The Waste Land: Ur-Text of Deconstruction Author(s): Ruth Nevo Source: New Literary History, Vol. 13, No.

3, Theory: Parodies, Puzzles, Paradigms (Spring, 1982), pp. 453-461 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468792 . Accessed: 25/11/2013 10:32
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The Waste Land: Ur-Text of Deconstruction

Ruth Nevo
to being a deconstructionist in any sense which would imply membership in that august company, so far as it is a company. I simply count myself fortunate in having younger colleagues, friends, and students willing to keep me up to date and initiate me into the perceptions and perspectives of a movement in criticism exciting enough to have discombobulated my own entrenchedly old-fashioned New Critical habits of mind. I believe it to be, as it has developed over the last ten or fifteen years, the most fruitful, stimulating, and revivifying of the intellectual shifts so constantly taking place around us. Voices (not necessarily the implied author's, mind you-that eminent personage has been dethronedbut real voices) are once again to be heard in literature, which methodological ossification had begun to turn into magnificent museum pieces. And not only is it humane and humanizing in this way but also democratic and emancipatory. What Robert Crosman has called "imperial truth"1-the monistic, single, all-encompassing, unified meaning supposed to reside in the articulated work of art, with its controlled and interlocking system of significant devices-has given way before what can only be called a declaration of independence. It is, among other things, a Reader's Rights Movement which has restored to the reader as obedient subject an exhilarating freedom of movement. What got discombobulated? The autotelic work of literature, its pristine immanence carefully surrounded by the heresies and the fallacies (affective, intentional, paraphrastic) which guarded the portals of its splendid isolation. Once it gave good value, that doctrine, that methodology. To one who, like myself, of all moving things in literature finds intelligible form the most moving, it supplied a working lifetime of beauties and insights. But since self-consuming artifacts, strange loops, infinite regresses, gaps, voids, and anxieties of influence have come into our lives, the critic's occupation has become at once more hazardous and more inspiriting than when we were the officially delegated tourist guides to a carefully fenced-off nature reserve of canonical and exemplary works. One of those canonical and exemplary works has been, for sixty
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years now, The WasteLand. It presents us with, appropriately enough in a field thick with them, our first paradox, or strange loop, in time. T. S. Eliot, one of the fathers of the New Critical sensibility, with its bias toward the objective, the unsentimental, the dispassionate, the rational, the technical, knitted into or mapped somehow onto a Romantic, organicist, intuitionist aesthetic-a knitting and a mapping which were to flutter the critical dovecotes for three generations-T.S. Eliot was also the founding father of New Criticism's devourer. We are told that such family cannibalism is literary criticism in a nutshell. Be that as it may, it is my thesis at present that The Waste Land, that seminal modernist poem of 1922, can now be read as a postmodernist poem of 1982: as a deconstructionist Ur-text, even as a Deconstructionist Manifesto. It was paradoxical enough then that radical modernism found its spokesman in the most conservative of converts to a most conservative and hierarchical church. History has its revenges, and if we speak of the irony of family romance, it is worth noticing that the chief deconstructionist critics ignore T. S. Eliot with a pointed contempt which amounts to a concerted effort to discanonize him. Just as, indeed, of all the authors quoted or alluded to in The Waste Land, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson, his own true precursors, do not (overtly) appear at all. The Waste Land exploded upon the world with an effect of total incomprehension. Yeats said it gave the impression of a man "helpless before the contents of his own mind." Leavis said, "It would be difficult to imagine a more complete projection of awareness, but ... there are ways in which it is possible to be too conscious-and conscious of too much-that is the plight."2 In the heyday of New Criticism it was customary to attempt to unify The WasteLand. Cleanth Brooks himself took the lead with one of the most distinguished and valuable essays of this kind. "Most of its critics," he says, "misconceive entirely the theme and the structure of the poem. There has been little or no attempt to deal with it as a unified whole." He thereupon marshals the whole battery of New Critical exegesis to show that the thematic "contrast between two kinds of life and two kinds of death," the parallel symbolism of fertility cults and resurrection, and the juxtapositional structure which ironically reveals the dissimilarity in surface similarities and the fundamental similarity in apparent dissimilarities all work toward the buttressing of a masked and indirect but unequivocal statement of Christian belief.3 It is my objective in this paper to show that, on the contrary, disunification, or desedimentation, or dissemination (to use Derridean terminology) is the raison d'etre of the poem; that in it the strategies of self-consumption, mise en abyme, and influence anxiety can be in-

