T. S. Eliot's True Fiction: a Study of the Dramatic Strategy of "The Family Reunion" (Metatheater, Metalinguistics, Reflexivity, Phenomenology, Gestalt).

Abstract

The Family Reunion (like Eliot's other plays) has been examined exclusively as a literary text while aural/visual elements and metadramatic/metatheatrical/metalinguistic devices constituting the performance text have been overlooked or misunderstood. This subtext emerges within the dramatic matrix as if in a palimpsest. Presentational elements (sound, rhythm, silence, interplay between forms, light, and space, and the juxtaposition of illusionistic and non-illusionistic theatrical styles) constitute dramatic languages subtly, but profoundly, shaping audience response. The play has been depreciated by stripping this layer so as to ascribe univocal meanings based on the words alone. This study shows how the subtext doubles, undermines, and contradicts surface meanings, thus precluding attempts to fix it as exclusively "religious" (therefore insignificant as modern drama) or attempts to regard it ( and Eliot's entire theatrical project) as an epilogue to the poetry. It seeks to restore what Eliot called "the acted and felt play, which is always the real thing" in "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation" (1927). The Family Reunion invites audiences to see double, creating perceptual problems that entail epistemological and ontological issues. This study shows how Eliot's dissertation, published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1964), provides philosophical codes that govern the play, especially the theory of perception and concept of "real fiction." These are continually reflected in Eliot's (variously designed) preoccupation with the confluence of subjective and objective states where real/unreal develop simultaneously, habitually concealed or falsely reduced, yet emerging (paradoxically) whenever possible worlds intrude upon psychic space. Eliot's final endeavor--the project of depicting the fringes of consciousness onstage, disclosing realities habitually concealed by presenting these possible worlds as both real and accessible within experience--mirrors his work as a whole. Eliot entered the world of commercial theater with The Family Reunion, marking a new frontier where scenic displays announced in Prufrock's invitation to visit other worlds are re-enacted in hieroglyphic characters arising within the hypothetically actual world of the theater: real and unreal in concert, voicing the overwhelming question concealed in explanation, preparing the stage for the Elder Statesman.