A Wave of Meaning
How Four Quartets Contrasts Joyce’s “Proteus”
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot argued for the preservation of literary tradition, historical awareness, and the inevitability of comparison for literary works to their past. To Eliot, literary works are inevitably judged and “not amputated,” “in which two things are measured by each other… [the poet] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same.” As a consequence, literary works are subject to comparison and that comparison necessitates criticism, something as “inevitable as breathing.” It is with this attitude that Eliot approached Ulysses where he coined the term the “mythic method” in his review “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” This method was the “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,” or the merging between the historical elements educated western artists could use to create universality of meaning between the past and present. These two modernist giants inevitably fractured and manipulated time in their writing, just as they did in their methods.
In this spirit, Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) and Joyce’s “Proteus” from Ulysses (or the “Telemachiad” in general) (1922) carry heavy parallels that implore juxtaposition. The authors themselves are intertwined as Eliot received copies of the chapters of Ulysses as they were being released, but their thematic overlaps demand comparison: questions regarding the determinism and causality of time; a heavy reliance on physical, aesthetic elements that are emblematic of Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ principle; and each speaker’s attempt to withdraw from the caustic or engulfing burdens of their respective lives. As a consequence of this comparison, Eliot’s Four Quartets voices a more intimately personal tone that conveys a ballad of turmoil and personal dissonance similar to the musings of Stephen on Sandymount Strand further revealing the limitations of philosophy, religion, and literature to clarify a world where roses and fire are one.
Walking Into Eternity
Eliot’s most obvious theme in Four Quartets is ‘Time.’ The work is a persistent, meditative exploration of time and its permanence yet the development and reading of any literary work is an act of time travel (albeit at the regular rate). In “Proteus,” Stephen uses two terms with his exploration of eternity that provide clarity regarding each interpretation of time: the “nacheinander” and the “nebeneinander.” Nacheinander could be equated with the English word ‘sequence,’ and nebeneinander with ‘unity’ or ‘togetherness,’ with Joyce exploring the difference between poetry and painting. This is an allusion to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's essay on the consumption and processing of poetry and paintings as “[p]oetry is an art of moving through time. Painting is an art of positioning things in space” (Hunt). Consequently, the reading of Ulysses, “Proteus,” Four Quartets, and all literary work is an exercise in the nacheinander or sequence of time where readers “[close their] eyes to hear [their] boots crush crackling wrack and shells” of words and literary art (Joyce 31). Joyce seemingly abandons the nebeneinander or unity of processing literature because the characters, descriptions, allusions, words, phrases, and actions of the chapters that preceded the immediately consumed content act as ghosts on the content consumed. In essence, “Proteus” requests that readers live in the present with the ghosts of the past haunting their every step as they walk blindly into the future. The past does exist but with inferior significance to the present. Furthermore, the future exists as a beacon of anxiety and turmoil.
Contrasting this perspective, Four Quartets attempts to function with unity and togetherness and stands as a literary attempt to exist with unity between the past, present and future. Avoiding or not tied to any narrative, the overall purpose of the work is contained within the first three lines: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past” (Eliot 1.1.1-3). All aesthetic elements do not seem to develop and exist through some linear progression of time like the walking of Stephen, but exist in the nebeneinander with simultaneous expression of meaning from the beginning, middle, and end. As a result, Eliot robs the reader with the experience of a narrative and experience itself: “There is… only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from experience” (2.2.31-33).
The consequence of Eliot’s choices reveals his take on time as all footfalls fall simultaneously: “If you came this way, / Taking the route you would be likely to take / From the place you would be likely to come from,... It would be the same at the end of the journey… Either you had no purpose / Or the purpose is beyond the end of figured / And is altered in fulfilment.” (4.1.20-22, 25, 33-35). To Eliot, the immediate temporal experience is not necessarily irrelevant or insignificant but it exists with equal presence as the past and the future. While the steps of Stephen fall with significance on the lines consumed with each subsequent line fading into the temporal diaphane of memory, Eliot’s Four Quartets falls as a mass of experience with no ‘step’ fading or standing with any significance more than any other. In essence, Eliot’s time exists and literature acts as insufficient simulacrum that fails to appropriately grasp and convey the simultaneous permanence and impermanence of consciousness and existence; Joyce uses this failure to bolster his narrative.
