The Waste Land: An Analysis of T.S. Eliot's Modernist Poem, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Waste Land: An Analysis of T.S. Eliot's Modernist Poem e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Rabaté -Twl seen as a modernist postwar poem -Joyce, Proust used time of war to revise their work > Eliot wrote in the aftermath of war . - deaths for Eliot : Fournier and Verdenall , his friends , in battle of Verdun 1914 and gallipoli 1915 With both in common love for Wagner and Laforgue -1914 meets pound 1921 mental breakdown , under the cure of DR Vittoz in Lausanne > twl response to this dramatic period Loss of reality that the poet seems to have experienced 1 1915 meets Vivien Haigh-wood > disastrous marriage > Vivien cheats on him with their friend Bertrand Russell > a sort of father figure for Eliot . DOUBLE UNREALITY 1) Unreality of the unspeakably traumatic scenes in trenches described by Maurice 2) Unreality of everyday life in London Unreality feeling affected many shell shocked soldiers Karamazov allegory > allegories the fall of Europe > dichotomy of chaos METAPHYSICAL POETS : E. Quotes Laforgue to illustrate how the latter can be obscure , allusive , indirect , all this to dislocate if necessary the language into his meaning War left moral and financial damages Twl > tries to make sens of collective and personal trauma s E had no anti-German feelings after war E. Dramatizes the difficulty of returning to a normal life > GAME OF CHESS : lil is reproached for not looking good for her husband Tiresias > postwar newly found sexual freedom that lead to mechanical and meaningless lovemaking APHANISIS >. Denote the disappearance of sexual desire > pleasure vanished after war PATHOS MATHOS >. Suffering bring knowledge Paradox > impossibility of choosing either order or chaos MORRISON ( mapping ad reading the cityscape ) Mapping in twl can be done by citizens Stravinsky’s music acts for Eliot as an alternative Baedeker , indexing urban experience in a form more textured than tourist guides or city maps that present abstract networks of streets and buildings. The Waste Land, often read as “the text of urban disa􏰀ection in modernist poetry par excellence,” both embodies and questions new ways of ordering, mapping, and artistically governing urban experience, meditating on the prospects for new spatial orders commensurate to the material upheavals of modern city. The Waste Land casts attention on the very processes of urban ordering and governing. The Waste Land’s governmental in actions in the poem’s representation of new forms of collective psychology produced by the unprecedented crowding of modern city life. Phantasmagorical unreality that su􏰀uses not just London but modern urban experience. “London in 1922 was still the centre of an empire,” and the poem’s positioning of London at the end of a list of failed imperial centres (Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna) allows it to shadow its textual city with the prospect of collapse. The Waste Land’s spatial story – its processes of “traversing and organizing places,” its sequencing of distinct spaces – constructs implicit comparisons between London and the diverse geographies (desert, alpine, and jungle). The concerns of “profit and loss” that preoccupy Phlebas the Phoenician, Mr. Eugenides, and modern capitalism more generally produce an economic need for continual material consumption and renewal. The Waste Land as a poem of modern ruin-gazing, where the act of seeing ruins – characteristically understood as an act that elicits both terror and pleasure in the viewer – transpires in a literary form attentive to the new speed of urban destruction. Leaving the ruin, a figure that suggests both a prior (lost) order that has fallen into ruin and a potentially utopian future (an order restored atop the ruin’s rubble). In fact, in many ways The Waste Land is a poem formally and thematically concerned with both ruins and crowds – and, more obliquely, with historically specific links between spatial ruination and crowd psychology within the experience of urban modernity. Ruinous psychic states characteristic of urban crowding necessitated by creatively destructive development. One example of how churches function as spaces of refuge in the poem arises immediately after the sordid tryst between the typist and the young man carbuncular. Infrastructural shifts in Euro- American cities from the mid- nineteenth century onward. The Waste Land “suggests that as the city lost touch with the land, with the rhythms and the psychic nourishment of nature, a spiritual meaning was lost. The Thames River, accorded a central role in London life by The Waste Land’s spatial imagination, serves as an intersection for the poem’s concerns with material infrastructure, city governance, waste treatment processes, and urban energy systems. This passage posits a method of governance ( Damyata means “control”) attuned to water’s , owes – and, more broadly, to the natural world. In this way, it evinces the sorts of “reforms” that The Waste Land envisions as vital to what could become a renewed urban order. Ordering, whether administrative or poetic, emerges in The Waste Land as inescapably provisional, an imperfect