Cyrena Pondrom on "The Waste Land"

Cyrena N. Pondrom's "T.S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land" is a very useful and provocative essay, but it's also frustrating in that it does not seem to capitalize on its important insights. The essay brings The Waste Land and Judith Butler's concept of gender as a performance into a fruitful and intriguing conjunction. The essay allows the reader to come to the poem with a new perspective, but Pondrom only suggests a picture of Eliot's ideas rather than embarking on a synthesis of the poem's pieces.

Another way to frame my frustrations is to ask the questions that Pondrom seems to avoid: What gender performances does Eliot present and what is he trying to argue by offering them? Pondrom's rather unsatisfactory answer, at its most basic, is that Eliot is arguing that gender is performative. For those of us who have read Judith Butler, this argument is not very exciting. Butler's seminal book, Gender Trouble, advances this argument in a very compelling (though Theoretically challenging) way. (And yes, I chose the word "seminal" deliberately).

Eliot might get points for prefiguring Butler's argument by 60 years or so, but that hardly seems enough, for a few reasons. First, Eliot was a prolific critic and purveyor of literary and cultural theories. If he felt strongly about gender as performance (rather than an ontological given), he would not likely have hesitated to state it outright. Second, if Eliot's poem exemplifies gender as performance, then the performances in the poem should be investigated to see how the characters navigate culturally constructed gender categories in unique ways. Pondrom does not seem to do this. In other words, we get the deconstructive mode but not the constructive one.

Pondrom gets tantalizingly close to laying out the path toward synthesis, but only by pointing out the negatives:

"[The scene in the hyacinth garden] becomes a founding site of one of the controlling conceits of the poem, the wastage of human erotic love, simultaneously figuring the absence of connection with a Divine Love; the interruption of desire in language; deferral of union of signifier with signified; and the failure of consciousness to be coterminous with its object."

I'm impressed by the compression and accuracy of this list of issues. But she doesn't spring from the list to that which eludes the processes on it. She summarizes the "wastage," "absence," "interruption," "deferral," and "failure," but she does not consider what remains, or what in fact is created.

This type of problem is endemic to a lot of postmodern criticism. I think some of the cultural and historical criticism in English studies since 2000 (and I'm very tempted to say 2001) has rectified some of these problems. We must learn how to construct after destruction, learn how to build after absences and interruptions. Pondrom's somewhat flat concluding sentence emphasizes that "Eliot understood life itself as a performance." In my own work, I'd like to push the ideas that Pondrom so cogently raises in an effort to understand how Eliot (and other modernists) conceived of the self -- in the positive sense. Eliot's philosophical concerns invites such a project; his reading of Remy de Gourmont and F. H. Bradley as well as the Metaphysical poets provide many productive sites of inquiry.