Ralph Fiennes' Four Quartets
An important theme of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is how we interpret what is handed down through tradition. In his early essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), he touches on this dynamism of how tradition becomes redefined with every new giant talent using a metaphor drawn from science.
Twenty-odd years later, a series of four larger poems (each a quartet) emerged somewhat wider in scope than “The Wasteland” and more sophisticated:
- Burnt Norton (1936)
- East Coker (1939)
- The Dry Salvages (1940)
- Little Gidding (1942)
Four Quartets was central to my M.A. thesis in English Lit. in the early ‘90s. I had it fairly well memorised then, and after watching Fiennes’ production, much of it immediately came back to me. However, this take on it brought new meaning somehow, which Eliot slyly points out inevitably happens in the act of interpretation (what in grad schools and seminaries is known as hermeneutics):
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form…
My dissertation (120-page essay, really) on the poem focused on the themes it shares (would share) with continental philosophers in the coming decades, notably Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Eliot’s poem holds up every bit as ‘timeless’ as it did then, but I am biased. The Quartets contain indirect references to Eliot’s experience as a wartime warden in London during the Blitz, John Milton, Dante (and Virgil by way of him), the Mahabharata, Mallarmé, Poe, King Charles I, and others.
Fiennes’ production in which the poem is the script, performed in a theatre with subtle changes of light, and accompanied by film interludes of the locations associated with the poem’s four sections. Burnt Norton: a fictional name Eliot assigned to a manor house in the Cotswolds he visited with Emily Hale (his lifetime ‘muse’) while writing Murder in the Cathedral. The focus is on the manor and its garden, including a dry pool. East Coker is a village in Somerset, England. The Dry Salvages, the part associated with rivers and oceans, features wide-angle shots of the ocean with gull cries. Little Gidding is a village in Cambridgeshire, where its early seventeenth-century church is the focus.
It is difficult to get permission from Eliot’s estate to adapt his works in other formats. I wonder if they have regrets about licensing Cats? However, what Fiennes does with 4Q will bring more people to read and study the poem, and for that I’m grateful, as it is perha
If you’re an English major or a fan of Fiennes’ acting (and his wife’s skills as a director), you may enjoy this. If you’re looking for plot and suspense, I don’t think this arthouse movie will do it for you.