LECTURE 4-13-01: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

In Abrams: dramatic monologue (70-71), free verse (105-7), point of view (231-236)

The Waste Land, Lecture One. The form of The Waste Land: pastiche, collage

I. Introduction:

The poet Wallace Stevens wrote a letter to a friend after spending a weekend reading Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queen and told the friend that he had become "naturalized in its imagination." He meant, I think, it was like become a citizen of a foreign county and its language. He noted that was effect of reading any long poem—the reader stops feeling that the language is strange, and becomes “naturalized” in it.

Getting naturalized means becoming so familiar with the structure and succession of sounds in the poem, by repeated readings when it still feels like nonsense, that you come to hear and feel how it's contextualizing itself. In 25 words or less I'd say that The Wasdte Land is post-WW1 poem written from the point of view of a man having a nervous breakdown that feels like the equivalent of a world breakdown. His mind is the mind of Europe in a state of trauma. Bits of text and personal memories have flown loose from his education and from his experience and are banging around in his brain; but they feel valuable to him, as if they hold like keys to meanings he needs if he could only figure out how they apply. "These fragments I have stored against my ruins" So the poem requires repeated re-reading, even with incomprehension; and your comprehension will be greatly assisted by thinking about these fragments with the help of the notes at the back of the book. There are two sets of them: Eliot’s notes, which were published with the poem and are printed on pp. 71-75, and the explanatory notes provided by the editor Frank Kermode on pp96ff.

The Waste Land is not a narrative, far less is it an allegory, where one-to-one relationships are established between symbols and meanings. It works more like a pastiche[i] or collage. [ii] Nonetheless, it does have a movement in it, specifically, the movement of a quest narrative—such as the narrative of the opera Parsifal, based on the Arthurian legends of the quest for the Holy Grail. The poem begins in torment and ends with a prayer. What's the torment, and what's the prayer for? Answering those questions is like going to a therapist or a spiritual adviser: there's no "right" answer but pressing the questions makes you look for repeating motifs and patterns--and above all for the movement of feeling in the poem, which I do believe is in fact utterly familiar. Depression. Grinding meaninglesness where meaning is supposed to be. Remember that it felt to the intellectuals of Eliot’s day like the expression of what they had all been through: the losses and ruination they had endured in the war. The “personal” voice in the poem did not seem to them like the voice of an individual, it was the voice of a whole suffering culture.

The Waste Land has endured as one of the 20thC’s most powerful works of literature. But it is a genre-busting work of art that requires approach via reading strategies that differ radically from those applied to other works of literature that preceded it: The Waste Land must be read as though it were a dream, not a story. That is, one must look for patterns of association, and attempt to comprehend the kinds of relationships they establish inside the poem. I’m going to focus my lecture on “reading” just a few significant elements of the poem today.

Form of The Waste Land: pastiche, collage

I. Recap of lec 4/13: “Prufrock” as Modernist dramatic monologue:

Character with a fragmented subjectivity: a man with an unconscious

Fragments: “you” = consciously adopted social persona

“you” as censorious “superego”

“you” as empathic addressee who knows juts what I mean

II. The Waste Land as pastiche (from pasticcio = pie: a voice pie!) Every word is an ingredient.

Today: read the beginning against the end, looking for operative elements in patterns of association: From “heap of broken images” to “fragments I have shored against my ruins”

A. Track the grammatical forms: Assertion (depressive inertness); Question (irony, curiosity); Optative mode (wishing, desiring)

Opening: lines 1-18

depressive assertion & reverie

Operative question: lines 19ff

“what are the roots …what branches grow?”

Ending: benediction

B. Track the dominant tropes: dry vs wet, to ending

Opening: “breeding”[iii] vs “dried tubers”[iv]

Operative questions: “what have we given?” etc

Ending: “rain” = what the Thunder said (nonsense syllable);

& what is made of it: insight, and prayer for transformation

Waste Land, lec 1: 13 April 20011

[i] From OED: (pastitto) [It. pasticcio ‘any manner of pastie or pye’ (Florio), in med.L. pastcium, deriv. of Com. Romanic pasta PASTE.] A medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch, farrago, jumble; spec. a. In the orig. It. sense, a pie containing numerous ingredients, of which macaroni and some form of meat are the chief constituents. b. An opera, cantata, or other composition, made up of various pieces from different authors or sources, a pot-pourri. c. A picture or design made up of fragments pieced together or copied with modification from an original, or in professed imitation of the style of another artist; also, the style of such a picture, etc.

