Pain and Sexual Pleasure in Dante Alighieri and T. S. Eliot

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LOVE' S TORMENT: PAIN AND SEXUAL PLEASURE IN DANTE ALIGHIERI AND T.S. ELIOT by Maria A. Romano

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August 1997 Copyright by Maria A. Romano 1997

11 LOVE'S TORMENT: PAIN AND SEXUAL PLEASURE IN DANTE ALIGHIER1 AND T.S. ELIOT by Maria A. Romano

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Priscilla M. Paton, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory com mittee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English.

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Author: Maria A. Romano Title: Love's Torment: Pain and Sexual Pleasure in Dante Alighieri and T.S. Eliot Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Priscilla Paton Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1997

Sexual pleasure, for the male writer, has been accompanied by pain for centuries. Italian poet Dante Alighieri presents a paradoxical treatment of lust by exploring pain and pleasure in Canto XXVI of "Purgatory" in The Divine Comedy. Over four hundred years later, Dante's sexual ideology would evolve into misanthropy and misogyny in T.S. Eliot's poetry. The poetry's aggression towards women begins with "The Love Song Of 1. Alfred Prufrock," escalates in "La Figlia che Piange" and "Gerontion," and reaches a violent pinnacle of misanthropy in "Sweeney Erect." Although T.S. Eliot attempted to emulate Dante's passion, his contorted visionary work chose the language of renounced, rather than consummated, sexual desire. Eliot's poetry seeks to mimic Dante's philoso phy on love and pain expressed in Canto XXVI of "Purgatory," but all that emanates is a sense of pity, loss, and disgust.

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER !...... Dante's Concept of Pleasure and Pain

CHAPTER II ...... 13 The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain in T.S. Eliot

EPILOGUE...... 28

WORKS CITED...... 30

v For my Mother and Father CHAPTER I Dante's Concept of Pleasure and Pain

The sexual relationship between a man and a woman has enchanted and puzzled the male writer for centuries. Within the modernist tradition ofliterature the conflict between spirit and flesh, and the attempt at their ideal fusion, perplexed Thomas Sterns Eliot. The peculiarly tension-wrought sexual libido expressed throughout Eliot's work has sources in the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Dante lays the groundwork for the mod ernist paradoxical treatment of lust by exploring the interrelations of pain and sexual pleasure in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory" in The Divine Comedy. Centuries later T.S. Eliot would create his own interpretation of Dante's sexual ideology concerning the relation of pain and sexual desire. Dante's exploration of the relationship between pain and sexual pleasure, as well as the effects of desire on man, would evolve over four hundred years later as misanthropy and misogyny in T.S . Eliot's poetry. Dante was indisputably a man of enormous intellectual energy. Critic Wendy Benge states Dante was impelled "to find his happiness in discovering the raison-d' etre of his existence" (13). The bond between desire and knowledge in Dante is aptly described by the theories of Jacques Lacan in L' acte psychanalytique , his unpublished seminar from 1967-1968. Lacan refers to the three poles that constitute knowledge. The third pole Lacan describes applies to Dante's quest for knowledge:

The third (pole) is the object which may be described as a falling of a piece of the real onto the vector which runs from the symbolic to the imaginary... The third pole that is knowable, then, is what emanates from this object a, jouissance. Lacan envisioned the analyst at a delicate point in the middle of jouissance, knowledge (an imaginary function of idealization), and truth, at the place of a hole in knowing, being, and feeling he called the place of desire. (Ragland-Sullivan 2)

The Italian poet spent his lifetime in search of truth or the "falling piece of the real," finding his desire could only be satiated once he was placed in "a hole" of knowing. For Dante, like Lacan, the concept of truth was linked to desire which was repeatedly found in the presentation of the bodies of his fictional souls. The souls he depicts in The Divine Comedy in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory" places the reader in the "delicate point in the 1 middle ofjouissance, knowledge .... and truth." Realization of the truth that we are all fallen souls makes the reader feel uncomfortable as one honest spirit reveals:

And ours was a hermaphroditic sin, but since we did not act like human beings, yielding instead, like animals, to lust, when we pass by the other group, we shout to our own shame the shameful name of her who beastialized herself in beast-shaped wood.1 ("Purgatory," Canto XXVI, II. 82-87)

Each of the souls depicted is "a falling piece of the real." Dante's powerful imagery evokes our own shame. Desire and the drive to obtain knowledge become connected through the poet's narrative, which runs as Lacan would say, from "the symbolic to the imaginary." In Body Works: Objects of Desire in Narrative Literature Peter Brooks states:

The desire can be a desire to possess, and also a desire to know; most often the two are intermingled," sometimes indistinguishable. The libido amandi, the libido dominandi, and the libido capiendi (lust for love, for power, for knowledge)---,-have always been closely allied in Western philosophy and literature. (Brooks 11)

Benge continues to state Dante's "joy was in knowledge, in the apprehension of truths of all kinds, proving unbounded and insatiable . . . . The Divine Comedy is Dante's testa ment of how he momentarily attained that divine goal, quenched that insatiable thirst, while still in life" (13-14). It becomes apparent to the reader that Dante's ability to satiate his thirst for knowledge and desire is the quality that attracted Eliot to Dante as the mod em writer struggled with his concept of sexuality. Dante's relentless desire for knowledge ultimately links itself to sexuality. Similar to a child's first "epistemophilic impulse," or the urge to know, Dante researched the confines of language in order to find the exact formula to express emotions (Freud 13). For Dante, the best way to explain emotions was to liken them to bodily sensations.

1Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy Vol. II: Purgatory. trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 1988. 2 Sensations of pleasure and pain, although experiences every human understands, are gen erally thought to exist outside language-emotions so powerful they can rarely be accu rately captured by words. Peter Brooks explains:

In modern narrative literature, a protagonist often desires a body (most often another's, but sometimes his or her own) and that body comes to represent for the protagonist an apparent ultimate good, since it appears to hold within itself-as itself-the key to satisfaction, power, and meaning ... Desire for the body may appear to promise access to the very raison d'etre of the symbolic order . . .. Narrative seeks to make such a body semiotic, to mark or imprint it as a linguistic and narrative sign. If the plot of the novel is very often the story of success or failure in gaining access to the body-and the story of the fulfillment or disillusionment that this brings-the larger story may concern the desire to pierce the mysteries of life that are so often subsumed for us in the otherness of other people. (Brooks 8)

Brooks' theories of modem narrative literature may be applied to "Purgatory" in Dante's The Divine Comedy. The souls of the lustful in Canto XXVI desire bodies and through their uncontrollable lust they find penance and an "ultimate good" through suffering. Through their intensely unfulfilled desire they are able to "access" what Brooks terms "symbolic order." Brooks may be borrowing from Jacques Lacan's first "pole that consti tutes knowledge." Lacan explains: "The first (pole) is the symbolic order signifier that joins the world of language to that of images and objects, creating a subject" (Ragland Sullivan 1). Through Dante's narrative plot in Canto XXVI, the souls attempt the "suc cess" of redemption, even though they have experienced the "failure" of being in "Purgatory." Dante's richly detailed descriptions link language to tangible emotions every human has experienced, and therefore enhance identification with the souls. Dante's fluidity of language is exemplified by the account of a soul on the Seventh Terrace first encountering Dante Poet:" I'm not the only one- all of us here/ are thirsty for your words, much thirstier/ than Ethiopes or Indians for cool drink" ("Purgatory," Canto XXVI, ll . 19-21). The narrative plot in Canto XXVI offers each reader a chance to piece together the mysteries oflife through the misfortunes of the souls on the Seventh Terrace. Dante is able to illustrate the pain of the souls' desire through the allegory of thirst. Like Dante's drive to know, the souls on the Seventh Terrace are satiated only through their drive for possession. The Italian poet found a linguistic formula that

