For a very helpful introduction to Eliot, see Bruce Ong's page. Ong is a self-described "engineering hack" who loves music and finds music in Eliot's poetry. Another good introduction comes out of the English Department at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
Probably no one has had more influence over the ways in which we have been trained to think about literature than Eliot. His influence was perhaps greater in his criticism than in his poetry; he was especially important to an American school of criticism known as the New Criticism, which was the dominant critical voice in here for many decades. (Some of the New Critics included Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom.) The connections between Eliot and the New Critics are evident not only in their definitions of what art should do, but also in their understanding of the work of the critic and their sense of the proper relationship between the aesthetic realm of literature and the larger world. But it is also accurate to say that the New Critics oversimplified Eliot's project.
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), Eliot spells out his theory that a work of art should be a free-standing aesthetic object, "not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." In an argument with Wordsworth, he says that literature is not "emotion recollected in tranquillity" (Wordsworth's famous phrase from his introduction to the Lyrical Ballads--it became a kind of defining phrase for romantic poetry) but is rather "a concentration." He seems to be making a turn away from the idea that descended from Romanticism that poetry was merely a transcription of personal emotions and toward some sense that the writing of poetry is hard intellectual work, that it "must be conscious and deliberate."
The Renaissance verse that he quotes is a passage from a play called "The Revenger's Tragedy." Notes these two lines from it:
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
That "bewildering minute" is, in the view of Frank Kermode (one of the critics on the film we saw), what Eliot focuses on in reading poetry: a moment of intense fascination, which is followed by his best intellectual efforts to articulate the emotion that he felt in the experience of reading. Like Pater, Eliot privileges the aesthetic moment, the burning of the hard, gem-like flame. But after the moment is over, there is more to do--the critic, according to Eliot, should then determine how the new work of literature fits within "the whole of the literature of Europe," how it fits within the "ideal order" of these "existing monuments."
Eliot's concern with "impersonality" had strong influence on the modernist idea (which we already saw developing in Pater, Wilde, and Yeats) that the artistic work has "autonomy"--that it exists separately from anything else--and also the modernist idea of the artist himself (and it usually was himself) as a special, autonomous personality, separated from his culture and in a kind of prophetic relationship to it.
But there's another side to Eliot that we see in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that's important--a dialectic (a kind of ongoing conversation) between "the self" and "history." He has a sense that knowledge is never really pure and that the supposedly objective intellect is always driven by pressures of history, culture, ritual repetition. The intellect may, in fact, simply be a means of holding the flux of experience into a structure of order that is always, finally, provisional. In other words, I think (and your class discussions seemed to suggest this also) that Eliot's ideas allow for more subjectivity (or for the "situatedness" of the reader) than the New Critical dilution of his ideas suggests. He seems to see culture as a moment in the present arising out of and constantly reformulating the past.
To return to Eliot's connection to previous theorists of the aesthetic: Whereas Pater compares the literary art to music (all art aspires to the condition of music), note Eliot's turn. He says literature should "approach the condition of science." What is the difference between Pater's saying that a critic works "as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others" (introduction to The Renaissance), and Eliot's depiction of the artist as the platinum-like "catalyst" in the process of the creation of literature?
What does Eliot mean when he says, "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality"? and that "the emotion of art is impersonal"? And what, in your own understanding, are Eliot's claims for the relationship of history (including literary history) to contemporary literature?
Eliot's theories--or rather, the ways in which they have been handed down to us through the New Critics--are under debate. Various groups of people who have not had the privilege of his education--women, as well as lower-class and minority writers and readers from many parts of the globe--have pointed out that the "ideal order" that Eliot points to is in fact a very narrow body of literature, one that is built on a system of education and culture that these other people have historically had little voice in. The point that art is "impersonal" is a particular sticking-point--these people note all the personal sacrifices that others (wives, mothers, domestic servants, plantation workers, and so on) underwent in order to maintain this system. Do you think that Eliot's critical project is elitist, or is there something within it that saves him from that charge?
