Making It New: 1900–1945 375You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
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 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.Whereas Whitman would absorb everything into the image of himself, Eliot
organizes everything – and denies the presence, or at least knowledge, of himself –
so as to catch a hint, or a glimpse, of otherness. The “I” in this passage is not, as it is
in Whitman and so much American writing, the active and reactive core of the
poem, its vital center and source of creative energy. It is, at its best, a linguistic
convenience, a way of locating the initial source of these perceptions and, at worst, a
kind of spiritual undertow that those following the “way of dispossession” must
resist. Here, a wholly personal style takes on a grand impersonality: the language
and line of Whitman are used against themselves. And here, too, the illusion of
personality is raised for a moment only to be dismissed as just that, an illusion:
the words “you” and “I” become floating signifiers, which can never be anchored in
any meaningful, moral reality.
Whitman does not represent all of American poetry, of course. Still, the basic
point remains the same: Eliot was and was not an American writer precisely because
the confluence of cultures required him, he believed, to make a deliberate choice.
He was an American by birth and an Englishman by force of will. Brought up in
St. Louis, where the South meets the Midwest, deeply affected by the introspective
inheritance of New England, he became a European – and more specifically an
English – poet. Yet, while doing all this, he retained the marks of his American
upbringing, as he had to, on his imagination and memory. Commonly identified
with the British tradition as he is now, all he wrote can nevertheless be seen in
terms of a fierce, irreconcilable conflict with his birthplace – and what he believed
were the limited terms of American culture. There is no easy definition of Eliot, as
there cannot be of any writers of clearly mixed nationality like him. But not just of
such writers; others, many of whom never even left their native shores, have
found themselves caught in the borderlands between several homes and histories,
required to make sense of the various traditions they have inherited. To be an
American has always been a complex fate. And to be an American writer has nearly
always been a matter of living in the encounter between different cultures, trying to
dramatize and resolve the differences. Eliot simply experienced difference in a more
knowing fashion than most; and, knowing this as a difference of nationalisms, felt
compelled to alter allegiance. Reversing the common process by which so many have
made themselves Americans and American writers, Eliot also repeated or reflected
a dominant strain in American writing – the intimation of duality of consciousness,GGray_c04.indd 375ray_c 04 .indd 375 8 8/1/2011 7:53:52 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 52 AM