The Word Problem
For Eliot, words are fragile facsimiles of ideas that are impossible to communicate. Eliot’s earlier works asserted the problem of language as Prufrock asserts in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (8.104) Furthermore, Prufrock asks questions that invade conscious existence but cannot be phrased in a comprehensible manner: “Oh, do not ask, ‘what is it?’” (5.11). In Four Quartets, the constant contradictory phrases are clarified only as their progression through time. Roses are able to exist simultaneously as beautiful objects that have “the look of flowers that are looked at” (1.1.29), but the “fire and the rose are one” (5.5.46) as the momentary existence of the rose is merely the precursor for its fate to turn into ash. People “die with the dying” (5.5.15) and are “born with the dead” (5.5.17) and find that the “end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (5.5.27-29). Eliot concludes that “where you are is where you are not” (2.3.46), a disorienting slew of contradictory phrasing that only functions if the reader is able to disassociate the distinguishing of the past, present, and future that consciousness brings. Eliot writes that “[t]o be conscious is not to be in time” (1.2.38) for to be conscious is to separate time into divisions that don’t exist.
Seemingly, the problem for this division is language. “Words move, music moves,” thus echoing the sequential conceptualization of language and meaning, but Eliot fractures language: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still” (1.5.13-17). Craig Raine furthers this point in his exploration of Eliot’s works as Eliot’s conceptualization of language “become[s] porous, paradoxical, elastic, shifty, shifting, contradictory, intelligently perverse” (98). In the creation of these contradictions, Raine argues that ‘echoes’ and ‘noise’ is created: “Noise is crucial here. Noise contributes its reality effects… First there is the echoing noise of footfalls, which immediately becomes the memory of an echo. This echo is conflated with Eliot’s words as they echo in the mind” (99). As a result, Eliot’s Four Quartets bends language into a form inherently contradictory to the manner in which it is consumed: simultaneously and collective in meaning; the nebeneinander. The ‘noise’ is subsequently the linguistic crash and fall through its own temporal existence: “If I fell over a cliff… fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably” (Joyce 31). Consequently, the ‘crash’ of contradictory meanings and ‘noise’ and ‘echoes’ from the language doesn’t exist in the same light because of Joyce’s artistic choice to abide by the temporal restriction of a narrative.
Joyce doesn’t wish to subvert and undermine the use of time in Ulysses. Instead, Ulysses is an extension of time while Four Quartets is seemingly an anti-chrono work. Ulysses is thus an extension of language’s ability to express time rather than a subversion of it. In “Nestor,” Stephen begins to explore the consequence of thought and language: “Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms” (21). This concept is developed early in “Proteus” with Stephen’s exploration of the limitations of the aesthetic existence: “Ineluctable modality of the visible… Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?” (31). Stephen develops Aristotle's idea about the “eternally active and perfectly capacious” nature of the mind and the soul (Hunt). Stephen, through his creation of thought, is attempting to create a hellenic God of himself and a new omphalos around language. Stephen thus is the creator ‘Los’ who uses his mallet of language and words to solve the problem of his grief. Yet, he seemingly fails to do so as the emotional tide swallows his sinking heels in a callous surrender to his own temporality: “See now. There all the time without you and ever shall be, world without end” (31). Leopold Bloom furthers this idea in “Hades” with references to obituaries: they are “inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper” (75). In essence, Joyce asserts the consistent impermanence of literature but uses that impermanence to add the importance of the momentary meaning of the text. While Four Quartets lives in unison and with universality, Joyce asserts the impermanence of the particulars in order to celebrate the universality. Yes, the characters exist as extensions of the mythic grandeur of the history that preceded them, but they will sink into the ocean of history just like the heroes before them, too.
