English 272D
Fall 1998
WollaegerDistance and the Search for Truth in Eliot and Lawrence Marc Schultz T. S. Eliot=s The Hollow Men ends with a meditation on Athe Shadow,@ the distance that falls between Athe idea / And the reality . . . the motion / And the act . . . the conception / And the creation . . . the emotion / And the response . . . the desire / And the spasm . . . the potency / And the existence . . . the essence / And the descent@ (Eliot, Hollow, 72-89). The Shadow, in this sense, is something dark and sinister and unknown, that separates idea from reality, motion from action, in order to stifle progress and understanding. It is, simply, mankind=s state in the midst of the Modernist era, a state compromised by the uncertainties left by the horror of the first World War. In this Shadow lies the gap between old, optimistic truths concerning the nature of Western civilization and the new reality of global warfare that has proved those truths unfounded and irrelevant. In this Shadow also lies The Waste Land, Eliot=s conception of a world drifting apart, a world that breeds only distance, a world so lost in its conception of truth that it is unable to act, unable to create, unable to respond, spasm, or even exist; instead, it merely descends into meaninglessness Awith a little patience@ (Eliot, Waste, 330). D. H. Lawrence also deals with a society robbed of truth in his novel Women in Love, with this idea of the distance between perception and reality, between optimistic past and brutal present, between belief and truth. Birkin=s search for a Aa strange conjunction . . . an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings:B as the stars balance each other@ is the search for an ideal within this distance, founded on the optimistic belief that there exists a perfect distance between two entities that precludes either isolation or consummation (Lawrence, Women, 148). Over the course of the novel, Lawrence depicts a progression toward a realization of this ideal, of its discovery in the actual world; though this actualization is never attained, the novel does end with the hope that a new truth will be uncovered, a truth born of Athe timeless creative mystery@ inherent in mankind that will ultimately produce Asome other being, finer, more wonderful, some new lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation@ (Lawrence, Women, 478-79). The two works, though they depict similar worlds of hesitation and disillusionment in advanced states of decay, reach far different conclusions about mankind=s ability to overcome that uncertainty and reinvent himself through the discovery of new truths, to pull together his ruins and close the distance marked off by the Shadow.
From their very outsets, the two works establish the immobilizing uncertainty that plagues their inhabitants. The opening lines of The Waste Land portray a speaker, Marie, recoiling from the idea of new life, accusing April of cruelty for Astirring / Dull roots with spring rain@; the speaker goes so far as to identify with the slumbering roots, saying that AWinter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow@ (Eliot, Waste, 3-6). The poem introduces itself through a persona who yearns for isolation, for an undisturbed slumber separate from the processes of life that take place above ground. As far above ground as you can get, Ain the mountains,@ is where Ayou feel free@, and also where she Awas frightened@; here, Eliot is immediately establishing a connection between fear and freedom, a fear of the responsibility and weight of decisions that must necessarily be made in a state of freedom (Eliot, Waste, 15, 17). Thus, the mountains and the freedom that they represent are to be avoided by retreating into a mechanistic routine: AI read, much of the night, and go south in the winter@ (Eliot, Waste, 18). Reading is a simple strategy by which the speaker is able to live vicariously through others, to allow the characters in a novel to make decisions rather than making them herself, and allowing them to suffer whatever consequences those decisions might make. AGo[ing] south in the winter@ has still further implications, beyond her obvious avoidance of mountains where she once felt free: by figuratively moving Adown@ the continent: in the sense that south, on a map, is down, Marie is burying herself beneath the snow-covered land to the north, cartographically Aabove@ her. Adhering to this pattern, Marie keeps herself from having to answer the question inherent to freedom, a question that forms and reforms throughout the poem: AWhat shall I do now? What shall I do?@ (Eliot, Waste, 131).
