Fragmentary Excess, Copious Dearth: "The Waste Land" as Anti-Narrative Author(s): Clare R.

Kinney Source: The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Fall, 1987), pp. 273-285 Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225191 . Accessed: 24/12/2013 13:09
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Excess,CopiousDearth: Fragmentary
TheWaste Landas Anti-Narrative
ClareR. Kinney
Whilemanyreaders haveattempted and will attemptagainto map out the Land,others considerthis a futile responseto a work "plot" of TheWaste that is "Not a seamlessnarrative, but a set of lyric moments,"'or, alternatively, "an extendedlyric structurein sequence form."2Certainly,the and frustrating of frustrated momentsof poetic poem'sassembly epiphanies, of significant concentration offeringbriefsuggestions designthat nevertheless refuseto propelthe readertowardsany sustainedmomentof resolutionor even appealing.Yetat revelation,make this point of view understandable, Landseducesthe readerinto a searchfor the linear the sametime, TheWaste morelogicaland unifiedthan of conventional plot, for a structure progression betweenfocal points of emotionalintensity.3 simplythe "felt relationship" From Ritual to Romance in the notes Evenif Eliot's citationof JessieWeston's to TheWaste Landhad not suggested that the GrailQuestmythoswasto form of this poetic fiction, the echoesof the "Prothefabulaor the "groundplot" Talesin the opening lines of "The Burial of the logue" to the Canterbury Dead" wouldimmediately inviteus to locatethe workin the contextof goalis veryclose to a quest)and story-telling.4 directed journeying(a pilgrimage In a reviewof Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot would argue that the "mythical method," as opposed to any conventionalnarrative method, was a useful meansof "givinga shapeand significance" to the complexities andcontradicexistence.5 In Ulysses,however, tions of contemporary the Homericsubtext is itself a separate and well-defined The readercan relyon his own narrative. evenif Joyce'swillingness priorknowledgeof what happensin the Odyssey, in Ulyssesnot only to parallelbut also to parodyand invertHomer's narrativemayplacethe significanceof specificallusionsin doubt. The "myth" that forms thefabula of TheWaste Landis considerably less stable;indeed, JessieWeston's primaryachievement may well havebeen less to confirmthe objectiveexistenceof a single originaryfertilitymyth or ritualthan to use the ambiguous evidence of romance narrative, legendand folk customto constructa "definitive" versionthat was actuallya personalfiction.6And when we considerthat Eliot's own acknowledgement of Westonwas madeas part

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factof his text(thenoteswere of a rather arbitrary supplementation-after-the the to need bringthe formatup to a convepublishers' partlygeneratedby nient 64 pages) we are faced with what may be a double displacementof Land authority:the notes that announcethe connectionbetweenTheWaste and the archetypal questto renewthe fertilityof a wasteland maybe viewed and interpretations that as one questionable fiction, the scholarlyredactions have createdthat archetypeas another. Nor is this the only teasing exampleof the self-subverting tendencyof materialthat mightbe expectedto authorizeour pursuitof a linearnarrative in The Waste Land.There is, for example,a threadof allusion linking the drowned Phoenician sailor Phlebas with other avatars of the questerthe FisherKing)by wayof Act I, scene2 of TheTempest. protagonist (including
Madame Sosostris says "Here ... / Is your card the drowned Phoenician

