are so much more enduring than any dream, so much more imposing than any man or generation of men. (6)

It is man's consciousness of this "labyrinth of phenomena" that provides his wax-winged transcendance of that phenomena, that is the source of his supernatural image of himself. And that is why Eliot has said: "I am convinced that if this 'supernatural' is suppressed..., the dualism of man and nature collapses at once. Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them. "7

Man's poetic consciousness is the means by which he comes to recognize and express his perception of the 'supernatural realities' that well up from 'the unknown depths' of not only human history but, because man is also an atomic being, universal history as well. It is the duality of his nature that allows him to both gaze into the deep depths of his organic past and to extend his sight into the far future of human potential. But this duality would amount to nothing more than a dim intuitive apprehension of a world of appearances if not for the poetic consciousness that allows him to recognize and find expression for the supernatural realities, the leitmotifs and symbols of his history. Indeed, the poetic consciousness is the supernatural reality, for it steps outside the past-future continuum (which can tell us everything about appearance and nothing about reality), and expresses its recognition of the eternally present moment, the moment of meaning 'at the still point of the turning world,' through metaphor. But this is not to say that a metaphor expressed by poetic consciousness stands for another reality, but rather that, in the moment it is expressed and experienced, it is reality. As such, the poetic consciousness is "a direct and total experience, 'the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. '"(8)

Now, it is precisely the suppression of the supernatural, which would result in the collapse of man's duality, that T.S. Eliot rebelled against, both in his poetry and in his essays. With his Unitarian upbringing in Missouri, his natural timidity and acuity, his poetic gift, and his Harvard education in philosophy, Eliot was well aware of the metaphysical implications of Darwinism and Einstein's theory of relativity. While those who supported these theories regarded them optimistically as freedom from man's barbaric past, Eliot saw no such optimism in releasing man from the historical consciousness by which he had come to define himself:

The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us, to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide. (9)

Eliot's is a bleak view, indeed. And he most certainly would have agreed with Jacob Burkhardt that "the only people who renounce this privilege of historical consciousness are primitive and civilized barbarians." (One might justifiably regard The Waste Land as just such a renunciation). But Eliot's view is also problematical because it is circumscribed by an almost pathetic submission to Christian ethics that would only grow stronger as he grew older, imbuing some of his later works and words (especially Ash Wednesday) with a rather repellant dogmatism: "As only the Catholic and the communist know, all education must be ultimately religious education. " (10). One gets the feeling in reading Eliot that had the theories of evolution and relativity not come to pass, his bleak view of human nature would not have been significantly altered, since in man's original sin lay the judgment that was to be his burden until the coming of a new heaven and a new earth. Eliot saw the expanding determinism of his time as a fatal step away from the saving grace of Christianity, rather than as a danger in itself. And yet, "paradoxically," as Rosemary Dinnage points out in her review of a recent biography of Eliot, "though he so hated and distrusted the modern world, the virtue of his poetry was to milk beauty out of modern desolation. "(11) But then, Dinnage adds, Eliot was full of curious paradoxes:

He stood for impersonality in poetry, yet imprinted his own personality indelibly on his work; argued the need for tradition, yet was an innovator; urged order and coherence, yet had a central vision, death-in-life; his voice is unmistakable, yet he put it together from the voices of others. (12)

But perhaps the most curious paradox of all is the dispassionate intellectualism that tinges almost all of Eliot's highly subjective work. The voice never changes throughout his poetry (from "Prufrock" to "Journey of the Magi" to "Ash Wednesday" " it is the same voice), the voice is Eliot's, and as a result one never comes away with a sympathy for any of the characters he introduces us to. Stephen Spender rightly criticizes this paradox " and shortcoming:

His ladies, his bank clerks, his Sweeneys, his Mrs. Porters, his pub conversationalists, are all part of the world of things...One of the most astonishing things about Eliot is that a poet with such a strong dramatic style should seem so blinded to the existence of people outside himself. Yet the effect of his poetry depends very largely on this blindness. (13)

