Summary
The first section of The Waste Land takes
its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made
up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different
speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood
of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims
that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the
woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian
imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with
remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much
of the night, and go south in the winter”). The second section is
a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste,
where the speaker will show the reader “something different from
either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow
at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful
of dust” (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known
novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone
is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a “hyacinth girl” and
a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her.
These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner’s
operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian
tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes
an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes
in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode
of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a
London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with
whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes
of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both
futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly
figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden.
The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs
du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing
the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.
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.
