The Waste Land as a Human Drama

The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed
by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination

Published in Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning, a collection of essays. Jacob Blevins, editor. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2008. 180-260.

Ian Probstein
(Touro College)

In The Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics Mikhail Bakhtin created his concept of a polyphonic novel (combined with that of a "carnival" and Menippean satire). The most crucial in his system was "dialogism," which enabled the scholar to reveal the many-voiced ("different voices singing differently the same theme <...> punctun contra punctum"), many-faceted character of Dostoyevsky's works. Bakhtin differentiates between dialogism and monologism "...pretending to possess the final truth" and states that "the truth is . . . born between people." Bakhtin says about the two main principles of a "Socratic dialogue": syncretic (the fusion of different points of view on the same problem) and anacretic (the ways to provoke a person entirely express his opinion), and states that "the main heroes of a "Socratic dialogue" are ideologists <...> those who seek and test the truth and involve the others in the process of doing it." Dialogue as the main principle and the method is combined with a micro-dialogue or dialogue per se which enables the author to create a ‘dialogic’ free character. According to Bakhtin, "The freedom of a character is the author's intention. The word of a hero is created by the author, but it is created in such a way that it can …develop its inner logics and independence as… a word of a character."
Bakhtin felt that other genres were more studied, fixed, and established, while the novel had an innovative force and was in the process of formation “in the full light of a historic day,” as he wrote in the introduction to “Epic and Novel,” but paradoxically, wrote about medieval literature, like Rabelais, and did not go any further than 19th century Russian prose focusing primarily on Dostoyevsky. Even though Bakhtin never considered poetry, not just lyric poetry, seriously, his major discoveries, such as ‘chronotopos,’ dialogism and polyphony as well as parody “as one of the most ancient and widespread forms of rendering others’ direct speech” can be found not only in epic poetry, but also in lyric poetry and most certainly, in the poetry of Modernism and Avant-Garde.
Although Max Nanny was mainly concerned with the problem of the Menippean satire and carnival in The Waste Land, he was among the first to point out polyphony and dialogism in the poem connecting it with Bakhtin’s works. Calvin Bedient, however, correctly stated that The Waste Land is not, unlike Satyricon, a “straight Menippea,” but it
substitutes for the impudent marginality of laughter a poetics of banishment, in which numerous voices, styles, and generic registers conspicuously fill a void left by a missing All. . . The Waste Land is never really, and is finally far from being, carnivalesque; instead, it arranges the appearance of a riot of tones and images and languages with the cold cunning of a Hieronymo and with no less an intention than to silence the pretensions of language and literature once and for all (a suicidal mission that even The Waste Land, for all its severity, is unable to perform—indeed, it even gathers, just before the close, a heap of heterogeneous, quoted phrases like a squirrel hoarding nuts for the winter, and, in the same place, praises song).”
In a way, Nanny and Bedient used Bakhtin’s method, so to speak, against Bakhtin, as was recently done by Jo-Anne Cappeluti who revealed Bakhtin’s contradictions. In addition to those contradictions, I would like to emphasize that M. Bakhtin is essentially ‘monologic’ himself in his discourse: on the one hand, he claims that ‘ideologists,’ as he calls them, of a Socratic school are seeking the truth as opposed to those who already know it, but on the other hand, his rhetoric is full of teaching and preaching, not to mention the fact, that Plato’s Dialogues and other writings, such as Laws and Republic, are essentially monologic.
Donald Wessling recently revealed Bakhtin’s contradictions in a broader context of lyric poetry, and Omri Ronen and the Russian scholar Iuri Lotman have both applied Bakhtin’s principles ‘against Bakhtin’ to lyric poetry in 1970s.
That’s what I intend to do in this paper. With the introduction of Pound’s ‘Personae’ and ‘Mask,’ even the frame and boundaries of once firm lyric first person “I” were shuttered and shifted. We by no means can take at face value the first person “I” of “La Fraisne,” or “Cino,” or “De Aegypto.” The same phenomenon can be observed in Eliot’s poetry. Stephen Spender correctly states that “there are many voices which say “I” in The Waste Land. But those which speak out their living characters are of the surface, objects of the prophetic or witnessing voices. Even when they speak in the first person, dramatically, they are third-person voices of people looked at from the outside.” As was observed by Frye, in T. S. Eliot’s “later poetry the “I,” the speaker of the poem, is a persona of the poem himself; in the earlier work the narrators are created characters, speaking with the poet’s voice but not for him.” The former is certainly true as far as Four Quartets is concerned, but does not necessarily apply in the case of “I” in The Hollow Men, or Ash Wednesday, or “Journey of the Magi,” or “Marina” from Ariel Poems. T. S. Eliot, like Pound, was seeking ways of “making it new.” Beginning with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” Eliot shifted the convention of lyric poetry filling it with “others’ utterances and others’ individual words.” In “A Question of Speech” Anne Ridler just mentioned the problem of direct quotations bluntly stating that “Eliot’s and Pound’s method of direct quotation is apt to be disastrous one in other hands” without drawing any further conclusions (any method is disastrous in the hands of a mediocre poet, not to mention the unskilled and the ungifted). In my view, Ridler has overlooked I. A. Richards’s fruitful idea that “quotation performs a work of concentration in The Waste Land, a poem which he says would otherwise have needed to be of epic length.” Doubting that it is true, she concludes: “It seems a purely personal technique, liable to degenerate in other hands into mere patchwork.” Had the esteemed author been well-read in other literatures, she would have noticed that using citation, allusion, and the speech of the other was a general tendency of Modernism that could have