3 enabled him to seemingly unravel the "mysteries of life" for his reader. Five hundred years later modernist writers like T.S . Eliot faced the anxiety of not only dealing with the problems of humanity, but finding a form to accommodate "the mess" they were attempting to explain (Smith 34). It is for this reason Eliot had a life long attraction to Dante's linguistic and conceptual clarity (Fowlie 128). The Italian poet immortalizes ordinary people in thumb-nail sketches throughout The Divine Comedy and as Wendy Benge explains, "Dante's people, his landscape, have a concrete reality, God's judgments a graphic accuracy and logic which compel us to make rational connec tions: to relate a man's life to the state of his soul ... . to see in the present moment cer tain factors which demand serious and urgent thought" {17). Eliot would later allude to Dante in his attempt to portray his modem, cloudy reality, with graphic misogyny which would compel the reader to deduce the poet possessed a disturbed soul. In his 1929 essay, "Dante," Eliot explains: "Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation .. . . My point is that you cannot afford to ignore Dante's philosophical beliefs" (Kermode 217-21 ). Eliot specifically addresses "Purgatory" in his chapter on Dante:

The greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words, and with the great~st austerity in the use of metaphor, simile, verbal beauty, and elegance .. . . I do not at all m~an that Dante's way is the only right way.... I put my meaning into other words by saying that Dante can do less harm to anyone trying to learn to write verse, than can Shakespeare ... . The language of Dante is perfection of a common language. In a sense it is more pedestrian than Dryden or Pope. If you follow Dante without talent, you at worst will be pedestrian and flat; if you follow Shakespeare or Pope without talent, you will make an utter fool of yourself. (Kermode 217)

Whether Eliot was confessing to his own insecurities about his poetry or offering the average writer insight, Dante's influence on Eliot is unavoidable. Particular fascination for the Italian poet centered around his theories on sex in relation to sorrow in "Purgatory" Canto XXVI. For Dante the notion of suffering and purgation is coupled with complex anxious emotions associated with sex. In Canto XXIII of"Purgatory" Forese Donti, Dante's friend, explains the punishment of the gluttonous. If gluttony is defined as "an excessive desire for something" then lust is similar in its definition as "a strong sexual desire" (Flexner, Random House 386, 540). Richard Abrams believes general, unspecified lust 4 "ripens lower desires, moving the subject beyond complacencies of greed and gluttony to intangible, demanding pleasures; it encourages a venturesome independence of spirit which, whatever its vicious main effect, undeniably renews the soul's vigor.... By exhausting food's mystique in homely similes, he (Dante) shows the proper use of food: to sustain the individual in health till sufficiently mature for forays into sexual mystery . . . . There is a definite chain or ladder of signifiers" (Abrams 6). Therefore both lust and gluttony may, in this instance, be perceived as interchangeable signifiers in that they are varied forms of desire. Gluttony addresses desires connected with tangible objects such as food, and lust deals with intangible sexual desires. As the souls thirst for knowledge like "cool drink" (1. 21) in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory," Dante again employs what Jacques Lacan would later term his "first pole of knowledge," using symbolic order to signify and join the world of language to that of images and objects. It is through the tangible sufferings of the gluttonous that Dante develops the concept that pain is volun tary as introduced in Canto XXIII. (I will further develop this idea later when masochism is addressed.) Through Forese, Dante speaks of.the gluttons' privation as "pain," then changing his word choice to "solace" as he states:

The fragrance of the fruit and of the spray that trickles down the leaves stirs up in us a hungering desire for food and drink and not just once: as we go running round this road, our pain is constantly renewed. Did I say pain? Solace is what I mean! ("Purgatory," Canto XXIII, 1.67-72)

The penitents' urgency to feel pain is a grotesque inversion of their former vice. Once the purgatorial souls hungered for food, but they now hunger for righteousness and the chance to reach divinity through the gluttonous consumption of pain itself. Canto XXITI serves as an introduction to the lust theme that is further developed by Dante in Canto XXVI. It is on the Seventh Terrace of "Purgatory" that Dante Pilgrim encounters souls whose uncontrollable desires have shaped not only their concepts of themselves, but of their afterlife. The Pilgrim stands on the Seventh Terrace where the sin of lust is purged and attracts the attention of several souls. Dante Pilgrim is asked to stop and speak, but is interrupted by groups of souls rushing from opposite directions. The members of the two groups greet each other quickly as the poet states: 5 I stopped to stare, amazed, for I saw shades on either side make haste to kiss each other without lingering, and each with this brief greeting satisfied. ("Purgatory," Canto XXVI II. 30-35)

The notion of haste figures centrally to the theme oflust. Dante establishes the souls' urgency as representative of both lust and lust's penance. The purgatorial souls on the Seventh Terrace rush to kiss each other, suggesting their sin was physical satisfaction without love. After fulfilling themselves with a kiss, the souls retreat to serve their penance. To Dante Pilgrim the bizarre ceremony appears ungratifying and without mean ing-precisely the activity that kept the souls out of Paradise. The concept of haste is again mentioned in lines 41 and 42 of Canto XXVI as a group of souls shout, "Pasiphae enters the cow/ so that the bull may rush to mount her lust!" The penitent's urgency to rush into both sex and penance suggests they hunger for pain in both life and death. In life the penitent's haste to satisfy their sexual desires caused them pain and now in death the souls rush to experience the pain of penance. Charles E. May suggests in Perversion in Pornography: Male Enyy of the Female that "the cultivation of pain-as-solace is revealed as crucial to eroticism, giving sexual pleasure its tang. In experimenting with keen sensations and poignant delight, the sensualist commits himself to pre-experiencing mortality, working through Adam's curse by means of a quasi-painful or sorrowful expenditure" (70). Robert Durling suggests the paradoxical interplay of pain and pleasure was not a new concept for Dante in The Divine Comedy. Durling explores the pain-plea sure concept in Dante's earlier work De Vulgari Eloquentia written in 1304-06 . .I;k Vulgari Eloquentia was written in Latin as a pioneering study of linguistics and style in which Dante argues for the use of the vernacular in serious works ofliterature and his desire to combine a number ofltalian dialects to create a new national language. For my purposes in this essay, De Vulgari Eloquentia is useful in expanding on the ideas pre sented in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory" that would later influence T.S. Eliot. Particularly influential would be the concept of masochism and the love-death relationship. Robert Durling writes:

De Vulgari Eloquentia illustrates the pleasure-pain concept by adopting Folco of Marseilles poem "Tan m'abellis," which Dante adapts to his 6 fictional Arnaut, and Arnaut's own tribute to the "sobraffan" (superfrustration) or "sobramar'' (superlove). What pleases Folco is love-anxiety, which means the lover cherishes the pain which affords him a heightened sense of his own being, which is worth more than conventional pleasure. Similarly, as unrequited love yields perverse delight, so sexual satisfaction converges with its apparent opposite in the sweet pain of the petite mort (little death or orgasm) and postcoital sadness. In his work ffie Vulgari Eloguentia), Dante reasons if suffering, in the sense of rejection, is sweet, then death must be sweet above all things. Dante's argument rests on a specious conflation of opposites (the petite mort results not from extreme rejection, but from acceptance leading to sexual consummation). Dante is supported by a linguistic coincidence: the perfect Provencal homonym I' am or/ Ia mort is easily worked into Italian am or/ una morte. (11 0)

