Michael Levenson on The Waste Land

Michael Levenson, in his A Genealogy of Modernism, brings a very careful analysis of narration and narrative perspective to the texts he examines. He explains his concerns succinctly in the first chapter by focusing on Joseph Conrad's bifurcation of narrative perspectives into the omniscient narrator who describes physical actions and the first-person narrator who offers psychological reactions.

What is most useful about Levenson's chapter on Eliot is that he takes the time to consider Eliot's underlying philosophical perspective. I can't go into too much depth because I haven't read Eliot's dissertation, but in Levenson's argument, Eliot attacks the rational ego on two ends. First, the rational ego (or the "subject") doesn't really come into being until after immediate experience. It is a construction. Second, the subject itself cannot ultimately determine reality. Instead a confluence of different perspectives must come together; reality is shared.

Levenson brilliantly shows that these two ideas are joined in the figure of Tiresias. Points of view merge together help define reality, not in Tiresias as a character, but as a point at which perspectives come together. Levenson articulates this concisely by stating that "The poem is not, as it is common to say, built upon the juxtaposition of fragments: it is built out of their interpenetration" (190). Levenson explains that this underlying philosophy makes Eliot's work much different than Imagism, which relied upon the perceiver's individual consciousness. Though the self is dissolved in Eliot's theory, multiple perspectives come together.

Levenson's examination of Eliot's poetic method in light of these philosophical points is particularly interesting. Rather than existing methods (even "modernist" ones), Eliot pursues the "mythic method." Levenson contends that the mythic method does not proceed by replacing modern narratives with mythic ones; instead, modern consciousness is created through myths or prior cultural texts (198). Nor is myth a narrative at all in Eliot's usage; myth "extends parallels" (200). Tradition is active in the poetry as well as in Eliot's concept of consciousness. Myth and tradition provides the organizing principle or framework required for consciousness to take shape.

What disappoints me a bit about Levenson's analysis is not what it does, but what it doesn't do. Levenson has much to say about Eliot's method and its underlying principles, but he is reticent when it comes to what Eliot's method yields. The bluntest way to ask this question is to reply with an insistent: "But what is the poem about?" Poems are rarely about their method; they use a method to say something. I don't feel I have a better idea about what Eliot is saying in The Waste Land, though I understand better how it might be working. In my own critical work, I hope to spend more time on this issue - but I wouldn't want to do it without the insights that Levenson brings to the poem.