T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief

304 Pages·1987·3.32 MB·English

by  Cleo McNelly Kearns

T. S. ELIOT AND INDIC TRADITIONS

T.S .E LIOTA ND
INDICT RADITIONS
A StuidnyP oetarnyBd e lief
CLEO Mc NELLY KEARNS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge
London New York New Rochelle
Melbourne Sydney
FOR GEORGE KEARNS
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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Kearns,C leoM cNell1y9,4 3-
T.S .E lioatn dI nditcr aditions.
Bibliograpp.h y:
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1.E lioTt.S, .( ThomaSst earns)1,8 88-19-65
Philosoph2y.E. l ioTt.,S .( ThomaSst earns)1,8 88-
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PS3509.L43Z618998 7 821'.91826 -13687
ISBN9 78-0-521-372 h4a3r9d-back
ISBN9 78-0-521-06p4a5p5e-r2b ack
CONTENTS
��
Preface Vll
Acknowledgments XIV
List of abbreviations xvn
PART I. SOURCES AND TRADITIONS
1. Tradition and the individual reader 3
Surrender and recovery 4
Metaphysics and wisdom 13
Texts and teachers 21
2. Hindu traditions 30
Vedas and Upanishads 30
Shankara and Paul Deussen 44
The Bhagavad Gita 49
Patanjali and James Woods 57
3. Buddhist traditions 67
Henry Clarke Warren and the Pali canon 69
Masaharu Anesaki and Mahayana Buddhism 76
PART II. COMMUNITIES OF INTERPRETATION
4. Philosophical issues 87
Realism and idealism 88
Josiah Royce and the Upanishads 96
Bradley, Vedanta, and Nagarjuna 103
Bertrand Russell and the New Realism 110
Knowledge and Experience as an ars poetica 117
5. Religious points of view 131
William James and counterconversions 140
Babbitt, More, and the need for roots 143
v
Contents
Roger Vittoz and meditation 152
The Anglican Middle Way 157
6. Literary influences 160
The Oriental Renaissance 161
The American sublime 166
The anxieties of influence 171
Whitman 178
Yeats 185
PART III. METAPHYSICS AND WISDOM
7. Metaphysics in The Waste Land 195
The reader as Parsival 197
Memory and desire 201
Tiresias: ego or Seer 205
Phlebas: the meditation on death 210
Repeating the rain mantra 212
From DA to Damyata 219
Sovegna vos 224
8. Wisdom in Four Quartets 230
Critique of immediate experience: "Burnt Norton" 232
Raid on the inarticulate: "East Coker" 239
What Krishna meant: "The Dry Salvages" 245
The simplicity of wisdom: "Little Gidding" 254
Works cited
Index
VI
PREFACE
��
THE INFLUENCE oflndic philosophy on the poetry of
T. S. Eliot has puzzled and intrigued his readers ever since
the appearance of The Waste Land with its allusions to
Buddhist and Upanishadic texts and its formulaic ending "Shantih
shantih shantih." The apparently more casual references to the Bha­
gavad Gita in Four Quartets have intensified both the interest and
the problems raised and have, in many ways, compounded the
difficulties of understanding by their very simplicity. Clearly,
Eliot's use of Indic traditions is important both to the comprehen­
sion of his work and to its various plaisirs du texte, but the nature
and extent of that importance are difficult to estimate, for they
involve not only a grasp of the Christian framework of Eliot's
thought but an understanding of his approach to very different
religious and cultural traditions. Even to approximate this under­
standing involves travel over some rather distant frontiers of lan­
guage, literature, and religious practice and a return to some equally
difficult problems in his poetic discourse itsel(
A preliminary survey of the ground to be covered indicates,
moreover, that a simple source study or a premature attempt to
harmonize the Christian and Indic points of reference in Eliot's
work will not do. Indic texts acted not only as a repository of
images and local allusions for Eliot and, in time, as a preparation
for certain important Christian insights, but often, and often more
vu
Preface
deeply, as a deliberately evoked catalyst for fundamental changes
in his thought and style. In the major classics of Hindu and Buddhist
traditions Eliot found perspectives that intersected at crucial points
with his own growing religious convictions, his work in philos­
ophy, and his interest in techniques of meditation and their relation
to writing. In general, however, these classics offered not simply
points of confirmation of previously held ideas but valuable chal­
lenges to established points of view. Eliot learned, then, to appre­
ciate the multiple perspectives involved in his Indic and Western
studies less for their sameness than for what he called "the difference
they can make to one another." At all times, the juxtaposition of
these very different concepts and of the different cultural contexts
from which they came gave dimensions to Eliot's work that were
subtle and pervasive and that affected the form as well as the matter
of his poetry.
It is difficult to articulate these subtle modes of influence without
falling into the danger of reducing Eliot's poetry, on the one hand,
to the level of a manifesto or a doctrinal treatise and, on the other,
to that of a religious confession or case study. As it happens, some
of the most useful perspectives for avoiding these errors, while at
the same time doing justice to the pressure on his thought of the
very different discourses of psychology, religion, and philosophy,
arise from Eliot's own critical theory and practice itself. That this
should be so may seem, at first, paradoxical. Eliot has long had
the reputation of being among the founders of the New Criticism,
usually characterized as a special, discipline-bound, and highly
aestheticized way of reading, which refuses entry into the work
other than by the narrow gate of poesie pure. Certain exceptions
may be made, it seems, for the incursions of Belief into literature,
especially when Belief comes in the form of a suave High Angli­
canism, but in general, extraliterary considerations of theme, con­
