by Peter Watson
The poem is divided into six parts: ‘The Epigraph,’ ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ ‘A Game of Chess,’ ‘The Fire Sermon,’ ‘Death by Water,’ and ‘What the Thunder Said.’ All the tides are evocative and all, on first acquaintance, obscure. There is a chorus of voices, sometimes individual, sometimes speaking in words borrowed from the classics of various cultures, sometimes heard via the incantations of the ‘blind and thwarted’ Tiresias.16 At one moment we pay a visit to a tarot reader, at another we are in an East End pub at closing time, next there is a reference to a Greek legend, then a line or two in German. Until one gets used to it, the approach is baffling, quite unlike anything encountered elsewhere. Even stranger, the poem comes with notes and references, like an academic paper. These notes, however, repay inspection. For study of the myths introduces other civilisations, with different but coherent worldviews and a different set of values. And this is Eliot’s point: if we are to turn our back on the acquisitive society, we have to be ready to work:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
It takes no time at all for the poem to veer between the heroic and the banal, knitting a sense of pathos and bathos, outlining an ordinary world on the edge of something finer, yet not really aware that it is.
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at morning rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?’17
The first two lines hint at Isaiah’s prophecy of a Messiah who will be ‘as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land’ (Isaiah 32.2). The German comes direct from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde: ‘Fresh blows the wind/Toward home/My Irish child/Where are you waiting?’ The imagery is dense, its aim ambitious. The Waste Land cannot be understood on one reading or without ‘research’ or work. It has been compared (by Stephen Coote, among others) to an Old Master painting in which we have first to learn the iconography before we can understand fully what is being said. In order to appreciate his poem, the reader has to open himself or herself to other cultures, to attempt an escape from this sterile one. The first two ‘confidential copies’ of the poem were sent to John Quinn and Ezra Pound.18
Eliot, incidentally, did not share the vaguely Freudian view of most people at the time (and since) that art was an expression of the personality. On the contrary, for him it was ‘an escape from personality.’ He was no expressionist pouring his ‘over-charged soul’ into his work. The Waste Land is, instead, the result of detailed reflection, of craftsmanship as well as art, owing as much to the rewards of a good education as the disguised urges of the unconscious. Much later in the century, Eliot would publish considerably fiercer views about the role of culture, particularly ‘high’ culture in all our lives, and in less poetic terms. In turn, he himself would be accused of snobbery and worse. He was ultimately, like so many writers and artists of his day, concerned with ‘degeneration’ in cultural if not in individual or biological terms.
Frederick May, the critic and translator, has suggested that Luigi Pirandello’s highly innovative play Six Characters in Search of an Author is a dramatic analogue of The Waste Land: ‘Each is a high poetic record of the disillusionment and spiritual desolation of its time, instinct with compassion and poignant with the sense of loss … each has become in its own sphere at once the statement and the symbol of its age.’19
Born in Caos, near Girgenti (the modern Agrigento) in Sicily in 1867, in the middle of a cholera epidemic, Pirandello studied literature in Palermo, Rome and Bonn. He began publishing plays in 1889, but success did not arrive fully until 1921, by which time his wife had entered a nursing home for the insane. His two plays that will be considered here, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), and Henry IV (1922), are united in being concerned with the impossibility of describing, or even conceiving, reality. ‘He dramatises the subconscious.’ In the earlier title, six characters invade the rehearsal of a play, a play Pirandello had himself written a few years earlier, insisting that they are not actors, nor yet people, but characters who need an ‘author’ to arrange the story that is within them. As with Wittgenstein, Einstein, and Freud, Pirandello is drawing attention to the way words break down in describing reality. What is the difference – and the overlap – between character and personality, and can we ever hope to pin them down in art? Just as Eliot was trying to produce a new form of poetry, Pirandello was creating a new form of drama, where theatre itself comes under the spotlight as a form of truth-telling. The characters in his plays know the limits to their understanding, that truth is relative, and that their problem, like ours, is to realise themselves.
Six Characters created a scandal when it was first performed, in Rome, but a year later received a rapturous reception in Paris. Henry IV had a much better reception in Italy when it was premiered in Milan, and after that Pirandello’s reputation was made. As did Eliot’s, his wife descended into madness and Pirandello later formed a relationship with the Italian actress Marta Abba.20 Unlike Eliot, whose art was forged despite his personal circumstances, Pirandello several times used madness as a dramatic device.21 Henry IV tells the story of a man who, twenty years before, had fallen from his horse during a masquerade in which he was dressed as the German emperor Henry IV, and was knocked unconscious when he hit his head on the paving. In preparation for the masquerade, the man had read widely about the emperor and, on coming to, believed he was in fact Henry IV. To accommodate his illness his wealthy sister has placed him in a mediaeval castle surrounded by actors dressed as eleventh-century courtiers who enable him to live exactly as Henry IV did, though they move in and out of their roles, confusingly and at times hilariously (without warning, a costumed actor will suddenly light up a cigarette). Into this scene are introduced old friends, including Donna Matilda, still beautiful, her daughter Frida, and a doctor. Here Pirandello’s mischief is at its highest, for we can never be sure whether Henry is still mad, or only playing a part. Like the fool in earlier forms of theatre, Henry asks his fellow characters penetrating questions: ‘Do you remember always being the same?’ Therefore, we never quite know whether Henry is a tragic figure, and aware that he is. This would make him moving – and also sane. It would also make all the others in the play either fools or mad, or possibly both. But if Henry is fully sane, does it make sense for him to live on as he does? Everyone in the play, though real enough, is also desperate, living a lie.
