Sleet and Hail of Verbal Imprecision

Anxiety with the Limits of Logos

Abstract

Whether the words of any literary creation constitute a
medium, a representational strategy for grasping the actuality or
whether the entire world that can inhere in words is a textual finality, an
artificial construct by the words themselves, remains a dilemma
unresolved over centuries of debate. Any flicker of faith in the
representational or significatory stability of the words can perhaps never
suffice and the intellect is bound to face the force of the whirlwinds that
blow through any discourse. Eliot’s concern with the word and its
communicative efficacy grows out of a long debate laden with
intellectual and spiritual perplexities – a debate that arches over the
Judeao-Christian and Hellenistic cultures to Aquinas, saint Augustine,
Gadamer’s hermeneutics and the modernist speculations. The concept of
the logos evolves over centuries passing through spiritual and secular
significations and the identity of the word changes with it. T.S. Eliot’s
anxiety with the word as a means of poetic communication reveals a
chequered journey through a labyrinthine maze of doubt and certitude,
laden with the tradition of this age old debate. Whether Eliot reaches the
ultimate zone where the transcendental Logos shines out with a
luminosity that dispels all doubt, cannot be asserted with exactitude; and
pursuing that line of investigation is not part of the present study. The
continual unfolding of significatory multiplicities, the inherent tensions
and seductions, the intermittent bewilderment and perceptual clarity,
that create a brilliant discursive design, are what constitute the essence
of his compositions and the thematic crux of this article.