The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is regarded by many critics as the peak of Modernist writing: Craig Raine called it “Eliot’s greatest dramatic work,” arguing that “Eliot’s purpose, in 433 lines, is to re-create history itself, via his swarming and largely anonymous voices” (90). Genres, contexts, and tradition play crucial roles in the poem: they provide a rhetorical and quasi-dramatic structure, a framework of past stability from which to begin a cross-examination of the present using the “ideal order” of tradition. In the Waste Land Eliot intentionally juxtaposes his genre allusions in search for stability; when they do not conform because of the gap between past and present contextual situation, Eliot reacts by repeatedly layering genres in a double move of recovering through allusion and parodying out of cynicism. By layering genres I am describing Eliot’s technique of working under the auspice of a single theme (the modern female) and incorporating past generic, literary, and social contexts via allusion to regenerate his poetic situation, and the composite female of “Chess,” Belladonna who is “an emblematic figure ….. a siren queen, temptress delaying the quester, and a suffering victim in love with herself, lonely and betrayed” (H. Williams53). Broker and Bentley affirm this move: “the women in this part of the Waste Land are all entrapped …. These women are enclosed and dangled as decorations or amusements for men” (96); and, within the allegorical framework of the entire poem, “The importance of women becomes strikingly clear when it is realized that a waste land is in mythic terms equivalentto a barren or unhealthy women” (97). Using allusion to generic conventions and past contexts, Eliot creates an atmosphere through language, gestures, and object that rely on the deduction of the reader to notice the difference in their applicability. The layering motif agree with Devitt’ claim that “genre can be redefined ….. as a dynamic concept created through the interaction of writers, readers, past texts, and

contexts” (Integrating” 699). Brooker and Bentely identify a similar process in the “thirtythree line of description, the longest descriptive passage in the entire poem” that opens “Chess”: “The most remarkable thing about the passage is the way it creates a powerful awareness of the women without describing any part of her” (100-1). The layering of multiple genres and contexts I instrumental in creating this pastiche of the modern female, as the passage, “consists mainly of signifiers pointing away from its occupant toward literary and mythical figures” (101). Eliot’s regard for traditional and its rejuvenation using the “historical sense” functions in much the same way to frame and provide support and scaffolding for new artistic creations. His knowledge of tradition allows Eliot to effectively parody, as well as draw parallels between past and present. Yet, the formal act of layering genre allusions produces only fragments because of the pre-exiting contextual gap. Since Eliot recognizes this fact, Helen Williams states that the overlapping of allusions is left incomplete: “if we begin from an underlying pattern of perceived experience as a circle and see the separate episode and personae as revolving segments, it is clear ….. that these two circles are not in harmony and that this is the poem’s most important sustained irony” (23). I believe that for Eliot’s purpose, the decision is made intentionally to portray this marked inadequacy of modernity. In the “prevailing disharmony” (24), the frustration of achieving only provisional meaning that drive Eliot to try and refine the women of “Chess” by repeatedly making allusions to different genres and contexts F.R. Leavis’ classic account of Eliot’s method is helpful: “By means of such references and quotations Mr. Eliot attains a compression, otherwise unattainable, that is essential to his aim; a compression approaching simultaneity – the co-presence in the mind of a number of different orientations, fundamental attitudes, orders of experience” (107). How Eliot engages and aligns an

array of literary and historical context by alluding to genres and contexts, and how he translates them to achieve a formal “compression” that exposes his “double identity” in “Chess” is the focal point of this paper.

A Game of Chess I have chosen to investigate part two of the Waste Land entitled “A Game of Chess” for critically reviewing the state of relationships, communication, and the status of women in the modern era. Each theme also has very personal implications for Eliot. How Eliot communicates these themes using allusion is of equal significance: literary genres and their contexts inn tradition are also modes of communication capable of linking past examples with present cases that are evolving, and still continue to do so. Eliot’s reliance on the “ideal order” of tradition implies that “repetition” of themes take place across literary genres and history, though they exist in different generic forms. David Chinitz writes that Eliot’s goal is “to seek a recombination of literature’s dissociated elements and specifically to call for a new form or genre in which such as reconciliation might be possible” (238). This tendency is also reinforced by R.V. Young: “Eliot’s vision of the modern cultural waste land emerges out of these oblique, streamof-consciousnessdramas anchored inn the pattern of allusions” (24). However, when they are translated into the wasteland of the present, their contexts are perverted by the pressures of the new situation, and Eliot’s ambivalence to wholly accept what he sees as now a decadent changed tradition. As Carolyn Miller pointed out, using multiple genres “must involve situation and motive” (Social Action” 152); both components are instrumental in the formation of present contextual value and meaning. According to Devitt, if genres “construct

influenced by the situation at hand. A crucial point in my examination of Eliot’s use of allusion is also supplemented by Devitt: “When literary works are read centuries after they were written, the situation within which they were produced has changed” (Integrating” 709). It is Eliot’s goal to capture such a change, a transformation of culture and history at work. Yet I believe that relying on allusion exacerbates Eliot’s Modernist dilemma: it evokes pre-existing circumstances and semantic values as unchanging historical makers in the “ideal order.” Though he advocates transformation, and refinement inn “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the irony is that his Modernist drive for stability and closure counteracts the acceptance of provisional meaning. Where allusions evokes traditional values “author and reader are assumed to share” to create a unified vision of past within the present, Eliot, as a Modernist, uses parody to separate the two; allusionis Eliot’s method of using ironic contrast to illustrate how the modern era had fallen into decadence. The Boudoir The first female figure the reader encounters is Eliot’s woman in the Boudoir. He frames her by alluding to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Elman and O’Clair expand Eliot’s note 1 to: “An ironic adaptation of the famous description of Cleopatra by Enobarbus in Shakespeare’splay; here ‘she’ may be Belladonna” (494). In this case, Eliot is trying to reconnect the modern female figure of the waste land to the “ideal order” using allusion: The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed upon the marble […..] (The Waste Land 77-78). I would like to contrast Eliot’s translation with Shakespeare’s version to draw out the subtle differences between the two”

The barge she sate in, like a burnishe’d throne, Burnt on the water. (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.191092) In the context of Shakespeare’s tragic play Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian Queen is observed amorously by other men; the passion, love, and self-sacrifice in the Antony and Cleopatra relationshipsymbolizes the height of Renaissance artistic expression as a symbol of feminine beauty and vitality in the literary canon. By drawing on the context and style of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, or as Helen Williams puts it, by “echoing the rhythmic and metrical casing exactly, only subtly changing the words” (51), Eliot establishes a thematical link through “tone and image” (34) to try to situate the depraved modern Belladonna alongside the vibrant Cleopatraof the “ideal order”.

Works Cited Devitt, Amy J. “Generalizing About Genre: New Conception of an Old Concept.” College Composition and Communication 44.4 (1993): 573-86 Ellmann, Richard, and Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton, 1988 Leavis, F.R. “T.S. Eliot.” New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932. 75-132 Miller, Carolyn. “Genre ass Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70(1984): 15167. Raine, Craig. T.S. Eliot: Live and Legacies. New York: Oxford UP, 2006 Williams, Helen, T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, Studies in English Literature. Ed. David Daiches. London: Edward Arnold, 1973

Brooker, Jewel Spears, and Joseph Bentley. “Amalgamating Disparate Experience: Myth and Gender in ‘A Game of Chess.’” Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and The Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: Mass. UP, 1990. 94-120 Young, R.V. “Withered Stumps of Time: The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion.” Intercollegiate Review 38.2 (2002): 23-33