Slides for Day 17 in ELIT 46C, Spr 18

1. ELIT 46C
Day 17
IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS ELIOT KNOWS IT.
DOES HE FEEL FINE?

2. Business / Participation
Look at you! Most of you came back!
Even after reading The Waste Land.
Paper 2 is due on Friday on Canvas. You can
talk to me about extensions, but do so soon.
I’m happy to help with your drafts.
◦ What kind of help can I offer you?
◦ DIRECTED feedback: ask me specific questions
about your drafts and I’ll gladly answer them.
Participation for today: 2 individual points.

3. Literary Modernism
1900ish-1940ish
Heart of Darkness (1902)
1920s-ish: “high modernism”
• Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust,
Mallarme, Kafka, Rilke, etc.
• Huyssen’s “Great Divide”: the distinction
between high Art (with a capital ”A”) and
popular/mass culture.
• Guess which side of the Divide the high
modernists were on?
WWII as end of Modernism
Key characteristics (as per Mary Klages):
1. an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual
arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception
itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. Example: stream-
of-consciousness writing.
2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient
third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut
moral positions. Faulkner's multiply-narrated stories are an example.
3. a blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more
documentary (as in T.S. Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more
poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).
4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and
random-seeming collages of different materials.
5. a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the
production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its
own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in
particular ways.
6. a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs
(as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large
part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery
in creation.
I’ll add:
7. a recognition that language is no longer adequate to our experience.

4. The Waste Land
A scene from Wagner’s Parsifal

5. “Whyyyyy?”: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
“Who is this poem for?”
The poem is undoubtedly an elitist document, in the high modern tradition.
It’s an intentionally difficult text, meant to be understood only by a few.
“Eliot was the worst, right?”
Ah, you forget Bosie Douglas, who was the WORST. But yes, Eliot was
terrible—the second worst. You would NOT want to be his friend. But I never
promised you we would only read authors who would be our friends.
“Aren’t the politics of this poem suspicious?”
Oh, for sure! It is certainly possible to read this poem as decrying the loss of
England’s privileged, white, patriarchal cultural dominance in the 20C. The
“barbarians” are at the gates of a dying “civilization” and Eliot is holding onto
the fragments and crying. (Though maybe it’s more complicated.)
“Why do we read it then?”
It is an essential document of a significant moment of literary and historical
transition. Stylistically, it is strikingly innovative and extremely influential.
Also, there are some gorgeous passages in it—which are hard to resist.

6. My approach to this poem
I am approaching the poem as a type of
amateur. An amateur who:
◦ has certain reading skills
◦ is attentive to the poem’s language
◦ is fascinated and occasionally stumped by what’s
happening
◦ is trying to love this poem and is willing to be
generous to it.
I CANNOT offer a comprehensive unified
reading of the poem—a reading that perfectly
accounts for all the passages and details and
fragments and wraps them up into one clean
sentence or two.
But then neither can any of the critics I’ve
read—without, that is, being reductive.
What can I offer?
◦ some observations on how the poem is doing
what it is doing (whatever that is). Attention to
form, structure, patterns, resonances.
◦ a thematic reading—based on previous critics
and Eliot’s own footnotes—that offers a “broad
strokes” interpretation of the poem’s concerns
and what it is saying about them.
◦ call your attention to problems, difficulties, and
uncertainties in reading this poem. Complicate
some of the simple interpretive moves that I will
be tempted to make.

7. Style
Polyvocality or multi-voicedness:
◦ Many different voices speaking here.
Eliot’s original title for this poem was “He Do The Police
in Different Voices.”
◦ A line from Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend.
◦ In Our Mutual Friend, the character “Sloppy” reads the
newspaper aloud and does different voices for all the
police.
We could also call this “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin):
◦ remember heteroglossia describes a text that speaks in
many different, conflicting voices.
◦ for Bakhtin, the genre where this happens is the NOVEL.
◦ lyric poetry, by contrast, only speaks in the voice of one
perspective—the lyric “I.”
Bakhtin identifies the novels of Dickens as essential
heteroglot texts. (And it’s perhaps no accident that
Eliot hat tips to Dickens here).
If you are interested in
exploring many of the different
voices here, there is this
fascinating website: He Do the
Police in Different Voices.
http://hedothepolice.org/
Here’s a list of different voices
that the website lets you
explore:

8. But is this poem really polyvocal?
BUT, is this what’s actually happening here?
Is this truly a heteroglot text?
◦ Are the different voices here in conflict?
◦ Has Eliot done something new to lyric poetry?
Or, do all of these different “voices” that we read in the poem
get “bent” to the meaning of one single organizing
consciousness?
◦ Is one voice “ventriloquizing” all of the different “voices” here?
◦ After all, in the original title, there is a “He” who is doing all of the
different voices!
Another way of asking this question is whether there is a
unifying consciousness in this poem: an “I” that connects all
of these voices and fragments.
Let’s look for this as we read it.