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spected at large; and that if one wanted a concise account of it, one could not do better than to quote Derrida himself on his own practice: it exhibits throughout "a certain strategic arrangement, which, within the field and its own powers, turn[s] against itself its own stratagems, produc[ing] a force of dislocation which spreads itself through the whole system, splitting it in all directions and delimiting it through and through."4 Let us begin with deconstructive strategies of the simpler kind: in The Waste Land the fundamental categories of literary discourse are dismantled or simply abandoned. There is no narrative, there is no time, though there are "withered stumps of time," and no place-or rather there is no single time or place but a constant, bewildering shifting and disarray of times and places; there is no unifying central character either speaking or spoken about, no protagonist or antagonist, no drama, no epic, no lyric, though there are moments suggestive of all these generic constellations. As is well known, Eliot's note announces that Tiresias, "although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem." But just as all the women melt into each other, and all the sailors and merchants, so Tiresias, the prophet of Thebes, melts into a number of prophetic or quasi-prophetic figures: the Cumean sibyl, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Madame Sosostris. And if what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem, there is no reason why the substance is not also what the Cumean sibyl sees as she contemplates those grains of sand in her hand, which include Tiresias and Ezekiel and Isaiah (or vice versa) and Madame Sosostris, and hence what she sees in her tarot pack, or what Eliot sees, who, conventionally received, is the overseer of all these seers. Beyond this miseen abymeof seers, or ventriloquism of voices, there is no one point of view, no single style, idiom, register, or recurrent and therefore linking linguistic device which could define a subject, in the sense of a dominant speaking or projecting persona. The "poet's mind" for which we are accustomed to seek is indeterminately catalyzer and/or catalyzed. Nor, similarly, can we differentiate a subject in the sense of an overall subject matter, or argument, or myth, or theme for the poem to be unequivocally about or to embody. I say nothing of the absence of obvious conventional poetic features such as meter, rhyme, stanza, or any regularity or recurrence or set of symmetries which could constitute formal pattern in any classical sense at all. It is totally, radically nonintegrative and antidiscursive, its parts connected by neither causes, effects, parallelism, nor antithesis. It is a cinematographic melange or montage of glimpses, gestures, images,

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echoes, voices, phrases, memories, fragments of speech, song, quotation, appearances, and disappearances. It consists of a plethora of signifiers in complete discomplementarity with any set or sequence of recognizably related signifieds in a represented world. It is an apogee of fragmentation and discontinuity, referring, if at all, only to itself. But this self that it is is constituted by what it is not, its presence is made up of its absences, its gaps and ellipses are the fountainheads of its significance, its disorder its order. If we compare it to the other early stream-of-consciousness poems-Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, even Preludes and Gerontion-we see at once the radicalization of the irrational and the incoherent which has taken place. There there are personae and stories to be descried. There are figure and ground. Here none. Nor do its symbols function as foci. They refuse to symbolize. They explode and proliferate. They turn themselves inside out, diffuse their meanings, and collapse back again into disarticulated images. Those are pearls that were his eyes, but is this a life image or a death image? Is water, or the sea, death or life? Is fire a lust of the flesh or the purity of the spirit? City, Garden, Desert, River-the great symbolic topoi-are all Janus-faced, multivalent, ambiguous. City, the "city," the unreal city, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London, "cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air." The Hyacinth garden is Adonis's garden, is the sylvan scene, is "the heart of light, the silence." In the desert of broken images, stony rubbish, "dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit," there is shadow under the red rock, your shadow in the morning, your shadow at evening. The Thames, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Euphrates-are they one river or many? Thick with accretions and supplements, are they opaque with the opacity of the concrete, or transparent lamps around a spiritual flame, unified, abstract, conceptual? Or are these possibilities in unceasing dialectical interchange: idea and image, essence and existence, appearance and reality? And if, wise after the Freudian event, we say, Ah, but there is a language which this mode of symbolic phantasmagoria resembles, the language of the unconscious, with its condensations, substitutions, displacements, and are then challenged to find an interpretative key to this dream, we cannot. Like dreams this text has no beginning or end. It could begin anywhere and end anywhere because it has no inception and no center and no closure. If "Shantih Shantih Shantih" sounds like an end, both in the sense of telos and of cessation, it also and at the same time is only one fragment in the plethora of dissociated fragments-"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"-with which the last section terminates, its first person indissolubly interentangling past and

