INVITATION TO THE DANCE: INTERMEDIAL ALLUSIONS IN T. S. ELIOT’S EARLY POETRY (“THE DEATH OF SAINT NARCISSUS”, “SUPPRESSED COMPLEX”)

К л ю ч е в ы е с л о в а : танцы; модернизм; русский балет; интермедиальные аллюзии; поэтическое творчество; английская литература; английские поэты. K e y w o r d s : dance; modernism; Russian ballet; intermedial allusions; poetic creativity; English literature; English poets. Д л я ц и т и р о в а н и я : Ушакова, О. М. Приглашение к танцу: интермедиальные аллюзии в ранней поэзии Т. С. Элиота («Смерть святого Нарцисса», «Подавленный комплекс») / О. М. Ушакова // Филологический класс. – 2019. – No 1 (55). – С. 136–143. DOI 10.26170/fk19-01-20. F o r c i t a t i o n : Ushakova, O. M. Invitation to the Dance: Intermedial Allusions in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry (“The Death of Saint Narcissus”, “Suppressed Complex”) / O. M. Ushakova // Philological Class. – 2019. – No 1 (55). – P. 136–143. DOI 10.26170/fk19-01-20. Ushakova O. M. Invitation to the Dance: Intermedial Allusions in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry... Philological Class. 2019. NO 1 (55) 137 The modernist aesthetics is characterized by an increasing tendency to transgress and displace the boundaries of different genres and art forms, a tendency conducive to postmodernist forms of intermediality. Most works of modernist writers are interspersed with numerous references to visual arts, music, theatre, etc. But the modernists didn’t refer to visual arts in the classical, ekphrastic way nor limited themselves by using one-dimensional linear references (quotations and direct allusions) to music or other arts in the texts. Their writing strategies and techniques were based on the new types of interactions between literary texts and arts. The arts influence the structure and content of the text in an ongoing process of incorporating alien components resulted in a complex synthetic amalgam and evoking new artistic emotions and effects. This paper examines in what way the visual arts and ballet as a synthetic art influenced the texts of T. S. Eliot (1888– 1965), a classic of high modernism. In this paper the analysis focuses on two early texts: poems “The Death of Saint Narcissus” (circa 1915) and “Suppressed Complex” (1915). The paper also presents a study of cultural-historical and biographical contexts of the creative process as well as th1e contexts of visual and dancing references. One of the research aims is to prove the intermedial nature of Eliot’s poetic allusions revealing the dynamic interactions between different kinds of art. While intermediality draws our attention to the aesthetic presence of other arts we also turn to some artifacts as the visual sources of poetic allusions (paintings by Andrea Mantegna, Henri Matisse’s, costume sketches and drawings by Leon Bakst). Under consideration there are also the materials (historical data, musical pieces, the drafts of scenery and costumes, photos, etc.) connected to Paris performances of the ballets “Narcisse” (1911), “Le Spectre de la Rose” (1911) of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes and a mystery play “Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien” (1911) as the important sources for performative allusions in Eliot’s poems. This problem has not been studied in a systematic way. However, the poem “The Death of Saint Narcissus” attracted the attention of the Russian researchers. Moscow scholars Vasiliy Tolmatchoff and Natalya Lavrova analysed the philosophic aspects of the poem, intertextual connections (Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, André Gide’ “Le traite du narcisse: theorie du symbole”, etc.), the theme of the poetic narcissism, homoerotic and Dionysian dimensions of the text, etc. [Толмачев 2014; Лаврова 2010]. These poems were also considered in connection to the theme of a mystic “burnt dancer” in my essay “A Dandy, Bully and Mystic: The School of Poetic Play in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Inventions of the March Hare’” [Ушакова 2016]. This paper addresses the methodologies connected to the intertextual and inter-art theories and intermediality studies. The main research argument will be founded on the concepts of intermediality and intermedial allusions as important issues of modernist studies. The intermedial studies are one of the most productive trends in the Humanities nowadays. As a Hungarian scholar Ágnes Petho mentioned in her paper devoted to intermediality in cinema: “The other factor that propelled “intermediality” to a wider attention was most likely the fact that it emerged on an interdisciplinary basis that made it possible for scholars from a great number of fields (theories of literature, art history, music, communication and cultural studies, philosophy, cinema studies, etc.) to participate in the discourse around questions of intermediality” [Ágnes Petho 2010: 40]. While the notion “intermediality” (“intermedial”) appeared as a literary term and an explicit theoretical concept only in 1960-s it might be applied to the earlier cultural phenomena. In recent years the studies concerning the relations between the arts have become one of the major research areas in literary studies in Russia and abroad. In Russian literary studies the problem of intermediality has been studied in theoretical (aesthetic) and historical fields as well in practical criticism from the position of discursive analysis (N. N. Gasheva, N. M. Myshiakova, N. V. Tishunina, E. V. Sedykh and others)1. Abroad the field of intermediality research has been ever-expanding since the 1980s. In her Introduction to a highly helpful collection of papers “Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music” (2015) a Swiss scholar Gabriele Rippl, the author of the anthology, explains the prevalence and emphasizes the topicality of literary intermedial studies: “The popularity and increasing importance of intermediality studies and other related fields can be attributed to the fact that in our digital age many works of art, cultural artifacts, literary texts and other cultural configurations either combine and juxtapose different media, genres and styles or refer to other media in a plethora of ways” [Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music 2015: 1]. The listing of studies investigating intermediality would take a lot of space and time therefore we will limit ourselves to mentioning several recent publications that could be interesting and stimulating in the context of the proposed study. The works of such authors as Jørgen Bruhn, Renate Brosch, Lars Elleström, Erik Hedling, Linda Hutcheon. Maria Marcsek Fuchs, Ana Cristina Mendes, Michael Meyer, Irina Rajewsky, Peter Wagner, Werner Wolf might be intensively circulated and included into the domestic academic context2. 