Notes on the Modern Period - 11 - Eliot and Death

In my earlier posts (on Yeats, on Keats and on Mallarmé, etc.), one theme has involved these poets’ engagement with death. The theme is, of course, a frequent one in poetry; for example, a powerful Renaissance confrontation with death is Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 with its last line: “Death, thou shalt die.” For nineteenth and early twentieth century poets, the reach toward transcendent possibility often involves the paradoxical death of the ordinary self. For Yeats, the power of the image is to transmute the passion and suffering of lived life into art – of the “fall to earth,” and that fall involves an awareness of how death and life are intertwined; for example in “Byzantium,” the “gold mosaic” images from the walls of Hagia Sophia are hailed as “death-in-life and life-in-death. / …Those images that yet / Fresh images beget, / That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” Even in this poem set far from Ireland, there is an affirmation of art’s turbulent connection to life, which makes sense perhaps especially in the context of a newly postcolonial culture. In contrast, the recognition of death’s role for Eliot’s imagination is another matter altogether. The difference is suggested by the opening of Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which is an epigram from Petronius reporting, in the Greek, what the Cumaean Sibyl said: ‘I want to die.’ Eliot’s work gives form not only to the experience of death as a part of life, but also to the yearning for death.

The Sibyl’s desire to die is one part of the many layers of allusion which characterize Eliot’s poem (here we are given the Sibyl’s original Greek, which is embedded within Petronius’ Latin narrative). Eliot’s strategy – constant allusions, often in their original languages – is not simply to impede immediate comprehension; nor is the poet merely challenging the reader to join Eliot as an elitist adept in the arcana of “the mind of Europe” and beyond (by the end of “The Wasteland” we are reading the original Sanskrit words of a prayer calling for humans to “give, sympathize, and control”). Such defensive harboring of past culture is not quite the point, for Eliot does provide footnotes to elucidate his poem’s allusions, and his strategy promotes a sort of delayed comprehension, so that one experiences the shock of confusion and then the decoding clarification. Yet the elucidation give little comfort, for the sensation produced is of an echoing emptiness. It is as if a desperate force is grasping rather hopelessly for pieces of the literary past, and the reader is made to participate with the poet in struggling with the fragmentation of that past, the defeat of inherited culture in the face of the emptiness of the urban present.

The sense of multiple voices haunting at the edge of death is implicit in the initial title Eliot gave the manuscript of the poem: “He do the police in different voices,” with the deadening vulgarity of its knowing self-mockery. Part I of “The Wasteland” is made up of “different voices” or interrelated sections, all of them focused in one way or another on symptoms of spiritual death; the title itself of this part is “The Burial of the Dead,” after the funeral service in the English Book of Common Prayer. The first voice is a bitter and literate voice which takes back Chaucer’s opening pastoral image of regeneration (“When that April with its sweet showers…”): in Eliot’s vision, “April is the cruelest month…” The second series of ten lines offers a trivial, gossipy voice recounting seasons spent in aristocratic leisure. Then, abruptly, the biblical prosody of a third series of lines preaches against the stony deadness and desiccation of modern life. Stoniness here is a symptom of spiritual self-blindness and is rather the opposite of Yeats’ metaphor for the “terrible beauty” of imaginative transformation. Eliot's poetry is never more eloquent than when it inhabits a zone of deadness, whether a lifeless desert or a ring of hell or purgatory. The next fifteen lines return us to the “social” aristocratic voice of the second sequence, but now the speaker is complaining of an abortive sexual liaison (and her complaints are framed by allusions to Wagner’s “Tristan.” Then the penultimate sequence introduces a “famous clairvoyante” with her bad cold, who evokes the mythic Tarot images of death and rebirth, but debased by their modern purveyor. In the final sequence of “The Burial of the Dead,” a new voice emerges, not biblical, but bitterly apocalyptic in evoking the “Unreal City” as a hellish vision (accompanied by an allusion to Dante witnessing the limbo of souls at the entrance of Inferno): here death pervades the “crowd [which] flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” The section ends with an allusion to Baudelaire, a quotation of the last line of “To the Reader,” which bitterly indicts the ultimate symptom of the bourgeois reader’s spiritual torpor: “It’s Boredom! Tears have glued its eyes together. / You know it well, my Reader. This obscene / beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine – / you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!” The poem’s subsequent Parts II through V imagine just this “yawning” for death.