been most certainly found in Borges or in Mandelstam, who “celebrates the orgy of quotations,” as he put in “Conversation about Dante.” Claire Cavanagh compared Mandelstam’s “craving for world culture” to Pound’s concept of “cross-fertilization between different languages” and Eliot’s idea that poetry grows from “the struggle between native and foreign elements.” The tradition of a quotation or allusion as a dialogue in time and space with the predecessors goes back in Russian poetry to Pushkin, whose Eugene Onegin is truly an “orgy of quotations” brilliantly ‘estranged’ or “defamiliarized” (a term proposed by Viktor Shklovsky and akin to Pound's "making it new") by the greatest Russian poet. In modern European poetry the use of allusions and quotations can be found even in Rilke with his constant allusions to the Bible or High Antiquity and Apollinaire, for instance, in the poem “The Synagogue” of the latter with a quotation in Hebrew at the end. However, Pound and Eliot made this device dominant and used it masterfully in their work. In “Prufrock,” epigraphs, citations, and allusions to Hamlet or St. John break the monologue, “the Swan’s Song,” as Eliot called it. Prufrock’s confessions are “estranged” by parody, irony, even sarcasm and remarks of the visitors of a high-society salon (“They will say” in art means, of course, that “they” are included in the dialogue); so are the words of the “one, settling a pillow by her head” or “Turning toward the window: “That is not it all, / That is not what I meant, at all.” From those remarks we learn as much about Prufrock as about unnamed ‘her.’ We do not only see her, but we also actually hear her intonation, not just words. For, as Bakhtin mentioned, “The expression of an utterance can never be fully understood or explained if its thematic content is all that is taken into account. The expression of an utterance always responds to a greater or lesser degree, that is, it expresses the speaker’s attitude toward others’ utterances, and not just his attitude towards the object of his utterance.” In a note to that phrase Bakhtin says: “Intonation is especially sensitive and always points beyond the context.” In poetry intonation is even more palpable and, I would say, more important than in other speech genres, with the exception of drama perhaps. Further, the intonation of the lady in Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” is much more distinct than that of her counterpart in “Prufrock.” The dialogue moves through seasons and space. Moreover, it is not just a dialogue, but a many-voiced lyrical drama and a musical piece, which includes the voices of Marlow’s characters, Henry James’s irony, Laforgue’s ironic, even sarcastic undertones juxtaposed with Chopin’s Preludes played by “the latest Pole” (I. Paderevsky or Joseff Hoffman), “the windings of violins / And the ariettes / of cracked cornets,” and, finally, by Arnold’s “buried life” put in the mouth of Eliot’s heroine. The fusion of buried life with April sunsets will be further developed in “April is the cruellest month” of The Waste Land. Thus even in the beginning of his work T. S. Eliot did not only learn the art of using personae from Ezra Pound, but he also elaborated his own forms of dialogism and polyphony in lyric poetry. It would be most illuminating to see in this light how Eliot developed his method of “dialogic imagination” in the first draft of the poem heavily edited by Ezra Pound. Although it certainly is a thrill to the connoisseur to reveal all the hidden allusions and associations, I should note that we must not forget that we are dealing with poetry, a “speaking picture, ” in Sir Philip Sidney’s dictum, or rather time-space condensed in images and revealed in music. For it is music and dialogism, not only the themes, as Frye presumes, that make Eliot’s longer poems whole. Stephen Spender perceived the sonata form in "Ash Wednesday" as early as in 1935 and compared Four Quartets to the late quartets of Beethoven. Therefore, Frye was right to compare The Waste Land to a musical piece. However, I would disagree with Frye that “Eliot in all his longer poems is. . . essentially a poet of fragments. The impulse by which he is able to see and organize his material as poetry is not very sustained.” Like Ezra Pound, Eliot was a modernist and as a modernist, he was concerned with “making it new,” i.e. not developing the plot, but shifting from scene to scene, very much like Pound in The Cantos and Eisenstein, Vertov or Kuleshov in their films.
In essence, Eliot’s entire work is a dialogue with humanity. I intend to show how the use of dialogism allows Eliot to develop the plot, to use implied narrators to reveal themes and ideas, to shift in time and space, combining the epic past with the lyric present, to create the music of the piece, to ‘defamiliarize’ reality and myth, making myth real and the reality unreal, and as a result, to reveal the human drama as in Dante’s Divine Comedy. I will limit my comments on the allusions, sources, references or mythology to a minimum necessary to reveal dialogism in the poem and identify the voices of this human drama, since, as Cleanth Brooks once stated, “To venture to write anything further on The Waste Land <. . . > may call for some explanation and even apology.”
The fact that The Waste Land has been drawing attention of poets and scholars alike, whether they have applied the approach of the New Criticism, Post-Structuralism, or Deconstruction, as Ruth Nevo once practiced, explored the case of Modernism and the new poetics, as was shown by Marjorie Perloff and Jewel Spears Brooker, the latter with Joseph Bentley explored the limits of interpretation and epistemological approach ; Russel Elliot Murphy revealed ideas, Armin Frank extracted images although almost ignoring the voices, —all that proves that The Waste Land does not only live reverberating with sound and meaning, but it also still disturbs the readers stirring all kinds of reactions except indifference.
Virtually everyone who wrote on The Waste Land has been interpreting the use of myth and symbolism in it. However, very few, with the exception of George Williamson and Spender perhaps, and later Max Nanny, Calvin Bedient, and Jo-Anne Cappeluti, revealed the dramatic character of the poem. Williamson suggested that The Waste Land “becomes a kind of dramatic lyric, in which the lyric themes are projected by characters associated with the central experience, and the individual fortune becomes a general fortune.” I would suggest that the poem is essentially dramatic, and it is dialogic imagination embracing centuries and civilizations that makes the poem a human drama.
