Form
Like "Prufrock," this section of The Waste Land can be seen as a modified
dramatic monologue. The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need
to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead
people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections
are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an
overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with
the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face.
Also like "Prufrock," The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes
and short bursts of structure. These are meant to reference--but also rework--
the literary past, achieving simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing
effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier
time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments
in languages other than English further complicates matters. The reader is not
expected to be able to translate these immediately; rather, they are reminders
of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of mankind's fate
after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one
another.
Commentary
Not only is The Waste Land Eliot's greatest work, but it may be--along
with Joyce's Ulysses--the greatest work of all modernist literature.
Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in print in 1922.
As the poem's dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from
Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to
break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot's wife, Vivien,
also had a significant role in the poem's final form. A long work divided into
five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot
considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War
had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his
subject is the poem's epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the
Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the
future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl's predicament
mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and
withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former
glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, inasmuch as it can be
said to have one, revolves around Eliot's reading of two extraordinarily
influential contemporary cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston's From
Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough. Both of
these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern
thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the
Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is
the cause of his country becoming a desiccated "waste land." Heal the Fisher
King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to
Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales
from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the
Fisher King legend's wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of
modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot's world
there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all.
The legend's imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack
of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.
Eliot's poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast
range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of
The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking
down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at
the time of the poem's writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest
in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The
overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no
overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow
be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately
difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he
means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own
intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing
world of the twentieth century.
The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages
and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating
after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back
reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the
time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie's childhood
recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and
coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political
consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it
involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste
Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a
juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads
for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else.
To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent
literary culture.
The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker
describes a true wasteland of "stony rubbish"; in it, he says, man can recognize
only "[a] heap of broken images." Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade
and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of
nothingness--a handful of dust--which is so profound as to be frightening; yet
truth also resides here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through
Christ, truth is represented by a mere void. The speaker remembers a female
figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of romantic
involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are
lush, full of water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene,
though, leads the speaker to a revelation of the nothingness he now offers to
show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the present, but
here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the
episode from the past, the "nothingness" is more clearly a sexual failure, a
moment of impotence. Despite the overall fecundity and joy of the moment, no
reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn leads
directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode
attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for
the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a philosophical
interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential
nothingness itself. The line comes from a section of Tristan und Isolde
where Tristan waits for Isolde to come heal him. She is supposedly coming by
ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly empty, devoid of the possibility
of healing or revelation.
The third episode explores Eliot's fascination with transformation. The tarot
reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of "reading" possible,
transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions, many of which will come
true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the traditional tarot
pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate
work of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare's The
Tempest ("Those are pearls that were his eyes" is a quote from one of
Ariel's songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the result of
the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud,
vulgarity, and cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in
her predictions of death and transformation is a direct commentary on the failed
religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.
The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the
true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. Eliot's London references
Baudelaire's Paris ("Unreal City"), Dickens's London ("the brown fog of a winter
dawn") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolate
and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the
apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters
him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried in his garden:
again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility.
This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous
slaughter of the first World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in
ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson's failure to respond to the speaker's
inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history,
tradition, and the poet's dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive
burden.