In Part II, images of sex without love encompass both past and present, the “withered stumps of time;” this “Game of Chess” first takes back the mythic adoration of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (of her, and also her own of Antony), then it dissects upper-class ennui (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”), and finally it deflates proletarian squalor and puts Ophelia’s “Good night, sweet ladies” into the demeaning mouth of the bartender at closing time. Part III is “The Fire Sermon,” in which disgust provides an ineffective refuge from the burning flames which are shown to constitute modern life; here the ugly vision of the Thames becomes a rescinding, through disgusted allusions, of the promise of Spenser’s “river” vision of love and Shakespeare’s “island” vision in “The Tempest;” finally the voice of Tiresias, dead and ‘foresuffering,’ takes over the vision of the loveless city, and the lines of the poem break down into short fragments which enact the poem’s statement: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” Part IV, the short “Death by Water,” presents the false promise of regenerative water as the instrument of drowning and despair. Finally, in Part V, “What the Thunder Said,” there is a counterpoint between images of death (“Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”) and a tentative vision of regeneration and refuge in a sort of noble asceticism (there are the Sanskrit words of Hindu prayer as well as allusions to the myth of the Fisher King). However, the healing vision of water gives little relief. The fourth line from the end of the poem proclaims that these images are the “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The next line is a quotation from Kyd’s Renaissance Revenge Tragedy, an upwelling of mad bloodshed and death. The penultimate line contains the aforementioned Hindu prayer, and the final line invokes three times the Sanskrit word for “the peace which passes understanding.”

Eliot’s reader hears “The Wasteland’s” piteous call for refuge, for our honoring of those fragments, both their content and their brilliant form, so influential and infectious for modern ears. Simultaneously, the reader is acutely aware of the equally piteous voice of a yearning for death, for an end to the torment of modern time. We are left to experience the tension between the two, between the call for refuge and the voice of death, and we are left wondering whether the image of that “peace which passes understanding” can endure, or is ‘achieved,’ in the poem, or whether it too is murdered by the relentless deadness, by both the desiccation and the drowning. Such is the paradox of Eliot’s poem. With great power and ambition, it enacts the dilemma of modernity, its yearning to affirm (even to affirm an ascetic or curtailed spirituality) in conflict with its awareness of the pervasiveness of death – of the self, of decadent and alienated society, of the ten million ‘Great War’ dead, and of entire structures of knowledge and community.

I hope next to post some commentary on one of Eliot's "Four Quartets" and particularly one in which he imagines a meeting with the ghost of Yeats.

Notes on the Modern period - 1 - chronology of the modern

In a course I teach, we have explored – over the past few weeks – some of the main “features” of the modern period. [Over the years, I’ve offered this course in various forms at both Cleveland State and now at Case Western Reserve University. The current version involves less reading and more writing for the students in one of CWRU’s “university seminars,” part of the school’s 'seminar approach to general education sequence' (“sages”).]

We first discussed a list of possible features of the modern, as follows: Autonomy, independence of vantage point and structure of thought. And the related feature of abstraction, both as subject and as abstract form and structure. Primistivism (again as both form and content) or openness to immediacy of the “moment” – also, stripped-down objectivity. As in the above contradiction between “abstraction” and the “moment,” there is a recurrent quality of paradox, contradiction, or ambiguity. A commitment to realism signals the ethos of confrontation, the critique of society from both right and left, and the interest in judging the entire course of Western civilization leading to the modern period. Destabilization of received convention; negation, and/or rebellion, and subversive freedom. The quality of paradox relates to a pervasive perspectivism, relativity/relativism, with an accompanying risk of nihilism. In general, there is an openness to change and experiment across the arts, the natural sciences, and the new social sciences – yielding new forms, concepts, approaches, and achievements. Paradigm shift. A transfiguring unity of being and vision is sought in the face of change and collapse (with the fullness of experience yielding a death of the ordinary self). The modern is beset by a sense of cultural mourning and belatedness.

We then went on to examine a chronology of the modern, which of course has a fascination in and of itself (partly for what it includes and excludes). It began with the early start of Rousseau’s Social Contract in 1762 and ended with 1945 and the end of World War II. The students repeatedly commented on the paradoxical combination of destruction and achievement apparent in many of its items (for an obvious example, the American Civil War’s abolition of slavery yet its massive toll in casualties partly resulting from the increased modernization of warfare – and generally the increasing human toll of war from the Civil War to World War II).

