The Hawthorne aspect of T.S. Eliot's Coriolan allusive journey as errancy

Abstract

Allusion is generally understood as a textual maneuver that calls into play remembered fragments and transfigured motifs in literature. While pursuing an allusive trail, readers sometimes neglect to consider the detours, certain errant trips a narrative prompts them to make in memory. This essay reads T. S. Eliot's Coriolan fragments alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," both texts featuring young men's errancy and rebellion leading to their respective realities of life. On an allusive trail a reader is a quester; allegory aligns readers and characters in fiction in their common pursuit for the meanings they seek. While parallels, correspondences, and repetitions are remarkable, readers are not always obliged to seek the arresting ground of an empirical "source." The reading here shows how Eliot appears to have reworked a large Hawthornian paradigm involving American colonial history and an individual American's progress in life. It illustrates further how allusion is both a tribute to tradition and a repudiation of its authority, a detail we remark both in Robin and the "hero" of Coriolan fragments. Both Eliot and Hawthorne before him have been, therefore, sensitive to the burden of paternal inheritance, an aspect Eliot's allusive practice in particular makes clear when he draws upon Hawthorne. Eliot's "Hawthorne aspect" thus enables us to see for once the advantage of looking away from a professed allusive lead in the title (Shakespeare's Coriolanus) but towards another paternal link the poet appears to have suppressed (Hawthorne's American tale). © 2007 Blackwell Publishing.