 So, welcome. This is an Arts One digital lecture by me, Kevin McNeely, on T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, introducing the poem for our section of Arts One called Monster in the Mirror. And that idea of monstrosity and of representation or mirroring is sort of in the background of this lecture and all of the lectures on the course, so I'll be touching on that a little bit. But principally I'm concerned today to describe and to talk about Eliot's poem and its reception and how it is we might read it. So, Eliot's The Wasteland. Something I asked students in the lecture that was delivered in the class situation for this poem was about their reading experience, how it was to read The Wasteland. And most of them, I sort of confessed for them, but most of them found it to be a bit of a difficult poem. It's a bit of a challenge to read. And I'm going to think about why that is and talk a little bit about the notion of difficulty and of modernity. We should maybe start off, you can see my title here, Modernity in Ruins, Otherness, Lateness and Fragmentation. So those are going to be key themes that come up, but we should perhaps start off by talking a little bit about the theme in the title, The Wasteland. I'll come back to the idea of landscape or geography throughout the talk today, but I wanted to pick up on the idea of waste. In particular, a kind of critical or literary version of waste, waste and exhaustion. This is a poem that has tended to be read and I think even over read by the critical establishment in the first days of its publication, Elliot was very concerned, I think, about introducing himself or ingratiating himself, really writing himself into the canon of English language literature. He was concerned with his own presence among the critical and academic establishment, those who were tending to interpret his poem and to take that poem and, in a sense, disseminate it out into the Western world, into Western culture. So an essay interpreting the poem and what I wanted to indicate to you today is that this idea of exhaustion was there almost from the beginning and of waste. An essay interpreting the poem in 1937 by Cleanth Brooks begins with this sentence and this essay is actually included in the edition of The Wasteland, the Norton edition that we have on the course syllabus. Brooks says to venture to write anything further, and remember this is 1937. The Wasteland is published in 1922. To venture to write anything further on the wasteland may call for some explanation and even apology. It's as if by 10 to 15 years in the decade after the wasteland had appeared everything had either been said about it or there was such a body of criticism, a body of interpretation that writers like Brooks, who were established presences in the critical scene, still had trouble thinking about saying something new. This idea of newness in fact is coupled to the general conception of modernism as it was inflecting itself and working itself out in Eliot's day. Ezra Pound who is a key presence in the composition and really in the editing and shaping of the wasteland had as a kind of mantra for his sense of modernist writing. An imperative, he said, what the poet must do, what the writer must do is make it new. This is tied perhaps to a certain conception of progress, but really to a sense of the exhaustion to being late or even at the end point of western culture and western civilization and grasping at ways to shake up and to reshape all of the received knowledge and all of the texts that writers like Pound and Eliot would have in their minds and would have before them. So Brooks as a reader of the wasteland is tapping into this sense of critical exhaustion of not quite knowing what to do even though he's a very knowledgeable reader. So as I've said here, the poem itself exhausts its own reading. It's like it is at the end point of the possibility of reading poetry per se. It is an artifact of its own lateness and was, I would say, from the point of its own conception from the fact, the moment of its making. The wasteland, I would argue, can't satisfactorily find its own words. Now it finds words, but it's not satisfied with those words. It's unhappy. They don't make sense in the way that the poet or the culture on whose behalf he seems to want to speak needs to have sense made. So as Eliot will say, we will look in a moment or two at a statement he made in his criticism, but he tries forcibly to wrench meaning, to pull meaning from all the fragmented and disparate parts of the textual heritage, the canon into which he wants to inscribe himself and of which he wants to take part. So to set up the discussion of the poem I want to take a line from its end or nearly its end. This is one of the lines that hasn't necessarily been poached from other texts. It hasn't been rewritten or repurposed by Eliot, and we'll see in a few minutes that this is part of his technique. He says in the third or fourth last line of the whole piece, these fragments I have shored against my ruins. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. And this sentence I want to suggest to you is a statement of the poetic of the way of writing and the way of thinking that lies behind the whole poem. So these fragments I have shored against my ruins. There are really four aspects of this rather brief and compact line that I want to draw our attention to. So I'll just highlight a few here. The first is the idea of fragmentation, and this is where we'll begin talking about the poem and its technique. It is a poem that assembles or draws together fragments, bits and pieces of, as I've said, western literature and western culture and indeed a number of non-western texts as well. So fragmentation. It also speaks to the nature of the mindset of Eliot's time that he, as he perceived it at least, his time was a time of fragmentation and of dissolution, of collapse and breakdown in many different senses. So first sense of this line is these fragments. The second part I want to pick up on relates to this is the idea of shoring up. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Something is being bolstered or repurposed in a way, solidified. He's trying in the poem to stabilize some sense of meaning and doing it forcibly. He's shoring up the ruination that he perceives around him to try and stop it from continuing, I think, and perhaps even to find a way out of the waste, this state of exhaustion in which he finds himself. Shoring up. Poetry in that sense is a kind of act of contingency of repair, of cobbling together in a rather temporary and potentially even unstable way the bits and pieces that you have left. Who's doing that shoring up? Who's doing that repair? Who's doing that remedial work is also at issue in the poem. So I have the I and the my here is worth noting in this line. That is to say this is a poem, despite appearances, I would argue about the first person or what we would say in a little more jargony way in sort of critical and theoretical kinds of thinking. It's a poem about subjectivity, subjectivity, how it is that a subject, a person, a sense of self constructs and reassembles itself. The idea of a subject comes to us really through grammatical or syntactical considerations of language, which is a linguistic term. So a subject, an I in this case, is a self that wants to write itself into being or to fabricate or construct itself through the medium of language in particular. So subjectivity, so we've had fragmentation, shoring up or contingent form and subjectivity. In many ways the wasteland tries to discover the nature of this I and asks us to ask ourselves, is it possible even in our own time to say I, to have a secure or even perceptible sense of who we are, of what it is that we consist of? Can we be said to have in any shared way an essence? This is a problem in the poem that I, as with the kind of labor, the poetic work, the short things up is also contingent and fragmentary and dissolving perhaps. And the fourth, we had one word, we've got one word left in the line now. The fourth thing I want to talk about is the idea of ruins or ruination. This is a signal in this line that Eliot's interested in addressing, not simply the state of mind in which he sort of finds himself, the troubled and even breaking down state of mind, but also to locating the place of that fragment itself in the broader context of what we might call Western civilization or the Western European world. And it's this point that I want to kind of depart from as we talk about the poem. So we're thinking about ruins and the poem as a structure of ruination and how it is that that sense of ruin is symptomatic of the time and place of the composition of the wasteland. In many ways, this is one way of understanding what the land part of the wasteland might be. The landscape, the figurative and literal landscape of Western Europe is a space of ruin for Eliot. So to do this, we're thinking a little bit about the notion of what in German would be called a zeitgeist, a spirit of the times. That is in Eliot's time, and you'll see that time in the wasteland, and if you read on in a lot of Eliot's later work, becomes a kind of crucial conceptual note or point of focus where he's thinking a lot about what time is, how history functions, how we exist as beings in time. The idea of a zeitgeist is the idea of a kind of overarching way of thinking or an overarching mode of being that characterizes a particular place in time. Thinking in this way can be very deterministic. Not all of us at the same time behave or think in the same way, but the idea of a zeitgeist is the notion of assembling all of our disparate ways of conducting our lives and ways of thinking into one dominant theme. It's pretty clear that Eliot's poem is trying to do this, that ruination is in many ways his understanding of the spirit of his time. I want to counterpose this a little bit though to another notion of zeitgeist or a related notion of zeitgeist that resists its deterministic aspect, and that is, it's a Greek word from Aristotle, episteme, episteme. Now, the French social historian and philosopher Michel Foucault talks about his notion of the idea, his version of the idea of episteme, which literally means science or knowing, knowledge I suppose, knowing. Foucault thinks about this as characterizing a particular way of knowing in a specific historical context, rather than understanding an episteme, a mode of knowledge, as deterministic, he tends to think of it as constructed and as in a certain way self-constructing as a way in which we fabricate and participate in how we know and perceive the world. So in this sense, you can have more than one episteme at a given time. I want to think about ruin and really about modernity in the context of the wasteland as an episteme, as a characteristic of certain dominant tendencies in the history of Eliot's time. So with that in mind, with a kind of non-deterministic view of this idea of spirit in mind, I'd still like to characterize some of the periodistic aspects of the modern. That is to say, just try to define what it is that modernism is. The wasteland is a key text in modernism and it's very important to understand what that context is in order to try to figure out what the poem is doing and to address its difficulty and its fragmentation. So when we talk about modernity, that's really a kind of a broad philosophical concept that can reach anywhere from the Renaissance to the present day. Modernism, by contrast, is a much more specific term really for a kind of artistic, cultural movement that, again, these dates are loose, but that took place roughly from the late 19th century, maybe the 1890s, to the middle to end of the Second World War, so 1945. After the Second World War, post-1945, we will tend to talk about postmodern literature's postmodern culture. So modernism is a kind of cultural or artistic movement that happens in the first half of the 20th century. It's a reaction in part to what we have talked about in class and what is generally perceived as Victorian propriety and Victorian formality. I've put down formalism here, but which is more of a kind of sense of the poetic conservatism of writing in the Victorian period. But nonetheless, that idea of propriety and formality general would tie in really well with what it is that Elliot and other modernist writers are wanting to resist. It's their antithesis in some ways, Victorian culture. These are three lines from Elliot's poem, Cousin Nancy, an early poem. Upon the glazing shelves kept watch, Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, the army of unalterable law. This is a poem that predates the wasteland, but you can hear Elliot at this moment looking at, I guess, their busts or something like that, small sculptures sitting on a mantle in his Cousin Nancy's very proper drawing room, I suppose, or parlor. And they are busts of Matthew Arnold and of Ralph Waldo Emerson, key figures in... They are called Victorian sages, key figures in Victorian culture, who despite whatever experiment or despite whatever kind of radicalism, they might tentatively have embraced here and there and their work tend towards a kind of cultural conservatism. They tend to represent, as Elliot puts it here, a certain notion of unalterable law, that there are things that are fixed and stable in which you can have faith. Arnold's culture and anarchy, for example, Matthew Arnold's culture and anarchy from the 1880s, articulates a program of, I guess we could call it, sweetness and light in culture of advocating for a stable set of truth values that exist at the core, at the center of what we might understand as culture or of any kind of cultural work. In Elliot's time, those values are in many ways under attack and are falling apart. They seem inappropriate. They seem to be dated or archaic. They're out of step with his time. There isn't, however, perhaps a sense of what values are in step with his time. It's a time that's out of joint, as Shakespeare might have said, or out of sync with itself, perhaps. These unalterable laws, we might characterize as master narratives, as stories or structures that lie behind or above or that surround the daily lives of people living in this historical context. Stories of the nuclear family, particularly the patriarchal family, of the rightness of law, of particular kinds of law, of state, of a well-conducted state, of church, of belief in God, and theological principles, of reason itself, in fact, the rational mind of culture. Again, this is from Arnold that culture is the best of what is thought and said, that culture is something you can count on as stable, as right, and as embodying truth. And in particular, narratives of canon, that is to say, of what is canonized. And this idea was particularly important for Elliot as he engaged in his critical and in his poetic career in various types of canon revision and of canon making, of deciding what texts, this is what a canon is, what texts do and do not count as important or as great, of what works of literature, let's say, or works of art represent stable sets of value, of what give us access as great art to some kind of eternal truth. So Elliot's concerned in his own work with thinking about that relationship, but those stable ideas of the essential qualities of Western culture, of what it is we can rely on to produce the canons of our moment, of our place, of our time, of our ethnic group, of our nation are falling apart. And Elliot in many ways problematizes that whole notion of canon and as well tries to redress it, tries to remedy it, tries to find ways to reassemble some of these collapsed narratives. It's also important to remember that Elliot's writing in the wake of the Great War, of the First World War, which was a time particularly in Western Europe when civilization had fallen to pieces was literally, quite literally in ruin as trenches were dug across the fields of France and Belgium and other countries in Western Europe and as the landscape itself, remember this poem is called The Waste Land as the landscape itself is torn apart and finds only death and self-destruction instead of rebirth or any sense of revivification, any sense of life. In the Great War can also be said to represent the falling apart of stable codes of value. Who's on the side of right? Who's nation? Who's people? What philosophy can be said to have access to the true or the right or the good? In the First World War, that sense of truth falls apart. In Arts One we've also been studying Freud's civilization and its discontents which comes in the 1930s, so after The Waste Land, but one of the things to notice in that text that participates in the project of Eliot's poem is Freud's fantasy, his desire for a certain kind of mastery. You may remember at the end of civilization and its discontents how Freud asks where has eros gone, where has the power of social or cultural bonding gone in the face of Thanatos' aggression and death? And he doesn't really have an answer for that question, but his book, his project, if you want to think of it that way, is addressing itself to that question, trying to find a way out of the crisis in civilization or in what he calls in German in the title of that book, in English it's civilization, its discontents, in German it's culture, the idea of culture to being of someone who is self-aware and embedded in, enmeshed in stable notions of value, of family and state. So for Freud this is a problem, for Eliot this is a problem, they're looking for remedies, looking for ways to master somehow poetically, conceptually of the fragmented world around them, the fragmented psyche for Freud, the fragmented self. So I mentioned that many people have told me, many students that this is a difficult poem and they're not wrong, this is from an essay by Eliot, a piece from an essay by Eliot that appeared a year before the wasteland and is concerned in part with a kind of canon recovery, the value and the worth of writing by a group of late Renaissance writers called the Metaphysical Poets, so John Dunn, George Herbert and others and trying to show people in his own time, in Eliot's own time, that this is literature worth reading and in effect he builds a connection between this rather difficult, complicated poetry that tended to be dismissed a little bit in its own time, he builds a connection between this difficult kind of writing and the difficulties of fragmentation and of ruination that he perceives around him. So I'll just read this passage, it's from page 126 in your edition of the Wasteland as well. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. So there's an imperative there, you must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety, so there's a notion of assembling, of comprehension, of understanding and of drawing together, of assembling disparate strands, but that process of assemblage, as Eliot notes here, is difficult and what's being assembled is also inherently difficult. It resists easy assimilation and that, he says, is a part of our own time as well or his own time, 1921, 1922 as it exists at present. So our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity and this variety and complexity playing upon a refined sensibility. There's some sense here of the poet or of the artist or of the critic as a little bit elitist, as a little bit better, a little bit more perceptive, a little more refined. When it plays upon a refined sensibility it must produce various and complex results, he suggests. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. Again, notice the metaphor of location there or of place. This is a wasteland, so it's a space of forced dislocation. There's a couple of lines from near the end of the poem this is from what the thunder said, the fifth section of the wasteland. A woman drew her long black hair out tight and fiddled whisper music onto those strings. The idea of whisper music here being a kind of ghostly music, a ghostly kind of art, something that's a bit ephemeral or that escapes perhaps from immediate understanding, it's obscure. You can notice the attention here to a kind of late 19th century aestheticist poetic. That is, he's reproducing a kind of twilight or purple verse. A way of writing that corresponds to the end of the day, to the autumnal, to things being dim and undefined. And that's the kind of music that comes out of that particular space. Something else to notice in these lines is that they are, poetically speaking, participating in and meshed in a kind of unalterable law. That is to say, these are iambic pentameter lines. A woman drew her long black hair out tight and fiddled whisper music on those strings. I don't know if you can hear the rhythm there, but these are iambic pentameter lines. But notice how Elliot has repurposed these very closed and fixed form to his own ends. It's as if this is a fragment inside of other fragments drawn from his poetic heritage and rewritten his immediate heritage in the estates of the late 19th century. This is a small point, but something else to notice here is that, of course, there's no punctuation. So it's as if this very closed form has been tweaked a little and opened up slightly. It's been broken. It's kind of small, but it is worth noting. So we're thinking about our civilization and our times. Another recurrent line in the poem is Unreal City. This comes up in a couple of the sections. As a line on its own, he thematizes. He calls out to the idea of the urban and of urban in really late industrial life of living in the city. This is a, on the PowerPoint slide here, you can see a photograph from a postcard of London in 1922, and you can see the exhaust smoke from the automobiles. You can see the kind of Greco-Roman-esque pillars on, I think that's a bank building in the background and gas lights and then the people milling about in the center of the street. There's a sense here of clutter, of dislocation perhaps, of alienation certainly, of being a little bit separate from your space or cut off from a place and from self, from a clear sense of self, of moving around in a dim, foggy, brown fog is what Elliot will use to characterize this space, a dim and foggy place, but which nonetheless has traces of both intellectual progress, social progress like those cars, and of ancient civilization, as I said, you can see traces of a kind of vague classical heritage here of one of the bastions in that building of, as he says in that poem, Cousin Nancy, unalterable law. So it's as if we see bits and pieces, leftovers of this firm sense of the civilized, but we can't quite access to them, and people are coming and going around them. They are one among many fragments circulating in the world. We can extend this a little bit, so from the first section, these are four lines, the Burial of the Dead is the first section. The line alludes to the Anglican funeral service from the Book of Common Prayer, I believe, the Burial of the Dead, and also to, we'll come to this shortly, what Elliot called vegetation rites that have to do with the dying and reviving gods that he had picked up from the Golden Bow by Sir James Fraser, an early work of anthropology, and also from a book by Jesse L. Weston called From Ritual to Romance, which was really about Arthurian legend and the Grail legends, but had to do with certain kinds of ritual death and rebirth. So in this section, the Burial of the Dead, near the midpoint of the poem, he says, Unreal City, under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. The line Unreal City makes reference to some texts, a particular text, but also others by Charles Baudelaire, you can see his photograph there on the PowerPoint slide, so a 19th century poet who himself was focused on the kind of consumerism and the dissolution of his own particular sort of civilized moment. He's best known for a book of poems called Flowers of Evil, Flowers of Evil. The other painting, the other image on the slide is a painting of Dante having his first look at Beatrice and there's an illusion, that's La Vida Nuova by Dante. The illusion in these lines is actually to Inferno, one of the sections of the comedy in which Dante enters, Inferno enters Hell in the Company of Virgil and sort of looks over the concentric circles of the descending pit of the underworld and says something like I had not thought death had undone so many, but here Elliott transplants that line, transplants Baudelaire as well historically and topographically into contemporary London so we have crowds flowing over London Bridge or if you can think back to that postcard crowds milling about on crowded streets. Elliott sees them as the living dead in many ways I suppose, like zombies he says I had not thought death had undone so many in Dante's poem this is a space of the afterlife a posthumous space in Elliott's conception that posthumous existence existence after death has come into his own present so he looks and sees people walking about as if they are dead cut off from each other one of the this is a preoccupation of Elliott's in fact this is a quotation a line from the love song of J. Alfred proofrock which is an earlier poem published in 1917 but it speaks to the sense of disaffection of alienation or of what Baudelaire would have called ennui of a kind of general boredom or really a kind of existential boredom a boredom in your spirit in your mind so here in this line proofrock or however you understand him this slightly dandish or in Baudelaire in terms flannur like figure passing around different kind of artistic cellones leading a little a slightly pretentious disaffected life he says I have measured out my life with coffee spoons he does nothing he trails around from place to place talking about nothing and you'll see that word nothing repeats itself in various sections of Elliott's poem as well the sense of the disaffected or disappearing self of a self that no longer knows itself I'm still talking about background to the poem although we've seen a few lines and we're connecting together this idea of fragmentation and fragmentation with the idea of subjectivity this is a digressive moment in this talk but I've got a photograph here again on the PowerPoint slide if you want to refer to it a photograph by Eugène Ache which is a picture of a storefront in Paris and although Elliott and Ache never connect directly they do I would say participate in a kind of common cultural moment and I feel like a photograph like this illustrates something this is another street photograph illustrates something of how it is that the wasteland puts itself together and it's thematic preoccupation so I'm just pausing for a moment to just do a quick reading or take a quick look at this photograph again it's from about the same time from 1925 so once you can notice here that Ache has done a kind of trick photography and by photographing a department store window an early department store window he captures a kind of translucent or transparent translucent reflection of the street in that window if we were to ask ourselves what's being represented here it's commerce obviously there are pairs of pants here with price tags on them and then mannequins in the background in the window it's a display it's an artificial depiction of I guess the dandish or the well-dressed man in the time something to notice is that people in this photograph have become mannequins this is an idea of the living dead I suppose or of the posthumous person we have bodies here with no content they're non-living bodies they're mere empty representations of people that there's a kind of a layering of fields of focus or fields of vision in this photograph and what this does is create a kind of well in literary terms we talk about this as being a palimpsest as one image or one word written over the traces of another here you have a kind of visual palimpsest but what it does is suggest the fragmentation of the focal point really of the photograph that is it's focusing primarily it's got a bit of a broad focus but it's focusing primarily on the surface of the glass as if you had a mirror there but we also have other planes both reflected in that glass what's behind the photographer here you can see the street you can see buildings and traces of people in fact and what's in the window display where we are visually becomes a problem you're not sure exactly what you're seeing here you're seeing multiple things at once your perspective in other words is fragmented and tripled at least tripled it may be more than that in this photograph a question I put to students about this photograph and that I would put to us today is to ask yourself if there are any real people it's a bit of a trick question if there are any real or living people in this photograph it's a photograph of the unreal city it's a spectral photograph we have ghosts I think to notice as I suggested this already there are traces in the reflection the glass of passing people but because of the shutter speed I think of the camera they blur because they're moving so all you get of people all that's left over of people in the work of art here or in the work of representation is our traces our blurry indistinct boundary list of blurs of people this I would suggest to you is a representation of the inability of art to represent that self this is a dissolving subject a subject who disappears from view but whose disappearance is what in fact we are viewing it's not as if they are gone but in the spectral traces of who they are we view the process of things coming apart just a couple more moments of background since for this course we read Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and also Nietzsche's genealogy of morals in a moment of reflection in his confession Dr. Jekyll points out that or projects a coming human being who will, you can see this highlighted there be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious incongruous and independent denizens Jekyll and Hyde among other things is about the segmentation and the fragmentation of the self who is at least two and here at this point he projects that what we are are incongruous broken cells that coming people, people of the modern age and remember this is published in the 1880s so this is a kind of a precursor to Eliot's Wasteland a literary precursor in the coming age, in the modern age Stevenson projects people who have no firm or clear sense of self but are mere assemblages that idea of the assemblage also harkens back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which we've also been reading for this course and thinking about the incongruity of the creature's body the creature as a made being as a being who educates himself in various, through various texts and whose literal body is also stitched together surgically bound up on itself in a grotesque and unresolved way that creature is not a coherent self and spends the text trying to find a way to give himself voice and to find a place for himself obviously to tragic and horrifying ends to speak to the theme of this course as well that idea of the assembled self might be a gesture at the monster at the monstrous self if we're trying to locate the monstrous within the wasteland we can think about the monstrosity of culture, of the horror of present day history for Elliot but also of the assembled admixture of texts and bits and pieces that try to constitute a self in his poem the genealogy of morals in section 13 of the first essay you have rather provocative claim that the self as we know it the representations of the self are always and the self itself, the sense of being a person is thoroughly constructed to the point of not existing Nietzsche says there is no being behind the doing, acting or becoming all you are is action, all you are is a kind of kinesis or motion kinesis think in the sense of cinema it's as if like those figures in the window that Aches photograph represented we are blurs as we move through our life destabilized and uncertain of any center so he says the doer is merely made up constructed, fabricated or if you want to think literally in terms of the wasteland poetry poetas means maker boyan in ancient Greek is a verb that refers to the fact of making, of constructing of building, of producing we are poetic constructs is what Nietzsche is suggesting here made up of actions of trajectories but having no stable concrete sense of self the doer is merely made up and added into the action, the act is everything so what we end up with in the context of I guess western civilization as elliott's addressing it is as he says at the beginning of his poem a heap of broken images and we're making an effort to shore up that heap but having some difficulty assembling all of the junk all of the traces of civilization all of the castoffs all of the central important stuff of understanding how to sort that out and of understanding how to put it together so these fragments I have short against my ruins the poem itself and you can see this this is what makes it difficult is a collection of ruins or is ruined I would suggest to you and this is certainly not original with me but this is one of the ways that the poem was taught to me is that the wasteland is an exploded epic it's a set of shards of ashes of refuse of leftover bits once a large epic poem a poem of cultural and philosophical reach a gathering together of everything in many ways once that's been sort of torn into shreds again in the wake of the collapse of various systems of value like those of western Europe that had fallen apart in the great war as I mentioned so it's like the Odyssey another text we've read in arts one but turned inside out it's a nostos a search for home that does not necessarily reach home we end the poem on the shore of potential gathering together the fragments to rebuild but I don't think any rebuilding necessarily takes place or if it is rebuilding it's cobbling together it's unsatisfactory so it's as if we have a nostos we have a kind of nostalgia for order or as the poet Derek Mahon called it a rage for order but it's unsatisfied and unfulfilled so we have shards it's also as much as the Odyssey maps out as a journey the I don't know attic basin of the Mediterranean the areas around what we now know is Greece and Italy that part of the Mediterranean the wasteland offers an incomplete map of its terrain again that land that landscape isn't fully fleshed out it isn't comprehensible we can't put it all together one of the things that Caroline Williams talked about in her lecture on the Odyssey is the idea of a catabasis that is of the descent into the underworld and this might also be something that we can see Elliot taking from the Odyssey in particular is the descent into waste dark spaces into posthumous spaces into spaces that lack life and vitality so Tiresias certainly is a figure who's discovered in the underworld by Odysseus who speaks in this poem as well so I'm quite sure that Elliot has this idea of the catabasis in mind the poet is in this case a kind of latecomer he comes too late to his civilization to make epic poetry to make it into something that is comprehensible and comprehensive and instead as I said we get this idea of the assemblage and I invited you to compare this to Frankenstein the poem is a stitching together of shards of fragments of what is a deceased of late bodies so that the poem itself is posthumous that stitching together might relate to the publication in the 1960s of the manuscripts and typescripts for the wasteland it became clear to readers once these various papers bits and pieces the drafts of the poem as Elliot was producing it in 1920 1921 1922 that the poem had been radically reconceived but also that his intention was to a touch on this and to embody in this text really so more than just touch on but to embody in his text this idea of a complexity and a plurality that could not resolve itself the first two sections of the poem were originally drafted under the title this was to be the title of the wasteland he do the police in different voices he do the police in different voices this suggests that polyvocality that polyphony multi-voicedness characterizes the poem that he's picking up on different texts and different subject positions different voices different ways of speaking it also tells you something about the technique of quotation that Elliot engages in in his writing practice as you can see from the PowerPoint slide that phrase is actually a quotation as is the title the wasteland as are many of the titles and most of the text within the within the poem itself a perlouin phrase it's stolen from another text in this case a chapter in Charles Dickens's novel our mutual friend so it's just a bit of literary trivia but it's it's worth knowing in the sense that the poem both defers to a kind of authority the police itself and master itself and also resists the police undermines and subverts the idea of unalterable law ironically when I'm talking about in a more theoretical or conceptual sense is the idea of intertextuality of texts referring to other texts and of excuse me texts taking bits and pieces so as I said the poem is built on quotations built of quotations and reiterations the iterative refers to can refer to repetition right another iteration another version of something to the archival to the idea of cultural memory what we store in a repository that this poem is a kind of bad museum in many ways of Western European thought and text it builds itself on what I would say is an aesthetic so a way of doing art an aesthetic of citation this is from an earlier essay by Elliott so from 1920 a book called the sacred wood famous passage a famous quotation he says immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets to face what they take and good poets making into something better or at least something different this isn't quite as repound's idea of make it new but it's close to that something better or something different you steal and you remake this is I think a good technical description of what it is that the wasteland is doing there are other forms of intertextuality here as well lots of references and I've got a question here which is a good question to ask yourself how many poems do you know that come with their own set of footnotes so pretentious a little elitist to do this but Elliott seems very hyper aware of the critical and readerly reception of his work and he wants to give you some guideposts and signposts to show you where to look for the various texts that he's been quoting but it does turn the poem into a kind of fragmented essay a set of allusions and quotations and purloinings turns it into a kind of scholarly text ideally suited for academic classes like this one lots of times this poem gets taught in university English classes and I think Elliott knew this or at least projected this knew this might be the case and so Angles' poem leverages poem toward academic interpretation but it also suggests something about the different levels of language that are stolen and repurposed in the wasteland itself that is to say academic language as well as a gossip in a pub all levels of language are fodder for the poet's work everything can be stolen and remade you can see for example there are various references to pop song and to mass media in the text itself O O O O that shakes beherian rag it's so elegant so intelligent I'm not sure if he thinks it is or it isn't this is a rather ironic commentary on the intelligence of Shakespeare whose tempest or Hamlet lies behind various lines in the poem itself and is also Anthony Cleopatra many other Shakespeare texts you can find quoted in this poem but Elliott has reduced him to not Shakespeare with a big capital S not William Shakespeare but the Shakespearean the artist of the Shakespearean rag of a kind of ragtime mass media pop song there was and you can notice in your book in fact the Shakespearean rag composed in a little ahead of Elliott's time so he probably had heard this or knew about it and is alluding to it there as well why don't we pause for a couple minutes so and then we'll come to the poem itself welcome back so I'm going to spend the next part of the lecture the last part of the lecture talking a bit more concentratedly about some of the themes and ideas I've outlined in the first half of the talk and doing a little bit of close or direct reading of the text itself so the slide we have up now in front of us refers to the figure of Tiresias and I've put a little parenthetical section from the quotation but it's from the fire sermon which is section number three and Elliott suggested we were talking a bit about how to assemble the different fragments of the poem how the poem wants to assemble itself and Elliott suggests in his notes that we've just talked a little bit about that the figure of Tiresias is a figure of assembling so Tiresias as you can see from the slides appears in Oedipus the king which we've read on this course and also in the Odyssey which we've read and he is a figure of a prophet in Latin the word for prophet or for poet excuse me the word for poet is what is which means seer so one of the ways to understand what it is that a poet does is prophetically a poet is a visionary sees beyond things here we have Tiresias the blind prophet the blind seer who perceives the world around him so this is about line two eighteen of the third section of the wasteland I Tiresias though blind throbbing between two lives he's both male and female old man with wrinkled female breasts can see at the violet hour the evening hour that strives homeward and brings the sailor home from sea the typist home at tea time clears her breakfast lights her stove and lays out food in tins so we have him looking in though he's blind looking in on a typical scene in urban London life as a young woman who is a typist think about what it is that typists do they transcribe much like the poem transcribes bits and pieces of writing by other authors by other poets other thinkers so too this person is a typist someone who reproduces who reassembles language on the page mechanically and in a rather alienated fashion rather than compositionally or creatively so we have the visionary thinker the original thinker apparently someone who in Oedipus the king perceives the truth and sees it clearly despite his blindness juxtaposed to the figure of this young woman who is bored who is tired who clears out her dishes sits down and who does nothing homeward as well we mentioned the idea of the nostos here is the version of home that the poem has we go home to a rented apartment we go home to maybe a hovel we go home to a space that isn't home like that isn't rural that isn't comforting that isn't familial it's an alienated and ruined space the typist home at t-time homeward it's repeated I Tiresias old man with wrinkled dugs perceived the scene and foretold the rest there's some idea of prophecy but what he does is see well the next line I too awaited the expected guest he the young man carbuncular arrives so what's going to happen here is that you have a pimpled young man coming to engage in I guess a rather sordid romantic trist with this with this typist with this young woman and Tiresias is going to sort of be a part of the scene and see it again though blind as a kind of peeping Tom really so this is where the quotation on the PowerPoint slide comes in I Tiresias you can see that's repeated three times this is another form of iteration reiteration in the poem it uses these cork structures it repeats itself unreal city burning I Tiresias you'll see repetition functions in lots of different ways in this text shanti shanti shanti it ends so and I Tiresias have four suffered all enacted on the same devan or bed they're engaged in a sexual encounter on a sort of fold out couch I who have sat by thebes below the walls the reference to the king and walked among the lowest bed a reference to the Odyssey prophecy in this case seeing is reduced to looking in on assorted uncomfortable and boring as it turns out seen in urban life so the figure of the visionary poet has been reduced to as I said a peeping Tom has been reduced to someone who doesn't have anything to see anymore and can merely gather together fragments from an unpleasant and fallen world one of the words for I think to describe this idea of suffering it says I Tiresias have four suffered all is Aegon in Aristotle's Poetics in his description of tragedy one of the things that tragic figures like Oedipus for example in Oedipus the king one of the things that they go through is called an Aegon which is translated into English that's a Greek word translated English as crucial struggle or as struggle but something to keep in mind is this is where we get the word agony from so it's as though we go through agonizing struggle in this case for self-knowledge certainly in the case of Oedipus as well to know and to see who he is and what he can do so this idea of seeing though blind from Oedipus as I said but also has to do with the protracted agony that the poem is leading us along so the agony that we're involved in remember this idea of the episteme of modes of knowledge I want to suggest this is an epistemic agony an agony about knowing and this relates back to that passage I quoted from Elliot's essay the metaphysical poets about the dislocation and the difficulty of the poem itself maybe you don't want to hear this but it's an agonizing poem to read it's difficult deliberately so it's trying to make the reader struggle and struggle with it productively we could say but that struggle nonetheless is there in front of us and happening these are a few extended quotations of this essay on the wasteland F.R. Levis was a figure who at Cambridge University was also involved in the kinds of canonizing processes the kind of academic work that Elliot wants his own thinking his own poetry and his own essay writing to participate in as well so Levis tells us that the poem is as we heard a little earlier when he does the police in different voices he do the police in different voices all those different voices for Levis are simultaneous and compressed a compression he says in the poem approaching simultaneity the co-presence in the mind of a number of different orientations fundamental attitudes orders of experience difference plurality is sort of assembled but unresolved in the figure of Tiresias and at other moments in the poem such an undertaking says Levis the difficult problem of organization and this is this difficulty the problem itself isn't difficult but the problem is difficulty per se that it cannot find its center it cannot find its organizing principle there is an absence in the poem of any inherent direction if we're going home if we have a nostos if we're heading in a specific direction toward comfort, toward security toward stability we never arrive there here and the poem cannot find that Levis though tries to get past this by saying how this piece is organized is musically now I don't know how helpful that is because we might have to ask ourselves what kind of music Eliot has in mind but one of the things I wanted to suggest is that Levis is not wrong in your textbook there is one of Eliot's written letters one of a set of a handful of essays he wrote for The Dial a New York newspaper where he describes attending the London premiere of Stravinsky's Right of Spring a work of fragmented and complex modernist music he says at the end of that essay in everything in the Sacré du Printant in the Right of Spring except in the music one misses the present so in the ballet he says it's not really present whether Stravinsky is criticizing it whether Stravinsky's music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steps I guess that's of Stravinsky's Russian homeland the landscape of his homeland the rhythm of the steps into the scream of the motor horn the rabble of machinery the grind of wheels the beating of iron and steel and the other barbaric cries of modern life so although the production of The Right of Spring the ballet production is built on a kind of anthropological anthropological interest it's a right a sort of a primitive ritual being restaged and brought into the present Eliot was critical of this as you could hear a little bit in the passage I just quoted to you although that's where the work of music is intended to go in that music Eliot doesn't hear of the primitive but rather the urban he hears alienated fragmented broken noise it's a noisy piece of music for him but that noise he says so we have all these barbaric cries of modern life in the music he says that noise aims to transform these despairing noises into music and it's that idea of transformation that I think Levis is picking up on when he's talking about what it is that he wants the wasteland to do so the poem is trying to without being able necessarily to find its way home to nonetheless engage in a transformative and I would suggest redemptive kind of tactics so here is what in the original publication and this tells you something about Eliot's work as a canon maker as well as a taste maker perhaps a canon maker and a taste maker as well as his context as a poet this is the title page of the first issue of the criterion which was a journal that Eliot himself edited and put together and you'll notice the different names here who are anthologized, Dostoevsky, Herman Hesse Virginia Woolf and Eliot himself the first publication of the wasteland without notes is in the first issue of Eliot's own magazine it's as if we get a sense of the poet both as an editor and as an anthologist as drawing together different kinds of voices one of the things he wanted to do with this journal the criterion is find some kind of saving power for western culture this culture he perceived of as he perceived as ruined or as disillute as broken apart and incoherent he wants to find ways to draw that back together and a journal like this was one of the organs that he felt could accomplish this so this is that redemptive music that transformative music a version of it that he's trying to find the wasteland is structured in five parts you can see them here on the slide they're named as well maybe a sixth as well it has the notes appended to it in the December 1922 publication so two months after the poem first appeared in the journal the criterion one of the ways we can try to figure out it's organizing principle the Olivas tells us we can't is to look at this structure it's a structure that Eliot himself arrives at but that he reproduces in poems from the 1930s and 1940s that are collected together under the title the four quartets he thinks of this structure in other words five parts with a fourth part being a kind of brief lyric and the kind of alternation between a philosophically abstract language and an imagistically dense musical kind of language he thinks of that whole structure as being like for example a string quartet in five parts five movements so this is a helpful way to understand this that each of these parts are musical movements and they're intended to have some kind of transformative power that's what Eliot wants poetry musical poetry to do the poem begins the burial of the dead with an invocation of spring although everything in the text is rather autumnal everything or wintery everything seems to be seasonally decrepit and without life he starts off in April April is the cruelest month breeding lilocks out of the dead land there's their wasteland, the dead land mixing memory and desire stirring dull roots with spring rain I would suggest to you and this isn't original to me by any means that this is an allusion think about these ideas of intertext this isn't remarked in the notes but it's an allusion to the opening of the general prologue of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer a late medieval text Chaucer says and these are the lines I've got in front of you one thought up real with his shower sot the druhk of March have perched toe the rota and bothered every vein and switched liqour of which virtue engendered is the floor he were there that we've seen a little bit like something a little bit like it in Machiavelli is a virtue which means power or strength virtue it doesn't exactly mean virtue it also looks a bit like the Latin Latinate words for green in French you would say so there's something about life power or life force in that term so April with its power with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to its very root so all that water is seeping into the ground and flowers are starting to emerge with this from this liqour this sort of sweet water that's some fertilizing and reanimating everything that doesn't sound a lot like the dull roots with spring rain that we get at the beginning of Eliot's poem I would suggest to you that he has inverted Chaucer's Canterbury Tales he's also referring to and I may be off with this because of the dating but a pop song from the early part of the 20th century what is it, when April showers they fall in May they bring the flowers, no they come your way, sorry, when April showers they come your way, they bring the flowers they bloom in May like that so that's a part of the kind of thank you, the kind of sort of denigrated highbrow language that's been denigrated from the highbrow it used to be a canonical English literature, Chaucer and it's pulled its way down into pop song and you see Eliot alluding to that at the beginning of his poem it's important to notice this idea of springtime because this has something to do with transformation although it's a bad spring in Eliot he's also referring, as I mentioned earlier, to Sir James Fraser's discussion in the golden bow of the dying and reviving God so in the golden bow the title in fact refers to Fraser refers to a ritual a set of rituals conducted by sort of Roman priests that are described in the Aeneid and Fraser goes through in his text and tries to think about the function of ritual anthropologically and there's a pattern of death and rebirth that he that he latches on to that he sees in Attis in Osiris the Egyptian God in Adonis and in Christ as well the God who is killed or who sacrifices himself him or herself descends into the world of the dead and is then resurrected, reborn redeemed somehow this is also, this is a ritual pattern that has to do with sacrifice in spring or in winter to bring about spring so that the world falls into a sort of sense of death and decrepitude in the autumn things leaves fall from the trees, greenness disappears from the world through winter we have white, gray lifeless cold times and then in spring again we've just had snow drops appear in our backyard for example flowers start to reappear, life reemerges so the rituals that Fraser is interested in describing and that have their literary counterparts in the poetry and stories in the myths of their contexts are about the revivification the reanimation of land in the burial of the dead you'll see a reference to the planting of a corpse and asking if it's begun to sprout again it's a morbid image but this is the idea of the dying and reviving god that he's invoking and it's connected to Stravinsky's right of spring vestigially at least in the sense that these are rituals that try to enact rebirth in the burial of the dead we also have a section where we visit there are many fragmented sections we visit Madame Sosostris who is a tarot card reader tarot cards for Elliott were images sets of sort of remains the fragmented remains there are many tarot cards of some of these ritualized practices mythologized practices so one that Madame Sosostris mentions is the hanged man who she does not find this is a version of this dying and reviving god you can see in the image from the tarot deck here how this echoes the idea of the crucified Christ for example although it's inverted in this case because the hanged man is descending to death and is potentially going to be reborn you can see also that the post the hanged is a tree like the tree of life so here is the one eyed merchant and this card which is blank is something he carries on his back which I am forbidden to see there is no one eyed merchant in the tarot deck Elliott is making up his own deck here I do not find the hanged man fear death by water I notice here the poem alludes to its forthcoming section I see crowds of people walking around in a ring of going nowhere in a circle and of death and disease and then she says thank you if you see dear Mrs. Equitone tell her I bring the horoscope myself one must be so careful these days see the mixing together of a portentious prophetic language the version of the Tiresias figure of the Wates the poet as visionary with commonplace everyday speech I bring the horoscope myself it's notable as well with regard to some other lines that tell her I bring the horoscope myself is an iambic pentameter line again so that in everyday speech you also have the ghost the traces of this rather elevated form of writing if you think back to Shakespeare for example say the Tempest which we read of arts one all of the lower class serving class people with the exception momentarily of Caliban in that place speak in prose where the aristocrats and the educated people speak in poetic lines in iambic pentameter lines so this the traces of this rhythm of this meter are a mark of the mixing together of poetic modes and the kind of admixture that's a mixture that doesn't resolve itself admixture that Elliott undertakes the second section is a game of chess and this concerns itself in part it starts off with references to restoration plays or rather pre-restoration to Renaissance plays that had to do with romantic intrigue and the kinds of scenes that we see carry forward in the Ticast and the Young Man Carbuncular that I alluded to already so here at the beginning of that section in vials of ivory and colored glass unstopped lurked or strange synthetic perfumes unguent powdered or liquid troubled confused and drowned the sense in odors this is in part a reference an oblique reference to Baudelaire a Baudelaire in sort of mixing of the senses of a kind of synesthesia you see carried forward a little later in the poetry in French of Artur Rambo as well you have your your sensorium undone and mixed so here we have troubled confused perceptions and these are also heavily aestheticized perceptions artful an artful kind of word music it's very seductive but it's also unsatisfactory and you can see how there's smoke in mirrors here coming towards the end or you can see windows and candle flames and patterns on the ceiling that you can't quite decode something you can start to notice here is that that iambic pentameter line becomes a little bit undone Elliott gave the manuscript early drafts of his poem to his colleague Ezra Pound whom I've mentioned already and Pound edited and cut about half of the poem suggested a few words and trimmed it up and one of the things he said in particular about this section of the poem is that it's there's a nice line too penty and by that he means that it's too bound up in this fixed unalterable form and Pound encouraged Elliott to fragment and to break that form and Elliott took his advice the poem is dedicated with a quotation from Dante to Ezra Pound he calls Pound il miliofabro the better maker and this idea of the maker is another version of of the poet in Greek so that's a transliteration in Latin characters but the poet can be referred to as a poetas which is a maker a maker so you have Wates the seer and poetas the maker so Pound is a maker an editor here rebuilding what it is that Elliott wants his poem to accomplish and Pound's also engaged in a kind of increasing fragmentation of the poem one of the things Pound says about his own work is that he wants to break the back of the pentameter when he's making it new or making it different he's taking poetry and snapping it off, fragmenting it and I think you have early versions of this kind of procedure taking place in the wasteland as Pound intervenes in Elliott's work here is the passage extended version of the passage I quoted a little bit earlier about the Shakespearean rag but ahead of that you have a kind of colloquia kind of discussion what is that noise, the wind under the door what is that noise now, what is the wind doing, nothing, again nothing do you know nothing, do you see nothing do you remember nothing so a very nihilistic frustrated moment where you have multiple voices a dialogue in the poem that can't produce meaning that can't produce knowledge that wants to somehow figure out what it has to say and what it has to mean is to produce pattern, to transform the noisy into the sensible you can see the lines here are also very fragmented and that pentameter has disappeared, it's been broken apart I remember what do you remember, I, here's that subject asserting itself, whoever or whatever that subject is, I, Tyreseus I, whoever this assembled figure is, I remember those are pearls that were his eyes that's an allusion to the tempest by Shakespeare to Ariel's song where, which Ferdinand hears Ferdinand the Prince of Naples here's Ariel singing describing his dead father presumptively dead, he's not in fact dead, but Ariel depicts the body of the King Alonzo under water being transformed by choral and other kinds of sea processes into, as the song says into something, he has suffered a sea change, into something rich and strange there's strange again, that very interesting word, something rich and strange, this is the transformative possibility here, but transformation right, coming out of doing nothing, coming out of this situation of a lack of meaning and of alienation doing nothing what substitutes for doing here is quotation and allusion that's a little hard to decode, to figure it out so the poem immediately undermines this and says that O O O, an empty piece of verbiage or song, there's nothing in the O nothing O O O O, that Shakespearean rag it's so elegant, so intelligent it's so intelligent that we can't figure it out so the poem tends to want to undermine itself and to be very aware of its inability to let itself be decoded, to find memory to fulfill its desires to say something to know something, to see something we end this section with a kind of a scene in a pub, you are a proper fool I said so it's a version of the kind of dialogue that we've been hearing earlier those different voices that the poem wants to do in this case that high brow kind of talk has been that has had itself substituted for by low brow, chatter and gossip you are a proper fool I said well if Albert won't leave you alone there it is I said what do you get married for if you don't want children hurry up please it's time well that Sunday Albert was home they had to have gammon and so on hurry up please it's time the poem has been talking at this point the dialogue has been involved in about how one of these women has lost her looks because of some drugs she took to procure an abortion so that the kind of romantic situation and the family situation that seems to be alluded to here about producing children getting married the kind of end of the tempest where Ferdinand and Miranda are bound together and all is made right is impossible here everything is wrong everything is tainted everything is broken and deathly her face is ruined in many ways she has no beauty anymore hurry up please it's time is the bartender intervening notice how the poem interrupts itself as well interrupts itself typographically this is in small caps and interrupts itself vocally it doesn't let the conversation continue it stops there's also an attention here to time itself it's telling me to hurry along maybe I need to hurry along in my lecture as well and it finishes off the section good night good night good night they say each other's names and then we shift to an allusion to Shakespeare good night ladies good night sweet ladies good night that's a reference to Ophelia in Hamlet her last speech before she departs to effectively do herself in to be undone so you have again the juxtaposition of the brow of the everyday and of the high brow of Shakespeare jammed together does this you could ask yourself produce meaning does this find as with the mrs. equitone line a little early on a kind of poetic shape a kind of poetic structure in the unstructured colloquial everyday language that we all use or does it simply leave you with a set of juxtaposed fragments that gives us there he says good night that is not the end of the poem but it is the end of that section he breaks off so I'm not sure that we are satisfied there's a pub just for fun a picture of a British pub anyway there you have it the third section of fire sermon picks up on these ideas I did a brief reading already of the Tiresias and a couple of sections of that poem the young man carpenter and the typist these are some lines that refer to the reactions of the typist after she and the young man have had sex and he's left her indifferent she turns and looks a moment in the glass there's a mirror there as well remember that our course is called the monster in the mirror so here's another instance of mirroring of self concoction self-viewing taking a look at yourself and trying to understand who you are the poem's trying to reflect to us too so she turns and looks a moment in the glass hardly aware notice that that awareness that perception has become decrepit has dissolved hardly aware of her departed lover her brain allows one half formed thought to pass well now that's done and I'm glad it's over hardly very romantic there's no stoop to folly so there's a reference to to 17th century drama there and paces about her room again alone she smooths her hair with automatic hand and puts a record on the gramophone you can hear the Iambic starting to assert themselves here amid this fragmented situation often this happens in the poem as it tries to secure a voice for itself tries to find something what she does for comfort is it could be an interesting way to think about the mindset that's represented in this poem throughout she distractedly with an automatic hand notice that she herself is mechanized like those mannequins in the app J window and puts a record on the gramophone technology is now mechanized and remember what Elliot hears in Stravinsky's music this is a mechanization of creativity of creative production this also suggests something that contemporary that is to say now contemporary students might find interesting is to think about this poem as a set of samples or of fragments that have been reassembled have been stolen from other recordings other texts other bits and pieces and then repurposed this is a version of turntabling that's why the gramophone here turntables as DJs now undertake it although the music it produces isn't necessarily a rhythmically coherent or danceable one nonetheless here you have it sampling Elliot was aware of this this isn't an entirely inappropriate I think reference this is another of his London letters where apparently occasioned by the death of a musical performing Marie Lloyd so this is written shortly after her death and you'll notice the date it's composed right around the time of the publication of the wasteland to he refers to another anthropological work about Melanesians and suggests that what this anthropologist has observed supposedly an essay almost an obituary for Marie Lloyd but it departs from that pretty quickly what this anthropologist has observed among Melanesians people of the South Pacific that he's studying is that they're bored they are dying from pure boredom when every theater has been replaced by 100 cinemas so he shifts gears from this moment of anthropological discovery and of mapping of the world and the peoples of the world to London to the present scene of his poem and of his thinking when every theater has been replaced by 100 cinemas when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones this is the poem he's picking up on this when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars when electrical ingenuity has made it possible to hear its bedtime stories through a wireless receiver that sounds like a crib monitor and an iPod all at once attached to both ears when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians who are all bored like that typist and all of this mechanization is symptomatic of that boredom we have to ask ourselves is the poem boring then is it just a reiteration of its own on we why should we be reading it and why should I be talking at length about it one of the things he does say about Marie Lloyd so here is her photograph this is the person whose death as I said occasions this essay where he kind of goes off on a tangent to the contemporary world Marie Lloyd represents for him revitalization so we are thinking a bit about a redemptive music one of the things that Marie Lloyd's singing and performing does for working class people for everyday people for people of the world is fulfill the promise that high brow art wants to make to us and that high brow art can no longer fulfill that culture can no longer fulfill for us her singing everyday common pop songs fun kinds of happy twisty provocative lyrics putting this out to people to enjoy in a music hall in a kind of theatrical context is what Elliott wants his poem still to do and I think that's why you get all of these references to mainstream and mass culture in the poem both as denigrated from the unfortunate outgrowth of the collapse of the civilized world of the lack of high brow culture of education and literacy among people and also as its potential saving grace as the space and the people among whom real vital poetry real vital theater actually happens and where they feel temporarily perhaps redeemed somehow transformed brought back to life so Marie Lloyd is a very important figure here in this poem she's an antidote to it although she's never mentioned of course by name but that's that Shakespearean rag the populist Shakespeare seems to be what Elliott is aiming for he did as well engage after the wasteland for decades on drama and on theater and trying to get his work heard and seen the fire sermon ends in more fragmentation on Margate's end Elliott was actually composing at a hotel in Margate so this is a personal reference I can connect nothing with nothing so that connection is failing but on the other hand what's happening here is that all those nothings that we heard about in a game of chess are starting to collide with each other you can make connections among all of these broken images the broken fingernails of my dirty hands my people, humble people who expect nothing la la it says that's an echo of a little bit of Shakespearean nonsense language in the songs but more than that of a kind of lament the language of lament in mourning in this section to Carthage then I came an allusion to Augustine burning burning burning the cities these unreal cities are full of a kind of lustful fire that he wants to on the one hand put out and purge from himself with a kind of ascetic act this is close to Nietzsche's notion of the ascetic priesthood which Nietzsche doesn't approve of in a genealogy of morals and also an attempt to find somehow some kind of purgative or redemptive moment in that kind of fire a kind of life force so you've got a double edge here as the poem falls apart as you get sort of burning into ashes here and if you assemble one of the interesting things about this section is if you assemble those those five reiterations that repetition of the word burning, burning, burning, burning skip a few lines burning you get you get a kind of ghostly reiteration of the Iambic pentameter in this case these are trochies burning so it's inverted a little but it still has that kind of repetitive coric feel so you can see literature highbrow literature burning you get yourself to shreds here falling apart you have ashes and fragments and leftover pieces of a manuscript but also trying to reassemble itself into this cogent poetic form the fourth section is called death by water and it's a brief, this is the whole section in front of you on the PowerPoint slide a brief lyric, Fleebus the Phoenician a fortnight dead, forgot the cries of gulls deep seas swell and the prophet in loss a current under sea picked his bones and whispers as he rose and fell he passed the stages of his age and youth then entering the whirlpool Gentile or Jew, oh you who turn the wheel and look to windward consider Fleebus who is once handsome and tall as you I'm not entirely sure but this is a made up figure who appeared in the tarot deck for Madame Sosostras earlier in the poem but what's important to notice here in terms of the idea of transformation is how Eliot has effectively rewritten Ariel's song from the Tempest and reiterated this principle of sea change, of being transformed artistically, aesthetically artificially into something new it is nonetheless a process of dissolution that we get described here rather than resolution dissolution rather than resolution as his bones are picked apart and as he enters into the Aporia into this empty circling space remember how they danced around in a circle singing ring around the rosy earlier in the poem the space of emptiness of nothing, a whirlpool has a nothing at its center so in some respects this lyric is a warning in other respects it is offering us the promise of overcoming the profit and loss of everyday life in a mercantile or in a capitalist or in a consumerist society of the sword again that's represented in that Ache window, department stores and things like that, that alienated urban life you can overcome it perhaps somehow by entering this whirlpool and potentially coming out remade on the other side but instead of there being pearls that were our eyes here that the skeleton coming apart in this kind of water it's a bit of an inverted baptism in a way and also you might think of this in terms of that ritual of the dying and reviving god we're descending down into a wasteland into a dark space into a nothing hoping perhaps to come out on the other side remade and reborn but with no promises, with no guarantees as the poem concludes it tries in fact to find something like those guarantees so the final section what the thunder said refers, the title refers to one of the Upanishads from Hindu scripture and we'll come to that it certainly quotes it at its end something to notice though as the poem as this section of the poem begins and follows itself through it's perhaps the longest section of the poem we get the replay of various scenes suggested as it tries again to assemble itself there are lots of reiterations here and also lots of the kinds of tonal variations that between a kind of academic among a kind of academic language a lyric language and a more daily everyday kind of language that the poem has pursued in its first four sections there is not only water amongst the rock, dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit there is not even silence in the mountains but dry sterile thunder without rain there is not even solitude in the mountains but red sullen faces sneer and snarl from doors of mud cracked houses you can see these lines are a little bit flexible, a little bit fragmented but also seem to be much more coherent as the poem searches for its center amid this wasteland here is a depiction of wasted space, of space that is sterile, that is lifeless that is desert space but it's a space through which we intend I think to pass poetically notice how the syntax coherent syntax is also broken here you can hear the sentences they make sense but periods and commas and things like that are missing from the poem it's as if one line sort of flows into the other and at the same time holds itself separate and apart so I would suggest to you this is a moment when Elliott's tactics of assemblage of putting different kinds of ideas, different kinds of images together in a way that isn't simply heaping them this is not a heap of broken images but a succession of images layered onto each other palimpsestically in terms of echo and so on to try and build significance to wrench meaning out of repeated form I quoted this line already this is from what the thunder said a woman drew her long black hair out tight and fiddled whisper music on those strings this is the rest of that section and bats with baby faces in the violet light whistled and beat their wings and crawled head downward down a black and wall you have grotesque horror images here this sounds a bit like Dracula or a kind of gothic horror like that and upside down in air were towers tolling reminiscent bells that kept the hours and voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells so this is a point as I mentioned that this is a poem of exhaustion the wells are exhausted in the sense that there is none of that April shower there is no rain there is no sweet water to reactivate to reenliven landscape nonetheless you have albeit inverted you have animals inverted here think of the hanged man being upside down you have towers in the sky this is perhaps a version of Augustine's vision of the city of God of the city beyond the everyday of the metaphysical of the promise of redemption resurrection fulfillment but it's inverted here it's upside down the agon through which we're passing is not necessarily going to lead us toward finality or toward closure but is instead going to produce another set of inversions of artificial camera obscura style images of things rendered backwards and mirrored in a way that we cannot sort through and we cannot return to their normal order again you see the Iambic pentameter lines here that particular meter ghosted into these texts but also stretched and pulled and foreshortened and fragmented at various points so these lines are struggling with themselves would be to find form I suggested in class that this is a poem that's trying to give birth to itself that's trying to find its form and I think that's fair to say we hear that happening here I want to finish up with just a brief discussion of the very last lines of the poem so this is the very end this is an image from medieval manuscript of Sir Gowing in the green night all those towers and so on that we saw should remind us perhaps of castles I mentioned Saint Augustine but also castles and sort of the spaces of Arthurian romance the architecture of the quest and here you have an image of Sir Gowing in the green night where King Arthur is above with his sword drawn and Gowing has just chopped the head off the green night if you have a look at that poem you'll see that it's also about quest and ritual about the descent into what's called a chapel perilous a waste space a disturbing space the performance of some kind of task and then the return back with a renewed vitality with a new sense of who you are and of what it is you have to do this story also forms part of a whole sequence of quest stories that are about the holy grail the search for the holy grail that is by and large the search for some kind of redemptive or healing remedial agency of text or way of thinking or object or something that will help to reanimate the dead land so the end of what the thunder said the thunder has been speaking and what it has been saying is da it has been articulating this what to English speaking ears might sound like a nonsense syllable it is in fact in one of the Upanishads that had that is to say, as I said Hindu scriptures that had been translated recently in Eliot's time to English so this is from the Brijadaran Yaka Upanishad I hope you'll excuse my pronunciation where the thunder does speak and that is the syllable that it says it's the syllable that begins three words in the Sanskrit dhata dayadvam again forgive my pronunciation but that forgiveness of pronouncing things if you listen to Eliot read this poem you'll see that he doesn't do much of a better job than I do and it suggests something of the orientalism that informs the end of this poem the search outside of the bounds of western European culture for some rather exoticized idea of salvation or redemption so in this scripture in this Upanishad the thunder is speaking and speaking these three terms which are translated by Eliot as give be compassionate and have self control give compassion and control and these are where the poem sort of ends up in a kind of for let's say a less informed reader I mean we can go and look at Eliot's notes and figure out where these things come from but when you meet these originally in the poem you're not going to necessarily understand them but which offer a kind of formal closure and offer the promise of mastery of compassionate self control in a way of some sense of though we're here as the poem says a little earlier the shore of a vast ocean unable to necessarily cross unable to move forward we've reached the limit of human experience that shore too should relate down to the line with which I began the lecture these fragments I have shored against my ruins shoring in that case means shoring up means I'm holding contingently together but it also refers to this idea of a margin or an edge of shoreline the limits as I said of where we can go as human beings now in this context and we get this voice from beyond the voice of the thunder telling us, promising us perhaps but impelling us at least to look for some form of mastery or control the poem ends with another quotation from the same Upanishad Shanti, Shanti, Shanti Eliot translates this in his notes as the peace pacith understanding another reference to Anglican liturgy to Christian liturgy in a translation from the 1930s so after the time of this poem of the principal Upanishads that appeared Shanti, Shanti, Shanti which are the concluding words of this gathering of the Upanishads of scripture this translated may peace and peace and peace be everywhere so there's some sense in which peace is what it is we've been searching for, amid all the noise amid all these ruins to somehow find a settling point a still point around which we can begin to reassemble all the fragments of our being the fragments of our sense of self of our psyches the fragments of our world we can shore ourselves up this ending has been characterized as overly formal it sounds like saying amen at the end of a prayer or of saying go now the service has ended or thank you very much for listening to my lecture formally cutting things off without necessarily conceptually finishing things off but this is where the poem leaves us so as I said as I told students earlier in the week this is a poem that wants desperately I think to give birth to itself to make itself work as a poem but instead of getting a conclusive poem gestured at in this very formal ending that Elliott almost you could say tax on to this piece to try and give it a sense of closure the poem cannot close but instead makes itself up in the effort to find that closure gesturing always with memory and desire understanding toward speaking toward making itself seen and heard and understood but never able finally to achieve that understanding and instead making a virtue out of necessity and showing us something of that agony that effort that we all engage in in finding meaning but making a poetry out of that effort a nice poetry perhaps but a poetry that I hope you will have found and we'll find is a seductive one nonetheless