Discarnate Desire: T. S. Eliot’s Poetics of Dissociation

Chapter in Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot. A blind, dirty, senile old man haunts the margins of Eliot\u27s 1910 poem “First Debate between the Body and Soul.” Along with a cast of characters in Inventions of the March Hare – clowns, actors, marionettes – he inserts himself in the consciousness of Eliot\u27s narrators as both self and other, a voice at once within and without the “I” who ostensibly speaks. Unlike Eliot\u27s theatrical personae, this often vile, chattering, drunken, or mad old man carries with him a horror of self-representation little mediated by a stage setting or controlled script. Similar figures appear in other poems, notably “Dans le Restaurant” and “Hysteria.” Yet he plays one role among many; in other forms, alien and intimate figures serve, in Eliot\u27s work, both to claim and to disavow desire. For example, the marionettes – “my marionettes” – of “Convictions (Curtain Raiser)” are filled with naive and exaggerated desires carefully detached from the narrator who also claims them: they “Await an audience open-mouthed / At climax and suspense” and have “keen moments every day.” The narrator of “The Little Passion from ‘An Agony in the Garret’” observes himself walking and notes, sardonically, his own “withered face” as if in a mirror behind a bar: speaker and other are strangely indistinguishable.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/1405/thumbnail.jp