THRESHOLDS OF WITHDRAWAL: MAURICE BLANCHOT AND THE SPATIAL POETICS OF T.S. ELIOT’S BURNT NORTON
THRESHOLDS OF WITHDRAWAL: MAURICE BLANCHOT AND THE SPATIAL POETICS OF T.S. ELIOT’S BURNT NORTON

Summary/Abstract: This paper reads T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” through Maurice Blanchot’s theory of literary space as a site of withdrawal, absence, and suspended presence. Blanchot’s l’espace littéraire offers a lens through which the poem’s spatial motifs – the rose garden, the still point – can be understood not as settings, but as thresholds: places that recede as they are approached. Earlier models of space in Aristotle and Kant present space as stable and measurable; Bachelard turns toward intimacy and reverie. Blanchot departs from both, suggesting that literature opens a space where meaning dissolves and presence is undone. This conception aligns with Derrida’s trace, yet Blanchot goes further: what is deferred in literature is not just signification, but the very possibility of arrival. Drawing also on J. Hillis Miller, the paper shows how “Burnt Norton” enacts spatial deferral through its rhetorical structure. The rose garden is never entered; the still point dissolves coordinates. In this reading, the poem is not about space – it performs it. Through repetition and negation, Eliot’s text becomes a space of poetic thought at the edge of expression: where language falters, and what remains is the echo of what could not be said.

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