Less Love and More Feeling: Radical Personality in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Impersonal Theory of Art’

1Those who have read Eliot’s poetry may recall the description of the evening sky in one of his poems: ‘Like a patient etherised upon a table.’1 Rather than afford relieving fantasies about the hereafter, it mirrors in its celestial immensity the claustrophobia of our own embodied liminality; that is, the point when the only thing that we can feel is that we feel nothing.

2This line from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was probably written in Munich in the summer of 1911 during Eliot’s first year out in Europe. He would then return to Harvard to start his studies towards obtaining a Ph.D. in the Philosophy Department. Though yet unwritten, his thesis on the British philosopher F. H. Bradley which he finished some six years later, would not be unrelated to this idea of corporeal claustrophobia evoked in the first lines of the poem. The last chapter of his thesis is in fact entitled ‘Solipsism.’

Thus we confront the question: how do we yoke our diverse worlds to draw together? How can we issue from the circle described about each point of view? And since I can know no point of view but my own, how can I know that there are other points of view, or admitting their existence, how can I take any account of them?2

3Eliot had struggled with Bradley’s metaphysics and specially with the philosopher’s concept of ‘finite centre.’ The ‘finite centre’ amounted to a re-interpretation of individuation which attempted to open subjectivity to collective coherence, yet at the expense of conscious communication between each individual. There is for Bradley no such thing as consciousness of immediate experience; thus, all communication can at best be tangential or unconscious. Not surprising, the poetic voice in ‘Prufrock’ echoes his own would-be embodied voice reiterating throughout the poem, ‘“That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all,”’ as he is trying to communicate a semblance of emotion to his addressee, who we are left to imagine is his love object. His frustrated attempts at communication find escape in the cold comfort of fetishistic fantasies about his own numb body; as the only alleviation to his solipsism is found in the imaginary dissection of body parts which culminate in the evocation of a post-mortem operation where a magic lantern ‘threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.’ It is as if this kind of illumination is the only resort left to make things clear—to communicate his emotions—which subverts the Renaissance lyric convention of listing the body parts of the loved one as they are turned into metaphors.

4The communication of one’s emotions, or love in this case, is the natural business of the lyric. In ‘The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ the degree of success of this communication refers to the capacity to feel emotions in the first place. The point, that is, where the emotions are a matter of feeling, and feelings dependant on the body which is experiencing them, and not on the body we are in love with. It is a cognitive implosion that leads the poetic persona in ‘Prufrock’ to shine a torch through his own nerves looking for these feelings, which, he in turn does not have due to the ether he has taken to enable the operation in the first place. What we are left with is Bradley’s ‘finite centre’: a point of view stripped to its bare nerve-ends as if in the absence of alternatives this kind of exposure was the last resort of contact with others. Note that others would rather metaphorically hold their hearts in their hands to express their emotions, rather than literally gut out their own spinal cord. Eliot’s odd choice is, however, deliberate as he would say of the Metaphysical poet John Donne some years later: ‘Donne looked into a great deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.’3

5The difficult relation between thoughts and emotions in the love lyric becomes for Eliot symptomatic of a general problem relating to the possibility of communication in all fields of discourse. As he returns to Harvard for the academic year 1912-13 he enrols to study for a Ph.D. in philosophy and becomes president of the Philosophical Club. In October 1913 he delivers a paper entitled ‘The Relationship Between Metaphysics and Politics.’ Eliot notes that:

This is a time in which philosophies lend themselves, or at least offer themselves, with great facility to emotional consequences. A time of what a pragmatist friend of mine has called lyric philosophers. James’ philosophical writings constitute an emotional attitude more than a book of dogma; the neo-realistic movement appears to the uninitiated at least a spontaneous outburst of genius, a song without words; and we observe Mr B. Russell directing with passionate enthusiasm his unearthly ballet of bloodless alphabet. Professor Bosanquet is the prophet who has put off his shoes and talked to the Absolute in a burning bush; to Professor Royce we owe the [illegible] of Christianity by the method of last aid to the dead. And the landscape is decorated with Bergsonians in various degrees of recovery from intellect.4

6‘Emotional,’ ‘lyric,’ ‘spontaneous bursts,’ ‘song without words,’ ‘passionate enthusiasm,’ ‘bloodless alphabet’—these are the words Eliot pejoratively chooses, words which define a sentimental response to experience. But how else should one do it? Reason might come to mind, but, at this early stage, Eliot is specifically thinking about science as the antidote to sentimentality. The kind of science that he is thinking about is perhaps as yet undefined, but this uncertainty is the driving force behind his interest in philosophy for which he does not in this occasion show much respect judging by the slandering irony to which he subjects it. This line of discourse analysis survives into his literary criticism of the second half of the decade. In 1920 we find it in ‘The Perfect Critic’: ‘when we do not know,’ he notes ‘or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.’5 The act of knowing must be here understood not just as an appeal to information but to cognition, and as such to the right kind of experience—one which is not sentimental. Appropriately, in this very same piece of criticism Eliot uses a quote from Remy de Gourmont’s The Problem of Style by way of epigram which reads as follows: ‘The writer of abstract style is almost always a sentimental, at least over-sensitive. The artistic writer is almost never a sentimental and rarely over-sensitive.’ This is, of course, not to say that the writer should not experience anything, precisely because not all experience is emotional. In fact Eliot adds in ‘The Perfect Critic’: ‘Not only all knowledge, but all feeling, is in perception.’ (Eliot 1920, 10) There are emotions, but there are also feelings whose distinctive trait is to belong to the realm of cognitive perception. In other words, and if we recall our discussion of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ we are concerned with the individual human experience which deals with the nerves rather than the heart. It is cognitive rather than sentimental, it concerns feelings rather than emotions.

