Reading Notes #5 – The Waste Land

Title: The Waste Land

Author: T. S. Eliot

Publisher: Norton

Form: Hardcover/cloth (included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6^th Edition, Volume 2)

Pages: 14 (434 lines)

Date of Publication: 1922

Source: Purchased new

Dates of Reading: January 29, 2013 – February 6, 2013

The List: #17

I decided to give myself a short reading week by tackling a long poem, and though objectively, The Waste Land is not very long, it is certainly dense enough to qualify for my week’s “book,” as there is as much to unpack in its 434 lines as there is in many books of 200 pages or more, and as I write this, I continue to struggle to understand it as a whole work, as its fragmentary nature seems to create rifts with only fraying rope bridges to span them, Indiana Jones-style.

T. S. Eliot simply won’t go away. I read The Hollow Men in high school, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in college, and now in my one-student schoolroom, The Waste Land. Though these poems aren’t even a hundred years old, they seem to have that quality of literature that endures – the words sound both old and new at the same time, the technique both shocking and classical.

At first I didn’t enjoy reading The Waste Land, though I’m almost certain that “enjoyment” was not T. S. Eliot’s primary concern in writing it. I couldn't see myself reading it for any other than purely academic purposes, going slowly, line by line, in the hopes of some kind of, I don’t know, revelation?

I was reminded of something that a colleague once said to me about reading James Joyce’s Ulysses: “It’s the kind of book where, you first have to learn everything else there is to learn, then you can read Ulysses and understand it.” I felt a bit of this helplessness before the opaque mass of The Waste Land. Much of it consists of hopelessly obscure and self-consciously erudite literary references, things like the Upanishads, St. Augustine, Grail lore and the Fisher King, Buddhist texts, and so on. The fact that Eliot himself appended footnotes to the published poem suggests his awareness that he was plumbing some deep waters, and I may be forgiven if I detected a smug self-indulgence on Eliot’s part that seemed to say it would be well worth the reader’s time to try to understand all this stuff.

But in the end, as with The Hollow Men and Prufrock, the words, and thus the greatness, seem inevitable, and I did begin to enjoy the poem altogether, and not just isolated lines, during my second reading. As academic as it is, the poem is not purely cerebral; it is a highly emotional response to the metaphorical wasteland of Eliot’s culture and times, where the soul finds no water, no respite, no nourishment whatsoever. And yet when water comes, it is “death by water,” as if even that singular element which sustains hope is ultimately antithetical to human flourishing. Themes of isolation, death, the feeling of being trapped inside your consciousness – it all spills out even if you’ve never read the Upanishads (which I haven’t) and have no interest in listening to a Wagner opera (which I don’t).

The Waste Land begins with the famous line, “April is the cruelest month,” which, aside from its quotability and coolly nihilistic irony (see its inclusion in The Big Lebowski), doesn’t really mean anything in itself. When you continue on a few lines, an idea begins to cohere:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

(1-4)

I first encountered lilacs in Chicago, where they bloom sometime in the spring, a sort of brightly colored affirmation that winter doesn’t actually last forever in the Windy City. Lilacs have a wondrous and unmistakable scent, a “perfume strong,” as Walt Whitman put it; but as readers of Whitman know, they don’t bloom for very long, and when they die, the little purple flowers turn brown and shriveled. Perhaps Eliot found something cruel about the way spring beckons life to sprout out of the comfort of hiding in the ground, only to bloom briefly and perish in the sun and air.

Like a lot of poetry, The Waste Land can seem terribly contrived, as if Eliot’s just dishing out a slew of images and telling us to make sense out of them. He uses a variety of styles, bits of dialogue, short ditties, scraps of what look to be gibberish and/or bird sounds, several lines in foreign languages. He even manages to insert a perverse sonnet into the poem to describe a banal seduction (what was once perhaps called a “courtship”), in effect subverting Shakespearean love using Shakespeare’s preferred form:

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavors to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defense;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronizing kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

(235-248)

I only seriously considered the problem of contrivance after having read the poem twice and written a few pages about it. One of the great annoyances of bad acting, particularly on the stage, is that you can see the actors “acting.” It’s entirely unnatural and takes me out of the performance.