Ghosts and Echoes
Stephen is bound to his aesthetic existence. Throughout Proteus, he consistently questions the ineluctable nature of his senses, seemingly in an attempt to understand his mother’s post-aesthetic fate (an Aristotelian afterlife as opposed to a Platonic afterlife). Joyce’s text lays victim to the aesthetic associations of Stephen, however ‘snotgreen’ they might be. Images are introduced in “Telemachus” and “Nestor,” but carry over into “Proteus” with Joyce’s restrained style; he provides the conscious thoughts of the speakers while leaving the reader to reconstruct the subconscious. In “Telemachus,” Stephen’s mother haunts his mind with moments of her “wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes,” compounding the imagery with other sensory details (smell and sound): “odour of wax and rosewood” (Joyce 5) and a “her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror,” “[bending] over him with mute secret words” (9). In “Nestor,” her image persists: “His mother’s prostrate body… the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes” (23). In “Proteus,” Joyce trusts the reader with the expectation that the subconscious would be recreated by them and almost entirely abandons the third person objective narration that supported the reader’s initiation into Ulysses. Instead, the reader is forced to reconstruct Stephen’s subconscious from the surface-level internal dialogue about Aristotle, Dante, Blake, ‘forms,’ harlots, “A bloated carcass of a dog” (37), and the persistent motif of a drowning man; Joyce expects the reader to understand that the “wasted body” of Stephen’s mother is perpetually tormenting and haunting his unconscious mind, even if it is not stated explicitly. It also leads the reader to question the reliability of the supposed stream-of-consciousness narration as it is so reserved with its selection of detail that labeling it as ‘first-person internal monologue’ seems more appropriate (Hunt). The epiphany that Stephen “could not save her” (38) signals the presence of that subconscious ghost because of the seemingly misplaced pronoun “her” in a paragraph consistently describing the agency to save a drowning man.
Joyce uses this method throughout the course of Ulysses which furthers the ‘ghost’ motif that Stephen associates with Hamlet. Those ‘ghosts’ exist with a heavy emphasis on visual elements and are often compounded with other senses, though sight is the primary mode for torment. All characters are haunted by their ghosts, occasionally less menacing than the wasted body of Mrs. Dedalus. Bloom, for instance, is haunted by the death of his eleven-day-old son, but the memory is often conflated with the sexual associations he has with his wife and her “cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins” (74). Yet, all these internal ‘ghosts’ are risen from external stimuli, whether it be the silence in a carriage in a funeral procession or the isolated musings of an intellectual when the green of the ocean reminds him of the “green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver” (5). Ultimately, characters remain slaves to their external aesthetic existence; their thoughts are triggered by sensory stimuli.
Eliot’s Four Quartets is bound to certain aesthetic elements but these elements are used with inverse consequence to the thoughts of the speaker. Eliot abandons the dependency on those elements and uses his temporal meditations to conjure aesthetic elements that function in support of his thematic purpose; a reverse object correlative. Relying primarily on the nebulous nature of ideological thought, Eliot avoids the grounding of extensive or consistent sensory imagery and relies on the ideological and thematic consistency to bring those elements together. Of those sensory elements, there is a heavy priority on visual elements that “echo in the memory” like “Footfalls” (1.1.11). Consequently, Eliot creates ‘noise.’ Craig Raine argues that the ‘noise’ Eliot creates is the repeated memories, echoes of footsteps, words, and roses (99-100). This noise can also be explored from the view of conflict. In essence, there is a conflict between the auditory, visual, narrative (or lack of), linguistic, historical, and autobiographical elements that whirl together in an attempt to create meaning of Eliot’s mystical conceptualization of time. From that conflict, language is fractured and becomes “porous, paradoxical, elastic, shifty, shifting, contradictory, intelligently perverse” (Raine).
The result is a figurative negative of Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ and Joyce’s “Proteus.” Eliot argued in “Hamlet and His Problems” that in order for something to express emotion in the form of art, sets “of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion…. [m]ust terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” In other words, the external aesthetic elements interact and draw out the internal emotional and more nebulous elements. This model functions beautifully in Joyce’s Ulysses to draw out the ebbs and flows of Stephen’s mind, especially in “Proteus.” However, the objective correlative seemingly functions only when the sequential model for time is followed. Much like Eliot played with the fractured nature of existence in The Waste Land, Four Quartets breaks the sequential necessity for meaning and imagery to exist and an ocean of meaning instead collapses onto the reader and onto the language itself. The result is an intentional collapse in structure where “It would be the same” (4.1.28) to read either section of the quartets for they all arrive at the same conclusion, begin where they all end, and the echoes and ghost of the past and future exist simultaneously in the present just as the present exists simultaneously in the past and future.
