Eliot's The Waste Land

On the subject of last week’s class, I was struck by the biography of Katherine Mansfield. In a way, her life and her work seem so intertwined as to be inseparable. Compared to, say, the works of Woolf or Eliot, Mansfield’s works seem to stem directly from her autobiography; Woolf and Eliot used theirs’ as launchpads while Mansfield used her life as template. In part, I attribute this to the fact that her greatest literary champion, John Middleton Murry, was also her husband, and his efforts to magnify her importance seem to reflect not just esteem but devotion (as well as no small amount of name-dropping self-promotion, as well). The relationship created the reputation, in a sense. Likewise, the themes throughout her short fiction seem to derive quite directly from her own life, be it the ambivalence she felt toward domestic life, the appreciation of home (HER home) or the relations between men and women. More than most, Mansfield’s biography seems central to understanding her fiction.

Now, onto “The Waste Land,” a poem that one might view as the Hamlet of 20th Century Poetry.

In reading “The Waste Land,” one finds a deeply profound ambivalence – indeed, though Eliot himself, according to Headings, stated that “The Waste Land” was not an allegory for his generation in Western Europe, one is tempted to perceive it as a psychic cutaway of the human condition. Also, despite Eliot’s use of foreign languages thoughout, one might view it as a pre-mortem autopsy of the England he has come to know – The Fisher King myth, though continental, became grafted integrally onto the Arthurian mythos and thus part of the illusory English Cultural Mythology. In borrowing from this but then removing it from the sweeping landscapes of chivalric adventure and placing it into the urban milieu of London, Eliot may have tried to make a statement about England in such dispiriting times – implicitly and instinctively if not overtly.

Also, one might find some interest in the following link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20080117.shtml

It’s an edition of the BBC’s In Our Time that covers the Fisher King and its influences, including “The Waste Land.”

Another major note that I had, beyond the vast ambivalence of the poem entire, was the gulf between the sexes. Male and female seem barely human to each other – presaging, perhaps, Pound’s pronouncement that Eliot had shut out the ladies from modern poetry. While this deadening of the sexual relations (noted by many as indicative of the sterility of the poem that mimicked the Fisher King) is prevalent throughout, the greatest illustration lies within Part III: The Fire Sermon. Eliot portrays an encounter between a clerk and a typist. The typist gives in to the clerk’s advances, and sexual congress ensues. Eliot describes the emotions not of the act but around the act – there is no savor to this lovemaking for there was no love made. The clerk leaves, expended but not spent (for, as Eliot portrays him, he has invested little in the occasion) and the typist is glad that it’s over. There seems to be no fulfillment – only achievement.

In considering Eliot’s life and his desire to make poetry of it by making private eyes to public pearls – even directly referencing The Tempest within “The Waste Land,” one might draw the conclusion that Eliot and his views of sex have seeped into the poem. As previously mentioned in class, Eliot suffered from physical maladies that yielded sexual dysfunction. As a man who was unable to savor the exercise of his desires, he would naturally manifest an ambivalence toward the act and those with whom he would share it. Thus, the infertility motif and the emotional sterility of “The Waste Land” seem almost a reflection of the void that Eliot would have felt in his own relations and relationships.