The title of this essay quotes directly from the last line of the fourth section of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Ash-Wednesday,” where the poetic line is itself an unequivocal allusion to the Salve Regina – a prayer beseeching the Blessed Virgin to intercede for humans suffering in their earthly exile. The notion of “exile” (from Latin: exilium; literally meaning, banishment) refers to the expulsion of one from his native place – or the estrangement from what is heimlich (literally: homely). The prayer continues, “after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus” – implying that the temporal banishment from home is that which leads to the final and eternal restoration of one’s rightful homeland, which is for the Christian, heaven. Analogically, a “literary exile” may be observed in Eliot’s poetry, where the individual’s estrangement from that which is familiar or heimlich –in this case, tradition –is evidenced not only in the evocation of the unheimlich, but also in Eliot’s presentation of his poetry as uncanny (a contestable point which will be taken up in this essay). Just as “exile” prefigures “homecoming”, so too does Eliot’s deliberate emphasis on the unheimlich (unhomely) in his poetry foreground and pave the way to a recovery of tradition. Before proceeding to explicate how the presence of the unheimlich or “uncanny” in Eliot’s poetry brings about a rehabilitation of tradition, it is necessary to first expound on the sense in which Freud’s conceptualisation of the “uncanny” is evinced in Eliot’s poetry.
Theorising that the “uncanny” is “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar,” (Uncanny174) Freud implies that the “uncanny” haunts not because of its foreignness or strange newness but precisely it belongs to the domain of that which is familiar, albeit estranged by repression; it is that which “was intended to remain secret, hidden away [but] has come into the open” (Uncanny 182). Germane to Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” is the notion of the “double” – that is, the unheimlich Other that issues from the ego’s narcissistic impulse towards self-preservation and serves as “an insurance against the extinction of the self” (Uncanny 192). Instead of conceiving of “tradition” as the unheimlich ghost that lurks pervasively in Eliot’s poetry, this essay positions Eliot’s modernist poetry as the unheimlich counterpart or – in Freud’s own words – “immortal soul” to the body of traditional literature –safeguarding tradition against the threat of “annihilation” (Ibid.) by ventriloquising (speaking through and for) the “corpses” or bodies of historical texts in his poetry. The “corpse,” as both a metaphor and metonymy of “tradition” is intimated by Eliot in his seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” (1919) where he mentions that:
[n]o 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 (44).
Accordingly, the presence of the dead is ubiquitous in Eliot’s poems – both explicitly in imagery and motifs (such as the corpse) and formally in the interpolation of literary works of the dead, where Eliot alludes extensively to the works of canonical literary writers including Dante and Shakespeare, as well as the religious texts of Buddhism, Hinduism and, most expansively, Anglo-Catholicism.
The profusion of intertextuality in Eliot’s poetry – in which significant physical and symbolic space is apportioned to the dead corpus of tradition– illustrates firstly, that his art is necessarily constituted by the tradition and secondly, that the heimlich and unheimlich, life and death, tradition and modernity are ultimately inextricable in his texts. Freud’s declaration that “[n]egation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed . . . though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed” (“Negation” 667) affirms the notion that the unheimlich is not extrinsic but existing (in a repressed form) within the heimlich. This essay posits that because that the unheimlichis not a contradiction but extension of the heimlich, a framing of Eliot’s poetry as the unheimlich Other to tradition implies that his poetry is continuous with and insistently part of literary tradition. The essay subsequently argues that Eliot deliberately “others” his poetry as unheimlich so as to allow his readers to come to a re-cognition of the heimlich via the unheimlich, tradition via the modern.
By presenting his poetry as a bricolage of re-written or re-appropriated traditional textual fragments, Eliot renders tradition which is erstwhile homely, unheimlich. The re-writing of texts by the dead is evinced in “East Coker” – which self-reflexively begins, ends and is interspersed with the quotation “[i]n my beginning is my end,” where the line reverses the order of the phrase it alludes to, “in my end is my beginning”. The original quotation is attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, before her being executed for alleged treason of Elizabeth I; she intimates that the “end” of her earthly existence (or exile) is the beginning of eternal life in heaven. The reversal of her statement in Eliot’s poetry not only defamiliarises the meaning of her words, but ostensibly subverts the hope of eternal salvation into a curse or damnation; in Freudian terms, it collapses the “assurance of immortality [into] the uncanny harbinger of death” (Uncanny 192). However, the word “end” refers not merely to the termination of existence, but also more significantly, the goal and purpose of it. The polyvalence of the term “end” allows us to perceive the “end” or telos of Eliot’s poetry to be the recovery of tradition – that is to say, a return to the “beginning” and heimlich , where “home is where one starts from” (“East Coker” V. 19).
