the waste land by ts eliot: a site for inertia in motion

Gomal University Journal of Research, Volume 31 Issue 2 December 2015

THE WASTE LAND BY T. S. ELIOT: A SITE FOR INERTIA IN

MOTION

Muhammad Saleem, Akhtar Ali & Shazia Kousar

Department of English, Government College Township Lahore

ABSTRACT

This study analyses T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land with reference to the

theme of stasis in the apparently mobile life of the twentieth century Europe. The

poetic sensibility of Eliot aestheticises the barrenness of the modern life in the

backdrop of spiritual bankruptcy. The horizontal motion is measured with the

yardstick of paradigmatic axis. Boredom, monotony and meaninglessness are the

various manifestations of stillness in the spiritually barren modern world. The

poet makes use of different artistic devices to foreground his concerns on this

modern dilemma. Self-critical text, suggestive alternative point of view, use of

grand-narrative in the modern context, inter-textual references, contrastive modes

of description and metaphoric images are some of them. This study is pursued in

the light of these poetic strategies to draw upon the stopped up life of the current

Europe. The variety of mechanical activities of the age makes face at the

theoretical framework of the modern existence.

Keywords: The Waste Land, alternative perspective, self-reflexive text, stasis

INTRODUCTION

T.S. Eliot is one of those twentieth century writers of who wrote in the

background of bloody World Wars which burnt all that was traditionally good.

The most dangerous damage caused by these wars was the loss of spirituality. In

this scenario, different artists took different positions to produce their art. Samuel

Beckett offered his thesis of absurd theatre that emphasises the existential

meaninglessness of man in this inhospitable and incomprehensible universe.

Hemingway was stripped of faith in God. He followed Plato, who says that if a

man has no God, he should himself create his God, by instigating the heroes of his

novels to create a high goal in life and then make use of all of the available

energies to achieve the destination. Bertolt Brecht, a German dramatist of the

previous century, reacted to the post-war scenario in his own way. He saw the

cause of the modern problems in the capitalist system that, according to him, was

dehumanising the entire world. T. S. Eliot has his distinctive filter in this regard.

He believes that the modern civilization that stands for pure worldliness and the

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sensate culture is a metaphor of hell for man. Detachedness from spirituality led

the modern man to the monotonous, soulless and dull existence that is just

unbearable. His world known poem The Waste Land is replete with this

phenomenon.

The present research is initiated to analyse the theme of stoppedness of the

modern man, presented by Eliot in his The Waste Land, which apparently sounds

prone to motion. For carrying out this investigation, two questions are devised:

Does the modern man live an immobile life? What devices are used by Eliot to

paint inertia in the movement of the modern era? These questions cover so many

aspects of the poem under discussion. Not only the form of the poem is analysed,

the hollow thoughts of the modern life that directly contribute to the hollow

culture and meaningless civilization of the previous century are also investigated.

This research is expected to add new dimensions to the criticism and

interpretation available on T.S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Critics and researchers across the world have made various successful attempts to

analyse different artistic dimensions of T. S. Eliot‟s poems and plays. Aurangzeb,

in 2002, completed his doctoral research entitled A Linguistic Analysis of T. S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land. This dissertation rejects the opinion of the critics that the

poem is, thematically, a patchwork and not a coherent whole. Aurangzeb moves

with the thesis that the poem under discussion is thematically, linguistically and

lexically a unified entity. He also argues that there is an intersectional unity

among five parts of the poem. It is a commendable study but it does not touch

upon the theme of standstillness in the rushed life of the modern era. The present

researcher completed his M.Phil thesis (2008) A Study of Regular and Irregular

Patterns in the Language of T.S. Eliot’s Poems A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

and Ash-Wednesday. In this study deviations and parallelisms are explored to

discover the message of the poet. Deviations of register and semantic deviations

are analysed exclusively to shed light on the paralysed mind of Prufrock and the

sex-based mentality of the hero of Ash-Wednesday. The literariness of the poems

is interpreted in terms of their foregrounding which is a formalistic device to

estrange the message of the artist.

Abdul Baseer (2011) wrote a paper Foregrounded Irregularities in T. S. Eliot’s

The Hollow Men. He chose graphological and semantic deviations for the

analysis. Semantic deviation stands for the symbolic use of language and the

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graphological deviation accounts for unconventional use of punctuation marks.

The researcher quite exhaustively pursued the study and made a good contribution

to the knowledge about Eliot‟s art of poetry. The Still Point of the Turning World

(2012) is an M.Phil thesis by Primrose Young. In this research document, a

comparative study of Thomas Mann„s Der Zauberberg and T.S.Eliot‟s poem The

Waste Land is carried out. Both the texts are composed in the backdrop of the

First World War in Europe. The researcher systematically analyses this

comparative study to foreground the inertia, colorlessness stagnancy and decay

spread all around. Certainly it is a valuable piece of investigation with reference

to the destruction that this war caused at different levels of human life in the first

half of the previous century but it did not specifically focus on the institutional

and individual immobility that the present researcher aimed at.

Jamie Berlin (2012) conducted an important research entitled The Poet in

Transformation: Dantean Aesthetics in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The

researcher traces the echoes of Dantean aesthetics in T.S.Eliot‟s masterpiece The

Waste Land. Eliot both in form and content pursues the Dantean poetics; the

miserable condition of the social beings of the 20th

century is just pitiable. What

the hellish souls in Dante‟s Inferno are doing is watched in Eliot‟s poem under

discussion. The poet is of the opinion that sacrifice on the personal level of

humans can change the barren land of modern civilization into a green land of

peace and happiness. There are so many other pieces of research conducted on

different aspects of Eliot‟s poetic art. There was a severe need to conduct a study

that takes up the theme of inertia in the apparently mobile life of the modern man

of the twentieth century. Hence the present study.

METHODOLOGY

The present study is carried out to find answers to the following questions.

1. Does the modern man live an immobile life?

2. What devices are used by Eliot to paint inertia in the movement of the

modern era?

T. S. Eliot is a conscious artist who diagnoses the catastrophic problem of the

modern man, inertia, in his poem The Watse Land. He makes use of various

devices like self-critical text, suggestive alternative point of view, use of grand-

narrative in the modern context, inter-textual references, contrastive modes of

description and metaphoric images.

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The present researcher takes up these devices as the unit of analysis to further his

research. With the help of these artistic techniques, the theme of stasis in process

is examined. For example, the use of traditionally grand narratives like love and

religion are placed in the context of the sensate culture of the modern man. The

conventional theme of regeneration and re-birth is ploughed by the poet in the

background of the mechanical life of the previous century. This study draws on

cries and sighs of the modern existence that has gone away from the spiritual

world.

Literature of Victorian era deals with the concept of gentility of man that is

defined in relation the mode of morality. Resultantly, adherence to traditions, also

called conformity, is the touchstone of the poetics of this artistic and cultural

epoch. When we cross the threshold of the 20th

century, a new phase of human

existence i.e. modern life and modern literature comes to the fore. In this modern

era, art and literature define the isolated man in relation to love. The life of the

modern man in the modern literature of the previous century is presented in

fragmentary mode. The humans apparently are in the flow and rhythm of life that

is always aimed at but when we penetrate the surface of this lifestyle, we are

shocked to notice the disgusting deep structures of this brand of life. There is a

lot of movement and motion at every level of the modern souls but there is no

happiness involved there; a sense of mechanical and routinized edition of life is in

triumphs. Humans do exit in life, but they do not live the life. This is the

dialectics that invites the attention of the modern present researcher. This

dialectical aspect of modern life is very favourite to the poets like T.S. Eliot. The

present researcher has attempted to distance the inertia stricken core self from the

apparently dynamic looking façade of the civilization of the day. The questions

included in this research project are quite apt for the analysis of the barrenness of

the modern waste landers.

DATA ANALYSIS

The Burial of the Dead, the first section of the poem The Waste Land, begins with

spring and winter as the two static opposites of a binary. The opening lines of this

section enter into a contrastive relationship with the starting lines of The Prologue

to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. April rain, in the Chaucerian idiom, is the

sign and mechanism of revitalizing nature that sets out the cheerful and

meaningful life for man. This traditional concept of spring intoxicates the humans

and they move off as pilgrims to the Canterbury shrines. It is a rapturous state of

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mind in which they feel the every touch of natural life. Eliot juxtaposes this

energetic and cheerful Chaucerian motif with the mechanical existence of the

modern man. The showers of the rain in April are still synonymous with the

currents of blissful life, but the degenerate modern life remains nonreactive to it.

The patterns of the artificial life are so deeply imbedded in the modern existence

that the modern souls are alien to the real domain of a soul i.e. spirituality.

Certainly, there are a lot of activities that the modern Europeans are busy in

during the whole winter but they are limited to their physical movements and not

to the stirring of the soul. Winter is metaphoric of a wasteland where grows

nothing that is related to natural life. Summer is just to shock them as they are

reminded of their great grandfathers who drew upon dynamic and blissful life.

Their wintery and routinized life is rather disturbed by the arrival of April. To

forget this disturbing spring, they commence a journey that again aligns them

with the soulless new civilization where materiality has established its domination

on spirituality. The spring rain upsets the young girl and she takes refuge under a

tree and then goes with her boyfriend to take coffee at a restaurant. This

movement of the young girl is contrastive with the journey of the Chaucerian

pilgrims for spiritual quest. The girl is mechanically mobile but not a spiritually

realized person and here lies the problem that is the dilemma of the modern man.

T. S. Eliot is a critically conscious artist who makes a shrewd use of the chosen

images and carefully selected narratives to let the intended meanings well out

profusely. Williams (1988) argues that the Eliotique imagery is strategic and

richly figurative in orientation. To explain the worthlessness of the modern life in

a shocking way, he sporadically introduces the traditional grand narratives in the

current context. Love as a traditional narrative is one of the blissful zones

available to the humans. In this background, he introduces the modern aesthetics

of mechanical love that is recurrent in the 20th

century existence. A young girl

remembers her „hyacinth‟, sex based love, that she enjoyed a year ago in the

„hyacinth garden‟ in the company of her sexual lover. As a parasite, he moved

across the body of the beloved, for sometimes, and then slipped away like a thief

never to be seen again. She is alive but as a frustrated, stopped up and broken up

self. The lover has left her forever and now she is in a state of bewilderment. This

love is the other name of mechanical and physical practices of the modern man

that lacks in spirituality and moral uplift. The grand narrative of traditional love is

contrasted with the guilty physical love of the hyacinth girl.

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City as a natural phenomenon remained “a maternal symbol to the ancients”

(Drew, p.98) but the modern city is „unreal‟ as it is utterly barren and far removed

from spiritual sources of life. Eliot explains this dilemma of the 20th

century life

through the configuration of stasis in process in the London city. Eliot calls

London the „unreal city‟ and explains its character by recalling Dante‟s

description of the common people who move on a bridge in Inferno with their

downcast eyes and mechanical walk (Southam, 1977). They drag on the bridge as

the water flows under it; they do not utter anything, they just produce „infrequent‟

sighs. Having seen through these city dwellers, Eliot says: „I had not thought

death had undone so many‟. What lurks behind this critique? They work on a

machine that is why they have adopted its characteristics: they move like robots

and sigh like the gaping engine. Their eyes are fixed before their feet and they

measure distance in an unthinking way. Their feet are on the move but their self is

clogged up; there is motion in their time but their existence is fixed. Their

miserable condition in the unreal city reminds us of Coleridge‟s poem The Rime

of Ancient Mariner. The sailors, who sinfully kill an albatross that comes to their

ship, turn into the metaphor of life in death. Their bodies move like the corps in a

nightmarish dream. The sea and the environment appear as a barren land where

just death is imposing. The ship on the sea looks frozen like a boat on the map.

The substanceless unreal city of Eliot is like a non-realised self that certainly

exists in the world but remains removed from the currents of real life. This

phenomenon is found in the Beckettian world also. In response to Vladimir‟s

question “do you remember the Gospels?” Estragon says “I remember the maps of

the Holy Land” (Beckett, 2009, p.86). Here the Holy Land is stripped of its

religious and spiritual character; it has been substituted by the pretty maps that are

like the stagnant ship in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The question arises is it

possible for these degenerate characters to experience regeneration? The answer

is in negative. After selling her soul to the devil in exchange of twenty four years

of voluptuousness, Doctor Faustus is no more a human being. He is unable to

repent because both God and Satan have joined their forces against him. That is

why he only pretends to repent in the last scene but in reality he cannot do so; he

is just an evil spirit now. There is a concept in Christianity that for the

resurrection of Christ, the Crucification of Jesus is essential. It is called to die into

life. The problem of the waste landers is their inability to die into life.

They are, according to Hugh Kenner (1979), just the meaningless noise. Their

routine life is repulsive in disposition but they have grown habitual of it. Their

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routinised existence has deprived them of their critical sense and they are

propelled endlessly by the force of their mechanical existence. Sylvia Plath in her

poetry also reaches a stage where everything appears in utterly faded colours and

there is just standstillness that hangs heavily to her. But she does not remain in

this situation for a long time. She soon enters into the second phase where she is

using all her forces to complete the process of self-destruction. Her poem Arial

starts with complete dissatisfaction with life as there is stasis everywhere but soon

the poetess is moving swiftly on her way to self-killing; in this process she moves

in an electric manner to die into life (Rosenblatt, 1979). And ultimately she

achieves the re-birth. But this phenomenon is absent among the waste landers.

They are, in the material sense, constantly on the move but in fact their motion is

the other name of inertia because their souls are not mobilised. Spiritually they

remain a barren land. Tiresias, the protagonist of the poem, has to cry loudly to

attract the attention of his friend Stetson who moves like a robot on the London

Bridge. He asks Stetson about the regeneration of the corpse that he buried in his

garden last year. But no response is received. The answer to the question lies in

the images of the poem that suggest the argument of the poet. The twentieth

century is a site of a „heap of broken images‟, „dead trees‟, „no shelter‟, and „stony

rubbish‟. This is the configuration of a waste land where nothing grows that is

green and healthy for man. Every character in „The Burial of the Dead‟ is literally

moving horizontally but no one is able to move paradigmatically. Their thematic

horizons are overshadowed under their formalistic parameters. It is called stasis in

process.

William Blake‟s philosophical statement which reads thus “without contraries

there is no progression” (as cited in Cruz, 2006, p.2) is appropriated by Eliot in

his poem under discussion. He presents the reality of the modern life in

antagonistic modes. A Game of Chess, the second section of the poem offers a

good example of inertia in motion. Belladonna, an upper class lady, exists among

the outclass luxuries. The royal backdrop refers to the „matchless‟ aura of the

lady. The throne, she sits on, is reflected in the marble floor. The pillars,

decorated with fruit and grapes designs, support the looking glass of the lady. The

ivory bottles and colour glasses produce drafts of synthetic perfumes. Sometimes,

the air from the window disturbs the internal atmosphere of the place. The grace

and splendor of the drawing room is thoroughly eclipsed when the lover of the

lady arrives. The conversation of the lady with her lover exposes her dangerously

stopped up and frustrated self that desperately invites the pity of the reader. The

images that appear during the talk are quite befitting to the concept of the waste

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land. Sex is a loveless and mechanical exercise for the lovers therefore she is

bored to the death point; unable to join the sexual activity, she asks her lover to

talk to her and in this way relieve her of the deadly monotony.

The imperial setting and the superlative figure of the lady is contrasted with the

barrenness of life that she is habitual of. The lady is unable to keep the gnawing

noise under control that is raging within her. She releases a series of questions to

the lover to evade the torture that the mechanical life imparts to her: „Why do you

never speak?‟, „What do you think of?‟, and „What thinking?‟ The crisis of her

personality has risen to the alarming heights. Her „nerves‟ are badly shaken and

she is in need of some external support to breathe. That is why she requests the

lover thus: „Stay with me. Speak to me‟. The question arises what these miserable

souls can say to each other? Answer is simple: they have nothing to communicate.

They are not traditional lovers who spiritualise each other through their sincere

love. She says „I never know what you think‟. They have association with each

other but there is communication among them. Eliot, while explaining the

dilemma of modern men says, that they are „stuffed‟ and „hollow‟ souls who even

cannot exist/stand independent of others. They, like a straw, must seek the support

of someone to maintain its entity. There is a lot of inertia in their life and that is

why their existence is lusterless and meaningless. They are like a drowning man

who tries to get breathing space through sighs and cries; this is the total of their

human substance.

Eliot, on purpose, juxtaposes the theme of metamorphosis against the sterility of

the modern life. The mythological narrative of Philomela is inscribed on the walls

of the lady. Philomela was raped by the king Tereus. She, to avoid his murderous

design, turned into a nightingale (Southam, 1977). Today‟s world is unable to

understand the message of the nightingale and considers it but a noise. The irony

of the situation is that the modern man himself is the sign of noise that is the

enemy of voice. The response of the lover to the onslaught of her questions is

indicative of the root cause of the problem. He says that that they are in „rats‟

alley‟ where „the dead men lose their bones‟. Rat stands for the pollution of the

twentieth century culture and society where degeneration is up to the mark. The

emblem of regeneration is invisible. The bones of the dead persons stand for the

hollowness of life that we are confronted with. And no hope of salvation is

visible. The lady again asks a question: „what is that sound?‟ The reply is again

shocking for the reader. The wind is raging there and this implies the barrenness

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of the modern waste land where fertility of life is in absences. A modern

philosopher Austin (1962) says that speech performs actions.

Eliot makes use of speech in a befitting manner. The questions and answers of the

two lovers perform the actions of frustrations and ennui that further unnerve and

bewilder them. The language of the lovers reminds us of the language and

situation of life of the characters of Waiting for Godot. When the characters of

Harold Pinter and Beckett are faced with the severe crisis in life, they are short of

statements and recurrently productive in interrogative sentences. On the one hand,

it shows their inability to get proper words to express their agonizing feelings and

on the other hand, it exhibits their acute sense of bewilderment. The lover says

that the wind is doing „nothing again nothing‟. The wind is the socially and

culturally alienated man that again and again fails to strike roots in the waste land.

The refrain of Waiting for Godot „nothing to be done‟ is the order of the

disorderly life of the existing souls. The assertion of the upper class woman that

her lover sees nothing and knows nothing brings home the feeling of the life of

stasis that is inscribed in the mechanical movements of the modern humanity. The

lady announces that she would repeat her routine activities like playing the game

of chess, bathing with hot water and running into the street with disheveled hair.

Even then she asks the questions: „what shall I do?‟ and „what shall I ever do?‟

These questions of the lady are the cry in the wilderness. Nancy K. Gish (1981)

holds that the surroundings and activities of the „lady of rocks‟ “mask a sterility

and desperation” (p.56). It is very paradoxical of her to be in a dialectical

situation.

The Fire Sermon, the third section of the poem, is a site for materialistic lusts of

the men and women of the twentieth century. These lusts provide joys to their

body and keep their soul dry and exhausted. The mismatch between the relaxation

of the body and that of the soul creates a sense of fragmentation and paralysis in

the modern life. The flowing Thames stands for the purity of traditional life that

was mobile, satisfied and enviable. The modern Londoners enjoy their picnic on

the banks of the river and pollute it with „cigarette boxes‟, „empty bottles‟, and

„sandwich papers‟. These pollutants are the sign of the modern mechanical

activities that have distanced the mechanised humans from the naturalness of life.

The dirtied Thames produces but ill smell that is the integral part of the current

civilisation of the west. The mechanical routine works of the Londoners are

silhouetted against „a rat‟ that „crept softly through the vegetation/dragging its

slimy belly on the bank‟. The naked bodies of the modern girls that lie along the

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banks of the river in the afternoons are bracketed with the noise of the cars and

the pollution on the Thames. It is all programmatic on the part of the poet. He

wants the reader to see through the hollowness of the modern civilization, through

these images.

Sex is one of the most popular activities that the modern men are busy with. But,

unfortunately, like other mechanical tasks, it also proves disgusting and repulsive.

There is a typist girl who comes from the office in the evening for rest at her

room. The lover comes to explore the body of the typist. He engages her sexually

and she produces no resistance. After the finish of the activity, the lover gives a

soulless kiss and goes away. The girl smoothens her hair and puts a gramophone

to listen a song. There are apparently a lot of movements in the life of the girl but

reality is that she is in the real sense a clogged up figure. She is, in practice, a

suitable candidate for the waste land site. The poet reminds us the theme of

Goldsmith‟s writing The Vicar Wakefield where the woman repents over her

mistake when she becomes a victim to it. But the modern typist girl has no

feelings of regret over her illici relations. The title of the section The Fire Sermon

refers to the claim of Lord Buddha that the world is on fire for its lusts and for the

hellish worldliness that makes their life barren.

The fourth section of the poem under discussion, Death by Water, presents

another example of inertia in the modern life. Water is traditionally linked with

the regeneration of life but here it appears in its nasty role where the re-birth of

life is not its function. The poet explains the modern man‟s dilemma through the

story of Phlebas, a Greek sailor, who devotes his life for business pursuits and

ultimately is drowned in a whirlpool. His body is passed through various

manifestations of the whirlpool but his re-birth is not realised. The role of water

in this case is quite horrible as we know that traditionally water has been with a

role to contribute to the regeneration of man. The Tollund man in Heaney‟s poetry

sacrifices his life for the nation by embracing the goddess of fertility in the

moorland. Consequently, the area is blessed with fertility which produces grains

for the relevant population. This story of the Greek sailor again stresses the note

of sterility in the life of the modern man.

What the Thunder Said, the last section of the poem, encapsulates the argument

that he has been advocating in the course of the poem. Eliot renarrates the arrest

and crucification of Christ. This is an artistic strategy of the poet to stress the idea

that the modern man is constantly killing Christ by going away from his teachings

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and commands. Christ and Christianity is the name of forbearance, patience,

resignation and self-redemption and constant struggle for peace. Is the modern

man fit for the mission of Christianity? The modern souls live in the body and the

salvation is possible through the cleansing of the soul that involves the long chain

of sufferings and tortures. Eliot describes this helpless situation of the modern

man through various narratives from the traditions. Sir Parsifal, a dedicated

follower of Christ, goes on an expedition in search of the Holy Grail. In the

course of the adventure, he faces so many devilish traps of Satan and his crew to

frighten him from going ahead. He suffers from acute thirst like severe problems

but he does not lose heart. And ultimately, he succeeds in his holy mission to

explore the realm of spirituality. Eliot relates this narrative to stress his point that

the modern European civilization is unable to achieve self-redemption. As the

modern man has no desire for re-birth.

CONCLUSION

The above analysis proves that T.S. Eliot arranges different types of movements

of the modern man to stress his barren self, inertia based life and immobile

personality. The poet introduces traditional grand narratives in 20th

century

context so that they may work as a contrast to the meaningless life of the modern

man. There is a strong feeling of mechanical concept of existence in the busy life

of the modern man. The feeling of futility in the western civilisation raises various

questions for the reader. Is the modern man alive? Can the modern man get

regeneration? Can we call the mechanical routine a life? Is it possible to live a

happy life without spirituality? The reader is instigated to muse over these

questions. It is a general belief today that the great writers, instead of answer

questions, raise questions. The reader is supposed to complete the text that was

initiated by the writer. T. S. Eliot is a successful writer in this regard as his

readers are charged intellectually to go for the solution of the problem of the

modern life. His philosophy that art should aestheticise the social consciousness

of the poet makes him the true guide of the world.

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