CORINNENOTES

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.

“The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that”.

With reference to the work of one or more writers discuss how and why the modernists experimented with their treatment of time and/or memory.

For Eliot, as for other modernist writers, linear time is not a full enough explanation of the flux of our lives. It constrains us and prevents us from realising our links with the past – and the future. In his poetry Eliot repeatedly attempts to look beyond the accepted definition of time, to explore our collective memory’s and to avoid the finality of beginnings and endings.

Eliot probably expressed his view of time and memory most lucidly in The Four Quartets and it is worthwhile to consider this emphatic statement on the failure of linear time before analysing the impact of time on his earlier, more radical, poems. To paraphrase Eliot would be to loose the impact of what he says and therefore it is necessary to quote the opening section of “Burnt Norton”:

This section of The Four Quartets is worthy of being an epigraph to the modernist movement. The abandonment of linear time, the notion that we exist in an eternal present, and, crucially, that what shapes us is not just the reality of the past but the ever present shadow of what could have been is as crucial to the understanding of writers such as Woolf as it is to the understanding of Eliot. For Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway it is not so much what actually happened at Bourton which haunts her, but the possibilities of what could have happened; the life she might have had with Peter, and more pertinently, the life she could have had with Sally. In Joyce’s Dubliners for Little Chandler in “A little Cloud” it is not the reality of his life which affects him but rather the constant reflections on what he could have been, and it this which he orients his life around. To go beyond the modernists, which I will later argue is integral to the understanding of the portrayal of time and memory in Eliot’s poetry, we see the same phenomenon in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where Jay Gatsby orients his life, not just around the past, but also around what would have happened had he not been poor when he first knew Daisy. This is also complicated by the fact that Gatsby invents memories for himself, which are definitely, to use Eliot’s words, “the world of speculation”.

If Eliot refutes the idea of linear time he does not abandon the use of markers of time such as seasons and day and night. The Waste Land famously opens with the line “April is the cruellest month”, a subverted version of Chaucer’s opening to the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. In “Portrait of a Lady” there is a clear ‘progression’ from the “December afternoon”, through “April sunsets” and an “August afternoon” to the “October night”. In “Preludes” we are confronted by “winter”, “evening”, and “morning” as well as “four and five and six o’clock”. “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, as the title would suggest, is set at night, and is dominated by the tick of the clock and the announcement of the time. Equally we encounter morning in “Morning at the Window”, and an even more specific morning in “Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”. However, and crucial to the portrayal of time in Eliot’s poetry, we are never given a specific date or year. Indeed Eliot’s use of these markers of time serves to highlight the similarities between them, rather than the differences. The “smoke and fog” of December in “Portrait of a Lady” is practically inseparable from the “smoky days” of “Preludes”. Equally The Waste Land’s April is precisely the same as that of “Portrait of a Lady”, which makes the lady think of her “buried life”, while the “lilacs…bloom”, just as the “lilacs” in “The Burial of the Dead” stir “dull roots”. Indeed Eliot and the modernists are not alone in this portrayal of April and spring, as Sylvia Plath’s poem “Spinster” demonstrates. There are not separate Aprils; instead there is only one eternal and undifferentiating April, as there is only one winter, summer and autumn. Equally it is difficult to differentiate between separate days. A morning is always a morning and the night is always the night. Equally the apparent rate of ‘progression’ in “Portrait of a Lady” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” needs to be questioned. Does it matter that one measures time in months and the other in hours? Is there really any difference between these units of time? Eliot would lead us to believe that there isn’t, and that they ultimately all “dissolve” into one another. This view is also shown in the novels of Joyce and Woolf. In Ulysses the action takes place over the course of a day but ultimately transcends such barriers, just as its title would suggest. Mrs Dalloway is, like Ulysses, set on a single day and is dominated by the striking of Big Ben. Crucially, however, Woolf repeatedly uses the word “dissolve” when describing Big Ben striking the hour, and the novel is as dominated by the past, for both Septimus and Clarissa, as it is by the day on which the action occurs. Equally Woolf demonstrates this concept of time in her mock biographies, Jacob’s Room and Orlando. In Jacob’s Room there is only one date mentioned, 1906, and the events of Jacob’s life are allowed to flow into one another. In Orlando Woolf dispenses with a traditional time frame as Orlando lives over the course of three centuries. Separating time into differing units, for the modernists, is not possible – these rigid definitions will simply “dissolve”.

