This Space: The intimate outside

When this post from Max Cairnduff appeared I had been reading Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry and books and essays studying Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry in a bid, however incongruous, to articulate an experience unique to reading novels, so I was perplexed by the adjectives he uses to characterise Eliot's sequence. I suppose Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is more accessible, but "dense"? Four Quartets is surely spaciousness itself.¹ How can such anxiety and suspicion when faced by works with a cultural aura be dissolved without the infantilisation of "accessibility"? They are feelings not limited to the common reader: Karl Ove Knausgaard expressed something like it in My Struggle 2 when he notices that he could perform an understanding of Hölderlin's poetry in innumerable ways without it ever opening up to him. Coming to a work without preconceptions is preferable, as one reader of Ulysses explained in a charming anecdote. For this reason Gabriel Josipovici says the quartets should be read "not as a philosophical examination of the problem of time but as the narrative of a person talking to himself at four o'clock in the morning".² The opening of Burnt Norton makes this uncannily obvious.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable,
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end which is always present. ³

Josipovici points to the "simple parataxis" ("and...and...and") and the "pervasive conditionals" ("perhaps… if…what might have been…") to show how Eliot achieves this. In this way the reader joins the poem's speculation, slowly advancing in uncertainty alongside the words. In effect the reader becomes TS Eliot; not the Great Poet, not the Nobel Prize winner, but one on their back in the dark. In this sense, we might ask: how accessible are we to ourselves?

Perhaps it is because we're so used to the confessional first person in contemporary poetry and novels that we read Four Quartets' impersonality as exclusionary. However, if we put Josipovici's suggestion into practice, the poem opens like a door. The issue then becomes: what is on the other side of the door? The metaphor appears quite simple: if the door is unlocked, the room beyond will reveal previously unknown treasures. If it remains locked, we shall remain forever excluded, unenlightened. This is why literary-critical discourse often seems to consist of the rattling of door knobs and of peeping through keyholes.

My copy of Four Quartets, bought for 2p in a church sale circa 1987. ⁴

Giorgio Agamben points out that the metaphor isn't quite that simple because there are two kinds of door. One is an empty space created by frame in a wall – he calls it a threshold-door – while the other is the same threshold blocked by panel attached to the frame by hinges, which he calls a panel-door. The first we can pass through unhindered, hardly noticing the divide, while progress through the second depends on whether we are allowed to open it and carry on through: it may be locked or there may be a sign warning against opening.⁵ In terms of a novel or poem, the threshold-door would be the language in which it is written. Four Quartets is in English, so a native-speaker cannot complain of any restriction. However, the epigram from Heraclitus in ancient Greek may nudge them in the back. Why is Eliot fronting a poem in English with lines from a dead language without offering a translation? Agamben provides a possible answer by adding a variant door.

When the architect Carlo Scarpa was commissioned to design an entrance to a university in Venice, he was asked to include an Istrian stone panel-door from a convent. He did so by laying it flat and covering it with water. This seems an odd thing to do but Agamben recognises it as a considered act and draws attention to horizontal doors that were a familiar feature in the classical world as a connection between the living and the dead, between world and underworld. Some were panel-doors, some were threshold-doors. The former, he says, were invented to control entry and is the reason for "endless ranks of guardians of the door, angels or doormen, latches and digital codes, that must ensure that the device functions correctly and permits entry to no one who does not have the right". We can recognise the correlation with literary culture: reviews judging functionality and readers as cowering supplicants seeking entry to the otherworld of literature (and perhaps authors hoping to be let out). Agamben notes that this supernatural feature dismissed by modern world as irrational has been devolved into legal affairs, with the law acting as a panel-door placed in the threshold of relations between men: "As Kafka's parable unequivocally shows, the law coincides with its own door; it is nothing other than a door." Hence no doubt the otherworldly aura of court judgments.

What kind of door then is Scarpa's? Agamben says it submergence alludes to its location, in that instead of city gates as a panel-door Venice has a lagoon as a threshold-door, so the city is accessed only by water, but one cannot pass through Scarpa's door since it is horizontal. It is therefore neither panel- nor threshold-door.

If the door is not a place but the passage and entranceway between two places, here it seems to become a place unto itself—perhaps the place par excellence, whose possible use is, however, not yet clear. In [this] case, the horizontal door now defines a space in which it would be possible to walk, pause to think, hesitate, perhaps even live—but not to close it or simply go across.

An ideal space, then, for a university. The parallels to books and reading are also very clear. Agamben encourages the impression further after discussing the four terms in Latin for door that leads to his "decisive point" that the person before the door is always on the outside and as such "experiences the outsideness of the door". We see this in the delight of anticipation before a book-door we can be sure will open and provide a welcoming space, hence the popularity of genre fiction and first-person novels and poetry, and in the trepidation before a book-room whose contents we suspect will be cold and forbidding, such as a book-length philosophical examination of the problem of time.

It is, then, possible to think of the door as neither an entranceway that leads to another place nor simply a space around which one could walk. It is rather the event of an outside, which is nevertheless not another place but, as in Kant's definition of the thing-in-itself, a space that must remain absolutely empty, a pure exteriority.

With this in mind, the Heraclitan epigrams could be seen as the horizontal door beneath the water of Eliot's uncomplicated English. Adding an approximate translation, as this site does, while appealing to accessibility and knowledge, dissolves the door. In unease before a book like Four Quartets, we should perhaps welcome that its possible use is not yet clear. Otherwise, what disappears from experience is experience itself; "for experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature."⁶ Or perhaps part of our nature to which we had yet to be exposed. Agamben says Scarpa's door allows one to live in a space that does not necessarily lead anywhere "but faces the sky and dwells in a pure taking place, showing the intimate outsideness of every door".

Notes

¹ The title is Four Quartets; that is, without the definite article, just as The Waste Land is three words not two. As I've always said, and it is especially true of poetry: Attention to detail is paramont.

² In The Singer on the Shore.

³ Paul Scofield's reading of the poem corroborates the advice; annoyingly, only the first part of Burnt Norton is not included on YouTube.

⁴ Signed by Eliot scholar Helen Gardner, confirmed by this signed photo found online. If it was her copy, it is not annotated. I've also signed it, so it's doubly unvaluable.