Bitter Waters
Eliot certainly argued for an impersonal theory to art, but Four Quartets seemingly abandons this dissociation. Having completed “Burnt Norton” around 1936, Eliot completed “East Coker” in 1940 (Easter), “The Dry Salvages” in 1941, and finally “Little Gidding” in September 1942 (Raine 95). The piece was created roughly ten years after his baptism and conversion to the Church of England in 1927 (Murphy 18) and it was written through the progressive aggression and expansion of the Nazi regeim. Throughout the course of writing Four Quartets, the Nazi regeim invaded Europe and Soviet territories and progressively advanced until their eventual stagnation at the Battle of Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943. The latter half of Eliot’s work saw the bombing of his British homeland with ‘The Blitz,’ a German bombing campeign that began in September 7, 1940 and saw thousands of German planes drop bombs for 57 consecutive nights (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica). Over three-thousand Londoners died from the bombing raids leading Eliot to take up shelter in country areas (Murphy 24) and watch the slow progression of Nazi trops over the Western world and Western literary tradition that Eliot artistically defended.
Thus, Four Quartets was completed without awareness of the turning of the war. “Little Gidding,” in particular, contained imagery associated with the destruction of London (Murphy 24). The “parched eviscerate soil” that “[g]apes at the vanity of toil” (4.2.13-14) is associated with the wreckage of London while the “death of earth” (4.2.16) that Eliot fears in the “uncertain hour” (4.2.25) and realistic possibility of the Nazi regime conquoring his new homeland. Eliot consequently carried heavy pessimism in this writing with consistent references to “fire” which is juxtaposed with the “spectre of a Rose” (4.3.35), seemingly representing the western artistic world Eliot has grown to promote and represent. His fears of the world being “Consumed by either fire or fire” (4.4.14) are furthered in the closing of the poem: “...the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (4.5.27-29). The “fire and the rose are one” (4.5.46) suggest Eliot’s prophecy for the eventual destruction of the western world, a fear never realized in reality but foreseen by Eliot’s consistent observations regarding the destructive impacts of the second World War. Eliot seems to consistently downplay the emotional significance of this potential destruction with his attachment to the cyclical nature of the poem possibly as a way to avoid complete dejection.
The heavy personal elements contrast the contradictory nature of Eliot’s writing philosophy as explored in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot argued heavily that poetry cannot be “a turning loose of emotion.” Instead, poetry exists as an “escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Good poetry from his perspective required that the artist to completely “[surrender] himself wholly to the work to be done.” Yet, Four Quartets seems to be an obvious extension and development of Eliot’s fears of the collapsing Western world. In “Burnt Norton,” Jed Esty argues that “Eliot calls for the English to attend to their own languishing traditions, especially the authentic rituals of native Christianity -native, that is, since the Roman conquest.” Furthermore, Eliot “proposes a revival based on pre-Revolution England, which he idealizes as a permanently exemplary organization of church and state, of art and faith, of town and country.” However, “Little Gidding” closes the poem with a heavy emphasis on “fire,” “ash,” dust,” and uncertainty that all reign in contrast with a notion of perseverance and continuance. Eliot is seemingly coping with the potential erasure of his entire western culture and Anglo-Christianity which he wishes to preserve and celebrate at the start of the poem.
This is not to say that Eliot completely abandons his writing principles for the sake of a sentimental release of fear in the face of potential annihilation. Eliot continued to write as a product of his time while keeping historical awareness of the past literary traditions he wishes to uphold while maintaining consciousness with the ‘historical sense’: “historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” Through the shift in tone throughout the creation of Four Quartets, Eliot is participating in the “conformity between the old and the new” throughout the creation of a single work. However, it does seem that Eliot’s notions of the ‘destruction of self’ in poetry and the impersonal nature of poetry to be a delusion in Four Quartets as the existential threats to his artistic existence and life were so immense that his emotional reaction eventually made its way into his work regardless.