1 Гашева Н. Н. Динамика синтетических форм в русской культуре и литературе XIX и XX веков. – Пермь, 2004; Мышьякова Н. М. Опыт интермедиального анализа (музыкальность лирики А. А. Фета) // Вестник Оренб. ун-та. – 2002. – No 6. – С. 55–58; Тишунина Н. В. Западноевропейский символизм и проблема синтеза искусств: опыт интермедиального анализа. – СПб., 1998; Седых Э. В. К проблеме интермедиальности // Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Серия 9. Филология. Востоковедение. Журналистика. – 2008. – No 3–2. – С. 210–214. 2 Brosch, Renate, ed. Moving Images – Mobile Viewers: 20th Century Visuality. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011; Bruhn, Jørgen. The Intermediality of Narrative Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2016; Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Hedling, Erik, and Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, eds. Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002; Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006; Marcsek Fuchs, Maria. Dance and British Literature: An Intermedial Encounter: (Theory – Typology – Case Studies). Leiden, Netherlands. Brill, 2015; Mendes, Ana Cristina, ed. Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2012; Meyer, Michael, ed. Word & Image in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009; Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialitat. Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 2002; Wagner, Peter. Icons – Texts – Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996; Wolf, Werner. Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies: Dedicated to Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of his Retirement. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009; Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999; Selected Essays on Intermediality by Werner Wolf (1992–2014): Theory and Typology, Literature-Music Relations, Transmedial Narratology, Miscellaneous Transmedial Phenomena. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017, etc. Ушакова О. М. Приглашение к танцу: интермедиальные аллюзии в ранней поэзии Т. С. Элиота... 138 Филологический класс. 2019. No 1 (55) It should be noted that the theoretical constructs of Russian and foreign researchers of intermediality are united by the common methodological basis, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and dialogism. A Finnish scholar Leena Eilittä, the editor of the book “Intermedial Arts: Disrupting, Remembering and Transforming Media” (2012) emphasizes that the basis of modern theories is rooted in the ideas of Bakhtin developed by Julia Kristeva: “Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, which focuses on the relations between texts, is the most relevant theory for intermediality. For Kristeva, the text is a dynamic mosaic of quotations that includes absorptions and transformations of other texts. Kristeva’s theory develops the ideas of Bakhtin’s principle of dialogicity, which assumes that words are filled with dialogic overtones and with echoes and reverberations of other utterances. Bakhtin’s theory allows the view that verbal expressions are not only influenced by expressions of a similar art but also by other media and their structures. However, although Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s theories have been important for intermediality to come into being, neither of these theories has really taken into


INVITATION TO THE DANCE: INTERMEDIAL ALLUSIONS IN T. S. ELIOT'S EARLY POETRY ("THE DEATH OF SAINT NARCISSUS", "SUPPRESSED COMPLEX")
A b s t r a c t .The paper "Invitation to the Dance: Intermedial Allusions in T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry ('The Death of Saint Narcissus', 'Suppressed Complex')" deals with some aspects of the early works by T. S. Eliot.The author examines relationships between dance, visual art and experiments in modernist poetry.The poems "The Death of Saint Narcissus" and "Suppressed Complex" are interpreted as the samples of a "dance-poem".The poetic text incorporates the visual and plastic arts not only in a thematic way but poetic structure itself tends to the specific intermedial metamorphosis.The paper discusses the Ballet Russes Parisian productions of "Narcisse", "Le Spectre de la Rose" and the performance of a mystery play "Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien" (1911) as the important sources for creation of the innovative poetic texts.The author also turns to some artifacts as the visual sources of intermedial allusions (the costume sketches and drawings by Leon Bakst, paintings by Henri Matisse's, etc.).The main research argument is founded on the concepts of intermediality and intermedial allusions as important issues of modernist studies.The paper aims to prove the intermedial nature of Eliot's poetic allusions, to examine in what way the visual arts and ballet influenced his texts and reveal the dynamic interactions between different kinds of art in the diachronic and synchronous perspectives.The paper presents a study of history of the creative process, cultural-historical and biographical contexts, peculiarities of the composition, the key images and themes, etc.The paper demonstrates in what way the intertextual, intermedial and other accompanying elements force the reader to reframe the original material and be included into the process of co-creation and formation a new intermedial narration.The results of this study could be helpful in teaching and research of history of English poetry, history and theory of modernism, in comparative studies (intermediality, reception of Russian culture abroad.etc.).The modernist aesthetics is characterized by an increasing tendency to transgress and displace the boundaries of different genres and art forms, a tendency conducive to postmodernist forms of intermediality.Most works of modernist writers are interspersed with numerous references to visual arts, music, theatre, etc.But the modernists didn't refer to visual arts in the classical, ekphrastic way nor limited themselves by using one-dimensional linear references (quotations and direct allusions) to music or other arts in the texts.Their writing strategies and techniques were based on the new types of interactions between literary texts and arts.The arts influence the structure and content of the text in an ongoing process of incorporating alien components resulted in a complex synthetic amalgam and evoking new artistic emotions and effects.
