Paradox in Time: Movement and Stasis in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Danielle Faye Tran
Michael Levenson, author of A Genealogy of Modernism, argues that within The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot creates a ‘moment of stasis in order to unify the modernist mind through the creation of a legitimate third term which is neither egoist nor absolutist.’ [i]
For Levenson, Eliot’s poem thus resolves the incoherence of the modernist movement through the creation of a unifying stasis. Before I advance my own argument in regards to Levenson’s statement, I will outline the differences between the egoists and absolutists. In doing so, I will be able to examine whether The Waste Land challenges or concurs with either group. What may seem at first like a digression will thus enable me to consider more accurately whether Eliot’s poem should be seen as an attempt to resolve the oppositions within the modernist movement, or understood as a commentary on the incoherence of social modernity.It is first important to define the terms ‘egoist’ and ‘absolutist’. For this essay, ‘egoist’ will be used in reference to the favouring of movement in terms of temporal progression. This movement concerns both the development of literary and social modernity. The leading ‘egoist’ group in modernism was the Futurists, founded by Filippo Marinetti. The ideas expressed in the Futurist manifesto of 1909 quickly spread across Europe. The Futurists believed that the past was no longer useful in helping with the progression of society, that people were living in futile worship of the past, and argued for a renewal of culture as a form of Italian national revival.[ii] The Futurists went on to influence the Imagists, formed by The Waste Land’s co-editor Ezra Pound. The Imagists, although not (they said) a ‘revolutionary school’[iii] and therefore arguably a timid response to Marinetti’s radical futurist ideas, nevertheless favoured the notion of a re-grounding of poetry and reformation of culture. Although the Imagists did not desire a complete detachment from the past, like the Vorticists, they ‘believed passionately in the artistic value of modern life’[iv] and thus desired to move away from the ‘sacripant past’.[v] The inheritance of such radical views in relation to the re-grounding of poetry is often associated with Eliot’s modernist work The Waste Land because of the poem’s innovative use of poetic form and style, even though it came a decade after the Imagist movement.
However, it would be incorrect to describe The Waste Land as an imagist poem. The goal of the Imagists was to convey a message to the reader without temporal delay. For the reader of The Waste Land, apart from some fragments of the poem, this notion of immediate and almost telepathic understanding of the poem’s inherent meaning is not achieved. Furthermore, in contrast to the Imagists’ desire to move forward from the ‘sacripant past’, The Waste Land expresses a concern with rapid social movement, producing a tension between past and present. A conservative reaction against egoism thus comes into play; this opposing view will be termed ‘absolutist’.
The conservative critic T.E. Hulme was a vigorous supporter of absolutism, desiring a ‘classical revival’ involving a return to rigid social roles and definite literary forms.[vi] Hulme’s strong Christianity caused him to comment further that ‘it is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of [man]’.[vii] In The Criterion, Eliot promulgated political and aesthetic ideas similar to Hulme’s.[viii] In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot encourages a poet to sustain the ‘timeless’ historical past, but later comments that the writer must also be ‘acutely conscious of his place in time’.[ix] Eliot’s contradictory views thus seem to support Levenson’s argument that the poet desires ‘conformity between the old and the new’.[x]
But in The Waste Land, as we shall see, the amalgamation of the past and present creates a social instability. Thus, although the modernist movement overall and The Waste Land in particular both exhibit the notion of temporal contradiction, it would be inaccurate to argue that the poem has any definite intention to resolve the incoherence of its context. Levenson’s belief in the formation of a middle ground could therefore be seen as an act of overcompensation, as Levenson tries to force the poem to be emblematic of the whole modernist movement. In opposition to Levenson, I will argue that The Waste Land is more a commentary on the incoherence of social modernity than an attempt to unify the modernist mind. I shall focus upon the poem’s ongoing contradictions between movement and stasis, which I believe act to create various halts in time. Instances of temporal contradiction are most evident during scenes of arrested memory and stunted growth. Through careful textual analysis of the differing perspectives concerning these halts in time, I will draw attention to a spectrum of views on the stagnation of society in post-war London.
The natural cycle of movement is immediately presented to the reader of The Waste Land through the introduction of spring during the first seven lines of the poem. However, the speaker’s aversion to progression acts to call for the return of winter, creating a halt in time. The feeling of dread which comes with change is also seen in Gerontion, where the speaker comments that ‘the tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours’.[xi] Within both poems the depiction of seasonal change does not awaken any optimistic notions of rebirth or renewal. Rather, reluctance is felt towards the need to modify one’s way of living after many months under the comfort of the ‘forgetful’[xii] snow. At the start of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ the speaker comments that
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers (ll.1-7).