If we recognise in Eliot’s work that there is only one eternal ‘day’[1] then this poses questions about the nature of past, present and future being separate entities. This fusion of past and present is shown in “Gerontion”. Gerontion’s very name suggests the past, as does the war reference to Thermopylae in the “hot gates” of line 3. However the “contrived corridors” are an allusion to the Versailles treaty and “estaminet” is a word which came into the English language following the return of soldiers from France and Belgium after the First World War. In this respect the poem undergoes a further fusion with The Waste Land, where Tiresias, who like Gerontion is labelled an “old man”, presides over “Mylae” as well as an “Archduke”. In many respects “Gerontion” is an embryonic The Waste Land[2] and it demonstrates the fusion of human and humanity, as well as past and present, which dominates the later poem. It also deliberately echoes the blank verse of Jacobean dramatists, with a particular allusion to Beatrice’s “I am that of your blood was taken from you” in Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling. This also gives the passage sexual connotations and links further to The Waste Land where “A Game of Chess” is an allusion to Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Through “Gerontion” we are made aware of the fusion which dominates Eliot’s work, there is no time and therefore no past or present.

If we accept that for Eliot time is not fixed, that it “dissolves” and that there is no past, present or future but simply an eternal now, then it poses a bigger, and even more complex question about the nature of his work – if there is no time, where do Eliot’s poems begin and end? For Victorian writers this was not even a consideration in their thinking. Charles Dickens was confident enough about the nature of time to emphatically open David Copperfield with “I am Born”, describing this as “to begin my life with the beginning of my life” [my italics]. Equally George Eliot started Adam Bede with a precise date – “the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799”. For the modernists there is no such structure of time. The Waste Land may start with the evocation of spring but it, crucially, is not where the poem begins – its origins lie in Thebes and even further beyond. Or to be pedantic the origins of the poem lie in the original manuscript, though if we see “Gerontion” as being the embryonic expression of the sentiments shown in The Waste Land then this takes us beyond the original draft. If we do that though what is to stop us from going beyond even this, beyond Eliot’s work, and to the sources of his poetry? Where does the beginning of The Waste Land lie? The First World War? In Middleton’s plays or Chaucer’s poetry? In Dante’s Inferno or in Satyricon? Equally if we are unable to state when the poem begins when does the poem finish? Unlike Thackeray Eliot never puts his puppets back into their box. Should we claim, as it would be easy to do, that after Eliot’s conversion to Anglicism that we are dealing with a totally ‘different’ poet and that The Waste Land marks the end of a period of Eliot’s work; that “Shantih, shantih, shantih” is not just the dénouement of the poem but the dénouement of everything which The Waste Land expresses? I have already stated the importance of The Four Quartets as an epigraph to the modernist movement and therefore feel that to suggest that The Waste Land ends with the final words on the manuscript is to hugely underestimate Eliot and what he was trying to achieve[3]. To understand Eliot’s poetry therefore we have to look beyond his work, and the key factor in this is his use of allusions.

To signal the fact that his poems do not ‘begin’ with their opening lines Eliot repeatedly uses epigraphs. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the epigraph is from Dante’s Inferno. Spoken by Count Guido da Montefeltro it is addressed to Dante, as Guido believes he may speak freely because, like himself, Dante is one of the dead who will never return to earth from hell. This immediately links Prufrock with Guido and the reader with Dante – Prufrock will speak to us from his own personal hell, because we too are trapped there. This idea is something which Eliot repeatedly uses in The Waste Land, most noticeably in the final line of “The Burial of the Dead”, when he quotes directly from Baudelaire’s introductory poem to Flowers of Evil. Dante’s[4] hell is also alluded to in The Waste Land, with the nameless, faceless stream of people crossing London Bridge being Eliot’s equivalent of Dante’s spiritual dead. In a further extension of this image, and thereby the idea that all time, people and places are ultimately the same thing, Woolf uses this motif in Jacob’s Room. This flowing effect between the different works highlights the continuous loop of time which Eliot desired to create – each of these uses of the spiritual dead, the references to Dante, and the attacks on the reader, build up layers in the work, as the present infects past just as much as the past infects the present. This continual dove tailing of ideas and images means that it is easy to be diverted from your original path, as I have just demonstrated. Of course I started with epigraphs and these merit further exploration. In “Portrait of a Lady”, the title of which is itself an allusion to Henry James’s[5] The Portrait of a Lady and therefore immediately draws up the image of Isabel Archer, suggesting the possibility that the “lady” is not unique to Eliot, the epigraph is taken from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. The “wench” which Barabas, the Jew of the title, talks of, links to the “lady” in Eliot’s poem, who is also abandoned by the speaker. In turn Eliot also uses The Jew of Malta as the source of the epigraph of “Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”, though this time the attack is directed at the church rather than the speaker, but it creates a double layering of ‘sin’, which is difficult to disentangle.

