Abstract
The essay below attempts to revisit the key aspects of the critical reception and understanding of T. S. Eliot through the lens of his most seminal poetic work The Waste Land. In this essay, the contemporary relevance of the poet is highlighted, revealing how the structure, the style and meaning generated in the poem may be read, understood, appreciated, as well as historicised.
Keywords: Eliot, modernism, The Waste Land, montage and collage.
Critical reception of T. S. Eliot’s early poems, immediately after their publication, was mostly not very encouraging. The reading public and literary critics were either indifferent or straightway hostile. Prufrock and Other Observations, published in 1917, did not sell out until early 1922. “The reviews in the English press were characteristically short and dismissive, the major complaint being that this was verse rather than poetry because it had no conception of ‘the beautiful.’ It was ‘amusing’ but no more” (Ackroyd 79). Louis Untermeyer moves one step further to observe that the volume would be of interest to psychiatrists rather than to readers of poetry (Perkins 122). Ackroyd feels that “[t]he little volume provoked such a response in part because of its unappealing or at least ‘unpoetic’ subject matter, but also because the poetry had no identifiable single voice behind it” (79). The poems did not “bear the weight of a powerful poetic personality” with which the readers had been familiar. He observes that “in the late-nineteen- and early-twentieth-century English poetry the idea of a sustained ‘tone’ was still central” (79). The general expectation of this ‘sustained’ tone and poetic craft was further belied when The Waste Land was published in 1922. Referring to this volume, William Carlos Williams commented that it dropped like an atom bomb on his own type of poetry, wiping it out. Perkins recounts that Williams, during the bombing blitz over London, wrote a poem which seemed to welcome the bombs because they would cleanse London of Eliot and all that he represented (120). It is true that there were some critics who were quick to recognise Eliot’s talent. In New Bearings in English Poetry (1932/1950 with a new chapter “Retrospect” added to it) F. R. Leavis, for instance, commented on the revolutionary potential of Eliot’s poetry. Similarly, in his book The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (1935), F.O. Matthiessen properly evaluated Eliot’s works. In a 1989 Calcutta University lecture, Stephen Spender spoke of the aspirations of the members of his own generation thus: “When we were young we did, however, seek for father and uncle figures…. The three whom we most admired were James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence” (2). He stated that “in England throughout the nineteenth century beautiful landscape is almost equated with poetry whereas the industrial landscape is equated with the anti-poetic, the ugly, transitory, materialist modern world” (2). The Waste Land, he said, “transformed the landscape of poetry” (2). Readers and critics, brought up on this diet, naturally reacted violently to the poems that catered to the ‘new aesthetic.’ Irène Simon in her article entitled “Some Early Studies of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry” briefly narrates her academic experience of the time – how in the 1930s she, as a student, had to negotiate the poetic canon dominated by Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury (1928). It is quite natural therefore that for the contemporary readers The Waste Land represented a shocking disruption of this poetic tradition. Hargrove1 sums up the reasons of why it was a deviant poetic creation:
The Waste Land when it first appeared was revolutionary in its technical innovations, its rejection of traditional stanza form, meter, rhyme, and linear structure, and its daring content with its graphic descriptions of sexual relationships, including infidelity, prostitution, and abortion, its portrayal of the modern metropolis and recent technology, and its frank criticism of excessive materialism. As Harding reminds us, although time and familiarity have robbed the poem of much of its shock effect today, it was “a formidable piece of anti-establishment writing” in its time (15). (105)
Simon points out that “the criticism of the ‘thirties and ‘forties reflects more clearly the problems with which the readers first encountering these poems were faced” (Simon 698). ‘Encountering’ the poems meant confronting a new poetic aesthetics that had already made its presence felt in Europe, particularly in France (in the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbière, and Mallarmé, for instance), and was gradually taking roots in England. From the vantage point of the present generation of readers, it may be difficult to realise the magnitude of difficulties the readers of the time, unfamiliar “with modern techniques in other arts as well as in literature” (Simon 698), faced.