9. An “Orientation” to the poem
Terrain (physical setting):
◦ the real world (England, Germany) vs. haunted
wilderness.
Temporality: more shuttling back and forth.
◦ Ancient vs. modern
◦ Elizabethan vs. modern.
Myth and Legend
• the Holy grail myth:
“The Fisher King, whose death, infirmity, or impotence […] brought
drought and desolation to the land and failure of the power to
reproduce themselves among both humans and beasts. This symbolic
Waste Land can be revived only if a ‘questing knight’ goes to the
Chapel Perilous […] and there asks certain ritual questions […]. The
proper asking of these questions revives the king and restores fertility
to the land” (Norton).
• fertility cults and rituals and The Golden Bough
• primitive fears about the cyclical seasons and death of
vegetation.
• a god who dies and is later resurrected.
• Philomela: not the only classical myth in play in the poem, but
certainly the one that recurs.
• Ovid tells the story in Metamorphoses
Other structuring ideas or symbols:
• four elements of classical thought:
water, earth, fire, air.
• life/death: and the deconstruction of this
binary.
• high culture vs. low culture: often presented
with irony.

10. Methods
Repetition
• Of words, phrases, ideas.
• especially “Nothing”—I want us to
keep our eyes out for “Nothing” in
the poem.
• repetition of symbols: “water” for
example.
How does the repetition of symbols work in
the poem?
Is the symbolic meaning of water static or
fixed throughout this poem? I would argue
not.
rain (good!)
Thames (good, but also not good)
sea (drowning, bad).
This is complicated. The symbols stand in for
shifting ideas.
Allusion: What are the allusions doing here?
Providing a residue of meaning.
• this is the method that Frazier and Weston recognize: later traditions
take aspects of previous traditions and adapt them to mean new
things.
• putting old traditions to new use: syncretism.
• residue of old meaning there, but also new meaning
Ex: Cleopatra and the nervous woman.
Are we supposed to read her as Cleopatra here?
A little, but not really.
Providing resonance or harmony.
So much recurs in this poem, but the allusions don’t always mean the
same thing in the same way.
• multiple allusions to drowning—multiple contexts.
Ex: the drowning of Marie’s uncle in the Starnbergersee,
“death by water,” the drowned Phoenician sailor, Ophelia’s last
words from the woman in the bar, the perfumes of the
nervous woman.
Does drowning always mean the same thing here?
• but there are harmonies (sometimes dissonant) in the symbols,
metaphors, allusions.

11. Thematic Reading
Eliot, with his footnotes about Weston and the Grail
myth, almost forces this reading on us.
Edmund Wilson famously calls it “the poetry of drouth
[drought]”
◦ not just physical, by metaphysical, spiritual.
◦ the poetic speaker lives in a Waste Land—a dead, dry
land.
◦ thirst (desire) remains: sexual desire, desire for meaning.
◦ but desire/thirst cannot be satisfied.
◦ no relief, no satisfaction, no meaning.
◦ just emptiness and death.
What caused this? What created the Waste Land?
Possible culprits:
◦ modern society
◦ mass/pop culture
◦ decay of tradition
◦ loss of faith/religion

12. The Epigraph
Translation: “For once I myself saw with my
own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage,
and when the boys said to her ‘Sibyl, what do
you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’”
What does this epigraph do for us?
How does it set up the poem?

13. I. The Burial of the Dead

14. Who is speaking here?
This is an important question.
Where do you break Marie’s fragment
from the narration that goes before?
How do you make this decision?
What’s the point of the Marie story here?

15. Critics have trouble with this passage.
What is it doing here?

16. And then, Madame Sosostris…
What is her job? Foresee the future.
--relation to the Sibyl (or, for that
matter, Tiresius).
--a modern, hack clairvoyant. Vulgar.
Should we take her seriously?
--AND yet, even though her reading
isn’t helpful, she actually does turn
over the cards that foretell much of
the rest of this poem.
--the symbols recur—they have a
power beyond her patter.

