T. S. ELIOT AND MODERN POETIC DRAMA

By N. S. SUBRAHMANYAM. M.A.

(Lecturer, Govt. Hamidia College, Bhopal)

Since Eliot began his career as a writer during the second decade of this century, there has been just a single shift in his mental focus and his turn over to the Poetic Stage is connected with this positional displacement. This focal shift in his approach does not involve any fundamental twist in his outlook. The original stand he took was one of repulsion to the bourgeois liberalist civilisation with its stress on realism, skepticism–‘the dry-rock, waste-land symbolism’ and from this he was logically led on to the subsequent position, that of deep respect for tradition and an understanding faith in theology and ecclesiastical authority. The poetic dramas which have come since 1935–Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Family Reunion (1939), Cocktail Party (1949) and Confidential Clerk (1953), show him to have moved away, even from mere ecclesiastical tradition, to a deep ritualistic pagan faith.

His early poem, The Waste Land (1921), which has become now a pass-word to pretended acquaintance with modern literature among pseudo-intellectuals, is a rapid-moving- disjointed-yet-having-unity-picture of what scientific rationalism has made of human society. His vision could take in only the world’s decay; he could not stomach the superficial optimism and shallow romantic outlook, full of smug assumptions regarding ‘the beautiful, the true and the noble’. In general, during the Post-Versaillesian world, there was a penetrating search for ‘a general theory of evaluation’¹ (usually called General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski in 1933). This attempt at rigid evaluation, mentally, undertaken by poets like Eliot and literary thinkers like T. E. Hume, exposed the false basis of Romanticism. The romanticist in his pre-occupation with the self tended to minimise the influence of environment; he believed ‘that man the individual is an infinite reservoir of possibilities.’ This attitude led to the gradual elimination of interest in the collective-consciousness as exhibited through ritual, folk-symbolism and myths. Thus romanticism, this worm-eaten liberalism, was exposed as a self-centred corruption of facts and there was an attempt at reviving deep interest in ritual, mystic symbols and ancient myths.

In this search, the East, ancient Egypt and the primitive tribes with their mystical rites and symbolism, became quite a reservoir from which to draw inspiring images. The study of social anthropology by such pioneers as Sir James Frazer and Miss Jessie L. Weston revealed an enormous wealth of mythical customs and rituals, and Eliot drew deeply from this source to build up his edifice of symbols, into which could be put his impressions. Writers earlier to Eliot, like Emerson, had drawn much from Oriental beliefs, as in poems like Brahma and Hamatreya. In fact, the impact of the East had its own part to play in the resurgence of poetic drama in Europe.

This basic movement away from the realistic, rationalist approach of the modern mind, into the thrilling but eerie world of myths, contributed to the development of the allegorical, symbolical style of writers between the two wars, men like D. H. Lawrence, Auden and Eliot. That realism is brittle and. inadequate to express the deep struggle in the consciousness of man, became evident as the war ended, and Eliot, being a man of extraordinary grasp, the necessity to evolve a new form with the help o tradition. The value of that underlying continuity in thought-process, that which is called tradition, had been minimised by the ‘romanticists’; but was deeply realised by Eliot as he wrote his famous early essay, Tradition and Individual Talent (1917):

“No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead” ²

What was required was the diversion of interest from the Poet to the Poetry and the realisation of the fact that the actual written work has to be studied and analysed, instead of the idealisation of the Poet’s personality–

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”.³

As F. A. Mathiessen puts it, the poet’s work, according to Eliot, is a process of continual self-sacrifice, the surrender of himself to the work to be performed.⁴ So in poems like ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’ the collective symbolism is reflective of the barrenness in the environments rather than of a purely personal world of ideas. The many suggestive symbolical phrases, which come in rapid succession, provide a picture of what the inherent state of the present civilisation is–the many references to bones like the one in ‘Ash Wednesday’:

Under a Juniper tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other

Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. ⁵

This imagist trend in Eliot is much evident in The Waste Land. In the second part with the title A Game of Chess, he seems to have the satirical pleasure which Pope derived while describing Belinda’s toilet in ‘The Rape of the Lock’:

The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

The glitter of jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes

Unguent, powdered, or liquid. ⁶

In the same section of the poem, is one of the best illustrations for Eliot’s synthesis of the modern imagist trend with ancient classical myths, the sad story of Philomela’s violation by Tereus, her sister Procne’s husband:

“The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice.