This paper examines in what way the visual arts and ballet as a synthetic art influenced the texts of T. S. Eliot (1888Eliot ( -1965)), a classic of high modernism.In this paper the analysis focuses on two early texts: poems "The Death of Saint Narcissus" (circa 1915) and"Suppressed Complex" (1915).The paper also presents a study of cultural-historical and biographical contexts of the creative process as well as th1e contexts of visual and dancing references.One of the research aims is to prove the intermedial nature of Eliot's poetic allusions revealing the dynamic interactions between different kinds of art.While intermediality draws our attention to the aesthetic presence of other arts we also turn to some artifacts as the visual sources of poetic allusions (paintings by Andrea Mantegna, Henri Matisse's, costume sketches and drawings by Leon Bakst).Under consideration there are also the materials (historical data, musical pieces, the drafts of scenery and costumes, photos, etc.) connected to Paris performances of the ballets "Narcisse" (1911), "Le Spectre de la Rose" (1911) of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes and a mystery play "Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien" (1911) as the important sources for performative allusions in Eliot's poems.This problem has not been studied in a systematic way.However, the poem "The Death of Saint Narcissus" attracted the attention of the Russian researchers.Moscow scholars Vasiliy Tolmatchoff and Natalya Lavrova analysed the philosophic aspects of the poem, intertextual connections (Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray", André Gide' "Le traite du narcisse: theorie du symbole", etc.), the theme of the poetic narcissism, homoerotic and Dionysian dimensions of the text, etc. [Толмачев 2014; Лаврова 2010].These poems were also considered in connection to the theme of a mystic "burnt dancer" in my essay "A Dandy, Bully and Mystic: The School of Poetic Play in T.S. Eliot's 'Inventions of the March Hare'" [Ушакова 2016].
This paper addresses the methodologies connected to the intertextual and inter-art theories and intermediality studies.The main research argument will be founded on the concepts of intermediality and intermedial allusions as important issues of modernist studies.The intermedial studies are one of the most productive trends in the Humanities nowadays.As a Hungarian scholar Ágnes Petho mentioned in her paper devoted to intermediality in cinema: "The other factor that propelled "intermediality" to a wider attention was most likely the fact that it emerged on an interdisciplinary basis that made it possible for scholars from a great number of fields (theories of literature, art history, music, communication and cultural studies, philosophy, cinema studies, etc.) to participate in the discourse around questions of intermediality" [Ágnes Petho 2010: 40].While the notion "intermediality" ("intermedial") appeared as a literary term and an explicit theoretical concept only in 1960-s it might be applied to the earlier cultural phenomena.
In recent years the studies concerning the relations between the arts have become one of the major research areas in literary studies in Russia and abroad.In Russian literary studies the problem of intermediality has been studied in theoretical (aesthetic) and historical fields as well in practical criticism from the position of discursive analysis (N.N. Gasheva, N. M. Myshiakova, N. V. Tishunina, E. V. Sedykh and others)1 .
Abroad the field of intermediality research has been ever-expanding since the 1980s.In her Introduction to a highly helpful collection of papers "Handbook of Intermediality.Literature -Image -Sound -Music" (2015) a Swiss scholar Gabriele Rippl, the author of the anthology, explains the prevalence and emphasizes the topicality of literary intermedial studies: "The popularity and increasing importance of intermediality studies and other related fields can be attributed to the fact that in our digital age many works of art, cultural artifacts, literary texts and other cultural configurations either combine and juxtapose different media, genres and styles or refer to other media in a plethora of ways" [Handbook of Intermediality.Literature -Image -Sound -Music 2015: 1].The listing of studies investigating intermediality would take a lot of space and time therefore we will limit ourselves to mentioning several recent publications that could be interesting and stimulating in the context of the proposed study.The works of such authors as Jørgen Bruhn, Renate Brosch, Lars Elleström, Erik Hedling, Linda Hutcheon.Maria Marcsek Fuchs, Ana Cristina Mendes, Michael Meyer, Irina Rajewsky, Peter Wagner, Werner Wolf might be intensively circulated and included into the domestic academic context 2 .