Essentially, of course, the source of these paradoxes is to be discovered in Eliot's beliefs. We've already discussed his strong Christian focus, but perhaps more influential on his poetic consciousness than the Christian system of faith was the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, which was the subject of Eliot's doctoral thesis. Bradley's idealist philosophy included, in part, a rejection of the belief in individual immortality and the strong conviction that individuality is only a passing phase of the final Reality or Absolute. The influence of Bradley's philosophy in general, and of his Appearance and Reality in particular, on Eliot's beliefs was deep. Northrup Frye's discussion of Bradley's seminal work is elucidating:

In Bradley's Appearance and Reality , "appearance" is a mass of logically impossible and self-contradictory impressions of time, space, change, causation and the like, where there is a huge fission between subject and object, "mine" and "this." We have to go on to a reality which is an "Absolute," where all contradictions of appearances are reconciled. The Absolute can only be reached by an "immediate experience" in which reason, will and feeling all fulfill themselves. (14)

The effect of Bradley's mysticism was to lead Eliot to advocate the "extinction of personality in Art. " (15) This, of course, parallels the Christian (but ultimately Eastern) dogma of the extinction of personality in life. In both cases, personality is seen as disreputable because it easily gets lost in the confusion of appearances and leads one away from the 'immediate experience' of Absolute reality.

The extinction of personality, and the movement of the self from confusion (appearance) to fusion (reality), would lead Eliot to the formulation of two important concepts in his philosophy of art: unified sensibility and the objective correlative. What makes the work of a poet of unified sensibility so magnificent, says Eliot, is that the poet "can make no distinction between the intellectual and the emotional: all is utterly fused."(16) The poet achieves this unified sensibility by expunging his personality from the creative process and relying on the objective correlative:

In other words, a set of objects, in a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must not terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked. (17)

Now, as we have seen, Eliot's notions of unified sensibility and the objective correlative are largely derived from Bradley's mystical differentiation between "appearance" and "reality," as well as from Christian prayer and Eastern incantation " both of which stress the suppression of the persona and fusion with the Absolute. The unified sensibility and the objective correlative are also the means by which the poet comes to recognize 'supernatural' realities and to express his recognition of them. Indeed, Eliot's concepts are little more than a description of the machinations of the poetic consciousness described in some detail earlier. But what Eliot does in his work, and by his work, is to turn that consciousness into a philosophy of life. "To formulate [a poem or poems] as a philosophy," says C. S. Lewis, "even if it were a rational philosophy, and regard the actual [poem or poems] as primarily a vehicle for that philosophy, is an outrage to the thing the poet has made for us. "(18) As a rule, of course, Lewis is right because the poetic consciousness, by its creations, transcends all philosophies, expressing the eternity of a moment in a metaphor that is itself reality. But Eliot is the exception to Lewis' rule, for his work progresses more and more away from the immediate experience of reality in the poetic consciousness to an abstraction of that reality which culminates in the lyrical and mystical philosophizing of Four Quartets.

Turning to Eliot's four major poems, we discover a movement away from pure poetic consciousness, beginning with "Prufrock," to a kind of processed rationalization of that consciousness; a consciousness of consciousness, as it were. This is a paradox with bizarre metaphysical overtones. For on the one hand, there is Eliot's conscious and immediate experience of reality, and on the other hand an attempt to purge his subjectivity of that experience, an attempt to merge with the objectivity of the experience, and attempt to be his consciousness of what is. Yet the poetic consciousness is an expression of the subject-object relationship in man's dual nature. Thus, any attempt to merge with that reality would result in the collapse of man's duality and the loss of his recognition of the supernatural which, ironically, is exactly what Eliot feared would result from the godless determinism of his time. But now, let's look at the four phases of Eliot's development, as represented by his four major poetical works.

In phase one of Eliot's development, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," we find the poet subdued by the despair and melancholy of an over-developed self-consciousness. Prufrock's vision of the world (and of himself) is summed up by the succession of adjectives that litter the first ten lines of the poem: etherised, half-deserted, muttering, restless, cheap, tedious, insidious, and overwhelming. The "you and I" of line one is apparently Prufrock addressing himself in a mirror (symbolically, his self-consciousness). The "overwhelming question" Prufrock seems to be wrestling with, like a caricatured Hamlet without an objective correlative to justify the chaos of his emotions, seems to concern a marriage proposal. This question is lost in the general shuffle of Prufrock's thoughts because his timidity, isolation, and high-strung self-consciousness prevent him from facing up to the question in his life that he has some control over. He mistakes his inability to even decide whether or not should 'pop the question' with metaphysical questions, the answers to which he already half suspects but cannot absolutely know.

