Modernist Drama and Referentiality: T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes and Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel

Abstract

“Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, … will not stay in place, / Will not staystill” (Burnt Norton V). Using words and not being used by them is rare to Eliot’s thought tormented figures, from his drama Sweeney Agonistes to Four Quartets. The struggle with words is a constant trait of Eliot’s poetry, besides being common among modernists all over Europe. His drama’s broken syntax mirrors the clashing mixture of Aeschylean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and the popular culture of music-hall, cabaret, and jazz, which make up the play. As a result, the play brings forth a modernistic defamiliarizing, and metatheatrical effect, by breaking up the linear rapport between action and word, actor and gesture, sign and signified. Poetic drama or unfinished poem, Sweeney Agonistes has been recently revalued (Chinitz, Buttram, Daniel, Cuda), but in its daring avant-garde experimentalism (de Villiers), still eludes interpretations, mainly because of the far from clear reason why Eliot neither finished it nor included it in his theatrical production. If, however, we place the play in the context of various dramatic theories and plays of the time, we may read its incongruities, and disjunctions between words and things, as a one of the modernistic traits that were widely discussed at the time, among others, by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Benjamin’s new way of looking at allegory, stressing its self-referential import, may help us find one more key to the revolutionary direction Eliot had envisaged in his non-dramatic tragedy. As Eliot himself said of Seneca: “the drama is all in the word and the word has no further reality behind it”. Although a link between Eliot’s conservative modernism and Benjamin’s messianism would seem unlikely, recent studies have highlighted some of their common ground (Neilson, Lehman). In order to account for the play’s disjunctions and metatheatrical language, I will dwell on Eliot’s notion of the dissociation of sensibility (1920–1927) comparing it to Benjamin’s allegorical perception, or “the falling apart of modern man”.