A similar kind of avoidance takes place in the opening paragraphs of Lawrence=s Women in Love, in which Ursula and Gudrun are introduced through their discussion of marriage. At first, the sisters seem in absolute control of what they shall do: almost flippantly, they dismiss the Aexperience of having been married@ as Alikely to be the end of experience@ [my emphasis], and conclude that rather than being Afearfully tempted@ to marry, they are in fact Atempted not to@ (Lawrence, Women, 7-8). Lawrence reveals, however, that though AThey both laughed . . . in their hearts, they were frightened@; the sisters, though outwardly exhibiting a sophisticated, feminist individuality that calls into question the well-established institute of marriage and the traditional roles described by it, are inwardly afraid of the freedom this questioning permits (Lawrence, Women, 7-8). They, like the first speaker in The Waste Land, fear freedom and the uncertainty that comes with it. The difference between the two scenes, however, is one of action: whereas Marie in The Waste Land avoids taking steps to overcome the routine of her life, the sisters of Women in Love get up from where they are sitting and walk to the scene of an actual wedding. By this action, Ursula and Gudrun are testing their convictions, are trying out their theories concerning marriage against the actuality of marriage, exploring the ways in which their idea of truth applies to reality. Action in The Waste Land is largely empty and indirect, revealed through either flashback or dialogue, and often employed merely to demonstrate the distances and hesitations that plague the text, rather than explore them.
One scene in The Waste Land which does exhibit uncharacteristically immediate action is the sex scene in AThe Fire Sermon;@ it is a scene that takes place in the present tense, related as it happens. Despite its immediacy, however, the action is far from spontaneous. Like much of the action in the poem, it is performed as part of an empty pattern, devoid of emotion or even much thought: a typist Aclears her breakfast, lights / Her stove@, an Aexpected guest@arrives, finds the typist Abored and tired . . . indifferen[t]@, he Aassaults and once . . . encounter[ing] no defense@, she is left with the Ahalf-formed thought . . . >Well now that=s done: and I=m glad it=s over=@ (Eliot, Waste, 222-52). Even the sex act, an act as intense, pleasurable, and fundamentally creative as any in human experience, has become routine. Further, as a literal, physical union between man and woman, this depiction betrays a distance between the physical and the emotional, a union that fails to unify. By identifying the narrator of this scene as Teresias, a character both man and woman and an ancient authority on the relations between the sexes, Eliot lends the scene a universality it would otherwise not have. Tiresias, watching the action unfold, claims to have Aforesuffered all / Enacted on this same divan or bed@; in the word Aforesuffered@ lies the implication that Tiresias has seen this drama unfold itself again and again, that this, indeed, is the normal state between man and woman, this incredible distance between the love-act and the love-feeling (Eliot, Waste, 243-44). The typist, however, fails to question the emptiness of the act; in fact, she Aallows@ herself only Aone half-formed thought@ before reducing herself to entirely thoughtless, mechanistic action: she Apaces about the room again, alone,@ then Asmooths her hair@ with a hand that has become Aautomatic@ (Eliot, Waste, 244-45). The scene ends with the typist putting a record on the gramophone, a device that produces a false copy of a human voice with its own Aautomatic hand,@ a culminating example of the actions of life reduced to the stirrings of a mechanical process. In this action, she perhaps unconsciously acknowledges the desperation of her mechanistic routine, but in so doing she takes no steps to remedy it, only to intensify it.
