vincent sherry
consummation of the second, in the rituals of savage, retributive justice just
conductedat Versailles.
Other references to this event provide the orienting points for the speaker’s
long, central meditation on ‘History’, which, in this representation, ‘has many
cunning passages, contrived corridors|And issues’. As in the Great Hall of Mirrors
at Versailles, the image of ‘History’ repeats in a receding frame, playing a trick
of substance and multiple reflections. This mirage-like prospect seems especially
and even wilfully deceptive, however, the illusion peculiarly shrewd, in so far
as these ‘passages’ are ‘cunning’, the ‘corridors’ being ‘contrived’—presumably,
around the ‘issues’ being argued, which include the guilt the Allied powers officially
imposed on Germany and the war reparations plan that this manoeuvre authorized.
Eliot’s current work in the Colonial and Foreign Department at Lloyd’s Bank
certainly alerted him to the worst consequences of this economic punishment. The
critical emphasis in his representation falls on the insidiousness of the case making,
moreover, a stress that echoes back to the sort of devious reasoning that was familiar
to him from the discourses of the Liberal war. And it is this specifically English
sensibility that Eliot puts on the rhetoricalline in the poem’s character-in-voice.
Eliot’s aged speaker belongs to the senescence of contemporary British Liberalism,
a generation that has authored in words a war that its old men have not fought in
body. Gerontion makes this admission in the opening moment of the poem, in the
oblique case of his citation of classical mythology:
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.Establishing his membership in the particular generation and partisan class of
aged Liberals, Gerontion also performs that identity, orienting himself toward
the reality of the war in a verbalist rite that is well rehearsed, if badly per-
formed. The clausal construction projects the progressive discriminations of verbal
reason—‘neither/Nor/Nor’—as its stipulative spirit, its motivating action, but the
ambitious plan of a thrice-suspended period turns into the wreckage that its phrasal
sequence actually makes of it. This masterfully awkward contortion of rationalist
syntax speaks as the spasm of the master language of English Liberalism at war. And
Eliot extends the sensibility of his speaking character to its revealing extreme in the
central meditation on ‘History’.
‘Think now’, his speaker proposes to open this deliberation, and repeats the same
injunction several times,
Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted,
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving...