Jennie Lynn Stanley
LIT436
Final Paper
April 28th, 2010
Transmuting the Four Quartets by Adding the Reader
Written in four parts, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets represents the four elements that constitute the universe: fire, air, water, and earth. Eliot organizes these elements untraditionally, moving from air to earth, water to fire. Each quartet, as it engages one of these building blocks of life, contributes to the creation of the Four Quartets as a whole. However, though Eliot’s poems stand visibly complete and seem immutable in the pages that have been published, his poems undergo a transmutation unique to each and every reading and rereading enacted.
With the first reading, Eliot’s Four Quartets strike beauty on the ear, modeling perfection in each syllable, each flick of the tongue. Despite the perfection apparent on the page, the initial reading only provides a vague, far-off sense of perfection, for one cannot get to the heart of experiencing the perfection of the poems before engaging oneself with the poems. At this level of removed, outside observation a reader can only sense a semblance of perfection and note its existence.
Also in this initial approach to the Four Quartets, it is highly unlikely that a reader should be able to understand Eliot’s poems with any legitimate profundity. This is not meant as a jab towards readers in general, but rather follows the insightful observation of Vladimir Nabokov:
A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation . . . In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it.” (3)
After having read the Four Quartets but once, a reader cannot possibly move beyond the complex structural elements of time and space to get at the heart of what Eliot says. In every first reading, the structures of the piece smother the mind, forcing the reader to operate initially from a very basic (or base), fragmented grounding. For this reason, we must reread to solidify our grounding, thereby shoring up the capacity to engage oneself in the text. Though undesirable in the long run, one must not fear baseness, the point at which a piece of literature seems daunting and foreign to one’s mind; rather, a reader must continue to read and reread, for “from the blackened and disintegrated base elements spring the higher elements” (Graham 205). If it were not for these base beginnings, these moments of confusion and abstruseness, higher elements would have no hope at all. Without a point of origin, there can be no forward movement, no improvement, no purification.
And so the reader must begin at the bottom of the ladder with tenacity. He must embrace himself in this baseness and reread with the aim of becoming better. As a reader reads, he notices the pattern, not only of beauty and perfection, but of structure. He sees that the Four Quartets on the page operate as a progression of elements. Each quartet, an individual movement, builds toward the larger movement of the collective work; as each section dies away, another comes to life. Bradbury explains, “Each element lives in the death of others, which appear in successive rebirths” (256). Upon categorizing the space, time, and in this case the elements that govern the poems, a reader can move ahead.
Becoming thus acquainted with Eliot’s words, the reader see more each time he returns to reread. He begins to discover nuances and to make new discoveries with every approach. At this stage, the Four Quartets begins to nest itself in the reader’s mind. The words lodge themselves here or there, and the reader begins to absorb the essence of the poems into himself. Suddenly the Four Quartets exist, not on the simple pages of a book, but within a mind. Having settled down in a new home, the poems begin to shift and rotate, and they begin the process of transmutation.
With the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth readings of the Four Quartets, the reader remembers and dwells upon the metered phrases as they lounge in his mind. And still, even now, as the reader begins to commit the words to memory, he cannot break through the unexplainable haze that looms in the way of him arriving at clarity in understanding the poems. Because of the nature of the task at hand, the reader knows he must resolve to again revisit Eliot’s prose. So he speaks them yet again:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. (Eliot: Burnt Norton 11-15)
This time, just barely into the first few lines of Burnt Norton, he finally gets it, and he exclaims ecstatically, “We! Your mind, my mind!” He sees that Eliot’s words matter to him not only because they are beautiful, but because they are personal. The cordial invitation, “we”, prompts a relationship to bud between the reader and Eliot. Knowing now that he plays an integral role in the poems’ meanings, the reader embarks on the task of trying to discover where and how Eliot’s words fit into his life. This marks a critical step in transmuting the Four Quartets into its form as it will be understood from this reading.