lover Sailor,/ (Thosearepearlsthat werehis eyes.Look!),"andBelladonna's line the same of the who had his fortune recalls told) (anotheraspect "you" from Ariel's song in "A Game of Chess."7 An echo of the speechof Ferdiof the nand that directlyprecedesAriel's song is heardin the ruminations (fishing) questerin "The Fire Sermon"(191-2),and the next line from the same speech, "This music creptby me upon the waters,"is interposedbetween the music of the Typist'sgramophoneand the music of the Thames side pubs(257). Phlebasthe Phoenicianappearsat last in "Deathby Water" and his sea-changeis elegizedthere.Finally,in the last paragraph of "What "I sat upon the shore/ Fishing the Thunder Said,"the FisherKing/quester's with the arid plain behind me" recallsnot only line 191of "The Fire Sermon," but also the subtextfromTheTempest (I, ii, 390-1),"Sittingon a bank, / Weeping againthe Kingmy father'swrack."The fact thatthe webof allusion extends temptthroughall five sectionsof the poemmakesit particularly to The questeris warnedthat releasing ing identifya narrative progression. the healingwaters(the springsof feeling)may also involvehis own dissolution, that if he does not "Feardeath by water"he will indeedbecome the drownedsailor whom the Tarotannouncesto be his alter ego. Amid the the threat boudoirhe recalls neuroticfrustrations of the scenein Belladonna's of corporealtransformation-a sea-changethat suggestsan objectivecorand petrificationin his WasteLand. relativeto the forcesof fragmentation As the questermelts into the FisherKing in "The Fire Sermon"he is now thinking of the "wreck" and dissolutionof all humanity(synechdochally in lines 191-92 the musiche will hearfrom by fatherand brother); represented fearof "Death will againbe the song of humanity's the Typist's gramophone of the Water"-and its associated fear of energies fertility.This fear is by of "Death by Water"as the afterwards made shortly emergence explicitby of the Phlebas a separatesection of the poem reportingthe disintegration aspect of the questerin the oceanic whirlpool. Yet the separatelyric that elegizes Phlebusdoes not seem to be the end to the quest so much as just in the last lines of is reconstituted one possibleend to it; the fisher/quester
"What the Thunder Said" so that he can at least think about setting his lands

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in order; he has movedbackto the shoreand now contemplates the dangerous waterthat mightrefreshthe "aridplain" (423-5).Wemightsuggestthat the from the Tarot'swarningto the sea-deathwas perhapsa purely progression mentaljourney-a journeyconjuredup purelyby his own terrorof action, a "trialby water"to be passedthrough beforeone mayreach but nevertheless even the tentativethresholdstate of "What the ThunderSaid." to just one of the fragmented sub-texts of The Gathering up the references in them this to construct ourselves a narrative Waste we can use Land, way line. But if we recallin more precisedetail the sourceof this groupof allusions, we may be taken aback to realize that the "death by water" and of whichAriel sangin TheTempest was in fact a merefiction metamorphosis whenhe thoughthis fatherdrowned; of death.Ferdinand wasdeceived Ariel's lyric of dissolution was an exquisitelie. These allusions suggest a proxy authoritythat might guide us in piecing togethera plot, but on closer examination,they proveto centerupon a fiction withinthe displacedsource. The temptationto viewthe Phlebaslyricas the poetic orderingand containencounterwith entropy,one whichactuallyinitiatesand mentof a necessary epiphaniesof the final section permitsthe (admittedlyhighly problematic) of the poetic narrativeshould perhapsbe resisted.8 Landis in this fashionalternately The readerof TheWaste and encouraged rebuffedas he tries to constructits plot (or plots). The poem seems to be what RolandBartheswouldcall a "writerly"text, so limitlesslypolysemous createit for himself.9 that the reader can and mustquiteliterally Criticshave pointed out that its epigraphfrom Petroniusmakesthe CumaeanSibyl a presidingdeity of the work and have emphasizedthe "sibylline"natureof haveseemedas difficultto orderand to the poem.'0Certainlyits fragments leaveswhichheld the Sibyl'sprophecies, but they unify as the wind-scattered as theypossessan intermittently arealso sibyllineinasmuch vatictone which, a terribly while neverproviding focal authority, trustworthy ultimatelykeeps the readerfromfeelingwholly freeto "plot" the poem'scourseas he or she pleases. One of the concludinglines of the work reads, "These fragments I have shoredagainst my ruins" (430) but in an earlierdraft of TheWaste Landthe line reads "These fragmentsI have spelt into my ruins.""A spell can be a story as well as a charm,so the suggestionof the final versionthat dispersedintimationsand echoes of horrorand beauty and banality must suffice to shoreup the "ruins" of post-World WarI European culturecould on a suppressed hint of a secret, more unified be said to be superimposed The "spelling" of a visionaryquest to orderchaos is concealed narrative. within the very act of renderingchaos. Evenas TheWaste Landoffers the readerfragmentary, half-buried glimpses of a goal-directed plot, it equally offers a progressthat partakesless of and complication.'2 One does not so muchpass linearitythan of restatement on from a given action or situationas repeatit; the poem offers a sense of of traveling overthe sameterritory it from but examining parallel journeying, different The multiplication of impotentquesters, of sterilerelaperspectives.