As I mulled over Eliot’s pruned images and manicured technique, that thought occurred to me, that a reader would see the ink and paper equivalent of “acting.” But for me, at least, the effect is like riding that neatly stitched seam that hides the ragged edge underneath. I knew that some maniacal effort went into the making of this object, and I was perhaps just on the cusp of seeing that effort, when I realized that I was so deep into the finished effect that any considerations of  how it was made became, well, purely academic. Despite its footnotes and literary allusions drawing attention to the places it came from and the places it wants you to go, Eliot’s poem just seems to exist.

The following passage ends with my favorite line from the poem:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you 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.

(19-30)

Ashes and dust, shadows and death. It’s been a somber year for literature. So next week, “something different,” something fun! 

Ode on a Circus Animal

I first encountered the work of David Grene, translator of my copy of Prometheus Bound and co-editor of the University of Chicago Press edition of the Complete Greek Tragedies, when I was in high school. We were assigned to read Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, in the long-lived Grene translation.

I didn’t know it at the time, but one day, I would be a student at the College of the University of Chicago, Grene’s stomping grounds. He was already an emeritus by this time (some fifteen years ago), and as far as I had heard, he spent most of his time on his dairy farm in Ireland, and taught the occasional graduate seminar class when he was in Chicago.

At the beginning of one quarter midway through my college career, I noticed in the time schedule that he was teaching a class, entitled simply, “Poetry.” It was a graduate class, every Friday, for three hours from 6PM to 9PM. I thought, here is a chance to learn from one of the giants of academia, a guy who knows more about Greek tragedy than probably anyone in the world, a guy who probably did his undergraduate work side by side with Euripides. I imagined all the brilliant insights he would teach me about poetry.

So I gave him a call.

On the other end of the line, David Grene sounded like a rusty saw going through tree bark. I knew he was old, but he sounded like someone who had actually sailed with Odysseus or berated Oedipus at the head of a Chorus. It was charming. And confounding.

I asked if I could add his class, despite my lowly undergraduate status. He sounded like he was inviting me to come. Certainly his manner of speaking was encouraging and surprisingly energetic, even if I could barely comprehend the words. And then he said something that perplexed me for the whole week before I attended his class:

“(garble garble) circus animals (grumble grumble)!”

Circus animals. Everything else was static, but those two words came in loud and clear. Circus animals. What on earth was he talking about? Lord forgive me, I thought maybe he was slightly senile. I asked him to repeat himself, and once again, I heard “circus animals,” the words seemingly spat out from a coffee grinder.

“Okay. Thank you very much,” I said.

That Friday, I went to his class. I had never seen a picture of the man, but I don’t think any picture could have adequately encapsulated him.

He was large, not very tall, but he had something of the look of a portly professional wrestler. He wore faded blue overalls, and his shaggy gray hair grew down past his shoulders in a wild profusion of wisps. His eyes smiled behind a clutch of skin and brows.

He was old. I could well believe that this was Very Old McDonald just arrived from his farm in rural Illinois. Sitting in his chair, he didn’t look like he’d be able to stand up without help. I didn’t expect this to be a peripatetic exercise, and it wasn’t.

I didn’t say a word all through the class. I thought any student who spoke would be mercilessly hushed for stealing oxygen away from this man who resembled a revivified Sophocles, brought back for just one evening to sing his mysteries.

I suppose I need not have worried so much. As far as I knew, most of the other students were graduates, but seasoned though they were, they were much in the same position as me. They had come for a curiosity, a revered name in the academy, and once there, they really didn’t know what to say to him without sounding, not stupid, but simply young. I mean, what could anyone say that David Grene hadn’t heard a thousand times before? There were one or two graduate students there who were clearly Grene’s acolytes and/or personal valets, but aside from these lieutenants, everyone else seemed to sit with a mixture of subdued delight and hushed discomfiture.

At the time, as a budding English major with little to recommend me beyond the ability to attend every class, the thought of spending three hours every Friday night in a room with David Grene and about fifteen graduate students, frankly, terrified me. Too ignorant to see past the legend, yet incapable of understanding the man, I left that night, never to return.

I wish I could say that even this one class with Grene was a revelation, but it wasn’t. I had hoped for his words to enlighten me, but I’ve forgotten them. All I remember is the overalls, the hair, the voice like a storm-beaten crag.

That, and the circus animals. It turns out that on the phone, he was informing me of the reading for the week: a poem called “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” by William Butler Yeats. And here I was imagining a man plagued by dementia, a once brilliant professor, now a veritable mummy drooling bits of animal crackers out of his stroke-addled mouth.

