Tiresias in the Wasteland

   

     

            On Wednesday morning when I got up the toilet flushed itself while I was peeing. Spooky!
            I forgot to go to the liquor store before leaving for English class.
            Our instructor, Scott Rayter, right away showed us a 23-minute video about T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, featuring selections read by Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins and Michael Gough, plus interview with various academics about the text. Except that Scott said the actress was Irene Richards. He gets a lot of stuff wrong.
            The video said that The Wasteland was influenced by one of Beethoven’s string quartets and that he wanted to achieve that same sad musical expression in a poem. Looking this up I see that it was Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that was directly inspired in this way but some scholars think that the five part structure of the poem is an attempt to achieve in poetry the characteristics of a symphony.
            The Wasteland was the most famous poem of the 20th Century. One of the British scholars being interviewed declared that T. S. Eliot was a better poet than W. B. Yeats.
            Eliot’s grandfather established a Unitarian Church in St Louis. His family were American aristocrats and Eliot was raised in a sheltered environment. He went to Harvard where he took long, lonely walks.
            In 1915, at the age of 23 Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which was his first major work. He reworked clichés into something new. The poem did not conform to the accepted styles of the day. He had already moved to England by this time, which was the preferred place for American aristocrats. It was Ezra Pound that advocated for the publication of Prufrock.                    Pound was a major figure in the early Modernist movement from which he developed Imagism. Pound, Wyndham Lewis and some others founded the Rebel Art Centre. Inspired by Cubism they formed their own Modernist movement, which Pound coined as Vorticism. They published an artistically radical literary magazine called Blast, with the intention of blasting away Romanticism. They wanted to create a modern tradition that pushed back into the ancient past.
            Eliot was called a company of actors in one suit and the greatest dramatic poet of the period.                Prufrock anticipates The Wasteland with its theme of failing to live. Prufrock was uptight as a rolled umbrella.
            Eliot began writing The Wasteland in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. He claimed that it took direct inspiration from The Golden Bough: a Study in Comparative religion by Sir James Fraser and From Ritual to Romance, an examination of the King Arthur legends by Jessie Weston. His manuscript title for the poem was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. The original poem was much longer but Ezra Pound as editor, excised about half of it. He uses language from the streets of London and deliberately chose the settings to be the dirty canals and the gasworks rather than the traditional English countryside.
            The poem was happening but it was hard to follow. Critics complained that it was an incoherent poem of fragments. But the poem spoke directly to the spirit of the age. It’s meant to appeal to the logical imagination.
            In The Wasteland, Eliot found his own voice by co-opting the voices of others. The work is composed of his own words combined with those of historical poets. He created poetically the music of our age by borrowing music from before.
            The sensuality of the poem is more apparent than real. Eliot’s wife went mad and he had a nervous breakdown, writing much of the poem in a sanatorium and incorporating his personal tribulations into the text. His problems became symbols of the age and his private career stood for the decline and collapse of the West, which had entered into a sort of spiritual desert after the war. The poem links up with the line by W. B. Yeats, “The best lack all conviction.”
            The character of Tiresias sees the whole of history simultaneously. Modern decadence is not unique. It’s part of civilization.
            The poet is a burglar that throws meat to the watchdog. He wrote the poem specifically for the academics.
            When a woman was seduced and fell in those days, she killed herself.
            Five years after publishing The Wasteland, Eliot joined the Anglican Church. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, married his secretary in 1957 and died in 1965. He represented in his own person international culture. He declared that he’d paid too high a price to be a poet. The Wasteland is religious despair.
            After the movie we took a break.
            I asked Scott about the readings from “Up From Slavery” but he said he didn’t know offhand. He suggested that I check the Norton website. I found out later that the text selection in the 9th edition was no different from my earlier version. Scott must have just read part of the first chapter as part of his lecture.
            After the break, Scott began by saying that The Wasteland is an amazingly dense and difficult poem. It can’t be separated from Modernism. It’s the urtext of Modernism. It produced its own industry and it was designed to be studied by scholars. One in three lines is an allusion to an ancient text. Scott quoted Eliot as having said, “Poor poets imitate; good poets steal” but the actual quote is, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” It’s a collage of analytic Cubism that takes things from newspapers. The footnotes are disruptive and some people think they were included deliberately to drive people out of their minds. The Wasteland speaks seven languages. It’s overwhelming.
            Is it a commentary on death? Is it a visit to the underworld? Is it madness? The voices are having fun. It is not meant to be understood. It is erudite and show offy. None of the voices have quotation marks. The Wasteland is waste, wreckage, garbage, pain, suffering and ruin. In particular it is the ruined bodies of women. It is the recycling of waste. Although written during the war he denied that it was a reflection of the conflict. A guy bites his own tongue off in the narrative.