And still she cried, and still the world pursued

‘Jug’, ‘Jug’ to dirty years.”

(The Waste Land)

The repetition of sordid images connected with rats, shows the nausea felt by the poet, looking at what is called civilisation.

“I think we are in rat’s alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.”

Also, another reference in ‘The Hollow Men’:

Rat’s feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar.

In his later plays such symbolical suggestions abound and they convey the same picture of a world which has lost its faith, just as the mention of ‘the cry of bats’ in The Cocktail Party.

In addition to this symbolical exhibition of the decay in modern civilisation, there is the recurring mention or the passage of time. Eliot’s love of tradition is somehow synthesised with the concept of Time both as understood in the ancient scriptures and as interpreted by modern philosophy. Time is as continuous as the flow of water in a river, in which like ripples are events; “what is actual is actual only for one time”, and only for one place.

Tradition, as far as it is comprehensible, became an unbroken force, against which should be evaluated individual human achievement. In his rejection of ‘bourgeois individualism’ Eliot seems to concur with the Left-Wingers in Literature and Philosophy. But the difference comes when he brings forward the idea of continuity in human thought-process, focusing our attention on ‘the present moment of the past,’ as he makes Reilly in The Cocktail Party remark:

Ah, but we die to each other daily.

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we know them. (Act 1, Sc. 3)

Tradition, physically defined, came to be a series of instants with their own units of experience, impressed on the human mind–this series stretching far out into space. Eliot was never convinced of the idea of actual movement forward in human consciousness.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past

(Burnt Norton)

He could think of the future as just the present, stretched in space. We do not, and need not, know very much of the future, except that the present is stretched into space; in fact the future by itself never exists, but as a delusion of the human mind.

The conclusion hence is, that it is the business of the writer and critic ‘to see literature steadily and to see it whole,’ ‘to see it beyond time’. The writers under Marxist influence ⁷ have the view that the progress of events in time has an alternating force, a dialectical play of opposites, but to Eliot the so-called progress is illusory.”

And it is through this ‘historical sense’ or the profound faith in tradition that Eliot reached the sphere of poetic drama. His interest in this field was because somehow Poetry, whatever be its nature, is the natural vehicle of dramatic action. Since Aeschylus, drama has been poetic in content; the use of prose for drama was the result of later rationalist schools from the XVII century onwards. Realism in drama, Rationalism in philosophy and Representation in Government were, after all, the products of ‘bourgeois individualism’. His interest in tradition was turned into a conviction, with the arrival of the new ideas on the nature of Time in its relation to Space as explained by pure scientific thinkers from Minkowski to Eddington. The fact that Space and Time are linked together indissolubly in a four-dimensional continuum, fortified Eliot’s contention that the so-called Future is simply the present Instant stretched into Space. One of our finest contemporary thinkers in India, Dr. Sankaran of the Deccan College Research Institute, puts the matter succinctly;

“Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world, experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it as history, that is, as a process’ that is going forward in time and takes place in space”. ⁸

Eliot grasped the psychical Possibilities of this Concept of Time in his later work–The Four Quartets where he assumed the existence of the Timeless, that Something which is beyond Time (God?), and of Reality as ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time’. The mythical vision as mentioned in ancient texts like the Bhagavad-gita gave him the vision of the regeneration of life from time to time–The Rebirth, experience of the Now, an incessantly moving Now.