Joyce maintained no delusions about the connection of a work and the author. His work was notoriously autobiographical in nature though not entirely exact in its depiction. Stephen’s actions and refusal to kneel at his mother’s deathbed were a direct reflection of Joyce’s actions in his youth. The timeline is shifted greatly, though, as Stephen meditates on his mother’s ‘ghost’ a year after her passing while Joyce meditated on her death almost two decades later through his writing of Ulysses. It was immediately apparent after the publication of Ulysses that “Stephen Dedalus represents only one side of [James Joyce],” as Stuart Gilbert claimed (King 299). Joyce himself encouraged looking at his work autobiographically (King 300) and extended this argument in “Scylla and Charybdis” with a dialogue about the autobiographical nature of Shakespeare’s work. Fittingly, Stephen furthers this analogy to God: “The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us” (Joyce 175). Thus, Joyce created a new omphalos or trinity within his work where the artist functions as a God in an Aristotelian sense; he functions as the creator, the art, and the interpreter of art simultaneously.
Juxtaposed, Eliot’s Four Quartets seems far closer to Joyce’s Ulysses in an autobiographical sense than Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry. They seem to overlap heavily thematically, though their approaches to those themes are contrasting. Eliot’s argument that poetry should remain impersonal certainly resonated earlier in his work, but Four Quartets seems to shift into more personal territory, though it be restrained. His emotions certainly are meditative, but Four Quartets seems driven by an emotional core just as Ulysses’s Stephen is driven by his.
An Emotional Core
This complex vortex of allusion and meaning in both works whirls around a rather simple emotional center: destitution, fear, and anxiety. While the external factors differ between the two pieces especially in terms of how they conceptualize and process ‘time,’ their emotional core ties Eliot and Stephen. Both Stephen and Eliot are attempting to detach from the elements that haunt them. In Eliot’s case, it is the looming existential threat of the war while in Stephen’s case, it is the ghost of his mother. Eliot attempts to reframe the loss of his ‘eternity’ and consciousness as the birth of another variation of his existence, while Stephen seemingly drowns in the bitter waters of his mother’s memory, haunted and bludgeoned: “I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost” (Joyce 38) (at least until his eventual confrontation in “Circe”).
The two texts offer two contrasting variations of time that exist on opposite sides of the spectrum. In “Proteus,” Joyce pushes time to its narrative extreme and attempts to stretch and use it to explore narrative elements to the highest degree. However, Eliot’s Four Quartets attempts to abandon traditional structures of time and thus reframe the function and capability of language. More experimental in this sense, Four Quartets attempts to reframe the possibilities for the use of allusion and aesthetic imagery in a form that is collective and exists within the nebeneinander. It is a collective bombardment of meaning that is weighted with the collective weight of the imagery it presents, all shrouded in nebulous arguments for the unity of time and driven by a singular emotional core. Each text exists in their respective extremes, yet bonded and unified in their use of aesthetic elements and historical sense.
Works Cited
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Poems of T.S. Eliot. Volume I, Collected and Uncollected Poems. Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2018.
---. “Hamlet and His Problems.” Bartleby.com, 1921, https://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html.
---. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Bartleby.com, 1921, www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html.
---. “‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, in the Dial, LXXV.” Www.ricorso.net, Nov. 1923, www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/major/Joyce_JA/Eliot_TS.htm.
Esty, Jed. "Eliot's recessional: Four Quartets, National Allegory and the end of empire." The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 16, no. 1, 2003, pp. 39-39+. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/eliots-recessional-four-quartets-national/docview/205427192/se-2?accountid=25320.
Holmes, David Dale. “The Fire Sermon: The Third Sermon of the Buddha.” Buddhistdoor Global, 8 Oct. 2018, www.buddhistdoor.net/features/the-fire-sermon-the-third-sermon-of-the-buddha/.
Hunt, John. “The Joyce Project : Ulysses.” The Joyce Project, Independent, 2015, m.joyceproject.com/info/aboutproject.html.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler, The Gabler Edition, Vintage Books, 1986.
King, John. “Trapping the Fox You Are(N’t) with a Riddle: The Autobiographical Crisis of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 45, no. 3, [Duke University Press, Hofstra University], 1999, pp. 299–316, https://doi.org/10.2307/441921.
Murphy, Russell. T.S. Eliot : A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Infobase Learning, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nu/detail.action?docID=366435.
Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nu/detail.action?docID=415810.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, editor. “The Blitz: World War II.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 31 Aug. 2018, www.britannica.com/event/the-Blitz.
Written January 30, 2022
Last Edited March 9, 2023