T. S. Elliot's The Waste Land

Gareth Reeves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315504834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This work argues that although "The Waste Land" demands close reading, the spirit of the old New Criticism works with inappropriate assumptions about unity and closed form. Many critics have tried to fix the text, to find hidden narratives and plots, spiritual guests and allegories of salvation. Instead, this reading sees the poem as resolutely open-ended, supporting this view with recent developments in Reader-Response criticism and Reception Theory. The study focuses on the way poetry sounds (or does not sound, cannot be sounded). It concentrates on syntax, lineation and intonation. It also brings out the presence of the muted voices of wronged women in a work often called misogynistic.

Preface

The Waste Land has come to be regarded as one of the chief exemplars of modernism in English literature. But it appears to have earned this status more by accident than by design. Although Ezra Pound famously helped bring the poem into the world, it is doubtful that he understood the nature of the brainchild. Nor, it seems, did Eliot himself ever make up his mind about it. Does it express 'the plight of a whole generation', or is it 'a piece of rhythmical grumbling'? Is it a series of loosely connected fragments, 'thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season', or does it contain some principle of unity? Is it a vision of despair or a quest for salvation? For all the commentary and analysis it has attracted, it remains a riddle, and not only to its readers but also, as Maud Ellmann has remarked, to itself. The sense of resistance a reader experiences, even today, on encountering The Waste Land is essential to it. To get beyond that sense many critics have wanted to fix the poem, to find hidden narratives and plots. But by trying to familiarise ourselves with it we are in danger of wishing away its defining characteristics: its inscrutability, its distance, its very lack of familiarity.

A poem that is a riddle to itself must remain so: it can be elucidated but not paraphrased. Hence this study is based on the premise that The Waste Land needs close reading, although not in the spirit of the old New Criticism, which tended to work with assumptions about unity and closed form. Rather, my reading recognises that the poem is resolutely open-ended (and not merely floatingly 'indeterminate'), a view supported by recent developments in reader-response and reception theory. The poem enacts the sense of thought and feeling being discovered and developed at the moment of writing. Consequently every moment of the text deserves pondering. Its self-reflexivity mirrors self-scrutinising, lockedin, even solipsistic emotions. But within the poetry can also be felt the often thwarted attempt to break free into full-throated lyric utterance.

The allusiveness of The Waste Land has, notoriously, encouraged exegesis rather than criticism. If the present reading goes too far the other way, my excuse is that I wish to help correct the balance. To hear what the poem is up to I have found it necessary to begin at the beginning and work my way to the end. Otherwise there was the danger of erecting spurious structures. Allusive 'keys' are everywhere in the poem, but invariably one is left wondering if and how far the poem is undermining its own, and the reader's, pretensions. Madame Sosostris, for instance, intimates a host of clues, but who is she to be believed? The Waste Land remains, to this day, a very singular work. Its sense inheres, more than most poems in English, in the way it sounds (or, sometimes, does not sound, cannot be sounded). This reading, therefore, concentrates on all the ways of sounding: syntax, lineation, intonation.

Historical and Cultural Context

Much of Eliot's poetry, and The Waste Land conspicuously, enacts a sense of displacement that remained with him always. He cultivated the role of exile; it became a carefully created identity, a self-protective cover. As an American living in England he sometimes signed himself 'metoikos', Greek for 'resident alien'.¹ He relished the in-between status, saying his poetry 'wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America.'² But the American expatriate was only one version. He saw himself as exiled everywhere, in America, in France (after graduating from Harvard in 1910 he spent 'a romantic year' in Paris studying French literature, and philosophy, at the Sorbonne)^,3 and even in what became his adopted country, Britain — as the following extract from a letter written when he was 40 testifies. Its writer stands outside himself, watching himself in the third person, while intimating what are for him some of the essential biographical facts:

Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn't an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn't a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension.⁴

'The point of view' is evidently unlocatable; and the voice's breathless forward movement conveys both displacement and a search for some place to rest.