17. And now, to London.
--London as both modern and seen
through a classical lens.
--what is the experience here?
Emptiness and conformity
Rigidity of experience.
--a type of death in life: the living
death of the London workers.
--hopes of rebirth: the buried god
in the garden.
Will it bloom this year? (No.)

18. II. A Game of Chess

19. The nervous woman and a dialogue with her
man.
• Do you know NOTHING?
• Are you alive, or not?
Echoes of the hyacinth girl passage:
• an encounter with Nothingness.
• the inability to keep life and death separate.
What does she want?
What does she want from him?
And what does he give her?

20. Then the story of Lil and Albert (as the pub
closes).
• the first explicit reference to WWI in the
poem.
• what did Lil spend her teeth money on?
• how does her friend feel about this?
How does this scene represent sexuality (or
heterosexuality)?
How does thirst show up here? Who is thirsty?
Who desires? What do they desire?

21. III. The Fire Sermon
“All things, O priests, are on fire. […]
And with what are these on fire?
With the fire of passion, say I, with
the fire of hatred, with the fire of
infatuation; with birth, old age,
death, sorrow, lamentation, misery,
grief, and despair are they on fire.”
(Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in
Translations, 1922).

22. Attempted Seduction I
How does this go?
Who is satisfied? Anyone?

23. Attempted Seduction II
Tiresias tells us of this one.
He foresees it.
How does this go?
Who is satisfied? Anyone?

24. Attempted Seduction III
The third Thames-maiden
recounts this.
What happens here?
How does it go?
Who is satisfied? Anyone?
What, then, is the “sermon”
in this section?

25. IV. Death by Water
What happens to Phlebas the
Phoenician?
Does this section advance the plot?
If so, how?
Why does Eliot transition from fire
to water?
How does this relate to Madame
Sosostris’s prophecy?
Just in case we thought water was
the answer here…

26. V. What the Thunder Said

27. Lyndall Gordon and A. D. Moody:
--we now have a protagonist: a spiritual
pilgrim.
--the first four sections are the “Voices
of Society” (Gordon).
--out of which comes our questing
knight of the Grail legend.
--on a quest to “fix” the Waste Land.
So the pilgrim goes deeper into the
mythical haunted Waste Land again.
--“We who were living are now dying”—
life in death; death in life.

28. Welcome to the Chapel Perilous!
Is the quest a success?
Is it raining now?

29. Ha! You wish!
What is going on here?
And then, one last visit with the
Fisher King:
Has it rained? What has happened?

30. Echoes of earlier themes: London Bridge,
social collapse; fire; Philomela, swallow,
spring; locked in a tower.
“These fragments I have shored against my
ruins.”
Many critics see this as a key moment in the
poem.
--Michael Levenson: “In the space of that line
the poem becomes conscious of itself. What
had been a series of fragments of
consciousness has become a consciousness of
fragmentation”
--in a ruined world, the poetic speaker is
collecting fragments, holding onto them,
keeping things together—and they recognize
that they are doing this, with a purpose.
Our earlier question: is this a unified
consciousness? Maybe not quite, but it’s a
consciousness that is engaged in a process of
unifying.
What is the outcome of this pilgrimage?
What is the outcome of this unification?
What is the summation of what the pilgrim has learned?
Shantih shantih shantih
Is this, as the Norton argues, a benediction. A blessing? Or is there irony?
And what does this have to do with Hieronymo? (line 431).
Brooks: “The protagonist is conscious of the interpretation which will be
placed on the words which follow--words which will seem to many
apparently meaningless babble, but which contain the oldest and most
permanent truth”
OR: “This is going to sound crazy, but I know what I’m doing.”

31. Soooo… read any good poems lately?
But seriously:
Do you feel like you understand the poem better?
Do you get a better sense of why critics are fascinated
by it?
Does the ending satisfy you?
Do you feel like there is a meaningful structure to this
poem?
Does it go somewhere?
Was the journey worth it?
How is it modernist?
What else do you want to say about it?

32. HW for Thursday
Reading:
◦ W. B. Yeats: “The Second Coming” (2099);
“Sailing to Byzantium” (2102-03); “Among School
Children” (2103-05).
◦ T. S. Eliot: “Journey of the Magi” (2546-47).
◦ W.H. Auden: “Spain” (2681-83); “In Memory of
W. B. Yeats” (2685-87); “September 1, 1939”
(2689-91)
There is a discussion post.
Get working on Paper 2!
Participation for today: 2 individual points.
Actually, give yourself an extra point if you
survived today’s lecture!