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Exteriority in TS Eliot and His Modernist Contemporaries

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Exteriority in TS Eliot and His Modernist Contemporaries BEDSOLE, MICHAEL, PhD. “I who am here dissembled”: Exteriority in T.S. Eliot and His Modernist Contemporaries. (2016) Directed by Dr. Anthony Cuda. 369 pp. This dissertation examines the way that twentieth-century Modernist poet T. S. Eliot stages the production and reproduction of human subjectivity in his work. It places him in context of other thinkers of the period (poets, novelists, social theorists) to better understand both their reflections on self-construction and his own. Specifically, this study examines how Eliot deconstructs the inner/outer binary that his contemporaries use when theorizing the self. In doing so, it positions itself against those critics who argue that Eliot exclusively emphasizes interiority (or the experience of inwardness) as such. Inverting these typical claims, this study argues that Eliot privileges exteriority (i.e., the externalized objectification of self), and it claims that from his earliest poetry, Eliot dramatizes individuals as opaque surfaces lacking depth. However, this dissertation also claims that Eliot portrays a process whereby individuals become aware of their own self- objectification, the realization of which proves ironically, dialectically generative of an experience of interiority, however tenuous or transitory. My hope in this work is to demonstrate Eliot’s difference from his contemporaries as well as to suggest how his work parallels certain later theorizations of the self. I also hope to advance a view of Eliot as a dialectical thinker and to trace an alternative genealogy for one branch of Modernism. “I WHO AM HERE DISSEMBLED”: EXTERIORITY IN T.S. ELIOT AND HIS MODERNIST CONTEMPORARIES by Michael Bedsole A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2016 Approved by ___________________________ Committee Chair To Amy, whose patience and support made this dissertation possible. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Michael Bedsole has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair _____________________________________ Committee Members _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................1 A Poet of Interiority? ...................................................................................1 Eliot the Dialectician..................................................................................10 II. CONSTRUCTING A POET: PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS ..................................................................................................28 Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, and the Anthropological Privileging of Exteriority ......................................................................32 Frazer’s Oppositional Ontology .................................................................40 Jane Harrison and the Inward Turn ............................................................47 Henri Bergson and the Primacy of Interiority............................................53 F.H. Bradley’s Deconstruction of the Inner/Outer Binary .........................59 The Victorian Foregrounding of Inwardness .............................................66 Robert Browning and George Eliot ...........................................................69 Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater .............................................................74 III. A RADICAL SKEPTIC: ELIOT’S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTI-DUALISM ..........................................................................................85 Eliot and Philosophy ..................................................................................90 Henri Bergson: An Early Infatuation .........................................................92 Eliot’s Rejection of Bergson’s Model of Subject/Object Relations .......................................................................98 Beyond Bergson .......................................................................................103 Appropriating Bradley .............................................................................107 Eliot and Social Theory ...........................................................................112 Fact or Interpretation? ..............................................................................115 Eliot’s Critique of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl .........................................123 Eliot on the Nineteenth-Century Literary Tradition ................................132 IV. THE DISRUPTIVE GAZE: EXTERIORITY AND INTERIORITY FROM THE EARLY POEMS TO THE WASTE LAND ............................151 Eliot the Laforguian? ...............................................................................154 iv Inventions of the March Hare: Eliot and the Poetry of Exteriority ...........................................................................158 “Portrait of a Lady”: Another Marionette Poem? ....................................170 The Emergence of the Interior .................................................................178 “Prufrock” and the Drama of Self-Emergence ........................................182 Dialectical Relations in “Prufrock” .........................................................186 From “Prufrock” to The Waste Land .......................................................191 The Waste Land and Interiority................................................................193 Voiding the Interior..................................................................................196 Tiresias and the Self-Externalizing Gaze .................................................201 V. DISSOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION IN SWEENEY AGONISTES, “ASH WEDNESDAY,” AND FOUR QUARTETS .....................................211 From “Prufrock” to Sweeney Agonistes ...................................................215 Sweeney and Oppositional Relations ......................................................219 Sweeney and Self-Dissolution ..................................................................229 Affirmation and Dissociation in “Ash Wednesday” ................................233 The Dialectics of Self-Construction.........................................................236 Dismembering the Self ............................................................................242 Four Quartets and the Dialectics of Transcendence ................................251 Heraclitean Purgations .............................................................................254 Incarnation and Resolution ......................................................................261 Conclusion: Eliot and Modernism ...........................................................269 VI. INTERIORITY AND EXTERIORITY IN ELIOT’S MODERNIST CONTEMPORARIES .................................................................................282 Woolf and the Inviolable Inner Self.........................................................287 Lawrence and the Subterranean Self........................................................299 Conrad and the Abyss of the Self ............................................................310 Prioritizing the External ...........................................................................320 Ezra Pound and Imagism .........................................................................321 T.E. Hulme and the Poetics of Objectivity ..............................................325 Gertrude Stein and the Word as Object ...................................................329 Wyndham Lewis: “Good art must have no inside” .................................335 William Carlos Williams: The World as Ontological Given ...................340 Conclusion ...............................................................................................346 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................353 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A Poet of Interiority? In Tracing T.S. Eliot’s Spirit, A. David Moody argues that Eliot’s The Waste Land “essentially” dramatizes the poet’s own personal “landscape of inward desolation” (116). By staging his emotional impressions and experiences through the poem’s various images, scenes, and personages, Eliot is able to “work out a set of personal feelings” that would otherwise remain unexamined (115). Indeed, in expressing those feelings, Moody believes Eliot in fact attempts to transfigure them, “to recover feeling through lyrical expression of the ‘dead’ state of being” (115-16). For Moody, at least in The Waste Land, Eliot is a poet of interiority, a poet who seeks to express inner states in outward form. In her biography of T.S. Eliot, Lyndall Gordon makes a similar point, writing that The Waste Land functions for Eliot as a “guarded mode of confession” (149). Like Moody, Gordon argues that one of Eliot’s aims in writing The Waste Land was to effect a transformation in himself, as a “knight will traverse a waste in his quest for grace” (156). For Gordon though, almost all of Eliot’s poetry can be seen in this way, as thinly disguised autobiography and emotional self-exploration.
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