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“Wanna Go Home, Baby?”: Sweeney Agonistes As Drama of the Absurd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William V. Spanos
William V. Spanos*
Affiliation:
Harpur College, Binghamton, New York
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Abstract

Shifting our critical perspective on Sweeney to encounter it temporally rather than spatially (New Critically), we discover an existential content embodied in an Anti-Aristotelian form remarkably similar to the drama of the absurd. Its thematic pattern is that which finds its paradigm in the myth of the Furies and its most articulate phenomenological description in Heidegger: the paradoxical flight from death and, ultimately, Nothingness (the Erinyes) that ends in the saving recognition that death is a benign agent (the Eumenides). The flight, characterized in existential philosophy as the self-deceptive “domestication” of death, is epitomized in the wastelanders effort to transform Sweeney's tale of murder into a well-made detective story. But this impulse is thwarted by Sweeney's refusal to draw a distancing conclusion. This becomes Eliot's formal strategy. Like the Anti-Aristotelian absurdists, he “decomposes” the “time-shape” of his microcosm to prevent the audience from objectifying the dreadful contingency of the world of his play. Eliot's Anti-Aristotelianism, however, is ultimately different from that of the “humanistic” absurdists. Whereas the latter project an absolutely discontinuous “time-shape” grounded in a vision of a radically discontinuous universe, Eliot, who sees the macrocosm as a Nothingness that may be the obverse of Somethingness, projects a discontinuous (circular) “time-shape” that contains the possibility of linear direction.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , January 1970 , pp. 8 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston, Ill., 1962), p. 298. All further references to this book will be incorporated in the text in parentheses. For Jean-Paul Sartre's somewhat similar use of the metaphor of flight (“la fuite”) in his analysis of the escape from anguish, see Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (L'Etre et le néant), ed. and tr. by Hazel E. Barnes (New York, 1964), pp. 21–48.

2 The Family Reunion, in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York, 1952), p. 250.

3 Stanley Romaine Hopper, The Crisis of Faith (Nashville, Tenn., 1944), p. 126.

4 Helmut Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness: An Essay on Existentialism (London, 1951), p. 104; my italics. See also Walter Kaufmann, “Existentialism and Death,” Chicago Review, 'xiii“ (Summer 1959), 75–93; and J. Glenn Gray, ”The Problem of Death in Modern Philosophy,“ The Modern Vision of Death, ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Richmond, Va., 1967), pp. 45–67.

5 See William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, N. Y., 1958), pp. 237–248, and my “Abraham, Sisyphus and the Furies: Some Introductory Notes on Existentialism,” A Casebook on Existentialism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), pp. 1–13.

6 In “Whispers of Immortality,” The Collected Poems and Plays, the speaker calls pneumatic Grishkin “nice” in the context of his consciousness of Webster's and Donne's existential dread: Webster “saw the skull beneath the skin,” and Donne knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton;

7 The Collected Poems and Plays, p. 280.

8 There are several allusions to Dostoevsky's Oresteian novel, Crime and Punishment, in Sweeney Agonistes, but the essential influence of this proto-existentialist work on Eliot is most clearly seen by a comparison of the moral impact of the murder on the murderer in Sweeney with the following comment by Dostoevsky in The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment, ed. and tr. by Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1967): “His [Raskolnikov's] moral development begins from the crime itself; the possibility of such questions arises which would not have existed previously. [In] the last chapter, in prison, he says that without the crime he would not have reached the point of asking himself such questions and experiencing such desires, feelings, needs, strivings, and development” (p. 64). See the remarkably similar passage from Eliot's “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” which constitutes a gloss on Sweeney, quoted below.

9 Selected Essays, new ed. (New York, 1950), p. 380. This characteristic existential paradox pervades Eliot's poetry and prose from beginning to end. It lies immediately behind the protagonist's “There will be time to murder and create” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; the speaker's bitter distinction between “lost / Violent souls” and “the hollow men” in “The Hollow Men”; and in the Dantean “Great Refusal” motif in “The Waste Land”:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

In The Idea of a Christian Society (New York, 1940), Eliot says, “We need to recover the sense of religious fear, so that it may be overcome by religious hope” (p. 63). It is also this paradox that informs The Family Reunion and, less centrally, the other late plays.