While discussing a text such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, which the present article will do, we need to keep another point in mind. The discovery of the original manuscript of the poem and its subsequent publication in 1971 (with the facsimile of original ‘corrections’ by Ezra Pound) changed our perception of, and response to, the poem. The unique prehistory of The Waste Land informs us that Pound’s corrections contributed considerably to the unusual shape of the poem and that “but for ‘violent’ Pound, basically ‘academic’ Eliot might have missed out on his high goal of literary achievement” (Cambon 194). Pound's ‘interventions’ were ‘truly maieutic’ (Cambon 194; also ‘Pound’s maieutic skill,’ Valerie Eliot xxii) – it brought into focus Eliot’s latent ideas in a condensed way. It was also responsible for a considerable abridgement of the poem, the original draft of 835 lines was brought down to 433 lines in the reworked version. Pound thus performed a surgery – a Caesarean operation – and the ‘sprawling, chaotic poem’ was reduced to ‘about half its size’ (Eliot qtd. in Southam 71-2). It is because of this quality Cambon calls Pound a ‘gadfly’ – the latter’s criticism provoked Eliot into accepting suggestions of big excisions and radical changes. The changes, the ‘sudden disjunctions and shifts of scene’ (103), asserts B.C. Southam, bestowed on the poem cinematic effects. Seen from another angle, the pattern of Cubist collage which ‘originally existed only in embryonic form’ (Cohen 14) in the original draft became more prominent. In short, The Waste Land, in its published form, embodied modernist sentiment and shape. Modernist sensibilities were gradually taking roots in England at that time.
This article will try to posit The Waste Land in the interface of modernist art forms. It will try to trace how Eliot used modernist techniques in representing the evils of modern decadent civilisation. It will also attempt a comparative discussion of The Waste Land and Picasso’s mural Guernica (1937), an excellent example of cubist art. Although sufficient evidence has not yet been found to prove Eliot’s abiding interest in art forms such as painting and cinema, it is assumed on the basis of some available references that he indeed took interest in these sister arts and applied in the poem some of the techniques he picked up from there. In this respect, most critics mention his visit to Europe in 1910-11 as having most pervasive impact on his creative self.
Eliot’s Early Encounter with Modernist Art
Eliot visited Paris in September 1910 and spent about a year there. In Sorbonne he closely studied French literature, particularly Charles Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière. His reading of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) had already made them familiar literary figures. This was a landmark visit in the sense that it made him aware of the ‘mind of Europe’ as well as it updated him about the developing patterns of literary-critical taste in Europe. He himself acknowledged this visit to be an “exceptional good fortune” for him (qtd. in Hargrove 89) as it provided him an excellent exposure to not only old European art and literature but also to the new, modernist art.
Paris was the most magnificent and extensive repository of great art works of the past, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth century, while at the same time serving as the acknowledged hotbed for a host of rapidly developing and shockingly innovative new art movements that were to change the art world forever. (Hargrove 89)
Looking back from our vantage point, we realise that traces of his experience in Paris had tremendous impact on his literary works. Not that he was a novice about European art at this point of his life. Prior to his visit, he had taken two courses in art history at the undergraduate level at Harvard: History of Ancient Art in the fall of 1907 and Florentine Painting in the fall of 1909 (Hargrove 89). In the absence of proper documents related to his exposure at that time to world of art in Paris, London and elsewhere in Europe, it is difficult to surmise the depth of his engagement with modern art. Hargrove provides some evidence (mainly Eliot’s letters) of his visit to the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Wallace Collection (where he “made notes!!”), and the South Kensington Museum (“in large part”), and thus Eliot had expressed his satisfaction that he had not “wasted [his] time” during his brief stay in London (Hargrove 96).