attempt to shore volatile forces against an eroding bank. This is because Eliot’s poetic ordering of urban experience charts the unsettling disorder occasioned by urban modernity while nevertheless performing and imagining new urban forms. GORDON ( mixing memory and desire ) 1 Early years writing of elior revealed a tension between desire and spiritual yearning and its reflects the struggle to reconcile physical and metaphysical. E. Exploration of sexuality was filtered through a lens of cultural and religion influences . Shared his disgust with his father with a series of loveless scenes in twl ( Typist and clerk , sad story of the Thames daughters, merchant and metropole encounter, mrs porter brothel ) According to Gordon twl rooted with personal issues and preoccupations Pound : saw modernist revolution in Prufrock and E’s early works > both dialed provincialism Marriage is for him a surrender > desire to surrender , surrender in what in twl are controlling hands DATTA, DAHYADVAM , DAMYATA ( give, sympathize, controll) > non of those words means what the translation suggest . Controll in the poem is at the last place . Give > not in 1st place morally , no sense of charity more of the awful Darin of surrender Sympathize> not exactly moral > openness to a ethereal rumors Controll > to beat Sexual desire in twl is restricted to lust , a polluted type of passion Moved toward some intimation of desire as a spiritual thirst for something unknown which lurks in the poem Crowd of commuters : dante inferno > strategy to transform documentary into surreal . E. Did random acts of heroism that are the source of the part removed In the 4th part . 1912 > meets Emily hale > platonic love > la figlia che piange ( an Eliot work ) , Mentions a girl with her arms full of flowers > 9 years later he creates in the waste land a similar scene with the hyacinth girl ( regretful voice that remembers) . Might have been > no place in waste of present , here there’s no longer place for fertile love > no more power for regeneration Uncompatible couple > obvious source for disaffected couples in the 2nd part of twl > according to pound was too close to life > the wife wants a communication while he shuts her out MEMORY > preserves the husband and by him , not Emily as she was but E conceives memory of the hyacinth girl > image of purity an elevated above daily contacts . MIXING MEMORY AND DESIRE > claim to unadulterated desire , her role is crucial in a a creative future in which love must pass beyond the object . E approves subjective view of the Poem > statements that deprecate common view of the poem as an impersonal social document > post war disillusion : poem defines the deadness by what is not dead ( ex, hyacinth girl , fisherman , message of the thunder ) Twl as a unified poem ? Is unified by the unitary experience of the poet LIVING MATERIALS > Biographial back ground > priority both emotionally and chronologically Eliot’s desire fro what Is not a wasteland To sink into a waste is to experience this loss of what is termed by E. As reality and to find ourselves repeatedly trapped in un unreal city It’s inhabitants ( commuters ) are too oblivious of their condition to suffer the realization that the poem grants those who enter its ominous silences > marks its repeated loss of vision The reflection of his internal sense of deadness finds in memory an elusive peace by projecting personal desires into the past . SPURR ( religions east and west in twl ) Journey of faith > recurring metaphor of quest for knowledge ( both personal and universal ) Moment of illumination as a result of a lifelong journey , manifested in a singular moment . E tendency to Christianity > in a letter to More in 1929 E rejected the notion that embracing belief was a comfortable end but as a daunting beginning . Various kinds of quest > needed to fulfill the understanding >in an antropocentric world . The metaphor of the quest for knowledge is present also in Eliot early works ( spiritual quest in prufrock ) Searching of meaning o human existence He studied Buddhism and Sanskrit Manju Jain >about E’s studies > gives him an alternative world view Allusion to eastern philosophy and religion > E poem provides different perspectives Twl title> myth of impotent king > with a curse land > linked with the grail legend > notion of a journey of enlightenment and renewal = similar to knight’s research fo the relic Epigraph > unpromising > burial of the dead > liturgical order fo funerals in book of common prayers > burial influenced by resurrection of the body FIsh > biblical allusion to Christ Seres of deaths : > of nature > reversal of the tradition in poetry > spring , no more regenerative season but cruel  Postwar death of Europe > Marie speech  Of passion and romance > disappointment dominates > Wagner Tristan and Isolde an grail legend where male hyacinth is reversed into female speakers ( sexual confusion)  Of prophesies , madame Sosostris  Of metropolis > tarot card hanged man is missing > Christ crucified Modernity > Rimbaud : one must be absolutely modern . Pound > make it new . Noisy modernity : produces a deranged perception of sounds > voices are generated and situated in this derangement LEVENSON talks about a late Eliot’s essays called “ 3voices of poetry “ , where E makes 3 distinctions,: address, orientation and rapport ( speaking to ) . Lays out a taxonomy of possibilities , voices as addresses > directness of speech towards the audience  One voice of the poet talking to himself or to nobody  Poet talking to an audience  Voice of poet attempting to create a dramatic speaking in verse Many voices in twl . 