Thus, in his anxiety, he thinks "there will be a time / To wonder do I dare?" and, "Do I dare? / Time to turn back and descend the stair, / With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-" But instead of localizing the source of this anxiety ('Do I dare ask her hand in marriage?'), Prufrock, unable to candidly admit his cowardice, instead universalizes his anxiety: "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" And so, though it is beyond his power to disturb the universe, even if he were inclined to try, Prufrock elevates the uncertainty regarding his marriage proposal to the metaphysical dimension " and thus escapes the necessity of resolving it.

From here Prufrock begins a long series of rationalizations. Since the marriage proposal has taken on metaphysical significance, Prufrock now sums up why he should not ask for more trouble (marriage): "For I have known them all already, known them all," he mutters, "the evenings,... the eyes,...the arms..." And besides, he seems to ask, "would it have been worth it, after all," if after ...squeezing the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question,"... if after a profound discussion of metaphysical matters with his wife-to-be, she should one night say, while turning her back on him, "That is not it at all / That is not what I meant, at all" " thus, imprisoning Prufrock in an empty relationship and intensifying his isolation " would popping the question have been worth it, if it resulted in this? Prufrock doesn't think so. Consequently, he will walk along the beach alone, listening to the mermaids sing (but not to him), and wait for human voices to wake him, so that he may drown in his self-consciousness.

This, of course, is not a full interpretation of "Prufrock." Instead, it was meant to illustrate a certain line of consciousness that is developed in the poem " Prufrock is dead inside; he no longer has the life in him to make marriage proposals, the end results of which he has 'known already'; he no longer has the life in him to disturb the universe; he would like to be Lazarus, 'come back from the dead,' but instead he is doomed to drown in his own consciousness. This death-in-life consciousness, by which Prufrock is obsessed, is, in the larger scheme, Eliot's own vision of man in which the 'supernatural' has been suppressed and the duality of his nature has begun to collapse. This weariness, deathliness, and consciousness of despair in a faithless life, plays Echo to the Narcissistic consciousness that is developed in the minor poems leading up to The Waste Land.

In The Waste Land, phase two of Eliot's development, his focus changes from the conscious despair of the faithless subject to the absurdity of the unconsciously driven objective world. The Waste Land is Eliot's vision of 'the dark age before us,' again, due to the suppression of the supernatural which would lead to the collapse of man's dual and humanizing nature. Written in a kind of controlled stream of consciousness, full of personas that melt into other personas, with deaths and resurrections, and teaming with literary and historical allusions, it would be a mistake to try to discover the 'meaning' of the poem, since its incomprehensibility is its meaning. In other words, The Waste Land is a vision of a world in which subject and object, time and space, history and myth are indistinguishable, a world without meaning; but the poem is no more than an exposition of that meaninglessness. That Eliot couched The Waste Land in obscure allusions is one of the shortcomings of the poem, and as Stephen Spender points out,

In The Waste Land Eliot seems, more than in any other poem, and more than any other artist, to describe the contemporary post-war situation of a certain very small class of intellectuals in Europe and in America. (19)

The Waste Land is important because it is a movement from the subjective despair of his "Prufrock" stage to a more intellectualist dismissal of the absurd objective world. But since man cannot live by consciousness alone, nor long take pleasure in the ironies and absurdities that affect his existence, Eliot made the leap of faith.

