Where the Dreams Cross Review
Where the Dreams Cross: Commemorating Eliots Epiphany
To borrow Joyces term "Epiphany" would not perhaps be hyperbolic to tag his coming across of Arthur Symonss The Symbolist Movement in Literature(1899) at the Harvard Union Library in 1904 as later Eliot has himself called "a revelation" [The Sacred Wood, (London, 1920), p. 5]. The subsequent pilgrimage into France, where his family was distantly rooted, and his concentration on the French literature, eventually came out to be an epoch making event in the history of English literature. Almost alone Eliot destabilized the extant canons, and formed a new poetic discourse altogether thus following The Waste Land in 1922, there was absolutely no looking back into the Romantic and Georgian works.
Nevertheless, for reasons like the British enthusiasm to proclaim Eliots "originality" as well as relative lethargy for a comparative study, it took thirty five years after poets demise. Professor Chinmoy Guha, with his Where the Dreams Cross: T. S. Eliot and French Poetry (Calcutta, 2000), has finally broken the ice by attempting a systematic and detailed study of Eliots borrowing from Joules Laforgue, Charles Baudelaire, Tristan Corbière, Valery Larbaud, Paul Claudel, Remy de Gourmont and Julien Benda.
In an Aix-en-Provence lecture, "Edgar Allan Poe and France" (April, 1948), Eliot himself acknowledged his deep French influences: "Je suis un poète anglais d'origine américaine, et l'influence de Baudelaire et des poètes qui en dérivent a été dominate dans ma formation" [I am an English poet of American origin who learnt his art under the influence of Baudelaire and the Baudelairian lineage of poets]. In Where the Dreams Cross: T. S. Eliot and French Poetry too, Professor Chinmoy Guha has shown how Eliot elsewhere remarked: "Without the tradition which starts with Baudelaire and culminates in Valéry, my own work would hardly be conceivable" [Where the Dreams Cross, Op. Cit.].
Distributed into five nice chapters (on Joules Laforgue, Charles Baudelaire, Tristan Corbière, Valery Larbaud, and Paul Claudel) and two appendices (on Remy de Gourmont and Julien Benda), Chinmoy Guhas Where the Dreams Cross is a doctoral thesis (submitted at the Jadavpur University, Kolkata) turned book that has won praise of even scholars like Sir Frank Kermode. Especially, the book must be praised for Guhas wide study of both the ends of his thesis, the literature of France as well as of Eliot.
In Where the Dreams Cross, Chinmoy Guha shows how Eliots unconventional usages had been strongly influenced by Laforgue. Lines like "Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop", "Co co rico co co rico" and "Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug" are almost verbal echoes of Laforgues "Klip klip klop klop klip klop" and "Bin bam bin bam". The reference to Hamlet in "A Game of Chess" is also Laforginian, and not Shakespearean.
While Dante and Laforgue guided Eliot's poetic discourse, Baudelaire showed him how to urbanize it. Eliot shared with him a deep distrust of the meaningless automata of urban crowd and jaundiced surroundings. The concluding line of "The Burial of the Dead" is actually the last line of the prefatory poem ‘Au Lecteur' in Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal. He also quoted four lines from ‘Les Sept Vieillards' in Les Tableaux Parisiens as the source of the ‘Unreal City' episode in The Waste Land. The Fisher King, apart from the direct source of Weston's book, was also possibly influenced by the impotent king recounting a barren landscape in Baudelaire's ‘Spleen'. Like Baudelaire, Eliot too has an ambiguous attitude to women, and he resolves that ambiguity by treating women as symbol of good and evil. Had there not been the Baudelairien lineage of misogyny, Eliot would not have perhaps dared to construct his woman with her bruised, defiled flesh – the typist with her carbuncular caresses. Elsewhere he alluded to Rémy de Gourmont and Gérard de Nerval.
The very name J. Alfred Prufrock in Eliots poem was possibly inspired by Valéry Larbauds A. O. Barnabooth. Chinmoy Guha shows how the much quoted lines – "Women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" – could have been forged from "the Monalisa smile" in Laforgues poetry [Where the Dreams Cross, Op. Cit. p. 71]. The Beckettian image of the futility of coming and going also resembles Laforgue's Mélanges Posthumes – "On les voit passer, repasser, sérieux…deux femmes causent" [‘One watches their coming and going seriously…two women talk'].
Eliot might have mistaken ‘tablier' or ‘apron' for ‘table' in Laforgue's description of the sunset as a butcher's blood stained cloth. This resulted in the comparison of evening to "a patient etherized upon a table". Guha observes that
"The deeply disturbing self-questionings and metaphysical interrogations in the early and middle-period Eliot, which seem to have upset the reading behaviour in the early decades of this century, appear to have modelled on the bantering conversations and hyperboles in Laforgue" [Op. Cit. pp. 76-8].
Without lengthening this discussion with glimpses from Guhas masterpiece Where the Dreams Cross, we can agree with Sir Frank Kermode that it is one of the best critiques of Eliot in the last few decades. Also, as Susha Guppy pointed out in a Times Higher Education review on 11 May 2001, Guhas admiring enthusiasm and enthusiastic admiration for Eliot is truly infectious, which his students at the University of Calcutta know very well and are also infected by!
|
|