Groping Together, Avoiding Speech: Eliot, Greene, Lacan

Abstract

This paper examines how a being can be distanced from the world enough to formulate a question about it. In other words, how can one be in the world which one questions? What is important here is not how we know that we know something, but rather, how we know that we do not know something. In the literary domain, both T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene have created works which address these issues. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) features a traumatic stuttering in the form of a repeatedly truncated question, while in Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (1940) a gap is opened by a refusal to name that which is welcomed into one’s world. Both ‘stuttering’ and ‘refusal’ are considered essential in this analysis because they show how questions can be disruptive while still being lodged within the formulations of symbolic language, just as the answer is. To this end Jacques Lacan’s thought will help develop a strategy for how to actually reside in such a traumatic moment of refusal, or what he calls the Real. In short this is done through strategies of resistance and withholding from within language itself. Put another way, fundamental questioning will be found in the refusal, stuttering and unnaming of things.