Modernism and Physical Illness by Fifield Peter;

Author:Fifield, Peter; [Fifield, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2020-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

With Bleistein’s drowning, Eliot has created a near sequel poem, continuing the downward trajectory of ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’. Having travelled from hotel, bridge, and Princess Volupine, ‘Dirge’ sinks the reader even below the buildings’ watery supports where, notoriously, ‘The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot’: we are now ‘Lower than the wharf rats dive’.78

The remnants of the conspicuously Jewish Bleistein exhibit a literally spectacular symptom of Graves’ disease, an autoimmune thyroid condition whose sufferers can experience exophthalmos—bulging eyes—caused by inflammation of the surrounding tissues. A strikingly diagnostic locution, Eliot’s image is not analytically medical, however, but more tightly bound with the bluntest of racist stereotypes. Bleistein has had his eyelids eaten away in a poetic gesture towards the heavy eyelids associated with Jewish physiognomy.79 Hence, working through Jewish caricature one feature at a time, the more familiar line—‘those are pearls that were his eyes’—becomes transformed into a disfigured Jewish face: ‘That is lace that was his nose’.80 Finally, the mouth too is as racially exaggerated as it is mutilated: ‘See the lips unfold unfold / From the teeth, gold in gold’.81 Bulbous lips, large nose, gold teeth and heavy eyelids comprise a complete roster of prejudice initially less prominent than the named pathology implies. Graves’ disease is not associated with Judaism beyond the perennial image that Sander Gilman calls ‘the motif of the diseased Jew’, but here allows Eliot to play on a sense of bodily disgust.82 While not a condition of the skin per se, Eliot’s description focuses on those parts of the body that stereotyping characterizes as excessive: the nose, the eyelids, the lips. The image is one where excess skin is nibbled away, at once grotesquely undoing and reinscribing racial difference.

The good fit of Eliot’s very specific mock diagnosis is, moreover, potentially misleading: this is, in the first instance, a dubious pun on Bleistein’s unburied body; a debt in its Shakespearean context, perhaps, to Mercutio’s ‘ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man’.83 Eliot’s joke feels uncharacteristic, even uncouth; its prejudicial strain sharing space with a ghoulish levity more familiar to Samuel Beckett’s ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards’.84 Its medical guise is, moreover, a crucially dislocated one; the body is attributed an illness not as a cause of death, or even a manner of suffering, but because of the visually suggestive process of its decay. In this reading, the eyes only apparently bulge because they lack eyelids; it is the decay which is read, not the body per se. Much like the quasi-diseased skin of the landlord of ‘Gerontion’, we may infer that Bleistein has not actually suffered Graves’ disease but is rather a corpse with a semblance of the condition an appearance created by his peculiar dismemberment. (One may expect eyes rather than lids to fall first victim to scavengers.)

The tenor of the image contrasts helpfully with its decaying descendant in The Waste Land. There Eliot revises

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