The real tragedy occurs when the doctor, in order to ‘treat’ Henry by facing him with a shocking reality, provokes him into murder. In Henry IV no one really understands themselves completely, least of all the man of science who, so certain of himself and his methods, precipitates the greatest calamity. Devastated by the wasteland of his life, Henry had opted for a ‘planned’ madness, only to have that backfire on him too. Life, for Pirandello, was like a play within a play, a device he used many times: one can never be entirely sure who is acting and who is not. One cannot even be sure when one is acting oneself.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, discussed in chapter 9, was actually published in the annus mirabilis of 1922. So too was The Last Days of Mankind, the great work of Wittgenstein’s Viennese friend Karl Kraus. Kraus, who was Jewish,
had been part of Jung Wien at the Café Griensteidl in the early years of the century, mixing with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schoenberg. He was a difficult and slightly deformed man, with a congenital abnormality in his shoulders that gave him a stoop. A satirist of almost unrivalled mordancy, he earned most of his considerable income from lectures and readings. At the same time, he published a magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch), three times a month, from 1899 until his death in 1936. This made him a lot of enemies but also earned him a wide following, which even extended to the troops on the front line in World War I. Punctilious to a degree, he was no less interested in language than his philosopher friend and was genuinely pained by solecisms, infelicitous turns of phrase, ungainly constructions. His aim, he once said, ‘is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.’22 Bitterly opposed to feminine emancipation, which he regarded as ‘a hysterical response to sexual neurosis,’ he hated the smugness and anti-Semitism of the Viennese press, together with the freewheeling freemasonry that, more than once, led him into the libel courts. Kraus was in effect doing in literature and society what Loos was doing in architecture, attacking the pompous, self-regarding self-satisfaction of the ancien régime. As he himself described his aim in Die Fackel: ‘What has been laid down here is nothing else than a drainage system for the broad marshes of phraseology.’23
The Last Days of Mankind was written – usually late at night – during the summers of World War I and immediately afterward. On occasions Kraus escaped to Switzerland, to avoid the turmoil of Vienna and the attentions of the censor. His deformity had helped him avoid military service, which made him already suspect in the eyes of certain critics, but his opposition to the aims of the Central Powers earned him even more opprobrium. The play was his verdict on the war, and although certain passages appeared in Die Fackel in 1919 it wasn’t completed until 1921, by which time Kraus had added much new material.24 The play draws a cumulative strength from hundreds of small vignettes, all taken from newspaper reports and, therefore, not invented. Life at the front, in all its horror and absurdity, is juxtaposed (in a verbal equivalent of Kurt Schwitters’s technique) with events back in Vienna, in all their absurdity and venality. Language is still the central element for Kraus (Last Days is essentially a play for voices rather than action). We witness the Kaiser’s voice, that of the poet, the man at the front, Jewish dialects from Vienna, deliberately cheek-by-jowl with one another to throw each crime – of thought or action – into relief. The satirist’s technique, of holding one phrase (or thought, or belief, or conviction) against its opposite, or reciprocal, is devastatingly effective, the more so as time passes.
The play has been rarely performed because of its length – ten hours – and Kraus himself claimed that it was intended only for performances on Mars because ‘people on Earth could not bear the reality presented to them.’25 At the end of the play, mankind destroys itself in a hail of fire, and the last lines, put into the mouth of God, are those attributed to the Kaiser at the start of the war: ‘I did not want it.’ Brecht’s epitaph of Kraus was: ‘As the epoch raised its hand to end its life, he was this hand.’26
The most overwhelming of the great books that appeared in 1922 was Ulysses, by James Joyce. On the surface, the form of Joyce’s Ulysses could not be more different from The Waste Land or Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, which will be considered later. But there are similarities, and the authors were aware of them. Ulysses was also in part a response to the war – the last line reads: ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921.’ As Eliot does in The Waste Land, Joyce, as Eliot himself commented in a review, uses an ancient myth (in this case Homer) as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’27
Born in Dublin in 1882, Joyce was the oldest child in a family of ten. The family struggled financially but still managed to give James a good education at Jesuit schools and University College, Dublin. He then moved to Paris, where at first he thought he might be a doctor. Soon, though, he started to write. From 1905 he lived in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway who he had met on Nassau Street, Dublin, in 1904. Chamber Music was published in 1907, and Dubliners, a series of short stories, in 1914. On the outbreak of war, Joyce was obliged to move to neutral Zurich (Ireland was then ruled by Great Britain), though he considered Prague as an alternative.28 During hostilities, he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but it was Ulysses that brought him international fame. Some chapters appeared first in 1919 in a London magazine, the Egoist. However, the printers and some subscribers took objection, and publication of subsequent chapters was discontinued. Joyce next turned to an avant-garde American magazine, the Little Review, which published other chapters of the book, but in February 1921 that magazine was found guilty of obscenity, and the editors were fined.29 Finally Joyce approached a young bookseller in Paris, another American named Sylvia Beach, and her shop, Shakespeare & Co., published the book in its entirety on 2 February 1922. For the first edition, one thousand copies were printed.