The notion of tradition as the heimlich is further intimated by the central motif of the “houses” (the home and homely) in “East Coker”. The series of verbs and images in the first six lines of his poems (evidenced below) are presented as heimlich and coherent insofar that they are read in relation to the grounding motif of the “houses”. Explicitly, Eliot positions “tradition” (represented by the “houses”) as the point of reference from which all new works of literature must – in his opinion – be read in relation. At this point, Eliot reveals that any attempt to perceive art independently of tradition results in an unheimlich decontextualisation as evinced in the fragmentation of the whole into separate objects in the section as follows:
In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces (I. 1-7).
The first six lines of the above section appear heimlich, and find significance by virtue of being “succession[s]” of the anchoring image of the “houses”. The continual and rapid sequence of revisions and developments in the poetic landscape as indicated by the onslaught of verbs –“rise,” “fall,” “crumble,” “extended,” “removed, destroyed, restored” and consecutive displacement of images, “open field,” “factory,” “by-pass” echo the ceaseless modification of the literary canon; the mechanism of tradition. The endless metamorphoses in literary tradition is further evinced by the substantial or alchemical transformations, from “old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, / Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth”. The preposition “to” as well as the commas, function as paratactic connectors, which signal readers to make the conceptual leaps between the “old stone” which combines with other materials and is re-purposed into a “new building,” and the “new building” which is de-constructed into “old timber”, which is itself ignited to produce “new fires”. The comma visually segments the above two lines into separate clauses, accentuating the fact that “old timber [and] new fires” bear no ostensible connection with the “old stone” in the previous clause — save for their connection to the “houses” (symbolising tradition). Subsequently, the following line involves no productive transformation into newer forms, but a gradual dying out the fire – gesturing towards the disintegration of the “houses” viz. tradition.
The uncanny – which brings death to proximity with life and vice versa –is evinced in the question Eliot’s persona asks in “The Waste Land”: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / has it begun to sprout?” (I. 71-72). Beyond the disorientating fact that the reader must confront — that life is inevitably a bearer of death, the uncanny also brings to mind the reverse notion that life springs out from death. Such a notion subtly recalls the idea of martyrdom or self-sacrifice which behooves the poet to uproot himself from the “soil of unbounded self-love [and] primary narcissism” (Uncanny192) to die symbolically to himself, surrendering the focus on his “individual talent” to conform to the body of tradition. In “East Coker,” the disruption of traditional “succession” is met with a jarring evocation of the unheimlichwhich is poignantly illustrated in the dismembering of the body into its corporeal components of “flesh, fur and faeces”– where the term “dismembering” also hints at the exclusion of one’s membership or participation in tradition. Eliot’s use of fricatives entail a necessary exertion of force which echoes an ejection or a breaking away of body parts from the body. The syntactical ordering of “flesh, fur and faeces” further implies an increasing estrangement of the bodily metonymy from the implied corpus: “flesh” being internal matter, “fur” being on the surface of the body and “faeces” being external to the body. Whist “flesh, fur and faeces” signify death, they fertilise the soil – strengthening the foundation out of which things can grow and in that sense, they too are productive indicative of future life (and not merely a deathly reminder of life that has past). Following on, the “flesh, fur and faeces,” as that which remains after the burning away of the “houses” – like “the indigestible portions [of the body] which the leopards reject” (“Ash-Wednesday” II. 15) – exist as unheimlichreminders of the unsuccessful attempt to abolish the homely corpus of tradition. Ergo, the uncanny, which on one hand functions as the inexorable memento mori, simultaneously exists as a reminder that tradition cannot be totally eradicated – thus implying that the uncanny is the token by which tradition can be immortalised.
In much the same way as he does in “East Coker,” Eliot perpetuates the uncanny on multiple levels in “Whispers of Immortality” to compel his readers to confront vis-a-vis the bodies or corpses (which are emblematic of literary tradition) that give his poetry literary “flesh” and a concrete existence. In his poem, Eliot refers directly to both “Webster” and “Donne” and alludes to Wordsworth by parodying the title of his poem, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”. The incorporation of writers spanning across the Jacobean and Romantic period suggests both a continuity of tradition, albeit one that is uncannily upheld by Eliot’s symbolic cannibalisation of his literary forefathers – as observed for instance, in the morbid description of Webster’s corpse in the first two stanzas:
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 (1-8).