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (written as early as 1910-11, when Eliot was in college; first published in 1917). There may be less to this poem than it seems. I don't mean that Eliot failed in his intentions, but rather that critics have treated it over-seriously. (Bruce Ong's page points to a number of parodies, including this one.) In the tradition of a French writer named Laforge (who we don't need to bother with), this poem is comic. It is satirizing a certain kind of too-serious self-conscious personality. It also happens to take place against the backdrop of the modernist culture, which is a culture that is at a loss for secure grounding.
The occasion is like one of Robert Browning's poems--it's a dramatic monologue spoken by a speaker whose manner reveals more about himself than his literal words do. The "you" referred to in the line is either the reader or the speaker's other self; in either case, he is thinking out loud, not talking to another imagined person. Some critics consider that Prufrock is a "divided personality" talking to himself. See, for example, the commentary at the bottom of the text.
Numerous notes about the allusions await your study in the book on reserve in Clemons, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, by B. C. Southam. (And when you're tired of those, try these.) It's not necessary to get them all, but you should know that the poem is full of allusions to older works. The method is a kind of pastiche, a series of quotes, of fragments. That, in itself, is interesting. What's the rhyme scheme? Who knows? It's irregular, fragmentary. The arrangement of words and sounds is more associative than a regular verse form would allow. (If, in other classes, you've come across "stream of consciousness" writing in a novel, you can make a useful comparison to that.) This style, at the time, was revolutionary--nothing Yeats ever did.
Before you leave this poem, test yourself with a quiz.
Eliot cont'd (2/21). "The Waste Land" (1922). For an introduction to the poem and to Eliot's biography, see the film on "The Waste Land" (it's in a series called Ten Great Writers; the younger man with the black hair and beard is a respected poet in his own right, Craig Raine). Why is it significant that we saw this film on Ash Wednesday?
Eliot cont'd (2/23). For our ways into "The Waste Land," a good point of departure is to talk more about the radical break that cut widely across cultural and intellectual fields around the turn of the twentieth century (when, by the way, the British Empire covered one-fourth of the earth's surface). From many directions, people had reason to feel "apocalyptic."
* Freud's theories of psychoanalysis emerged in the late 1800s (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1904). His research suggested that all of our outer actions and decisions are based in inner, primitive drives that center on the desire for pleasure. The pleasure principle, with its own independent associative logic, is at odds with the social world of the "reality," but at the same time the pleasure principle is the source of the dreams that make life bearable. In any event, the suggestion that outer realities of human interactions did not mirror inner realities was a deeply disturbing one.
* In science, the world of classical physics was being similarly uprooted. From the time of Newton till the late nineteenth century, scientists had assumed that every part of the universe, from tiny atoms to the stars, was capable of being observed, if only they had the right instruments; and, further, that, once observed properly, they would reveal a systematic and logical structure. But after the structure of the atom as a dense positively charged nucleus, surrounded by many negatively charged electrons, was discovered (1913), new lines of investigation began.
Gradually scientists had to acknowledge that the old ways of describing physical activity at these minute levels did not work. For one thing, it seemed that the electrons jumped around the nucleus in ways that were not predictable. Observing an atom, a scientist could say what had happened inside it and could make some reasonably accurate predictions about what might happen in the future, but could not follow what was happening as it happened. Everything became just a matter of "probabilities." Niels Bohr was one scientist who was involved in this work early on; he eventually constructed the theory of "quantum mechanics." Meanwhile, in 1925 Werner Heisenberg came up with something called the "uncertainty principle," which held that two measurements were important--weight (the electronic particle) and speed (its radioactive wave)--but that when you measured one you could not measure the other. Therefore, you could never see the whole picture at once.
Although Eliot was writing earlier than 1925, these theories were already being developed and talked about. The radical news that they brought was that ordinary language could not longer claim to represent, in plain terms, what was happening at the level of the atom. The long-held scientific hope of describing in logical linear terms how the universe was organized had to be given up. From now on, all was metaphor, language thinly strung across an abyss.
* The First World War (1914-18) was in itself a near-apocalyptic period. The first war in which all the world's major powers were thrown into conflict, it was also the first war to involve air power (though not sophisticated) and other very advanced technology, such as poison gas. The British lost some 800,000, which amounted to a whole generation of men. ("I had not thought death had undone so many.") No one had ever imagined destruction on this scale.
