An Ontology of Distance in The Waste Land

D. W. White

Literary Criticism

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Of the great moments in literature, perhaps no other is as closely identified with pure language as much as Modernism, that incessant revolution of the word. The Modernists took as their clarion call the unabridged and unfiltered machinations of language, a joyous elegy marking the death of the lineal and the grammatical. There is no small irony, then, that much of what the Modernists¹ were after was beyond the immediate purview of language itself. This extra-linguistic realm is the goal of Modernist literature, a communication beyond the denotative and the grammatical, a conveyance of expression, feeling, or thought that works, like visual art, to enact more than articulate.

In prose, this is best exemplified in the wild, whirring words of Woolf in Mrs Dalloway or Joyce in the “Penelope” Episode of Ulysses—the banal enormity of Molly Bloom’s nighttime presence is more understood by the weight and association of the words used than explicated by the traditional machinations of language. We might think of this distinction as one drawn between an aesthetic ontology and a mimetic one—rather than a representation of everything Molly is thinking, experiencing, and remembering, it is the feeling of the words, artistically, that grounds the meaning of the passage and thereby causes it, on its own terms, to exist.² These are terms of an engagement that poetry has long been waging: to work sense-affectively rather then strictly explanatory. It is, in one sense, that which separates the two forms. In T. S. Eliot’s seminal The Waste Land, this aesthetic ontology serves to ground the poem’s immense communicative functions in a quintessentially Modernist artistry while capturing the poet’s pervasive outsider status; an American moving through a fractured Europe in search of meaning in the corporeal and the spiritual; a supremely ambitious work of literature that expresses far more than it says.

One can see this focus on the extra-linguistic in the work and commentary of countless poets, including Eliot himself. Of Dante, he notes how ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’; Matthew Hollis observes that here Eliot reaches towards a “central nervous system” for poetry, one that has a “pre- or para-linguistic pulse – a pattern of emotive sound that suggests a tonal meaning before the words arrive.”³ Another poet (and novelist, and critic) Lucy Ives, finds something similar in the Commedia:

I have never been one to believe everything I read, but I have never so agreed with literature as in late 2014, when, at the age of thirty- four, I experienced what I took to be the end of my life. Ché la diritta via era smarrita. Where the right way was—one barely needs to translate Dante’s adjective, the sound itself offers so much. Smarrita. This gorgeous adjective, an offspring of the verb smarrire, “to lose or become faded,” has survived in modern Italian. It is used to mean missing, mislaid, astray, stray, bewildered, nonplussed. Synonyms include vagabondo, perduto, disperso. Doesn’t it even sound wiped away? Swept into a mess, a dusty pile subject to the frivolities of the wind; meaningful traces covered with material, smeared and eroded, disordered and glommed, cluttered, lost. Smarrita. That s and m: you feel and see the soil of the road, rub your palm in it. At least I do.⁴

This passage captures nicely the immediacy that language, in its artistic mode, can reach, vectored phenomenologically, a continental viewing of an analytic show, reaching deeper towards the mind, and the associative chains it may set alight—for both reader and writer alike. Indeed, according to Hollis, Eliot qua critic became renown for his theory—of the objective correlative—wherein through a “knowledge of tradition and the impersonality of objects, a force of individuality can uncover an expression personal to the poet and understood by the reader.”⁵ To achieve this “depersonalization” was first required a personal experience, the raw data of emotion, a life lived, from which the poet might alchemize into his art.⁶ Despite his long tenure in England, Eliot found himself “always coming up against differences in feeling that make one feel humiliated and lonely. One remains always a foreigner.”⁷ In the period immediately after the First World War, Eliot faced the death of his father, the strain of his marriage, and the isolation of grey, wet London. Thus in composing The Waste Land, Eliot drew on years of source material, born of the changes wrought by life, and death—as a son removed from his father, a husband distanced from his wife, an artist separated from his home—crafting a work that, like all “genuine poetry,” would be able to “communicate before it is understood.”

From Ives’ earthy smarrita we might fall back upon Eliot’s marmoreal, windswept opening:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Like Ives’ reading of Dante, one can feel the rhythm and texture as they invoke more than announce. As Hollis observes, all three of Eliot’s central elements to a poem—a distinctive cadence, personal mode of arrangement, and individual interpretation of traditional craft—appear in this first stanza, with its surprising pace and breath that sweeps “in a carousel of sound and childhood.”⁸ This associative functioning worked to distill, capture, and emote Eliot’s individual, poetic genesis into a new form, playing seriously off the foundations of the old—tradition, as he put it, mixed with individual talent. These associations which form the beating heart of The Waste Land operate, through words, extra-linguistically. As Virginia Woolf put it: “I have only the sound of it in my ears, when he read it aloud; and have not yet tackled the sense. But I liked the sound.”⁹ The sense, as both Woolf and Elliot knew, would come later, would come to each wearing a new disguise. But the first, the most immediate, the most essential, was the feeling—the enactment rather than the articulation.

