Understanding ‘The Waste’

REVISITING THE WASTE LAND By Lawrence Rainey.

Yale, $35, 205 pages

THE ANNOTATED WASTE LAND WITH ELIOT’S CONTEMPORARY PROSE

Edited with annotations and introduction by Lawrence Rainey Yale,

$35, 208 pages

REVIEWED BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD

What more, at this late date, is there to be said about T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the mostfamous poem of the last century and only 17 years short of celebrating its 100th birthday? An English scholar of modernism, Lawrence Rainey, has brought out not one, but two books that aim to help us put Eliot’s creation more clearly in our sights.

But who are “we” — how many are there likely to sit down and read once more this monumental example of modernist difficulty and controversy? Mr. Rainey rightly suggests, in his preface to “Revisiting The Waste Land,” that most readers will have been first exposed to the poem “in a classroom setting that sometimes encourages a style of reading inimical to [its] grotesque and grim extremism.” The name for that style of reading is interpretation, as demonstrated and practiced in the scores of books, essays, and classrooms devoted to explaining what this or that passage or line or word really means. But it is inimical to the poem’s ferocity, a word that Eliot used more than once as a term of praise at the time he was composing “The Waste Land.”

Interpretation treats the poem as a puzzle to be understood and solved, rather than as a strange performance not to be reduced to orderly codes of meaning. For Mr. Rainey the starting and maybe the ending place for a true experience of “The Waste Land” is to respond to that ferocity; to find, as one of its first readers, John Peale Bishop, found it, in capital letters — “IMMENSE. MAGNIFICENT. TERRIBLE.”

In other words, Mr. Rainey is adversely critical of the many attempts to find continuities and repetitions in the poem’s five parts that somehow make it cohere into narrative order. The notes Eliot himself wrote to the poem (in part, he later admitted, because his publisher Liveright worried it was too short to constitute a published volume) suggested that it exhibited unity if readers followed up on the hints tossed out in the notes.

For example, Eliot claimed in them that Jessie Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance” was instrumental to the anthropological and mythic structure of the narrative; or that the seemingly disembodied voices emerging in different places in the poem could be thought of as emanating from a single unifying presence — the Tiresias who comes front and center in “The Fire Sermon” (Part 3 of the poem).

Mr. Rainey, I think rightly, refuses to take these assertions of unity and coherence as solemnly as did many of Eliot’s critics; while not denying the assertions of connectedness made by the poem, he says that though they are “remarkably insistent … the connectedness itself isn’t very vivid; it remains inert and extraneous, like so much scaffolding erected around a building that remains obstinately and mysteriously invisible.”

It’s no accident that the allusion to scaffolding refers to a highly influential essay the New Critic Cleanth Brooks published in the 1930s, in which Brooks laid out an interpretive “scaffolding” for the poem. Many readers, more interested in reading through the eye and the mind rather than listening with the ear, were happy to confuse the scaffolding with the poem itself whose “real reckoning with the world” (in Mr. Rainey’s words) occurs elsewhere.

The two books aspire to address a double audience — “Not just scholars of Eliot’s work but also that large body of nonspecialists who continue to take an intelligent interest in understanding a poem that has been so central to the culture of the twentieth century.”

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