7But what kind of individual are we left with? Are we happy with the vision of a dismembered Prufrock as our ideal subject? A sociopath unable to express his love and indulging in compensatory fetishistic fantasies about his own body? The price for cognitive purity seems far too high, for surely it is better to misunderstand rather than not communicate at all. The way out of the problem is precisely to determine the sort of individual self Eliot envisages, and which does not need to be anything like Prufrock whose self is as fragmentary as his body. The paradox of Eliot’s proposition is that just as he seems to be limiting the span of individual experience to feelings he is expanding their potential communicability, making a cognitive truism of less is more. His Impersonal Theory of Poetry is equivocal precisely in this respect.

8In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ written in 1919, a year before ‘The Perfect Critic,’ Eliot had made his move towards defining selfhood by suggesting that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ (Eliot 1975, 40) We are left to suppose that personality is the site of the emotions and sentimentality, factors which obscure discourse and communication with particular reference here to poetry. It is difficult, on the other hand to figure out the place where feelings reside other than by holding a torch against the nerves and examine their pattern on a screen. The tentative suggestion is that impersonality is a process of cognitive purification rather than a point of arrival, for, if this point of arrival is the uncontaminated self, Eliot shies away from being explicit about what this exactly is. This is the reason for the negative capability of the Impersonal Theory of Poetry which may lead to equivocation in its interpretation, to assume that impersonality is another way of talking about the not-self. To some extent this is a justified conclusion insofar as Eliot does little to contradict it and the little he does easily goes unnoticed.

9Eliot, like Prufrock in this respect, finds a certain alleviatory release in the consciousness of the malaise rather than in its solution. The isolated ego does have its comforts precisely when the solution seems to be part of the problem—as Eliot brings himself to admitting at the end of ‘Tradition’: ‘only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to escape from these things.’ (Eliot 1975, 43) For once we have finished depersonalizing, how is it that we are in a better position to communicate to others? If impersonality means the extinction of personality and with it of the self, then, arguably we are part of an undistinguished whole of a selfless collective joined by fluid channels of communication. On the other hand, if it means the refining of individual selfhood, then, are we not back where we started, alone even if feeling a little more virtuous? Eliot is striving to articulate reconciliation between individuation and collective coherence without making philosophical concessions to metaphysics, something he had found unacceptably lyrical and emotional in his address to the Philosophical Club. There is much in this that accounts for Eliot deciding to stay in England and give up on a career in philosophy back in Harvard. It remains curious, however, that, having finished his thesis he would devote his whole strength to the enemy—the lyric—by becoming a poet and literary critic. It is less difficult to understand this shift by considering that the problem was not so much philosophy or the lyric as metaphysics and emotion. The corrective laid in science, something he felt more equipped to exploit through poetry and literary criticism than philosophy as discourse. Hence, Eliot first tells us in ‘Tradition’: ‘it is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science,’ (Eliot 1975, 40) and later ‘this essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics and mysticism.’ (Eliot 1975, 43)

10Now, does impersonality really alleviate the isolation of the ego or radicalize it? If it radicalizes isolation how is coherence between depersonalized selves to be achieved without appealing to metaphysics? In a sense this is the unresolved problem Eliot faced while writing his thesis with reference to Bradley’s ‘finite centres’ and the Absolute. He explicitly returned to this issue philosophically one last time, having already decided to stay in England, by writing a couple of articles for the journal Monist. One of these articles was entitled ‘Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres’6:

Like monads [finite centres] aim at being one; each expanded to completion, to the full reality latent within it, would be identical with the whole universe. But in doing so it would lose the actuality, the here and now, which is essential to the small reality which it actually achieves. (Eliot 1964, 202)

11Here Eliot shows his uneasiness with a resolution to the isolated ego in the form of monads or finite centres which universalize individuation in such a manner as to override present experience, thus overriding the here and now of embodied individual consciousness. It is in effect an attack on the idea of a universal soul inhabiting individual bodies simultaneously. He is quite clear on this point when he notes in ‘Tradition’:

The point I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the soul; for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. (Eliot 1975, 42)

12Personality stands akin to the equivocal universal function attributed to the soul; an emotional response, then, because metaphysical. Yet Eliot is hard pushed to get rid of ‘personality,’ ‘soul,’ ‘metaphysics’ and ‘emotions’ simply because he is unable to posit a self which does not somehow partake of these or else burn in the fires of isolation. It is in this sense that we should talk about radical personality instead of impersonality because Eliot is clearly interested in positing an experiencing self, but whose depersonalization is wished in so far as it cannot be completed: either as the unattainable wish fulfilment of unity with the divine soul or as the fetishistic fantasies of dismemberment to alleviate existential angst. These are pathologies found in mystical experience and to which Prufrock bears witness and which in the poem finds provisional fulfilment in the idea of the resurrection of the body: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.’ (Eliot 1963, 16) Obviously, personality has to get worse before it gets better to be able to tell us all.