It should be noted that the theoretical constructs of Russian and foreign researchers of intermediality are united by the common methodological basis, Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogue and dialogism.A Finnish scholar Leena Eilittä, the editor of the book "Intermedial Arts: Disrupting, Remembering and Transforming Media" (2012) emphasizes that the basis of modern theories is rooted in the ideas of Bakhtin developed by Julia Kristeva: "Julia Kristeva's notion of intertextuality, which focuses on the relations between texts, is the most relevant theory for intermediality.For Kristeva, the text is a dynamic mosaic of quotations that includes absorptions and transformations of other texts.Kristeva's theory develops the ideas of Bakhtin's principle of dialogicity, which assumes that words are filled with dialogic overtones and with echoes and reverberations of other utterances.Bakhtin's theory allows the view that verbal expressions are not only influenced by expressions of a similar art but also by other media and their structures.However, although Bakhtin's and Kristeva's theories have been important for intermediality to come into being, neither of these theories has really taken into consideration the perspective" [Eilittä 2012: vii-viii].Considering the last thesis of this statement I would suggest that the methodological potential of Bakhtin's theory is quite universal to generate the necessary tools for studying various dialogic relationships both in the earlier and latter literary texts.
To solve our research problems, we took a grounded theoretical approach to analyze the particular issues and better understand how different media combinations, transformations and references contribute the content and change the reception of Eliot's early poetry.The term "an intermedial allusion" relevant to the aims of our research has been already used in the works of the Russian researchers focusing on the intermedial nature of Vladimir Nabokov's prose.The author from Saint-Petersburg Olga Dmitrienko analyzing such novels as "Mary" ("Mashen'ka"), "Glory", "Invitation to the Beheading" emphasized the receptive and creative aspects of intermedial correlations in Nabokov's texts: "Nabokov chooses the forms of interaction between literature and visual arts more free than ekphrastic: his intermedial allusions and correlations were designed for recognition, guessing and active co-creation of the reader" [Дмитриенко 2013: 36].

Historical and Cultural contexts of T. S. Eliot's Poetry of the 1910 s
The modernist authors (James Joyce, Virginia Wools, T. S. Eliot, Roger Fry, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle and others) successfully merged literary works with the oeuvres, techniques and instruments of different arts.There is some sense to refrain from delineation of modernist allusions into different groups (musical, visual, plastic, performative, etc.).Modernists were experimenting with pluralistic approaches to art and very reluctantly explained the sources of their images (the author's comments to "The Waste Land" rather submit an exception in a post-modernist manner).Any modernist text represents a quiz, complicated allusive complex suggesting the reader to engage into a risky and fascinating play.Hunting for allusions the researcher not only expands the field of understanding of the text but steps in the process of recreation and reconstruction receiving a new dynamic structure open to new transforma-tions.The disclosure and analysis of intermedial allusions in modernist texts contributes to reveal their innovative and transgressive potential that articulate their message in the interstices between different arts.
As Ágnes Petho thoughtfully pointed out: "Intermediality as an object of research can only be examined within its context, within the framework of concrete time and place coordinates" [Ágnes Petho 2010: 49].The cultural context of Eliot's early poetry is symbolistic, decadent, bohemian, psychoanalytic, Parisian and extremely intermedial.Thus one of the main cultural appeals of the time formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé was a creation of an ideal 'total work of art "which should be conceived as consonant with music, painting and plastic representation" [Verna 2015: 3].
Eliot discovered the fascinating art treasures and cultural opportunities at the time when Paris was the cultural and intellectual capital of the world.He came to Paris in October 1910 and stayed there till September 1911.This Eliot's "annus mirabilis" has been brilliantly presented in the highly stimulating and informative monograph "T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year" by a prominent American scholar Nancy Duvall Hargrove.I would totally agree with the thesis of Professor Hargrove that Eliot's "Parisian year gave him the foundation to become a major writer of the twentieth century and the inspiration to produce his first masterpiece at the age of twenty-two" [Hargrove 2010: 58].