Eliot’s metaphorical cannibalisation of Webster is illustrated in the progressive dismantling of his corporeal make-up, beginning with a stripping away of Webster’s epidermal layer to reveal the “skull beneath the skin” – where the sibilance mimes the unsettling sound of the skin being peeled back from the skull and the alliteration suggests a close adherence between the “skin” and “skull,” emphasising the thinness of the veneer separating life and death. The specific mention of “breastless” conveys a dissection and possible consumption of Webster’s literary flesh, where the hollowing out of Webster’s corpse is further evinced in Eliot’s description of his expression as “lipless”. The adjective “lipless” suggests silence – both because Webster is dead and is being spoken for and about by Eliot, who in silencing Webster, figuratively cannibalises his lips. The poem moves from the corporal to the abstract, in which “thought clings round dead limbs,” situating Webster’s dead body and the rest of the literary canon (which Webster’s body is both metaphor and metonymy of) is the foundation upon which Eliot’s poetic thought coheres to. The last two lines of the poem, “But our lot crawls between dry ribs/ to keep our metaphysics warm” perpetuates the trope of the late poets’ body as tradition. The act of “crawl[ing] between dry ribs” (or bones, which are a common trope in Eliot’s poetry) thus suggests a re-situating of oneself within the heimlich and traditional body of literature. Here, “metaphysics” distantly alludes to the immortal soul which Freud delineates as the unheimlich Other of the body, implying that it is only by adhering to the heimlich space of tradition, that the poet’s soul (his poetry) can live on – immortalised in literary canon.
Just as he does in “Whispers”, Eliot employs the trope of mortality in “Ash-Wednesday” to illustrate the inevitable death of the poet when decontextualised from tradition and paraded as an individual entity. Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent and self-mortification reiterates the need for kenosis (self-emptying) and metanoia (literally: a total conversion of one’s mind). Metanoia is expressed succinctly in the words spoken by the Anglican minister as he smears ashes on the foreheads of the believer: “Turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel.” Two movements are involved in this exhortation: a turning away from sin and a turning towards God. Here, Kathryn Murphy points out the Augustinian conceptualisation of “sinful man as homo incurvatus in se [which might be briefly glossed as] humankind turned, or bent, inwards upon itself: stopped with the burden of sin” (69). In other words, the turning away from sin may be construed as a turning away from the self. Here, the ashes function as a poignant symbol of mortality, finding its significance in the biblical quotation “dust you are, and unto dust shall you return” (Genesis 3:19) which is essentially an exhortation for the believer to turn away from sin and the self by recalling his beginnings and end. In Eliot’s poetry, this translates as the poet’s shift away from individual artistic merit to a return to his traditional artistic roots. However, in “Ash-Wednesday,” the distinction between the ontological and literary is not entirely distinct, since religion or the turning to God is mediated through the traditional texts of the Bible and of the Anglican Liturgy. Also significant is the fact that both “Ash-Wednesday” and “East Coker” conclude on Good Friday (the day of Christ’s death) instead of Easter Sunday (the day of his resurrection) – allowing the notion of the notion of mortality to penetrate through the form of the poem.
In the second sequence of “Ash-Wednesday,” Eliot perpetuates two of the same tropes as observed in “Whispers”, specifically, that of consuming and being consumed, as well as the exteriorising of that which conventionally remains interior or invisible. Specifically, Eliot exposes the innards of the body in his poetry – both in his self-reflexive acts of re-writing and in the uncanny “dissembl[ing]” of the speaker’s body. The butchering of speaker’s body is conflated with Eliot’s inflicting of symbolic violence in his dissection and re-assemblage of textual bodies as observed in:
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull. And God said Shall these bones live? shall these Bones live? And that which had been contained In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping (II. 1-7).
The specificity of detail in the first line intimates the possibility of an allusion since most of each of the individual descriptors (“Lady, ‘three” and “white”) on their own bear vague reference to Christianity, yet – when syntactically combined – yields no coherent meaning. The incomprehensibility of the quasi-allusion excludes and denies the reader access unless one has access to Eliot’s subjective frame of mind, illustrating the inefficacy of a private language or reliance on the “individual talent” to communicate meaning. The first line ultimately confounds more than it reveals, elucidating “an uncanny effect [which] is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality” (Uncanny 198). In “Ash-Wednesday,” the uncanny flickering back and forth in the liminal space between reality and fantasy serves to demonstrate the incoherence of “individual talent”, as will be momentarily explicated.