Many comments focused on the remarkably fast pace of technological achievement in the century before 1945 (a natural focus for some of the students at the former Case Institute of Technology). Examples of those achievements include: 1873 Remington’s typewriter; 1879 Edison’s phonograph and incandescent light bulb (and the electrification of cities in later decades); 1882 Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus but, also, the development of the machine gun; 1885 Pasteur’s Rabies vaccine, the discovery of radio waves, and the development of the internal combustion engine; 1887 Daimler’s automobile; 1890 the Kodak camera and the completion of the Eiffel Tower; 1891 the first subway in London opens; 1892 Lorenz’s electron theory; 1893 the Ford auto assembly line; 1894 the gramophone disc; 1895 Roentgen discovers x-rays, Lumiere invents the movie camera, and Marconi develops the wireless radio; 1898 the Curies isolate radium; 1903 the Wright Brothers create the first airplane; 1905 Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity; 1909 the typhus vaccine developed; 1912 the isotope theory developed; 1915 Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity; 1923 television and insulin developed, and skyscrapers begin to shape the New York skyline; 1925 the Copenhagen hypothesis of quantum physics; 1927-8 Penicillin, missiles, sound movies; 1936-9 jet engine, radar, computer; 1945 the U.S. uses atomic weapons in war.

Here are some of the other details from the chronology:

Enlightenment conceptions of individual rights: 1762 Rousseau’s Social Contract; 1776 Jefferson et al’s Declaration of Independence; 1789 French Revolution’s “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” followed by the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars (until Waterloo in 1915); the Godwins (husband and wife) on political and women’s rights.

Romantic ideas of subjectivity and beauty: 1794 and following - Blakes’s poetry (the first gas lights in Britain, even as speech and assembly are suppressed repeatedly in the following decades); 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads; plus the following, which I’ll discuss more soon: 1807 Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit and 1819 Keats’ Odes.

Realist efforts and their complement in Aestheticism: 1833 Britain’s Reform Bills and, in 1836 on the eve of Victoria becoming queen, its abolition of slavery; 1848 abortive revolutions in Europe and Marx’s Communist Manifesto; 1851 the Great Exhibition of Science and Industry at the “Crystal Palace” in London (responded to with horror by Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man in 1857, the year of Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”); 1859 Darwin’s Origin of the Species; 1861-65 the American Civil War, with its uncounted civilian toll and 620,000 soldiers dead in four years; 1865 Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde; 1866 Britain’s second Reform Bill; 1871 the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War with its 200,000 solders dead in one year, and also George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the founding of Newnham College for Women in Cambridge, U.K.; 1872-3 Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; also in the 1870s the first Impressionist exhibition, the poems of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and Ibsen’s Ghosts; 1881 Henry James’ Portrait of A Lady; 1884 Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; 1895 Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, plus Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest as well as his imprisonment for the “issue” of his homosexuality; and finally 1900 Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams; 1902 Britain’s expanded Education Act and Gide’s The Immoralist; 1903 G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folks, and Simmel’s The Metropolis.

The modern period from 1905 (with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity) to 1945: 1907 Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse’s Fauve period; 1909-11 London’s First Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Bartok’s First String Quarete, and Shoenberg’s Second String Quartet; 1913 Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; 1914 D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Wyndham Lewis’ Blast; 1914-18 World War I with uncounted millions of civilian casualties and 10 million soldiers dead (and in 1918-19 a similar number of deaths from influenza); 1915 – the year of Einstein’s General Theory – Lawrence’s Women in Love suppressed; Joyce’s A Portrait, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious; 1917 Lenin’s Russian Revolution; 1919-20 Pound’s Mauberly, Weimar cabaret and Bauhaus, Duchamp’s Mona Lisa and Dadaism, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and in America Women’s suffrage; 1922 Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; 1924 Kafka’s The Trial, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Breton’ Surrealist Manifesto, and Forster’s A Passage to India; 1925 Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Heminway’s in our time, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and in 1927 Heidegger’s Being and Time and in Britain, Women’s suffrage; 1929 the Great Depression begins, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Brecht/Weill’s operas; 1930s Hitler comes to power, Stalin’s purges, the Spanish Civil War, and 1939-45 World War II with its scores of millions of civilian casualties, its 25 million soldiers dead, the Holocaust, and Atomic weapons first used in war. 1945 postmodernism begins.

Then the class turned to some precursors of the modern, including Kate Chopin “The Story of an Hour,” excerpts from Whitman, Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain,” Baudelaire’s “To the Reader,” Verlaine’s “The Art of Poetry,” and a paragraph on self-consciousness by Hegel. Those will be the subject of my next post.