10 Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy, tr. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven, Conn., 1954), pp. 19–20. The translation of Gremsituationen abstracts the significant spatial metaphor (Grenz: boundary) that Jaspers intends, and thus minimizes the impact of this very powerful term.

11 The Little Review, 'iv“ (May 1917), 9. See also The Family Reunion, where Agatha says:

Harry has crossed the frontier
Beyond which safety and danger have a different meaning.
And he cannot return. That is his privilege.
For those who live in this world, this world only,
Do you think that I would take the responsibility
Of tempting them over the border? No one could,
no one who knows, (pp. 284–285)

For the parallels with S⊘ren Kierkegaard, see especially The Present Age, tr. Alexander Dru (Oxford, 1940), and The Concept of Dread, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N. J., 1944).

12 The final chorus recalls the recurrent “bad night” motif in The Sun Also Rises and in a number of the short stories, including “Big Two-Hearted River,” “Now I Lay Me,” “A Pursuit Race,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” and “A Way You'll Never Be.” The parallel (in image and meaning) is so close that an influence is suggested, though it is impossible to tell who influenced whom. Hemingway's first presentation of the motif occurs in “Big Two-Hearted River,” first published in May 1925. But it was not until The Sun Also Rises, started in July, finished in Sept. 1925, and published in 1926, that it received its full expression. Eliot's Sweeney was first published in 1926 and 1927, but seems to have been circulating in manuscript form since late in 1924 at least. Eliot had sent a draft version of the play to Arnold Bennett in October of that year. (Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, Chicago, 1962, pp. 113–114.) It is possible, therefore, that Hemingway saw the manuscript and found the symbolism of the chorus' last speech to epitomize his consciousness of the terror of nada. At any rate, it is interesting to note that the focal “bad night” motif common to both writers (it appears again in The Family Reunion, p. 250) should lead the critics to perceive the proto-existential dimension of Hemingway's fiction but not of Eliot's poetry and drama.

13 Borrowing the term from the English existential psychoanalyst R. D. Laing (“Ontological Insecurity,” repr. in Psychoanalysis and Existential Philosophy, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeck, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962, from The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Chicago, 1960), Richard Scheduler uses it to characterize the dreadful psychological and spiritual predicament of Ionesco's characters in “The Inner and the Outer Reality,” TDR, 'vii“ (Spring 1963), 192–193.

14 Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 112. In keeping with Smith's definition of the form of Sweeney, he also says of the “Prologue,” “It concludes with a fatuous dialogue between Klipstein and Krumpacker, whom Eliot might better have eliminated. ... If anything in the ”Prologue“ deserved commendation—and not much feeling runs through its nerveless plot—it is surely the jolly singsong and thump of the verse” (p. 115). The “fatuous dialogue” to which Smith refers plays with devastating subtlety and power on the theme of feeling “at-home” in London, a theme which is absolutely at the center of what is happening below the surface of the action.

15 The Family Reunion, p. 249.

16 “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time. (p. 120)

Kierkegaard's “crowd” and Heidegger's das Man can be put no more awfully.

17 Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre, tr. Donald Watson (New York, 1964): “Several times I have said that it is in our fundamental solitude that we rediscover ourselves and that the more I am alone, the more I am in communion with others; whereas in organized society, which is an organization of functions, man is merely reduced to his function, which alienates him from the rest” (p. 78).

18 Dionysus the Areopagite, The Divine Names, tr. C. E. Rolt, in The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 1940), pp. 151–152.

19 The Dark Night of the Soul, tr. and ed. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York, 1957), p. 26; my italics. See also Ralph Harper, Human Love: Existential and Mystical (Baltimore, Md., 1967), pp. 111–113.