Within our topic there is a sense to narrow the panorama of cultural events attractive and interesting for a young American intellectual thirsty for artistic impressions and life experiences.The outline and characters of the protagonists (Narcissus and a "red dancer") in both poems might be inspired by certain pictorial and scenic images.In our case the turn to historical cultural data is necessary because Eliot's biographical documents (letters, notes, commentaries) of this period are not numerous.Thus the main documentary and factographic basis could be the poetic texts themselves and the Paris cultural chronicles of the time.The figures of dancers in the poems directly refer to the main choreography events of 1910-1911, the performances of the Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Russian culture was an important factor of forming modernist aesthetic discourse, the Diaghilev's seasons were echoed in modernist literature for many years (E.Pound, V. Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and others).Eliot attended the performances of the Ballet Russes first in 1911 in Paris and then in 1919 and 1921 in London.The letters or the direct memoir evidences (Eliot's Paris fellows, Jean Verdenal and Alain-Fournier died in 1915 and 1914 at the Great War) confirming the fact of visiting the performances haven't been found.Nevertheless, we can't but agree to Nancy Hargrove's logics: "Eliot's connections with the Ballet Russes, which are clearly verifiable in the late 1910 s and 1920 s , seem to have begun in 1911 when this famous company returned to Paris for its third season, giving eight performances at the Théâtre du Châtelet from June 6-17, with Nijinsky and Karsavina as its lead dances.Eliot would have been attracted to its performances for a number of reasons: its enormous popularity among the intellectual and artistic elite of Paris; its innovations in dance; its ideal of fusing various art forms into one artistic whole; the opportunity to see the most acclaimed male dancer of the day; and the chance to learn more about the culture of Russia in con-junction with the reading of Dostoevsky under the tutelage of Alain-Fournier" [Hargrove 2010: 169].
Interested in all elements of the Parisian cultural scene Eliot no doubt was greatly attracted by these fabulous innovative performances.There are the direct indications that he knew and was influenced by "Le Spectre de la Rose"1 [Gardner 1978: 202] and "Petrouchka" (according to the words of Valerie Eliot cited in a few publications), Two another performative sources of inspiration for Eliot's early poetry might have been the ballet "Narcisse" 2 and the mystery-show "Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien" 3 which caused a sensation in Paris in May 1911.
The performances of the Russian Ballet being the fashionable epicenter of the Parisian artistic world represented the very aesthetic ideal of the epoch, a "total work of art" synthesizing music, painting and plastic representation.And it can be assumed that the other impressions and arttours (visits to Louvre and established art institutions, acquaintance with the innovative pictorial art in the Salon d' Automne and Salon des Indépendants) were superimposed on this performative basis generating the breeding ground for the individual creativity and new multiply perspectives of poetic development.After identification the main media sources of the poems we could localize the presence of their elements in the texts and define their importance for the certain texts and Eliot's works in total.
A "Dancer to God": Heterogeneous Mode of "The Death of Saint Narcissus" According to Valerie Eliot , the widow of the poet, "Eliot could not remember when he wrote this poem, but it may have been early in 1915 [Eliot 1971: 129].The history of the publications of the text of "The Death of Saint Narcissus" is presented in several sources, e.g. in the book "Eliot's Poetry and Plays.A Study in Sources and Meaning" by a distinguished Eliot scholar Grover Smith [Smith 1967:34].The poem was submitted through Ezra Pound to "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse" in 1915 but was withdrawn after proof sheets were ready.After a long period of time it was published in the collection "Poems Written in Early Youth" privately printed (12 copies) with the author permission at Stockholm in 1950.The editor John Hayward used as a source the gallery proof for "Poetry" magazine in the Harriet Monroe Collection (University of Chicago).Now this text is available in the volume edited in 1967 [Eliot 1967], its reissues and other editions.The drafts to the poem were published in "The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound" (1971).
From the first sight at the title of the poem it refers the reader to Saint Narcissus (AD c. 99-216), an early patriarch or bishop of Jerusalem.But the first lines of the poem transfer us to a different story, another reality and atmosphere: Come under the shadow of this gray rock -Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, And I will show you something different from either Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock: I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs And the gray shadow on his lips [Eliot 1977: 605].
The scene presents the shadow leaping in an ecstatic dance and passing through a series of metamorphoses coming to death.Most researchers interpret this ghost dancing like a symbol of the conflict of body and soul, ecstasy of suffering, an expression of a sense of horror when "certain desires and temptations rise to frighten the soul" [Schuchard 1999: 10], explicit madness, erotic tortures, nightmares, masochistic complexes, etc.The sensual mode of the text could be caused by the personal inner traumas of the poet (the death of his close Parisian friends at the War, unsuccessful marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, etc.), deep spiritual crisis, historical tragedy of the Great War, etc.At the same time the spatiotemporal mode, the type of psychodynamics and the graphic outline of dance movements were influenced by the artistic paradigm of the time.
The chain of metamorphoses that follow the first stanza remind about the classical mythological roots of Narcissus (Ovid's "Metamorphoses"), they present a sequence of snapshots consisting of separate dance scenes like in Cherepnin-Fokine's ballet "Narcisse".The composition of the ballet included the following ten scenes: pantheistic landscape; the forest spirit playing the flute; dance of Boeotian girls and youths: Bacchae dance; distant voices; dance of Narcisse; Echo's Dance; Narcisse at the stream; disappearance of Echo; death of Narcisse turning into a flower.The text of "The Death of Saint Narcissus" also includes ten consecutive fragments (subplots): hero as a shadow at the grey rock in the opening stanza; his travelling between the sea and the cliff; walking at the meadow; moving by his own rhythm in the river; walking in city streets; arrival to the rock and start to transformations; a fish metamorphose; a tree metamorphose; a young girl metamorphose; turning into Saint Sebastian and birth of "a dancer to God"; the last transformation -the death of Narcissus.All these fragments are united into a series of connected motion scenes including sensual events and body-and-soul transformations.