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present, outside and inside. Extra- or intertextually, this section alludes to the Fisher King, Isaiah, an English nursery rhyme, the story of Arnaut Daniel in The Purgatorio, The Pervigilium Veneris or Ovid's Metamorphoses,de Nerval's "The Disinherited," The Spanish Tragedy, The Upanishads. Intratextually it picks up the themes of fertility/infertility, prophecy, apocalypse, sexuality and homosexuality, spring renewal and its inversion, violation and flight, life-in-death and deathin-life, loss, grief, passion and madness, plays within plays, appearance and reality, and redemption or nonredemption. But which? Does "Shantih Shantih Shantih" bring us, ironically, back to base, to the forgetful snow of "The Burial of the Dead," irremediably unredeemed, or does it not? Does it open to a transcendent world and close a fallen one, a prison in which each, thinking of the key, confirms the prison? Shall these bones live? Or shall they be only picked in whispers by the sea? or rattled by the rat's foot? Shall these bones live, does the poem say, or shall only the corpse in the garden sprout and bloom? Have we a poem at all? An antipoem? It oversteps its own frame: Baudelaire's "You! hypocrite lecture!-mon semblable,-mon frere," like the hand seeming to come right out of the enlistment poster of 1916, transforms author into audience or vice versa, or both into each other's double. But is there an author at all? II migliorfabbro,when you look through the Facsimile, was, it seems, not only the better craftsman but the only craftsman. Is what Ezra Pound omitted part of the poem or not? Part of the "original" poem? Or is the original poem now Pound's? What is "original"? Tradition, speaking in the actual phrases of countless dead European authors, or the individual talent's, Eliot's or Pound's? Author, referent, reader, language, message (to read round Jakobson's model of functions) have all been dislocated or deconstructed, and the result is to foil and confound every attempt to construe a total meaning or to provide a unified or single interpretation out of whole cloth. Have we a whole at all? The poem is divided into parts which are subdivided into parts, for which no rationale of part and whole is evident. One could reallocate the parts at any point with no noticeable consequence to the overall effect, and with no noticeable effect upon the innumerable exegeses which have been attempted. There is, and there is not, a seasonal order suggested. It is adumbrated only to be evaded. The poem begins with spring-a cruelly deconstructed spring to be sure, but undeniably April. In Part III, "The Fire Sermon," "The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf/ Clutch and sink into the wet bank." It is autumn. But there is no hint of a season in II and IV, unless we press for it: the ladies in "A Game of Chess"

