31 Letters, 13 Dreams, and the Communications Revolution

If you want to understand the significance of Richard Hugo's 1977 book of poems, 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, you're going to need to check in with the Envelope Manufacturer's Association.  Let me explain.

Although the slim Norton edition I've been reading features an envelope on the cover, the importance of communications technology—and the envelope is certainly a technology of communication—isn't the most immediately apparent thing about Hugo's book.  Indeed, it comes across more as a book about solitude and loneliness than anything else, as I'm sure Hugo intended.

As the title indicates, the poems in the book come in two forms: letters and dreams.  The letters are invariable given a title in the format "Letter to [name of recipient, usually another poet of the 1970s] from [name of town, usually someplace with a university Hugo was visiting, or a little western town where he'd gone to fish]." So: "Letter to Ammons from Maratea," for example, or "Letter to Simic from Boulder." The dream poems, too, have titles that follow a format of sorts: "In Your [descriptive word] Dream."  Thus: "In Your War Dream," "In Your Hot Dream," and so forth.

One soon catches on that the letters and the dreams are really two different ways of addressing the same theme.  The letters are the public, or semi-public, way of dealing with Hugo's sense of isolation as an aging, unattached man who spends a lot of time traveling around the country from one poetry reading or visiting writer gig to another.  There's a lot of alienation, and a fair bit of non-specific frustration and detachment: "I'm awfully frightened/and I don't know why.  I keep feeling revolutionary/but I have no cause," he writes in "Letter to Hanson from Miami"—"I feel I am going to dynamite/the swimming pool."  It's a condition he attributes to being "as far from home/as I can get in the United States." 

Letters sent to someone with whom he feels a connection, an old girlfriend, say, or to a fellow poet, becomes a way of trying to connect, to write his way out of isolation.  It's also a way of converting pain and sometimes panic into anecdotage, reminiscence, and a presentation of himself as wistful, gently melancholy, a little stoic.

The dreams, by contrast, are private: not Hugo's way of trying to communicate to sympathetic people in the world, but his way of trying to communicate with himself.  That is, they're where his unconscious feeds up images of his isolated condition, directing them to the waking mind for contemplation and interpretation.  "You are riding a camel/in Athens.  The citizens yell 'We are not Arab.  This/is not sand" we read in "Your Wild Dream," before discovering that, through the metamorphic logic of dreams, "the camel is a yacht.  You cruise/a weird purple river.  Girls doze on the bank.  One/stands up and waves.  You yell, 'Where is your town?'/You are alone."  The imagery is weird, but the condition from which the dream springs is clear enough: isolation, displacement, a yearning to connect.

This kind of confessional poetry, in which the poet takes stock, as best and as directly as he can, of his inner needs and fears, and tries to tell them to others, is pretty out of fashion now.  Indeed, reading Hugo's book concurrently with Juliana Spahr's wonderful 2011 collection Well Then There Now, one really senses a change in style and attitude from the poetry prominent in the late 1970s to the well-received poetry of our own time.  Spahr's work is all about Hawaii, which one would think would give her ample cause to write about isolation and distance.  But instead we get a picture of Hawaii as a place deeply interconnected with every other place: we see it penetrated by, landed on, and changed by information and bodies and species from all over the world.  Like Spahr's equally fine This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, it is a book about connection and community, and her preferred pronoun is not "me" but "us."

And if we want to understand this difference between Hugo's lonely confessionalism and Spahr's sense of interconnectivity and community, we'd do well to look at the Envelope Manufacturer's Association 2006 report "First Class Mail and the United States Postal Service: Future Strategies for This Time-Honored Medium."  This, after all, throws into stark relief the very different communications regimes under which Hugo and Spahr have written.

