And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.^7This passage, says Julius, “breathes hate, the sibilants hissing scorn” (45). The
word “spawned” prompts Julius to expatiate on swamps and slime as breed-
ing ground for the subhuman Jewish race. “Blistered” is a reference to the
pustular skin diseases associated with Jews, especially smallpox (46). But the
truly offensive word in the passage is “squats.” “The squatting Jew,” writes
Julius, “his posture defecatory, becomes what he expels, just as his own mo-
tion enacts what must be done to him.” And he reminds us that anti-Semites
have commonly referred to the Jew as a form of “social excrement” (134).
That verbs like “spawned” and “squats” are insulting and disparaging—a
point taken up in a recent study by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who calls her
methodology in tracing the meanings of these words “social philology”^8 —
is obvious enough, the question being what the poem does with this “offen-
sive” material. Julius is forced to admit that the “horror picture” of the pas-
sage in question is not carried further in Gerontion’s monologue. Why? His
own explanation is that “Gerontion resists all consoling visions, including
the consolations of anti-Semitism, which is a casualty of its relentless nega-
tivity” (59). Since Gerontion believes in nothing—neither God nor History
nor Progress of any sort—he rejects all frameworks; and even anti-Semitism,
Julius posits, is, after all, a framework. Thus the poem rejects form; it “sets
its face against the tradition of the dramatic monologue,” which is its chosen
genre. And since it refuses even anti-Semitism as an “organizing principle,”
the poem “lacks coherence” (61).
Again, then, the charge against “Gerontion” is that it is incoherent. Coher-
ence, according to this view of poetry, must involve consistency of voice and
narrative, of imagery and my thological frame. For Julius, “Gerontion” is not
suf¤ciently Browningesque; it does not carry through the ¤ction of an indi-
vidual dramatized subject, whose speech is determined by the control of a
silent addressee. Ironically, although Julius’s subject is such an important
one—Eliot’s anti-Semitism and how Eliot’s readers have managed to ration-
alize it away—his reading of “Gerontion” is written under the sign of the
New Criticism he ostensibly scorns, for it treats the poem as an autonomous
artifact, whose words express certain sentiments about the Jews. But what
happens if we look not at genre or external reference but at the poem’s ac-
tual language, syntax, and rhy thm as Eliot’s poem took shape in the winter
of 1919?
Eliot’s “Gerontion” 23