Spooky Beautiful T. S. Eliot

I enjoy Eliot's poetry. I understand that he held some very unpleasant social, racial, and political opinions, but the poetry is finely crafted and often...beautiful. That's such a dangerous word, of course, because it announces a value judgment so boldly. Any use of the word "beautiful" is condemned to spend the next several paragraphs justifying it -- a justification usually unsatisfying both to those who agree and those who disagree. But it's fortuitous that I just wrote about Freud's "The Uncanny" yesterday, because I've selected a section of Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday" whose beauty seems to depend on an imagined image loaded with uncanniness. Here it is, the first stanza of Section III:

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

Eliot sets up a doubling of the poetic speaker. The speaker looks down the stairs and sees himself (i.e. "The same shape") struggling. This is uncanny in a few ways. First, all doublings throw into question the child's separation from the original caregiver (perhaps the mother). Second, and in a related way, there's the temporal aspect of the self on the second level of stairs as the adult version of the child on the first level.

Thirdly, and perhaps most important to Eliot's project in "Ash-Wednesday," the double has a spiritual aspect. Freud follows Otto Rank in pointing out that: "the 'immortal' soul was the first double of the body. The invention of such doubling [is] a defence against against annihilation." Freud suggests that this invention is child-like, representing the extreme narcissism of childhood. He argues that, "when this phase is surmounted, the meaning of the 'double' changes: having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death." The protective double created during one stage of development becomes a terrifying figure for the adult.

The quoted excerpt of Eliot's poem is fascinating because it places the speaker in the perspective of the adult who contemplates himself as a child (rather than the adult contemplating the immortal soul created by child-like thinking). The relationship between Eliot's doubles is perhaps even more uncanny than Freud's because of the temporal overlap of the former. The adult on the second stair and the child on the first coexist; the struggles of the child are ongoing. Even though he is on the second level, the "deceitful face of hope and of despair" plagues him. In other words, the narcissistic stage of childhood is not surmounted at all -- as evidenced by his continued reflection on himself as a child.

What makes this so moving is it throws into question the speaker's whole spiritual struggle. It's no accident that Eliot's speaker is climbing stairs, which acts as a figural motif indicating spiritual enlightenment and the path toward heaven. The coexistence of the second floor adult with the first floor child problematizes the notion of spiritual progress. The "devil of the stairs" appears to be narcissism, the perpetual concern with the self. (Though a full reading of Section III continues the journey...and continues the problematization).

All this commentary may seem to be moving too far away from the poem itself, but this interpretation is supported by some textual evidence. For example, the stanza rhymes (or nearly rhymes) insistently (stair, banister, air, wears, despair) -- except for the word "below," the sound of which jolts the reader. The propulsiveness of the rhymes pushes one forward, but there is that nagging "oh" sound pulling the reader back down again. Also, the inclusion of the second "of" in the last line maintains iambic meter, which is a regular and pleasing rhythm, but it oddly departs from a more standard conjuntion that would simply join "of hope and despair" rather than "of hope and of despair." In other words, the phrasing is regular and irregular at the same time. This doesn't just reproduce rhythmically the semantic contradiction of simultaneous hope and despair, it arrays double against double, adult against child, and self-centeredness against spiritual purity.

Okay, I wasn't able to come back to why I find this "beautiful." That's maybe too large a task for tonight. Perhaps I'll be better prepared to make a rousing return to that idea after I read Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime later this week.