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tionships,of incompleteepiphanies,createsan unhappycopia, an excessof Landas "the examplesof dearth. Ezra Pound's descriptionof The Waste is not as hyperbolicas it may longest poem in the English langwidge"'3 seem; the work's very compression,its dense shorthandof allusion which collapsesinto the textworldhistoryand literary history,givesthe poem some of the epic rangeof, for example,Paradise Lost. In fact, more than one kind of "compression" is at work in Eliot's text. of reference Thereis the compression notedby F. R. Leavisthat, in juxtaposof the ing imagesand allusiondrawnfrompast and presentwith prophecies and distillationa createsout of poetic concentration future,paradoxically whichdefiesteleology.14 But TheWaste Land senseof copious"simultaneity," also exhibits a sporadic urge to embracethe more formal compression represented by the containmentof poetic "bound language"that seems to the of supplementary content. challenge continualaccretion (if fragmentary) The authoris alwaysexperimenting with differentmeters,differentkindsof and even differentstanzaic forms, as if searchingfor a verse paragraphs, framework thatwouldpermithim, however to orderhis narrative temporarily, of confusion.'5 Yetno suggestionof a controllingpoetic form is eversustainedfor long. The first two speechesof the threeviolatedThamesdaughters at the end of offer us quatrains "The FireSermon"(292-99),for example, ABAB, rhymed rather irregularin rhythm and with some heavy enjambments,yet still as patterned language.But the thirdspeechbreaksthe sequence recognizable of "formal"stanzas:it is in the formof six irregular lines of whichthe first and fourthand secondand fifth rhyme,whilethe thirdand sixthoffer a rime
riche:

On Margate Sands I canconnect withnothing. Nothing Thebroken of dirtyhands. fingernails My peoplehumble peoplewhoexpect
Nothing. (300-5)

as follows: this might be rewritten Interestingly, On Margate Sands withnothing. I canconnect nothing Thebroken of dirtyhands. fingernails nothing. My peoplehumble peoplewhoexpect to the previousABAB -a "stanza" which offers a closer approximation and the if It is as a is quatrains. repeateddesign purposelysuppressed,'6 of the patterningimpulseis emphasizedby the line break-the frustration Land's disjunction-after "connect":the non-stanzadramatizesTheWaste

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"connections" difficultieswith maintaining withinthe narrative process,and reflectsthe stylistic,syntacticaland semanticdislocationsof the work as a whole. Even the most obviously self-containedsection of the poem, the lyric whichis basicallytwo ABCBquatrains, exhibitsa desire "Death by Water," to breakout of the control of meter and rhyme: a fortnight Phlebas the Phoenician, dead, the cryof gullsandthe deepsea swell Forgot Andthe profitandloss. A current undersea As he roseandfell Picked his bonesin whispers. He passed the stagesof his ageandyouth the whirlpool. Entering Gentile or Jew O you whoturnthe wheelandlook to windward, andtallas you. (312-21) whowasoncehandsome Consider Phlebas, in terms of grammatical Not only is the passagearrangedtypographically ratherthan poetic syntax(the threeseparatesentencestakepriorityoverthe after"fell" half masksthe swell/fellrhyme, linesof verse),but an enjambment while the rush of extrasyllablesin the final line suggestsa burstingof the bonds of meter. (alreadysomewhatirregular) As a last example,let us look at the Typistepisode(215-56).In the original draftof "The Fire Sermon"this was entirelyin rhymedquatrains,but here the stanzashavebeen piled togetherin continuousverse,and the quatrains broken themselves aresometimes apartby cuts.Lines218-21 (I Tiresias though
blind .
. .

closedone. AnotherABAB ABAB,althoughit is not a syntactically rhyming quatrainappearsat 225-28;this one does end with a full stop, but the next threelines breakthe patternagain. A sequenceof quatrains is only achieved with the arrival of "the youngman carbuncular" whoseappearance initiates a closedABCB"stanza";immediately afterwards therearethreemoreclosed quatrainsrhymingABAB. W. M. Gibson has suggestedthat these last actually form the first twelvelines of a "sonnet" that finishes at line 247.'7 Weshouldnote, however, that for all the regularity of the quatrains, the last two lines of that sonnet are unrhymed and essentiallyopen-ended: the clerk one finalpatronizing Bestows kiss,
And gropeshis way, finding the stairsunlit .... (247-8)18

the sailor home from the sea") offer us our first apparent quatrain

Gibson also arguesthat this "sonnet" is immediatelyfollowedby another one (lines249-62).Certainly lines249-56offerus a closedoctave,but although the nextsix lines(whosecontent,in anycase,movesus fromthe Typist's bed-sit to the Thamesdocks)end withthe rhymemandoline/within, thereis no sense
of a closed lyric whole here; the content overflows into line 263 and the verse