The report, issued after a "summit meeting of former postal leaders and mailing industry leaders," is a bit panic-stricken.  The envelope industry, it seems, is deeply worried about the fate of the personal letter, as the wrapping of such letters has been a major source of their revenue.  But, they note, the share of United States Postal deliveries taken by first class mail (primarily letters and post-cards) has been in steep decline.  Sometime around 2002 the volume of first class mail sank beneath that of pre-sorted mail (bills, large-scale business mailings, much junk mail) and the plunge has been precipitous since then.  It's indicative, of course, of the rise of the internet, email, Facebook, iChat, Skype, and all the other means by which people keep in touch.  Richard Hugo, back in the 1970s, wrote in a world where personal communication over great distances was either very slow, like the paper letter, or very expensive (a three minute Sunday off-peak phone call in 1970 would cost over four dollars in today's money, which was down from the equivalent of almost 23 dollars in the mid 1960s; and when 31 Letters and 13 Dreams was published air travel was about two and a half times more expensive per mile than it is today, though the in-flight meals were better).  All of this matters at the experiential level: when my wife's work takes her to Paris, as it sometimes does lately, I can get on iChat and have a video chat with her for hours at, essentially, no charge.  Back in the eighties, when I had an argument with my girlfriend during her family's vacation to England, the satellite phone bill ran to some 80 bucks (maybe $160 in today's money), and the short time-lag as one's voice bounced into space and back made for some very confusing moments.  I think it might have led to the break-up. 

Anyway.  If we think about Hugo's moment, it wasn't just a time of relatively expensive communications: it was a time when American poets, novelists, and artists were more geographically scattered across the nation than ever before.  In the early decades of the twentieth century, the tiny number of people privileged enough to be engaged in these kinds of creativity clustered in a few places—Greenwich Village, say, or the parts of Paris where expats hung out together in cheap cafes.  The expansion of the universities in the decades after World War Two allowed many more people to make their way as artists and writers, but it also scattered them across the continent. And this scattering took place at a time when it was much, much more difficult to stay in touch with likeminded people than it is today.

This combination of the growing academic-cultural establishment, and the still-primitive nature of communications technology, accounts for much of Hugo's pervasive sense of loneliness.  He travels from gig to gig, from college town to college town, accumulating acquaintances but not close friends.  He's uprooted, and yearns to be in touch with the people he's met who care about the same things he does.  He can't go and meet them at a left bank bistro, because they, like him, have been scattered to the four winds by the great academic hurricane of the mid-to-late twentieth century.

This, I think, connects to a powerful feeling I had, mid-way through reading 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, that this was a book my father would love.  My dad (a ceramic artist of some renown in the field) comes, like Hugo, from a generation of artists scattered by academe, and linked only by slow or expensive communications.  I remember how big a deal it was when other artists would come to visit us—the painter Toni Onley making a grand entrance landing his pontoon plane on the lake at our weekend place, John Cage making off with someone else's beaded Indian jacket, which he mistook for a gift for the Visiting Grandee, and so forth.  And I remember the hand-written letters from artists all over the world.  Sometimes the sense of isolation and alienation in them could be moving: I remember sneaking a peek at one left on the dining room table, in which the Florida-based artist wrote of "not feeling like part of America anymore, but more like one of a handful of eternal madmen."  You get the idea: confessional, passionate, troubled stuff, born of a kind of isolation it is now difficult for us to imagine.

Nowadays, we live in a kind of dialectical synthesis of the low-tech world where artsy types had to cluster in a few bohemias, and the technological/academic world of mass culture and distance.  We're scattered all over the world, as was Hugo's generation, but thanks to our iPhones and Facebook, we're always in touch, making minor small talk and nudging one another.  There was no small talk in Hugo's letters—communication was too precious for that.  And it would be very strange to find something like the passionate, lonely statement in that letter my father received in a Facebook update or a tweet.  We're more like the gossiping left bank crowd, except, you know, without the affairs, the croissants, and the absinthe.

So: one significance of Hugo's 31 Letters and 13 Dreams comes to light when we think about the kind of statistics on letters given in the Envelope Manufacturers' Association report.  That doesn't exhaust the significance, of course—but statistics on dreams are harder to come by.

Otherness and Empathy: Harvey Kurtzman’s War Comics

I don’t remember much about the war comics I read as a kid, in part because I didn’t read them the way I read Tintin or Asterix (obsessively, slowly, repeatedly).  I couldn’t read them that way, because they weren’t mine: they belonged to the kids whose family had a little cabin next to my family’s weekend place on a lake a couple of hours into the enormous conifer and rock-outcrop forest of the Canadian Shield.  The Reichert kids were older than I was, and had lived in England for a while, and kept a stash of English and American war and horror comics in a back room of the cabin, and sometimes, when our family was visiting theirs, I’d sneak into that back room and hurriedly read through a comic or two with a flashlight.