The growth of ‘dull roots’ here disturbs the previous peace of winter when people were kept ‘warm’. The opposition in language between the words ‘winter’ and ‘warm’ emphasises how the winter season was more appreciated as it froze time with its coldness. The halt in time enabled individuals to deflect the thought of having to comprehend the destruction of war and ignore the ongoing social changes occurring in the post-war world. The desire for stasis thus lies in its ability to allow individuals to forget the past and reject the future.
Further oppositions in language can be seen between verbs such as ‘breeding’, ‘mixing’, ‘stirring’ and ‘feeding’ with words such as ‘dead’, ‘dried’ and ‘dull’. These contrasts in lexis can be interpreted to suggest an underlying ‘desire’ for change within the speaker in order to escape the current sterility. The movement of growth beneath the ground is suggestive of the emerging changes in society contemporaneous with the modernist movement. The feeling of growth is emphasised by the pattern of the passage, which employs a series of present participles to mirror the progression of spring. However, these changes are just beginning to fight their way into the world as they mix and stir below ground. The possible incompletion of these changes is suggested through the poet’s choice to end each enjambed line with a verb, causing each line to roll onto the next without any sense of resolution. The notion of stunted growth is further suggested through the depiction of ‘little life’. The active yet disrupting progression of spring thus reaches a lethargic standstill, again creating a halt in time. For the speaker, this halt in time becomes both comforting and restricting as it acts to prevent any chance of social development.
The blossoming flowers of spring are portrayed as if they are corpses rising ‘out of the dead land’. A.D. Moody comments that the depiction of dead flowers allegorically points to the soldiers who now lay beneath the earth after the war, ‘white bodies naked on the low damp ground’ (l.193).[xiii] The portrayal of these soldiers emerging from the ‘dead land’ signifies a return of the past, in turn suggesting a failure within the speaker to detach him or herself from the memory of losing a loved one during the war. The time needed to mourn has thus caused the speaker to find comfort in the halt in time as it allows for a moment to come to terms with the loss he or she has suffered.
In contrast to lines 1-7 where a loathing of progression was initially expressed, the new speaker during lines 71-3 conveys a longing for and anticipation of movement. During a conversation with his friend the speaker asks:
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?
The inauguration of spring is now welcomed and the thought of ‘frost’ is associated with disturbance rather than being viewed as a blanket of blissful forgetfulness. But the plant is still portrayed as a ‘corpse’, and the impossibility of a lifeless entity producing life contradicts the advancement of spring, creating a temporal contradiction. Harriet Davidson comments that the oppositions in vocabulary create a lack of clarity which acts to present a world defined by the absence of a central stabilising force. Without this centre, the world has no order or delimitation among objects, subjects, ideas, emotions, past or present.[xiv] As a result, the lack of social coherence which the speaker complains of has become the characterizing aspect of the waste land, making it increasingly difficult for its inhabitants to break this ongoing stasis. I.A. Richards similarly interprets this section of the poem as ‘a specimen of the rather withered pleasantry in which contemporary culture has culminated and beyond which it finds much difficulty in passing’.[xv] The repeated questioning of the speaker could thus be interpreted as an anxious attempt to hasten the movement of time whether it is towards egoism or absolutism, as what is worse than movement or reversion is the thought of continually being suspended in time. As a result, the speaker finds the temporal contradiction frustratingly unproductive as it prevents him from escaping the absence which defines his social existence.
The critique of social stagnation can also be seen through the poem’s fragmented form and structure, which constantly resists any feeling of progression. Eliot places various episodes and passages after one another without any logical connection. This lack of formal coherence is emphasised by the poem’s disjointed syntax, which also limits the fluidity of reading. The visual format of the poem is also inconsistent, its scattered gaps and at times erratic layout reflect the dislocation and dividedness of society. The constant allusions to myth further prevent the reader’s progression as they are forced to acknowledge Eliot’s referencing of numerous texts, acting to defer meaning. The poem also employs a range of speakers commenting on different events which are neither explicitly connected nor set in a central location. The poem thus moves across a range of settings including that of a pub, a bedroom and the city centre, amongst others. As a result, the reader is forced to comprehend a spectrum of situations, people and social classes which are continually juxtaposed with each other. The form and structure of The Waste Land thus also performs the critique of a fragmented and stagnated society.
