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eye was fixed on the contemporary world and there are many places in The
Waste Land where we can note Eliot s reaction to the crises all around.
The fall of the three empires in Central and Eastern Europe the Prussian,
the Austrian, and the Russian are alluded to in several places. The decline of
religion and the arrival of fortune-telling charlatans in its stead are the
subject of satire in Part I. The loss of social cohesion as a result of secularism
and the political arrival of working-class characters like the young man
carbuncular communicate Eliot s sense of his own time. This is perhaps
why, when the poem was first published, it was thought to be a work that
expressed the disillusionment of a generation. The Waste Land certainly does
that, but it does so only in part. The poem is more extreme than mere satire.
It exemplifies a philosophical radicalism that goes to the heart of twentieth-
century thought. In Tradition and the Individual Talent again, Eliot
remarks that, in the essay, the point of view he is struggling to attack is
perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the
soul (SW 56). One can say of this statement that it has often been quoted
but not suYciently well understood. That it comes in the midst of an essay of
literary criticism and theory is the first point to note. One might expect such
a statement to be encountered in a philosophical or theological text. But here
it is in this unexpected context. What does this sense of the soul as not
substantially unified have to do with the creative process and with the works
of art that are its products? It turns out that this is the point where the real
drama of The Waste Land is to be found.
Oddly enough, the uncertain unity of the soul returns us to what lies at the
core of Eliot s thought, the question of language. Eliot s philosophical studies,
with their anthropological leanings, had brought the relationship between
language and reality vividly to mind. How does language convey a sense of
the real when it is patently a system of second-order symbols that impose
abstract patterns and meanings on experience? These patterns and meanings
do not necessarily inhere in reality; they are very likely systemic projections of
the language system itself. The action John throws the ball does not happen
and is not perceived as happening as a rapid concatenation of grammatical
categories. Something primordial occurs to put us in contact with the event.
Works 75
That primordiality cannot be entirely captured in language because language
works via categorical and generic processes and the primordial does not. The
absolute uniqueness and singularity of an event inevitably escapes the reach
of language. Indeed, language acts to simplify the welter of impressions,
experiences, and impingements of the real on consciousness (including the
consciousness of the body). Without that screening process, or process of
ordering sense impressions and experiences, we would be unable to control
or manipulate our fields of living and would perhaps be subject, like the
animals, to the shaping obligations of our nervous system. Unlike, say, cats or
dogs that instinctively turn toward the sun on a warm day, human beings
have the power to negate or resist the compulsions of our nerve endings and
our bodies.
Language in its social uses acts to simplify and arrange. It gives us a
repertoire of devices, vocabularies, and rules in order to regulate the endless
flux or stream of experience. Most social uses of language capture and
control, order and pattern experience and the knowledge that we gain from
it. Only the creative artist, the poet, puts into question the received orderli-
ness of social discourse. Only the poet, working within the limits imposed by
language, manages at the same time to breach those limits. Language for the
poet is both an instrument for the preservation of order and an instrument
for its radical dishevelment. This may sound contradictory, but it is the poet s
task to make the paradox work. We are not to think of these opposing
intentions in the same way that we might think of the contest of two ideas,
which either lead to a higher concept or are resolved in some other way. What
I am describing is by its very nature irresolvable. The positive language of
themes and satire, social and historical descriptions, are opposed not by other
descriptions and explanations but by negation. Unlike the stability of the
social text, wherein diVerence and disruption of meaning is moderated,
the poetic text generates diVerence, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes
slyly. In short, it multiplies variance, ambiguity, and surprise. Disturbance
and disruption of the smooth operation of social languages goes to the heart
of its calling as poetry. One can argue, no doubt, that all texts generate
diVerence as part of the internal character of language as such, but social
texts work to stabilize or diminish the play of diVerence. Poems do not, or at
least not to the same extent. Among other things, they draw attention to the
anxiety of a radically ruptured text and The Waste Land is a highly anxious
text.
The practice of narrative by luminous fragments was, in 1922, a new
approach to the cohesiveness of a text. It both suggested possibly coherent
sequences and, at the same, revealed the cleavages that continually interrupted
76 The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot
the seamless flow of words. The eVect of this procedure is to place all the
fragments in quotation marks so to speak, to hold them at arm s length in a
gesture of critical distancing. The mind of the poet composing takes on
a critical cast in addition to the energies of creative inspiration. The poem,
as a result, is a critical act as well as a creative one. The way in which the
language and form of the poem constantly draw attention to their own status
as communicative processes moves in two directions in The Waste Land.
In the first instance it blocks a reader s easy consumption of the text. The
text is diYcult. It resists the usual procedures of interpretation. Seeming to
lack a semantic center of gravity that can be located in the text, the poem s
references to a familiar external world the seasons, familiar landscapes,
familiar social settings and activities suggest that its unity might lie outside
its boundaries, out there in the world. This might suggest that the poem is
primarily a satire, a way of looking askance at the failures of a moribund
society. The mythological roots of the poem, then, might be interpreted as
the scale of implicit values that all true satires must have in order to show
how badly contemporary society fares in comparison. The vitality of ancient
fertility rites belittles the sterile sexual fumblings of clerk and typist. But let
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