The text has been constructed in the montage technique close to the aesthetics of old photo albums or early cinema.This composition corresponds to the contextual and intertextual elements: merging the constructive principles of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" based on comparing the adjacent cadres with the methods of Bakst organizing the ballet scenes as alternation of costume spots placing against the backdrop of scenery.The whole poetic text by Eliot was also organized like a choreographic set with change of masks (costumes) reminding Cherepnin-Bakst's libretto, Bakst's scenography and Fokine's choreographic patterns in "Narcisse'.
Филологический класс.2019.№ 1 (55) The Ballets Russes produced a revolution in movement based on the freedom of movement when movement comes from within the body and is expressed through the entire body not just hands and feet.Nijinsky as a Narcisse spoke with his body creating universal artistic language.The protagonist of "The Death of Saint Narcissus" also speaks through this innovative and scandalous body language modifying and transforming his masks and nature and expressing through plastics the complex metaphysical ideas and feelings.The verbal structure of the poem presents the dance moves and sweeps: "sprawling over", "leaping", "his limbs smoothly passing each other, "his arms crossed over his breast", "stifled and soothed by his own rhythm", "his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers", "to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees", "twisting", "tangling", "writhing in his own clutch", etc.The poetic text discloses the hidden meaning of intermediality transforming a verbal structure into a synthetic form of "a dance-poem".
There are no records or reconstructions of the 1911 version of the ballet: in most latter ballet performances Fokine's setting has been replaced by Kasyan Goleizovsky's choreography.But impressionistic music by Cherepnin, the original scenario plan, Bakst's magnificent sketches of costumes and decorations, some rare photos witness the emotional intensity, colorful expressiveness and ecstatic Dionysian character of the 1911 production.The turn to the illustrations of Bakst's sketches could contribute the reader's reception of the coloristic decision and landscape architectonics in Eliot's poem.The grey and red rocks in the text allude to the imagery of Bakst's gloomy scenery of "Narcisse" and ominous red rocks in "Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien".The progression of colors in the last stanza: from white skin to redness of blood and to green could be also explained by reference to Bakst's drawings.The penultimate line of the last stanza "now he is green, dry and stained" refers to a famous drawing of Rubinstein bound to a laurel tree: Ida (St.Sebastian) dressed in a green chiton is tied with gray ropes to a tree with the stain of blood glowing at the heart.The green color could also refer to the foot garters and sandals of Nijinsky-Narcisse (in the draft of the poem we see "the green limbs" [Eliot 1971;91]) as the symbol of plant metamorphosis and rebirth pattern in both poem and ballet.
The poem ends with Narcissus's ecstatic dance on the hot sand: So he became a dancer to God, Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows He danced on the hot sand Until the arrows came.As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him [Eliot 1977: 608].
This scene of dancing on the hot sand and transforming Narcissus into a Christian saint reminds one more fabulous theatre event of 1911: the performance of a mystery "Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien".
St. Sebastian, an early Christian saint and martyr (died circa AD 287-288) became the popular object of the decadent and modernist imagination, e.g. he appeared in the innovative works of European painters (Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Egon Scheele, etc.), literature (Oscar Wilde, John Gray, R. M. Rilke, J. Cocteau, W. Stevens, etc.), photography (the sequence of images of martyr modelled on working-class youths by an American Photographer F. Holland Day, 1906, etc.).According to the literary legend the idea of the performance of a modern mystery with orchestra, choir and dancers came to Gabriel D' Annunzio when he saw Ida Rubinstein in the title role of "Cléopâtre" at the Théâtre du Châtelet (1909).D' Annunzio thought: "She has the legs of Saint Sebastian".Nancy Hargrove suggests that Eliot could visit the performance and reflect his feelings in the poem inspired by art of Rubinstein: "The speaker's description of his dancing on the burning sand while waiting for flaming arrows of lust and/or physical chastisement to penetrate his flesh (34-36) reflects rather directly both Saint Sébastien's walking on burning coals in the first act and his agonizing but ecstatic death in the fourth act of the former" [Hargrove 2010: 12].