For Marie, the notion of movement is connected both to seasonal change and to the cycle of day and night. Suffering from insomnia, Marie states that she ‘read[s] much of the night and go[es] south in the winter’ (l.18). Marie’s choice to migrate each winter highlights her attempt to escape the changes in seasons. In doing so, Marie is forced to live a nomadic lifestyle, causing her to become uprooted and rootless.[xvi] Although Marie’s continual migration can be seen as an act of movement, she does so in an attempt to ignore the progression of time. Her reasons for migrating thus create a temporal contradiction. As a result, Marie’s spatial dislocation parallels her temporal dislocation, causing her to become representative of the modernist self whose notions of time and space are constantly being reconfigured. Her inability to sleep also emphasises her reversal of day and night and lack of a coherent time scale. By not sleeping during the night, Marie is unable to draw a line under each day, causing every day to blend into one. Marie’s insomnia thus causes a temporal contradiction, which in turn causes her to live in a temporal stasis. It can also be noted that Marie’s insomnia is self-inflicted, as it is rooted in her personal desire to escape time. Marie uses her self-created halt in time as a smokescreen in order to separate herself from society where she no longer feels ‘free’ (l.17). But in contrast to some of the other speakers, Marie does not find her halt in time to be in any way comforting. Rather, it seems Marie’s reason for continually remaining in a temporal stasis lies in her belief that it is the easiest and most convenient method for ignoring the changes of modernity which have turned London into a pile of ‘stony rubbish’ (l.20).
T.S. Eliot experienced a personal crisis during 1919-20, with severe depression after the death of his father in January 1919. His declining health caused him to become hospitalised in Lausanne in 1921 where he was advised by his doctor not to write for six months.[xvii] Many times during this period Eliot sensed he was trapped in a bad dream. He confessed to Conrad Aiken that he was living in a ‘dull nightmare’.[xviii] Eliot’s emotional suffering can be seen to be expressed through the memories of the hyacinth girl who ‘was neither living nor dead’ (l.40). His refusal to move forward from his father’s death is thus mirrored by Marie’s rejection of temporal progression.
In an effort to resolve her hatred of progression, Marie returns to a life of memory and reflects upon a past romance:
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.
- Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth
garden.
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence (ll.35-41).
Marie speaks of how her lover had ‘arms full’ of hyacinths. The idea of having ‘arms full’ conveys satisfaction at having gained an abundance of goods. For Marie, the past is a time of gratification and productivity, in contrast to the ‘handful of dust’ (l.30) representing modernity. Marie here employs the absolutist method of ‘looking back’ to the stability of the past as a cure for social evils. Marie’s memory thus suggests how ongoing social changes caused many to feel detached from any traditional culture. As a result, Marie now lives in a state of emptiness, detached from personal experience and feeling alienated from all life.[xix] Marie’s initial experience of contentment is thus followed by a burnt-out aftermath. Her identity can now be compared to ‘a heap of broken images’ (l.22). The nickname of the ‘hyacinth girl’ is the only sign of a youthful personality and identity. But the immediate use of the past tense suggests that she no longer has this nickname, and so currently lacks a recognisable persona. Marie’s dissolution of self thus causes her to revert back to a previous life in an effort to reform her now fragmented self.
However, Marie’s joyful memory is an arrested moment as she suddenly loses her ability to speak. Marie’s loss of speech represents a loss of control over her own body, whilst her loss of sight causes her to become wrapped in darkness. Marie’s moment of blindness is reflective of how many trauma victims are unable to speak, causing their stress to be revealed through symptoms visible on their body: ‘[her] eyes failed’. As she ‘was neither/ Living nor dead’ Marie becomes exiled from earthly realms, reflecting her previous insomniac exile from time. Although Marie is unable to live a life in memory, she still refuses to accept temporal progression. As a result, a halt in time is created in which her identity remains fragmented.
Another contributory factor which causes various halts in time is the continual resurfacing of fragments of history. In ‘A Game of Chess’ one could interpret Philomel’s castrated speech as being representative of a silencing of history. However, Philomel’s continual effort to cry out and make known her story in an ‘inviolable voice’ (l.101) underlines how a buried incident is able to resurface. The breaking through of the past into the present acts to create a lingering of time as chronological progression is detained. Similarly, throughout the poem, speakers are frequently interrupted by memories of the past, causing the poem to be haunted by the voices of history.[xx] The continual resurgence of past voices and events can be argued to point to the ongoing desire to keep a hold of the past.
