T.S. ELIOT: THE WASTELANDThis poem was written for the most part while in a sanatorium in Lausanne in Switzerland recovering from nervous exhaustion (not the least cause of which was his marriage to Viv). A revolutionary poem both stylistically- and thematically-speaking, Pound described it as the ‘justification of our modern experiment, since 1900’. Although this is a difficult poem to sum up (the vastness of its scope has made some critics describe it as the epic of the Twentieth century and even Eliot conceptualised it as a collection of separate poems rather than one whole poem), there are a number of technical and thematic features which are worth noting.Formal Strategies:Heteroglossia / Montage:multiple voices succeed each other with alarming and bewildering rapidity. There is, notwithstanding a bizarre footnote crediting the figure of Tiresias with more importance in this respect than he has, no single, central speaker who unifies the multiplicity of perspectives offered in the poem. This is not a single dramatic monologue. Rather, many different chunks of the text (there are no clear demarcations) seem to be snatches (mini-monologues) uttered by different, individually recognisable personalities. At other times, there are passages seemingly uttered by oracular voices possessed of an almost visionary, prophetic, even Biblical quality (e.g. in the first and final sections). At other points, the voice is almost incantatory: e.g. the beginning where a speaker or perhaps a chorus of voices seems to lament the return of life in springtime.The Absence of a Traditional Narrative Development:no plot, no consistent flow of thought (logical or associational) to assist the reader in making sense of the poem. The effect of this accumulation of discontinuous voices is to release a flurry of implications whose swiftness and dense complexity make the poem difficult to apprehend, let alone digest. In short, this is a poem seemingly without coherence which simply begs the reader to unify it even as it denies the reader the normal means to do so: there simply is no continuity of setting, voice, narrative or style. In the place of these, one finds:Naturalistic Description:Eliot focuses for the most part on the more sordid and depressing details of the contemporary metropolis (such urban poetry represented a radical departure from the traditional focus on the natural landscape and on the agreeable, the beautiful and the ideal in Romantic poetry and its derivatives). The poem serves up something akin to a montage of visual images that explore city life and the lives of its inhabitants by juxtaposing images, scenes, dramatic vignettes containing fragments of conversation, etc. At times, these images assume an almost phantasmagoric dimension (e.g. “Unreal city”). Sordid urban images commingle with images of the desert/aridity to the point where, quite clearly, they are meant to comment upon each other: to wit, modern life in the city is being compared to an arid, sterile waste. Recurring Leitmotifs:these, in accumulating significance, become evocative symbols: these are scenes, images and allusions that are repeated in separate contexts and, by dint of which, assume symbolic resonance: e.g. hibernation, the desert; the rock; water; drowning (the allusions to the drowned Alonso in The Tempest, Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet, a drowned Phoenician). As these motifs return in new contexts, they bring with them suggestions and associations from former contexts and evolve into “progressively denser nodes of connotation and feeling” (Perkins 504) and, in so doing, become symbols. This process also serves to link the diverse parts of the poem together. Eliot both draws upon established symbols and forges images into fresh symbols that include: fire (lust), death (this can sometimes mean literal death, sometimes the living death which these Wastelanders lead), rebirth, and water (arouses a mixture of longing [it quenches thirst], fascination and fear [death by drowning]).Recondite Allusions:these are to all sorts of other texts (at least 37) via deliberate echoes of and quotations drawn from other writers. Today, Postmodernists celebrate such pastiche and parody as the basis of all art but many critics of the era saw it as the effect of a lack of creativity. Is The Waste Land the quintessential Modernist/Postmodernist text?Mythological Framework:Eliot, influenced by Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, implicitly alludes to the myth of the dying and reviving god which recurs throughout human civilisation. According to Frazer, primitive man explained the natural diurnal and annual cycles in terms of “the waxing or waning strength of divine beings” and the “marriage, the death and the rebirth of the gods” (qtd. in Perkins, 506). The king was regarded as an incarnation of the fertility of the land: if he weakened or died, the land wasted and would become fertile only when the king was