The Waste Land by T. S. Elliot - An analysis of the interaction between form and content

Tipo de documento:Redação

Área de estudo:Filosofia

Documento 1

Introduction In Heidegger's conference entitled as “The Provenance of Art and the Destination of Thought” (1967)1, he addresses the issue of the impossibility of dealing with the problems of the arts in the modern world without bearing its sociohistorical conditions jointly. Adorno’s speech on lyric poetry and society2 deals with the same questions in a similar fashion, however this author devises a definition concerning lyric poetry and its sociohistorical circumstances. In his own words: “The reference to the social must not take one outside the limits of the work of art, but it should in fact take one even deeper inside of it. ” This assertion goes towards the purpose of this essay, which is to confront form of expression and content in a way it become possible to perceive the sociohistorical context transcribed/mimicked inside the formal devices of a poem.

This separation between form and content is rather an analytical one, as Terry Eagleton (2011, p. ​Lyric poetry and society. Telos, v. n. p. ​ 3 ​EAGLETON, Terry. As Walter Benjamin explains in his ​Experience and poverty that the scars left by WWI go beyond the war devastation, they rather go deep inside the very level of human experience. Benjamin asserts that the monstrous development of the technique, which seems to have a huge potential in terms of making money, made appear a whole new kind of poverty. The orthodox marxists philosophers have been pointing out the material poverty for a while, but they almost completely forgot to perceive this new model of poverty which is completely linked to human experience. The same modern technology which seems to develop life brought a warfare state, and the pervasiveness of this technology in everyday life has resulted in the absence of life as it once was, based on community and in the sharing of group values and tradition.

In short, life lost its roots in the collective experience, and it was replaced by modern technology, what had an impact on culture in general, mostly because it turned stead and continuous cultural experience in something shapeless and fragmentary. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. These episodes, however, evoke a prior moment, the precise instant of the destruction, this happens mostly because what is presented to the reader is the consequence of some supposed catastrophic circumstance.

This absence seems to be open to interpretation, and demands a constant return to it as one goes on on reading the poem; the vacancy of the cause of the destruction leads the reader through the poem. The reader seeks to establish a causal relation, one which could possibly provide some sense of objectivity, and fulfil the lack of the cause for the destruction. The very non appearance of one of the terms of this causal relation is seminal to the poem as a whole, because this is a given tool to prospect meaning from “The Waste Land”, in short, this is a kind of absence which can be perceived as meaning making, fragmentary and oxymoronic. The poem begins alluding several times to an imagery of death. Winter and hibernation usually coexist in the same semantic space, which summons the idea of a reality where life is not present completely, and the consequence of it is the freezing of movement, a stillness that is grammatically expressed in the opening sentences.

However, this scarcity of movement may have a closer relation to the historical background that have been pointed out in the introduction to this paper. The lack o movement expressed through this opening lines, summed with this thematic of winter, which implies stillness, may be representative of the post-war feelings towards a civilization dependent of technology. The development of scientific knowledge has brought an unprecedented warfare state to the world, something that have been the cornerstone of the bourgeois era has finally shown its worst face. Starnbergersee and ​Hofgarten are both located in Munich, the first is a lake and the last is a garden. These micro narratives that are all over “The Waste Land” have a purpose, which according to Michael Coely8 is to mock the reader that still have a expectancy for a guidance of some sort.

These narratives do not account for a story, they merely depict the progression of time, and besides that they are associated to a character that do not correspond to the lyric voice. Despite Coely’s view on the micro narratives inside the poem, I strongly believe that they function in a more serious manner, they are not a mere mockery, they tend to enact glimpses of reality finely chosen. In the precise case here analysed, the narrative is depicting a character, Marie, and a place, Munich. As I already said, both take a central role in Eliot’s conceptual decayed pre-war world, and because this is a pre-destruction scenery it can be understood as corresponding to the missing term of that causal relation I mentioned in the beginning of the analyses.

Routledge, 2002. unification of Germany, and so its rise as a country, was something quite recent, from the 1870’s. Then how can Countess Marie be pure German if, almost certainly, her father was born before the unification? And then I must focus on the missing part of the dialogue, that is precisely the very fact that the noble woman has had her nationality confused, since someone thought she was Russian, apparently. What is interesting to address is that how this simple phrase, a personal memory, serves as a trigger to WW I, since Germany is a central piece in the war puzzle. This leap that takes the reader from memory, personal level, to history seems to be an effort to concatenate human societal experience to History, in this way Eliot is using poetry in a tolstoyan sense, since both seems to assert that the very acts of individuals, as such, cause inflexions on History.

The poem summons dead trees, crickets, dry stone and twice it mentions rock. This is quite related to what the title proposes, somehow this precise fragment fulfils certain expectancy towards at could possible be an image of a waste land. It becomes even more relatable to the poem's title when the lyric voice address the reader on the next part. The poem reinforces the previous waste land imagery by asserting to the reader that he, the lyric voice, "will show something different from either\ Your shadow at morning striding behind you\ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;\ I will show you fear in a handful of dust. At a first look, as I said above, it is easy to consider this excerpt a poetic confirmation of one could expect to be the so called devastation of land, but it is mandatory to defy this sudden clarity the poem is showing, especially because the poem itself is affirming that there is something under the "red rock".

​ Earth and reveries of will: An essay on the imagination of matter. Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2002. poem presents the mingle of past and present, by the other side it points out the necessity o death, or a termination. This conflict may have to deal with the lack of mobility that stuck history to its bourgeois era, what leads this analysis to the verge o historiography, because Karl Marx had foreseen a developing history, where revolutions inevitably would brought humankind back to the collectivity. Somehow death is depicted as a needed force, the one which can terminate this era in order to promote history to move. This allegory is in concordance with the whole spectrum of the poem’s cosmoview, since it suggests that, if there is a possible way out of the current crisis, it may have to survey the path outside the tradition by reasoning with the tradition itself.

Somehow this proposal is analogous to the structure of the poem, once it resembles a multi-layered palimpsest, and at the same time it is an ​avant-garde piece of art. It is still important to address the second definition based upon a double negative assertion, I am referring to the person’s condition, which is nor living nor dead. What results in a paradox, because someone who is in this condition is experiencing non-existence, something 11 ​BURKERT, Walter. ​Greek religion.

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