It is well-known that The Waste Land initially started with the epigraph from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, finally omitted (but later Heart of Darkness reappeared in “The Hollow Men” in a different form). The epigraph from Conrad emphasized “fear in a handful of dust,” not the theme of a “buried life.” Then, an intensive, lavish dialogue “in medias res” simultaneously defamiliarized and “made new” Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, as if placing its characters “hic et nunc.” Moreover, dialogism was perhaps more emphasized in the original version, the first two parts of which had a subtitle “He do the police in different voices,” thus not only alluding to Dickens’s novel, but also revealing a polyphonic nature of the poem. Eliot’s own reminiscences of his life in Boston were richly interpolated with songs from George Cohan’s Fifty Miles From Boston and from other popular musical plays of the beginning of the nineteen hundreds. As a result, Eliot merged the past and the present, made the past real. Since the title of the first movement in the first draft was the same—“The Burial of the Dead,” alluding, as Grover Smith observed, to the “majestic Anglican service” bearing the same name, and the first draft starts with the first person plural “we,” very much like “Prufrock,” I would agree with Frye that this is not the voice of Tiresias, as Smith presumes.
Pound finally convinced Eliot that the opening of the first draft was excessive and drew the reader out of focus, but the method was, nevertheless, productively at work. Likewise, the cuts in other parts, especially in “The Fire Sermon,” as was shown by Richard Ellmann and later by Joseph Militello, prove the tendency to exclude overt or redundant fragments sometimes sacrificing skillful lines not only to achieve coherence or emphasize the tragedy, but also to escape excessive didactic comments and thus to make a truly modernist dialogic poem. The final version of 1922, The Waste Land as we know it now, is a monument to Eliot’s genius and to Pound’s extraordinary ability to see the text of the other (another facet of dialogism) and liberate the essence of sense from the husk of words. It opens with the words of Trimalchio boasting that he has seen the Sybil at Cumae who asked the gods to grant her eternal life but forgot to ask eternal youth. Trimalchio quotes her telling the boys that her only wish is to die. As Russel Eliot Murphy keenly observed, Sibyl’s words
are in a first-person report from a third person; and that third person, Trimalchio, is himself being quoted by Encopius, himself the fictional narrator of the Satyricon. <. . . > Furthemore, while Trimalchio’s report is in Latin, the words he is reporting were said in Greek. Meanwhile, the entire first-century assemblage introduces a poem written two thousand years later for an audience which speaks English, itself partly derived from Latin and ancient Greek.
Thus direct speech is at least four times transformed here: Sybil—to the boys—Trimalchio—through Encopius —to the guests— Petronius to— Eliot, and the epigraph immediately introduces the theme of an unnatural, buried life combining or rather juxtaposing it with the revival of nature. Hence we have a dialogue between the two writers evoked in several languages, and both Petronius’s Trimalchio and the Sybil at Cumae are “estranged,” parodied, and included in a new work of art, in the dialogue or rather a drama of The Waste Land.
In his study of Seferis’s translation of The Waste Land into Greek, Nicholas Bachtin (1896-1950), professor of Greek and Linguistics at Birmingham University, England, the brother of Mikhail, was among the first (1938) to notice a dialogic nature of The Waste Land as opposed to “essentially monological” Journey of The Magi or Gerontion as well as to emphasize a dialogic nature of quotations:
They are not really “quotations”—that is, extraneous elements incorporated into a unified poetic utterance; they coexist on equal terms with the other elements of the poem. They too are voices among other conflicting voices: a snatch of an Australian street-ballad or a line from Marvell, no less than the talk in the public-house, the words of the hysterical woman, or the poet’s own voice <. . . > which vanishes again as the others do, passing abruptly or imperceptibly into another voice.
“Citation is a cicada,” as Mandelstam said in “Conversation about Dante,” emphasizing a truly dialogic nature of the appropriate quotation. Hence the citation from Petronius does not only transform Eliot’s text, but the latter also transforms the former creating a new meaning. This new meaning is further modified and transformed by an allusion to The Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
And droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich liquor
Of which vertu engendered is the flour. . .

Although Eliot’s allusion to The Canterbury Tales was mentioned by a number of scholars, Dansby Evans, Wolfgang Rudat, to name a few, most of them limited their comparisons to the two prologues, the motifs, or separate characters. Frank Perez found striking similarities between Prufrock and Chaucer’s clerk of Oxford. Not less important is that Perez reconstructed what he called “a backward evolution of literary allusions: Prufrock to Hamlet to Polonius to Chaucer’s clerk.” In a note Perez connects this with “Eliot’s concept of the ‘historical sense,’” while I would rather emphasize dialogism of allusions which work exactly the same way as Petronius-Eliot allusion discussed above. Evans, a medievalist and a scholar of Chaucer, was probably the only one to emphasize the similarity of motifs, in particular, those of pilgrimage as spiritual quest and salvation. Further, Evans correctly asserts, that following Chaucer, “Eliot partially renders his pilgrims through reference to their perspective vocations and social status.” Therefore, Eliot did not only parody the motifs of reviving earth, roots, and flowers, opposing draught and fog to rain and reviving nature, but he also parodied the characters of The Canterbury Tales. Thus I presume that the Knight, who has fought in the Crusades from the Mediterranean Cost, North Africa, Alexandria, to Prussia and Russia is certainly parodied by Stetson (and earlier by Gerontion); his son, the Squire, an ideal lover is opposed to all the failures in The Waste land; the Nonne, who “was cleped madame Eglentyne,” an ironic character, a Prioress without a vocation, but with dogs and jewelry, is replaced by Madame Sosostris; further, The Merchant and the Skipper re-appear in The Waste Land as well (One-eyed merchant, Mr. Eugenides, and Phlebas the Phoenician respectively); moreover, in my view, there is an allusion to certain characters in Chaucer’s personages; thus, for instance, the fallen kings from the Monk’s tale, especially, Croesus who was hanged, washed by Jupiter in snow and rain, is perhaps The Hanged Man in Madam Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards.” Perhaps the cock “heet Chauntecleer” from “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” who was crowing in church on Sundays is an additional literary allusion to the rooster in the haunted chapel scene from “What the Thunder Said” discussed below. In addition, the ability of the cock from “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” who “By nature. . . knew eech ascensioun / Of th’equinoxial in thilke town” might be an additional allusion to the Wheel. Thus Eliot is more than alluding to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales using the motive of pilgrimage as spiritual quest and salvation in a continuing dialogue with one of the greatest English poets, who was among the first to introduce dialogism in poetry (my emphasis).
