World War I

T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland contains a melting pot of voices, experiences, perceptions, senses, and allusions. While this masterful work may have the appearance of disorder, the issue of order, or attempts to find order are not completely absent within the work, nor the way the work was put together by Eliot himself. Within Section II: “A Game of Chess,” lines 111-134 are full of frenzied questions. The speaker asks “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?...What shall we do now?...What shall we ever do?” (9). The repetition of these questions, and the exploration of their variations (sometimes drawn out questions, other times single words fragmented from complete thoughts) speaks to the chaotic mind of the speaker, but this frantic display is immediately followed by a startling attempt to create order. The speaker continues: “The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess” (9). Here, events are specifically designated a time and a chronological order. Devoid of the type of emotion that preceded it, this objectivity stands out, though the order created here (or the attempt to create order here), still seems empty compared to the deep emotional and psychological concerns immediately before. The supposed order does not solve problems or answer questions, but perhaps is a way to cope with the reality of not knowing and of uncertainty.

In regards to the way that this text is published, I think that it is very interesting that Eliot himself chooses to create a sort of order for the reader by including his own footnotes that identify important allusions. This, of course, is assuming that The Wasteland was originally published with these notes. While we heavily rely on annotated works in our studies today, I have not come across many authors who would provide such substantial documentation of their sources in a creative literary work. Such original documentation by the author would certainly make poets like Pope easier for students to read. Evidently, Eliot does not want the reader to miss his references, or to overlook their importance. As such, it seems that not only are these references extremely meaningful, but he is ascribing that meaning to the reader in a practical way merely by providing the footnotes in the first place. While the references themselves are seamlessly interwoven into his poem, the footnotes seem to create a sense of order to the madness. I wonder if he does this to reach a wider audience? Or if this was a typical convention? Or if he is merely trying to assert more control over his work and the way that we read it?
 

As an English scholar inexplicably reading The Waste Land for the first time at 25, my encounter with it was one loaded with admiration for its lasting influence. The ways that Eliot appropriates language to embody both individual and collective experiences in the midst and aftermath of World War I is often moving, sometimes disorienting, always powerful. Part I, “The Burial of the Dead,” is littered with personal anecdotes and dialogue. Eliot produces a collage effect as he blurs the lines between pronouns, paradoxically highlighting the interiority of human experience while also making it more universal. By making little distinction between the “I”s, “you”s, and “we”s, it feels like all experience can become your own through reading the poem, while the inviolability of the self remains intact. This paradox seems to sum up at least partially the essence of modernism and the Lost Generation, in a way; they remain united by shared experience even as they become increasingly aware of the inevitability of isolation.

Eliot’s abundant use of allusions to canonical and obscure texts further stresses this need to draw from other people in order to highlight the uniqueness of the self. By employing such a wide variety of texts, Eliot creates a new one entirely its own. He even resorts to re-appropriating his own language in Part IV, “Death by Water.” This use of words evokes the idea that experience is cyclical, even as it is being forever created anew—the world is constantly changing, yet nothing ever really changes because the human is always alone with himself. The drift in and out of other consciousnesses, other languages, only provides a temporary reprieve from the unflinching presence of one’s own reality. At least, that’s how it felt encountering The Waste Land at 2am for the first of many readings to come.

As I have mentioned in class before, I enjoy studying epic poetry and have written papers in several classes on the subject.  At Pittsburg State (where I got my B.A. and M.A.), I took a class on the British Epic, and in the course, we read and discussed Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Modernist epic.  I realize that rehashing all that I learned in another class wouldn’t necessarily do much good (and would take up a lot of space), so instead, I thought I would do a more specific “epic” reading of the text.  First, it is important to mention why one could argue that the poem is an epic one at all. 