Dante adopts Folco's masochistic tone in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory." The souls in "Purgatory" maintain an unstable position between extremes, on one hand the subject and object of pleasure, and on the other hand the uncontrollable agent of pain. Dante is reasoning that "if suffering, in the sense of rejection, is sweet, then death must be sweet above all things." Sigmund Freud concisely states in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" that "the goal of all life is death .. . . Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the living organism struggles most energetically against events (dangers, in fact) which might help it to attain its life's goal rapidly-by a kind of short-circuit. Such behavior is however precisely what characterizes instinctual as contrasted with intelligent efforts .... One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final goal of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey" (54). Dante's religious outlook anticipates the Freudian formula: the goal of all life, whether emotional or physi cal, is death. Dante succeeds in linguistically capturing emotional death between men and women that is believed to traverse words. Scholar Peter Brooks succinctly discusses the concept of emotions being prelinguistic:

One tradition of contemporary thought would have it that the body is a social and linguistic construct, the creation of specific discursive practices, very much including those that construct the female body from the male. If the sociocultural body clearly is a construct, an ideological product, nonetheless we tend to think of the physical body as precultural and prelinguistic: sensations of pleasure and especially pain, for instance, are generally held to be 7 experiences outside language; and in the body's end, in death, is not simply a discursive construct. Morality may be that against which all discourse defines itself, as protest or as attempted recovery and preservation of the human spirit, but it puts a stark biological limit to human constructions. (7)

The body often seems outside the limits oflanguage. Surely this must have been a major consideration for Dante while writing The Divine Comedy. What appears as a childish play on words by poets such as Dante and Folco, with words such as "petite mort," or the similarly sounding "amor'' (love) and "una morte" (death), are in actuality attempts to capture physical and emotional experiences that exist outside the realm of language. The phonetic similarities are no coincidence, but rather they are meant to illustrate the circu lar construct of life through linguistics. Brooks notes both pleasure and pain are two sen sations writers find particularly hard to convey. It was Dante who embraced the chal lenge of bringing to life these abstract concepts, and not only succeeded in making them synonymous, but did so with a sense of grace and style that influenced modern writers such as Eliot. Dante amusingly displays the paradox of pain mixing with pleasure throughout Canto XXVI in various case studies. For example, when Guido discloses that he repent ed early on in his life by stating, "I am Guido Guinzinelli-here so soon,/for I repented long before I died" ("Purgatory," Canto XXVI II. 92-3), he is suggesting his purgation is a lengthy process, not an immediate renouncement. The extended period during Guido's life in which he repented suggests he came to know the sadness lying at the heart of sex ual excess, not abstinence. The text in Italian reads, "Guido Guinizzelli, e gia mi purgo/ per ben dolermi prima ch'a lo stremo" ("Purgatory," Canto XXVI II. 92-3) which literally translates "I'm Guido Guinizzelli, purged here because I grieved before my end." Linguistically "Ben dolermi" may be construed to indicate a clean break from sex as the literal meaning is "to be extremely sorry" (Zanichelli 776). Other uses of dolersi (to be sorry), which is the root, in The Divine Comedy are found in the Inferno, Canto XXVI 1.19, "I know that I grieved then, and now again" suggesting Guido is experienced with sexual consummations' sweet pain. The language indicates the emotion has been previ ously encountered. Dante uses the language of consummated rather than renounced desire, but Guido experiences all the pain of an individual who has experienced unful filled desire. To the sexual connoisseur such as Guido, indulgence is not abstinence's 8 contrary, but a subtler form of suffering. Excessive sexual pleasure torments Guido until he welcomes the climactical end of delight in a petite mort (orgasm). The question is then why would Dante choose to focus on lust when the same point can be made in the Cantos exploring greed and gluttony? Allan Gilbert believes Dante's fixation with lust is a variation on Freud's death wish:

Dante, I think, is a variation on Freud's death wish. Lust originates in a desire to suffer, to yield oneself up to purgative travail. From the carnal sinner's situated viewpoint, sexual desire repeatedly exhausts itself in individual acts of consummation, and with each act the palate is sharpened for keener, more refined pleasures, yet again and again one returns to unfulfillment and regret. Indeed, this refining process continues in the afterworld where the penitents, "spent a thousand years within the fire's heart" ("Purgatory" Canto XXVII ll.25-6), in Dante's semi-erotic metaphor, experience a different mixture of pain and joy. Viewing sexual desire as essentially masochistic, Dante correspondingly understands God's goodness as effecting a cure by exciting shame. (136-37)

Therefore, Guido's comment directed at the homosexuals can presumably be applied to all of the lustful as he states, "they use their shame to intensify the flames" ("Purgatory" Canto XXVI I. 81 ). There are then two fires on the lustful Seventh Terrace: one is an agent of purification, the other a symbol of the very ardor that is purified. If shame is a by-product of lust, then shame assists in fueling the purgatorial fire . Physiologically, shame involves blushing of the skin and a raised body temperature mak ing the flames of ardor bum hotter and redder. Shame is then in itself a process of purifi cation. Chronic sexual alienation is alleviated by Dante's purgation theology and its cathartic pain that delivers salvation to the soul. Similarly, Dante uses the allegory of the Dante Pilgrim climbing the terrace to alleviate his blindness and to obtain grace through his suffering in the underworld as he states:

I did not leave my body, green or ripe, below on earth: I have it with me here; it is real flesh, complete with blood and bones. I climb to cure my blindness, for above a lady has won grace for me, that I may bear my mortal burden through your world. ("Purgatory," Canto XXVI, II. 55-60)

9 There is a definite masochistic tone in Dante Pilgrim's quest that Eliot would later mirror. Rene Girard explains in Deceit. Desire and the Novel : Self and Other in Literary Structure "The masochist perceives the necessary relation between unhappiness and metaphysical desire, but he nevertheless does not renounce his desire . . . .He chooses to see in shame, defeat, and enslavement not the inevitable results of aimless faith and an absurd mode of behavior, but rather signs of divinity" {177). To reach God Dante Pilgrim must "bear his mortal burden" and thus glorifies suffering. Girard continues that "every passion feeds on the obstacles placed in its way and dies in their absence .. . . concluding that desire should be defined as a desire of the obstacle" (Girard 178). Dante reveals to the reader his desire of the obstacle- the insurmountable odds of overcoming lust through pain to achieve redemption. The purgation of shame and lust is only a by-prod uct of the highly desirable pain, as seen in Canto XXVI with the introduction of Arnaut through a confluence of opposites. To make room for Amaut on the terrace, Guido, "dis appeared into the depths of fire/ the way fish seeking deeper waters fade" ("Purgatory" Canto XXVI, ll. 134-5). Guido has retreated into the purifying flame, and Arnaut opens himself shamelessly to Dante Pilgrim: ,

Your elegant request so pleases me, I could not possibly conceal my name. I am Arnaut, singing now through my tears, regretfully recalling my past follies, and joyfully anticipating joy. I beg you, in the name of that great power guiding you to the summit of the stairs: remember, in good time, my suffering here!" Then in the purifying flames he hid. ("Purgatory" Canto XXVI ll .140-8)