Eliot's interest to Saint Sebastian was also resulted in his poem "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" (1914).In his letter from Marburg to Conrad Aiken (25 July 1914) Eliot explains that he didn't share the homoerotic reception of the saint popular in the decadent and avant-garde circles nevertheless the letter confirmed his lively interest to various artistic interpretations of St. Sebastian: "<…> I have studied S. Sebastians -why should anyone paint a beautiful youth and stick him full of pins (or arrows) unless he felt a little as a hero of my verse?Only there's no homosexual about this -rather an important difference perhaps -but no one painted a female Sebastian, did they?So I give this title faute de mieux" [Eliot 1988: 44].Evidently Eliot's interests extended not only to the paintings of Andrea Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, Hans Memling ("three great Sebastians" as he wrote in another letter to Aiken).Rubinstein's female image and exotic interpretation of Sebastian could influence Eliot's perception and thought resulting in an androgynous image of dancing Narcissus -Sebastian in the poem.It could be assumed mentioning the date of writing that "The Death of Saint Narcissus" would have written as an epitaph for his dead Parisian friends as well.In this case the erotic themes would recede into the background bringing to the fore the mourning for premature deaths of beautiful young men.The death on the battlefield as the last tragic metamorphosis and senseless sacrifice could have been interpreted in terms of martyrdom of "tall and handsome" youths, beauty disintegration as it was later embodied in "Gerontion" and "The Waste Land" ("Death by Water").
The poem "The Death of Saint Narcissus" could be considered as one of the key works by Eliot.The first five lines of the poem became lines 26-29 of "The Waste Land" (1922) and thus Bakst's decorations became the part of "The Waste Land" macabre landscape.I would assume that the image of a "hyacinth girl" in line 36 of the same stanza of "The Waste Land" whose image is usually interpreted in the Wagnerian context might be considered as the color reference to a famous Bakst's image of nymph Echo (also named as "a hyacinth girl").The main rebirth pattern of the "The Waste Land" is intertextually connected to the early poems and the neo-mythological anthropological cultural context of the time.
Eliot returned to the images of "The Death of Saint Narcissus" and integral aesthetics of the Russian ballet more than once later.The image of a "dancer to God" will be enriched with new meanings and expand to the important aesthetic and philosophic concept in his poetry, literary criticism and drama.It would be interesting to add that the poem contributed to other arts, e.g.inspired the British composer Benjamin Britten to create the canticle "The Death of St. Narcissus" for tenor and harp (op. 89, 1974).Thus the process of intermedial transformations is being in progress and should be discussed in a media-comparative perspective.
"Dancing joyously": the Fauvist Mood of "Suppressed Complex" The text of "Suppressed Complex" first appeared in Eliot's letter to Ezra Pound on 2 February 1915.He wrote: "I enclose one small verse.I know it is not good, but everything else I have done is worse.Besides, I am constipated and have a cold on the chest.Burn it ' [Eliot 1988: 87].Later the text of the poem was included into the collection of early poetry "Inventions of the March Hare: Poems. 1909-1917" [Eliot 1997: 54].The text of the poem is quite small that there ii a sense to to present here the whole text: The title of the poem corresponds to the psychoanalytical context and implies the content related to repressed instincts, fears and desires.The figure of a dancer symbolizes hidden impulses and probably unacceptable thoughts and emotions toward a sleeping girl.Hysterical behavior, "nerves", suppressed erotic impulses were typical subjects of the early Eliot's poetry and his famous neurotic monologues being "a manifestation of a modern sensibility and of the vibrating, supersubtle perceptual mechanisms necessary to the avant-garde poet" [Jenkins 1997].The poem is based on the contrast of a moving bright figure of a dancer and a static still pale girl.The new thrilling unexpected artistic perspectives open up when we turn to the possible "sources of inspiration" rooted in the cultural context of 1910-1911 s .
It is interesting to disclose the hidden meaning of the intermediality in the poem under scrutiny taking into account the impact of contextual, historical, intertextual and other accompanying elements and dimensions, that will inevitably force to reframe the material.In this case such nonverbal media important for a closer reading of the text were the clue events of the Parisian artistic life puzzling and shocking the audience and echoed over the years: Henri Matisse's "Dance" debuted at the Salon d' Automne in 1910 and the premiere of ballet "Le Spectre de la Rose" in June 1911.
That's fabulous that nobody hasn't noted before that the model of the plot in this Eliot's poem reminds the libretto of Fokine's ballet: a sleeping girl, and a ghost dancing in her room and leaping out through the window.The idea of the ballet came from Jean-Louis Vaudoyer who wrote the story based on a verse by Théophile Gautier.Eliot keeps on the plot but transforms the romantic story interpreting it in the spirit of the epoch, psychoanalytical and expressionistic.The history of transformations of the orig-inal idea could become the object of the special research.In 1819 Weber composed the piano piece, a concert waltz (orchestrated by Hector Berlioz in 1841) and dedicated it to his wife.He labelled his work "rondeau brillante" and devised a program for the piece: "First approach of the dancer to whom the lady gives an evasive answer.His more pressing invitation; her acceptance of his request.Now they converse in greater detail; he begins; she answers; he with heightened expression; she responds more warmly; now for the dance!His remarks concerning it; her answer; their coming together; their going forward; expectation of the beginning of the dance.The Dance.End; his thanks, her reply and their parting.Silence" [Samson 2010].One can hardly see in this cute story the perspective of further development of the story, however, the dance canvas is preserved in all further transformations.This Eliot's poem could be also defined as a "dance-poem" retentively keeping the spatiotemporal and psychodynamic modes of Fokine's ballet.The action takes place at the night in the room with the large window, like in Bakst's scenery we can see the bed and flowers.Bakst's contrast colors of the costumes of the ghost and the girl, white and pink, are embodied in "pale" and "firelight" in Eliot's poem.At last the main attraction of the ballet, a famous Nijinsky's leap, "a leap into madness", corresponds to the leap of the protagonist in "Suppressed Complex".The spirit of the rose will become also one of the through key images in Eliot's poetry.And in the light of "Suppressed Complex" the line "to summon the spectre of a Rose" ("Little Gidding") acquires new shades of meaning.
