Disciplining 'The Waste Land', or how to lead critics into temptation

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Jo Ellen Green Kaiser

As "the cry of a man on the verge of insanity," the poem Wilson first read enacted the very failure of modernity it critiqued. Following Zygmunt Bauman's account, I define modernity as the political and socioeconomic episteme that became dominant during the seventeenth century and may be characterized by its desire for order.(4) This desire for order, however, continuously deconstructs itself, as the very imperative to "set my lands in order" assumes as its foundational ground the presence of chaos. Eliot's poem, by expressing this central dilemma, marks a significant moment of crisis in the history of modernity. Faced with the impossible task of formulating a totalizing order, the poem's speakers, like the modern inhabitants of the everyday world they represent, fragment their world into increasingly smaller segments in an attempt to achieve a local order (e.g., "If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock / and also water"). Yet the more the world - and the poem - is catalogued, divided, fragmented, the more insistent becomes the pervasive sense of disorder. Read in this way, the poem suggests the postmodern possibility that the individual's relation to the world, and to him or herself, is fundamentally ambiguous and obscure. In this postmodern, poststructuralist reading, Eliot's poem is indeed what Wilson had early termed a "cry de profundis," a profound demonstration of the deconstruction not only of individual identity but also of the fundamental categories through which the individual in modernity has heretofore understood the world.

At first glance, Wilson's revised account of the poem as a representation of "our whole world of strained nerves and shattered institutions" seems only to underscore this poststructuralist reading. Yet Wilson does not believe that the representation of disorder necessitates a reconsideration of the quest for order. In his review of The Waste Land, Wilson asserts that the poem's apparent lack of "structural unity" is belied by "the force of intense emotion" that "provide [s] a key" to the poem's organization. In arguing for the ultimate order of Eliot's poem, Wilson is drawing on Eliot's own discussions of the craft of poetry in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) and "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921). According to Eliot, the best poets do not express their "personal emotions," but rather "transmute the passions" into an impersonal emotion, "forming new wholes" out of ordinary feelings and experiences ("Tradition" 8; "Metaphysical" 247). Those who succeed in marrying thought and feeling in this way are said by Eliot to possess a "unified sensibility." That possessing such a unified sensibility would lead to the creation of better poetry was a point already made by Ezra Pound and the imagists, who argued that presenting "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" was the ultimate aim of art (Pound 4). Wilson evokes this imagist aesthetic when he explains that Eliot's lines might "be wrung from flint. . . broken and sometimes infinitely tiny," but that they are nonetheless "authentic crystals." Like crystals, the bewilderingly multifaceted nature of the poem's lines are proof for Wilson of the strength of the underlying sensibility that orders the poem.