An epic poem comes in two forms: the folk (or primary) epic and the literary (or secondary) epic.  The literary epic (for instance, Milton’s Paradise Lost) uses the conventions of a folk epic (like Homer’s The Odyssey).  Some of these epic conventions are: major digressions from the story; grandiose language; the display of the poet’s almost-encyclopedic knowledge of history, art, and mythology; the fate of nations being at stake; and the hero’s trip to the Underworld.  I feel that Eliot, at various points within the poem, fulfills these conventions.  His small vignettes create a fragmented narrative that seemingly digresses from the discussion of the Unreal City of London.  He uses both high and low language, but I definitely feel like his quotations create a very grandiose feel.  He definitely shows off his knowledge of literature and mythology, as we are constantly getting references to other literary works, ideas, mythological figures, etc.  As far as the fate of a nation being at stake, culture itself is fragmented and broken.  Maybe Western society’s literal fate may be safe, but its metaphoric fate is almost (if not completely) doomed.  Obviously, the fact that World War I caused all of this fragmentation makes the epic element even more appropriate.  Finally, as I argued in a previous paper, I believe that London itself constitutes a figurative “Underworld” in The Waste Land.  For instance, we get connections of the “Unreal City” to Dante’s Inferno, as well as images of “brown fog” and the “dead” people on London Bridge.  Also, the use of Tiresias in “The Fire Sermon” definitely fits with the Underworld aspect, as Tiresias is the blind soothsayer who speaks with Odysseus in the Underworld.  

However, when reading The Waste Land as the modern form of an epic poem, we are immediately met with a problem: where is the epic hero of the story?  Notice that Tiresias, instead of having a hero come ask for his prophetic advice (as in The Odyssey), is left to watch the young man carbuncular have sex with the unsatisfied typist.  As the structure of the poem is fragmented and we get a multitude of voices from around the city, I would argue that Eliot and his speaker function as the hero—if, indeed, we can say there is one at all.  If the speakers are the hero of the epic, they are definitely not the powerful, dynamic type of figures we see in Odysseus or in Satan from Paradise Lost.  They are intentionally weak and almost powerless to affect their world.  However, the speaker of the poem does exhibit some power in that it is showing us all of these different parts and levels of modern society.

Another possibility would be that the reader is the figurative hero of the Underworld.  The speaker—much like Sybil in The Aeneid or Virgil in Dante’s Inferno—is leading us through the hellish Unreal City of London, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna.  In this case, each little fragment of the poem functions much the same as one of the many circles of hell or glimpses of Dis that we see in these earlier epic poems.  If this is the case, Eliot is emphasizing something even more disturbing: there is nothing we can really do to redeem the “Waste Land” that is civilization after the Great War.

Although this is not related to our current discussion of The Waste Land, I discovered an article discussing the role of Girl Guides (or as we know them in America, Girl Scouts) as messengers for MI5 during WWI.  Their work was also mentioned in the British Secret Service's 100th Anniversary speech.

According to the article, these Girl Guides--who were between the ages of 14 and 16--acted as messengers, delivering highly classified information.  In some cases this information was so highly classified that it had to be delivered orally, showing a high level of trust.

Boy Scouts were originally included in this program.  However, they were removed from the program because "Girl Guides were more efficient because they were less boisterous and talkative."

While I was doing some undergraduate teaching in Germany, I visited the Hofgarten during a weekend trip to Munich.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the Hofgarten is mentioned in The Waste Land, and I am currently having difficulty adding photos from my computer to this blog.  However, I think that my personal experience can give a better understanding of what Eliot was trying to achieve by mentioning the Hofgarten.

I think a key part of understanding the importance of the Hofgarten to The Waste Land is its location.  Hofgarten means "courtyard garden," which is very appropriate because it is across the street from the Münischer Residenz, or the Munich Residential Palace.  Every inch of the Hofgarten is extremely manicured, with the plants grown in a precise geometrical pattern.

From the ground (looking a lot better than when I visited in February.)

From above.

This neatness, contrasted with the open, comfortable roughness of the nearby Englischer Garten ("English Garden"), leaves the impression of a luxurious and insular aristocratic life (supported by the stanza's speaker referring to the Archduke as "my cousin" (line 13-14)) prior to World War I.  This gentility, however, was disrupted by the violence of The Great War and the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles.  

I believe that through mentioning the Hofgarten, Eliot is trying to evoke a sense of what life was like before the war, in order to show the disruption it caused.

