View source for Allusions in Context

by Elizabeth Behm

    Understanding the allusions Eliot uses in the poem, and understanding the context in which the poem was originally published,
    are two extremely important parts of reading "The Wasteland."    
    Allusions: See [[Shoring Up Fragments Against Our Ruin: Quotations and Allusions]].    
    Context: See [[Archival Evidence]].

==Introduction==

The allusions within “The Wasteland” get a lot of attention because the poem’s internal structure and content rely so heavily on allusions. Eliot purposely uses them to convey certain messages. But perhaps equally important are the allusions surrounding the poem. By looking at what other pieces of literature (poetry, drama, fiction) that were published simultaneously with “The Wasteland” in two literary magazines of 1922, the intricate web of things available to be referenced in the minds of Eliot’s audience and contemporaries can be better filled out. With this knowledge, “The Wasteland” itself may even make more sense, especially for modern readers cannot already have all the same background information that someone in Eliot’s time would have had. Indeed, modern readers are mostly unaware of popular music from that era, and they must be wholly unfamiliar with the feeling of living in a post-“war to end all wars” society.

Really, the concept of allusion surrounds “The Wasteland” in surprising ways. For example, in ''The Dial'', there is paged entitled “Notes on the Contributors.” The magazine’s publishers find it relevant to allude to the previous work and the outside life of the authors and artists whose work is found in the magazine. The motivation behind including the page is clear: it is to give credibility to their contributors so that readers will take the magazine and its contents seriously. Interestingly, this is similar to what Eliot did in “The Wasteland”: by alluding to previously accepted works of literature, he gives his poem validity; by alluding to familiar issues, he gives his poem relatability. Apparently this is a concern of both author and publisher. perhaps it may even be generalized to all people in the postwar environment, as they asked themselves questions like, Was the war worth it? Is what I do worthwhile? People long for validation.

Further on the idea of validation, one way to measure the validity of a work would be to become the object of allusion oneself. On some of the pages with advertisements, ''The Dial'' includes the following request: “When writing to advertisers please mention the Dial.” When a reader mentions (alludes to) ''The Dial'', the advertiser knows his ad in that publication was profitable (worthwhile), so they renew the advertisement, which shows the magazine that readers are responding to what they’ve published. Both sides make sales: both sides are validated. Allusion has the potential to be a rather powerful force.

==Looking at Allusions with Gephi==

Network graphs are useful for visualizing information that might otherwise be difficult to inter-relate. Graphing the allusions found in “The Wasteland” and the other contemporary works of literature from the magazines it was published in with a program like Gephi (http://gephi.org/) can show upfront which types of allusions are used the most in which pieces—something that would take a lot of tedious work to deduce by hand. This information can be used as a starting point for analysis.

As with any data-displaying system, subjective decisions have to be made about how to categorize the data and what counts as relevant information at all. I have decided for simplicity’s sake to consider only one degree of allusion in the graphs. For example, when a certain piece of literature is alluded to, its author is also indirectly implied, but I have chosen to include only the name of the literary work itself.

In the networks included on this page, the points on the graph, or nodes, are organized based on the “thing referred to.” For example, in The Player Queen by W.B. Yeats, found in ''The Dial'', one character mentions that “my saviour was content with a stable,” which alludes to the birth of Jesus, so the allusion appears as a node called “Nativity.” From the alluded-to nodes come a variety of lines, or edges, that connect them to nodes with information about their Location (what piece from the magazine they come from, or what section of “The Wasteland” they come from), their Source (''Dial'', ''Criterion'', or “Wasteland”), and what type of allusion it is (place, religion, literature, etc.). By moving the nodes around to see where their connecting edges are pulled, patterns start to emerge.


''Network A: Allusions in “The Wasteland”''

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Let’s begin by looking at “The Wasteland” by itself. Network A is a network of the allusions from the poem (see [[Shoring Up Fragments Against Our Ruin: Quotations and Allusions]]), with the allusions nodes clustered in the middle, the sections of the poem along the bottom, and the types of allusions at the top. Clearly, some types of allusions are far less frequent in the poem than others. For instance, Jews and Gentiles are the only allusions associated with the category “group” [of people]. However, there are clearly a lot more references in the poem to places, religion, and literature. Place includes landmarks, cities, and countries; religion includes references to Christianity, Greek mythology, Buddhism, and mysticism; literature includes poetry and prose from contemporary authors and some from the past. Apparently, these are the traditions that Eliot most heavily relies on to aid his readers in the understanding of his poem.

Identifying these patterns opens up new questions about the nature of the allusions that may never have been asked without visualizing the information in this way. For example, knowing that there are so many subtypes of religious allusions, it might be helpful to picture what that distribution might look like.


