Read Online Fame & Folly by Cynthia Ozick - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Cynthia Ozick
Ads: Link
stand-in for the poet’s personal suffering—not Vivien but Tiresias. Secret becomes metaphor. Eliot’s biographers begin with the metaphor and unveil the secret. When the personal is exposed, the objective correlative is annihilated.
And yet the objective correlative has won out, after all, in a larger way. If
The Waste Land
can no longer hide its sources in Eliot’s private malaise, it has formidably sufficed as an “objective equivalence” for the public malaise of generations. Its evocations of ruin, loss, lamentation, its “empty cisterns and exhausted wells,” are broken sketches of the discontents that remain when the traditional props of civilization have failed: for some (unquestionably for Eliot), a world without God; for others, a world without so much as an illusion of intelligibility or restraint. In 1867, contemplating the Victorian crisis of faith, Matthew Arnold saw “a darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night,” but inEliot’s echoing “arid plain” there is nothing so substantial as even a clash—only formlessness, “hooded hordes swarming,” “falling towers”; hallucination succeeds hallucination, until all the crowns of civilization—“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London”—are understood to be “unreal.”
In 1922 (a postwar time of mass unemployment, economic disintegration and political uncertainty),
The Waste Land
fell out upon its era as the shattered incarnation of dissolution, the very text and texture of modernism—modernism’s consummate document and ode. In the almost seventy years since its first publication, it has taken on, as the great poems do (but not the very greatest), a bloom of triteness (as ripe truth can overmature into truism). It is no more “coherent” to its newest readers than it was to its astonished earliest readers, but it is much less difficult; tone and technique no longer startle. Post-Bomb, post-Holocaust, post-moonwalk, it may actually be too tame a poem to answer to the mindscape we now know more exhaustively than Eliot did. Professor Harry Levin, Harvard’s eminent pioneer promulgator of Proust, Joyce, and Eliot, quipped a little while ago—not altogether playfully—that modernism “has become old-fashioned.”
The Waste Land
is not yet an old-fashioned poem, and doubtless never will be. But it does not address with the same exigency the sons and daughters of those impassioned readers who ecstatically intoned it, three and four decades ago, in the belief that infiltration by those syllables was an aesthetic sacrament. Even for the aging generation of the formerly impassioned, something has gone out of the poem—not in
The Waste Land
proper, perhaps, but rather in that parallel work Eliot called “Notes on ‘The Waste Land.’ ” This was the renowned mock-scholarly apparatus Eliot tacked on to the body of the poem, ostensibly to spell out its multiple allusions—a contrivance that once seemed very nearly a separate set of modernist stanzas: arbitrary, fragmented, dissonant, above all solemnly erudite. “The whole passage from Ovid,” drones the sober professorial persona of the “Notes,” “is of great anthropological interest.” There follow nineteen lines of Latin verse. The procession of brilliantly variegated citations—Augustine, the Upanishads, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Hermann Hesse, Shakespeare,Tarot cards, the Grail legend—suggests (according to Professor Levin) that context was to Eliot what conceit was to the metaphysical poets. A fresh reading of the “Notes” admits to something else—the thumbed nose, that vein in Eliot of the practical joker, released through Macavity the Mystery Cat and in masses of unpublished bawdy verses (nowadays we might regard them as more racist than bawdy) starring “King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween.” In any case, whatever pose Eliot intended, no one can come to the “Notes” today with the old worshipful gravity. They seem drained of
And yet the objective correlative has won out, after all, in a larger way. If
The Waste Land
can no longer hide its sources in Eliot’s private malaise, it has formidably sufficed as an “objective equivalence” for the public malaise of generations. Its evocations of ruin, loss, lamentation, its “empty cisterns and exhausted wells,” are broken sketches of the discontents that remain when the traditional props of civilization have failed: for some (unquestionably for Eliot), a world without God; for others, a world without so much as an illusion of intelligibility or restraint. In 1867, contemplating the Victorian crisis of faith, Matthew Arnold saw “a darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night,” but inEliot’s echoing “arid plain” there is nothing so substantial as even a clash—only formlessness, “hooded hordes swarming,” “falling towers”; hallucination succeeds hallucination, until all the crowns of civilization—“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London”—are understood to be “unreal.”
In 1922 (a postwar time of mass unemployment, economic disintegration and political uncertainty),
The Waste Land
fell out upon its era as the shattered incarnation of dissolution, the very text and texture of modernism—modernism’s consummate document and ode. In the almost seventy years since its first publication, it has taken on, as the great poems do (but not the very greatest), a bloom of triteness (as ripe truth can overmature into truism). It is no more “coherent” to its newest readers than it was to its astonished earliest readers, but it is much less difficult; tone and technique no longer startle. Post-Bomb, post-Holocaust, post-moonwalk, it may actually be too tame a poem to answer to the mindscape we now know more exhaustively than Eliot did. Professor Harry Levin, Harvard’s eminent pioneer promulgator of Proust, Joyce, and Eliot, quipped a little while ago—not altogether playfully—that modernism “has become old-fashioned.”
The Waste Land
is not yet an old-fashioned poem, and doubtless never will be. But it does not address with the same exigency the sons and daughters of those impassioned readers who ecstatically intoned it, three and four decades ago, in the belief that infiltration by those syllables was an aesthetic sacrament. Even for the aging generation of the formerly impassioned, something has gone out of the poem—not in
The Waste Land
proper, perhaps, but rather in that parallel work Eliot called “Notes on ‘The Waste Land.’ ” This was the renowned mock-scholarly apparatus Eliot tacked on to the body of the poem, ostensibly to spell out its multiple allusions—a contrivance that once seemed very nearly a separate set of modernist stanzas: arbitrary, fragmented, dissonant, above all solemnly erudite. “The whole passage from Ovid,” drones the sober professorial persona of the “Notes,” “is of great anthropological interest.” There follow nineteen lines of Latin verse. The procession of brilliantly variegated citations—Augustine, the Upanishads, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Hermann Hesse, Shakespeare,Tarot cards, the Grail legend—suggests (according to Professor Levin) that context was to Eliot what conceit was to the metaphysical poets. A fresh reading of the “Notes” admits to something else—the thumbed nose, that vein in Eliot of the practical joker, released through Macavity the Mystery Cat and in masses of unpublished bawdy verses (nowadays we might regard them as more racist than bawdy) starring “King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween.” In any case, whatever pose Eliot intended, no one can come to the “Notes” today with the old worshipful gravity. They seem drained of
Similar Books