For this post, I would like to discuss the Dada art and its connection to the Postmodernist literary movement that came later.  It seems to me that the pieces that we looked at very much fit with the literary movement that first began to develop in the 40’s and 50’s, and I believe that these pieces of art prefigure the movement itself.  The idea that first put me onto this was how the title of each painting existed within the painting itself. This struck me as being very odd, and it reminded me of the conscious effort of Postmodernist writers to create a meta-narrative that calls attention to the fact that the piece of writing is a fiction, rather than a “true story.”  The Postmodernists were concerned with breaking the fictional dream, and I believe the Dada artists are doing the same sort of thing.  They are drawing attention to the fact that the painting is a piece of creative work.  Rather than allowing you to get lost in the painting, you are instantly pulled back and reminded that it is a painting.  Another tenet of Postmodernism is the use of the absurd.  For instance, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the main character, Billy Pilgrim, believes that he is continuously being abducted by aliens, and these aliens place him in a zoo that they have built to house him.  These aliens bear a striking resemblance to the very dime-store sci-fi novels that the character is so enthralled with.  I think this absurdity fits very well with the paintings, as most feature the connection (by bold black lines) between electrical equipment/machines and things like a headless mannequin modeling a dress.  Another major element of the Postmodern in these paintings is the idea of intertextuality.  This concept is whenever you take things from one text and transfer them onto another, especially whenever that text is from a different medium.  For one thing, we have the use of text in the paintings which by itself is very surprising: the painting “PORTRAIT D'UNE JEUNE FILLE AMERICAINE DANS L' ÉTAT DE NUDITÉ” contains the words “FOR-EVER” and the painting “J'AI VU et c'est de toi qu'il s'agit DE ZAYAS! DE ZAYAS! JE SUIS VENU SUR LES RIVAGES DU PONT-EUXIN” contains a very long title, part of which is sprawled over the canvas.  Beyond this, the use of “de Zayas” is intertextual, because it is referencing the Spanish writer María de Zayas who wrote in mid-1600s.  Not only is it referencing an early feminist writer, but it is taking a literary reference and placing it into a completely different medium in a very bold way.  The words “De Zayas! De Zayas!” are placed above what appears to me to be sunlit ocean waves.  This same image feeds into my final connection between Postmodernism and Dada art, which is the use of fragmentation.  Postmodernism is known for having narratives that are broken up and fragmented, which is one of the major influences that it took from Modernism.  I believe that this element is very apparent in these paintings. A lot of them feature machinery/electronics which are only connected by the bold black lines, as I mentioned above; however, technology isn’t the only thing in the paintings.  We get mannequins, ocean waves, and words that are seemingly disconnected within the very paintings that connect them.

War poetry is evidently a heterogeneous genre, as exemplified by this week’s readings. While some of the poems depict life in the trenches in a way that I have come to expect, writing about the horrors of the conditions of the trenches, the gutting experience of gas warfare, and themes of alienation, others, particularly those by Guillaume Apollinaire, experimented with form and poetic art in a new and revolutionary way. Marjorie Perloff writes that “violence, energy…these were judged to be the very spark of life” (160). Especially in “Il Pleut/It’s Raining,” this energy is exemplified in multiple creative ways. The content of the poem is (especially initially) secondary to the form of how the words are displayed on the page. The act of reading curiously takes precedence over the poem itself as the reader must mimic the falling raindrops by reading the words from top to bottom in a continual manner. Once the reader has engaged in this process, the meaning of the words emerge, addressing the rainfall of “women’s voices,” for instance. The cities, including the individual “I” as well as the masses (presumably, from his generalizations), must turn their ears to listen to the “rain” that is falling. Rather than washing away “regret and disdain,” it brings uncomfortable issues to light and we must pay attention, listening (and reading) actively.

In one article of Broom magazine (Vol. 5, No. 4, November 1923), there was a curious snippet about Apollinaire that is addressed “To the Bibliophile” and I was very curious about the way that he and his work were being advertised. The excerpt reads:

Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the most arresting personalities among European writers of our time, was easily the modern prototype of Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne. Possessed with an Aristophanic demon of satire Apollinaire wrote the most astonishing prose and poetry of his day. During the four years since his death from wounds received in the Great War writers have declared him to be France’s greatest war poet, in fact the only great poet who emerged from the war.

But the man was versatile. His sway spread through the whole continent as poet, novelist, art critic and leader of divers revolutions and buccaneering expeditions in painting and literature. His rebellious spirit was at the bottom of all the artistic upheavals of the Twentieth Century. (238)

The matter-of-factness of this passage, compared to the explosive, energized, and revolutionary nature of Apollinaire’s work, is somewhat jarring and seems to contradict the spirit of what he was trying to accomplish in his art. This writer mentions his “rebellious spirit” as a charming accolade, and by comparing him to Swift, Sterne, and the others, the author is trying to fit this poet into the established literary canon in a way that I’m not convinced Apollinaire (or the other Vorticists, Futurists, Dadaists) would have wanted. It is also interesting that here he and his work are being advertised for a mass audience. Claiming him as the “greatest war poet” or “greatest poet who emerged from the war,” is high praise indeed and certainly something that readers of the magazine would (perhaps depending on the readership and circulation of the magazine), notice, trusting such a recommendation to advance their own literary tastes (particularly if they identify themselves as “bibliophiles”). Does this show the acceptance of his (and the other poets’) project? Or is this a more subversive way to get people reading this revolutionary material?
 