The first impression of the opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead” is that it is narrated in the third person, but then we encounter “us” in the eighth and “we” in the ninth lines, while the first person plural, in its turn, is replaced by the first person singular—in German. As a result of inserting the words of Countess Marie Larisch, Eliot shifts in space and time, combining the present and the past. “Speaking in tongues,” polyglossy or, in Bakhtin’s dictum, “heteroglossia,” is another lesson of Pound creatively adopted by Eliot. The dialogue of characters is also the dialogue of languages and vice versa. The words of the countess (and her cousin) are then dissolved in a mighty and frightful ‘bass profundo’ of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. As was observed by Williamson, “the speaker also is the ‘son of man,’ his inheritor; and this inheritance is the lot of the Fisher King, whose experience he repeats.” After the crescendo “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” the only logical continuation could be switching to a completely different tonality, which has been initially found by Eliot, who introduced new voices and new characters—those of Tristan and Isolde. It also includes the medieval romance and the music of Wagner in the “speaking picture” of the poem. Thus the theme of a tragic love is juxtaposed with the theme of a loveless buried life. The theme of “a hyacinth girl,” which is perhaps an allusion to Tennyson’s Mariana, links the medieval romance and Wagner’s opera with modern times, reinforcing “the chronotope of love,” in Bakhtin’s dictum, and introducing a new character. The motif of hyacinth does not only remind us of “the slain Hyacinth,” thus bringing back the theme of a dying and reviving God, but it also “carries as much of the weight of “memory and desire” as does the lilac in The Waste Land.” However, I would argue that it is not simply an implication of “a male-male love ending in tragic loss,” as Query maintains, but it also suggests the desire to bring spirituality into stale female-male relationships of the poem, especially that of “The Game of Chess.” Hence the connection to “the hyacinth garden” in the manuscript, which was removed from the final version since Eliot was especially meticulous in avoiding any overt biographical connections and allusions. The intermediate resolution leads us to “the heart of light, the silence,” since silence is not the absence of speech but a pattern of music allowing the poet to switch between the planes, for “words, after speech, reach / Into the silence” (“Burnt Norton” V). Shifts in space and time allow the poet to lead his reader to London of 1920s and introduce a new character, Madame Sosostris, who is a complex, fused character herself: a parody and a counterpart of Sybil and, as it has been until recently believed, a hidden citation or an allusion, as Grover Smith noted, to Huxley’s Crome Yellow (uniting, in an androgynous manner, Mr. Scogan, the sorceress of Ecbatana, king of Egypt Sesostris, and Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias). In his recent studies Revisiting The Waste Land and The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, based, in part, on the analysis of the three typewriters used in The Waste Land drafts, Lawrence Rainey asserts that Eliot “had probably drafted the scene with Madame Sosostris by early February 1921 and had certainly completed the typescript of parts I and II somewhere in mid-May, while Huxley, who was living in Italy, did not even begin to write his novel until the beginning of June.” Nevertheless, Rainey tells the entire story of Mr. Scogan disguised as a gipsy fortune-teller named Sesostris, which since 1954 Smith’s essay in American Literature 25 (1954): 490-492, mislead generations of scholars. Although Rainey maintains that Eliot’s letter of 1952 to Smith was a kind of mystification, Rainey does not put forward his own hypothesis why Madame Sosostris is introduced as an androgynous counterpart of Tiresias. True, the statue of Sesostris III is in The British Museum, and the Paraoh was mentioned by Herodotus (ii. 102-II), Diodorus Siculus (1. 53-59), and Strabo (xv, 687), yet the cause of a striking resemblance between the two fortune-tellers is not clear. One might even assume that Huxley, as he did before, borrowed the character from Eliot, not the other way round. Huxley even intensified the elements of carnival and Menippean satire. Madame Sosostris’s mentioning Mrs. Equitone and the remark “One must be so careful these days” brings us back to reality—but that of the “Unreal City,” which in this case is not limited only to the Financial District of London, as Rainey presumes, thus making present unreal and the myth real. Although drama and myth are parodied and downplayed, the effect is, nevertheless, achieved: the themes of wandering, of fate and death, the chronotopi of the road and of quest are uniting myth and reality, antiquity and modernity.