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does not conclude until line 265. paragraph Landexhibits Denis Donoghueis right,I think, to maintainthat TheWaste The poem but "a passion for form, largelyunfulfilled.""9 not formlessness differentmethodsof orderingand containingits is constantlyentertaining language,adoptingtemplatesas diverseas the blank verseof Renaissance of varying of popularsong, quatrains drama,the rhythms precisionand sucof the and even of the cinctness, stylizedperiods glimpses King JamesVersion. At the sametime, as soon as any one form is takenup it is quite likely at the momentwhenit shouldattainsome eitherto be explodedor subverted in favorof looseror morefragmenkindof closure, or to be suddenly dropped tary verse.Wesee the latterphenomenonin "Whatthe ThunderSaid": the singlesentencebeginning"A womandrewherlong blackhairout tight" and a quiteelaborately visionsconstitutes nightmare offeringa seriesof surrealistic embedverseparagraph structured ABABCDDE,withan additional rhyming bells/wellsin its last two lines (377-84).The passageis imded cross-rhyme followed, however, by the muchlooserlines-in termsbothof poetic mediately structure and of syntax-of the nextverseparagraph (385-94).And yet there into "free"(or freer)verse,whereform is littleevidencethat suchtransitions or imposinga particularorderupon conis not exertingits own pressures tent, actuallyliberatethe more linear narrative impulsesof the poem. The of the two I havecited does bringreaderand second and looser paragraph to the "GrailChapel,"but only to presentthemwith emptiness, protagonist And at the close a lacunawherethereshould be illuminationor revelation. of "The FireSermon,"wherethe formof the Thamesnymphs'songs begins we are left with merescrapsof languageculminatingin the to disintegrate, that a laconicindexto a suspended final isolatedword"burning," purgation seems to lead nowhere(306-11). Landtowardsformallycontainingand conThe impulsewithin TheWaste of loss and drouth is undercut,then, by a kind of trolling sub-narratives of supplementaspillageor overflowof both formand content,a movement not so much turns out to represent tion that repeatedlyand paradoxically of a narrative as a restatement dearth,unhappy stasis,or absence. progression on the largescale when the This reactionmanifestsitself most dramatically lyricaldescriptionof Phlebas'sdeath and dissolutionin IV-the section of the poem that is certainlyclosestto an autonomouslyric-is followedby the dead-alivewaitingfor quietus (329-30)and the endlesstrekthroughthe arid Said" (331-58). of "Whatthe Thunder mountains of the openingparagraphs In one sense,of course,all of the poem beforethe walkamongthe dry rocks of the literalwasteland of V consistsof proleptic glossesof thatjourney.The manifestationof the "Dead mountainmouth of cariousteeth that cannot spit" (339) towardsthe end of the poem is not the resultof the actions of the Typist,the Clerk, Belladonnaand her lover,the people who fear April or the unseeing Londoncrowds: and fertility, theyarealready walking through of Phlebasin the verymidst the waterydeathand sparagmos it. Furthermore,
of a superfluity of the forces of life is merely a resonant inversion of the slow

