The Wind’s Talk: Spectres in T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion

Dominantly, criticism of T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion has consisted of attempts to explain the play by referring it to some circumstance of the author’s personal history or an interest he has espoused at one time or another. The play has been discussed as a telling of the author’s own life by projecting and mediating it through one of the characters, usually the main character, Harry Monchensey. It has also been discussed as his comment on the situation of the old landed gentry, whose way of life is threatened from within and from without, and also upon the conditions of the times in which the play was first produced. Other critics have offered accounts of it as having been shaped by the author’s religious beliefs. The view taken in this paper is that recognizing the play as a work demands rather a criticism that focuses on the object as a totality and with the help of close reading to try and make out its organic structure. In this paper, the work is unfolded as a sequence of the pharmakon or pharmakos and it is argued that its movements derive from this principle, which also accounts for its total intelligibility.