Photo: Corbis
T.S. Eliot, ca. 1925-1935
BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867) is a definite cartographer of The Waste Land: in 1930, T.S. Eliot acknowledged his use of Baudelaire’s guidebook to “the sordid life of a great metropolis.” Indeed, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal is given two explicit nods in Eliot’s notes to the poem, but it never hurts to look further afield. So I report in passing that Baudelaire’s poem, “Le Vampire,” perfectly anticipates Eliot’s own concerns with “the undead” London commuters. More importantly, in Baudelaire’s “The Taste for Nothingness,” we are informed that Spring, formerly “adorable,” has lost its pleasing fragrance! This is almost a literal anticipation of Eliot’s opening lines in The Waste Land. In the conclusion of the 1861 edition, Baudelaire informs Death, our Captain, that “this country bores us” and that it’s time to set sail. This is not only pertinent for the epigram that serves as a preface to Eliot’s poem, but indeed is a theme in all its sections from “The Burial of the Dead” onwards. Perhaps of even greater interest is Baudelaire’s reputation as “the painter of modern life.” In an essay of that title (1863), Baudelaire emphasizes “le transit-
of the poem, Eliot appends the following masterpiece of legerdemain: “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.” This deception is the theme of Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige, also recently turned into a film. As the diary of Priest’s magician explains, the major moment in any conjuring trick is the misdirection of the audience; while the illusionist is directing your gaze in one direction, the real action is taking place elsewhere on the stage. Having been distracted, you are made to search “in the wrong direction.” Eliot’s note to line 68 suggests that he is once again reporting a sound he has recorded in passing, and glued into the scrapbook that is his poem. Nothing unusual there, we are supposed to think. And my interpretation of this stanza in terms of zombie-like commuters is fully warranted by the attributed quotation to Dante’s Inferno at line 63, and the wholly unattributed reference to Bram Stoker’s Dracula at line 381, which is also “lifted” directly from the novel. But now let’s put all this “audience misdirection” aside: an attentive reader
may catch another shape emerging here from the shadows. Think of the Mediterranean world, and more specifically of the Levant and the sacred places of the Holy Land. Here the days are more uniform than they are in our more northern latitudes, nothing like our seasonal extremes, and so traditionally the day was divided into twelve day-light hours. Consequently, the 3rd hour would be our 9am, the 6th hour our Noonday, and so on. If one has this Biblical information rattling around in one’s head —and that is exactly how Eliot’s allusions all work: they are scraps of information of things we vaguely remember—then our hypothetical attentive reader will recall that Christ was crucified at the sixth hour, and at the ninth hour “yielded up the ghost.” This is why I admire this poem so much: in the midst of the scene of the most profane human activity, there is inserted a reference to the greatest spiritual reality… but it is only for those who can see past this literary genius’ masterpiece of misdirection, that is to say, for those able to feel their way past the notes and into the heart of Eliot’s monumental The Waste Land. ∂
oire, le fugitif, le contingent,” and defines modernity as “the passing, fleeting beauty of present-day life.” From suggestions such as these, perhaps, one of our former FYP lecturers on The Waste Land (Stephen Brooke) summarized Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as “the experience of life lived in fragments.”
epic “Odyssey” the governing narrative technique of his own sprawling novel. Eliot has exploited Joyce’s archetype in two ways: first, by choosing the epic quest for the Holy Grail as his shaping narrative. The poem makes the quest for the redemptive power of that sacred vessel the stabilizing backbone of Eliot’s bleak vision of urban alienation and decay: the river Thames has become a repository of stinking, floating rubbish, and London Bridge is “falling down.” But secondly, Eliot is equally a master with Joyce in collapsing the monumental with the ordinary, the heroic with the banal, the sublime with the ridiculous (even with the vulgar and lewd); the novelist brings the epic journey of Odysseus to the urban meanderings of Dublin’s Leopold Bloom. Eliot, for his part, makes the quest for Christ’s healing chalice, the sacred relic in the keeping of the Fisher King, the constitutive ground for his enervating daily commute to his London office. This is almost enough to make us believe that Eliot’s morning passage “down King William Street” has as its journey’s goal a sacred encounter, in the basement vault of Lloyd’s Bank, with the legendary Fisher King.
JAMES JOYCE is the other literary giant, whose influence upon Eliot in the composition of The Waste Land is explicitly acknowledged. After the Paris publication of Joyce’s notorious Ulysses in 1922 (the very same year as the first publication of Eliot’s poem), Eliot gave this account of Joyce’s “mythic method”: Joyce’s novel, we are told in 1923, had manipulated “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.” By this means, the author had a way of “controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Remember how Joyce himself calls the tale of “brave” Ulysses, “the most beautiful, all-embracing theme” in the whole history of our literature, and makes that hero’s
TIDINGS | SUMMER 2007
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