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are perhaps, however frustratedly or dispiritedly, in the summer of their lives, and death, by water or otherwise, is homologous with winter. That gives us a deconstructed seasonal cycle, consummated or abrogated by the apocalyptic, trans-temporal fifth part with its thunder speaking out of the whirlwind. But this does not help us to find out what the poem, as opposed to the thunder, says. One could pick up a hint of structure from the quinquepartite division and attempt to construct a five-act dramatic order. A five-act antidrama, of course, since there is no protagonist, no dramatic action, and no outcome. But we can read a predicament of sorts into Part I: loss of faith and hope and vitality, and a follow-through in II with its unhappy and crisscrossed human relations (even a Shakespearean double plot, if you will, with high life and low life counterpointed and contrasted). Part III offers a large number of crises and reversals in love: betrayals, adulteries, seductions, errors, and mistaken identities (Tiresias is confused even about his own). Phlebas suggests a point of nihilistic despair, or possibly the hint of a countermovement toward transcendent remedy, and "What the Thunder Said" is catastrophe as apocalypse. But even as deconstructed drama, The WasteLand offers us no way to determine whether the thrust of its nonoutcome is tragic or comic. Its fifth-act recognition may be either a tragic recollapsing into temporal ruin and chaos or a divinely comic resolution of all previous perplexities through the magic formula: give, sympathize, control, and the peace that passeth understanding. The radical indeterminacy of The Waste Land has provoked a number of recuperative strategies. T. S. Eliot himself was characteristically noncommittal. It was a rhythmical grumble, he said. But he also pointed weightily in the direction of reconstructed myth: The Golden Bough with its slain and risen gods, Jessie Weston's pursuit of the Grail legend in From Ritual to Romance, with its barren Fisher King and its Questing Knight. Moving on from these clues, it has been possible to read The WasteLand as a sermon in disguise (as did Cleanth Brooks), preaching a Christian message in Brahman disguise. A countermove was the attempt to read it as no more than a gift for his Imagist friend, the as yet unachieved long poem in the Imagist mode: a mosaic of and emotional "comobjective correlatives or images-intellectual in none of the instants of time-with stigmata of the discurplexes" sive, abstract, or sentimental against which Pound inveighed in his Credo.5 Internalized versions of these readings make it a latent conversion poem in which the preconversion experience of sex disgust, self-disgust, alienation, sterility, and failure hovers, so to speak, on the brink of transformation or transcendence (Eliot's actual conversion took place, it will be remembered, in 1927), and the poem can be seen

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retrospectively in that event's long shadow; or it is simply the inscribing of a nightmare, a literal dream, death-obsessed, saturated with death imagery in both of its climates-snow death and desert death-and with the grotesque fantasyings and defenses of primary fear. Just as all of Eliot's poetry can be seen as a self-consuming dialectic in which flight from subjectivity (or "personality") becomes a flight into extreme subjectivity, so The Waste Land has been read in similarly polarized ways: as an objectivist panorama of the decadent times, with the Fisher King as tutelary protagonist and Spengler of The Decline of the West as tutelary genius; and on the other hand as a deeply personal elegy, like its precursors, Lycidas, Adonais, and In Memoriam,mourning a friend lost at sea but, unlike them, dismantling itself as elegy and dissimulating its intimate motivations, expressing and not expressing them, on account of the unresolved guilt and anxiety the poet's relations with Jean Verdenal, "mort aux Dardanelles," evidently entailed.6 An irreducible plurality of meaning, of course, is no news to literary critics, and would not in itself justify the title of this paper. If, however, deconstruction has been no more than the valorizing of plurality to a point where no vestige of embarrassment stemming from the rationalist, universalist traditions of thought is left, even that would bring The Waste Land, with its extremist aesthetic of irrationality and the infinite regress of its discontinuities, firmly into the orbit. But I believe there is more to it than this. T. S. Eliot's own "mythical method," which he attributed to Joyce and Yeats as initiators-the manipulation of a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, which made, he said, the modern world possible in art7-is identical twin to Harari's account of Derrida's deconstruction: "The tracing of a path among textual strata in order to stir up and expose forgotten and dormant sediments of meaning."8 And if, according to Derrida, "a text is a text only if it conceals, from the first glance, from the first comer, the law of its composition and the rules of its game," then Eliot's text positively out-Herods Herod. And to make this clear I would like to add a deconstructive footnote to Eliot's famous footnotes. As everyone knows, something was required to fill out the printer's extra pages. What more suitable padding for a Harvard philosophy graduate than a little academic apparatus? Twenty-four years later he himselfjoked about "bogus scholarship." But is that what it is? First of all, it is a parody of academic footnoting. Everything bibliographical recorded in it is undoubtedly true. One can check. But it is so far from being exhaustive or comprehensive that it is, by default, more misleading than leading. Quite a few of the notes record a chance associ-