But the return of Philomel’s voice is incoherent as she cries ‘jug jug jug jug jug jug’ (l.204). Articulate human language has here degenerated into purely expressive iterations of the animal kingdom.[xxi] Marie was also previously unable to express her memory in the hyacinth garden as she suddenly ‘could not/Speak’. Their blighted voices may be comparable to the ‘stuck’ voice of trauma. Nevertheless, although both females find themselves unable to recover their history, they refuse to move forward from their past, creating a halt in time in which language breaks down. Their repeated attempts to communicate their past thus highlight the underlying fear that due to the growing changes in modernity people will soon forget their traditions and cultural history.
Kathleen Nott comments that after the First World War, ‘the world during modernism was chaotic and lacked any common concept of human existence’.[xxii] In The Waste Land, post-war London is similarly portrayed as an ‘unreal city’ (l.66) which threatens to dethrone the self:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet (ll.60-66).
Whilst the movement of a crowd crossing over London Bridge is depicted, no destination is specified. The crowd therefore advances without end, causing a cyclical journey to be portrayed, mirroring Madame Sosostris’ tarot reading of ‘crowds of people, walking round in a ring’ (l.56). The lack of finality which arises out of the contradictory ideas of movement and stasis acts to create another halt in time. Although the repetition of the word ‘flowed’ suggests a feeling of continuation and movement, when placed with the abrupt and definite end of ‘death’, the feeling of temporal stasis is achieved once again as the inhabitants of the ‘unreal city’ are portrayed as existing in a living death. It seems that within The Waste Land any notion of fluidity within the city becomes associated not with progression but with the restless tide of modernity. In this way, the uncertainty of the crowd’s progression also mirrors the instability of the modernist movement itself.
Furthermore, the syllabic drops at the start of the words ‘unreal’, ‘under’ and ‘undone’ [emphasis added] underline the tone of pessimism as a result of the problematic halt in time. Additionally, the description of the ‘brown fog’ could be seen as pathetic fallacy, as the gloomy weather reflects the melancholy of the city’s inhabitants. The vision of the dead world thus objectifies the dead mind. The brown fog and heavy mist also acts to obscure the sight of the travellers, preventing them from journeying forward. It has been noted before that Marie’s sight was also lost as her ‘eyes failed’ suddenly in the hyacinth garden. Throughout the poem, the failure to see clearly is thus often paralleled with a temporal stasis, in which characters lose their sense of direction. All the commuters have ‘fixed [their] eyes before [their] feet’ as they are left wayward and wandering.
Sigmund Freud in ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ argues that as a result of war, death would no longer be denied, as people were forced to confront it.[xxiii] But the inhabitants of the waste land resist having to face the reality of death; the men have indeed ‘fixed [their] eyes before [their] feet’. The idea of people fearing to look straight ahead and face what lies in front of them parallels an earlier fear of the war and having to accept how ‘death had undone so many’. The words ‘so many’ is repeated within the passage and acts to underline not only the number of fatalities during the war, but also the number of mourners who had been affected by the deaths of loved ones. War is therefore portrayed as a temporal disruption, dislocating individuals from their daily routine and causing them to live in a temporal stasis.
The context of war is further emphasised through the continuous invocation of words associated with war such as ‘corpse’ (l.71), ‘bodies’ (l.193) and ‘death’ (l.63), which act to refocus the poem around the subject of war, mirroring the suffering of trauma victims who often felt controlled by a past event which would persistently break through into their conscious life by forcing their minds back to the traumatic incident. Eliot’s choice of language similarly prevents the reader from progressing or moving away from the subject of war as the vocabulary continually reminds the reader of the event in a sharp and frightening manner. In section five of the poem, ‘What the Thunder Said’, the speaker comments:
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying […]
He who was living is now dead (322-328) [emphasis added].
The first few lines of the passage act to recall various key moments which have been described in the poem so far. First, the ‘frosty silence in the gardens’ reverses the reader back to the hyacinth girl’s sudden loss of speech earlier in the poem (ll.38-9). Second, the ‘agony in stony places’ makes an allusion to the ‘stony rubbish’ mentioned previously (l.20). Finally, the ‘shouting and the crying’ arguably points to the rape of Philomel and her cries, which ‘filled all the desert with inviolable voice’ (l.101). After recalling these varied past events, the speaker states that ‘he who was living is now dead’. The recollection of past memories is thus quickly replaced by an emphasis on the melancholy present which is centred round the war and the death of loved ones. The mythical story of Philomel and the distant memory of the hyacinth girl are thus made to seem futile amidst the current decay of Europe. The poem’s repeated focus around the context of war creates a cyclical tone, which acts to point to the various halts in time in which the inhabitants of the waste land are constantly trapped between movement and stasis.
