The Living Dead in Section Two of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

In section two of "The Walls Do Not Fall," H.D. sets up a stark contrast between good and evil: "Evil was active in the land, / Good was impoverished and sad."  The setting, described in the first section, is still WWII, and more specifically the bombing of London.  So the reader is encouraged to see the references to good and evil as specific historical references to the Allies and Axis powers.  However, H.D. is not concerned with historical explication.  Instead, she moves from the large-scale historical forces toward an investigation of the poet's responsibilities:

your rhythm is the devil's hymn,

your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate,
how can you scratch out

indelible ink of the palimpsest
of past misadventure?

In a way, this is the question the poem as a whole tries to answer: how can one break the pleasant inertia of stillness and begin creating?  As many H.D. scholars have pointed out, Trilogy is not just a reaction to the difficulties of war; it is also an examination of creativity.  H.D. had experienced a long period of creative difficulty leading up to the writing of Trilogy (though she wrote several novels in the period that unpublished in her lifetime).  What she could do with her "stylus" was an anxious question for her at the time.  And it seems important that she was able to unleash her creative powers within the context of good and evil.

Underneath this surface reading, however, we are forced to ask about her characterizations of good and evil.  That is, how can good be so ill-equipped to care for itself?  She points out that good was "smug and fat."  Good requires some intensive rejuvenation.  In short, good is not good on its own.  It needs an active force to keep it going.

For me, as a psychoanalytic critic, this means we must seek the drive and the repression at work in this dynamic situation.  Without being able (at this point) to provide a reading of Trilogy in its entirety, I must read this second section against the first, in which the speaker confronts a destructive war.  Therefore, it seems that physical danger itself is the motivating force.  The possibility that death may seek out the speaker from the sky, unknown and unbidden, is what drives the creative efflorescence H.D. experiences.

While this, by itself, seems fairly obvious, there are a few directions we can take this.  First, death should be viewed primarily as the imposition of finality.  I argue that human motivation, which includes poetic creation, is based on strategies to deny or delay finality.  I use this term rather than "death" because finality is conceptual while death is too frequently reserved for the physical.  Images of movement, continuation, activity, or struggle counteract finality; it sounds far-fetched to say that they counteract death.

The second way to read this section of the poem is to think of the productive (though oxy-moronic) concept of the living dead.  For that is what H.D. gives us in her depiction of the "good": impoverished, sad, smug, fat.  They are alive but they are not truly living.  It is as if they have ground to a halt, and it is the terror from the sky that causes them to spring to life -- and causes H.D. to begin her creative endeavors again.

Water as a Complex Symbol in "The Waste Land"

"Death by Water," Section IV of "The Waste Land," is by far the shortest individual section of the poem, but it seems integral to the poem as a whole. Many of the poem's themes are concentrated in these ten lines:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Eliot develops a productive tension between forgetting and remembering. The dead sailor forgets the surface world, but the speaker urges the listener to remember the sailor. It seems that life may be forgotten when one enters the realm of death, but the reverse is not true: the living are to remember the dead. The dead inhabit the living.

The persistence of death in life is a theme touched upon throughout the poem, right from the beginning in which April's cruelty is evidenced by its "breeding / lilacs out of the dead land" (1-2). In "Death by Water," we see a foreshadowing of our death, since the sailor, "who was once handsome and tall as you," was not so virile as to avoid death. Since death seems to be at both ends of life, and life (in "The Waste Land") is comprised of remembering death, we seem always to emerging out of and into death.

An interesting contrast to the pervasiveness of death, however, is the collection of attempted sexual encounters through the poem. In some ways, sex (and reproduction more specifically) is a stay against death. We perpetuate ourselves and our species by producing the next generation. Eliot, who was moved by anthropological accounts of vegetation ceremonies, seems to call upon these notions in his choice of myths and symbols. Moreover, he was familiar with Remy de Gourmont's thought, which included radical ideas on the significance of sex in human behavior.

A productive intersection of Gourmont's and Eliot's perspectives occurs in the theme of unity. Gourmont points out in The Natural Philosophy of Love, "fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated elements into a unique element, a perpetual return to unity" (13). Eliot, as I've mentioned in other posts, is intensely interested in unity, as well. "Death by Water" presents the ultimate failure of sexuality. There is no redeeming aspect to this section; it represents a negative object lesson. There is no positive transformation (however cruel) in this section. Instead, the "current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers" (315-316).

As Brooker and Bentley point out in Reading The Waste Land, "Death by Water," despite its bleak sense of closure, is NOT the end of the poem. Instead, it comes just before the final section, "What the Thunder Said." In this way, Eliot situates the ending against the backdrop of unproductive death; it provides a contrast for what follows. The offerings of "What the Thunder Said" are unified with the drowned sailor and cannot be the offerings they are without him. The urgency of the rock and water section is intensified because it occurs after "Death by Water." Furthermore, the experience of water as both deadly and life-giving in such close proximity achieves a richer and more affecting reaction.

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.

Randall Jarrell and Basic Instinct

In his "Field and Forest," Randall Jarrell strips man of civilization in order to get down to the root of instinct. The agricultural field is a metaphor for the ego, while the forest stands in for the unconscious as the realm of instincts. Our egos, like the fields, "have a terrible monotony." Between the fields, however, are the dark forests.