One of the most enlightening of Eliot’s epigraphs in relation to his presentation of time and memory is the one which precedes The Waste Land. Taken from Petronius’s Satyricon it refers to the Cumaen Sibyl[6] who possessed eternal life, but not eternal youth. The only thing which the Sibyl is left to do is “long to die”. The first of the mythical allusions in The Waste Land it establishes the lack of hope which characterises the majority of the poem and also links to Tiresias. The fact that the Sibyl is eternal also suggests an abandonment of time constraints, in a similar way to that of Woolf’s Orlando. The Sibyl is representative of all the characters which Eliot portrays –from Gerontion to the women in the second half of “A Game of Chess”, they, and us, are all ultimately trapped in a never ending moment that encapsulates the past, present and future. Only through death can we hope to escape this. The Sibyl is one of the major examples of where Eliot’s poem does not “finish”, as the Sibyl goes on beyond the confines of the poem. Equally Eliot’s Sibyl is also the source of allusion in Waugh’s Handful of Dust[7]. In Waugh the Sibyl is Tony Last, who at the conclusion to the novel is also trapped, forced to read Dickens until he dies. Notably the fact that Tony is trapped becomes apparent only after he has had his watch taken from him. After this literal removal of time, it ceases to exist for Tony – there is no tomorrow, simply an everlasting today. But of course if we accept Eliot’s reasoning then Tony’s watch is merely an outward symbol of time, just as is suggested in Stoppard’s If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, and Tony has been freed from the illusion of time, and is allowed to see the, admittedly painful and terrifying, reality of time.

If the Sibyl always exits, her addition to The Waste Land, however, was a late one. In the original draft the epigraph for the poem was:

“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –

This epigraph is taken from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and while it may well have been rejected from the published version of The Waste Land due to Pound’s belief that it was not “literary” enough to open the poem, if we follow through the notion that the beginning of the poem is long before the line “April is the cruellest month”, and especially the idea that what did not happen is just as important as what actually did, then this quotation is important to our understanding of the poem. Kurtz is a less universal figure than the Sibyl, after all the words are those he says when dying – something which the Sibyl can only long to do. However, like Tiresias, as well as the Sibyl, Kurtz actually sees, something, which is highly important for these prophetic characters. Kurtz looks past the substance, and into the heart of darkness; a heart of darkness which Eliot’s poem would suggest is universal. Kurtz also provides a link with Eliot’s poetry beyond The Waste Land as “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” is the epigraph to “Hollow Men”. In The Waste Land it is “the horror” rather than death which Eliot chooses to dominate, and chiefly the horror of the eternal now.

Eliot makes such extensive use of allusions that it would be easy to spend eternity, if that term really exists, examining them. Due to this I am going to focus on one aspect of his use of allusions to connect the past to the present, those allusions to Shakespeare, and, in particular, to the two major ones in The Waste Land. One of the most noticeable allusions to Shakespeare’s plays in this poem is that of the opening section of “A Game of Chess” which is a parody of Enobarbus’s speech in Act 2 Scene 2 of Anthony and Cleopatra. In Eliot’s version it is a neurotic woman who sits in a “burnished throne”, rather than Cleopatra. Equally while Cleopatra’s cupids are “pretty dimpled boys” Eliot’s equivalent “[hides] his eyes behind his wing”, a rather sinister and uncomfortable image. The “synthetic” perfumes of the neurotic woman “lurk”, waiting to assault the senses, and the rape of Philomel is evoked, completing the defilement of the passage. Eliot’s use of Anthony and Cleopatra provides several connections between the past and present. Firstly it links Anthony and Cleopatra to the neurotic woman and her disillusioned partner, suggesting an eternal degradation. Secondly once this link has been established it links both couples to Elizabeth and Leicester in “The Fire Sermon”, whose relationship is ultimately pointless. All of these couples connect with the typist and the carbuncular clerk of “The Fire Sermon”, whose relationship, reminiscent of the rape of Philomel due to Eliot’s echoing of the word “assault”, is one which is squalid and pathetic. In turn the reader is also forced to connect these couples with the emotional void demonstrated by the East End pub section of “A Game of Chess”, where fertility is not positive, but the subject of abortions. Like the fact that Eliot forces us to connect days, months and years, he also forces us to “dissolve” these relationships; they are simply one reoccurring couple, doomed in the waste land.

