Between Augustine and Derrida: Reading T.S. Eliot's Poetry of Exile (Critical Essay‪)‬

Hugh Kenner's observation that "commentators tour the Eliot territory in chartered buses" (x-xi) rings true even today, particularly in reference to Four Quartets. Post-deconstructionist criticism may have taken us beyond Dame Helen Gardner's orotund assessment of the poem as "beautiful, satisfying, self-contained, self-organized, complete," but delusions of critical mastery--the perfect "tour" of Eliot territory--still persist. Even with the use of various interpretive maps or grids, however, the reader of Four Quartets still finds it difficult to recover a clear "narrative." Harriet Davidson's insight into The Waste Land is equally, perhaps even more apt when applied to Four Quartets: "the opacity remains stubbornly there, not dissolved by any interpretation" (Davidson 5). While this opacity may be attributable to the dense fabric of the poems' intertextuality, it is equally attributable, I suggest, to the ways in which place, or space, functions in the poems. Numerous readers have argued that the historical and autobiographical significance of the house, gardens, and pools of Burnt Norton, the ancestral "old stone" and loam of East Coker, the river landscapes of the Dry Salvages, and, especially, the unique religious community at Little Gidding are central to our understanding of Eliot's life and work. This essay argues that while place functions as setting, subject, or point of reference in Eliot's poetry, it also functions as a trope of displacement, or potential exile, a means to problematize the spiritual journey that Four Quartets describe. This essay suggests one possible philosophical configuration through which to consider place in Four Quartets.