By way of concluding this essay, let me recall the initial reception of the poem. Although The Waste Land was praised by many as an innovative piece of literary modernism, it was also commonly perceived as a ‘distracting’ ‘mad medley’ of poetic linguistics.[xxiv] The latter view comes as a result of the narrative layering of the poem, which prohibits the possibility of discovering an authoritative reading that can be called its ‘meaning’. It is in this way that The Waste Land exhibits the difficulties that are characteristic of modernism. The reader not only has to find coherence from the oppositions in language and contradictions in time, but also take into consideration the poem’s contextual backgrounds, including war and Eliot’s own internal conflict. Earlier in the essay, I also briefly related the temporal contradiction of the poem to the incoherence of the modernist movement.
Surprisingly, Sara Blair argues that:
modernism can be understood as a unified movement promoting a distinct set of concerns, foremost among them a commitment to experimenting with the cultural power of literary traditions and forms.[xxv]
However, as this essay has illustrated, the modernist movement cannot be so hastily summarised. To generalise the movement as Blair does raises more contradictions than it does answers. The egoists and absolutists differed greatly in relation to form and purpose and thus could not easily be said to participate in a ‘unified movement’. Blair’s approach to modernism is reflective of Levenson’s earlier understanding of The Waste Land as a poem which creates a ‘moment of stasis in order to unify the modernist mind through the creation of a legitimate third term which is neither egoist nor absolutist’ [emphasis added]. But as I have highlighted, the feeling of stasis achieved in The Waste Land does not act to unify the sense of division at the centre of the poem. Rather, the egoist desire to move away from the past and the conservative yearning for a return to the classical era created a contradiction which was both formal and temporal within The Waste Land, through Eliot’s employment of oppositions between movement and stasis, timelessness and the pull of context. Furthermore, through Eliot’s disjointed syntax, inconsistent visual format and constant switching between speakers and location, offering the reader no logical connection between verses, the egoist and absolutist positions are unable to be reconciled, as the poem can only represent them within a formally incoherent structure. The differing views concerning these ‘halts in time’ (as I have taken them) range from frustration to melancholy, suggesting a spectrum of opinions regarding the stagnation of society in post-war London. An analysis of these perspectives also reveals how the inhabitants of the waste land suffer broken identities, as they are unable to detach themselves from the ongoing memory of war, causing them to live constantly in a state of trauma.
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Notes
[i] Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 185.
[ii] Filippo Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909’ in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 249-56.
[iii] F.S. Flint, ‘Note on Imagism’ in Poetry (March 1913).
[iv] Preface to ‘Some Imagist Poets’ in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, p. 269.
[v] ‘Vorticism’ from ‘Blast’ in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, p. 291.
[vi] Sara Blair, ‘Modernism and the Politics of Culture’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 160.
[vii] T.E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, p. 179.
[viii] Criterion: A Quarterly Review, 1:2, (January 1923), published by R. Cobden, London, p. 29.
See also: Martin Jay, ‘Modernism and the Speaker of Psychologism’, Modernism-Modernity, 3:2 (1996), p. 93.
[ix] T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, p. 367.
[x] Ibid., p. 368.
[xi] T.S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’ in T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems, ed. John Dawson, Peter Holland and David McKitterick (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), pp. 15-18.
[xii] T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ in T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems, pp. 23-39. Subsequent references are to this edition.
[xiii] A.D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 82.
[xiv] Harriet Davidson, ‘Absence and Density in The Waste Land’ in Critical Essays on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ed. Lois Cuddy and David Hirsh (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), p. 211.
[xv] I.A. Richards, ‘The Poetry of T.S. Eliot’ in Critical Essays on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, p. 71.
[xvi] Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 70.
[xvii] James Miller, T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), p. 34.
[xviii] Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, ed. Stephanie Golden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 55.
[xix] A. D. Moody (ed.), ‘To Fill all the Desert with Inviolable Voice’ in The Waste Land in Different Voices (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), p. 51.
[xx] Crawford, The Savage and the City, p. 131.
[xxi] Stan Smith, Inviolable Voice (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Humanities Press, 1982), p. 14.
[xxii] Kathleen Nott, ‘Ideology and Poetry’ in The Waste Land in Different Voices, p. 203.
[xxiii] Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916), p. 79.
[xxiv] Nancy Gish, The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), p. 9.
[xxv] Blair, ‘Modernism and the Politics of Culture’, p. 166.