And yet, this somehow makes sense when we read the poem itself, wherein Yeats sees himself as “a broken man,” ambling through a literary gallery of the now-departed “circus animals” that were his former glories, bemoaning his lack of a new “theme” in his “old age.” This is one of Yeats’s last poems, published in 1939, and in it, he reflects on three of his previous works, verses steeped in mythology, heroism, and romance. He seems to conclude that however much he loved the fantastical artistic worlds he had created, and however airy and elusive they seem now, they were born out of real emotions that are not lost to him: “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Though I never really knew David Grene, perhaps it is almost as well that I know him through his work, which continues to teach me after his death. His translation of Oedipus the King was (along with Shakespeare’s Othello) one of the treasures of my literary adolescence, and his Prometheus Bound has brought me back into the lavish yet stern bosom of Greek drama. A little way into his Herodotus, it is quickly becoming one of my favorite books. And now, all these years later, I come to Yeats’s poem, and I see why Grene thought it worth reading and teaching. 

I sing thee, Prometheus: fire-bringer, light-bearer, teacher. 

Reading Notes #4: Frankenstein

Title: Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

Publisher: Everyman’s Library

Form: Hardcover/cloth

Pages: 231

Date of Publication: 1818*

Source: Purchased new

Dates of Reading: January 19, 2013 – January 29, 2013

The List: #67

"Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! you may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains – revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict." (Chapter 20)

From antiquity’s Prometheus we go to “the Modern Prometheus,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s subtitle to her scary, sad, somewhat insane novel evokes the creation of man out of clay, the disastrous consequences of overreaching our destiny, the irresistible urge of a creation to become a creator, the frightful power of science and civilization, the curse of the outcast, and much, much more. Larded over this is the Christian analogue, specifically Milton’s Christianity as dreamed up in Paradise Lost, concerning the fall of an angel and the rise of a devil, the fall of man and the rise of civilization; and I think the parallels between Christianity and Greek mythology that I noted in my article on Prometheus Bound are not such a stretch.

Books upon tomes upon folios have been written about Frankenstein, and there seems paltry little I can contribute, in a brief essay anyway, to the unraveling of its horrifying and mysterious layers. The book is also further removed from unadulterated critical analysis by the plethora of film and pop culture adaptations, as society has put its stamp on the story over and over again, in an almost 200-year parade of variations on a theme.

As of this writing, I haven’t carefully watched any movie versions of Frankenstein, but the Halloween-ready, Karloff-cum-Munsters iconography has become pervasive enough for me to realize that the apples have fallen quite far from the tree. The fearsome but silly, wrathful but bumbling Frankenstein of pop culture bears little resemblance to Shelley’s “hideous” monster, who, of course, isn’t actually named “Frankenstein.”

Nomenclature notwithstanding, every child in America knows what a Frankenstein is, so it can be a shock to read Shelley’s founding text and find the monster capable of delivering speeches like the one at the beginning of this article. Eloquent, existential, and sensitive, Shelley’s monster has read Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch; he has observed human kindness, but received only human fear and hatred.

I was further surprised by the monster’s creation story, or rather, the lack thereof. How many times have movies and television shown the creature being brought to life on a stormy night by lightning summoned by a mighty apparatus, and sent surging through this unholy mishmash of humongous body parts? And yet none of that appears in the book. There is certainly the implication of lightning: a scene where a thunderstorm breathes inspiration into our desperate scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and the allusion to noted lightning specialist, Benjamin Franklin, in the name “Frankenstein.” However, it is never explicitly stated that a lightning-channeling apparatus is used to vivify the creation, nor even that any apparatus is involved beyond Frankenstein’s “chemical instruments.” And many people perhaps read into the book by assuming that the monster is created from portions of cadavers, but all we hear about are unidentified “materials.”

Frankenstein himself, as he dictates his story to us, insists that the secret of creation, the method he used to bring the monster to life, will go to the grave with him:

I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be. (Chapter 4)

And furthermore:

Sometimes I endeavored to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation: but on this point he was impenetrable.

“Are you mad, my friend?” said he; “or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a daemoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.” (Walton, In Continuation)

What a tease! Methinks the lady doth protest too much, as Shelley really goes out of her way to justify denying the reader this juicy morsel. But the withholding of such details was not an uncommon technique in early science fiction, where the writers were less concerned about dreaming up the machinations, and much more concerned with the social implications of the nightmare scenario.

