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.

Telescoping of Images in "The Waste Land"

It is especially provocative to read the following quote from Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" when considering how fragmentary The Waste Land is:

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary [...] in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

The poem forces us to ask whether Eliot has marshaled the abilities that he values most into a successful work. Does Eliot, after his sojourn in the waste land, "form new wholes"?

That is too large a question for an itsy-bitsy blog post, but I want to look at a technique that Eliot calls “telescoping of images” and attempt to determine whether it has the power to create the unity Eliot refers to. Here's the beginning of Section V, "What the Thunder Says":

After the torchlight read on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

The first thing to consider is Eliot's insistence on the word "after," which begins each of the first three lines of this final section. Eliot tries to focus on a moment after the sturm und drang of life. But I would suggest that this is not just some interlude or a lull; by definition, the moment after the sturm und drang of life is...death. Eliot juxtaposes life and death throughout the poem (along with a corresponding contrast between desire and frustration). But after all these "afters," Eliot actually deposits us in a present that only continues toward an ultimate after, the cessation of movement. That is, he does not offer death, just the act of dying. So, despite the insistence on the possibility of "after," we are only always moving toward "after."

To me, this seems like an example of telescoping images. The telescope metaphor itself exemplifies Eliot’s poetic practice. Looking through a telescope unifies distance and proximity. A telescope allows one the experience of a distant object as a close object. The distant object suddenly is near. [The way some small telescopes operate (that is, by sliding open and closed) also unifies pulling apart and staying together]. In the section quoted above, Eliot seems to unify after and during. The past (the torchlight, the silence, the agony) seem to weigh on the present; they are incorporated into the feeling of the present. Eliot's phrase "structure of feeling" is useful here (from his "Dante" essay). The present is not discrete, nor is the past ever really over.

This complex notion of time and movement is reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. One can never move because one must cross half the remaining distance, but half of that distance must be crossed first, ad infinitum. For Eliot, these are not philosopher's games but real problems of experience. However, they are not problems to be solved so much as they are problems to be captured in artistic expression. Poets get closer to reaching the absolute if they can telescope images into unities. They must create structures of feeling rather than individual responses. If we are conceived of as only "living," then we are separated from our inevitable "dying."

These ideas help make sense of Eliot's claim that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" ("Tradition and the Individual Talent"). He isn't arguing against emotion in poetry; he suggests that a "personality" is too singular, that an individual's emotional response is devoid of a context from which it can never truly escape. Instead, the poet should aim to achieve a union of past and present, subject and object, self and other. In short, the poet must seek to express the absolute. When Eliot complains at the end of his "Dante" essay that modern poets present "only odds and ends of still life," he offers in his poetry a telescoping of images that pulls these odds and ends into complex layers of time and relation.

Entry into The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a complex and allusive poem. As Eliot's notes indicate (and an avalanche of scholarship confirms), a full reading of the poem requires much study. But often the reader first approaching the text is not equipped with the requisite learning, especially those ranks of young but intellectually fatigable college students. How do these readers find entry into The Waste Land? I would suggest that the most readable and compelling section of the poem comes near the beginning of the final section, What the Thunder Said:

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

This begins a sub-section of 29 lines that hang together. They present a sustained contemplation that doesn't require knowledge of a foreign language, the Grail legend, the biography of Augustine, references from Shakespeare, etc. The poetic repetition of these two substances, water and rock, is hypnotic and frustrating at the same time. There's a paradoxically musical confusion in the poet's persistent attempt to imagine these two substances interacting with one another.

Eliot counts on some basic symbolist principles in this section. Rock is still and solid; water is moving and diffuse. These simple concepts circle around each other in permutation after permutation. Rock is inescapable; water is desired. The length of this section emphasizes the insurmountability of this problem; the reader always comes back to the rock; the reader is never given water. This denial accomplishes the reader's emotional response without establishing a clear "meaning" (and without the layers of allusion covering other sections of the poem).

Furthermore, the grammatical structure mirrors the description of unachieved desire. A lengthy set of conditional phrases is never completed, reenacting the impossibility of the desired object:

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A a pring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And the dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

The reader does not get to consider the possibility of water because the putative realm that includes water is never described. The substance is denied to both the speaker and the reader. Through these methods, Eliot dramatically builds emotion and frustration, while at the same time constructing a poem that embodies the themes it explores.

But I'd like to look a bit deeper at these two substances in order to uncover another layer of meaning. First, due to much of the rest of the poem's obvious interest in sexual frustration (which I haven't developed here, but about which has been much written), it is worth seeing these substances in this light. Motion is rightly conceived of as essential to the sexual act; the rock's immobility does not lend itself to participation. On the other hand, the rock's rigidity might have a claim to mimicking male sexual readiness, but the lack of water suggests an unfulfilled readiness. That is, the rock does not find its yielding and flowing counterpart.