The problems that sex presents for the characters in both works are significant ones, both on the physical and metaphysical levels. Basic survival requires the love-act, requires a union between two people, in order to propagate the species. But seemingly more important, in both works, to the survival of species is the discovery of new truths, of new forms in which to unite, to overcome the distance that haunts the Modernist landscape. As this distance grows, however, it becomes harder and harder to move beyond the sex-unison, inasmuch as it requires the giving over of something more profound than flesh to another. This sacrifice of self is something that Birkin, throughout the novel, struggles to deal with, and something that the characters in The Waste Land dread to the point of death. In the final section of The Waste Land, the thunder speaks in Sanscrit to a lone figure, detailing the necessary steps toward salvation; the first, give (Datta), elicits a vision of terror and doom from the speaker:
Not only is the speaker unable to give of himself so that he might achieve foundation, but an all-inclusive Awe@ is unable, a we that exists only by a principle of avoidance. Cleanth Brooks, in his essay AThe Waste Land: Critique of the Myth@, states that Athe surrender to something outside the self is an attempt (whether on the sexual level or some other) to transcend one=s essential isolation@; the inhabitants of The Waste Land, unwilling to carry through with this surrender, each draw out the distance between himself and his fellow man (Brooks, 80). Without surrender, mankind becomes nonexistent: Aeven the propagation of the race B even mere >existence= B calls for such a surrender@ (Brooks, 80). On both Athe sexual level@ and Asome other@, the inhabitants of The Waste Land are doomed through their fear of the Aawful daring of a moment=s surrender@, unable to continue their species through sexual union, and unable to arrive at new truths through emotional union (Brooks, 80; Lawrence, Waste, 404). Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment=s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed (Lawrence, Waste, 402-06)
This surrender, however necessary in the search for new truths, can be problematic as well. In Women in Love, Lawrence explores the dangers of absolute surrender in his search for the distance-ideal, the Astar equilibrium.@ The sex scene in ADeath and Love@ between Gudrun and Gerald does well to explore the Aawful daring of a moment=s surrender@ in its extreme (Eliot, Waste, 404). Gerald, throughout the text, represents the subjugating mechanization of society, and is constantly imposing his will upon others in order to subdue or control them: when he takes over his father=s mines, it is Gerald=s Awill to subjugate Matter to his own ends@ (Lawrence, Women, 223). In AThe Industrial Magnate,@ Lawrence explicitly states that what Gerald wants is Athe pure fulfillment of his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions@; of course, in this case, his will was Ato take the coal out of the earth, profitably@ (Lawrence, Women, 223-24). Later in the novel, however, his will is to take Gudrun, sexually. In ADeath and Love,@ Gerald sneaks into Gudrun=s room at night; when pressed by Gudrun for an explanation as to why he came, he dodges the question: AI came B because I must . . . there is no answer@ (Lawrence, Women, 343). The truth, however, is that Ahe had come for vindication@, a puzzling and sinister motivation that belies the distance, once again, between the love-act and the love-emotion (Lawrence, Women, 344). Sex becomes, for Gerald, another way Ato subjugate Matter to his own ends@; in this way, Gudrun is dehumanized, becoming Aa vessel filled with his bitter potion of death . . . and she received it in an ecstacy of subjugation, in throes of acute, violent sensation@ (Lawrence, Women, 233, 344). Though Gerald is seemingly reborn afterward, having filled Gudrun with the Acorrosive flood of death@ that had been destroying him, and worships her as Amother and substance of all life@, it is not out of love that he has come to her, nor out of love that he has made love to her, but rather out of Avindication@, out of his need Ato subjugate@ her Ato his own ends@ (Lawrence, Women, 233, 344).
This twisted vision of sex, however, does not serve to define a universal in Women in Love; rather, it is one of many erotic encounters that serve to explore the meaning behind both the love-act and action in general. Though the characters in Women in Love illustrate the distance between emotion and act, they also explore that distance by reorganizing themselves in relation to each other. Birkin=s constant struggle to define a relationship in which the parts are neither isolated nor lost in each other is merely a reflection of Lawrence=s technique throughout the book of moving his characters toward and away from each other, combining and recombining them in order to uncover a new and perfect balance. For a great deal of the novel, this combining and recombining makes it easy to confuse Ursula with Gudrun and Birkin with Gerald. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, in his introduction to the novel, explains that Lawrence wanted Ato get rid of the idea of a stable ego, the belief that personality is constant, and find ways, instead, of showing human beings as fluctuating and changeable B like water, which can be ice, steam, or liquid@; this analogy is a fitting one, as the personalities of each tend to flow into each other, especially in the earlier chapters, before the characters pair off and settle themselves into familiar contexts (Kinkead-Weekes, Women in Love, xiv). These contexts serve to stabilize the characters= identity, to solidify them in their relative positions to each other. This stabilization, however, is one of societal convention, of old truth, and ultimately must give way to the exploration of new truth in the distance-ideal. In order to bring the characters into a final crisis of identity, Lawrence plunges them into an actualization of Birkin=s idea of Nordic destruction, the apocalyptic Amystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation@ (Lawrence, Women, 254). In their AContinental@ journey, the characters are not merely moving through space, but through time, to the very end of the earth, to the moment when the world is consumed by the Auniversal dissolution into whiteness and snow@ (Lawrence, Women, 254). Traversing this incredible distance through time and space, the distances between the characters shift, once again, allowing them to gain them new perspectives of each other, and providing them with new opportunities to test those perspectives against their idea of truth. In this world of Asnow-abstraction,@ Ursula suddenly finds that Birkin has changed from Aa man who could be so soulful and spiritual@ into one that is Abestial@, prompting Ursula herself to not only become bestial, but to A[exult] in it@; Gudrun, in bed with Gerald, begins to plan their grand and idyllic future together, how Ashe would marry him,@ and Ahe would go into Parliament@, only to be gripped by Aa terrible cynicism@ in which Aeverything turned to irony@ (Lawrence, Women, 413, 417-18). In shifting the context of the characters= relationships, new truths are gained while old truths are either lost or violently retooled.