1st person talking , Marie , archduke , Tiresias, hyacinth girl . But also in 1stperson quoted : Milton , Shakespeare , dante ecc. there’s a shifting. From opening line characterized by a declarative statement or asserting facts style into the closing line that shows emotivity and a strong personal statement . According to LEVENSON this shifting is a process of voicing which is fluid , inclusive . The poem raises the stakes fro subjectivity in tone > 1st by moving from objectivity of language to realm of personal utterance and then by shifting Amon persons so intonation that suggest one character modulate into suggestion of another. Shifting scene in twl described as montage > big influence of cinema in Eliot of twl in 19222 The poem distributes the voices on a range of dessert act of speech ( interrogation , demand , wish , ecc ) but the central one is testimony . All the characters turn their back to the past frequently testifying loss , failure disappointment ecc . Asymmetry of monologic voices . Imagism > movement that gave E his first encounter with avant-garde, proposal were terse and polemical , no superfluous words, revise the rooot of lyric style , purified voice w/o taint of rhetoric . E kept away from imagism . BROOKER ( dialectical collaboration ) Debut of twl in 1922 > at wolf couple house E mail to Quinn ( his publisher) a package with54 leaves divided in 2 part , the first one made by 40 leaves with the main text and the second made of 14 leaves with the drafts and manuscripts . He wanted them to be considered two different parts , he wanted to preserve the annotated text as a tribute to pound and the rest to remain unpublished . From the manuscripts emerge also the collaboration of the genesis and shape of twl of Pound and Vivien . According to modernist collaboration was a positive value because they were fighting the idea of solitary genius of romanticism . For Eliot. The interaction with other was part of his own idea of tradition . Vivien and pound represent the dialectical dilemma in E life between life and art , V was life and P was art . Vivien suggested his husband to be personal while Pound suggested the opposite , to be impersonal , he wanted Eliot to delete all biographical markers . Game of chess biggest contrast . Pound had 2 solutions : an entire section be removed from the text or repetitiveness not added to the main text . He also helped E in meter and rhymes , noting that they needed attention and revision . Different attitudes : Eliot. | Pound Inductive. Deductive Moves from life to art. Moves from art to life From living materials to form From poetic to content Projects collapsing of Europe in his own mental breakdown Sees modernism as renaissance 2 Discussion on epigraph of twl COYLE ( doing tradition in different voices pastiche in twl ) PASTICHE > DESIGNATES WRITING THAT IMITATES THE STYLE OF ANOTHER ARTIST OR PERIOD Proust saw pastiche being less a destination then a formal communion w/ tradition Eliot proposes that the most individual parts of an artist work are the one where the voice of the dead poets assert their immortality the most For Proust communion is a departure for Eliot means a destination What Proust wants to purge Eliot struggles to embrace Earl twentieth century critics expected pastiche to be a mere exercise for artist to reach mastery of tradition , > for this Eliot writing of twl prompted a series of misunderstanding of what he was about . A century later postmodern audience was accustomed in seeing new works put together from features and fragments of older works . Pastiche In twl is not always complex in tone , its function is sometimes light even comical, style produced can be both modern and ancient . Twl does its best work in such passages, that deliberately generate ambiguity and resist attempt to solve its ambiguity . Moreover, although the diagetic scene is dreadful, there is such life and invention in Eliot’s language as to suggest, however implicitly, reason for hope. Pastiche is the modal key that unlocks this cage. Functioning as neither parody nor allusion, pastiche in The Waste Land summons historical di􏰀erence and hermeneutic ambiguity without o􏰀ering grounding for either. There is, at last, no part of The Waste Land untouched by pastiche. In fact, “The Burial of the Dead” originally presented a fi fty- four-line opening sequence that Eliot later cut, perhaps because it seemed to him too much an imitation of the “Night Town” section of Joyce’s Ulysses. POTTER ( GENDER AND OBSCENITY IN TWL ) McIntire , north and coyle : argued that the women in twl served to enforce the poem’s depiction of disorder > they were expression of the historical forces found threatening by Eliot . Pinkney> psychoanalytic reading > revealed misogyny and murderous violence in E imagery of women Femaleness produced unity of being in the poem , all women are one woman .