What makes this poem a good representation of the "middle generation" is its ambivalence. Jarrell occupies a middle ground, and his poem takes pains to show that the farmer wishes to turn everything into farmland. The exploration of this wish, simultaneous with (and contradictory to) the wish to re-enter the forest, marks a significant difference from most postmodern poetry. This is particularly true of the "Deep Image" poets, who would have rushed headlong flaming into the ethereal forest, civilization be damned. (See my earlier post on Galway Kinnell's "The Bear").

Jarrell shows us an undressing of the self: "The farmer, naked, takes out his false teeth: / He doesn't eat now. Take off his spectacles: / He doesn't see now. Shuts his eyes." The physical body is taken apart, and Jarrell explores what might be left after such a dismantling. He takes an important step along the way, suggesting that the man is able to take off his cultural inheritance: "And after he has taken off the thoughts / It has taken him his life to learn, / He takes off, last of all, the world." It seems a bit naive, in light of contemporary theory, to believe that one can dispense with our own cultural constructedness. But it is important that Jarrell does this in the figure of the child. Though it was the old farmer who went off to sleep, it is the boy who enters the dream forest and encounters the fox.

I think Jarrell's point is that we long for the past, before the imposition of the reality principle. In this way, we are haunted by the civilizing process. Repression cannot be undone, but the dream of the pleasure principle inhabits us at our core.

The other interesting thing is that Jarrell suggests the world itself can be taken off. Again, departing from Altieri's notion that postmodern poets celebrate immanence, Jarrell describes a type of being that somehow escapes being-in-the-world. Once we have shed our physical selves and the objective world, all that's left is "A wish, / A blind wish; and yet the wish isn't blind, / What the wish wants to see, it sees." The blind wish, however, is not made explicit. Jarrell does not show us how it operates or to what end.

The poem ends with a stalemate typical for the "middle generation." There's a frozen quality to the face-off at the end, in which child and fox stare at one another. The farmer is ensconced within a dream, and the figurative child and fox are frozen and indistinguishable. I find the last line particularly illuminating, for though Jarrell dispensed with the world earlier in the poem, it ends with an enduring world: "The trees can't tell the two of them apart." Through the poem, we see the ego diminished by its breakdown, but we also see the "blind wish" ultimately broken by the trees which exist objectively regardless of this subjective struggle.

This static triangulation of ego, unconscious, and enduring object world seen in this and many other poems by Randall Jarrell. The same confrontation (which could also be termed self/desire/world) is found in particularly provocative ways in the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Jarrell is more prone to substitute to the social world, broadly conceived, for the object world. (Robert Lowell substitutes the nuclear family in this position). There's a sense in all of their work that one cannot but be trapped in this matrix of forces, dissolved but undissolvable.

Randall Jarrell and Extremity of Self

Randall Jarrell is particularly interested in the intersection of the self and the social world. In "90 North," he takes the concept of one's interaction with the world to its logical extremity: the north pole. But rather than a sort of transcendence or ultimate selfhood, the speaker recognizes the inevitability of the physical world.

What intrigues me most about this recognition of physical reality is the spatial configuration of the self that results. When the speaker reaches the north pole, he does not reach a sort of undiluted self-consciousness; instead, he comes to realize that he cannot avoid the world: "Turn as I please, my step is to the south." He is necessarily mapped onto the world, no matter which way he turns.

To me, this perspective seems radically different than the modernist poets who came before Jarrell and the others of the "middle generation." Certainly the authority over the physical world that Ezra Pound asserts, or the power of the imagination in shaping the world advanced by Wallace Stevens, are far from the immanence intimated in Jarrell's poem. Perhaps William Carlos Williams at his most "objective" harbors some of the same ideas, but Williams seems to suggest different implications. In "Paterson," for example, the protagonist both moves through and *is* his world. This duality is empowering in Williams.

Jarrell's figuration is not as holistic. The energies of the self-in-the-world instead form a whirlpool: "all lines, all winds / End in this whirlpool I at last discover." The self is a whirling chaos and it doesn't seem to have any agency or be able to learn. It is at the mercy of the winds.

If it could be said that the self (the Freudian "ego") is challenged, however, it does not seem that the unconscious takes over. The poem isn't like a return of the repressed. Instead, the poem suggests that the loss of the self is more like being cast from the Garden of Eden, more like the devolution of humankind. He casts this struggle in terms of knowledge and ignorance. The fruit of the tree of knowledge in this case (the approach to the extremity of self) is not a stay against the chaos of the world. For the poem itself is figured as a night voyage, a dream of discovery, but ultimately an emptiness.

Immanence is a sort of nightmare rather than an example of a reassuring solidity in the world. The speaker is bereft of a meaning beyond the brute fact of the world. This notion of immanence is important to recognize because it runs counter to the sort of joyous immanence that Charles Altieri talks about in "postmodern" poets in his noteworthy study "Enlarging the Temple." The sort of positive experience, or at least the unburdening of such testimony, shown in the slightly later poets Altieri talks about, is not yet possible in the "middle generation."