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ation in the author's memory (for which, of course, we have only his word), as if he were helpfully providing a future Livingston Lowes with material for a Road to Timbuctoo.And the combination of these two modes, the quasi-encyclopedic and the quasi-introspective, puts deconstructively into question the whole matter of sources, origins, traces, parasites and hosts, and the civil liberties of readers. Middleton's WomenbewareWomen is quoted for "A Game of Chess" but not, significantly, the more obviously evoked game of chess between Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, which is massively present through Ariel's ditty, "this music crept by me upon the waters," and "the king my brother's wreck." Hallucinations occurring on Antarctic expeditions will surely be less resonant to most readers than the unseen presence of Christ on the road to Emmaus. Most deadpan of all perhaps is the laconic "A phenomenon which I have often noticed" for "With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine"-the hour, according to Christian hagiography, of the crucifixion; or the treating of a London County Council pamphlet, "The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches," as equivalent in status to a work by Dante, Virgil, or Milton. Is he not throwing into deliberate disarray all the paraphernalia which represent the rational order and hierarchy and mastery of knowledge, of the mind? We are informed of the obviously nonaccidental collocation of Buddha and St. Augustine as the "representatives of eastern and western asceticism," and we have F. H. Bradley brought to gloss a line which is as lucid as the sun, while the truly opaque and mysterious connections and disconnections of the poem are left in fathomless obscurity. Yet at the same time the Notes chart a number of tracings (significant? insignificant?) through the epochs of his imagination, which are, however, no more and no less authoritative than the language of the poem itself. And the question remains open: Are the Notes a part or not a part of The WasteLand? If they are supplementary, what do they supplement? The poem on the page? The poem in the author's or implied author's mind? The poem in any reader's mind? The poem which itself has become a supplement to the whole corpus of European literature that it quotes, and within the drama of which it acts its play? These supplements themselves, as they add, so they displace or replace, just as the Hermit thrush's song of the Notes, unequalled for "purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation," supplements and displaces/replaces the unheard song of the absent bird of the poem, present only by proxy in the imagined sound of the water drops: Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop. Thus the final deconstructive act of The Waste Land deconstructs distinctions between critic and author, "fiction" and "fact," presenta-

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tion and representation, origin and supplement. These are the classic, central deconstructionist themes. Deconstructionists will know better than I what profit they may derive from this Ur-text of their creed. But at least we may all feel freed at last in our readings of a superimposed message, an indoctrination, an obligation to the definitive. "Perhaps," said Yeats, to conclude once again with the words of Eliot's great rival and antagonist, "Perhaps in this new, profound poetry, the symbol itself is contradictory, horror of life, horror of death."9
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NOTES 1 Robert Crosman, "Do Readers Make Meaning?" in The Reader in the Text, ed. Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, 1980), p. 162. 2 F. R. Leavis, New Bearings (London, 1932). 3 Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1939). 4 Jacques Derrida, L'ecritureet la Difference (Paris, 1967), p. 34. In English, Writing and Difference, tr. and introd. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978). 5 W. J. Frank, The Widening Gyre (Princeton, 1963). 6 John Peter, "A New Interpretation of The Waste Land," Essays in Criticism, 2, No. 3 (July 1952). 7 The Dial, 75, No. 5 (1923), p. 483. 8 Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), p. 37. 9 Introduction, The OxfordBook of Modern Verse (New York, 1936), p. xxi.

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