Eliot also plays with context by uprooting lines from other works of literature and planting them into the rocky soil of The Waste Land, a similar shifting of subjects from one location to another, through both time and space. This violent upheaval serves Eliot, too, as a way of forcing his literary subjects into crises of identity, of testing their truth against the reality of The Waste Land. Conrad Aiken, in his essay AAn Anatomy of Melancholy@, has much to say on the subject of Eliot=s use of allusion:
Aiken drives home the point that, for a modern audience, the meaning behind the poem=s many literary allusions is simply lost in the transition from their original time and place. Cleanth Brooks=s essay AThe Waste Land: Critique of the Myth@ provides a direct contrast to the attitude of Aiken toward the poem=s use allusion; for the most part, Brooks=s essay is a dissection and explanation of the multitudinous allusions made through the course of the poem. Brooks believes firmly that Amost of its [The Waste Land=s] critics misconceive entirely the theme and the structure of the poem,@ and that it is Avaluable B if not absolutely necessary@ for Athe reader to have an explicit intellectual account of the various symbols and a logical account of their relationship@ (Brooks, 59). Brooks then proceeds to detail an extensive and exhaustive catalog of The Waste Land=s complex system of allusions and symbols, a bewildering and confusing text that only seems to support Aiken=s stance that such intellectual analysis of the poem=s allusionistic structure is destined to fail. Aiken purports, instead, that the allusions are Anot important parts of an important or careful intellectual pattern; but they are important parts of an important emotional ensemble@; the poem Asucceeds B as it brilliantly does B by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan@ (Aiken, 58). Aiken=s view of the poem, as triumphant through the ambiguity of its meaning, supports the uncertain nature of the world it describes, a world in which meaning has become slippery and impressionistic. In his essay AUlysses, Order and Myth,@ Eliot stresses the importance of Joyce=s using Athe myth . . . manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity@ as Aa way . . . of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history@; the suggestive way in which Eliot uses this technique in The Waste Land is far from a Acontinuous parallel@, and more like the pattern of the tide, a pattern that rises and falls, eventually crashing upon the Aarid plain@ of the final scene to come to rest Afragments . . . shored against . . . ruins@ (Eliot, AUlysses,@ 177; Waste, 425, 431). In this way, Eliot draws attention to the discrepancy between his own belief in classicism and that classicism=s application in the reality of the modern world. The dissolution of The Waste Land is well supported by this system of literary allusions that don=t quite work properly as literary allusions; in defying intellectual analysis, in creating Arelations . . . dim and tonal . . . not exact@, Eliot=s allusions emphasize the growing distance between the present and the past, between (once again) perception and reality (Aiken, 58). What we feel is that Mr. Eliot has not wholly annealed the allusive matter, has left it unabsorbed, lodged in gleaming fragments amid material alien to it . . . there is a distinct weakness consequent on the use of allusions which may have both intellectual and emotional value for Mr. Eliot, but (even with the notes) none for us. The AWaste Land@ of the Grail Legend might be a good symbol, if it were something with which we were sufficiently familiar. But it can never, even when explained, be a good symbol, simply because it has no immediate associations for us . . . Hyacinth fails in the same way. So does the Fisher King. So does the Hanged Man, which Mr. Eliot tells us he associates with Frazer=s Hanged God B we take his word for it. (Aiken, 55-56)
In the end, however, what does this distance reveal about the original problem of distance, that of the old, optimistic pre-war ideas of truth and the conflicting reality of a war-scarred planet? In his essay, AResurrection of the Body,@ Lawrence uses a symbol from classical literature, but in a much more direct and explicit manner than Eliot=s in The Waste Land; instead of using an obscure, scholarly reference that only hints at an idea of outmoded truth, Lawrence picks what is, for many, a defining symbol of Truth: the Resurrection of Christ. In taking this story and attempting to reinvent it, Lawrence is, in essence, declaring that the distance between pre- and post-World War I society is so great that even the most sacred and unquestionable of truths is no longer relevant. Lawrence claims, in the essay, that the story of the Resurrection is ideal for a post-war society badly in need of Asome vision of himself@ in order to renew a world in which the old truths have been shattered by war (Lawrence, AResurrection@, 921). It is not enough, however, to accept the doctrine that Awe rise with Him [Christ] in the body;@ the doctrine itself must be retooled in order to reflect the experience of modern times:
Thus, Lawrence begins his radical reinventing of Truth by tearing down the old and establishing the new: Aif Jesus rose as a full man, in full flesh and soul, then He rose to take a woman to Himself . . . to know the tenderness and blossoming of the twoness with her, He who had been hitherto so limited to His oneness@ (Lawrence, AResurrection,@ 922). This is the same kind of reinvented truth that Birkin struggles with in his attempts to love Ursula and Gerald; his idea of Aan equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings:B as the stars balance each other@ is a kind of rediscovery of the traditional ideas of marriage and brotherhood in much the same way that a Resurrected Christ would rediscover the traditional life of everyday man in Lawrence=s rewritten gospel, a tradition freed of its Aself-absorption, self-consciousness, self-importance . . . [and] self-sacrifice@ (Lawrence, Women, 148; AResurrection,@ 922). Indeed, the entirety of AResurrection of the Body@ can be seen as a parallel for Birkin=s notion of the Aeternal creative mystery@ at the end of Women in Love that Awould bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation;@ Christ, in Lawrence=s view, has Afailed creatively to develop,@ and so is dispensed by Lawrence, the controlling Acreative mystery@ behind the essay, and replaced with a Christ who Arose to do His share in the world=s work, something He really liked doing@ (Lawrence, Women, 478-79; AResurrection,@ 922). A new world, a new Truth, is thus established with the reinterpretation of a symbol through its juxtaposition in a modernist context. Christ risen in the full flesh! What for? It is here the gospels are all vague and faltering, and the Churches leave us in the lurch. Christ risen in the flesh in order to lurk obscurely for six weeks on earth, then be taken vaguely up into heaven in a cloud? Flesh, solid flesh, feet and bowels and teeth and eyes of a man, taken up into heaven in a cloud, and never put down again? It is the only part of the great mystery which is all wrong. The virgin birth, the baptism, the temptation, the teaching, Gethsemane, the betrayal, the crucifixion, the burial and the resurrection, these are all true according to our inward experience. They are what men and women go through, in their different ways. But floated up into heaven as flesh-and-blood, and never set down again B this nothing in all our experience will ever confirm. If aeroplanes take us up, they bring us down, or let us down. Flesh and blood belong to the earth, and only to the earth. We know it. (Lawrence, AResurrection,@ 921-22)
Eliot, too, alludes to the story of the Resurrection and finds in it a Modernist translation; his translation, however, is completely unlike Lawrence=s in AResurrection of the Body,@ in that Eliot does not retool the myth in order to increase its relevancy to a Modernist audience but instead expands on its irrelevancy. The final section of the poem includes a figure who may or may not be Christ himself, resurrected and walking among the characters of the poem:
In the speaker=s inability to identify the cloaked stranger, the scene evokes the Bible story of Christ=s apostles being unable to identify him after he has been resurrected. In the notes to the poem, however, Eliot reveals that this scene is based upon an Antarctic expedition whose members, at the limits of endurance, swore that there was always one more member than they could count (Eliot, ANotes,@ 73). A combination of these two references seems to indicate that this image of Christ resurrected is nothing more than a delusion, brought about by the decaying condition of mankind. The idea of Christ as delusion is elaborated further by the note=s subtle reference back to the snow-blanketed environs of the poem=s beginning, recalling the fear of freedom established there. In this way, Christ becomes an emblem for man=s dependence upon religion to quell his fear of freedom by making decisions for him. Further, Eliot