> desire to enforce poetic unity Poem’s power comes from energy of its disordered parts mirroring an engagement with historical and political divisions. DISORDER IS NECESSARY TO ACHIEVE ORDER TIRESIAS > fondamental figure for the poem’s substance, its an unifying figure because in him being both man and woman gives structural and visionary cohesion . Visualized trough the details of his female physical degradation ( wrinkled breast) NORTH > considers Tiresias the failure of reconciliation POTTER > IDEA THAT ELIOT TETHERED FEMALE PHYSICALITY TO THE OBSCENE AND USED FEMALE BODY TO EXPRESS CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONFLICTS HE FOUND TROUBLING. Obscene > threat to communal unity > ideas of contamination carried into modernity .  In literature : satire, irony , parody > Rabelais father of obscene Rabelais > rediscovered the folk culture of humor , use of mocking and abusive language Obscene pubblication acts> legal basis for publication of obscene > everything that could corrupt opened minds was prohibited , the representation of female and male physicality was source of moral and literary crisis for Eliot and his generation . Modernist saw climate of publication very censorious , many were asked to cut sexual references , Eliot also had to remove sexual reference present in the early drafts of the poem . Homoerotism in twl > 1950 Elliot silenced an essay that was suggesting the presence of homoerotism in twl Isolation > obscene bodies have a different flavor because satirical and rabelaisian elements are absent . Bodies > sites of degradation , animalistic violence , non communication . Female body has a repellent sensuality . Body processes and instincts beyond control . In e poetry female body becomes a reproductive prison and subject to decay , not even mythical figures can escape the time . Art connected to an image of freedom or an escape from the body > philomel change allows her to escape in an animalistic form, she will always be flying away The body is its own corruption Game and fire > sexual interaction constitutes psychic isolation , mired as it is in male violence an female fear . EMPTY SIGNIFICANCE • The dirty bodies form part of Eliot’s more general focus on the ubiquity of modern waste, while his malodorous and unseemly bodies and clogged ears and eyes make communication difficult. • The obscene female body, then, connects to Eliot’s wider philosophical and political reflections on the contradictions of modern culture. REJECTION OF THE IDEA OF UNITY > If women are “one” in their shared physical substance, then, this oneness exposes the absence of meaningful connections in The Waste Land. Eliot argues that meaningful kinds of unity have been replaced by false and empty forms of order The obscene bodies of The Waste Land capture the conflicts of cultural fragmentation and moral emptiness, the shared physicality of Eliot’s poetic women constitutes a poetic challenge to this constraint BADENHAUSEN ( TRAUMA AND VIOLENCE IN TWL ) BADENHAUSEN : ELIOT CHARCHTERS ARE NEVER GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO HEAL FROM THEIR WOUNDS , IMPOSSIBILITY TO PROCESS AND OVERCOME THEIR TRAUMAS> DEAED END . ELIOT IS TRYING TO DISPLAY HE RUPTURES CAUSED BY WWI BY USING TRAUMA AS A TROPE NAD IMPOSSIBILITY TO HEAL FROM THOSE SUFFERINGS . Catastrophic ww1 but doesn’t engage those events directly Inspiration : Weston , denerval, dante ,Spanish tragedy . A state of emergency and trauma hangs over twl . Violence > represented by cadavers and mutilated bodies Violence and consolation fail to meet in 3 key points : Tiresias , death by water as a failed elegy , dialogue in a game of chess , traumatic shock and destructive effects upon intimate relationships Tiresias > impotent witness , history tied directly to trauma and violence , he is stuck mediating the traumas in the poem . Experience > witnessing death , sexual violence , devastation , tied to suffering . Incarnates every wounded figure in the poem > central site of emotional suffering in the poem He’s he identifies with the typist , it’s blurs identities and make Tiresias occupy the subject position of the poem’s other victims . Can foretell the future but cannot act on it > paralyzed figure in a timeless position . Can’t distinguish btw past and present trauma , crucial point for recovering victims . Twl as elegy > mourning and refusal of consolation , covert elegy , doesn’t settle on the specific loss, the poem is attempting to overcome the personal loss but also the collective one of ww1 . Death by water : elegies usually are long, this is short , only 10 lines , with an emotional buildup that here isn’t present ,brutally cut by Eliot . Colloquial vocabulary with higher register . Body not idealized : lack of discretion No possibility o f mourning, no promise of life after death . Detached impassivity , death not processed properly > anti elegy . Wartime trauma > intimate distance btw man and woman due to war , murice > speaks about war with debilitating emotional distance . Complete indifference resulted in man impossibility of relating those unspeakable tragedies to those who remained home > the environment in which they have returned is not ready to deal with their