The literal re-positioning of the speaker’s interiority – his “heart . . . liver and that which had been contained/ in the hollow round of his skull” on his legs is undoubtedly horrifying. However, it is not uncanny since the dislocation of his organs to such a degree clearly renders the text unequivocally bizarre and fantastic, eliminating any possible semblance to reality. In other words, the hyperbolic and extreme nature of the text ceases to defamiliarise but is totally unfamiliar. Yet, the juxtaposition of the ostensibly meaningless or inaccessible against a recognisable allusion to the book of the prophet Ezekiel in the Bible (which is charged with both divine authority as well as the literary authority based on its traditional value) is that which disorients the reader and renders the textual universe both familiar and strange and hence unheimlich. The reference to dry bones – which in the biblical narrative become enfleshed and given life – reiterates the foundational, underlying structure of tradition that Eliot believes new literary texts ought to be constructed upon. Eliot’s use of enjambment and repetition in “Shall these bones live? shall these/ Bones live?” formally illustrates his act of re-writing and revising the biblical rendition. Here, the repetition is not tautological but is suggestive of the “compulsion to repeat” – stemming to “loss of love and failure [which] leave behind . . . a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 603). Similarly, the repetition is also reminiscent of Plato’s anamnesis which, cursorily speaking, is the notion that all new knowledge is merely a rediscovery of a previously known (though veiled) knowledge within. As mentioned, Eliot’s re-working and re-contextualising of traditional forms rendering them uncanny insofar that they are both an amalgamation of the heimlich and unheimlich. The uncanny therefore situates Eliot’s epistemological grasp and poetics in tradition, in which he acknowledges himself – unlike Ezekiel – to be “no prophet” and his poetry, to be “no great matter” (“Prufrock” 83-84) but instead, attempts to re-invoke tradition not via his individual voice but by “restoring/ with a new verse the ancient rhyme” (“Ash Wednesday” IV. 17-18).
Eliot further explains in the same section that the reliance on the self, and a forgetfulness of one’s tradition will inevitably lead to self-erasure from history and a total loss of significance as intimated in the lines: As I am forgotten/ And I would be forgotten, so I would forget” – implying that a willingness to accept anonymity and a certain self-forgetfulness is a necessary condition for one’s poetry or oneself to be immortalised in tradition. Such a notion Eliot affirms in his statement that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (“Tradition” 47). Eliot’s poetic utopia – a return to tradition –may be perceived in the Israelites’ entry into the Promised Land, the heimlich space after their exile (the unheimlich) as evinced in the last stanza: “Forgetting themselves and each other, united . . . This is the land which ye/ shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity/ Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.” By critically exiling his poetry from tradition at specific occasions in his poems (indicated by his use of abstruse and veiled imagery), Eliot allows for “self-observation and self-criticism” which Freud suggests “superannuate[s the] narcissism of primitive times” (Uncanny 192). The uncanny occurrence of physical decomposition as evinced in the breaking down of the self into body parts, “legs,” “heart,” “liver,” “skull,” “guts, the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions” subsequently intimates Eliot’s own “de-composition” in his attempt to steer the focus of his poetry away from his “individual talent,” and critically distance his poetry as the uncanny Other (as opposed to Self) to conform to the larger body of tradition.
This essay has primarily focused on the uncanny in terms of the resuscitation of dead things, or life that can burgeon from death; it has not thoroughly considered the dying of the living. The antithesis to the re-animation of the dead in Eliot’s poetry is found in the prologue of “The Waste Land” in the figure of Sibyl – who had traded her virginity for eternal life but neglected to ask for eternal youth and was thus doomed to wither and decay while alive. Eliot’s mention of Sibyl’s impossible death wish in his poem casts her as the ultimate paradigm of how one ought not to ask for or achieve immortality. Eliot’s infinitely more subtle attempt to immortalise his art (in terms of establishing it as part of the literary canon) is evinced via negativa — since negation is ultimately not a denial but affirmation and acknowledgment of that which is true but repressed:
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not.
Eliot brings to the forefront of his readers’ consciousness that his poetry is traditional despite appearing to work against it – de-constructing and slaughtering traditional works and appropriating in his own – via the figure of the uncanny. Insofar as the unheimlich is an affirmation rather than a denial of the tradition, Eliot’s presentation of the unheimlich in his poetry, or his poetry as unheimlich, paradoxically reveals that it is traditional. In enshrining and immortalising the works of traditional poets and artists in his poetry, Eliot too is immortalised and elevated by them and interpolated into the same canon.
Works Cited
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—.”Tradition and the Individual Talent”. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and
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Freud Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia”. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New
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—. “Negation”. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
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—. The Uncanny. 1919. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin Books Limited, 2003.
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