And indeed, the monster is basically your worst nightmare. Fearless and highly intelligent, and using all that fearlessness and intelligence to destroy your life. As I read, I imagined the creature as a combination of a nimble sasquatch, the Incredible Hulk, and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, though I would conjure for this description the most terrifying iterations of each of these creatures.

I was perhaps most surprised that there is just so much moral and formal complexity in Frankenstein. Shelley uses multiple narrators, epistolary sections, lengthy passages that read like a travelogue, a smattering of quotes from contemporary writers, including her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a bedrock influence for Mary Shelley.

Often, readers express surprise that Frankenstein was written by an 18-year-old girl. But Mary Shelley was born into great expectations, the daughter of two heralded radicals and intellectuals, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and surrounded all her life by the intellectual and literary elite of Britain, as well as notable luminaries who would visit her family from America and Europe. At the age of sixteen, she married a bona fide poetic genius and scandalous reprobate, Percy Shelley, whose influence she effusively credited, and whom she idolized long after his death.

If I am surprised at her as a person, it is because of what she wrote in her 1831 introduction to a new edition of Frankenstein, thirteen difficult years after her book was first published:

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.

In 1818, when Frankenstein was published, Shelley had already had two children, the first of whom died shortly after birth. She grieved the recent suicide of a half-sister, and certainly endured some guilt when Percy Shelley’s first wife, from whom Mary had essentially stolen him, drowned herself and her unborn child. So to speak of those as “happy days” where “death and grief were but words” perhaps speaks to just how much she suffered afterward – the death of two more children, a near-fatal miscarriage, the death of her husband, the decline of her health.

It is appropriate that Frankenstein is the creation of some mix of joy and sorrow. Duality is at the heart of the story (as it was for Robert Louis Stevenson in his later story of monster and man, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). The monster is born of man, man who harnesses and manipulates nature, but ultimately cannot control it.

Through his literary education, in particular, reading Paradise Lost; through his months spent in hiding, secretly watching the kindness and magnanimity of a poor rural family, and the mere seconds it takes for the family to attack and hate him once he reveals himself, the monster identifies and condemns the hypocritical duality of humanity:

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing. (Chapter 13)

The monster is isolated despite his hunger for companionship, and we watch his anger and self-loathing grow as his repeated attempts at human contact are violently rebuffed:

And what was I? . . . When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? (Chapter 13)

Having received utter rejection when he solicits human compassion, he orders Frankenstein, who owes him at least the chance for happiness, to create for him a female counterpart. Though understandable, this ambition is arrogant, as arrogant as anything his creator pursued, and when this creative ambition is stymied, the enraged creature embraces the other part of his duality – his ability to destroy.

And so the creature’s anguish comes back around onto Frankenstein. When the monster ensnares him, framing him for the murder of his best friend, Frankenstein is made to understand what it feels like to be shunned and hated by all. To feel what his creation feels. And though it seems that his isolation and punishment is complete with the loss of all his loved ones, whom the monster murders one by one, agonizingly slowly, it is not truly complete until Frankenstein, like his monster before him, finally comes to condemn mankind as savagely as the monster did. He addresses a magistrate, exhorting him to help him hunt down his wretched progeny:

My revenge is of no moment to you; yet, while I allow it to be a vice, I confess that it is the devouring and only passion of my soul. My rage is unspeakable when I reflect that the murderer, whom I have turned loose upon society, still exists. You refuse my just demand: I have but one resource; and I devote myself, either in my life or death, to his destruction. . . . Man! . . . how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! (Chapter 23)

“Man!” In one word, Frankenstein becomes his own creation, who had earlier cried, “Man!” at Frankenstein, enraged at the heartlessness and cruelty of humankind. Up to this point, Frankenstein has been motivated by ambition, and then fear. Now he is a creature of “rage.” Now, finally, Frankenstein becomes one with his monster, outcast from society, hopelessly miserable, just as the monster wished to make him.

So it makes quite a bit of sense that the monster himself has come to be called “Frankenstein.” The monster is like the scientist who made him, alike in sorrow and isolation, both helpless as creatures, both thwarted as creators.

We, too, are both Victor Frankenstein and his monster, both creator and creature. And as Mary Shelley noted in her own life and in the society around her, we are desperately alone, as was the monster, as was the man.