In the following 17 lines Eliot blurs the boundary between the past and the present, showing the burial of the past (or the memory, as Leavis and Matthiessen suggest) and an unreal present. Brooks believes that Dog with the capital “D” symbolizes “Humanitarianism and the related philosophies which in their concern for man extirpate the supernatural—dig up the corpse of the buried god and thus prevent the rebirth of life.” Smith connects the dog with the Dog Star, with Stephen Dedalus’s joke about the fox and his grandmother in Ulysses, and, finally, with Frazer’s Folk-Lore in the Old Testament. Perhaps it would be less dangerous, lest one can be drowned in sometimes contradictory details, to see the image of the dog as a symbol of cynicism and disbelief and the meaning of the entire “Unreal City” passage as “the lack of purpose and direction, the inability to believe really in anything and the resulting ‘heap of broken images’ that formed the excruciating contents of the post-War state of mind.” In a short passage Eliot unites the battle at Mylae with WWI (also observed by Brooks ) by the implication “I had not thought death had undone so many” (echoing Pound’s “Hell Cantos”) and makes Stetson a universal character. Smith presumes that Stetson is a modern representative “of him who from cowardice made the great refusal” (Inferno, III) and is a counterpart to the quester. The corpse he has planted in his garden is the dead god, of whom he has knowledge, but whose life he rejects, choosing to remain a ‘trimmer.’” The last two lines fuse the “estranged” quotation from Webster, transforming “the wolf . . . that’s a foe to man” into a “friend to men,” and a quotation from Baudelaire, thus making Stetson “every man including the reader and Mr. Eliot himself.” Moreover, as was mentioned by Andrew Ross, Stetson is an anagram of “tsetse,” Eliot’s Harvard nickname, thus adding not only satirical, but self-critical dimension to the poem. The second person ‘you’ literally involves the reader in the dialogue, though, as Smith mentions, “Eliot’s quotations from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal was an insulting one.” This is another perfect example when citations speak in a literally dialogic manner. Moreover, here Eliot introduces parody as a constructive device of plot and genre formation, not as a stylistic device, on all levels: In The Waste Land Eliot parodies citations, epigraphs, classic meters and popular songs, myth, and finally shifts the convention of the genre, that of a lyric poem, to create a new genre, that of a dialogic or a dramatic long poem. Such understanding of parody was proposed by the Russian scholar Tynianov in "Dostoyevsky and Gogol," while the differentiation between the plot and the story (narration) was first proposed by Shklovsky.
“A Game of Chess” adds a new facet to dialogism since it introduces Eliot’s use of Ut Pictura Poesis: the change of Philomel is literally a speaking picture, and the nightingale physically cries. As Hugh Kenner pointed out, that cry might have derived from John Llyly’s song, which adds to dialogism of quotations and allusions. Before the woman actually speaks, we hear many voices—of myth and of the past as well as of implied literary characters—from Cleopatra to Imogine to Bianca raped by the duke in Middleton’s Women Beware Women and back to Shakespeare’s Ferdinand and Miranda, which is all “Shakespeherian Rag,” as the male character states. Beladonna, as was observed by Nanny, means both “a fair lady” and a deadly poison. As Nanny asserts, Eliot is simultaneously hiding and revealing his personal drama and uneasy love-hate relationship with Vivien beyond the Tarot cards, masks, and the dramatis personae. Therefore, Nanny concludes, the client of Madame Sosostris might very well be Eliot himself, a querrent and an alter ego of the quester. This statement is proved by Richard Ellmann’s analysis of the first Waste Land suggesting that not only Beladonna and, therefore, her interlocutor, might be Vivien and the poet themselves, but also the Fisher King might bear resemblance to T. S. Eliot . Thus a “wicked pack of cards” alongside “impersonal poetry” does not only help Eliot to elevate himself beyond his personal discontent, but also to reveal an archetypal tragedy of the time, which “is out of joint,” to quote Shakespeare. In addition, there are masculine voices—those of King Lear and of Ariel’s song from Act I of The Tempest “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” as was observed by Smith. The woman whose desperate cry is akin to that of Philomel symbolizes a passion of the one lost in a loveless love. Whether her interlocutor actually speaks or not, we hear him. Perhaps he is not literally blind and deaf, but he is spiritually dead, and they both aimlessly wait in fear and hope for the final “knock upon the door.” We as readers doubt whether something comes out of nothing since the marriage is loveless and sterile and the land is still bare and waste. As the scene moves on, the upper-class characters are replaced by the low middle-class Bill, Lou, May, Albert and Lil. Those are the little simple folk who do not even think of Shakespeare or of higher matters; neither can they express themselves in a sophisticated manner of the man and woman of the previous scene. Here again Menippean satire is at work. Although there is a stark contrast between the exquisite chamber of Belladonna and a London pub, the motif of sterility and of a waste life prevails. The land is barren; the City is unreal. It is notable that the actual speakers in the second part are mostly women. The proprietor’s words—or perhaps parodied ‘eternal’ call: “Hurry up Please It’s Time”—remind us of the final “knock upon the door.” Hence Ophelia’s farewell is interwoven in the parting of the pub’s visitors. Like Phlebas the Phoenician, Ophelia also died by water. Thus Ophelia introduces the Thames-daughters and their counterparts, the Rheintöchter of “The Fire Sermon.” The main motifs of this chapter are those of water and fire, both of death by water and fire and, perhaps, death of water and fire, as in the second movement of “Little Gidding.” Such an interpretation can be justified by Helen Gardner's subtle observation that Eliot's poetry
is extraordinarily self-consistent, and there is almost nothing he has published that does not form part of his poetic personality. One of the results of this integrity is that his latter work interprets his earlier, as much as his earlier work does his later, so that criticism of “The Waste Land” today is modified by “Ash Wednesday”, and “Ash Wednesday” is easier to understand after reading the “Quartets”.
Gardner proposed to interpret The Waste Land not simply as "the disillusion of a generation," but "as an Inferno which looked towards a Purgatorio.”