In his first London Letter for the Dial, which appeared in April 1921, he [Eliot] commented that the Picasso Exhibition at the Leicester Galleries was “the most interesting event of London at this moment” (453), and in the third, published in August 1921, he argued that Cubism “is not license but an attempt to establish order” (215). Certainly, a variety of modern art movements were very much on his mind from 1919 to 1921 when he was working on The Waste Land. (Hargrove 121; emphasis added)
Despite establishing Eliot’s interest in the area, Hargrove had to depend on his gut feeling that Eliot ‘must have’ visited the exhibitions held during the period or seen specific paintings in museums. For instance, Hargrove resorts to statements such as “News of the scandalous exhibit was so wide-spread in Europe that Eliot surely read or heard about it, perhaps even seeing some of these harsh reviews” (99; emphasis added). She refers to a “notorious exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings …at London's Grafton Gallery from early November 1910 to January 1911” (98-99). It was organised by the art critic Roger Frye and featured works by “such innovative recent and contemporary artists as Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and André Derain.” It was “a ‘succès de scandale’ with its ‘boldly distorted and wilfully unnaturalistic paintings’ that engendered for the most part outrage and shock among viewers and reviewers” (Hargrove 99). Hargrove assumes, “News of the scandalous exhibit was so wide-spread in Europe that Eliot surely read or heard about it, perhaps even seeing some of these harsh reviews [in circulation]” (99; emphasis added).
The Waste Land: Interface with Other Arts
Jacob Korg (“Modern Art Techniques in The Waste Land,” 1960) was perhaps one of the first critics to comment on the influence of modernist art techniques on The Waste Land. He examined in some detail how the poem embodied the techniques of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Subsequently, critics such as John Dixon Hunt (“‘Broken Images’: T.S. Eliot and Modern Painting,” 1974), David Tomlinson (“T.S. Eliot and the Cubists,” 1980), Jacob Korg (“The Waste Land and Contemporary Art,” 1988), and Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley Brooker (Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, 1990), Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio (“Tzara in The Waste Land,” 1990), Nancy D. Hargrove and Paul Grootkerk (“The Waste Land as a Surrealist Poem,” 1995) and Nancy D. Hargrove (“T. S. Eliot's Year Abroad, 1910-1911: The Visual Arts,” 2006) further explored the impact of modern art movements on his poems. These works have tried to explore Eliot’s interest in, and familiarity with, the works of modernist artists, explore the range of references to these works/artists in his poetry. Some critics have also explained the relevance of modernist philosophy in understanding his poems and analysed how Eliot applied modernist techniques to his own poetry. This article will try to explore in some detail the issue of how the concepts and techniques of ‘collage’ and ‘montage’ can be used as tools to interpret the complex structure of meaning in The Waste Land. It will also attempt a comparative discussion of The Waste Land and Picasso’s Guernica within this framework.
We have already seen that The Waste Land was the result of a collaborative effort of Eliot the poet and Pound the editor. Much like a film editor who works closely with the film director, Pound (along with Eliot’s first wife Vivien) went through each ‘frame’ and each ‘shot’ which Eliot’s camera eye had captured and edited them, meticulously juxtaposing them, and eliding links between them, thus providing them a ‘metonymic’ character.’2 Pound’s editing method is akin to that of montage, a concept closely associated with the Soviet filmmakers and critics of 1920s and 1930s such as Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov, and Eisenstein . It is an editing method involving assemblage and juxtapositions of cinematic frames and shots. It is, as Bordwell states, “used to build a narrative (by formulating an artificial time and space or guiding the viewer's attention from one narrative point to another), to control rhythm, to create metaphors, and to make rhetorical points” (9). The notable exponents and theoreticians of montage like the ones mentioned just now “assumed that filmic meaning is built out of an assemblage of shots which creates a new synthesis, an over-all meaning that lies not within each part but in the very fact of