I went looking for Pound again. He showed up indirectly all over Bruno’s Weekly. The most interesting issue was from 7.29.1916, where I found a book review of Pound’s memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska.

It wasn’t very nice. Dedicating an entire section of his review to “Mr. Pound’s Failings,” W. G. Blaikie Murdoch asserts that “nearly every page of his writing is slipshod” (880), then proceeds to compare the book to what he considers much more effective biographies. Because Murdoch has no taste for the way that “ Mr. Pound has preferred to fling things down at random” (880), he spends the second half of his review trying to lay out a “disentangled” narrative of “facts” about the sculptor. As you might imagine, his version was pretty boring—the most interesting part of the review was the inclusion of sketches Gaudier drew for Major Macfall’s Splendid Wayfaring.

More thought-provoking parts of this issue provide more intriguing glimpses into the world of Art During Wartime. The issue opens with an excerpt from a chapbook (published by Bruno in 1915) by Sadakichi Hartmann—early secretary to Walt Whitman, sometime friend to Stieglitz, and rather opinionated art critic—called “Permanent Peace: Is It a Dream?” In the piece, Hartmann reflects on humankind’s ongoing tendency to glorify and idealize war, from art museums to everyday life. He outlines a history of the ways that society has justified fighting through various means, concluding that “it is capitalism that instigates war, just as the Church and Imperialism in former centuries. The casus belli, like the assassination of the Austrian archduke, at Serajevo, the Ems despatch, the firing in Fort Sumter, the blowing up of the Maine, is never more than an incident” (872). His major claim is that “wars are invariably fought for strictly material reasons” (872, emphasis mine), and they are often driven by economics or national political prominence; Hartmann is skeptical that idealistic justifications for war are as pure as they appear. He also breaks down the idea of “civilized warfare,” instead arguing that “warfare, premedidated [sic] wholesale slaughter can not be civilized” (873). From his perspective, then, “There is no diffrence [sic] whether one is clubbed down with a morning star and pierced by a halberd, or torn to pieces by shrapnel and throttled by asphyxiating gas. One is as barbarous as the other. Only modern war has become more scientifically cruel. The mucular [sic] strength has dwindled down to naught” (873).

This is a far cry from the glories of war that other people in the art world bled out their pens for, but it is not to say that Hartmann and others no longer have faith in art. The issue also dedicates plenty of space to poetry and poets, including a section dedicated to “Books and Magazines of the Week.” Their analysis of The Egoist is particularly telling—so, at the risk of doing what I have to tell my students not to do on a weekly basis, I will reproduce the passage in full:

“This excellent journal, the only one from English shores at present bearing the stigma of the big times Europe is passing through has of late somehow changed radically in its contents. Not in its excellence, but the idealism which one could read between the lines of its page has given way to a bit of philosophy of hopelessness, and then there is Mr. Ezra Pound again among the contributors and that might have something to do with it. Richard Aldington, the assistant editor, is doing military service and his ‘A solemn Dialogue’ in the current issue expresses very little martial enthusiasm, but some very clear views of what military service means to the individual: slavery.”

This “radical” shift in “content” speaks to the already deep awareness during wartime of the different ways that thinkers responded to the war and tried to incarnate it in their work, all the while preserving the experience of it through art in a way that could make it persist (even if only for a short time). The sheer continual effort to produce these little magazines and to redefine art shows how this “philosophy of hopelessness” and lack of “martial enthusiasm” did not prevent people from creating something out of the destruction of the time. It’s important to remember that wartime contained many varieties of perspectives about the value of the war throughout the period, but one idea largely remained the same in the cultural world: the world we knew is ending, and art must embody the apocalypse.