This interior-exterior continuum, running not only from the outer world in (and back again) but from the universal sound to its individual emotion, gains its ontological force from the aesthetic communication offered by Wittgensteinian public-private language roles. Stanley Cavell, on reading Wittgenstein, talks of his wonder at

how he can arrive at the completed and unshakable edifice of shared language from within such apparently fragile and intimate moments—private moments—as our separate counts and out-calls of phenomena, which are after all hardly more than our interpretations of what occurs, and with no assurance of conventions to back them up.¹⁰

Tradition and the individual talent—for the Modernists who were devouring the convention from within—as Eliot said to Woolf, “We’re trying something harder”¹¹—there is nothing upon which to construct the edifice of their art beyond the art itself; it is a deeply personal, idiosyncratic lived experience that forms the genesis of the artistic act, moving outward via a medium of language that inherently cannot capture the whole. To fully encompass the imminently personal and therefore human experience that art wishes to achieve, one must find a way from the unsayable inner realm towards the comprehensible outer world. That is to say, one requires art. For Eliot, a lived reality comprised at once of artistic lineage and personal isolation sought to reveal itself through the deep-rooted, yet innovative, poetic form terminating in The Waste Land. 

If an inner world antecedent to grammatical language constitutes the gravitational orientation of High Modernist literature, poetry of the movement—The Waste Land most of all—perhaps most recognizably entails certain moments wherein a literary technique can allow the delivery of [consciousness / emotion / specific and individual locale in the extant world] extra-linguistically: more immediately—and more deeply—than grammar-based explication can do. This involves us in denotation vs connotation, certainly, but much more about feeling. Hollis adopts seamlessly his understanding as a critic of poetry in exploring this concept:

If you experience the cadence then you animate the image, and if you can do that then you have communed through your senses with the poem before it has been decoded by the brain phenomenologically. The rest – intention, allusion, tradition, context – is additional, and is something that happened around the event of the poem, but which is not the poem itself. The meaning of a poem is its sensory event: imagined pictures cast on received sounds.¹²

Building out this distinction between an aesthetically-grounded ontology on the one hand and a mimetically-grounded one on the other achieves the idea that the art of (some) literature is that which provides its ability to communicate existence, in turn constituting its own existence (i.e. ontology). Wittgenstein: “All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place.”¹³ The impossibility of private language obviates it from the channel by which we think (which is something more immediate, more expansive, faster, more raw, more erratic, more associative), even while language (necessarily) is the thing that vectors our inner states outwards. But there is of course a price for this transaction, something lost in translation between this world and our own, something that cannot quite be got within the frame of typical, grammar-bound enactments of language, which fail as they do (must) to in fact capture how the person feels. Instead language is a convenient shorthand, something we all largely understand, and most of the time is good enough to use in day-to-day life. But literature—art—is not interested in “good enough”, it’s interested in what is:thus a transcendence, in the form of artistic skill, is sought. Eliot, intensely attuned to this difficulty, finds or fashions techniques that impart (perhaps: impose) rather than explain their meaning.

In The Waste Land, then, the persistent presence of the outsider is grounded and then accelerated through an aesthetic ontology of language, reifying a self-imposed excommunication. Eliot, like Joyce an exile by conviction more than circumstance, is the haunted, expatriated American whom Prufrock was destined to become. An unspeakably Modernist work, The Waste Land achieves an aesthetic meaning surpassing the limits of mimesis; paradoxically making manifest a sense of distance and isolation while bringing its audience irrevocably into the experience. A poem drawn through and then beyond a genesis in the personal realities of its creator, its ontological coherence is not one of grammar-bound language, but instead haunts work and reader alike, a ghost hidden amongst the words.

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Endnotes

1. “Modernists” in this paper will be synonymous with the High Modernist movement in literature of the 1920s, although I take Modernism and Modernists to be still stubbornly extant into the present day, most notably Rachel Cusk.  ↩︎
2. Modernism is obviously highly concerned with the mimetic; especially in external description. The turn here is inward, and an accompanying awareness that such finely realized details will not meaningfully approach true inner lived experience. ↩︎
3. Hollis, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, 24. ↩︎
4. Ives, An Image of My Name Enters America, 42. ↩︎
5. Hollis, 136. ↩︎
6. Cf Hollis, 142. ↩︎
7. Letter to his brother, July 1919. Reproduced in Hollis, 102. ↩︎
8. Hollis, 232. ↩︎
9. Letter to David Garnett, Oct. 1922. ↩︎
10. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 36. ↩︎
11.  Diary, March 22, 1921. NB the discussion of this entry in both Hollis, 248 vs Lee, 436-7. ↩︎
12. Hollis, 26. ↩︎
13. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109 ↩︎

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Works Cited

Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford, England: Oxford UP. 1979. Reprinted 1999.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land in The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. 1971.

Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. New York: Norton. 2023.

Ives, Lucy. An Image of My Name Enters America. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf. 2024.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage. 1999.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. 4th ed. West Sussex, England: Wiley-Blackwell. 2009.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. II, 1920-1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harvest. 1980.

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D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. He serves as Prose Editor for West Trade Review, and Executive Editor and Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches workshop along with classes on Modernism, Rachel Cusk, and the Self.

Photo Credit:  Irina Nakonechnaya on Unsplash