juxtaposition” (Bordwell 9). Referring to Eisenstein, Thomas W. Sheehan points out how the procession of frames and shots brought about by montage helps the meaning making process: “Eisenstein's usual idea of montage involves an overdetermined organization that synthesizes juxtapositions or superimpositions, creating a graphic succession of frames that circle back around a single theme, meaning, idea, or ideology” (78; emphasis added). But this centripetal movement that creates a semantic structure is rather complex as it depends on ‘decomposition’ and ‘reconstruction’ – factors that involves “the dialectic of conflict and resolution” (Sheehan 71). It constructs a reality through a highly mechanical way and does not just reproduce the world the camera sees. At the editor’s laboratory the film roll undergoes complex, often experimental, operation that seeks cinematic articulation. Francois Albera explains Eisenstein’s concept of filmic articulation thus:
Eisenstein locates the minimal space of filmic articulation between frames, rather than between shots. Two frames which follow each other . . . can differ minimally (Al + A2 + A3 . . .), to a greater degree (Al + A15), or can be totally disjunctive (A + B or Z). In the first case, movement will seem continuous; in the others it will be increasingly intellectualised, to the point of becoming a purely filmic movement. (qtd. in Sheehan 72)
The extent of defamiliarization or distortion that may appear in the finished product will depend on the type of inter-frame relationship mentioned by Albera. In The Waste Land the poetic articulation approximates mostly to the more complex ones – either the second or the third one. In the poem the speaker (or speakers?) is looking at a vast spectacle of the arid land with its inhabitants. Both the land and the inhabitants are caught, to borrow cinematic terms, through different kinds of shots – close shots, medium shots and long shots. The lines describing the vast vista of the desert space (“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water” (I. ll.19-24) have the effect of a long shot. The description, embodying both the contemporary urban reality and the historical memory that stirs imagination, effectively stretches up to line no. 30 (“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”). It serves the purpose of what is technically called the ‘establishment of shot.’[3] This shot is preceded by the spectacle of the arid time and space (“April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land”),[4] and the flashback of a character called Marie (who represents both a corrupt regime/milieu but who slips into a happy past that serves as a contrast to the present situation).[5] Then follows a patch of hope – a picture of romantic love borrowed from Richard Wagner’s Tristan un Isolde. A sailor is singing about his beloved whom he has left behind. The extract in German is translated thus: “Fresh blows the wind from off the bow/ My Irish maid, where lingerest thou?” (qtd. in Williamson 131). The hyacinth girl episode is followed by the introduction of Madame Sosotris,[6] a ‘famous clairvoyante,’ whose power seems to have been impaired by a bad cold. The pack of ancient Tarot cards which she displays has now been reduced to the ‘comic banality of fortune telling” and gets associated with her fake commercial overtures. This again is followed by a `scene of city workers crossing London Bridge and the speaker’s address to Stetson, one in the walking mobs. In a hallucinatory movement, this vast crowd of living dead (“I had not thought death had undone so many”) walk through the real streets (King William Street), over a real bridge (London Bridge), past a real church (Saint Mary Woolnoth). All these are ‘real’ spaces in the ‘unreal’ city. The speaker comes across one whom he knows. He addresses the person thus:
Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with its nails he’ll dig it up again!
You hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère! (ll. 69-76; pp. 62-3)
Times and spaces, human beings and animals have been mixed up in a surrealistic evocation of the city. References and quotations from Baudelaire and John Webster render the environment more confusing. Such a variety of scenes from the past and the present, an assemblage of figures of working class and aristocracy, references to different landscapes are fused together both within the individual frames and shots, and those between them. Evocation of a confused time and place has been possible through a clever collage of images effected by the montage method.