Because of such background he gradually changed over to a deep conviction of the immense value of ecclesiastical authority and a traditional religious doctrine with all its inventive myths. The Leftist critics have bitterly attacked Eliot for this doctrine of Tradition as negative if not reactionary. Frankly speaking, Eliot is definitely afraid of the consequences of man’s experimentation with his life and beliefs, rather than that he is a reactionary. It was with this frame of mind that about the year 1932 Eliot shifted over to poetic drama two forces, Tradition and Theology, holding sway over his mind. A deep faith in the Catholic Church, if only for its traditional ritual and symbolistic value, came over him, as he expressed in strong language:

“The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilised 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 civilisation, and save the world from suicide”. ⁹

Among all the types in literature, it is in the field of dramatic poetry that Eliot discovered the deepest tradition of myths, symbolical representations and other ritualistic forms, as much as in the case of Yeats who derived the same satisfaction out of Celtic myths.

Drama, since the most ancient days has always been ‘poetic’ in garb and ‘symbolist or mythical’ in content. Eliot expressed, as Dryden did in 1681 in his famous Essay on Dramatic Poesy, all his thought on drama in the modern context in the form of a dialogue among individuals representing differing angles of view of the same poetic drama. There are seven individuals A, B, C, D, E, and F, instead of the more informal persona1 names used by Dryden–Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander, but all are supporters of the poetic drama. There is a general criticism of the ‘realistic drama,’ of Shaw, William Archer and such others

who championed ‘the play with a purpose.’ To Eliot, deeply stained by that weakness for ritualistic tradition, contemporary drama lacked ‘the more formal element, a system of traditional symbolical and highly skilled movement’. Might be that Eliot was influenced by the Natya Sastra of Bharata, with its detailed doctrinaire attitude to drama, or the Kabuki and No-technique of the Japanese. But the ‘Ballet russe’ with its systematic movements and strict art-form appealed to him so much that he wished to incorporate into dramatic poetry an element of ritualistic rigour along with the usual plot and action. If what is permanent and universal is to be represented, then highly formalised poetry is to be added on to the dramatic action:

“The more fluid, the more chaotic the religious and ethical beliefs, the more the drama must tend in the direction of liturgy……” ¹⁰

He is convinced that modern drama fails to reach sublime heights, because “plays are written by poets who have no knowledge of the stage and also plays are written by men who know the stage and are not poets.” The reasons that drew Eliot to the poetic stage are ritualistic symbolism, deep distrust of realistic and problem plays which are as bald as the lines:

He’s been in the army four years,

he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him,

there’s others will, I said

Oh, is there, she said.

(The Waste Land)

The early attempts of Eliot at poetic drama are to be seen in that ‘Aristophanic Melodrama’, Sweeney Agonistes (1932) and The Rock (1934). But the most developed of his poetic plays came later at long intervals, starting with Murder in the Cathedral ((1935), The family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949) and The Confidential Clerk (1953). Of these the first mentioned does not show that deep mystic symbolism of the cycle of regeneration that Eliot developed in the Four Quartets and which is evident in the last mentioned plays. As he is moving through the latter three plays, the feeling is inescapable that Eliot is even giving up his stand on the ecclesiastic tradition of the Catholic Church and is becoming more universal in his grasp of values.

The preoccupation with the concept of Time amounting to obsession, is present even in 1935, in the Becket play:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again

Men learn little from other’s experience

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns.

The poet obviously feels an apparent contradiction in their totality; events appear to repeat themselves, though individually they look separate and unconnected. That ‘Time past is time forgotten,’ may appear a truism, but another great passage spoken late in the play by the impetuous Archbishop completely brings out the Time-factor involved in the chain of causation. The common fallacy of the ordinary logic is “to argue by results”–“to settle if an act be good or bad.” But the cause and effect interchange their position in the continuity of time–

“And as in time results of many deeds are blended

So good and evil in the end become confounded.”

Historians always use the apparatus of causation to the determination of the values attached to an event. They delude themselves “arguing by result,” because they take their stand and think they “can turn the wheel on which they turn.” This interesting problem can be restated as the futile effort of man, himself bound inside the web of time, trying to observe an incident that also takes place within that web. The more correct view would be when the individual takes his ego out of the continuity of time and in that isolation derives his experience, as Becket proudly says:

“It is not in time that my death shall be known;

It is out of time that my decision is taken.”