In The Waste Land the sense of displacement has a wide historical and geographical context. Against the backdrop of the First World War and its aftermath, the rats and dead men, the talk of demobilisation, the vision of exploding cities, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London, there are, for instance, the displaced aristocratic Marie and the 'hooded hordes' of 'swarming' refugees. The disintegration of European civilisation is the scenario for what comes across as a general sexual, moral and spiritual collapse. But does the poem's hallucinatory and phantasmagoric manner convey a state of mind more than a state of civilisation? Interior and exterior merge in a private world of sensation. As the next section will argue, this doubleness has been at the heart of critical debate about The Waste Land ever since its publication.

The war certainly affected Eliot personally, if indirectly. Jean Verdenal, his closest friend and intellectual companion during his year in Paris, was killed in the Dardanelles (Eliot dedicated his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations [1917], to him); people close to his wife's family were killed fighting; her brother returned from the front to tell of mangled corpses and trench rats. But Eliot was characteristically wary of any trace of emotional indulgence. He looked askance at the war enthusiasm of those who, like his American relations, were at a safe distance. He wrote to his father:

To me all this war enthusiasm seems a bit unreal, because of the mixture of motives. But I see the war partly through the eyes of men who have been and returned, and who view it, even when convinced of the Tightness of the cause, in a very different way: as something very sordid and disagreeable which must be put through.'⁵

No doubt this authentic sense of the war's horror, and perhaps the consciousness of his inability to participate (he tried to enlist in the United States Naval Intelligence Service, but to no avail), gave personal urgency to the 'impersonal theory of poetry' promulgated in his essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1917), in which he tried to argue that great art is not expressive of the emotions of the individual: in another letter to his father he wrote that 'everyone's individual lives are so swallowed up in the one great tragedy, that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant!'⁶

Eliot's habitual way of keeping himself apart while appearing to belong, of being both alien and resident, is demonstrated by his wary association with the Bloomsbury Group at the time of The Waste Land. Consorting with Bertrand Russell and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, he was in touch with people who had inherited or earned status within Edwardian society and English culture. The group had many academic, literary and political connections. Yet they were also outsiders, unorthodox in their social and sexual behaviour and in their political leanings. Leonard Woolf was a determined antiimperialist. Russell, an important philosopher of distinguished lineage, was a pacifist and a philanderer. Such views and behaviour were in many respects opposed to Eliot's. But Bloomsbury's position of nonconformity at the centre of the Establishment matched his powerful instinct for camouflage. In all this there was a strong element of self-preservation on Eliot's part, a remoteness that sought to go deeper, and more ruthlessly, than any social connections would allow. He wrote to Mary Hutchinson, also associated with the Bloomsbury Group through her friendship with Clive Bell:

I like to feel that a writer is perfectly cool and detached, regarding other peoples' feelings or his own, like a God who has got beyond them; or a person who has dived very deep and comes up holding firmly some hitherto unseen submarine creature. But this sort of cold detachment is so very rare — and stupid detachment is so much the rule.⁷

The feeling here is akin to that behind the submarine imagery in The Waste Land ('Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!', a line adapted from The Tempest: 'A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers'). This letter was written in the year which saw the publication of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', and it betrays, once again, the personal pressures behind the essay's impersonal theory, behind the 'cold detachment' of such sentences as 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.'⁸