* With all of this in the background, it is little wonder that the voice of Eliot's poem is fragmented and desperate. The unifying principles of the poem (that is, if they really unify the poem, which is debatable) are ritual, art, and religion. "The Waste Land" is built around the ancient fertility rituals that are the basis for all major religions, including Christianity. It is a land waiting for rain, for spiritual renewal. After the failure of the project of the scientific/philosophical Enlightenment (the rupture in physics, the world war with its affront to rational political deliberation), Eliot seems to want to move forward by turning backward toward a combination ancient and Christian religion.
* Or perhaps he is proposing (think back to "Tradition and the Individual Talent") a science of art? I've been reading a book called Homo Aestheticus (translated: man, the aesthetic animal) that begins with a quote that seems relevant:
"A science of art is therefore a far more urgent necessity in our own days than in times in which art as art sufficed by itself alone to give complete satisfaction."--G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art
Religion, or art, or both, may provide a way out of the waste land. But Eliot's poem offers no guarantees.
Eliot cont'd (2/26, 2/28). Here is a bare outline of "The Waste Land," based largely on the notes that you have in B. C. Southam's Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. This reading should not substitute for your own, but it might help.
"The Waste Land" is symbolic of the whole of western culture. The images are fragmentary, the logic associative--it is a highly suggestive poem. No voice intervenes to tell us where we are; there are only the recurring thematic developments assembled in the form of a collage to achieve a total effect. The works alluded to are in many cases great works of western literary culture--thus in one sense Eliot is demonstrating the way in which the whole culture has suddenly failed to cohere or make sense to itself. But often the allusions are to obscure works (works that would have been obscure even to contemporary audiences). Eliot may have done this as a way of reflecting the sense that the world is so complex that no one can suppose that any one body of readers will share the same cultural knowledge. Possibly the voice(s) of the poem is using deliberately obscure references a way of emphasizing each reader's isolation from the other.
I. The Burial of the Dead
Why is April the cruellest month? In part this notion probably has to do with pagan fertility rites, the idea that nothing could be assured about the future until all the proper rituals were performed to bring on the spring. Thus, there would be some sense of trepidation until the spring had really arrived. Another reading is that the man who speaks this part of the poem is perhaps conscious of just how powerless or impotent he is, in this season of spring. Through snatches, we see just how impotent, barren, infertile the world is. The literal description of the waste land reveals that modern man has nothing left to worship. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
Part I is kind of an overture (if we want to think in musical terms, as Eliot seems to want us to do) in which the themes are laid down. (Including the idea of the brown fog over London. These days when I think about the poem I think about disembodied voices arising out of this brown fog.) The fortune-teller, Madame Sosostris, lays out these themes. But she misses one: she does not see the "hanged man," the sacrificed god, Christ. She does see modern Europeans "walking around in a ring," though. The story of the fisher king, and the story of the quest for the holy grail (see Southam's notes), are both relevant from this point on.
II. A Game of Chess
This passage begins and ends with Shakespeare. The woman in the chair like a "burnished throne" is Cleopatra . . . and at the end, the woman closing up the pub echoes a scene from Hamlet in which Ophelia has descended to madness and suicide, "Good night, ladies . . . ." In between, the focus is on the way in which romantic love has descended to an intricate game.
The "sylvan scene" of the Cleopatra-like segment abruptly shifts to the story of Philomel, who was raped ("so rudely forced") by a "barbarous king." This allusion is to one of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a classical story about a king named Tereus who raped his sister-in-law and then cut out her tongue to keep her from talking. She was eventually turned into a nightinagle, thus escaping his punishment. But in Eliot's poem, even the pleasant "nightingale" ending is debased: "`Jug Jug' to dirty ears."
Next the scene jumps to a contemporary couple, the woman with a case of "bad nerves." Again, sterility seems to be the name of this "game." They are waiting, but for what?
Then to the pub scene. Another degenerated conception of love. And perhaps a degenerate form of religion too? the phrase "hurry up please it's time," intended merely to get customers out of the store, is repeated like a liturgy.