Second, while the preceding paragraph admittedly participates in a bit of vulgar Freudian criticism, it does so within a context of more obvious references to sexual frustration. I'd like to step beyond this into another layer of (perhaps still Freudian) analysis. The rock is a stable object; it is clearly delineated; its boundaries make it discrete and isolatable. Water is counter to these ideas. I would suggest that the rock indicates a single and identifiable subjecthood. The rock is a unified Self. Rock, as a substance, is consonant with the "windowless monad" of the self described by Leibnitz. From this perspective, the desire for water represents a sort of death drive, a wish to wash away the self, to dissolve into movement. The speaker is unable to imagine or achieve the loss of self, but he is inevitably drawn to it.

If we take the first and second of the points listed above in conjunction, we find that Eliot presents sexuality as a loss of the self. This reminds me of my thoughts about Ezra Pound's Imagistic poetry. But there's an important difference: where Pound (in his poetry) rejected sexuality outright, Eliot seems intent on remembering the pull of a desire whose satisfaction is ultimately impossible. In large part, I would argue that The Waste Land explores desire and the inevitability of its failure to find satisfaction. In conjunction with this failure comes the protection of the self as a discrete monad. I hope to support this reading in entries to come. However, at th is point it seems safe to say that the above quoted section of the poem provides a useful entry point for new readers, not just because it is not so allusive or fragmentary, but also because it hints at the themes we see throughout.

Quentin Meillassoux's "After Finitude" Chapter One

Meillassoux provides a unique history of philosophy, splitting philosophers into two grops: pre-Kantians (who believe in objects themselves) and post-Kantians (who believe in the relations between subjects and objects). Meillassoux calls these later philosophers "correlationists" because correlation takes primacy over the thing itself or the subject as Being. He considers consciousness and language (and the phenomenologists and linguistic post-structuralists who seem to oppose them) examples of correlational thinking.

Meillassoux begins by pointing to the concept of "ancestrality," which is essentially the idea that scientists can offer true statements about objects that exist before humans were around to perceive them. "Ancestral" facts include the accretion of the earth 4.56 billion years ago. The fact of the earth's accretion is difficult to fit into correlationist thinking because they see the link between man's consciousness and the object of which it is conscious as primary to any object or self as such (that is, "in itself").

I don't know where Meillassoux takes his argument from here (I hope to write more as I make more progress through the book). But it seems promising for my work on the modernist poets. First, and most obviously, Meillassoux's perspective seems to hint at some sort of pre-existing absolute. This might have interesting implications compared to the thought of English philosopher F. H. Bradley, who went on and on about the Absolute -- and about whom T. S. Eliot wrote his doctoral dissertation. Second, the Imagist emphasis on "direct treatment of the thing" seems problematic from the perspective of "correlationists," who represent the mainstream of twentieth century philosophical thought (as described by Meillassoux). But it also seems problematic from a Bradleian perspective; after all, how does one directly treat the thing if it cannot be distinguished from other things because they're all part of the Absolute?

Clearly, the Absolute is too quaint an idea for Meillassoux to return to, so it will be interesting to see where his argument leads. But I will be reading with an eye toward Eliot's interpretation of Bradley's metaphysics. Eliot's obvious interest in the human search for unity may be illuminated by these other thinkers, both before and after him.

Subjectivity in Section Four of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

H.D. seems to advance a notion of subjectivity worth examining in section four of "The Walls Do Not Fall." She uses an extended metaphor in which coral represents the self. This metaphor allows her access to a number of generative concepts that she explores in provocative ways. One of these is continuity:

continuous, the sea-thrust
is powerless against coral

H.D. points toward the perpetual tension between the motion of the sea and the coral's growth. The coral continues to grow despite the friction of the sea that threatens to wear down and dissolve it. In the poem's overt historical aspect (as a WWII poem), continuity suggests the fortitude of Londoners to survive the Blitz. On another level, the continuity explored here suggests life's inexorable striving, the persistence of being despite the dangers presented by the world. Other sea life exhibits this same perserverance:

the shell-fish:
oyster, clam, mollusc

is master-mason planning
the stone marvel

The poem calls attention not just to the continuous production and proliferation of sea life, but to those forms that maintain themselves due to their hard exteriors. In order to withstand the world, one must form a tough exterior. Although this unyielding surface is necessary, she contrasts it with a central softness:

yet that flabby, amorphous hermit
within, like the planet

senses the finite,
its limits its orbit

of being, its house,
temple, fane, shrine

Successful existence, from this perspective, requires a balance of soft and hard, malleable and rigid. H.D. imagines a finite subject. But one doesn't get the sense that this is a "windowless Monad" in the Leibniz sense, for the subject is constantly testing its boundaries and interacting with the world, acting through a relation with the world rather than as a discrete self. The soft center is separated from the world by its hard exterior, but it is, at the same time, always projecting out into that world.

