‘Paralysed force, gesture without motion’: a queer reading of aporetic space in T. S. Eliot’s early poetry

Abstract

This dissertation, entitled ‘Paralysed force, gesture without motion’: A Queer Reading of Aporetic Space in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry, investigates queer sexuality in the early Eliot poems written between 1909 and 1927, specifically The Waste Land (1922) and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). Queer theory, in this dissertation, acknowledges its foundations in the poststructuralist Foucauldian critiques of history and identity categories, and connects them to aspects of multiplicity, fragmentation and transgression. The representation and subsequent deconstruction of sexual dimorphism and the metaphysics of presence, which emerge in these literary and theoretical texts, is further critiqued through extensive reference to Derrida’s work, particularly in relation to Aporias. Building in its first chapter on distinctions governing Derrida’s use of problem and aporia, along with Foucault’s genealogical method and writings on sexuality, this study follows through with close readings of selected early poems by Eliot in order to determine whether the discernible yet indeterminate sexual space is problematic or aporetic. To this end, the second chapter deals primarily with the figures of Gerontion and Tiresias, and examines whether the hermaphroditic figure serves to deconstruct the sexual binary or only manages to problematically displace its hierarchy. Foucault’s and Derrida’s writings here help in further understanding Tiresias’s self-representations, as well as how The Waste Land’s extensive use of allusion problematises tradition and constructions of individuality. The third chapter recalls Derrida’s critique in Aporias of Heidegger’s three distinctions between different ways of death in order to highlight the transgressive nature of what this dissertation calls ‘aporetic indeterminacy’ within Eliot’s literary work. Furthermore, it looks at possible prefigurative links between ‘The Hollow Men’ and aspects of the limit/liminal experience, in conjunction with Foucauldian thoughts on madness. The queer and ultimately irrational, post-structuralist (non-)presence in Eliot’s poetry, if truly demonstrable, points to the possibility that Eliot is awaiting (at) the arrival of post-structuralist thought. On the basis of the above research, the conclusion examines how the entirety of this dissertation has also maintained a close relation to the question of death and its (im)possibility, and intimates further study in consideration of the experientialist aspect of queerly transgressive sexuality, especially in regards to more post-structurally oriented approaches to T. S. Eliot’s poetry.