20 Encounter with Nothingness, pp. xxi–xxii. For Kierkegaard's version of the process of divestment, see Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death (Garden City, N. Y., 1954), pp. 38–64.

21 Job xlii.4, 5.

22 Quoted in Heidegger, “Remembrance of the Poet,” Existence and Being (Chicago, 1949), pp. 255–256. See also Stanley Romaine Hopper, “On the Naming of the Gods in Hölderlin and Rilke,” Christianity and the Existentialists, ed. Carl Michalson (New York, 1956), pp. 148–190. The original German is:

Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst,
Das Rettende auch.

23 Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York, 1954), p. 31. That Beckett is conscious of the pathetic irony of his characters' enactment of the circularity that neutralizes action in terms of a word epitomizing the linear time and dramatic direction of a defunct Christian theology is clearly implied by the fact that it is the only sequence of dialogue in the original French version that he has not translated into English.

24 The Religious Situation, tr. H. Richard Niebuhr (New York, 1956), p. 80.

25 What is Literature?, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1949), pp. 222–223

26 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” reprinted from Dial (1923) in Forms and Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Bloomington, Ind., 1959), p. 123.

27 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, p. 4; my italics. It is important to mention here that the inadequate interpretations of Sweeney stem in large part from the failure to perceive or acknowledge the emphasis that Eliot gives to the idea that the historical sense “makes a writer most conscious of his. . . own contemporaneity.” Even Carol Smith's reading in T. S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice (Princeton, 1963), which is easily the best, goes astray in assuming much too easily (like the New Critical studies) that for Eliot the historical sense means tradition, which, in turn, means radical commitment to the past. In focusing primarily on the fertility myth—which, according to F. M. Cornford, lies behind Aristophanic comedy—she evokes the past as the Gestalt of the play, thus distancing its action from the present.

28 Most humanistic dramatists of the absurd, of course, do not project absurdity radically.

29 The Courage to Be (New Haven, 1952), p. 36.

30 The Courage to Be, p. 39. Although Tillich characteristically presents man's obsession to objectify dread in the best possible light here, he nevertheless does suggest its escapist thrust. The Christian side of this analysis (and its relation to the meaning of Eliot's play) is suggested in the following extract: “The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety; and there is a relation between the two. For facing the God who is really God means facing also the absolute threat of nonbeing” (p. 39). For Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's versions of the distinction between fear and dread, see The Concept of Dread, 2nd ed., tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1957), pp. 38–39, and Being and Time, p. 230.

31 “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” p. 9.

32 The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 181.

33 The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 275. Indeed, the effort to transform dread into fear, which, in turn, leads to a perception of events or, in Eliot's term, of “happenings,” as if they were pieces in the puzzle of a well-made play, is precisely the source of the metaphor of playacting that pervades the language and gestures of all the “everyday” people in the world of Eliot's poems and, especially, his plays.

34 This analysis of form should suggest that the conventional definition of Eliot's last plays in terms of a reversion to the well-made-play tradition is a gross oversimplification. It is true that Eliot abandoned the absurdist shock tactics of Sweeney for a progressively subtler method of activating participation, but the strategy is fundamentally the same.

35 I am indebted, in part, for this analysis of the phenomenology of middle-class perception to the editors of Midwest Monographs, Richard Wasson and Neil Kleinman. In a letter, one of them writes: “The old stage was made for the rationalist voyeur, the scientist who through his reason peeped through the world's third wall and passively observed the happening.”

36 Three Plays: Amédée, The New Tenant, Victims of Duty, tr. Donald Watson (New York, 1958), p. 119.

37 The Birthday Party and The Room (New York, 1961), p. 10. See, e.g., Sweeney Agonisles, p. 78. It is interesting to note that Martin Esslin's elaborate history of the origins of the drama of the absurd in The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, N. Y., 1961) contains no mention of Sweeney, nor, for that matter, of T. S. Eliot.

38 A short version of this paper was read before the Modern Literature section (English 11) at the 1968 MLA meeting.