[ii] From OED (kl) [Fr., lit. ‘pasting, gluing’.] An abstract form of art in which photographs, pieces of paper, newspaper cuttings, string, etc., are placed in juxtaposition and glued to the pictorial surface; such a work of art. Also transf., fig., and attrib.

[iii] “Breeding” inaugurates the theme of the quest for the Grail, the quest that eventually heals the wound of the Fisher King; his wound is impotence. Eliot’s note refers to a work of literary criticism (From Ritual to Romance) that draws on contemporary anthropological work on fertility myths, accounting for the way the myths continue to be transmitted in Western Culture through works of art such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romances (including Perceval, le conte del Graal), Wagner’s Parsifal, Robert Broawning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”

[iv] From OED: 1. Bot. An underground structure consisting of a solid thickened portion or outgrowth of a stem or rhizome, of a more or less rounded form, and bearing ‘eyes’ or buds from which new plants may arise; a familiar example is the potato. Also applied to other underground structures resembling this but of different origin, as in tuberous roots. 1668 WILKINS Real Char. 90 Tuberous roots; consisting of one single tuber, or of several. 1704 [see b]. 1822 J. FLINT Lett. Amer. 57 The potato crops are better.., the plants are more vigorous, and the tubers much larger. 1870 HOOKER Stud. Flora 352 Orchis. Tubers

globose ovoid or palmate. 1880 GRAY Struct. Bot. iii. §3 (ed. 6) 59 A Tuber may be.characterized as a short thickened rhizoma on a slender base, or a rootstock some portion of which..is thickened by the deposition of nourishing matter. b. (With capital initial.) A genus of underground discomycetous fungi, comprising the truffles. [1693 Phil. Trans. XVII. 824 The Tubera Terræ..observ'd lately at Rushton in Northamptonshire..are indeed the true French Truffles, the Italian Tartuffi. 1699 EVELYN Acetaria 42 Trufles, Pig-Nuts, and other subterraneous Tubera.] 1704 J. HARRIS Lex. Techn. I, Tuber, properly, is a subterraneous Mushroom, or a Truffle; but by Botanick Writers, is often used to signifie the round turgid Roots of some Plants: which they call Tuberose, or Knobby Roots. 2. A rounded swelling or protuberant part in the animal body. a. Path. A morbid swelling or enlargement, as of a gland, etc. 1706 PHILLIPS (ed. Kersey), Tuber,..a Swelling or Bunch in a Man's Body. 1834 Good's Study Med. (ed. 4) IV. 233 Those who are constitutionally predisposed to a production of tubers and tubercles. 1888 FAGGE & PYE-SMITH Princ. Med. (ed. 2) I. 96 In a solid organ it [i.e. a tumour] may form a rounded mass, which is called a nodule or tuber. b. Anat. A rounded projecting part or structure; a tuberosity. Chiefly as Latin, with pl. tubera: often with defining word, as the specific name of such a structure: e.g. tuber cinereum, a conical

projection at the base of the brain; tuber cochleæ or tympani, the promontory of the tympanum. 1741 MONRO Anat. (ed. 3) 209 The Tuber is afterwards added in the Manner that other Epiphyses are. 1857 DUNGLISON Med. Lex., Tuber cinereum, a grayish tubercle, seen at the base of the brain behind the commissure of the optic nerves. 1866 HUXLEY Preh. Rem. Caithn. 110 Norwegians are remarkable for the length of their skulls, and the very general development of an occipital tuber, or probole. 3. gen. A rounded projection, protuberance. rare. 1888 DOUGHTY Arabia Deserta I. 32 We..came where in a torrent bed are laid bare certain great tubers of the lime rock underlying.