For all the alchemists, there were just four elements — earth, air, fire and water. Each of these elements was distinguished by a combination of two of the characteristics: hot, cold, moist, and dry. More complicated bodies were a combination of some or all of the four elements in different proportions along with a fifth component the quinta essentia which constituted its unique distinguishing characteristic. Transmutation was postulated by the substitution of one characteristic for another, but in order to reproduce or transmute compounds, the alchemist had first to discover and isolate the quintessence.” (Graham 199)
And so the reader, in an effort to provide the Four Quartets with that fifth element of himself, that “quinta essentia”, must delve into the depths of his own life. Once the reader knows himself well enough, he can then add his own meaning and experience to the Four Quartets and thereby assist in transforming the poems into “more complicated bodies”, giving life to the poems by sharing his “vital persuasive fluid substance [which] penetrat[es] and animat[es] all things” (Chalmers 1032). According to Walters, a person naturally possesses a certain divinity absent in inanimate objects. He writes, “The quintessence (a term used by the alchemists to denote sometimes the transmuting agent and at other times, especially in alchemico-medical treatises, the seed of perfection within each substance) is merely another name for the ‘Spirit of the Living God’ . . . the ‘magic art’ is not finally concerned with physical objects, but ‘ascends by the light of Nature to the light of Grace, and the last end of it is truly theological” (108). The reader endows the book with divinity or with Walter’s “’magic art’ [which] is not finally concerned with physical objects,” thereby acting as the critical agent for its metamorphosis, which would otherwise go unrealized.
Once the reader has contributed the fifth element to assist in the metamorphosis of the poems, the Four Quartets arrives at its completeness. This completion cannot be realized without consumption by a reader nor without the addition of the reader. Without a mind to absorb Eliot’s words and draw their meaning into understanding, Eliot’s words remain delegated to the base task of occupying space on an otherwise empty page. In reading the Four Quartets, a reader assists in its transmutation into the form that is unique to his own reading of it. By allowing himself, and the quinta essentia he shares with all other living beings, to become part of the movement, he enables the Four Quartets to undergo a transmutation into something that is meaningful and momentously practical to his own life.
Works Cited:
Bradbury, John M. “’Four Quartets’: The Structural Symbolism.” The Sewanee Review 59.2 (1951): 254-270.
Chalmers, Gordon Keith. “Effluvia, the History of a Metaphor.” ¬PMLA 52.4 (1937): 1031-1050.
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1943.
Graham, Victor E. “Proust’s Alchemy.” The Modern Language Review 60.2 (1965): 197-206.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Books, 1982.
Walters, Richard H. “Henry Vaughan and the Alchemists.” The Review of English Studies 23.90 (1947): 107-122.
Postscript:
I had a very difficult time reconciling the fact that I was writing a more traditional academic paper after hearing stories, songs, and such from my peers. I thought to myself, "Oh crap, maybe I should be doing that." After a lot of thought and several calls to my friend Anna, (and after the below attempt to transform the topic of my paper into a tale), I realized that though it would probably be more entertaining to write a story, it was my sacred duty to write an academic paper. I won't forever be writing papers, and I realized that when summer rolls around, I likely won't sit down to my computer to analyze Eliot, Bradbury, Chalmers, Nabokov, etc. Instead I might write in the former manner, writing creatively, a tale or something fun. I'm SO glad I made the decision I did, because every time I write a paper, I take away something new. It's gratifying and reinforcing to see how one can pull all sorts of information together towards one point. If you're interested here's where I was going when I was having my crisis about my paper:
There once was a little boy with bright blue eyes who gasped for air to feel what it felt like within him. He tasted the air and thought that on this summer day, the air was quite hot. He felt the air with a swish of his hand, and felt too that, on this day, the air was dry. He looked at the earth and saw that it was moist. He dug his fingernails in and felt that it was quite cold. He walked down to the lake and dipped his toe in. My! how cold and how moist. The little boy built a fire and held his hand near, sensing the dry heat.
At the end of all of this, the little boy with bright blue eyes then pondered himself in the mirror and pinched his own skin. It was warm and sticky, for there were tears. He remembered a riddle his mother used to tell him. That night, he sat up and watched the faint star on which he knew she lived. He murmured to himself:
The air is in the earth; the air lies o’er the sea.
The air blows o’er the sea and land, and feeds the everlasting fire.
And you, my son, are somewhere in between.