In the third phase of his development, "Ash Wednesday," we find Eliot groveling for forgiveness and salvation from his redeeming god. Torn apart by his subjective despair in the face of the absurdity and barbarity of the objective world, Eliot resorts to typical Prufrockian rhetoric: "(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)" For Eliot, the choice has become clear: either one accepts the death-in-life existence that consciousness swallows one up in, or one takes the leap of faith to Christianity (and preferably Catholicism). Eliot's is a bleak vision " and no matter what one chooses " death-in-life or Christianity " there is no hope, no meaning to man's existence other than its being a long purgatorial preparation for death. The death-in-life choice renounces meaning by definition, Christianity by design. This is a rather appalling view of things and, what's more,

It is difficult to feel that Eliot's view of Western culture is anything more than a heresy in his own sense of the word, a partial insight with "a seductive simplicity" which is "altogether more plausible than the truth. " (20)

Four Quartets is Eliot's meditative, philosophical phase; he has been driven half-mad by the overwhelming questions of his subjective consciousness, bowled over by the objective world's meaningless replies, and has sought refuge and forgetfulness in Catholic penitence. There is nothing left to do but to groom himself and tidy up his affairs before meeting his Maker.

With Four Quartets, Eliot seems finally to have achieved his desire to purge his art of all personality. The result is a fusion of his reason, will, and feeling into a unified vision that, for once, is not loudly troubled by the world of appearances. The serenity and poise of Four Quartets is unmatched in any of Eliot's other writings. It is as though he had to first bring his feelings to full consciousness ("Prufrock"), followed by all of the connections of his reason (The Waste Land), only to purge them, along with his will in Ash Wednesday, and thus, finally presenting his true self in Four Quartets. But, alas, when this true self emerges from the closet of his cloistered anxieties, it is not a poet that stands before us but a philosopher. And with a smile that passes all understanding he says to us,

Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension".

And,

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Four Quartets, like The Waste Land to which it bears a thematic resemblance, tells the story of man's Fall, his fledgling attempts to find his way back Home, and the hope of redemption he may receive if he lets go of the desire that binds him to the world of appearance and which is the source of all his suffering. The influences of Bradley, Catholicism, and Eastern mysticism are clearly evident in this work. And these influences are the limits to Eliot's poetic consciousness. That in the end he continues to point to the Church as the only hope of saving man from his own self-destruction tempts one to concur with some of the criticism that has been leveled at Eliot's depth:

Eliot became prone to enunciating "great truths-- or cracker barrel saws, if you see it that way, and very often saved himself only by a hair's breadth of irony or imagery from being pathetic. (21)

Harsh. But perhaps the most glaring irony of Eliot's poetic consciousness is his attempt to escape from his personality in his art. In fact, however, what he does is dive head-long into his personality and it swallows him whole, so that he ends up mistaking pure subjectivity for objectivity--that is, at the end of all his exploration, he arrives at the place he started (Christianity, Bradley's idealism, and Eastern mysticism) and mistakes them for the first time. The mechanization of man that he so keenly saw coming was, to a great extent, made possible by the low self-esteem that Christianity had imbued man with for two millenia. And as far as Eliot points to the Church as man's salvation, that is where his poetic consciousness flickers, for he is no longer showing us glimpses of reality; and instead of giving us an extinguished personality in his poetry, that is where his personality becomes most evident.

Notes:

1. Carl G. Jung, "Psychology and Religion: East and West" in The Portable Jung

(London, 1971), p 569.

2. Northrup Frye, T.S. Eliot: An Introduction (Chicago, 1963), p. 45.

3. Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), p. 22.

4. The Smith, "The Simple-Mindedness of Albert Einstein or Modern Creation

Myths," The Smith, 21 (July 1979), p. 6.

5. Ibid, p. 6.

6. Stephen Spender, Life and the Poet (New York, 1974), pp. 41-42.

7. T. S. Eliot, "Second Thoughts about Humanism," in Selected Essays (London,

1932), p. 485.

8. Frye, p. 44.

9. T.S. Eliot, "Thoughts after Lambeth," in Selected Essays, p. 387.

10. T.S. Eliot, "Modern Education and the Classics," in Ibid, p. 515.

11. Rosemary Dinnage, 'T.S. Eliot: A Life by Peter Ackroyd," New York Review

of Books, 31:20 (20 December 1984), p. 31.

12. Ibid., p. 34.

13. Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 146.

14. Frye, pp. 43-44.

15. H. L. Sharma, The Essential T. S. Eliot (New Delhi, ND), p. 33

16. Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis, 1956), p. 4.

17. T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet," Selected Essays, p. 145.

18. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (London, 1961), p. 82.

19. Spender, The Destructive Element, p. 133.

20. Frye, p. 24

21. Dinnage, p. 32.