once more healed, resurrected from the dead or succeeded. These ancient fertility myths were incorporated into Christianity. As Perkins puts it,the poem alludes repeatedly to primitive vegetation myths and associates them with theGrail legends and the story of Jesus. In the underlying myth of the poem the land is adry, wintry desert because the king is impotent or dead; if he is healed or resurrectedspring will return, bringing the waters of life. The myth coalesces with the quasi-naturalistic description of the modern, urban world, which is the dry, sterile land. . . . Thepoem does not tell the myths as stories but only alludes to them. . . . (506-7)Eliot’s mythological allusions introduces a semblance of an ordering framework or, for want of a better word, narrative into the poem:[w]hen one knows the plot, one can vaguely integrate some of the episodes of the poemwith it. The fable provides a third language, besides naturalistic presentation andsymbolism, in which the state of affairs can be conceived; the story of the sick king andsterile land is a concrete and imaginative way of speaking of the condition of man. (508)As Eliot put it in a commentary upon Joyce’s Ulysses, the whole apparatus of symbolic and mythological allusion together with the other related narrative techniques served as a way of ‘controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’ The possibility of regeneration signalled by the myth here may hint at Eliot’s growing interest in Christianity.Overview:The narrative strategies described above are not isolatable from each other. It is impossible to consider the use of symbolism, for example, apart from the use of leitmotifs or the mythological framework. In short, in this poem, the juxtaposition of diverse fragments and strategies serves to make them comment on each other,suggesting manifold, complex and diverse implications. Through symbolism multifariousassociations and connotations were evoked and complexly interwoven. The‘mythological method’ added levels of reference at every point. By allusion, Eliot . . .brought another context to bear on his own, and the parallels and contrasts might offer arich, indefinite ‘vista.’ (513)Some questions arise, though. For example, is The Wasteland one poem or is it several?Content / Themes:The Human Condition:This is summed up in the very title of the poem.Sexuality:The very nature of the myths alluded to has the effect of underscoring the sexual as the source of much of the horrors of life in this wasteland. It is perhaps not accidental that The Wasteland was composed and published in the heyday of Freudian thought. The Wasteland seems to have a special relationship in particular with Freud’s celebrated Civilisation and Its Discontents which was composed in the years leading up to 1930 and which was the crystallisation of much of Freud’s thinking up to this point. Freud’semphasis on the degree to which the harmony of human civilisation was merely a facade, predicated as it is upon the repression of the sexual drive and of aggression (his celebrated conflict between the so-called ‘reality’ and ‘pleasure principles’) is echoed in this poem in which sex, usually in some decadent and sullied form, is almost incessantly evoked (especially in sub-poems II and III). Sex is, indeed, the preoccupation of much of Eliot’s poetry. This is a poem which seems to identify the source of the deadening of moral life and the corruption of civilisation with a perversion of the act of procreation that is synonymous with life itself. This link between Frazer and Freud is directly addressed by Eliot who remarked once that The Golden Bough is a work “of no less importance for our time than the complementary work of Freud--throwing its light on the obscurities of the soul from a different angle”(qtd. in Perkins, 509).Dialectic of Form and Content:Marshall McLuhan once argued that sometimes the ‘medium is the message.’ This is of relevance, arguably, to The Wasteland: Perkins argues that “meanings are ambiguous, emotions ambivalent; the fragments do not make an ordered whole. But precisely this, the poem illustrates, is the human condition” (513). The poem conveys in one vignette after the other, the “sickness of the human spirit”(514), the “weakening of identity and will, of religious faith and moral confidence, the feelings of apathy, loneliness, helplessness, rootlessness, and fear” (514). Thepanoramic range and inclusiveness of the poem, which only Eliot’s fragmentary andelliptical juxtapositions could have achieved so powerfully in a brief work, held in onevision not only contemporary London and Europe but also human life stretching far backinto time. (514)Amidst this welter of confusion, people struggle to make sense of an existence which impedes every attempt to do so. Hence the appropriateness of the end where a “total disintegration is suggested in a jumble . . . of literary quotations” (514).。
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