Thus reading a text is not merely an exercise in subjective interpretation, but rather a collaboration between reader and writer. Iser points out that the entirety of the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its 'individual realisations'. Therefore, a biased reinvention of the text created by the lone reader becomes an irrelevance because it is the response process in relationship to the text which is important, not the product. Indeed, Wolfgang Iser, in his essay The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach published in Reader-Response Criticism argues that the text is as much dependent on the reader as the writer to give it meaning. The argument puts language rather than, for example, religion, as the central critical theme of East Coker. What has been thus far propounded, however, one could argue, is a reader's selected and specific response, superimposed on the text. It seems that in this second of the Four Quartets Eliot is not so much displaying scholarly references, as testing the finite nature of language to probe the limitations and the extremities of human thoughts, conditions and existence. In East Coker one is confronted with this challenge. One can become so immersed in researching the derivation of the material that a preoccupation with the sources can obfuscate the poet's primary purpose - the poem as a holistic form, not a series of obscure references. It is all-too-easy when studying the Four Quartets to become diverted by the range of erudite references which Eliot uses. Account is taken of how Eliot's use of cyclical images, and the language he uses to create them, impacts on the reader's perception of the division and unity between the physical and spiritual dimensions of human existence. As well as the linguistic aspects of Eliot's poem I shall be referring to the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser to demonstrate how the symbols used to convey the cyclic repetitive patterns of being are as much the fruit of the reader's interpretation as they are of the poet's intent. Eliot (1888 - 1965) employs the medium of language to parallel and reflect his perception of the cyclical and repetitive patterns of the life and death process. In this discussion I shall be examining Eliot's use of a range of linguistic devices in East Coker. Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,Īre removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
English Literature Essays T S Eliot: Four Quartets
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