6 - Being Between Two Lives: Reading The Waste Land

Summary

[Dandyism is] above all a burning need to acquire originality, within the apparent bounds of convention. It is a sort of cult of oneself, which can dispense even with what are commonly called illusions. It is the delight in causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished.

Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

Man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects.

Emerson, “Nature”

The essential Relativity of all knowledge, thought, or consciousness cannot but show itself in language. If everything that we know is viewed as a transition from something else, every experience must have two sides; and either every name must have a double meaning, or else for every meaning there must be two names.

Alexander Bain, Logic: Deductive and Inductive, Book 1, Chapter 1

Though it is rare to find a discussion that does not add to one's understanding of The Waste Land, a sense nonetheless persists that something about the poem remains disembodied, out of context, just beyond critical reach. However necessary, the decades of source hunting and literary sleuthing proved to be only an intermediate stage that, far from slowing down the proliferation of interpretation, probably accelerated it. Despite renewed attention to The Waste Land recently, asking “How do we read this poem?” remains a legitimate question. Perhaps it is the only question. Yet as if this fundamental inquiry were not difficult enough, the subsidiary problems of linking The Waste Land to Eliot's prose criticism and fitting it into his poetic development also remain to be explored.