The scenery of this Inferno represents a vast and devastated bank of the river that suddenly flows into the waters of Leman, which, in its turn, merges with the river Chebar in Babylon. Hence the voice of Ezekiel joins the song of the daughters of the Thames. Thus Eliot removes the border between past and present chronotope uniting history and myth in the present—here and now. “The rattle of the bones” intensifies the comparison of the scenery with the dessert alluding to the “son of man” of the first movement and anticipating the wanderings in the desert of the fifth movement (and perhaps the scenery and the chirping of the bones in “Ash Wednesday” II). The “nymphs” of Spencer’s “Prothalamion” appear to be the girlfriends of “the loitering heirs of city directors.” The nymphs will reappear later as the voices of the deceived lovers and will speak for themselves. Likewise, the allusions to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and to Day’s “The Parliament of Bees,” noticed by a number of scholars, have been defamiliarized, placed in a contemporary London setting and thus sound modern allowing the poet to shift in time and space and juxtapose the voices of Ezekiel, Marvell, and Day with the quester, whose is the leading voice, the solo, so to speak, for the poet, as was stated by Bakhtin, “makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to unmediated power to assign meaning (as it were, ‘without quotation marks’), that is, as a pure and direct expression of his own intention.”
As was observed by Brooks, in Weston’s book “the title ‘Fisher King’ originates from the use of fish as fertility or life symbol” associated with many of the later Grail romances, but Eliot “reverses the legend,” as Brooks put it, or, I would say, defamiliarizes the myth. Further, as Brooks showed, the ‘Fisher King’ also refers to Prince Ferdinand of The Tempest and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. The king, though, is impotent and unable to set his “lands in order.” Hence the triumph of Apeneck Sweeney, an anti-quester, brought to anti-Diana Mrs. Porter by lust. Mrs. Porter, a character of the Australian ballad sung by Australian soldiers in Gallipoli in 1915, as was observed by I.A Bowra, is another mundane voice juxtaposed with the pure voices of children from Verlain’s “Parzival.” Purity and chastity, however, are unattainable in the ‘Unreal City’ and, therefore, the voice of Philomela sings of violence and rape again. Her desperate voice is immediately followed by a “demotic French” of another character, Mr. Eugenides, a parody of a Phoenician sailor and a one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s “wicked pack of card,” who introduces another trap for the quester, homosexuality, that will by no means undo the curse and make the barren land fertile. The reader then is led to the apartment of a typist, a contemporary Philomela, another victim of a loveless love. The entire scene is described by Tiresias, a seer and an androgen (I am not sure that “the young man carbuncular” is a quester, as Smith presumes; he is rather another counterpart to the quester). Although there is a sharp contrast between the description of the typist’s apartment and an exquisite chamber of the opening of “A Game of Chess,” the essence is the same—a loveless love, almost a rape. Hence both scenes are accompanied by a desperate voice of Philomela. It is a well-acknowledged fact that Eliot subtly uses myth to reveal the timeless in contemporary life and to juxtapose profane with sacred. Eliot himself emphasized the impact of Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance and Sir Frazer’s The Golden Bough on his poem in his “Notes on The Waste Land.” Eliot orchestrates the myth, so to speak, or even transposes and transforms it bringing Tiresias to the apartment of a London typist to witness and comment on the contemporary loveless love that is difficult to distinguish from rape. On the contrary, in Pound’s Canto I, for instance, the protagonist, Odysseus, is descending to the underworld to hear Tiresias, which is still very much in the spirit and letter of Homer. The reader has to follow the narrator and the protagonist. Eliot defamiliarizes the myth and brings Tiresias to the reader, thus making the Greek seer both the narrator and the actor. We actually see and hear Tiresias as if he were on stage, but The Waste Land is neither a play nor a medieval mystery, yet it is a human drama. Nevertheless, I would argue, that all ‘the three voices’ from Eliot’s later essay, that is lyric, epic/narrative and dramatic, are present in The Waste Land. Eliot combines historical and mythological time, which enables the poet to juxtapose different phenomena. History acquires a mythical character of permanently repeated denominator, and vice versa, myth becomes real. Myth, therefore, becomes an instrument of searching reality. As was pointed out by Smith, “through myth art may express a sense of the present; but it must be remembered that the artist’s point of view is personal, not social.” It is necessary at this point to clarify my usage of the term “myth.” Myth, in my view, is not limited either to “the things that are spoken in ritual acts” (la legomena epi tois dromenois), as was understood in Greece, or to retelling of mythological plots and images, or even to symbol and archetype. Neither should it be limited only to anthropological studies of dying and reviving god or to “anthropological studies of vegetation myths,” as was stated by Spender. It is rather a way of poetic thinking that enables to reveal in the symbol and the archetype an approach towards being as becoming to show such a perspective of time and space, in which the entire picture of the world of the beginnings is evoked. To quote Smith, “The substance of a poem forms a myth, something wholly new, generated by that mind in the semblance of a timeless point of view of continuum, filled with images and echoes and diverse voices” Eliot’s mythological imagination is a bridge joining contemporary and ancient, individual and universal, sacred and profane, while a spiritual quest is aimed at the restoration of wholeness of human consciousness and faith. Like Joyce and Pound, Eliot defamiliarizes the myth “making it new.” While reviewing Ulysses in The Dial (November 1923), Eliot himself acknowledged his indebtedness to Joyce:
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing the method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigation.”
