The Waste Land: War

Question 1

Patricia Gabilondo discusses the dislocation of poetic language in ‘The Waste Land’ - how does this aid Eliot’s purpose?

Answer 1

“the necessary dislocations of poetic language not only mirror the present state of civilisation but reflect the poet’s urgent need to intervene, through a choice of significant form, in the apparent disorders of history”

Question 2

How does Patricia Gabilondo suggest Eliot’s reintegration of broken fragments relates to the destruction of contemporary culture?

Answer 2

• indicates his attempt to redeem the apparent ruins of a culture’s tradition by recomposing its broken forms into organic unities that will resist outside chaos

Question 3

How could ‘TWL’ be considered an allegory?

Answer 3

• has been called an “unstable” or “incomplete” allegory about writing poetry in the wasteland of modernity
• most fittingly because ‘The Waste Land’ can be read as modern allegory

Question 4

Why does Angus Fletcher call the poem a “decapitated allegory”?

Answer 4

• meaning that, although retaining the figurative gestures of allegory, the poem is dispossessed of a vital, culturally approved system of reference, a transcendent origin or paradigm which it longs for
• its fragmentary form can be read as a succession of attempts to generate and to reach the stability of such a paradigm

Question 5

What is the effect of having so many quotations in Gabilondo’s view?

Answer 5

• when so much seems quoted, the multiplication of voice turns the poet himself into a cubist-like face of intersecting quotations

Question 6

What are the two different effect of quotations in Gabilondo’s view?

Answer 6

• on one side - there is a struggle to build up a destroyed cultural inheritance
• the quoted fragments being signs of its defeated history and the babble of multiple discourses being a sign of the impossibility of reaching the sustenance of antecedent contexts through the exhausted resources of language
• on the other side - quotation does violence to the force of tradition, juxtaposing miscellaneous textures from past and present discourse as a means of subverting the order of tradition

Question 7

Although in the 19th century there was a sense of novelty - how did the war heighten this to extremity?

Answer 7

• idea that technology of violence and war etc. had reached a new level

Question 8

How did the war contribute to a feeling of “passage into another strangeness”?

Answer 8

• there was the feeling that peace did not mean a return to pre-war years

Question 9

Woolf described wars as remote - what does she say?

Answer 9

“wars were then remote; wars were carried on by soldiers and sailors, not by private people”

Question 10

What are ‘heterotopias’?

Answer 10

physical sites that are marked as places socially apart, as ‘counter-sites’ to the normative organisation of space
(in relation to WW1 Foucault observed that war introduced a new set of heterotopic sites: the trench, the hut, the battlefield, the detention camp)

Question 11

In Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘The Leaning Tower’ what did she write about war?

Answer 11

“Then, suddenly like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came”

(she is NOT referencing WW1, she is talking about the Napoleonic wars at this point but the sentiment still stands that ultimately war is a rupture)

Question 12

Eliot, of course, wrote poetry reflecting on WW2 as well as WW1 - what damning comparison did George Orwell make about this work (including 1940: Dry Salvages) and why?

Answer 12

shows how damning Orwell’s comment is - “accepts defeat, writes off earthly happiness as impossible”

• compares him with Marshell Petain - who was Chief of State after France surrendered in 1940 - increasingly collaborated with them and was tried after war
• George Orwell saw Eliot’s poetry (Burnt Norton, East Coker, Dry Salvages) as defeatist fatalism

“there is no end of it, the voiceless wailing/ No end to the withering of withered flowers” -