T.S. Eliot is profound. His poetry can be read as a verbal defense of, as well as a contribution to, the modernist aesthetic. Perhaps the central idea of the modernists (keeping in mind that the individuals in any grouping cannot be perfectly uniform in their thought) is the primacy of subjective experience, of what people feel in a particular moment, over some objective continuity of reality, something humans cannot actually experience. It is this idea that makes sense of Stravinsky’s dissonance and Nijinsky’s sexualized, graceless choreography: anything to shock, anything to evoke feeling in the audience. An argument for the exclusive reality of the subjective weaves throughout Eliot’s work; the motif of the typical writer will be a symbol or an object, but for Eliot the noticeable motifs are as likely to be ideas. In Ash-Wednesday, a poem that obliquely describes his 1927 conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Eliot writes, ‘I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place/ And what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place’. An explanation of this statement can be found in his play ‘The Cocktail Party’:
[W]e die to each other daily
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger. (Act One. Scene 3. Pp. 384-385)
This idea, Modris Eksteins argues in his book Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, is the birth of the ‘liberation theology’ that has come to dominate the humanities, and it is easy to see how it might feel emancipating. People of this consciousness are no longer tied down by ‘dull roots’ (The Waste Land, line 4) and memory is no longer so cruel. The possibility of reinvention, the truest freedom available to humans, is always there.
This is the lens through which Eliot looks at and damns his society in The Waste Land. ‘You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images’, Eliot writes on the opening page of the poem. (lines 21-22) Given this insight into the fragmented manner of perception, Robert Louis Stevenson was downright reactionary to proclaim ‘that man is not truly one, but truly two’. (Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, page 52) The incoherence of identity was certainly aggravated by the pace of modernity. As Eksteins argues, the age ‘was characterized by overwhelming speed and a corresponding disorientation in the populace.’ (p. 67) Of course, Eliot is not a mere philosopher, and he captures this sense of disorienting motion aesthetically, through his use of punctuation. In the poem’s last section, ‘What the Thunder Said’, from lines 322 to 386 there is not a single full stop, leaving readers without respite as Eliot assaults them with ghastly images of a ‘Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit’ (line 339), ‘falling towers’ (line 373), ‘the shouting and the crying’ (line 325) and, most of all, a drowning absence of water. Water, with some competition from the ‘unreal city’, is the dominant motif in The Waste Land, and though Madame Sosostris leaves her client ‘fear(ing) death by water’, the poem is dominated by aridity. In water, Eliot finds the perfect image to marry to his argument: it is a medium that, in its fluidity, can handle the pace of modernity. It is sensible, then, that the absence of punctuation leaves readers racing for breath just as Eliot writes, ‘But there is no water’. People are not so fluid as water, so when ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge,’ Eliot observes, ‘so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many.’ People, with their dead pasts, cannot make their lives cohere in an age of such rapid ‘progress’.
This reality does not only manifest itself in a lack of full stops; there are stresses in life beyond an inability to ‘sit still’ (what Eliot asks God to teach him how to do in Ash-Wednesday). In expressing these other agonies, punctuation is once again vital. In ‘A Game of Chess’, the most quotidian of the names of the five sections, Eliot creates a tortured dialogue:
‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.
There is an undeniable tension and anxiety in these staccato phrases, with the apostrophes serving a double function by indicating dialogue and suggesting a quickened pace, as though something has been left out. This tension is released with another ghastly image, answering the plea: ‘I think we are in rats’ alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones’. This motif of tension and ugly relief repeats itself immediately:
‘What is that noise?’
The wind under the door.
‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
Nothing again nothing.
‘Do
‘Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you
remember
‘Nothing?’
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
The motif brings to mind another quotation from ‘The Cocktail Party’: ‘It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous./ Resign yourself to be the fool you are.’ (page 363) In both, people are freed by recognizing their own ugliness (or at least, aspects that are undesirable); emotions—reality to Eliot—will not be controlled by human will, and the quicker one accepts that the better. Eliot’s unusual arrangement of the words on the page reinforces the sense of fragmentation, of ‘broken images’ oddly arranged. He is not content to rely on punctuation alone, however, to create a sense of dissonance. After another anguished query (‘Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?’), the reader is greeted with an abrupt, and at first glance nonsensical departure:
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag –
It’s so elegant
So Intelligent
The poem swings from the existential to the deeply frivolous, pivoting on that tangential ‘but’. This is followed by another round of existential inquiry: ‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’ In ‘A Game of Chess’, Eliot is following the commandment of English teachers across the world: Show, Don’t Tell. These juxtapositions do not present themselves as taking place inside a single, unified consciousness, but surely that is the point; ‘we die to each other daily’, after all.
This idea of the subjective as all that is real and the aesthetic it drives lead naturally to an obsession with death, an obsession that is obvious throughout The Waste Land. Consider only the titles of five sections: ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’. Four are portentous, with two referencing death explicitly. Then there are two fantastic (in both senses of the word) lines that cannot fail to make an impression on the reader in the poem’s first act, ‘The Burial of the Dead’. The first, ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many’, has already been referenced. The second is even better in how it treats death as a subject of nonsense. ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ ‘Has it begun to sprout?’ some voice asks, ‘Will it bloom this year?’ This is almost a perfect expression of fascism, with death and destruction as forces of creativity. It is an idea that becomes much easier to embrace if one believes, as Eliot does, that the city is unreal. Indeed, it is not merely easier to embrace but logical to do so given Eliot’s consideration that the subjective moment is all that is ‘actual’. If that is true, it immediately follows that those old enough to realize they are alive are also old enough to realize that they are dead as well, so many times over. That there might be some attraction in death if one is conscious in this matter seems quite the conservative extrapolation. This thought constitutes an attack at the bases of the ideas of rationalism and empiricism. More importantly, however, it is simply incorrect, for it misses something fundamental in its analysis. The different moments one experiences during a lifetime, though impossible to fit into a neat pattern, do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in relationship to one another and in memory. People cannot escape the continuity of time for some liberating moment, and nor should they want to. Reality is much more what one person perceives in one moment; what, after all, would there be to perceive?
Unfortunately Eliot, like so many of the avant-garde, was no exception. He was a conformist to the contemporary zeitgeist, and the thought it expounded had horrific consequences. Like The Waste Land, The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky thematically explores the connection between the creativity and fertility of spring and death; somewhat ironically, the ballet was originally titled The Victim. For the arch-Wagnerian historian (he even married his daughter) Houston Stewart Chamberlain, ‘History existed only as spirit and not as an objective reality; its truths could be approached only by intuition, not by a critical method.’ Eksteins goes on to explain that Chamberlain was deeply admired by the Kaiser and, in time, Adolf Hitler.
Reductio ad hitlerum: Quod erat demonstrandum
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