trauma > domestic space becomes inhospitable for. Traumatized soldiers unable to recover . he cannot speak due to his trauma > dislocation and alienation experienced by veterans . Impossibility to rejoin with those who didn’t experienced war because they couldn’t be able to understand . Language is inadequate to capture the essence of their suffering > so alienated and traumatized . Twl conceals the roots of trauma . Carachters are trapped in thei traumas w/o knowing how to deal with them . SORUM ( PSYCHOLOGY IN TWL ) From the opening stanza with its shifting pronouns, The Waste Land presents speaking voices that challenge the autonomy of the individual subject. Over the course of the past century, this challenge has spurred two conflicting critical stances: on the one hand, that The Waste Land provides a method to unify its many voices and subjects; on the other, that the poem records and even promotes the inevitable fragmentation of the modern subject. The variation in scholarly responses suggests that examining the issue of subjectivity and the role of psychology in The Waste Land means confronting contradictory critical impulses and interpretive pathways. The polyphony in The Waste Land becomes connected to attempts to reach outside the individual subject - to engage in acts of empathy - even while acknowledging the painful and dangerous nature of such perspective shifting. While The Waste Land presents a cosmos in which subjects are profoundly alienated from both themselves and from others, as well as one in which the idea of the coherent subject is fundamentally questioned, the poem simultaneously suggests that "subjects can reconnect through the construction of a common world built, in part, out of the 'unreal' objects of language and culture". MCINTIRE ( THE WL AS ECOCRITIQUE ) OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE : set of objects , situations or chain of events which should be the formula of the particular emotion that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader Ecocriticism > delineates forms of critical or cultural engagements w/ natural environments in which we live . E’s keen eye for surrounding and landscape Writes about a barren land , postwar , polluted > simbolic and metaphoric expression of our own wasted existence Thames : condition relatively clean at th beginning > contrast w/ ending very dirty . City lost touch with the land > spiritual meaning lost Fire sermon > title from Buddha from abstaining from desire , desire that leads to overconsumption Fisher king > looking for his nourishment in the wrong place Eliot was writing a version of ecocriticism. In The Waste Land, worries about fragile and deteriorating ecologies are embedded in its mythos and preoccupations, with its attention to polluted states working. Between “nature” and “the human,” where “nature” is profoundly unbalanced by the effects of the human on a global scale > massiveness and irreversibility of these changes. Eliot’s attention to the ecological settings of his speakers elsewhere, his external landscapes metaphorically and symbolically function as versions of Eliot’s “ objective correlative,” > offering sometimes nearly mimetic counterparts to personal interior states and influenced by the story of the land where we live . The Waste Land, Eliot’s desert is a place of brokenness and trial. the environments of The Waste Land desperately need water: after the pleasant “shower of rain” from “over the Starnbergersee” near its opening, most of the remainder of the poem is dominated by physical and spiritual dryness. The inhabitants of the waste land desperately crave the fundamentals of survival from a natural world that repeatedly fails them. In the “hyacinth garden” the speaker comes close to a sexual -romantic nirvana after recounting a memory of a gift of hyacinths to a beloved figure, finding himself in a blinding and silent state that briefly transcends the poem’s paralyzing dialectic of “death in life” to reach a place beyond this dualism: “I was neither / Living nor dead”. Meanwhile, the hyacinth is, of course, an early spring flower – one of the first – a - flower that lets us know that springtime has definitively arrived. With the hermit-thrush Eliot wants us to hear the real thing, even if only spectacularly far away in a remote and northern woodland and remembered as a fragment of nostalgia. The Waste Land registers an economy of lack where we still desperately need the natural, but where the natural is precariously circumscribed, compromised, and tragically unavailable for more than the briefest of moments. The major centres of culture that Eliot names are as broken and “Falling” as the inhabitants of the waste land. The Waste Land functions both as a memorial for what had already been lost or destroyed, and as a harbinger for the ecological crises we are experiencing today. The Waste Land stands as a poetry of crisis. Unreal City” and “Falling towers” have become our unreal world: the waste land of 1922 is still the waste land of today, and we are far from abolishing the ills that Eliot was anxiously representing. (Shantih Shanthi Shanthi) suggesting that beyond these pages there may be ways to discover peace CUDA ( CODA OF CAMBRIDGE COMPANION )