13That Eliot attempts to give a definite definition of impersonality as an achievable goal is in itself an oxymoron he only evades by artificially keeping at bay metaphysics and mysticism in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ but which in other of his writings remains an ambiguous rhetorical game which stares at tautology in the face. Take for instance his early address ‘The Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics’:

But as a matter of fact you never find a pure ethics and a pure metaphysics in this sense; for every system or at least every noteworthy system is shot through with the personality of its author, and this binds the various branches of his thought together with indissoluble and impalpable bonds. It is, in short, the personality of the author that makes the system true, and prevents it from being more than being relatively true. (Eliot 1913, 9)

14Here, it is personality that ensures truth-value through the acknowledgement that philosophical systems are never completely autonomous from a self who thinks it. This is a great example of making the best of a bad situation. Incorporating subjectivity into epistemology thus defeats relativism, but ontologically releases the nightmare of solipsism. For who is it true for? This is a thought that haunts Eliot throughout the 1910s and 20s, perhaps till he converts to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927. Impersonality attempts to compensate for this solipsism by suggesting not the absence of personality, but by negatively ensuring the right kind of personality—not emotional, not metaphysical. By appealing to the exactitude of science he suggests a radical cognitivism based upon feelings which spring from embodied perception. It becomes for Eliot a scientific literary tool which he articulates in ‘Tradition’ and applies unashamedly thereon. Just a year later we find in his essay ‘Philip Massinger’ phrases such as: Massinger ‘was not guided by direct communication through the nerves,’ (Eliot 1920, 136) indeed he ‘suffers from cerebral anaemia.’ (Eliot 1920, 131) Or, ‘Had Massinger had a nervous system as refined as that of Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, or Ford, his style would be a triumph.’ (Eliot 1920, 131) Prufrock’s magic lantern throwing the nerves in patterns on a screen comes to mind. And then, Eliot clearly recalling his earlier address to the Philosophical Club, adds: Marlowe’s and Jonson’s ‘comedies were as great literature is, the transformation of a personality into a personal work of art... Massinger is not simply a personality: his personality hardly exists.’ (Eliot 1920, 139) But, here impersonality reverts to personality, as if the former was only a purposeful aside to redefine the latter—that is, impersonality as cognitive or radical personality. Massinger’s poetry is thus bad because he lacks this kind of personality.

15Once Eliot establishes his critical formulas he breaks them, thus subverting the scientific pretensions which held them up, along with the literal physiological language which in fact continues to infiltrate his criticism thereon into the 1920s. It is Prufrock’s language of dismemberment with a difference. The difference lies in that the imaginary post-mortem in his criticisms is no longer physiologically destructive but cognitively constructive, constructing the self as an acceptable personality. Furthermore it gives to this personality the ability to act as a corrective to the soul’s metaphysics, to the lack of a ‘here and now’ he notices in ‘Monads’ and ‘Finite Centres,’ and thus recalling his Ph. D, thesis where he had stated:

The more of a personality [the soul is], the more harmonious and self contained, the more definitely it is said to possess a ‘point of view,’ a point of view towards the social world. (Eliot 1964, 148)

16And just as Prufrock’s fantasies of dismemberment are dealt with so is the fantasy of union with the divine and the resurrection of the body, both of which are thus rescued from what William James considers to be the morbid pathologies of the mystic:

Invariably [Mystics] have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas... and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.7

17Rather than intense emotional experiences they become for Eliot crucial cognitive experiences, where seeing the object as it really is is akin to divine contemplation without the metaphysics; ‘to attain,’ as Eliot puts it in ‘The perfect Critic,’ ‘that stage of vision amor intellectualis Dei.’ (Eliot 1920, 12) The love that had been lost in emotions is recovered through feelings, just as pathological fantasy is supplanted by a vision rooted in the scaffold of ordinary cognition. So, Eliot tells us in ‘Dante,’ ‘the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation.’ (Eliot 1920, 170) Once this scaffold is in place even personal emotions can be reconverted into meaningful expression, and in this, Eliot tells us ‘Dante’s is the most comprehensive, and the most ordered presentation of emotions that has ever been made.’ (Eliot 1920, 168) This scaffold is the allegory of the Divine Comedy, where Dante’s love for Beatrice is both intensely personal yet divine (just as she embodies both these qualities), and his philosophy not merely metaphysical because perceived. As the archetypal philosopher-poet Dante represents the culmination of Eliot’s rescue of the love (lyric) and philosophy, by allowing him to get back in touch with his feelings.