            The poem is not a unity but a hankering for unity. There was a redrawing of boundaries after the war with displacements of large groups of people and disruptions of culture. Is studying English a waste? Is The Wasteland about industrialization, the production of waste? Is it about wasted lives? Is it about wasted bodies and infertility?
            Why is Thebes a wasteland? There was a curse that made it that way. Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and ended the wasteland. Oedipus is all over Hamlet. Freud’s Oedipus complex is the envy and revulsion of the father. In Parsifal there is also an infertile kingdom that became that way because the maidens of the land had been raped. There are fertility and infertility myths. All of the relationships in the poem are infertile and full of failed ideas of love. What one wants one cannot have.
            Sibyl is immortal and yet continues to age and so her only wish is to die.
            The Burial of the Dead is an ironic title since the whole poem is about digging up bodies.
            The “April is the cruellest month” opening is a parody of the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but inverted in meaning so that April is the opposite of sweet. Why is April cruel? I suggested because it’s tax time. April is cruel because most people are happy and if you are not happy everyone else’s joy is just salt in your wound.
            Each line of the opening has words that indicate life at the end of each line, but the body of each line contrasts by emphasizing words that indicate death.
            Winter kept us warm because we were inside in unfeeling suspended animation.
            Countess Marie von Moennich, the niece of Empress Elizabeth of Austria was the go-between for Elizabeth’s son Rudolph and his lover. She thought that she was helping to arrange a tryst but they died in either a suicide pact or a murder-suicide. Marie spent the rest of her life atoning and travelling. Offing oneself for love is pretty stupid but very idealistic.
            Hyacinth, in Ovid’s Metamorphosis is Apollo’s cupbearer. He ended up taking a discus toss in the head but his blood became the hyacinth flower. Scott wondered though why Hyacinth is a girl in The Wasteland. Maybe the hyacinth girl is not supposed to have anything to do with the Greek myth.             “Pearls for eyes” comes from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.
            Eliot admitted that he knew nothing of the Tarot and just made up everything that he said about it in the poem.
            Everything is about water.
            The mention of Mylae refers to another horrible war. The poem wouldn’t work if he were writing directly about WWI.
            A Game of Chess is the heart of the poem. The title of the section references a Thomas Middleton play of the same name.
            Philomel was a princess of Athens who, after being raped and having her tongue and hands removed by her sister’s husband, is transformed into a nightingale. Her sister Procne took revenge on her husband by boiling his son by her and then feeding him as a meal. After he had finished eating she showed him the severed head of his child. Why so much rape? Is being turned into a nightingale any kind of consolation? I assume that in this case Philomel was turned into a nightingale because female nightingales don’t sing but Eliot might not have known that. The line “jug jug to dirty ears” means that to a dirty mind the song of a bird will still sound vulgar. Where does human suffering fit into all of this? If it’s about fertility he is not finding it.
            “Hurry up please it’s time!” is the call by the bartender in a pub that it’s closing time. Fertility is killing Lil. “Goodnight sweet ladies” is a line by Ophelia from Hamlet.
            Suffragette women took control of when they would have children. The reference to “Mrs Porter and her daughter / they wash their feet in soda water” is from a song sung about a Madame and her daughter and what they washed were their cunts as a means of both birth control and of warding off syphilis.
            Of the reference to Mr Eugenides and a weekend at the Metropole, Scott says the Metropole was a famous meeting place for homosexuals.
            “The young man carbuncular” Scott says it means he is full of boils but apparently it’s also a saying to describe someone with a lot of pimples. His rape of the secretary is in sonnet form.
            The London Bridge rhyme is sung, leaving out “my fair lady”.
            The Wasteland is set between the promise of Christ’s resurrection and the event.
            T. S. Eliot was a virgin when he married his first wife. Sexual anxiety about women’s bodies permeates The Wasteland. Things changed in the modern era as women began to reveal their bodies and began speaking about subject that had been taboo for them before.
            Eliot said that Ezra Pound rescued The Wasteland from the womb by caesarean section.
            After The Wasteland was published people were talking and writing about it so much that Eliot began to claim that it had all been planned from the start. In his Theory of Impersonal Poetry he declared that the poet in a depersonalized vessel. He turned the personal into something resonant in culture. The poet is most unique when the least personal and falls back on schooling.
            The Wasteland ends in Sanskrit, which is supposedly the source of all European languages, with “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih” or “all peace”. Is eastern religion a comforting end?
            The Wasteland was as radical a poem as had ever been done.
            Argued with Scott about Tiresias. He insisted that he had been turned into a woman by Hera for taking Zeus’s side in an argument about whether men or women have the most pleasure in love. I told him that it says right in Eliot’s notes that Tiresias turned himself into a woman and that’s how after seven years he had the authority to confirm that women have more pleasure. His punishment by Hera was to be turned blind. Scott said that Eliot was wrong. I said, "How could he be wrong?" If he based his poem on the wrong information then the wrong information in the context of the poem becomes the right information.
            On the way home I tried to make it to a liquor store. I’d heard that the one on Spadina was open till 22:00 but it wasn’t, so I had to go without beer. Talk about a waste!