*          *          *

For my first month of this year of reading, I have unintentionally chosen to read four books in a row that are, in some sense, fantasies. I don’t mean “fantasy” in the genre sense (as epitomized first by Tolkien and currently by legions of his spiritual scions), though this is what the word has become. I am not primarily concerned with this generally underappreciated genre, though it is peculiar that in our times, literary esteem is typically lavished upon more realistic fiction, whereas fantasy writers are consoled, if at all, by filthy lucre and the hopes of selling something to Hollywood.

Yet most of humanity’s literary history has been dominated by tales of the impossible, or at least improbable. I suppose two thousand years is enough to transform fantastical stories about Greek gods and demons into “literature,” so perhaps science fiction and fantasy writers of today can hope for similar vindication from generations to come.

Perhaps the most useful label, should one be required, for Frankenstein is “romance.” Reveling in elements of the supernatural, shrouded in mystery, and elaborating its ideas through astonishing visions that have not and probably cannot happen, Frankenstein is the very model of the romance as described by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, writes that the romance allows its author “to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material.” And though there is a risk that the romance “may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, [it] has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”

Frankenstein is also called “Gothic,” and Mary Shelley surely owes a debt to the Gothic literature that was so popular at the time. In turn, her book’s influence, direct or indirect, can be seen in many of her kindred artistic spirits of the 19^th century. The ominous atmosphere of living nightmares is highly reminiscent of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

There are shades of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, as well, in the physical and psychological isolation of Victor Frankenstein, and in his desperate hunt to kill his massive, elusive quarry.

And of course there is Hawthorne, whose many stories of phantasms and shattered ambitions seem to be a direct descendant of Shelley’s vision. Frankenstein was born in a dream, as Shelley describes in her 1831 introduction: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This is the very archetype of many a young man who finds himself the unfortunate protagonist of a Hawthorne story.

Furthermore, this now makes four out of four books that seem deeply invested in exploring death in its various shades of horror. Slaughterhouse-Five is a meditation on death. The action and ideas of the Oresteia are pursued through the consequences of acts of murder. Though no deaths occur in Prometheus Bound, the title character is punished because he has saved the entire human race from death, so mortality should be very much on the mind of the reader.

I must admit, it doesn’t take a long walk or a far throw to touch upon death in literature. What else would an artist explore, but the greatest of mysteries, and the deepest of sorrows? There is also love, I suppose, but love is incidental – a happy, if confusing, accident. Death, on the other hand, is a certainty; thus its centrality in art.

Perhaps one could say, “All art is about love and death, for the two are irrevocably intertwined.” The Romeo and Juliet hypothesis.

*          *          *

A few notes on the edition I read, published by Everyman’s Library. This is a much-storied imprint that currently exists as a series of classic titles presented with a uniform look and style. Frankenstein is a rather lovely volume that includes such niceties as Smyth-sewn bindings, thick, cream-colored paper, dark green buckram covers, a silk ribbon-marker, and even a note describing the history of the typeface. This makes for an enjoyable reading experience, though I perhaps would have traded these luxuries for a moderately extensive set of annotations. More troubling is the omission of Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition, even though this copy uses the 1831 text.

It speaks to the experience that one wants when reading. Do you want a clean, uninterrupted text, where you are free to read without being distracted by outside interpretation? Perhaps a book with fine bindings, pleasant to the touch, like the books that Mary Shelley herself might have pulled from her parents’ estimable library? Or do you want as much knowledge as possible – information about the author’s life and influences, critical commentary, supplementary materials like contemporary reviews, and most relevant to me: explanations for every now-obscure reference (without having to dash to the computer every time)?

None of this information would have changed my reading, but it probably would enhance it more than the physical qualities of the volume. There is however, a trade-off – I have read books in the form of pure digital text, with the option of looking up anything and everything online, but I find that the reading experience on a computer or smartphone lacks the intimacy of having all the details I want in one volume, or perhaps one volume and a separate volume of annotations. It increases my respect for the curating process, and really the artistry, that goes into the creation of a book, whether physical or digital.

*          *          *

*I read the 1831 edition. According to Shelley, the changes are “principally those of style. I have changed no portion of the story nor introduced any new ideas or circumstances.” However, commentators note that the changes suggest a growing conservatism on Shelley’s part, particularly with respect to the characterization of Elizabeth Lavenza.