Mythological consciousness, alongside dialogism, allows Eliot to shift freely in time and space combining Tiresias’s words “I who have sat by Thebes below the wall/ And walked among the dead,” with allusions to Tennyson’s and Swinburn’s “Tiresias,” as was observed by Smith, and to Goldsmith’s “When lovely woman stoops to folly.” The reader is led between the two planes, like Tiresias between his two lives, while the line “ this music crept by me upon the waters” alludes both to Prince Ferdinand in The Tempest and to the brother of the Fisher King, who observed “A rat crept softly through the vegetation.” Thus the poet again unites sacred and profane: “a public bar in Lower Thames Street” and “Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold” of the church of Magnus Martyr at the foot of London Bridge. As was observed by Smith, St. Magnus “was especially the fishermen’s church, erected, in fact, on Fish Hill, opposite the site of the Fishmonger’s Hall. ‘Fish,’ ‘Martyr,’ and vestmental ‘white and gold’ form a complex link with the Saviour and the Ritual of Easter.” The movement also links Buddhist “Fire Sermon” with St. Augustine, thus uniting Eastern and Western ideas in a dialogic manner. The image of the river brings the theme of human, local time and history, as in the first movement of “Dry Salvages,” in which the voices of the river and the sea are re-enacted in a kind of a dialogue revealing the images of local time and eternity, if we apply Helen Gardner’s approach quoted above. The river brings back the themes of filth, lust reinforced by mentioning of the Dog of Isle, passionate, promiscuous but sterile relations between Queen Elizabeth and Earl Leicester that resemble both couples from “A Game of Chess” as well as of a typist and a clerk from “The Fire Sermon” while the song of the daughters of Rhine is juxtaposed with the song of the deceived daughters of the Thames, the nymphs from the opening of the chapter. The latter evoke the real human drama and defamiliarize the song of the former. As a result, we simultaneously hear two triads, so to speak, as in an ancient tragedy. The words of St. Augustine at the closing emphasize the necessity of purification of desires and love as if anticipating “the crowned knot of fire” from the end of “Little Gidding.” Here again a citation from the Confessions is included in the poem in a dialogic manner, and St. Augustine himself becomes a character of the poem thus uniting time and history. The theme of fire, though, is quenched by water, which symbolizes oblivion and death. The sea swell disregards petty human considerations of “the profit and loss.” As Smith put it, “The Death of Phlebas writes the epitaph to the experience by which the quester has failed in the garden.” Driven by lust and greed, the Phoenician, “who was once handsome and tall,” was finally sucked into the whirlpool. At this point the narrator shifts from the third person to the second addressing the reader “on the level of familiar experience,” as Spender put it, reminding “Gentile or Jew”—everyman, in fact, of a tragic outcome of neglecting higher principles of life.
After death by fire and death by water, the quester returns to the desert and to the red rock, where there is still no water. The round is almost completed, and the wanderer returns to the wilderness, but the spiritual thirst has not been quenched, the land is still bare and waste, and even the thunder is sterile. After all, it took Moses forty years to take his people from captivity to the blessed land, and he spent most of his life in the desert without seeing the Promised Land. Following the same route, like Pound in his Cantos, Eliot spent his lifetime searching the way out of the dead-end of spiritual death-in-life “lost in living” (Choruses from “The Rock”) of human sterile activities filled with “profit and loss.” It would take the poet twenty more years of intensive spiritual quest, and in the middle of another world war his lyrical hero would be still wandering in wilderness, where
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
(Little Gidding II).
The son of man returns to the beginning of his wandering—under the red rock to see “fear in the handful of dust.” The movement begins, as was stated by almost everybody who wrote about The Waste Land, with the agony of birth and rebirth of Crucifixition narrated, or rather performed, like a chorus in an ancient or a medieval tragedy or in Bach’s Passions, most probably by the disciples of Jesus Christ – hence the first person plural “we”:
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With little patience.

Quoting the same lines, Spender correctly presumes that the entire movement “consists of a number of visions in the desert of the world without God, dominated by the absence of Christ, the God, who has not risen and whom the disciples cannot see.” However, Spender is concerned mainly with the theme, visual images, and “the voice that says “I” or the I of the lyrist,” as he puts quoting Nietzsche, disregarding other voices. In my view, even the change of rhythm in the following passages suggests different thirsty voices. While Brooks connects the passage beginning with “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” with the Journey to Emmaus, Smith also suggests “a parallel to a Buddhist legend in H.C. Warren’s Buddhism in Translation.” If so, this is another case of polyphony and dialogism involving allusions. Based on Eliot’s notes, both Matthiesen and Smith connect “the Murmur of maternal lamentation” with the ‘decay of Eastern Europe.’”
Unknowingly, Matthiesen was even more right than he meant to say, so to speak, when he presumed that “the ‘shouting and the crying’ re-echo not only from the mob that thronged Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, but also, as is made clearer in ensuing lines, from the ‘hordes swarming over endless plains’ in revolt in contemporary Russia.” Alluding to such a well-known historic event as the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, Eliot has made unintentional but, nevertheless, archetypal allusions to the poems of three prominent Russian symbolist poets—Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), who wrote “Tread on their Eden, Atilla!”, Valerii Briusov (1873-1926), who took the above line from the former as the epigraph to his poem “The Coming Huns” (1905), and Alexander Blok (1880-1921), the author of “Scythians” and “The Twelve” (1918). In “The Coming Huns” Briusov anticipates and greets the coming of barbarians although they will destroy both the civilization and him:

Where are you Huns who are coming,
Who cloud the wide world with your spears?
I hear your pig iron tramping
On the still-undiscovered Pamirs.

Like a drunken horde from dark field-camps
Fall on us in a clamorous flood. . .
To revive our too-soon-grown-old bodies
With a fresh surge of burning blood.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Perhaps all that is our own will perish
And leave no trace that men’s eyes can see. . .
Still I welcome with a hymn of greeting
All of you who will destroy me.
(Fall 1904; 30 July—10 August 1905.)