This and similar sentiments in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' strongly intimate a sense of relief at the 'extinction of personality'. But it is the burden of The Waste Land that though it would bury personal experiences and emotions, they re-emerge painfully and unexpectedly ('April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead ground'; 'Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow'; 'What are the roots that clutch'; 'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?'). One such experience is Eliot's unhappy marriage to the Englishwoman Vivien HaighWood, who suffered from nervous mental and physical ailments. The marriage must have had some bearing on the sexual anxiety in the poem, although, as I argue in the section on 'Theoretical Perspectives' below, this should not lead to facile conclusions about Eliot's attitudes to women. Nor is it wise, as Peter Ackroyd warns, to find in The Waste Land an autobiographical transcription of their marriage. For instance, many readers identify Vivien with the woman in the neurasthenic episode of 'A Game of Chess' (lines 111—38). However, these lines must contain a large fictional component, otherwise Eliot would surely not have felt able to show her the poem in the making, which we know he must have done because she wrote in the margin of a draft of the episode 'WONDERFUL' and 'Yes & wonderful wonderful'.⁹ Eliot's acute sexual inhibition and fear are revealed in several poems he wrote before the publication of The Waste Land. For instance, in the prose poem 'Hysteria', written in 1915, the speaker imagines himself swallowed by a femme fatale, 'lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat'. He is threatened by loss of identity, until, like the speaker at the end of The Waste Land, he takes refuge in salvageable 'fragments', and consciousness masters environment: 'I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.' In an obscure and allusive poem called 'Ode', published in 1920, apparently about a sexual rite de passage, the ritual is a failure: there is 'silence from the sacred wood', the 'Mephitic river' is 'uninspired', and Turnus's sombrely sonorous death at the end of the Aeneid is reduced to a disappointing sexual 'death', to what, in Lyndall Gordon's words, 'appears to be a premature ejaculation': 'Indignant / At the cheap extinction of his taking off.'¹⁰ As can happen in The Waste Land, the poetry here takes refuge from, and thus signals, difficult emotions by switching into a disturbingly satirical register.

One of Eliot's poetic procedures for distancing himself from his emotions is his extensive and habitual art of allusion, by which personal experience can be seen from the perspective of other poets, other times. Dante's Divine Comedy provides one such perspective in The Waste Land-, one memorable instance is the allusion to the Inferno in the hallucinatory crowd that flows over London Bridge at the end of 'The Burial of the Dead'. Other perspectives come from Conrad, John Day, Goldsmith, Kyd, Marvell, Middleton, Milton, Ovid, Shakespeare, Spenser, Verlaine, Virgil, Webster, to name some of the more apparent. But one of the most pervasive presences behind the poem is the great precursor of French Symbolist poetry, Charles Baudelaire, who showed Eliot a way to bring modern urban life into his poetry. Baudelaire's example is partly responsible for the phantasmagoric unreality of Eliot's Waste Land city. Eliot's note to the 'Unreal City' at the end of 'The Burial of the Dead' quotes the opening lines of Baudelaire's 'Les Sept Vieillards': 'Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, / Où le spectre, en plein jour, raccroche le passant!' (O swarming city, city full of dreams, / Where the ghost accosts the passer-by in broad daylight!),¹¹ The poem depicts a modern psychological Hades. Eliot learned from Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which he first read in 1908, how it is possible to turn outer circumstance, mundane 'reality', into the poet's interior and visionary world. For Baudelaire the exterior, material world can become a 'forest of symbols', transformed into images of the poet's inner life. The poet's psyche gets projected outwards 'as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen', in the words of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1917). The poet thus stands outside his own emotions and feelings in order to observe them.

This process goes on in much of Eliot's pre-Waste Land poetry. The imagery of 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' (1917), for instance, is a visible demonstration of the speaker's spiritual and emotional condition. 'Preludes' (1917) contains lines which can be read as commentary on this kind of poetic strategy:

You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.

'Portrait of a Lady' (1917) creates drama out of the poet's emotions, and even as it does so acknowledges the slipperiness of self-expression: in Part III the speaker ironically stands back from his feelings to watch himself act them out:

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance —

This is self-consciousness consciously arrived at, poetry that knows it is looking in the mirror, placing its emotions precisely.

The figure cut by some of these early poems was imitated from another nineteenth-century French poet, the Symbolist Jules Laforgue, whose poetry makes a formally mannered virtue out of ironic self-regard. The speaker of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', for instance, comes partly out of Laforgue's dandyish, shape-changing persona. He can only 'find expression' through self-projection. He watches himself watching the world. Eliot's early poems watch themselves sometimes with sang-froid, as with the switch at the end of 'Preludes' from 'The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index