Montage as a compositional mode creates in the poem an artistic pattern known in visual arts as ‘collage’. It is typically a Cubist art technique introduced during the second phase of Cubism known as Synthetic Cubism (1912-14). The first phase is called Analytical Cubism (1909-12) which roughly began around the year 1909 and continued till 1912. Eliot was in Paris during 1910-11 and hence might have been familiar with how
Picasso and Braque collaborated in experimenting with a host of new techniques. Chief among them were the distortion or fragmentation of the figure, still-life, or landscape into geometric planes or cubes …, the use of multiple perspectives so that the subject is presented from several angles simultaneously, the limitation of colors to dull, monochromatic shades of tan and grey, and the reflection of primitive art and culture. (Hargrove 100)
The collage technique introduced during the second phase of the Cubist movement is so much prominent in The Waste Land that Philip Cohen calls it the “literary equivalent of Cubist collage” (14). Nancy D. Hargrove also feels that “Perhaps the most daring technique which Eliot adapted for the poem was collage, the invention of Picasso and Braque which ushered in Synthetic Cubism …” (105). Hargrove and Grootkerk point out that Surrealist artists borrowed the collage technique from the Cubists:
this technique of mixing bits and pieces of materials such as ticket stubs and scraps of newspaper from the world of daily life with paint, glue, and canvas is one the Surrealists borrowed from Cubism because it conveys qualities in art which they revered: spontaneity, absence of logical thought patterns, shock created by removing things from their conventional contexts, and the inter-penetration of the real world and the fantastic or irrational. (15)
We have already mentioned briefly how the juxtaposition of mutually incompatible images without connecting links – deliberate acts of elision – has been carried out in The Waste Land through the method of montage and how it creates an impression of a collage pattern in the first section (“the Burial of the Dead”) of The Waste Land. In most of the five sections of the poem (“The Burial of the Dead;” “A Game of Chess;” “The Fire Sermon;” “Death by Water;” and “What the Thunder Said”) this pattern is perceptible. In this short article we cannot trace this pattern as evident in all the sections of the poem. But it is quite evident that structurally all the sections project collages of images and impressions of barrenness of the contemporary civilisation and the sense of ennui experienced by modern urban people. This collapse of cultural life, the essential sterility of modern civilisation is rendered real through a mixture of different voices, speech registers, quotations, scenes involving historical and mythical figures, genres and tonal varieties – all these accompanied by echoes from the past which often serve the purpose of creating a contrast. The use of the collage results in “a progressive emptying out of realistic character and landscape in the poem” (Cohen 12). The echo of the opening line of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,/And bathed every veyne in swich licóur/Of which vertú engendred is the flour”), voice of a woman called Mary, the episode of Madame Sosotris, the submerged allusion to the dirge sung by Cornelia in John Webster’s The White Devil (“But keep the wolf far hence, that’s foe to men,/ For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.”), the quotation from Baudelaire – all these in “Burial of the Dead” alone – are examples of how Eliot lays a rich variegated carpet of images for the readers to explore.
“A Game of Chess” (Section II of the poem) is a remarkable collage of linguistic registers. In the description of Cleopatra on her ‘Chair’ (with a capital ‘C’) against a lavish setting Eliot uses a poetic register, while the conversation of the modern upper-class couple with neurotic conditions conform to the medical register:
My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?I never know what you are thinking. Think. (ll.111-14; p. 65)[7]
This is interspersed with the musical register when an American ragtime hit of 1912 is alluded to. Along with the above, the dialogue between two working class women (register of informal family talks), and the call of the waiter (register of the pub house) represent a variety of moods and contexts. All these, however, underscore the single, unchanging theme of decadence and failure in sexual love and dominance of lust that characterise the lives of the inhabitants of the waste land. The spectacle of the passionate Cleopatra in a gorgeous setting is a contrast to the usual scene – she might have followed the wrong god but was nevertheless sincere in her pursuit of love.
The collages of voices, historical and mythical figures, quotations and allusions, mixture of cultures and religions along with fragmented images and dreamlike environment – all these create a sense of confusion and apparent incoherence. Critics such as Matthiessen often find coherence in the ‘mythical method’ Eliot himself has spoken about in a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But Scoffield feels that the poem has its roots in Eliot’s personal experience which gets reflected in the central consciousness of the speaker/s burdened with “an intolerable despair” (133). The voice at the centre, according to him, articulates the following (133-34):
a) I was neitherLiving nor dead, and I knew nothing,Looking into the heart of light, the silence
b) I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.c) O City city….My friend, blood shaking my heartd) … Your heart would have respondedGaily, when invited, beating obedientTo controlling hands
This is the voice that sometimes merges with those of others, of Prospero and of Ferdinand, Prince of Naples in The Tempest, for instance. He strongly feels that this voice ‘remains distinct, like an undertone, a voice in the mind’ (134). The voice has scrutinised its own experience and has surveyed the general human scenario. This has given him an insight into the sterility of human existence. Now, Eliot prefers a poetic mask, a façade, that would serve as a useful poetic technique of presenting the personal experience in the garb of another. The intensity of the personal feeling is there but at the same time there is a sense of distance brought about by the prophetic voice of Tiresias. Tiresias is also capable of surveying the entire scenario and witnessing thousands of spectacles, one who can juxtapose the fragments in a collage-like fashion. He has thus an important functional role in The Waste Land. This aspect will be further investigated in the next section.
