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.