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death and dissolutionof those who cannot tap and control those forcesto not destruction,to their waste land. bring refreshment, Dearth and excessgo hand in hand in this poem; the text is at once full of lacunaeand ellipses-missing words, missing links, missing climaxesand characterizedby copious augmentationand restatements.Madame SosostrismentionsTarotcardsshe does not find (54-5)-but is not allowed to describeone that is present(42-54). The poem is supplemented by notes which seem to havebeen merelyadded to makethe text a more convenient length for the publishers,and yet, as Eliot himself ruefullyadmitted,have now integrated themselves so thoroughlywith the poem that it wouldbe imwhile appearing to propossibleto detachthem fromit.20 Characteristically, vide additional selective theseidiosyncratically annotations coninformation, the interpretive tain as many lacunaeas the poem itself.2'Moreover, supplementationthey supply may in the event actually emphasizenarrative absenses.Let us glance at a passage from "A Game of Chess": 'Do 'Youknownothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember 'Nothing?' I remember Thosearepearls thatwerehis eyes. 'Areyou aliveor not? Is therenothing in yourhead?' (121-26) The note to line 126refersus backto I, 37 whichreads"-Yet whenwe came The specificconnection is not apparent back,late,fromthe hyacinth garden." until one invokesthe speaker'slater remarksin lines 39-40: "I was neither / Livingnor dead, and I knewnothing."But this is not just an instanceof sloppy line counting:in an earlierdraft of lines 121-26,line 124is given as "I remember the hyacinthgarden,"22 makingit quiteclearthat the hyacinth girl and her loverare earlieravatarsof Belladonnaand her lover.The note is herecompensating for a suppressed it retrospectively connection; encourages the readerto resurrect part of a submerged plot. At the same time, in the contextof the final versionof TheWaste can onLand,its supplementariness ly lead him to confront an absence,a gap. The largerdesign within which The Waste Land'sdepictionsof loss and failureare deployedmay perhapscontain an alternative narrative-the one I havesuggestedwe aretemptedto look for-of the questthat reachessome kindof goal, leadsto some kindof significantactionor vision. On the other of everpinningdownthat "story,"of everbeingcerhand, the impossibility tain that some kind of recovery has come to the wasteland at the last, may constitutethe realsubjectof the poem as a whole:it is, to an extent,"about" the difficulty of its interpretation. The reader'sproblemsin mappingthe Landare exacerbated (definitive)plot of TheWaste by the fact that although its manyvoices, points of view, literaryallusionsand echoes suggestthat it is the twentiethcenturyequivalentof the Renaissance encyclopaedic epic, it

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lacksanyconsistentfocal point of narrative Weareofferedneither authority. the poet as controllingdeusartifex,nor any mediating"figureof the poet" withinthe text. Insteadnumerous and borrowed) proxyvoices(both invented tell fragmentary tales. Certainlysome of these utterances seem to be more authoritative than others. There are intermittent glimpsesof oracularand didacticstrainsin the poem, passagesthat perhapspartakeof an Old Testamenttone and flavor-such as the addressto the "Son of Man" (19-30)and the sermon-likeglosses of the Thunder'scommandsin V.23 But even if a confidentpropheticvoice can be isolated, the poem offers no clear indication that we shouldprivilegethis voice aboveall the otherjostlingutterances
in The WasteLand.

The two presiding in TheWaste Landarethe Cumaean propheticpresences the Sibyl'sleavesprovideus withone modelfor the poem's Sibyland Tiresias; structure(or lack of it), and, accordingto Eliot's note to line 218, "What Tiresiassees, in fact, is the substanceof the poem." Tiresias,who has been both man and woman, who foretellsthe futureand "foresuffers"it in the present (229; 243) would seem to representa particular resonant and authoritative organizing pointof view(thereis something veryMiltonicabout the emphasison the blind seer). YetTiresias(as impotentin his way as the superannuated Sibyl, lockedin her jar wishingonly for death)has no truly voice;he is less a seer,perhaps,than a helplessvoyeur, empowering prophetic of in innumerable and enduringthe same a cycle metamorphoses trapped as those whose lives, and subjectivity, he temporarily wastelandsubsistence The passagesin "The Fire Sermon"wherehe parenthetically shares.24 but 228-30;243-46)havelittle explicitlyidentifieshimselfas the speaker(218-19; in commonwiththe dictionof the episodein "TheBurialof the Dead"where the unnamedVoice addressesand exhortsthe Son of Man. Landis In fact, for all its flirtationwith oraclesand prophecy,TheWaste vision-the thwarted moreconcerned withmomentsof abortedor suppressed any of its "stories"fromreachingan authoritative apocalypsesthat prevent In Eliot'soriginal draftof SectionI, the closinglinesof the fortuneresolution. teller's speech read as follows: in a ring. I see crowds of people, round walking them). (I Johnsawthesethingsandheard Thank you. If you see dearMrs.Equitone, TellherI bringthe horoscope myself, Onemustbe so careful thesedays.25 The second line cited above was eventuallycancelled.It derives,of course, of the sight fromRevelation 22:8,whereit occursshortlyafterthe description of the New Jerusalemand shortly beforethe book's conclusion.The supto one of pressionof the borrowedapocalypticvoice and of the reference visions in the Christiantradition(an End, the most powerfuleschatological
for example, explicitly invoked in-and very important to-such other en-