The joyous ecstatic character of the dance of "suppressed complex" and the peculiarities of spatial and coloristic organization and entourage demand to refer to one more possible visual pretext of Eliot's poem; Henri Matisse's paintings "Dance" (1910) and "Nasturtiums and the ' Dance'" (1912).This allows for the self-reflexive revealing of the intermedial status and performative potential of the painting as a captivating, sensual event and understanding the process of synesthesia causing the text to function as a visual artwork in itself.The primitive, hedonistic character of Matisse's dancing figures allows viewers to experience the simple, pure joy that results from the act of dancing.Matisse's "Dance" is one of the few wholly convincing images of physical ecstasy made in the twentieth century.The red-orange figure of Eliot's dancer devoid of any individual features and sublimating the unconscious emotions, physiological tension and chthonic energy could be imagined among ecstatic dancers by Matisse In turn the themes and character of these paintings were the result of the Matisse's passion for the dance culture of his time.Like his contemporaries Matisse found in dance and dancers a source of inspiration for his work.Forbidding, menacing, tribal, ritualistic mood of "Dance" coordinated to the modernist interest for the archaic and primitive art forms.One of the possible intermedial pretexts of Matisse's "pagan bacchanalia" could the performances of the Ballet Russes in 1909-10s and first of all oriental and Dionysian "Polovtsian Dances" ("Danse polovtsiennes du 'Prince Igor'").A British scholar Olga Taxidou underlined this total intermedial importance of dance for Modernity: "Dance offers a laboratory where the discourses of Hellenism, Orientalism, Primitivism, technology, and gender interact, fuse with, and contradict each other, creating the Филологический класс.2019.№ 1 ( 55) movement that has come to be known as Modern Dance, but also inflecting the broader aesthetics of modernism" [Taxidou 2017: 111].
No doubt that Eliot arriving to Paris visited the Salon d' Automne to see a new work of Matisse which had acquired expressive resonance.It is difficult to say when exactly Eliot knew Matisse's works but in the notes to his letters we found the following fact: "He <Okakura Ka-kuzo> took TSE to meet Matisse in 1910" [Eliot 1988: 93].
To answer the question of what kind that meeting could be should become the task of the future study, by now we can confirm that in 1910 Eliot was definitely interested in Matisse's works.
The composition and entourage of the other Matisse's painting "Nasturtiums and the 'Dance'" corresponds to the décor of the room in which the action of "Suppressed Complex" took place.In the second version of the picture we can see the chair, table with flowers and dancing figures in the painted landscape at the background.Matisse's inclusion of this landscape in an interior creates an intriguing ambiguity by bringing the outdoors inside.Also there is the illusion that the figures are dancing outside the window.A few sprigs of nasturtium in a vase might trigger Eliot's line: "the long nasturtium creeper in the tawny bowl" [Eliot 1997: 54].Thus the poem could be illustrated by this Matisse's picture.And in this case it is not a traditional ekphrasis: the poem is connecting to different intermedial sources through a very complex and dynamic system of references.
The analysis of the early Eliot's poems proves that modernist texts install relations of equivalence with other arts by applying all sorts of literary techniques.The poetic text incorporates the visual and plastic arts not only in a thematic way the text tends to the specific intermedial metamorphosis.The intertextual, intermedial and other accompanying elements force the reader to reframe the original material and be included into the process of co-creation and formation a new intermedial narration.
The turn to the historical context demonstrates that experiments in dance and painting inspired the experiments in poetry.The creative interface between moving modernisms and literary modernism clearly exhibits how the intermedial allusions help to state relations between different arts and texts and to expand semantic field of the recipient text.In his poems "The Death of St. Narcissus" and "Suppressed Complex" Eliot responding to the specific socio-cultural context and individual artistic impulses renewed genre conventions and produced innovative hybrid literary forms, new imagery and original poetic concepts.
She lay very still in bed with stubborn eyesHolding her breath lest she begin to think I was a shadow upright in the corner Dancing joyously in the firelight.She stirred in her sleep and clutched the blanket with her fingers She was pale and breathed hard.When the morning shook the long nasturtium creeper in the tawny bowl I passed joyously through the window[Eliot 1997: 54].