The poem was finalized in the time of the first Russian revolution of 1905. Thus the fall of civilization, not only the decline of the West, was anticipated by the Russian poets much earlier than by Spengler. Unintentional as it is, Eliot’s dialogue with his Russian contemporaries was nevertheless in the context of the epoch, although Eliot has never hailed the destruction of civilization trying to save the fragments of it, as in the final verses of The Waste Land. Moreover, by showing “falling towers” and making the cities that once were centers of world civilization as unreal as London, Eliot shows a decay and fall of the archetypal city and of the entire civilization. Hence Eleanor Cook, alluding to Hugh Kenner, maintains that this archetypal city is Rome stating that all the “great cities in Part V. . . were also capitals of great though very different empires: ‘Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, / Vienna, London.’. . . Eliot preserves the chronological order of the flourishing of each empire.” Cook suggests that Dante’s map of the inhabited world is a key map to Eliot’s poem and the maps of Europe and the Mediterranean should be added to the map of London. We, therefore, come to an inevitable conclusion that in The Waste Land the image of space evokes time and history.
Almost everyone who wrote about The Waste Land correctly connected the scene in the perilous chapel with Weston’s book, the Grail Legend, the rite of initiation, and the decent to the underworld, but Smith also emphasized that “the imagery of the lines (II.379-84) was partly inspired, according to Eliot, by a painting from the school of Hieronymus Bosch,” which again, as in “The Game of Chess,” involves Ut Pictura Poesis and visual dialogism and makes the description of decay “a speaking picture,” whereas “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” include, in addition to Eccles. 2:6, and Jer. 2:13, mentioned by Smith, Jer. 2:7, 20:2, 32: 3, and most importantly, Jer. 38:6, which narrates that Jeremiah was cast into the dungeon, “where there was now water, but mire. So Jeremiah sank in the mire.” In the notes, Smith also adds that “in Wilde’s Salome the prophet speaks from the cistern.” Evidently, the voices of prophets, especially Jeremiah’s, to whom Eliot alludes from part I through V, almost quoting him in “The Burial of the Dead,” intensify the unveiling of human drama. Other voices and sounds include the singing of the grass, the swinging of the door, the gust of the wind, the clicking of the dry bones, and the crowing of the cock (enigmatically in Portuguese, as was observed by Smith). Smith and Brooks both state that “the cock in the folk-lore of many people is regarded as the bird whose voice chases away the powers of evil,” and although Smith suggests that the cock’s crowing alludes to Hamlet while Brooks supposes that “the cock has connection with The Tempest symbols” and quotes the lines from the first song, which Ariel sings to Ferdinand, and I suggested above the connection between the roosters in The Canterbury Tales and in The Waste Land, the crowing is another voice included in the “speaking picture,” thus connecting myth, literature, and contemporaneity. Finally, the voice of the thunder, which again connects the Buddhist wisdom of the Upanishad with the Western tradition as in “The Fire Sermon,” is actually a dialogue of civilizations, a spiritual quest of the entire humanity, not only of one part of it. As elsewhere in Eliot’s work, here allusions are at work. The three calls “Da Da Da,” meaning “give, sympathize, control,” receive three negative answers and include new allusions, associations, and quotations in the polyphonic poem. A dialogue of the final citations brilliantly analyzed by Smith (97-98) and by Brooks (30-32) after the return of the quester, the heir of the devastated kingdom and the waste land to the shore (I am reluctant, though, to associate him or the lyrical hero only with Tiresias, as Smith does), is again a subtle use of parody as a constructive device of plot and genre formation. Eliot defamiliariazes the myth and weaves together Old Testament (Isaiah, 38:1), eastern and western spiritual aspirations and beliefs, which symbolize destruction and a call for renewal, hope and despair (the swallow from the myth of Philomel is joined by Pervigilium Veneris simultaneously alluding to Tennison’s The Princess, as was noticed by Smith (314). An “orgy of quotations” and a magnificent dialogue involving Isaiah, Dante, Marlow, Nerval and their characters, including the prince of Aquitaine beholding a broken tower, two broken kings, Hezekiah and Fisher King, two prisoners, Ugolino and the one from the folk song “Take the key and lock him down”—all dissolve in the final wisdom of the Upanishads: this world is beyond our understanding. Brooks stated that “the basic method used in The Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity” and observed the double play of irony and parallelisms (what I call defamiliarization and parody). I would say, though, that the basic principle of the poem is dialogism and would be reluctant to interpret the meaning of the poem either in Morton’s or even Edmund Wilson’s way, in other words, to see only despair and destruction as the theme of the poem. Neither would I accept the interpretation of Smith, who wrote that “the very fact of recognition, the deliberate acknowledgement of humility, points toward ultimate triumph, if not for society, nevertheless for himself. He can expect, if not the joy of Ferdinand, then at any rate the liberation of Prospero.” I would rather agree with Brooks that the poem is ambiguous (another characteristic feature of modernism), and if it were clearer, it “would be thinner, and less honest.” It is rather Eliot’s Inferno pointing to Purgatorio, if we apply Gardner’s method quoted in the beginning.
To me Eliot is not only the poet of archetypes but he is also an archetypal poet, as was in time, when prophets were poets and poets were prophets. As an archetypal poet, Eliot spent his lifetime in search of the way out of a spiritual dead-end. From the ‘Inferno’ of “Prufrock,” “The Waste Land” and “Hollow Men” to the ‘Purgatorio’ of “Ash Wednesday”, “Choruses from “The Rock,” Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets, he leads his reader to the Promised Land. Perhaps like Moses himself, Eliot died without seeing it, without creating his Paradise Regained. However, he did resurrect the Word and did “purify the dialect of the tribe.” He never flattered his readers; nor did he console them:
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
(Little Gidding V).

In essence, Eliot’s entire work is a dialogue with humanity. The use of dialogism allows Eliot to develop the plot, to use implied narrators to reveal themes and ideas, to shift in time and space, creating the ‘chronotopi’ of love, of the road, of quest and combining the epic past with the lyric present, to create the music of the piece, to ‘defamiliarize’ reality and myth, making myth real and the reality unreal, and as a result, to reveal the human drama as in Dante’s Divine Comedy.


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