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and Paradise as TheFaerieQueene cyclopaedic poeticnarratives Lost)is wholThe of Waste Land's of failed and characteristic narratives vision ly narrowly missed revelation. RobertJ. Andreachhas suggestedthat the hyacinthgirl episode is Eliot's Lost:a wrong choice or a betrayaltakes rewritingof Book IX of Paradise But in fact the readernever place in a gardenand leads to a terribleloss.26 even penetrates that locusamoenus; what happensbetweenthe loversoccurs of both "whenwe cameback . . . fromthe hyacinth (37).The failure garden" vision and of languageto which the "neither/ Living nor dead" speaker is condemnedafter he has visitedthe gardenand neglectsto act upon what therefunctions,fromthe reader's he has experienced point of view,as a double suppressionof the numenwhich emanates from the (unseen) pastoral mentioned the cancelled center.I havealready secondreference to the hyacinth gardenwhich makesit clear that Belladonnaand her lover are versionsof the hyacinthgirl and herwooer.In the descriptionof Belladonna's chamber in "A Gameof Chess,"that unseenhyacinthgardenhas metamorphosed into a kind of SpenserianBowerof Bliss wherethe naturalis submergedin and the artifice:here "fruitedvines" (79) are only metalliclamp standards to Eliot'snote,is borrowed from phrase"sylvanscene"(98)(which,according l oeil paintParadise LostIV, 140,the MiltonicEden)refersmerelyto a trompe locusamoenus andvisionhasfinally of heightened ing. Theocculted experience been made concreteonly to be petrified. In the final section of TheWaste Landwe do have what appearsto be a nightmarish apocalypticvision (verymuch in the style of John's in Revelation 15:18) which includesthe collapse of a representative city that may be Jerusalemor Athens, Alexandria,Vienna or London (366-76).The subseand bats amongits wreckage imagesof the madwoman quentsurreal (377-83) in the "voices singingout of emptycisternsand exhausted climax, however, wells" (384), and the reference to drouthsuggeststhat the city's plightis not so much a resultof a Last Judgmentupon the sins of the WasteLand as in heightened terms,of the WasteLand'sexistenceand simplya restatement, of the elusive anotherversionof the sameold story.The reminder universality: grail quest/fertilityrite subtextis followedby a passagethat hints at an arrivalat a desired to completethe ritualand release goal and at an opportunity the life-givingwatersupon the "mountainsof rock without water" (334) traversedby the protagonist.Yet the skeletal "Grail Chapel"--"only the that precedes wind's home" (388)-at first seemsto hold, not the revelation havea suggestion renewed life, but emptinessand absence.Wedo, however, that the quest may be completed: ... a cockstoodon the rooftree Co co ricoco co rico In a flashof lightning. Thena dampgust rain Bringing

(391-94)

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But eventhis hint of an achievedgoal is complicated with by the cock-crow, its possibleallusionto an act of betrayal ratherthan attainment,and before the desertwastescan be refreshed,the verseparagraph simplyhalts. There is no punctuation,no period;the completionof the ritual quest is broken off and there is a lacuna,a white space in the text before we read: wassunken, andthe limpleaves Ganga Waited for rain,whilethe blackclouds Gathered fardistant, overHimavant. in silence. Thejunglecrouched, humped Thenspokethe thunder

(395-99)

We do not have a progression betweenline 394 and 395 but rathera shift in place or time to an India wherethe rains have not yet come and where the thundermay very well be the "dry sterilethunderwithout rain" (342) of the walkthrough the mountains. Thethunder's sermon(orthe protagonist's gloss of the thunder'scommands)is not a promiseof relief or release:its first two sectionsdescribethe (continuing)surrender to selfish desiresand the terribleisolation of the WasteLand dwellers,and the most hope it can offer the quester/reader is that he could havehad the capacityto construct a betterworldfor himselfhad he submitted himselfto a worthwhile authorihis own self-control or an external controlis unclear)- ". . . your ty (whether heartwouldhaveresponded / Gaily,wheninvited,beatingobedient/ Tocontrollinghands"(420-22).The pastconditionalof "wouldhave"is the nearest to transcendentfinality we are going to be given; at this point another white space intervenes and returnsus (againafter no punctuatypographic tion, no period)to the liminal condition of the questerback on the "arid plain" (perhapsone of those "endlessplains" of "crackedearth" crossed by the "hooded hordes" in the earliernightmare visions), tryingto decide whetherto act: I sat uponthe shore withthe aridplainbehind me Fishing, ShallI at leastset my landsin order?