points forward with his Ahooded@ figure of Christ to the next stanza, in which Ahooded hordes swarm . . . over endless plains@ in what appears to be a battle (Eliot, Waste, 364, 369-70). Christ=s role, in this sense, could be a more traditional one, as a figure returned to cast his judgement upon the world, to cast the inhabitants of The Waste Land into a hell of Acracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers@, and a heap of broken cities: AJerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal@ (Eliot, Waste, 373-77). Combining these two implications, Christ becomes the destructive force of delusion, himself the embodiment of a distance between perception and reality that causes a historical progression toward dissolution and death. Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
B But who is that on the other side of you? (Eliot, Waste, 360-66)
Lawrence=s use of symbols in Women in Love can be, like Eliot=s, suggestive rather than concrete; the characters themselves often debate over the meaning of a symbol, as in Birkin and Gerald=s contemplation of the African fetish or in Birkin and Ursula=s analysis of the encounter between two cats in AMino.@ Lawrence, however, again allows himself leeway to play with the distance between symbol and meaning; one instance of particularly streamlined, and at the same time entirely naturalistic, metaphor provides the centerpiece for AMoony.@ Standing at the edge of a pond, Birkin contemplates the idea of truth just before he begins throwing stones at the image of the moon reflected in the water. The moon breaks apart, comes together, breaks apart again, comes back together; Birkin throws more stones, attempting to Amake it [the moon] quite gone off the pond,@ until the moon has been dissolved into Aflakes of light . . . tormented among the shadows . . . in strange places, among the dripping shadow of the willow@ (Lawrence, Women, 248). Far from dissolving, however, the fragments of the moon Acaught together, re-united, heaving, rocking, dancing, falling back as in panic, but working their way home again persistently@; a profound moment of destruction and rebirth has taken place, initiated by Birkin and completed by the settling effects of gravity, pulling surface of the water taut again. Gravity, being at the center of Birkin=s idea of a Astar-equilibrium,@ here takes on the role of regenerator, of the Atimeless creative mystery@ that serves as the engine for the reinventing of the moon=s image. Further, gravity serves to hold the moon in orbit around the earth, and the earth in orbit around the sun, all of which play a part in the projection of the moon=s image upon the water: the sun, providing the light which bounces off of the moon and streams down onto the water that is cradled in earth. The complex system of relationships here, involving the forces of light and gravity, as well as the grouping of three massive objects, suggests the truths discovered by Birkin at the end of the novel, after he has lost Gerald and realizes the missing link in his equation of equilibrium: the Apure balance of two single beings@ that Birkin seeks is not a balancing between two people, but between two kinds of love stretched out among three people: Ursula to Birkin to Gerald (Lawrence, Women, 148). In this equation, each individual is one of three solar bodies, the twin loves are the forces of light and gravity, and the new truth that unites them is the pond.
In throwing the stones, Birkin begins this process, but he does not end it, and therefore cannot see it through to fruition. It is not until further action has been taken, until Gerald dooms himself to the frozen oblivion of the novel=s AExeunt@ that this new truth reveals itself to Birkin. This tragedy ironically reveals the hidden equation to Birkin while at the same time ending any possibility of that equation coming to fruition; Gerald has been lost to the Aprocess of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold,@ and Birkin is left to Athe strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution@ (Lawrence, Women, 254). With nothing to offset his love for Ursula, Birkin finds himself doomed to collapse into the other, to lose his individuality in the Aawful . . . surrender / which an age . . . can never retract@ while Gerald is doomed to the other extreme, to the Asnow-abstract annihilation@resulting from insurmountable distance, a distance that Birkin is acutely aware of as he leaves Gerald and Gudrun in the snow, Agrowing smaller and more isolated@ (Eliot, Waste, 404-05; Lawrence, Women, 254, 440).