The second major allusion to Shakespeare in The Waste Land, and one which is particularly interesting in regard to Eliot’s portrayal of time and memory, is that to The Tempest. It is through the image of water which Eliot evokes via The Tempest that the “flow” of time is best shown. The “Death by Water” section is in stark contrast to The Tempest to which it alludes. In The Tempest drowning is positive as it leads to rebirth (“those are pearls that were his eyes”) while for Phlebas there is no such redemption. Instead of Shakespeare’s “sea nymphs” all Phlebas’s body is met with is the “gulls” that “pick at his bones”. The disillusioned man in “A Game of Chess” thinks of images of drowning in The Tempest and Madame Sosostris states that we should “fear death by water”. Water, and drowning, is a collective memory for all of those in The Waste Land. Equally beyond Eliot’s poetry it appears that water and drowning are part of a wider collective memory in 20^thcentury literature. Rivers are highly important in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and in “In Search of a City” in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is separated from his dream by water and eventually dies in his pool. Woolf’s novels are filled by water, and in particular the sea[8]. Plath, in particular, shares a similar view to Eliot on drowning. In “Full Fathom Five” (the title of which is an allusion to The Tempest) death by drowning is seen to be positive. “Suicide of Egg Rock” is Plath’s more contentious view of drowning, but the final line suggests relief and the possibility of positive drowning. Equally in The Bell Jar Esther first of all intends to kill herself in the bath and then attempts kill herself in the sea twice more. If we accept that there is no beginning or end to Eliot’s poetry, but just a continuous stream which flows in all directions, then these images of water contribute to our understanding of the poem just as much as those of The Tempest do.

Eliot’s view on memory and the past is most clearly shown through the tarot cards in The Waste Land:

In his notes Eliot linked the one-eyed merchant to Mr Eugenides, whose name means “well born”. The thing on his back which Madame Sosostris is forbidden to see, is the past which he, and indeed everyone since all of the characters ultimately “dissolve” into Tiresias, carries in some small part. That Tiresias is the defining character of the poem also adds to the idea of a collective memory that transcends time barriers – we are as much affected by “Mylae” and “Thebes” as we are by the “Archduke” and the “contrived corridor”.

For all Eliot’s attack on time it dominates his work. Moreover it creates a situation where Eliot’s work should not be read in isolation, and what follows his work is as much a part of it as what precedes it. Time flows and loops, is indefinable and cannot be caught. That we try so hard to define it is a result of our desire not to have to face “the horror” which is inevitable if we reject our rigid definitions. Eliot, however, forces us to look directly into the failure of our concept of time and to see how little it really means.

[1] . Using such terminology seems at odds with Eliot’s intention, but being conditioned by the tick of the clock I feel it is the clearest way, if not the most accurate, to describe Eliot’s creation.

[2] . This further confirmed by the fact that Eliot wished to use “Gerontion” as a preface to The Waste Land but was dissuaded in doing this by Pound.

[3] . This is not to suggest however that there is no difference between Eliot’s earlier and later poetry, it is simply that the differences should not obscure the fact that Eliot’s work has an overriding unity and continuation. Noticeably when Eliot stated in a letter to Richard Aldington in 1922 that The Waste Land “is a thing of the past…I am now feeling toward a new form and style” he used the word “past” which, considering The Four Quartet’s is a particularly loaded one.

[4] .Dante and his influence on Eliot’s poetry is one of the more obvious continuations between the pre and post The Waste Land poetry. For example “The Hollow Men” draws heavily from Dante’s Divina Commedia.

[5] .B.C.Southam in A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S.Eliot also states that “Burbank with a Baedeker” is a “joking, mocking tribute to Henry James”, which provides another connection between Eliot’s poems.

[6] . Interestingly the original title for Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is heavily allusive to The Waste Land, was “Trimalchio in West Egg”, another character from Satyricon, and noticeably one keeps “a uniformed trumpeter in his dining room, to keep telling him how much of his life is lost and gone”.

[7] . The title of this novel is also taken directly from “The Burial of the Dead” section of the poem, and the fact that it is “fear” which is shown in the “handful of dust” hints at the sense of danger and foreboding which does not become obvious until the latter part of the novel.

[8] . It is surely no coincidence that Woolf’s chosen method of suicide was drowning.