The self is made up of these soft/hard contrasts. Given H.D.'s interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, one might extend this set of oppositions to include the unconscious and the conscious. There are desires within us that are amorphous in their unknowability; we can only guess their contours when they emerge. To extend the analogy to Freud's psychoanalytic topology is perhaps warranted given the direction H.D. chooses to develop her contrasts:

it unlocks the portals
at stated intervals:

prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow

Trusty Wikipedia tells me that coral reproduces sexually by releasing gametes around the full moon. Rather than existing as self-authorizing selves, complete with their own agency, the examples of sea life that H.D. discusses are beholden to a physical world that generates their desire. She describes a "hunger" that cannot be denied; the "tide-flow" caused by the full moon demands a physical response. The subjectivity H.D. describes is continuous, finite, and sexual, but it must always relate with a world that compels it in certain ways. Rather than (what I argue is) the traditional modernist subjectivity that forgoes sensual desire in order to maintain (the illusion of) unity and order, H.D. develops a more dependent and relational model.

Nicholas Mayer on T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Nicholas Mayer brings much careful research to his paper "Catalyzing Prufrock," but one gets the sense that he ended up with his interpretation because he went into the poem with it tucked into one of his interior pockets. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as long as you can make the interpretation stick -- which Mayer is almost skillful enough to do here.

Mayer's essential point is that the published version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and our knowledge that it at one time included a section called the "Pervigilium," allows us to see how Eliot's "depersonalization theory" of poetic creation works. In this case, the Pervigilium included too much immediate history or emotion to be in the finished poem. Mayer derives this point from examining Eliot's response to F. H. Bradley's philosophy. Very quickly (and according to Mayer), Bradley has two stages to his metaphysical theory. First, there is the act of immediate experience or feeling. This is undifferentiated and non-relational. The second stage is the mind's work on the material of the immediate experience.

Mayer argues that Eliot's poetic method introduces a third stage: the artist's transformation of emotion into art. Mayer explains that Eliot is suspicious of "sincere language" to express emotion. That is, Eliot does not authorize the self who emerges from Bradley's second stage a direct way to express himself. Instead, Mayer sees Prufrock the character as the second stage, and "Prufrock" the poem as Eliot's third stage. It is the impossibility of representing Prufrock's sincere emotion that leads to the "Prufrock" poem (which seems, paradoxically, to achieve a sort of emotional intensity because of this very depersonalizing maneuver).

What I like about Mayer's essay is that it points to something I've felt is obvious about modernist literature but not mentioned enough: the modernists were incredibly self-ridiculing. The method that Mayer describes above involves poking itty-bitty holes into the serious ways we once felt. The mix of high and low does not raise the low but reorients the high. A good example of this is when teenagers have glorious visions of their immortality or believe they are going to play in the NBA (or become rock stars); the only way to get over this is to scoff a bit at that silly (but earnest) earlier self. In some sense, that earlier self needs to be purged in order to complete the mature human being. This seems to be the argument Mayer makes in his essay about the failure of sincere language.

Where the essay suffers, however, is that it doesn't deliver on the promise it offers by raising Bradleyan metaphysics. I believe Eliot's notion of depersonalization relates to Bradley's metaphysics in a more complicated way than Mayer suggests. Mayer's characterization of Eliot's "third stage" is not primarily metaphysical. Instead, it presents a commonplace understanding taken from Eliot's criticism. But Mayer doesn't ask What IS a self as a result of this third stage, the artistic endeavor? Surely Eliot must have had a working notion of his own answer to this question as he wrote his poetry and criticism...but what is it? I regret to say I don't have an answer yet, but I will surely be attempting to form one as I continue reading.

Self and Community in H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall

I've just begun reading H.D.'s long poem "The Walls Do Not Fall," which is the first of three long poems comprising "Trilogy" (1944-1946). The poems are primarily about the Second World War, and more particularly about the experience of being in London during the Blitz. So in many ways, this is a community poem, exploring the spirit of resistance and fortitude of a whole people. H.D. frequently employs the first-person plural to give witness to collective experience. For example, in the first section she writes:

the flesh? it was melted away,
the heart burnt out, dead ember,
tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,

yet the frame held:
we passed the flame: we wonder
what saved us? what for?

One pictures the people of London sharing meaningful looks as they go through their lives recognizing that they have shared the experience of survival -- and continue to share the experience of danger. H.D. suggests that this sort of experience is more than just life or death; the threat of death can lead to transcendent understanding. Again in the first section, she writes that the "ruin opens / the tomb, the temple." Rather than just a fear of death, she suggests a spiritual possibility; the risk that one might lose one's life opens up meaning beyond the mundane.

This first section introduces the image of ruins, buildings damaged by the falling bombs, but with walls that do not fall. But she sees this as more than destruction. She understands these events as lessons in understanding. The perilous life brings wisdom that exceeds other forms of knowledge:

another sliced wall
where poor utensils show
like rare objects in a museum;

Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,

While I have much of this poem left to read, it seems that H.D. sets up an opportunity to explore different modes of epistemology. That is, she compares immediate experience to research and reflection, and she seems to argue here in favor of immediate experience (or perception). From this perspective, her poetic project seems to be "modern" in the sense that it operates on a different level than Wordsworth's sense of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity.

But there is an obvious tension between her valorization of immediacy and the actual poetry in "The Walls Do Not Fall." Her later work is quite different from her earlier Imagistic pieces. This poem is clearly not presenting an "emotional complex in an instant of time."

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.