『네 사중주』와 역설

Four Quartets and Paradox: Here and There

This paper examines how the transcendental world and this world is interconnected in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets by resorting to structure of paradox. It traces how the poem expresses the various intersection between ‘here’ and ‘there’. In doing so, it demonstrates the inseparability between the incarnating 'here' and the incarnated ‘there’. In Burnt Norton, ‘here’ and ‘there’ are disjoined as two contraries; in East Coker they are conjoined, not in actual fact, but as a promise to the fulfillment of which we may aspire. In The Dry Salvages the use of straightforward definition of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is perturbed. In Little Gidding, a verifiable reality is created as the outcome of a double assertion. ‘There’ in Four Quartets is always already an indistinguishable part of ‘here’ itself. ‘Here’ displaces ‘there’, yet ‘there’ can exist in time only through ‘here’ that ‘there’ becomes visible at all; in fact ‘there’ takes shape in the very moment that it incarnates itself in ‘here’ in time and at the same time blots itself out in ‘here’. The purpose of Four Quartets is therefore beyond the purpose Eliot has figured, and has become altered in fulfillment; the home he starts from is the tombstone on which he obliterates his name and to which all his ceaseless explorations must return.