There are two principal characters in Ulysses, though many of the countless minor ones are memorable too. Stephen Dedalus is a young artist going through a personal crisis (like Western civilisation he has dried up, lost his large ambitions and the will to create). Leopold Bloom – ‘Poldy’ to his wife, and modelled partly on Joyce’s father and brother – is a much more down-to-earth character. Joyce (influenced by the theories of Otto Weininger) makes him Jewish and slightly effeminate, but it is his unpretentious yet wonderfully rich life, inner and outer, that makes him Ulysses.30 For it is Joyce’s point that the age of heroes is over.* He loathed the ‘heroic abstractions’ for which so many soldiers were sacrificed, ‘the big words which make us so unhappy.’31 The odyssey of his characters is not to negotiate the fearsome mythical world of the Greeks – instead, he gives us Bloom’s entire day in Dublin on 16 June 1904.32 We follow Bloom from the early preparation of his wife’s breakfast, his presence at the funeral of a friend, encounters with newspaper acquaintances, racing aficionados, his shopping exploits, buying meat and soap, his drinking, a wonderfully erotic scene where he is on the beach near three young women and they are watching some fireworks, and a final encounter with the police on his way home late at night. We leave him gently climbing into bed next to his wife and trying not to wake her, when the book shifts perspective and gives us his wife Molly’s completely unpunctuated view of Bloom.
It is one of the book’s attractions that it changes style several times, from stream of consciousness, to question-and-answer, to a play that is also a dream, to more straightforward exchanges. There are some lovely jokes (Shakespeare is ‘the chap that writes like Synge’, ‘My kingdom for a drink’) and some hopelessly childish puns (‘I beg your parsnips’); incredibly inventive language, teeming with allusions; endless lists of people and things and references to the latest developments in science. One point of the very great length of the book (933 pages) is to recreate a world in which the author slows life down for the reader, enabling him or her to relish the language, a language that never sleeps. In this way, Joyce draws attention to the richness of Dublin in 1904, where poetry, opera, Latin and liturgy are as much a part of everyday lower-middle-class life as are gambling, racing, minor cheating and the lacklustre lust of a middle-aged man for virtually every woman he meets.33 ‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read’, said Joyce to his cousin, responding to criticism, ‘life isn’t fit to live.’ Descriptions of food are never far away, each and every one mouthwatering (‘Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith.’). Place names are left to hang, so we realise how improbable but very beautiful even proper names are: Malahide, Clonghowes, Castleconnel. Joyce revisits words, rearranges spelling and punctuation so that we see these words, and what they represent, anew: ‘Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday …’, ‘He smellsip
ped the cordial …’, ‘Her ample bedwarmed flesh …’, ‘Dynamitard’.34
In following Bloom the reader – like Dedalus – is exhilarated and liberated.35 Bloom has no wish to be anything other than who he is, ‘neither Faust nor Jesus’. Bloom inhabits an amazingly generous world, where people allow each other to be as they are, celebrating everyday life and giving a glimpse of what civilisation can evolve into: food, poetry, ritual, love, sex, drink, language. They can be found anywhere, Joyce is saying. They are what peace – inner and out – is.
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay about Ulysses in the Dial magazine in 1923, in which he confessed that the book for him had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery,’ and indeed part of Joyce’s aim was to advance language, feeling it had dropped behind as science had expanded. He also liked the fact that Joyce had used what he called ‘the mythical method.’37 This, he believed, might be a way forward for literature, replacing the narrative method. But the most revealing difference between Ulysses, on the one hand, and The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room, and Henry IV on the other, is that in the end Stephen Dedalus is redeemed. At the beginning of the book, he is in an intellectual and moral wasteland, bereft of ideas and hope. Bloom, however, shows himself throughout the book as capable of seeing the world through others’ eyes, be it his wife Molly, who he knows intimately, or Dedalus, a relative stranger. This not only makes Bloom profoundly unprejudiced – in an anti-Semitic world – but it is, on Joyce’s part, a wonderfully optimistic message, that connections are possible, that solitude and atomisation, alienation and ennui are not inevitable.