Eliot’s The Waste Land and Picasso’s Guernica: A Comparative Analysis
A comparative analysis of The Waste Land and Picasso’s Guernica from the point of view of representational techniques will clarify the kind of arrangement of images both the creative artists resort to in their works and the nature of ‘unity’ that Eliot and Picasso impose upon them. Picasso’s painting represents the sufferings of man and animal in a particular Basque town called Guernica after it was destroyed on 26 April, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The town was razed to the ground by German bombers flying for General Franko. The barbarity of the attack, and Picasso’s consequent reaction to it, can be understood from the following report in The Times:
Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air-raiders. The bombardment of the open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes consisting of three German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers and Heinkel fighters, did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1,000 lb downwards … The fighters meanwhile flew low from above the centre of the town to machine gun those of the civilians who had taken refuge in the fields. The whole of Guernica was soon in flames except the historic Casa de Juntas …. (qtd. in Berger 164)
Picasso, greatly affected by the sufferings of the people, created the work Guernica. From the point of view of technique, this work is surprisingly akin to Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Picasso selects some images or their fragments thereof – synecdoches – which would act as the symbol of human and animal sufferings, as Eliot does in his turn to paint a picture of sterility of the living dead. Both selected and defamiliarized images of sufferings and the experience of devastation. Men, women and animals (such as a bull or a horse) are present in Guernica not in their entirety but only in synecdochic fragments. Their agonised limbs try to reach out to invisible sources for help. The pain is writ large on their faces. The defamiliarized details of flesh are juxtaposed without apparent links, the components, however, combine to create a comprehensive picture of sufferings and agony. The fragments of human or animal bodies are arranged in the collage form. The law of space is violated as parts of the bodies (even the witness of the scene – represented metonymically by one of his eyes) are brought in the canvas and sometimes. The fragments in Guernica serve as the objective correlatives for all the living beings, now dying pathetically. Despite the presence of fragmented components, Picasso creates a sense of unity through the use of a very ingenuous symbol. There is a bulb glowing approximately in the middle of the ceiling. Interestingly, it is placed strategically in the middle of the ceiling so that the light is distributed equitably. This bulb is often associated symbolically with the bombing and the sparks associated with it. However, it may be interpreted more meaningfully if we accept the bulb as the eye of the central witness and his consciousness. The eye is penetrating enough to prise open the spectacle of the pogrom in minute details. It effectively measures the magnitude of the devastation. The glow falls on the images below and illuminates them. Without the presence of the bulb, all the images would have been plunged into total darkness. The bulb is, therefore, a very effective artistic device in the painting. It renders the sufferings visible.
In The Waste Land the figure of Tiresias functions similarly. Eliot mentions in his notes to The Waste Land that “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest” (78). He is the one who perceives one scene after another and stores them in the memory in the form of cinematic shots. We may recall Arnold P. Hinchcliff’s comment:
Today’s film-goers should have little difficulty with the montage. Eliot’s method was in a way cinematic. He glued together bits of poetry and pretended that he was only a camera (the editorship theory fashionable at the time) … The glue was mainly personal and the emotions of the poem were filtered through literary works that echoed personal feeling but in an impersonal (because second-hand) way. (71)
Eliot for all practical purposes made Tiresias work as a camera. The poet (along with the Pound the editor, the better craftsman) assorts the impressions without rearranging them in spatio-temporal order. The result is a collage of images scattered all over the body of the poem. The collage usually insists on fragmentation and defamiliarization, and depends on metonymic details. Fragments also allow one to view an object from inside out as well as from different angles. Tiresias collects these fragments and makes them visible. His function is equivalent to the glowing bulb of Picasso’s painting. He illuminates all the fragmented images of the land. He is a person in whom both the sexes have met. He is the one who can see both the past and the future. Hence, he is the most appropriate person to visualise the historical past and the contemporary time and embody/witness the experiences of both the sexes. He is part of the scene, yet he can see from outside, a distant perceiver who can predict things accurately. It is no wonder, therefore, that Eliot himself should admit that “[w]hat Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem” (78).