Marjorie Perloff's piece "The Great War and the European Avant-Garde" provides a helpful review of Italian Futurism, Pound's Vorticism, Russian Futurism, and French Futurism. It seems that Futurism as a movement began with manifestos (like Marinetti's) and spread throughout Europe rather quickly. Each form or location of Futurism seemed to be as artistically revolutionary as it was politically revolutionary. The term avant-garde, as Perloff notes, is a military term that means to be in the front flank leading the way and always carries with it a sense of being "embattled" (142). It makes sense then that Futurism as avant-garde would not only lead the way in creating a new artistic aesthetic but a sort of militaristic aesthetic that was violent, advocated for the political revolution of the working class, and expressed a certain forward motion or dynamic. When discussing Marinetti's Italian Futurist manifesto, Perloff notes, "The Manifesto...[was] a celebration of 'the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness'" (145). The Manifesto also called for "courage, audacity, and revolt" (145). These two descriptions of Marinetti's Italian Futurism could be read as applying to poetry, or political revolution. It seems that for many Futurists, Italian and Russian, art and politics were inseparable. Futurism clearly anticipated and later reflected the necessity of violence and adversarial political ideologies germane to war. Moreover, Futurism used the war as a backdrop, even a pedestal for its aesthetic and political agendas. That is, Futurists like Marinetti were keen to realize that militarism and revolution are akin to war, and by aligning his political and aesthetic ideologies with those wartime sensibilities, he was successful in gaining immediate traction for his movement.

On the other hand, it may be unfair to align all of the Futurist movements as pro-war, militaristic, and politically revolutionary simply because they are avant-garde and take place around World War I. The French Futurist, Apollinaire, embraced a less political and aggressively violent form of avant-garde Futurism in his poem "It's Raining." The avant-garde nature of this poem reflects a poetic experiment through a "visual and verbal collaboration" (157). This collaboration can result in a poem whose verbal text mirrors its visual image. Apollinaire's poem appears as five semi-parallel lines that run downward along the length of the page slanting to the right. Simply put, the semi-parallel lines create what looks like raindrops in the actual process of falling downward at an angle. This visual and verbal collaboration embraces the avant-garde idea of movement and dynamism found in Futurism and Vorticism, but it also seems to embrace some of Marinetti's futurist poetics that Perloff discusses earlier. Perloff writes, "Poetry, Marinetti argued, could get rid of most parts of speech, especially the decorative adjective along with the adverb...[p]unctuation was also to be eliminated so that poetry might be 'an uninterrupted sequence of new images'" (150). Similarly, Apollinaire's poem has minimal adjectives, adverbs, and has no punctuation. As Marinetti argued, this creates of an uninterrupted flow of words that create images verbally and also visually through their experimental arrangement. Therefore, we can see through this example of Apollinaire's poetry that avant-garde futurist poetry during World War I may share many aesthetic similarities with other Futurists' agendas (as expressed primarily in their manifestos), but it may not necessary be overtly violent, militaristic, or political.

Like Annie, I agree that Blast displays a high degree of misogyny.  (Protip:  if you have to start your publication with anything that can be distilled into "I'm not sexist/racist/classist," you should probably put your pen down and never pick it up again.)  However, I believe that more than misogyny is at play in "Indissoluble Matrimony".

If we review which characteristics that George Silverton hates most about Evadne, we can see that they are, in the story's chronology:  that she is "alternately of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness" (98), her style of singing (99), her sex drive that so horrifies George (101), her vocalness--in her case, in the political sphere (102), and the perceived but nonexistent infidelity (102-9).  All of these traits have been and still are used to characterize the stereotypical black woman. In short, what George simply cannot stand is "that uncanny, negro way of hers" (99).  What George seems to despise about his wife is not just that she is a woman, but that he perceives her as having the traits of a black woman.  This perception is confirmed in the way that he refers to her as a "beast" (105), and feels enough ownership of her to attempt murder-suicide.  In this story we see a combination of two disparate threads that wind themselves through Blast:  a horrified hatred of women and a bitter disdain for non-whiteness.  What is expressed in "Indissoluble Marriage", therefore, is not just misogyny but rather an expression of misogynoir.

This story doubly calls into question Blast's proclamation that they are for "the individual" (7), not any particular group.  While they use their manifesto to style themselves as being universal in their focus, it is quite obvious that they do not mean to include women, black people, Jewish people (with Pound being unsurprisingly anti-Semitic on page 45), or "the People"--read:  the common rabble (7).  So who, exactly, was this publication for besides the middle- or upper-class white artists who were already part of the artistic elite?