''Network B: Religion in “The Wasteland”''

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Network B shows a network of only the religious allusions in “The Wasteland,” sorted by which religious tradition they are a part of. From the network, it is easy to see that more than half of the religious allusions in “The Wasteland” are Christian references: books of the Bible, events in the life of Jesus, people of the Bible, and one religious rite. It is interesting that all the religious allusions that fall under other subcategories are references to people within that religious/mythic tradition, with the exception only of Tarot cards. Not only do the Christian references outnumber the others, but they also encompass a wider variety of what things are alluded to. This probably implies that Eliot’s contemporary audience was the most familiar with Christianity, and therefore also more aware of its details, so those references would trigger the most meaningful responses.


''Network C: Allusions in other pieces from ''The Criterion'' and ''The Dial'' from October/November 1922''

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Moving forward, Network C shows what the allusions from the content in the rest of ''The Criterion'' and ''The Dial'' look like. It is laid out similarly to Network A: the types of allusions are spread across the top of the image, with the two magazines’ names at the bottom, and the names of the pieces within the magazines on the right side of the image. As in “The Wasteland,” religion is one of the most common categories of allusions in the two magazines. Network D exhibits the relationship between the different types of religious allusions from all three sources.


''Network D: Religion in ''The Criterion'', ''The Dial'', and “The Wasteland”''

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This network clearly shows that pieces in ''The Dial'' bring Egyptian mythology and more Greek mythology, on top of Christianity, to the picture, but ''The Criterion'' only contributes Christian allusions. It follows that mysticism and Buddhism are referred to exclusively in “The Wasteland.” Out of all the authors contributing to both magazines, Eliot must intend to stretch his readers’ minds the most, which he does by subtly forcing them to think about a wider variety of religions—just by mentioning and alluding to them—than his contemporary contributors do. This is also a comment on the universality of the point Eliot means to make. The First World War was a universal event, and everyone, from all backgrounds including religious traditions, suffered from it. By alluding to an array of religions, Eliot is able to catalogue this universal event in a universal way. His method complements his intention.

Looking back at Network C, the most frequent category besides religion is “person.” (Recall that in “The Wasteland” the top three categories were religion, place, and literature.) It is interesting that the magazines have one “most frequent” category of allusions in common with “The Wasteland” but their other “most frequents” differ. This may have to do with the purpose of the pieces represented in each network. Names of people are often the most recognizable items in the catalogues of history, which renders it unsurprising that overall, people are some of the most referred-to “items” across the corpus of the October/November 1922 issues. Whether to consult an authority on a philosophical topic in an essay on modern poetry, or to call to mind a specific English poet, the contributing authors of the two magazines are able to generate for readers a certain level of comfort with their text by calling upon the familiarity of real people their readers have already heard of.

However, in “The Wasteland,” Eliot refers not so often to people but rather to specific places, which grounds his poem in the real world of his audience. His poem is a kind of archive of reactions to and conditions surrounding WWI. So, referring to real-world places that readers can recognize emphasizes the realness of what he is writing about. Furthermore, by alluding to other works of literature, Eliot does a couple clever things. First, by so often alluding to great works of literature from the past, Eliot accredits the entire corpus of Literature as a relevant—and important—source for understanding (in this case, to understand his poem), which in turn legitimates his poem, as a member of the body of all literature, for his readers as a source for understanding (here, to understand the war and their post-war world).

Second, he does not limit himself to any certain literary genre or time period, but includes poetry from the fifteenth century (i.e. The Canterbury Tales), a memoir from the fourth century (i.e. The Confessions), drama from the seventeenth century (i.e. Hamlet), as well as more recent works in poetry and prose. The variety here also contributes to the universality of the poem, and it hints at timelessness, even though it is so closely connected with the time-fixed event of the War. Timelessness is further allowed precisely by Eliot’s sparing use of allusions to specific people, quite unlike the pieces that surround the poem in the magazines. This may be because referring to certain people could tie down the poem to be associated only with their time periods, and thus undermine the universality of “The Wasteland.”


''Network E: Allusions in ''The Criterion'', ''The Dial'', and “The Wasteland”''

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Network E is a conglomeration of Networks A and C. Although this network looks overwhelming because of how large it is, it should be manageable based on prior exposure to the other networks. In this one, the pieces from the magazines are lined up at the top, the sections of the poem are listed down the right side, the names of the sources are on the left side, and the categories of allusions are along the bottom of the image. The cluster of things referred to in the middle is organized only so far as necessary to make the nodes mostly legible. My intent with this graph is mainly to show the potential a network graph has for making a large amount of information—135 rows by four columns of input in Excel—visible quickly. Indeed, this network is much less cumbersome than my pages of notes from which I extracted the node names and relationships. It sums up the premise of this project concisely: the way allusions are used in “The Wasteland” and the other pieces that were published alongside it in ''The Dial'' and ''The Criterion'' in 1922 are related in a significant way, and technology like Gephi can help make it possible to literally see where the connections are.