This time-concept is iterative in the later dramas also, but specially in The Family Reunion it assumes a terrifying symbolic shape which has all unendurable experiences hidden inside its sweep:

“The noxious smell untraceable in the drains,

Inaccessible to the plumbers,

That has its hour of the night; You do not know

The unspoken voice of sorrow in the ancient bedroom

At three O’clock in the morning……”¹¹

That time is a vast unending corridor with hidden riches through which life has to pass down, meeting with unexpected ‘noxious vapours’ and terrifying apparitions, is the underlying sense in the play:

“When the loop in time comes

and it does not come for everybody

The hidden is revealed, and the

spectres show themselves.” ¹²

Time is simply a projection of human consciousness and the latter has recorded impressions which hop up often to disturb what is called the ‘Present’

Why do we all behave as if the door might suddenly open, the curtains be drawn,

The cellar make some dreadful disclosure, the roof disappear

And we should cease to be sure of what is real or unreal?” ¹³

The obsession with the time-concept is more insistent in the next production, The Cocktail Party (1949), the Hitler War having probably backed up the premises:

“Ah, but we die to each other daily

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient Social convention

Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember

That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger” ¹⁴

Along with this obsession with time in the poetical plays, Eliot has frequent references to the concept of projection. Our consciousness of a past, present or future time is, after all, a projection of itself, as in geometry.

The greatest motive in these poetic plays seems to be to construct a pattern of states of reality at various time-levels. In The Cocktail Party Edward Chamberlayne and his wife, Lavinia, are both suffering from the illusory visions they have built up for themselves. Such illusions are psychologically the smoke screen which hides certain underhand dealings and mental reservations, on the part of individuals. In the modem sophisticated upper class circles also, there are certain primitive impulses in the relations between the two sexes. In the simple society of the past, such impulses would be shown in positive action outwardly, fearless of consequences. But in the sophisticated cultured society, in the effort to order impulses to a pattern, an individual finds himself in different positions at different “time segments.” The “unidentified guest” (Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly) of the play, is one who has a better perspective than the others.

Edward and Lavinia, after a married life of a few years, discover that each, in his and her way, desires a change. In human relations inside society, one person expects another to be what he or she wishes him or her to be. The difficulty is that the objective personality is different from this mental projection and hence arises the difficulty of reconciliation:

“Most of the time we take ourselves for granted,

As we have to, and live on a little knowledge

About ourselves as we were.”

There is an inherent duality in an individual:

“It’s always happening, because one is an object

As well as a person.”

It is this proposition, that a person goes on changing himself and his view of reality at every segment of time, which currently occupies the mind of Eliot. This proposition of what one may call ‘mental projection into the Space-Time Continuum’ is blended successfully with the structure of “the ordinary West-End drawing-room comedy-convention,” that which dramatists used since Congreve to Oscar Wilde or Somerset Maugham.

The Confidential Clerk, staged during the Edinburgh Festival of 1953, has the same structure of the West-End drawing-room of Sir Claude and Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer. The products of such extra-marital affairs–Lucasta Angel and B. Kaghan, are bound to have a disturbing influence on the pattern of existence. Lady Elizabeth had left her child of the affair and could not trace it. Meanwhile she got herself married to Sir Claude Mulhammer. It is after so many years and so many vicissitudes of life that she discovers her lost child in the person of B. Kagnan, whom no one suspected to be in any way connected with her. Strangely enough in this latest play, Eliot has refrained from imposing too many of his ideas on the plot, leaving it to work itself out. He seems to be more interested in the stage success than in pushing forward his pet readings of the human consciousness, in its relation to Space-Time structure.