Arnaut proclaims he will not hide his identity from the Pilgrim, but then he immediately returns to the fire. The scene is reminiscent of Genesis {3 :7, 10) in which Adam and Eve wear fig leaves and hide from God. Arnaut only partially reveals himself to the Pilgrim and attempts to mask his physical image while hiding from God in the purifying flames. Arnaut's need to hide demonstrates his feeling of unworthiness and his inability to face shame as well as lust. Until Arnaut can fully accept his shame coupled with lust, he will not be able to complete the redemption process and achieve salvation. Arnaut has not suffered in the purgatorial flames for an adequate amount of time; therefore, he is not yet

10 full of the good pain Dante believed remarries the soul to God. In Dante's "Purgatory" the lustful are examples of the complexity of sexual desire. Dante's concept of desire is a mixture of pain, as well as, pleasure born of the soul's consciousness of guilt as well as physical actions. Sexual travail brings pleasure and sorrow in life; and in death the desire for sorrow or "dolersi" outlives the desire for physical pleasure. As Charles E. May states "When in the fire the sensualist is no longer gratified by self-mortification recalling carnal desire to mix pleasure with pain in a petite mort (orgasm), when he can in conscience take his pleasure straight, luxuriating in par adisal joys he feels under no compulsion to produce, then his term of spiritual travail is ended" (67). Not pleasure, but labor, pain, darkness and anxiety, which falsely enhance pleasure, are sacrificed and the unashamed soul comes out of hiding. Richard Abrams believes: Dante appears committed to displaying the virtue of a vice, to redeeming lust esthetically, in ways unrecognized by previous studies. No easy dismissal of the dunghill vice of medieval homiletics but a poignant appreciation of the beauty sacrificed in attaining heavenly bliss marks Dante's valediction of the flesh. Writing as a cognoscente (authority) of sensual delight, he makes sexuality the root cf sin-the flower. (Abrams 3-4)

Abrams continues to cite that, as a consequence of purging lust the two poets Dante introduces in Canto XXVI, Guido and Amaut, grew disinfatuated with love poetry (Abrams 22). It appears the these poets' disenchantment with love poetry resulted from the purgation of sensuality from their bodies. The reasoning for Guido and Amaut's disil lusionment with love poetry may be found in Joy Potter's discussion ofDante's use of language and lust as she states:

Dante describes language's twin graces as sapor and venustas. He employs a division corresponding to the two grades of libido, gluttony and lust, purged on Purgatory's highest slopes. By sapor Dante means the flavor imparted to language by inversion of normal sentence order, by venustas the charm imparted by poetic figures. And though sexual connotations rarely attended venustas in classical Latin usage, its present coupling with sapor argues a revived etymological force ...Dante seems to imply the image's specific appeal is to the sexual imagination. Dante showed poetic images are fetching, sexy; they seduce us visually. (Potter 69) 11 Not only did Dante show poetic images could "seduce," he did so using concrete images and simplistic words that lead to a purity of language that Eliot would adopt. Abrams continues that "Dante lays the groundwork for this notion of the sensual poets' purged infatuation with textuality in De Vulgari when he derives language's complex structure from man's physical opacity, obliging man to couch or corporealize intellectual meanings (the soul of communication) in spoken and written signs" (Abrams 23). Dante presents souls whose conscious efforts were to free themselves from their passions or, if this task was found to be impossible, to recreate it, dominate it, and bring it into their own service rather than be ruled by it. This task essentially was completed through the act of writing for not only Dante poet, but both Amaut and Guido. But both Amaut and Guido's disen chantment with desire and sexuality affected the ancient poet's writing; they came to thirst for the pain found coupled with desire that would be reincarnated in the misogynis tic and masochistic poetry ofT.S. Eliot five hundred years later. How did The Divine Comedy influence modernists such as T.S . Eliot with its examples of the interrelations 'of lust, poetry, and purgation? T.S . Eliot readily infuses Dante's philosophy of pain and sexual desire with a hint of misogyny derived from his reading of The Divine Corned~ T.S. Eliot pen'ned poetry on disgust, eroticism, impo tence, misogyny, misanthropy and sexuality with a wounded heart. Eliot's poetry deals with the agonies of this world, not the next, while repeatedly owing inspiration to The Divine Comedy. Eliot turned to Dante in his struggle to understand sexual desire and possibly help explain his revulsion of sex that permeates the modem writer's poetry. Eliot borrows Dante's concise language and fully develops the pleasure-pain motif to a heightened level to include masochism and sadism. When Eliot's poetry is read, there is something chilling in its explicitness; it is filled with pain, desire and fear.

12 CHAPTER II The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain in T.S. Eliot

Contrary to Dante, T.S. Eliot did not find personal happiness in the quest for his raison-d'etre of existence. Eliot once stated, "One of the unhappy necessities of human existence is that we have to find things out for ourselves. If it were not so, the statement of Dante would, at least for poets, have done once for all" (Malagi 18). Eliot respected Dante's ability to combine stylistic and spirtitual aims and to treat philosophy in terms of vision. On July 4, 1950, while addressing the Italian Institute in London, Eliot acknowl edged his literary dependence on Dante: "I still, after forty years, regard his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence on my verse" (McDougal 57). However, Eliot chose the language of renounced rather than consummated sexual desire. Unlike Dante, Eliot could not resolve his sexual conflict without destroying the object of his desire, and in a sense himself. Eliot's works reveal sexually dysfunctional attitudes paralleling Dante's belief that sex is directly related to sorrow and pain. The modem poet borrows Dante's pleasure-pain motif and distorts it until it includes misogyny, masochism and sadism. Dante's work that is most often found in Eliot is "Purgatory" Canto XXVI. Dante meets the poet Arnaut Daniel who states:

Ara vos prec, per aquella valor que vos guida al som de 1' escalina, sovenha vos a temps de rna dolor! Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.

I beg you, in the name of that great power guiding you to the summit of the stairs: remember, in good time, my suffering here! Then he plunged back into the fire which refines them. ("Purgatory" Canto XXVI)

Indeed Eliot related to the pain of Arnaut Daniel as he repeats the Troubadour poet's words on four specific occasions: in the original title of his 1920 collection "Ara Vos Prec," towards the close of "The Waste Land," "Poi s' ascose nel foco che gli affina" ("The Waste Land" 1. 428 ), in the early title of "Ash Wednesday III" which had origi-

13 nally appeared as "Som de l'escalina" (Ellis 229), and in "Little Gidding" as "the exas perated spirit" proceeds unless "restored by that refining fire" ("Little Gidding" IT). The speaker of the famous lines, Arnaut, is in "Purgatory," not Hell, where the spirits desire suffering in order to expiate their sins on earth. Dante's repeated presence in Eliot's work, as well as the modem author's developing misanthropy, can be observed chrono logically. Eliot began studying Dante in 1910, following in the Harvard tradition of reading Dante in the original without prior training in Italian (McDougal 58). Eliot then began composing "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1911, even though the poem was not published until 1917 (McDougal60). Eliot's most famous early poem, though in debt to Jules Lafargue, relied greatly on Dante. Dante appeared to offer a method to achieve sophistication that was not present in Lafargue. Dominic Manganiello explains:

Dante discovered a method of utilizing, transforming instead of discarding, the emotions of adolescence; he made a discovery analogous to those concerning the use of the waste-products of the coal-tar industry. The result of this discovery was a real extension of the area of emotion, and an attitude more "spiritual" and more "worldly" than that of Donne, or that of Tennyson, or that of Lafargue. In this respect, Lafargue appears to Eliot an adolescent in his erotic life, Donne middle-aged, and Dante ageless. (pp. 69-70)

An early version of the poem reflects Dante's overwhelming influence on Eliot. The sub titled poem "Prufrock Among the Women" exists in an early notebook and is substan tially the same as the final version, with the exception of an epigraph which reads: "Sovenge vos al temps demon dolor/ Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" directly bor rowed from Canto XXVI (McDougal 60). This original composition of "Prufrock" demonstrates Eliot's enormous desire to incorporate his favorite lines of Dante into his poetry. In the final version of"Prufrock," direct references to The Divine Comedy failed and were dropped. The first stanza of"Prufrock" reveals Eliot's thematic affinity for Dante and offers another touchstone for the modernity of the Italian poet. Eliot profiles and accentu ates his master's ability to combine style with spiritual aims, and to treat philosophy in terms of vision. Dante offers the reader visual imagination through precise and evocative language . The result is simplicity and intelligibility. Manganiello states "Dante had also 14 extended the width of emotional range that man is capable of experiencing, from deprav ity's despair to the beatific vision" (5). Eliot reflects the extended visual imagination in order to reveal his agonizing despair in the rhythm of a holy incantation:

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit. ("Prufrock" 1. 1-12)

Like Dante, Eliot is slowly incorporating the reader into his poem through the use of the physical person "you and I," as well as "then" in the first line suggesting a contin uation of action. He is initiating the reader into the quest to examine lust's torment. Unlike Dante, Eliot's use of the pronoun "you" does not remain fixed throughout the poem, and serves only as an invitation to join the suffering protagonist. Eliot quickly switches to a more self-centered "I." Eliot lures the reader into Prufrock's socially and sexually dysfunctional psyche and shares the torment of desire's pain describing "restless nights in one-night cheap hotels" ("Prufrock" 1. 6). Thus begins Eliot's early poetic career symbolizing negative aspects of sexuality. While the sexual aura of the women in the cheap hotel disgusts Prufrock, the threatening sexuality of the untouchable tea-party women terrifes him. This is where Eliot deviates from Dante into the world of perver sion representing the modem society around him. Michel Foucault suggests "Modem society is perverse," and indeed Eliot's characters authenticate this thought (Foucault 47). Sexuality has become not only perverse, but dangerous, representing a "potential dissolution of the self' (Felski 177). The dissolution of Eliot's Prufrock becomes apparent as he imagines an upper class woman as an emasculating figure who will critique him by saying, "How his hair is growing thin!" ("Prufrock" 1. 41) and "But how his arms and legs are thin!" ("Prufrock" 1. 44). As if he were tired Prufrock exclaims, "I have known the arms already, known

15 them all-/ Arms that are braceleted and white and bare/ (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)" ("Prufrock" 1. 61-64). No longer himself whole, Prufrock defen sively fragments the female body into disassembled, non-threatening parts. This practice reduces the threat of sexuality. For Eliot, as with Dante, the notion of suffering is cou pled with complex anxious emotions associated with sex. However, to say "Prufrock" is a poem about a man who is disgusted by women would be too simplistic. Prufrock's first concern is the threat of sexuality. It is not only gender, but the threat of sexuality in forms of male masochism, voyeurism, and fetishism that is explored in Eliot's text. The figure of the woman provides the vehicle through which expression of misanthropy and self hate may be expressed. Scholar Heather McClave believes:

In "Prufrock" especially, the allusive language of the speaker seems more a diversion than a source, a refracting surface meant to conceal the pressure of the unsaid by camouflaging basic obsessions - a desperate yearning for contact thwarted by an equally desperate fear of being engulfed; a sense of worthlessness combined with a defensive fascination with the self as object. . . . Significantly, we never hear specific words unless the matter is trivial, for the content is suppressed while the matter of speaking continues. The premise behind his chronic evasions, I think, belies his timid app~arance : the sense that, if he were to speak, something absolute would happen- the word would be true, and he, by proclaiming it, would be powerful. . .. For Prufrock, clearly, this exposure would be too revealing - "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen" because it would realize the self at the cost of relinquishing a dream" (167-8).

Prufrock's suffering, like the souls in "Purgatory," is voluntary. He is attracted to the suffering, there is no other option. Satisfaction and redemption have no place in this poem. Whereas Dante, as poet-pilgrim, may ultimately reach the divine, Eliot's personae in many poems, are held captive to self-destructive desires. The suffering in Eliot's poet ry is a thousand times sweeter than satisfaction. Voluntary suffering is a concept Eliot addressed in his 1929 essay on Dante. In an ironic statement, Eliot reveals the suffering ofDante's characters offers some degree of hope. Eliot states:

The souls in "Purgatory" suffer because they wish to suffer, for purgation. And observe that they suffer more actively and keenly, being souls preparing for blessedness, than Virgil suffers in eternal limbo. In their suffering is hope, in the anesthesia of Virgil is hopelessness; that is the difference. (Eliot 220)

16 Despite Prufrock's suffering, it does not seem to offer a form of anesthesia. Although his characters appear like a "patient etherized upon a table," in his poetry Eliot is never at peace. What appears to Eliot most is suffering as catharsis, similar to the con cept oflove-anxiety presented by Dante in De Vulgari Eloguentia. Prufrock cherishes his pain which presents him with a heightened sense of his own being worth-more so than conventional pleasure. Similar to the sensualists in "Purgatory," Prufrock craves love death coupled with his present desire to mortify the vestiges of bodily existence by undergoing pain and suffering which lead to fuller, contorted delight and eventually death. A preoccupation with death emanates in Eliot's poetry as he writes, "We have lin gered in the chambers of the seal By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (1.132-34). Unlike the souls in "Purgatory," there is no hope for salvation for Eliot's suffering Prufrock, only the dream of drowning. Jewel Spears Brooker writes:

Eliot's sexual needs ... are explained in part by his quick and disastrous marriage. This marriage precipitated a reevaluation ofEros, and indeed of all human satisfactions. In a 1919 review, Eliot praised the great French and Russian novelists for having understood "the awful separation bewteen potential passion and any actualization,possible in life." Such knowledge, coming just a few years after his marriage, may represent the death of hope. (128)

Images of Eros did not appease Eliot, and the writer turned to images of death. Like the beautiful sea-girls swathed in seaweed, the woman of "La Figlia che Piange" is physically alluring as Eliot constructs his version of a Botticelli-nymph:

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair Lean on a garden urn Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise. (1. 1-4)

The modem poet aptly combines Dante's "petit mort" philosophy, infusing sex with death imagery. The dichotomy continues as Eliot's female figure, like Beatrice in Dante's Paradise, is shown as both tempting seductress with "fugative resentment" and pristine feminine idol. She represents Eliot's conflicting dual perception of woman and in a pathetic tum of events, Eliot, "would have had him leave,/ So I would have had her stand and grieve,/ So he would have left" (1. 8- 10). Eliot brings to the modem poetry the