III. The Fire Sermon
In Buddhist practice, the fire sermon is preached against "lust, anger, envy, and the other passions that consume men" (Southam). More broadly, fire is an ambiguous symbol because it can symbolize either a cleansing and purging or destruction. The nymphs of old are departed; nobody believes in them any more. The Thames is not the same as it was when Spenser wrote "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song."
In the pastiche of images leading up to a return to the Unreal City (which is London and all other great cities of Europe) there's another reference to the rape of Philomel, very abbreviated.
Then Tiresias appears, at the "violet hour." (Note: "Prufrock" also takes place at the cocktail hour--a lot of Eliot's poems do. There's something about that transitional state, from day to night, from work day to personal life, that he wants to explore.) Tiresias, the blind prophet who has been both male and female (see Southam), tells a story of yet more devalued sexual relations, the typist's liaison. Note Eliot's poetic technique in this passage. To echo the mechanical way in which this scene unfolds, he uses very regular iambic pentameter--an unusual move for such an irregular poem.
Then there's another shift back to fragmentary writing, to scenes that stand in contrast to Elizabethan times (Elizabeth and Leicester are Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite suitor, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester). Within the fragments of the ending there's another echo of the typist. And then the one word, "burning," standing all alone on the page.
IV. Death by Water
This section tells of an ancient pagan merchant whose corpse has deteriorated in the sea. The current causing him to rise and fall implies possible regeneration, or hope, for humankind. There is also probably (see Southam) some allusion to Christian baptism, which is a symbolic "death" followed by rebirth.
V. What the Thunder Said
Thunder promises rain, regeneration. Two specific symbols suggest Christian renewal: the allusion to Christ's appearance to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the scene of the cock crowing, which can be connected to the story Christ foretold about Peter's betrayal. More broadly (remember "The Dreaming of the Bones"), the cock is a symbol of the coming of morning, thus of hope.
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Perhaps at the end we can find some order emerging out of the chaos. But that end is not the end, after all: it breaks down one more time ("Hieronymo's mad againe") before concluding. But then in another twist of the paradox, it does conclude with a combination prayer and blessing.
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) (3/4, 3/6). For a thumbnail sketch of Ford's career, see the biographical note at the back of your volume of The Good Soldier. Although not a well-known figure in British modernism, Ford was a fellow-traveller with such writers as Eliot and more especially Joseph Conrad, with whom he collaborated on some works. Ford spent much of his career in Europe, editing a couple of influential modernist journals.
The Good Soldier. This novel is the story of two couples, the English Ashburnhams and the American Dowells, who meet year after year at a German spa and, on the surface, are friends, just as, on the surface, each couple appears to be married happily enough. In reality, the four figures are connected to one another by the most ambivalent passions, sometimes concealed from the others, sometimes concealed from themselves.
The action is complicated by Edward Ashburnham's various extramarital affairs, especially an unrealized one with the daughter of his wife's best friend, Nancy Rufford. Florence Dowell, wife of the narrator John Dowell, was Edward's mistress at the time he fell for Nancy; when she learns of his love for her, in a fit of jealousy and self-hatred (aggravated perhaps by the realization that her husband finally knows about a premarital liaison of hers), she commits suicide. Edward kills himself because the alternative--to seduce Nancy--is unthinkable, given the kind of man he is (a "good soldier" committed to a formal sense of honor and duty); and Nancy goes mad.
John Dowell presents these complications by unfolding the story not in chronological order, but in the order that his understanding (such as it is) of the events and motives and characters dictates. Dowell's narration seems to be a burrowing into this tangle of relationships, a search for truth. Much of his narrative seems to be involved with searches for justifications of the behavior of all the characters, including himself.
But, as U.Va.'s own Michael Levenson points out (see his chapter on The Good Soldier in Modernism and the Fate of Individuality), the search for justification is in itself a nineteenth-century rationalist approach that for the modernists no longer works. To explain Leonora Ashburnham's outburst at the scene of Luther's Protest by pointing out that she's Irish Catholic not only misses the point, it obscures the point of what is really happening there.
