Eliot's "The Waste Land"

After reading The Waste Land, I immediately noticed the ritualistic nature of the poem and Eliot’s play with life and death. It brought me to some of Frazer’s ideas from The Golden Bough and the other theories of the Cambridge Ritualists (but I will discuss that further on Wednesday). As with Eliot’s previous poems, the use of a wide variety of intellectual property is at Eliot’s beck and call. He uses the words of Dante, Baudelaire, the Bible, and so on. A first that I have seen with Eliot, he uses the device of Virginia Woolf and plays with stream of consciousness in the first section of The Waste Land. It was in “The Burial of the Dead” that I had a rather strange idea.

In line 13, Eliot writes, “And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,/My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,/And I was frightened. He said, Marie,/Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.” Is the narrator not inferring that her name is Marie? Again, in “The Game of Chess” I thought that it was two women quarrelling with one another, rather than a man and a woman. In “The Fire Sermon”, Mr. Eugenides asks the narrator to lunch and to a weekend at the Metropole, insinuating a possible act of prostitution. Finally, in “What the Thunder Said”, I think considering the act of crucifixion that is occurring, it is possible to see the narrator as a Mary-Magdalene-type figure. I may be way off in making these parallels, however, I also thought that Eliot used this device in Preludes. In Preludes, I thought that the narrator shifted from man to prostitute in the final stanza of the poem, in turn making the prostitute the one who wipes her mouth in the end. I realize that Brooks argues it is homosexuality in his analysis, but if that is the case, perhaps cross-dressing is a possibility within the poem as well. I am unsure if any of this is at all viable criticism, given all of Eliot’s own notes, but it is one that I can no longer ignore as a reader.

In reading Brooks’s article, we came upon the same idea that Eliot was trying to convey; “all wars are one war; all experience, one experience” (191). However, where Brooks witnessed this idea in Eliot’s reference to the war, I did not see the full connection until “What the Thunder Said” in lines 373-377. Eliot’s repetition of cities, “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London” followed by “Unreal” on a single line, for me, blended these cities into Dante’s Limb - all of those cities, renowned for different wars, victories, religions, and cultures become one. There is a similar experience that E.M. Forster writes about in A Passage to India with Mrs. Moore in the caves. Definitely a religious experience for her, once she is within the caves, everything sounds the same. There is no difference between words – they all result in “ou-boum”, everything is nothing.

Brooks and Eliot’s use of the rooster was also extremely interesting to me. In Eliot’s time, anthropology was what my undergraduate colleagues would call “armchair anthropology”. Most of the research regarding human social behavior was done through reading the classics and developing theories from that information. A few decades later, Bronislaw Malinowski delved into the world of ethnography and participant observation, traveling to different parts of the world and coexisting with various peoples. Now, many anthropologists are aware of the importance of the rooster within various native cultures. The most famous example is the Balinese cockfight as studied by Clifford Geertz. While in Bali, Geertz learned the significance of the cockfight and the rooster to the Bali people to be religious. He writes, "In the cockfight, men and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death" (pp. 420-1). This statement perhaps best describes portions of Eliot’s waste land, in ways that I had never imagined. In these rituals, there are battles that occur until an outcome can be produced, ultimately resulting in some sort of meaning. Perhaps for Eliot, that meaning was found in the Upanishad he quoted, “Shantih shantih shantih” – “The Peace which passeth understanding”.