17 sexual desire that is as masochistic as the lustful souls on the Seventh Terrace of "Purgatory." The sense ofloss that pervades "La Figlia che Piange" is due to what Eliot termed, "the fact that no human relations are adequate to human desires, but also to the disbelief in any further object for human desires than that which, being human, fails to satisfy them" (Eliot 211 ). Rene Girard states:

The masochist has learned from his many different experiences that an object which can be possessed is valueless. So in the future he will be only interested in objects which are forbidden him by an implacable mediator. The master seeks an insurmountable obstacle and he almost always succeeds in finding one. Continual success, or rather continual disappointment, makes him desire his own failure; only that failure will indicate an authentic deity, a mediator who is invulnerable to his own undertakings. Metaphysical desire always ends in enslavement, failure and shame. (Girard 176)

Eliot's speaker demonstrates not only a Dantean embrace of pain, but a masochistic acceptance. Instead of striving to reach "that great power/ guiding you to the summit of the stairs" ("Purgatory" Canto XXVI ll . 147-8), as was the goal of Dante Pilgrim, Eliot's speaker shuns the woman on "the highest pavement of the stair" (l.l) and allows himself to be engulfed in the stable, predictable emotions of pain and loss. Eliot emphasizes his artistic emotion in his 1920 group of poems originally titled after his favorite "Purgatory" passage "Ara Vos Prec." The title translates "Now I pray you" from the final lines of "Purgatory" Canto XXVI which continues, "by the power which guides you to the summit of the stair, in due time be heedful of my pain" ("Purgatory" Canto XXVI 145-7). What unifies this particular volume of Eliot's poetry is indeed pain, as Stuart McDougal points out: "there are violent emotions and feelings, often caused by unfulfilled or misdirected sexual desires, and the sense of pervasive suf fering ... . the desire to achieve a fusion of sensuality and intellect remains central throughout this volume" (63-5). "Gerontion" is the opening poem in "Ara Vos Prec," and undoubtedly one of the bleakest. "Gerontion" presents "an old man in a dry month" (l.l) as he reflects on his life characterized by the lack of desire and the failure at love. There is no chance of redemp tion for Eliot's old man; he is similar to Dante's Guido Guinizzelli in "Purgatory" Canto XXVI who says he is "purged here because I grieved before my end" (l. 92-3) and is then 18 able to advance from "Purgatory," but the confessions of Eliot's old man do not lead to salvation. "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" (1.34). Instead, the truth of "What's not believed in, or if still believed,/ In memory only," becomes useless "recon sidered passion" (1.42-3). The "reconsidered passion" (1.43) may be read as impotence and the result of the problem of how to "Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled" (1.64). The old man's knowledge is similar to that of the souls thirsty for knowl edge "like cool drink" (1 .21) in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory." However, whereas Lacan's insight about symbolic order would later apply to Dante, the "first pole of knowledge" using symbolic order to join the world oflanguage to that of objects does not apply to Eliot. For Dante, like Lacan, the concept of truth is linked to desire. Unfortunately for Eliot, the only truth found in desire is the horrific pain of"reconsidered passion" (1.42- 43). The poem illustrates an absolute severance from desire rather than the sense of loss which is found in both "La Figlia Che Piange" and "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock." The old man defines his life by what he has not accomplished and his lack of desire while failing at love. The speaker's life has become a personal hell as he states he has lost his "sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch" (1.60). No hope remains given what the reader has become, through the speaker, once lives are measured in losses. Heather McClave states:

In "Gerontion," however, the scale and import of expression radically enlarge as Eliot channels archetypal history, the objectivity we contrive by connecting multiple points of view, through the pure subjectivity of a "wilderness of mirrors" (1. 49) .... The speaker in this poem grounds his language in general experience- in facts .. . . The life accepted as fact becomes a matter of the larger history to be validated from without the self as part of a natural process ... . The world of fact and the language that describes it seem increasingly inconsequential" (McClave 169).

Eliot delivers a severance from desire in his poetry with grace and ease as if failure were an unavoidable part of incarnation. The tone is overtly masochistic. However, the factual tone impresses a certain amount of credibility on the reader as the deteriorating cycle of love appears to be a natural part of life. The language is grounded not only in "general experience" as Heather McClave states, but decidedly sexual rhetoric: the longing to be at the "hot gates," wading "knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass" (1. 3-5); the

19 opposition between "the tiger springs" and to "stiffen in a rented house" (I. 49, 51). Instead of trying to adapt his word choice to emotional fantasy or life's concrete images, Eliot combines both in concepts through general experience in the opening: "Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/ Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain" (1.1-2). The poet's word choice, though appearing sententiously repudiating, overflows with the active male sexual image of siring through orgasm: "Till the refusal propagates a fear''; "Unnatural vices/Are fathered by our heroism"; "These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree" (I. 8-9). The figure of an old man who has reached the end of his life coupled with lan guage of rebirth through sexual activity creates a link between sex and death in "Gerontion." Michel Foucault perceptively explains this link:

It was not just the fear of excessive expenditure that caused medical and philosophical reflection to associate sexual activity with death. This reflection also linked them together in the very principle of reproduction, by holding that the purpose of reproduction was to compensate for the passing away of living beings and to provide the species as a whole with the eternity that could not be given to each individual .. . . This was a way of cheating death . .. . Hence sexual activity was located within the broad parameters of life and death, of time, becoming and eternity. (Foucault V 2, 133-5)

The speaker has not been able to escape death through procreation. The old man has experienced sex without the benefits of offspring and is left with nothing but a feeling of loneliness and unfulfilled desire. Eliot's preoccupation with language describing male sexual failure enhances rather than diminishes the poem's erotic power. The intimacy and habitual truthfulness of the poem lie in its twisted grasp of the language of male desire. Thus, Eliot's collection opens with "Gerontion's" unfulfilled desire, the sense of perva sive suffering and a complete lack of hope. Following "Gerontion" Eliot plunges the reader into the world of vulgar sexuality with the brutal physicality of sex in "Sweeney Erect." "Sweeney Erect" is a poem that numerous critics invariably pass over. No where in Eliot's work does he diverge so far from Dante's borrowed concepts of desire than in "Sweeney Erect." The physical descriptions take the reader beyond unfulfilled desire into a world of graphic and violent sexual imagery: This withered root of knots of hair Slitted below and gashed with eyes, 20 This oval 0 cropped out with teeth: The sickle motion from the thighs Jackknifes upward at the knees Then straightens out from heel to hip Pushing the framework of the bed And clawing at the pillow slip. (I. 13-20)

Eliot describes Sweeney gazing in the bathroom mirror prior to shaving, suggesting a violent male perception of a woman. The passage depicts what Hugh Kenner calls "Eliot's besetting vice, a never wholly penetrable ambiguity about what is supposed to be happening" (Kenner 92). If the reader dissects the passage, the first three lines are a mas culine perception of a woman complete with "knots of hair," "slitted" and "oval 0" (I. 13-5). Eliot is presenting unusually graphic images with the "knots of hair" suggesting pubic hair, the "withered root" a depiction of the clitoris and the emasculating "oval 0" of the vagina, "slitted below" complete with threatening "teeth" (I. 13-5). Eliot's "Sweeney Erect" supports Freud's argument that no man can look at female genitalia without fear of castration (Brooks 12). Therefore, the visual experiences of anatomical difference related by Freud should be considered manifestations of the complex structur ing of human desire as seen in Eliot's poetry. . Peter Brooks elaborates on human desire:

What makes sexuality in human beings specifically human is repression, that is to say sexuality owes its existence to our unconscious fantasies. Desire, in human sexuality, is always transgression; and being something that is never completely fulfilled, its object can never offer full satisfaction. What there is in the unconscious is a danger and a threat for the man, and a desire and an envy for the woman, and not-as is assumed-an overvalued penis and an undervalued vagina. (Brooks 13)

There is little doubt that dysfunctional sexual desires are no longer repressed in "Sweeney Erect." Unconscious fantasies flood to the surface of the modem poet's misan thropic work as he reveals his fear. Sweeney's sexual response contains violent images of weapons as Eliot writes, "The sickle motion from the thighs/ Jackknifes upward at the knees" (L. 16-7). There is a definite sexual desire, and envy for the woman located in the unconscious, but it is the woman who is in danger. The words "sickle" and "jackknife" suggest imminent violence. The dominant theme of the passage is the male genitalia as a blade accosting the female body in a form of mutilation. The next three lines support the

21 idea of violence as Eliot continues, "Then straightens out from heel to hip/ Pushing the framework of the bed/ And clawing at the pillow slip" (1.18-20). The phallus "jack knifes" from the knees in a slicing motion from "heel to hip." The unnamed woman is left "pushing" and "clawing" in a hopeless form of self-defense. Whereas women pre sented earlier in the poem were given mythical names such as "Ariadne" and "Nausicaa," the nameless, realistic woman on the bed is defined solely in terms of her threatening genitals while attempting to recoil. The violence peaks as Eliot writes:

Sweeney addressed full length to shave Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base, Knows the female temperament And wipes the suds around his face. (The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun. Tests the razor on his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides. The epileptic on the bed Curves backward clutching at her sides. (21-32)

Although the woman remains nameless, the male figure is identified as Sweeney and the sexual image is reinforced as he is presented "full length" suggesting an excited sexual state. The female is presented without pronouns and appears simply "Broadbottomed" and presumably anonymous as she is turned around so all Sweeney may view is her "pink from nape to base" (1.22). Eliot methodically stresses the deliberate dominance of Sweeney over his prey. "Lengthened" in the next stanza only continues the sexual pun as we witness Sweeney "straddled," suggesting he is approaching consumption of his female subject. The stanza that follows is the most violent of the entire poem as Sweeney "Tests" the erect phallus as "razor" on his leg and enforces his pleasure of dominance as he "waits" for the "shriek" of the terrified woman to subside. The victimized woman on the bed is then dubbed "The epileptic" as she contorts her body in fear, unnaturally curv ing "backward." The nameless woman's actions are presumably in response to anticipa tion of grotesque sexual assault. The scene is suspended at its climax on a present partici ple of the violent action- "clutching"- which carries the reader away from the maimed female body to a broader scenario. At this point in "Sweeney Erect" Eliot enters a realm never crossed by Dante. Whereas the souls in Dante's Canto XXVI in "Purgatory" may be described as masochis- 22 tic, constantly desiring the brutalities which will allow them to achieve the divine, Eliot now crosses into sadism. Tired of playing the part of the martyr, Eliot chooses to become the tormentor. "Sweeney Erect" becomes a violent portrait of self-hatred. Rene Girard states:

Sexual activity mirrors the whole of existence. It is a stage upon which the masochist plays his own part and imitates his own desire; the sadist plays the role of the mediator himself. The sadists want to persuade himself he has already attained his goal; he tries to take the place of the mediator and see the world through his eyes, in hope that the play will gradually tum into reality. The sadist's violence is yet another effort to attain divinity. The sadist cannot achieve the illusion of being the mediator without transforming his victim into a replica of himself... .It is frequently said the sadist persecutes because he feels he is being persecuted himself. (Girard 185)

Eliot's Sweeney has become the tormentor while the nameless woman takes his place. The suffering expressed in "Prufrock," "La Figlia che Piange" or "Gerontion" culmi nates in Sweeney's violence as the poet grasps at divinity. Sweeney reflects Eliot's con torted reality as the poet completes his tense scene:

The ladies of the corridor Find themselves involved, disgraced, call witness to their principles And deprecate the lack of taste Observing that hysteria Might easily be misunderstood; Mrs. Turner intimates It does the house no sort of good. (1. 33-40)

The crescendo of violence has peaked and the poem returns to the aftermath scene in a brothel. "The ladies of the corridor'' are indeed working girls and Eliot provides a pun on female genitalia by referencing it as a "corridor." The ladies are implicated by their very bodies and thus "disgraced," while the apparent Madam Mrs. Turner rushes to the scene to assess the damage. The tone of the traumatically sadistic scene changes with the entrance of Doris as Eliot writes:

But Doris, towelled from the bath, Enters padding on broad feet, Bringing sal volatile And a glass of brandy neat. (1 . 41-4) 23 The violent act is complete with the entrance of homely Doris freshly "towelled from the bath" guilty of washing away a similar sexual experience. However, in stark contrast to the raped and possibly even murdered nameless female, Doris enters the room "padding on broad feet" with "a glass of brandy neat" for either herself or Sweeney. Doris appears as a complementary piece to the puzzle featuring the convulsing and horrified "epileptic on the bed." Doris appears with all good intentions of assisting in offering her aid, but her padded feet and after-dinner drink offer a sharp contrast to the shrieking woman "clutching at her sides." There can be no objective reasoning towards such poetry. Eliot's fear of sexuality mutates into active violence. Eliot twists Dante's theory of "love-anxi ety" and produces a lover who not only revels in pain, which gives him extreme pleasure, but is capable of inflicting pain on others. It is in "Sweeney Erect" that the "perfect Provencal homonym l'amor (desire)/ la mort (death)" (Durling 110) is realized. Unlike Guido Guinizzelli in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory," both Sweeney and Eliot, as poet, finds no redemption in sexual consummations' pain. While the concept of male mastery and female submission in "Sweeney Erect" represent the dualistic simplicity found in Dante's "Purgatory," nowhere in The Divine Comedy is there sadism or violence against women. In Eliot, fear of intimacy and the risk of pain that is associated with pleasure develops into ferocious misanthropy in "Sweeney Erect," as both the male figure and the woman seem despicable. The oppositions in "Sweeney Erect" are designed to exclude the woman who threatens Sweeney and, of course, Eliot. Sweeney is sexually aroused by the nameless woman, but if he can destroy her he will also eradicate any chance of being hurt himself. The woman serves as a mirror image-if the mirror is destroyed the nega tive self will cease to exist. As Prufrock imagines, Sweeney has a one-night stand in a cheap motel, but the patient on his table is denied ether. Instead of risking failure of cheating death through procreation like the Old Man in "Gerontion," Sweeney masters his own fate by becoming death. Eliot's poetry lacks the redemptive process found in Dante. The shame experienced by Arnaut in Canto XXVI of"Purgatory" is completely absent. There is no salvation through Eliot's pain that could possible remarry his soul to God as found throughout The Divine Comedy. Eliot may be fitted into what Bram Dijkstra calls the "tum of the century male's fascination for, horror of, and hostility towards woman, culminating in an almost uncontrollable urge to destroy her, to do vio lence to that perverse, unPlatonic reflection of the Platonic beauty he was so eager to

24 pursue" (149). The actual cause of Dante's tormented longing for himself and his charac ters in Canto XXVI was generally erotic, focusing on women and their power (Potter 61-2). The Italian poet was frightened by the sexual allure women possessed: however, women were never destroyed in his poetry. Unlike Eliot, Dante never sought destruction of the object of his desire, but instead looked inward to the purification of the self in order to achieve divinity. Perhaps reflecting the increased stress of modem times and a lack of faith in coherent order, Eliot sought to destroy his literary women in order to achieve peace, instead of looking inside himself. Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" that "The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" (27). Eliot fulfills this fascination with death-in-lust with his poem "Whispers of Immortality."