tent, and social or political relevance are, or are said to have been,
strictly excluded by this method. So, too, are the kinds of philo­
sophical approach to the work of art that critical theory is making
available to readers today.
It is true, of course, that Eliot was extremely sensitive to any
reading strategy that tended to reduce the literary text to the terms
of a competing discipline, whether psychological, political, phil­
osophical, or religious. A poem, he argued, could all too easily be
"altered" or flattened rather than "transformed" or given a new
Vlll
Preface
dimension by being drawn into too close a relation with other kinds
of discourse (SW 6). This concern for the autonomy of the literary
work did not, however, as is often supposed, lead Eliot to advocate
a total separation between literature and other forms of thought.
Rather, it served to sharpen his sense of the boundaries or what he
called the "frontiers" between many ways of speaking and many
kinds of texts.
Eliot used this metaphor of "frontiers" repeatedly in his own
critical work, usually to express the sense of a limit he did not
propose to transgress. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"
for instance, he said he would "halt" at the "frontier" of meta­
physics and mysticism. Likewise, in his important later essay, "The
Frontiers of Criticism" (1956), he said that "the thesis of this paper
is that there are limits, exceeding which in one direction literary
criticism ceases to be literary, and exceeding which in another it
ceases to be criticism" (OPP l lJ). Nevertheless, the very choice
of the term "frontier" indicates the possibility of such transgression
and even, at times, its necessity. As Eliot said in his essay on Goethe,
"Literary criticism is an activity which must constantly define its
own boundaries; also, it must constantly be going beyond them."
While dutifully applying for a passport to other and contiguous
realms, literature must occasionally make unlicensed forays into
forbidden territories (OPP 250).
In view of this discreet mandate for excess, Eliot praised major
critics and poets of the past who did not confine themselves to
aesthetics or straight explication du texte. He mentioned in this re­
spect not only Goethe, for whom he had a growing respect, but
Coleridge, who, he pointed out, had introduced into criticism the
disciplines of philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology. Were he alive
today, Eliot went on, with remarkable prescience about the future
of criticism, Coleridge would "take the same interest in the social
sciences and in the study of language and semantics" (OPP 115).
However, the one "invariable rule" for such excursions across fron­
tiers of discourse, Eliot insisted, was that they be undertaken "in
full consciousness of what (we are] doing" (OPP 250). Only after
the boundaries have been defined, if only provisionally, can their
transgression invigorate.
Eliot offers caveats as well as licenses for this activity of moving
back and forth among discourses and points of view. Certainly, in
his own work, he observes a considerable reticence about exactly
IX
Preface
how, when, and where this transgression of boundaries is to take
place. Indeed, his critical practice, sometimes quite against his con­
scious intentions, indicates in some ways both the advantages and
the pitfalls of the interdisciplinary process he appears to endorse.
In his essay on Baudelaire, for instance, the neighboring discourses
of psychology and religion are handled with great tact. Baudelaire's
personal problems, his antifeminism, his depression are neither ig­
nored nor given undue prominence as explanatory factors, but are
related subtly and finely to the problems and achievements of his
verse. In After Strange Gods, however, a conscious attempt to bring
literary discourse into relation with the discourses of religion, psy­
chology, and politics leads to disaster, as one is imposed on the
others without regard to their differences. Hence, literary experi­
ment is reduced to the terms of religious heresy, and both are
subsumed to sociological concepts of racial and cultural heteroge­
neity in ways that are dubious, to say the least, and that have led
repeatedly to the association of Eliot's views with racist and fascist
policies he otherwise deplored. The result, as Eliot came to rec­
ognize, was a violation, rather than an expansion, of the boundaries
of literature, of sociology, and of religion. "Full consciousness of
what [we are] doing" is, it seems, even in Eliot's own practice,
neither easy to achieve nor a guarantee of immunity from harm.
Eliot's errors in After Strange Gods are not unrelated to the issues
posed for him by Indic thought, and I have tried to bear both his
warrants and caveats in mind. Part I of this book, then, surveys
the Indic texts and traditions Eliot knew, with the scholarly trans­
lations and interpretations through which he came to his under­
standing of their significance and with some examples of the ways
in which he drew on these discourses at specific points in his poetry
and plays. Part II deals with the intersections between Eliot's lndic
studies and his concomitant reading in Wes tern philosophy, his
psychological and religious development, and the problems posed
for him by the literary figures - especially Whitman and Yeats -
through whom lndic influence had in part been mediated to him.
Part III turns more directly to the poems themselves and seeks to
show how an awareness of Indic and philosophical contexts quite
apart, at times, from their matrix in Eliot's own studies can enrich
our understanding of The Waste Land and Four Quartets. In all of
these discussions, I have tried to remain alert to Eliot's characteristic
ability to combine without confusing remarkably disparate, indeed
x