T. S Eliot - The Waste Land

This poem is seen as one of the greatest contributions of Modernist literature in 20th century. When I first read it what struck out to mea was the incoherant structure of the poem, their seem to be a plurality of voices juxtaposed in a choatic narrativeless poem. There seems to be no grand metanarrative that underlies the whole poem, we never get to see the big picture but we get a mosaic of glimpses that seem to be worlds apart. THe fact that their is no grand unifying story behind the incoherant voices, is often taken to reflect Eliot’s belief that modernity had lost a unifying meaning itself. Throughout the poem is contradictions this invite the reader to try and reconcile them in a paradoxical world that fails to make sense of itself. The opening section introduces this with its reconfiguration of April as not a month of regeneration, but instead a painful period in which old memories are brought back. In this state, even the cold winter is preferred to remembering, the snow bringing a blanket of forgetfullness that is able to eclipse the world in white. The current political turmoil that Marie recollects is juxtaposed on her childhood memory of sledding. She claims that through escape into the mountains freedom is possible. Eliot thus sees the need to try and escape from the troubles of the past, this fleeing to the mountains is why winter is preferred. Yet the idealisation of winter is undermined in the next line when Marie says that she reads through the winter, escaping once more into a literary world where the narrative is clear, and the world makes sense, and heads south. It is almost a message that saying the refuge that the winter offered from remembering the dire condition she is in, is not even as much of a refuge, that she has to keep heading further out in order to find the same solace from the world.

I find it interesting that the whole text is a giant palimpsest. It is a giant collage of quotes, allusions and references. It invokes myths, legends, and archetypal figures to both try and oriantate and disoriantate. Because of the multiplictity of refereences all going on at once, it opens up so many readings and ways to interpret the dots, yet the dots are their to draw attention and give a series of hints into the meaning of the text. It is almost like no matter how much you try and find meaning in the world in the end, the real meaning of the text is always going to escape you. This resounds with the lines “I can connect/ Nothing with nothing” THe whole poem is about trying to connect the nothing sto try and make something. In the end we should humble ourselves and letgo of our presumptions that the world can all be explained by some grand theory and expect nothing as the people on Margate sand expect. THe broken fingernails and dirty hands of people who have waded through the pile of broken images to find that such an attempt to reconstruct the images is futile and that in the end they hold nothing.