(423-25)

The discontinuitiesbetween the episodes of the grail chapel and the thundersermon and betweenthe latterandthe final fragmentary ruminations of the poemarestriking; we arebrought to the vergeof climaxandthenpulled back from it by movements of displacement or substitutionuntil we are left in a moresubduedthresholdstate whereaction is contemplated but has not been--and will not necessarilybe-carried out. One suspectsthat Eliot is at last forcingus to disabuseourselvesof any idea that narrative teleology will be mademanifest.The final linesof TheWaste Landconstitutea polyglot to urban collapse, uncompletedpurgation, heapingtogetherof references of the themes metamorphosis, rapeand madness-a shorthand compendium

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the poem has so compulsively fromother texts and reiterated, appropriated othertongues.Wethen cometo the ritualrepetition of Thunder's imperatives (432) and the triple "shantih"that forms the last line of the poem: is this the "spell" that will set one's landsin order?The commandsto give,to symof the wordsignipathize,to controlare followedby the threefoldrepetition fying a transcendent peace, as if obeyingthe formerwill resultin the latter. Yethowconvincing is thisdeclaration of resolution? It is distanced linguisticalfrom the the barrier of a reader ly by foreigntongue, by Eliot's informing of it as "the Peacethat passethunderstanding" us that his translation is but a "feeble equivalent"of the originalSanskrit,27 and by the fact that in any case the notion in questiondefies comprehension. The readermayinvestthis untranslatable termfor the inexpressible withwhatever he desires, significance just as he might previouslyimpose whateversignificancehe desiredon the in and beyondthe hyacinth experiences gardenwhichcould not be visualized or articulated or at will about the imminentreleaseof the (38-40), speculate waterswhich is occludedby a poetic ellipsis. It is the narrating"I"-or at least one of the many "I"s of The Waste Land-who announces, "These I haveshoredagainstmy ruins" (430). But it is as usual up to the fragments readerto resolvethese fragments (which, ratherthan actingas staysagainst chaos are alwaysliableto proveto be merelysupplementary recordsof coninto a linear narrative-to discover the narrative that will per"ends" fusion) mit him to constructhis own plot. University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia

NOTES
1. DenisDonoghue, "TheWord Withina Word" in TheWaste in Different Land Voices,

ed. A.D. Moody(London: Edward Arnold & Son, 1974), 194. pp. 185-201,

2. M.L. Rosenthal," TheWaste Landas an OpenStructure," Mosaic,6 (1972), 189.

Poetic TheGenius OxfordUniversity (NewYork: Press, of Modern Sequence: Poetry

Rosenthal andSallyM.Gallfurther thisviewof thepoemin The Modern develop 1983), pp. 156-64.

3. Cf. Rosenthaland Gall, TheModern PoeticSequence, p. 6.

4. Thepilgrimage to Canterbury andcontains thenarration of many quest generates different thestory-telling actsalsobeing in so farastheir stories, "goal-directed" wishthemto be judged narrators for "sentence or solaas" pre-eminent among the rest.
5. T.S. Eliot, "Ulysses,Orderand Myth," TheDial, 75 (November1923),480-83, in James Vol. I 1902-27, ed. R.H. Denning reprinted Joyce,TheCritical Heritage,

& Kegan 270-71. Paul,1970), (London: Routledge pp. 268-71,

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284

The Journal of Narrative Technique

6. JessieL. Weston,From Ritual to Romance (1920;rpt. GardenCity, N.Y.:Doubleday Anchor, 1957).Westonnotes that the unredacted "graillegend"is "a conArtof TS. Eliot(New congruous,if not completelycontradictory" (p. 2). In The Helen Gardner York:Dutton, 1959),however, suggeststhat the mythEliot uses is completelyunmediated by laterfictions:the poet "goes back behindany artistic treatment to the bareelementsof the mythitself beforeit was rationalized into a story" (p. 87). 7. Lines 46-48 and line 125. All references to and citationsof TheWaste Landwithinthe body of the text-are from TS. henceforthindicatedby line numbers
Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962(London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1970). geries of widely differing elements .
. .