The closing lines of Eliot=s poem can be seen as a kind of synthesis between the two extremes of distance, a collapse into dissolution. In a way, the final scenes of the poem act as an inverse of Women in Love=s; no less ironic, the poem presents, toward the end, a chance for redemption, for the rebirth of The Waste Land, but it turns out to be a chance that comes too late, that finds the inhabitants too far lost to take advantage of the opportunity they have so longed for. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker considers a boat that Arespond[s] / Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar / The sea was calm, your heard would have responded / Gaily, when invited, beating obedient / To controlling hands@ (Eliot, Waste, 419-23); the sentiment of these lines, a seeming testament to the joy of being led by a higher power=s control, is subverted by the conditional tense with which the speaker refers to Ayou.@ In saying Ayou would have responded,@ a question of condition is raised: what is keeping Ayou@ from responding? If the rest of the poem is to be used as precedent, with endless examples of dead and dying things, it is obvious that Ayou@ is dead, and that whatever higher power to which Ayou would have responded / Gaily@ is powerless to bring Ayou@ back (Eliot, Waste, 421-22). The water that the speaker desperately seeks throughout AWhat the Thunder Said,@ when it finally comes, does no good to those who are already dead; in fact, the arrival of the rain only seems to intensify the speaker=s isolation as one who is already marked for death: Ato be found in our obituaries / Or in the memories draped by the beneficent spider . . . in our empty rooms . . . each in his prison@ (Eliot, Waste, 407-12). Even in the presence of supposedly rejuvenating forces, there is no resurrection at the end of The Waste Land, but a confused descent into what Eliot translates in the Notes as AThe Peace which passeth understanding@:
The poem collapses in these final lines, collapses language, collapses physical structures, collapses communication, collapses the speaker=s will to live; AThe Peace which passeth understanding@ can only be death, from which The Waste Land provides no escape (Eliot, ANotes,@ 74). At the edges of The Waste Land, the universe entire collapses into itself and breaks down, meaning a Auniversal dissolution@ of the text itself Ainto whiteness and snow@ (Lawrence, Women, 254). Lawrence himself might see, in Eliot, a perfect representation of Gerald, doomed to a Asnow abstract annihilation@ at the hands of his own Aice-destructive knowledge@ (Lawrence, Women, 254). I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s=ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon B O swallow swallow
Le Prince d=Aqutaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo=s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih (Eliot, Waste, 424-34)
Birkin, in contemplating Gerald=s death, comes to the conclusion that Athose who die, and dying still can love, still believe, do not die@; Eliot portrays the death of a world devoid of love, devoid of belief, in which the distance between action and meaning, between perception and reality, has become too great to overcome, and thus a world unable to transcend death and reinvent itself. The world of Women in Love, however, in providing the reader with a new truth, a new belief, overcomes its tragic ending by living on in the reader, by providing its audience, its Abeloved@, with a new truth to test against reality. The progression of the two works, though they start in similar places, reach much different ends; while the processes of The Waste Land grind to a halt in its final moments, the processes in Women in Love are only gearing up by the end of the novel. The distance between these two outlooks, between the despair of dissolution and the hope of rebirth, turns out, upon inspection, to be a distance not occluded by the presence of the Shadow, but rather illuminated by the texts that describe them, texts that reflect and rejoin each other in their mutual exploration of the Modernist world.
Works Cited Aiken, Conrad. AAn Anatomy of Melancholy.@ A Collection of Critical Essays on AThe Waste Land. Ed. Jay Martin. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968. 55-56, 58. Brooks, Cleanth. AThe Waste Land: Critique of the Myth.@ A Collection of Critical Essays on AThe Waste Land. Ed. Jay Martin. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968. 59, 80.
Eliot, T. S. AThe Hollow Men.@ Selected Poems. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1930. l. 72-89.
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