Conclusion
The discussion in the earlier sections establishes Eliot’s participation in modernist aesthetics and his engagement with modernist techniques. His college and university courses made him familiar with the creative works of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and in the early years of his writing career he picked up the lessons from modernist artists. His visit to Europe during 1910-11 exposed him to the great experimentations the avant-garde artists had been resorting to. Later, his friendship with contemporary poets and authors (such as Ezra Pound) and artists (such as Wyndham Lewis) helped him a great deal. Despite the absence of much evidence, critics have been convinced of his interest in art in general and modernist art in particular. Through meticulous efforts, he made himself aware of the riches of the ‘mind of Europe.’ His vast reading about the cultural resources of both the East and the West, and his exposure to the European visual arts contributed to the shaping of his art-world. As this article shows, some understanding of the experiments of film-making and film aesthetics will certainly help interpreting his unique poems such as The Waste Land. It has made an attempt to study, through the critical lens of montage and collage, two texts – Eliot’s The Waste Land and Picasso’s Guernica to discover the points of intersection between these works. It shows that Eliot and Picasso, despite belonging to two different fields of representation, employed similar artistic means to achieve a sense of unity in their works. This article is thus a modest attempt to read modernist works together to facilitate a better understanding. It is hoped that more works will be taken up in future along this critical trajectory.
[The present article is a thorough reworking of a section of my M.Phil. dissertation chapter on The Waste Land. The dissertation entitled “A Critical Reading of T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry” was submitted to Jadavpur University in 1994. No part of the dissertation was published before]
Notes
[1] While making this comment, Hargrove has in her mind the modernist, more specifically surrealist, features of the poem. She refers to a comment made by Luis Buñuel, the great Surrealist filmmaker, “… although the surrealists didn't consider themselves terrorists, they were constantly fighting a society they despised. Their principal weapon wasn't guns, of course; it was scandal..." (qtd. in Hargrove 105). The comment unmistakably links The Waste Land to this emerging genre of disruptive potential. No doubt Carlos would wish an equally violent means – bombing – to counter or destroy this emerging ‘evil.’
[2] In my M.Phil dissertation titled “A Critical Reading of T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry” (Jadavpur University, 1994) I have analysed in some detail how consideration of ‘metaphoric’ and ‘metonymic’ modes of representation discussed by critics such as Roman Jakobson and David Lodge can be useful in the interpretation of some of Eliot’s poems. The dissertation has not yet been published.
[3] Nashville Film Institute website defines the term thus: “An establishing shot is the first shot in a scene that provides an overview of the setting. It is shot from above as an aerial shot, offering a view from a distance that helps the audience orient themselves to and identify the time and/or location in which the scene is occurring.” For details, kindly see Nashville Film Institute website (“Establishing Shot: Everything You Need to Know,” https://www.nfi.edu/ establishing-shot/)
[4] Chaucer’s lines are suggestive of Spring energy and cheerfulness, but to the waste land inhabitants it is a cruel period. April, as L.G.Salingar points out, is an “in-between state, neither spring nor winter, neither dull nor alert, but straining between the two, provides the model of everything that follows (qtd. in Williamson 131). The inhabitants of the waste land remain suspended between these two.
[5] Southam thinks that Eliot took the Marie episode from My Past (1913), the autobiography of the Countess Marie Larisch. This book “is the reminiscence of an Austrian noblewoman … there is an undeniable fascination about this briskly-told story of corruption, of sexual intrigue and domestic subterfuge in the royal circles of Europe” (Southam 21).
[6] Southam informs us that Eliot ‘unconsciously’ borrowed the character of Madame Sosotris from Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow (1921) which has a fake fortune-teller called Madame Sesostris (74-5).
[7] Southam thinks that Eliot might have been influenced by D.H. Lawrence’s story “The Fox’ where the following lines occur: “My eyes are bad tonight…My nerves are all of one tonight … I am all nerves tonight …Nothing. Nothing.”
Works Cited
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