which at first sight appear hopelessly in-

8. The situationis furthercomplicatedby the fact that Eliot's idiosyncratic notes allusionsin "The FireSermon"and ignorethe Ariel only mentionthe Ferdinand The reader mustconstruct mostof his owncross-references. quotation completely. 9. ForBarthes on the "writerly" textsee S/Z,trans.Richard Hill Miller(NewYork: and Wang, 1974),pp. 4-6. 10. Fordiscussionsof TheWaste Landas a "sibylline"text see Helen Williams,TS. Eliot:TheWaste Land(London:Edward The Arnold, 1968),p. 17;Hugh Kenner, InvisiblePoet: TS. Eliot (London: Methuen& Co., 1959, 1977), p. 137, and Donoghue,p. 191.
11. See T.S. Eliot, The WasteLand: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts,

ed. ValerieEliot (London:Faber& Faber,1971),p. 81.

12. Cf. Gardner, p. 96; Donoghue,pp. 185-56.

13. In a letter to Eliot of 24 December 1921;see TheLettersof Ezra Pound 1907-1941,

ed. D.D. Paige (New York:Harcourt,Brace, 1950),p. 169.

14. ER. Leavis, "The Waste Land," in TS. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed.

Hugh Kenner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1962),pp. 89-103,99. in TheWaste 15. Foran interesting thatcertain verseformsand linepatterns hypothesis or emotionalresonance, haveparticular semantic see NancyLawlor, "Eliot's Land
Use of Rhyming Quatrains in The Waste Land," Poet and Critic, 4 (1967), 29-37.

16. A.D. Moody suggeststhat the threespeechesof the Thamesdaughters actually a sonnet;I wouldpointout that thisuneasy"sonnet"of two quatrains constitute at theexpense anda mostpeculiar sestetis achieved of threemoreorderly quatrains. See Thomas Stearns Eliot:Poet(Cambridge: Press, 1979), Cambridge University
p. 75.

" American 32 (1961), 17. W.M.Gibson,"Sonnetsin T.S.Eliot'sWaste Literature, Land, 465-66. see TheWaste 18. In factthe "couplet"is reallyhalf of a quatrain whichgot cropped;
Land: A Facsimile, p. 47.

19. Donoghue,p. 191.

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FragmentaryExcess, Copious Dearth

285

20. See "TheFrontiers of Criticism" in OnPoetry andPoets Farrar, (NewYork: Strauss, 1957),pp. 103-18,109. 21. On Eliot'sselectivecitationsee also JohnHollander, TheFigure of Echo(Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of CaliforniaPress, 1981),p. 103;and RuthNevo,
"The WasteLand: Ur-text of Deconstruction," NLH, 13 (1981), 453-61, 459. 22. See The WasteLand: A Facsimile, p. 19.

23. On echoesof the Old Testament Landsee FlorenceJones, prophetsin TheWaste "T.S.Eliot Amongthe Prophets," American 38 (1966),285-302;Helen Literature,
Williams, p. 67ff; Ann C. Bolgan, Whatthe ThunderReally Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Making of the WasteLand (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens

Press,1973),p. 157.Fora discussionlinkingEliot and Miltonas vates University see Herbert Howarth, "Eliot and Milton: The AmericanAspect," U70TO, 30 (January,1961),150-162.

24. Characteristically, while Ovid's Tiresiaswas blindedby Juno and compensated with propheticvision by Jupiterfor revealing that womenenjoy sex more than in the passageof TheWaste as a helplessseer/voyeur men, Eliot'sTiresias emerges thatdemonstrates the complete detachment of theTypist fromsexual Land passion.
25. The WasteLand: A Facsimile, p. 9.

26. RobertJ. Andreach,"Paradise of TheWaste Lostand the Christian configuration Land,"PLL,5 (1969),296-309,299-300. 27. See Eliot'snote to "shantih"in the 1922editionof TheWaste the qualificaLand; tion was suppressed in later versionsof the Notes.

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