Coming to some of the structural innovations in his plays, the most visible is the revival of the chorus. Even in the Greek Tragedy, the chorus besides supplying comment on events, hasn’t got anything beyond providing contrast with the heroic figures. But in Eliot’s plays, the chorus indulges in mystic and symbolistic movements and utterances of a prophetic nature. The chorus in the earliest of his poetic plays, Murder in the Cathedral, is provided by the old women of Canterbury, and it is not much different from that present in Aeschylus and Sophocles in its function, even in the estimate of Allardyce Nicoll,”...by means of the chorus the poet gains a means of presenting indirect commentary on his action; and above all, the lyrical opportunities thus offered give excellent means both of enriching the speech of the play and of arousing the imaginative receptivity on the part of the audience.” ¹⁵

The chorus in each of the next two plays The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949), consists of characters wholly individually have roles but form a group. This group is more or less emancipated like the tribal elders and exert to influence the career of younger untried elements. In the activities of the mystiques Harcourt-Reilly and his confidante Julia (Mrs. Shuttlethwaite) there is the idea of the mystic rites by which the novices are initiated into full-fledged life. In the other play, The Family Reunion, Aunt Agatha plays the same role of mystic initiator to Harry, Lord Monchensey and Mary. At the closing stages of the play, Agatha and Mary perform a mystic ritual, going round and round a small table, on which is placed a birthday cake with lighted candles, blowing out each of the candles at every revolution–the Pradakshina–ritual as though–

This way the pilgrimage of expiation

Round and Round the Circle

Completing the charm

So the knot be unknotted

The crossed be uncrossed

The crooked be made straight

And the curse be ended

By intercession

By pilgrimage

By those who depart

In several directions

For their own redemption

And of the departed

May they rest in peace–

Agatha is not any witch from tribal circles, or a prophetess of the Egyptian temples, but one who is “the efficient principal of a women’s college.” She may be classed “morbid.” Harry has committed a crime by pushing his wife over the railings of a ship in mid-ocean. The popular version given out was, death due to accidental falling-over. But Harry is pursued by the Eumenides; his abnormal mental condition sees the furies pursuing him, and from this pursuit the escape lies in Expiation–the patent Prayaschitta idea of India or the ‘ordeal-concept’ of tribal civilisation. The Family Reunion is a successful blending of tribal customs, ancient mystic beliefs like that of the furies, and the life inside an aristocratic family. The latest of Eliot’s plays juxtapose the modern upper middle-class family life on the ancient tribal legends of Greece, like that of the Atridae. There were dreadful secrets hidden in the dark-consciousness of the Atridae, sin breeding sin, until expiated by the suffering of Orestes at the hands of the Eumenides. Harry, Lord Monchensey is Eliot’s version of Orestes, in a modem aristocratic household. Eliot’s view of life in the modem context is brilliantly symbolised in The Family Reunion:

In an old house there is always listening, and more is heard than spoken,

And what is spoken remains in the room, waiting for the future to hear it.

Whatever happens began in the past, and presses hard on the future.

The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying,

Gathers into itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future.

¹ ‘Science and Sanity’ by Alfred Korzybski

² ‘Tradition & Individual Talent’ Collected Essays of T. S. Elliot (Faber) p. 13.

³ Ibid. P 22.

⁴ F. A. Mathiessen: ‘American Renaissance’ p. 365.

⁵ ‘Ash Wednesday’.

⁶ ‘The Waste Land’

⁷ R. Hinton Thomas: Culture and T. S. Eliot.

The Modern Quarterly, Vol. 6 (Spring, 1951) (Lawrence & Wishart)

⁸ ‘Time and speech structure’ (p. 397) Indian Science Congress Session, Lucknow 1953.

⁹ ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’ Critical Essays P. 387

¹⁰ A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry

¹¹ ‘The family Reunion’ p. 29

¹² Ibid. p. 18

¹³ ‘The Family Reunion’. p. 45 (Faber Edition)

¹⁴ ‘The Cocktail Party’ p. 65 (Faber Edition)

¹⁵ Allardyce Nicoll: ‘World Drama’ p. 376

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