What is happening there? Edward Ashburnham's passions are once again getting the better of him. Passion would seem to be the chaotic underside of empiricist justification, but ultimately even Edward's passions seem to obey a logic of their own, as Levenson notes.
When what can we say about John Dowell? Is he, as Levenson proposes, beyond the logic of rational justification and beyond the logic of passion? Is he an illustration of Pater's radical (meaning here "root") notion of subjectivity, to such an extent that he becomes a completely blank slate? Is he, as Levenson says, "suffering from Impressionism"?
How is Dowell's relationship with Asheburnham comparable to that of Conrad's Marlow to Kurtz (Heart of Darkness or Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway to Gatsby (The Great Gatsby)? That is a good line of inquiry for the lit trends group and perhaps others.
In class, we noted the intricate formalism of the novel--consult your own notes, because I can't draw all those boxes here! What's the significance of all that form against all the formlessness of the novel's content? In part, I think we're faced with a typically modernist trope here: Dowell can't really order his life, but he can make something ordered out of it through the act of writing. Notice how this very passive narrator becomes finally very actively involved in his writing (remember the moment where he comments on how hard it is "to keep all these people going"!). In the end, the question becomes, has he successfully shored up these fragments against his ruin (Eliot), or is the novel, as Dowell says about Nancy, "a picture without a meaning" (276)?
The idea that aesthetic form can serve as a kind of hedge against the "drift" of subconscious desire was something that Ford shared with other modernists (including James Joyce and Ezra Pound). We can engage in some psychological criticism of The Good Soldier, as perhaps some members of our science group might want to do, although its stereotyping of gender roles might well be questioned by the gender group.
Engaging in psychological analysis, critic Peter Nicholls writes, "Dowell's narrative provides a striking example of desire as identification. Dowell's ignorance of Ashburnham's affair with his wife Florence is so extreme as to hint at collusion. Ashburnham usurps his friend's position quite blatantly, but instead of reacting in a spirit of antagonism and rivalry, Dowell finds himself accepting Leonora's 'look of a mother to her son, of a sister to her brother . . . she looked at me as if I were an invalid.' It is not coincidental that family relations should be called upon to defuse aggression here, for only the family can sustain this residually feudal order (Ashburnham has been 'the good landlord and father of his people'). The myth of the family is, in short, the bedrock of the 'sentimentalism' of an order doomed do siappear, an order in which masculine desire produces not open rivalry but envy. Ford's sympathies lie clearly enough with this order, but at the same time the novel cannot help exposing Ashburnham's moral 'innocence' as a sort of socialized infantilism--Leonara 'was even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable--as if they had been children'--and the regular association of Dowell with figures of weakness prepares us for that final moment of emotional identification which registers the full absurdity of imitative desire: thinking of Ashburnham, Dowell concludes that 'I love him because he was just myself. . . . I am just as much a sentimentalist as he.'
"Ford, no doubt, hoped that this remarkable moment of forgiveness might give substance to the 'sentimental' world of good soldiers, but Dowell's passivity signals modernity's collapse into passive imitation. When Dowell tells us on the final page of the novel that Ashburnham was 'to the last, a sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent poems and novels,' Ford has given the game away: the pathos of identification which the novel cannot bring itself to disavow is the reflext of large-scale cultural enervation."
Which of our groups is left? Religion. We have specific religious identifications (Irish Catholic, European Catholic, Anglican, American Quaker) all failing to explain people's motivations, but what about any deeper sense of spiritual connectedness? As Dowell would no doubt say, "I don't know . . ."
The lack of a spiritual or moral center to the novel may very well be related to its time period, just prior to World War I. By 1913, when Ford started writing the novel, everyone pretty much knew that a war with Germany was inevitable. There may be some hints of this in something Dowell says:
"You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed."
And there is one more subtle but powerful connection: that date 4 August, which keeps coming up again and again. The last significant 4 August in the novel is 1913. Although Ford began writing the novel in 1913, the book was not published (for the first time) till 1915. In 1914, on precisely the 4th of August, Britain declared war on Germany: World War I began.
That is where our study takes us next.