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. Daffodil bulbs instead of balls Stared from the sockets of the eyes! He knew that thought clings round dead limbs Tightening its lusts and luxuries. Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense, To seize and clutch and penetrate; Expert beyond experience, He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone. (1-16)

"Whispers of Immortality" is one ofEliot's most macabre poems-bringing death to an individual level. The poem addresses the individual, not poetry that is "possessed by death" (1. 1) like John Webster's work. Eliot invites the reader to contemplate the sexual, and perhaps grotesque, experiences of our fellow human beings. "Death" in the first line of the poem may be read as a traditional Jacobean pun on climax or orgasm. The female body prefigures death as Eliot graphically describes "the skull beneath the skin" (1.2). The absence of breasts and lips suggests the "creature under ground" is female and unlike the repented souls in "Purgatory," "Leaned backward with a lipless grin" (1. 4)

25 suggests not only rigor mortis, but a seductive pose. The coy corpse accentuates the erot ic power of the poem even though she is dead. Eliot is recreating Dante's Canto XVI of "Purgatory" in his own dysfunctional image in "Whispers of Immortality." The lustful on the Seventh Terrace of"Purgatory" are six feet under in "Whispers." For Eliot, the possi bilities of the "flesh" can only be released from the bondage of desire through an immer sion in "sense" (1 .10) . The grotesque image continues as Eliot places "Daffodil bulbs instead of balls" (1.5) and through the verb "Tightening," (1. 8) Eliot combines male sexu al arousal with an image of death through strangulation. The poet John Donne mentioned in line 9 was preoccupied with the human body and favored brief words with sudden contrasts as found in "Whispers" (Eliot 60). Eliot combines Donne's concern with the body with the nineteenth-century view that the fertility of a woman's body suggests the horrific opposite (Brooks 17). If the first half of the the poem belongs to the men and their lusts-Webster, Donne and Eliot-the second half is the possession of the lipless female creature. The female is dignified with an identity; she is Grishkin and the name is repeated three times in order to illustrate who has control over the final four stanzas. Grishkin manipulates male desire for women in the second half of the poem with her "Russian eye" ringed with the mask of make-up and her ungartered "friendly bust" promising "pneumatic bliss" (1. 17-20). Grishkin's inviting camouflage of flesh and make-up suggests an impending sexual encounter, but behind the facade of beauty lies the stench of"dead limbs" (1. 7). Male fears of emasculation are revealed as Grishkin is likened to a "Brazilian jaguar'' poised for the kill. Eliot's misanthropic tone emerges as the reader is told the exotic cat does not emit "so rank a feline smell/ As Grishkin in a drawing room" (1. 27-8). The smell may be Eliot's commentary on women in general, or it may be a reference to necrophilia. The point is "anguish" (1. 13), such as that felt by Donne, may be inflicted by women as well as experienced and "No contact possible to flesh" may satiate the desire found in the "fever of the bone" (1. 15-6). Eliot develops Dante's anxious emotions associated with sex to the level of the neurotic. The final stan za continues Eliot's misanthropic solipsism as the poet writes, "But our lot crawls between dry ribs/ To keep our metaphysics warm" (1.31-2). The sexual act has become self-serving and completely devoid of reciprocation so that the woman (Grishkin in this instance) is treated as a mere tool to fulfill desire. Like the souls on the Seventh Terrace who rush to kiss each other, the male's sin in "Whispers" is sexual desire without love.

26 "Whispers" becomes a demented version of Charles May's theory that the culti vation of pain is crucial to eroticism, as the male pre-experiences mortality through sexu al desire with a corpse. There is no sexual consumption followed by the sweet post-coital pain as experienced by Guido Guinizzelli in Canto XVll of"Purgatory." Eliot heightens the concept of sexual desire as essentially masochistic, as found in Canto XVII of "Purgatory," and escalates desire in "Whispers" to the level of sado-masochism. Eliot's poetry is populated by self-centered souls similar to those inhabiting Dante's "Purgatory;" however, the suffering of Eliot's protagonists is not purifying-it leads to nothingness. Eliot's poetry falls into a pattern which corresponds to Dante's own philoso phy on pain and desire. However, Eliot does not force himself to conform to the Dantean philosophy artificially; he infuses his own fears and dysfunctional attitudes. Eliot's poet ry is not a pale copy of the medieval "Purgatory," but a modem contortion of the sexual desires expressed in the great medieval artifact. Perhaps Eliot meant for his poetry, such as the parody "Whispers oflmmortality," to be humorous. In an ironic statement unrelat ed to the poem "Whispers," Eliot argued, "the indecent that is funny may be the legiti mate source of innocent merriment, while the absence of humor reveals it as purely dis gusting" (Eliot, After Strange Gods 54). Unfortunately for the modem reader all that emanates from Eliot's poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "La Figlia che Piange," "Gerontion," "Sweeney Erect" and "Whispers of Immortality" is a sense of pity, loss and disgust. Indecent situations within Eliot's poetry appear lacking in inno cent merriment, or a redeeming "comedy," and it is this quality that separates the modem poet from the great Italian.

27 EPILOGUE

My preceding remarks tell us more, perhaps, about Eliot than they do about Dante. They reveal the mental state of a man, who in his 1929 essay, stated that his inten tion was simply to introduce Dante and his work by means of personal impressions and observations to the English reader, to whom he noted ironically: "I mean to restrict my comments to the unprovable and the irrefutable" (Selected Essays, 272). In "What Dante Means to Me," Eliot wrote that The Divine Comedy serves as a "constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inartic ulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordi nary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already acquainted" (To Criticize the Critic, 23). Eliot, like Dante, captures feelings which have no words, but unlike Dante, Eliot focuses on pity, pain and loss. This "mental hell" can only be thought of, and perhaps only experienced, by the projection of sensory images, such as the open ing metaphor of the evening sky as an etherized patient. Eliot capture's Prufrock's torpid ity and delivers the tormented image to "his fellow citizens." The poetry seems to play out Eliot's own suffering, based on feelings of sexual inadequacy, and this suffering turns out to be not only psychological in nature, but also spiritual. This is apparent in the epi graph to the poem from "Purgatory" Canto XXVI. The vain cry, "sovegna vos" ("be mindful in due time of my pain") resonates throughout Eliot's poetry. Whereas Dante's philosophy asserts, to paraphrase Sartre, that "Hell is other peo ple," Eliot's philosophy is best summarized by his character Edward in The Cocktail

~ :

Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone. (Browne 28)

For Eliot, other people became projections of his own desires, fear and inward isolation. To love something created by one's own imagination means loneliness. Celia in The

28 Cocktail Party states: "Then lover and beloved are equally unreal/ And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams" (Browne 29). To regain a true image of the self requires see ing the beloved as a human being, not a projection, who exists outside the self. This is the process that eluded Eliot in his poetry. He would never achieve within the poetry a sense of salvation, and divinity that embraced sexual peace-an achievement with which Dante appeared blessed.

29 WORKS CITED

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