The horror comics were a mistake: I’d always rush home and try to forget about the terrifying images by reading Asterix, but it never did any good, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night convinced that the sound of the wind in the branches could only be the wailing of corpses risen from the grave.  But the war comics were fascinating: full of guys punching out heavily armed enemies with nothing but the oversized knuckles on their spectacularly rendered fists, or jackbooted Nazis and commies marching in lockstep against our side’s ragtag bands of can-do misfits.  I do remember one exception: a grim tale of a Vietnam veteran returned home after a bad injury in the jungle, only to face social rejection, unemployment, a girlfriend who’d left him while he was away at war, and finally a crippling drug addiction.  In the end, he tries to commit suicide, but when he pulls the trigger of his old service revolver, nothing happens, and a mysterious man appears to explain that he can’t take such an easy way out: he died in the jungle, and this America to which he’d returned is hell.  But by and large the pages of Nick Fury and His Howling Commandos, Smash! and Sgt. Rock took a more gung-ho tack.

This early experience of 1970s war comics conditioned my expectations when Michael Robbins pulled a nicely produced hardcover of Corpse on the Imjin! And Other Stories by Harvey Kurtzman from his courier bag and passed it to me in the departmental lounge one evening (he’d written a review of the book for The Chicago Tribune).  Kurtzman wrote—and, frequently, illustrated—many issues of the EC comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat during the 1950s, and I expected to find simple jingoism like I’d seen in the comics I’d read growing up.  I mean, these were comics about war during a time when America was at war in Korea, when Cold War propaganda was picturing a red under every bed, and before we’d had the hard national disillusion of Vietnam.  But instead, I found something rather different.  Perhaps because Kurtzman had been a soldier himself during the Second World War (though not a combat infantryman), his stories tend to be defined by two characteristics: an acute sense of the suffering of all soldiers; and a sense of the essential irony of war.  That is: the soldiers in his stories aren’t the sort who’d shout “go get ‘em, boys!” and charge down an enemy machine gun nest.  Rather, they’re people whose boots aren’t good enough for the journey, who hunger, who are plagued by fear and lack of sleep and more fear and by naïve courage that lasts exactly up to the point of first contact with the enemy.  Which is also exactly as long as the best-laid plans of officers lasts: armies plan, in Kurtzman’s stories, and the gods of war laugh.  More often than not, soldiers are caught in their own traps, or by their own illusions.  And it’s not just minor characters who perish: protagonists die, sometimes quickly, sometimes alone and in pain.  At least one critic, Ng Suat Tong, writing for Comics Journal, has complained that Kurtzman presented war as “gentle, dignified, and bloodlessly pleasant”—to be perfectly honest, I do not know how he could experience Kurtzman’s stories, in which we watch corpses float down rivers, see the laboriously built homes of innocent farmers destroyed by mere chance, and witness the slaughter of P.O.W.s by their captors, in this light.  If this is dignity and pleasantness, I shudder to think of indignity and pain.

There are, to be fair, occasional moments where we hear the false note of jingoism —“America is a way of life... and as long as we believe in good we can’t go wrong!” But generally Kurtzman is better than that, even in a format that openly panders to the audience’s prejudices (the last panel of many stories consists of a little message like “That’s it readers!  Did you enjoy this magazine?  Your letters give us an idea of what you like to read so won’t you please write us and tell us what you liked and why!”).

What’s most interesting is the sympathetic treatment Kurtzman gives to the Chinese and North Korean experience of the war, in comics for an American market published during the war itself.  Although Kurtzman doesn’t get into the political issues behind the war, he does treat the ethics of individual combatants, and in doing so he refuses to elevate the Americans above their Chinese and Korean opponents: both are shown as capable of dehumanizing their enemies, both are capable of great loyalty to their fellow soldiers, and of self-sacrifice, not for some abstract cause, but for the other guys in the unit, in the hopes of getting everyone back home safely.

One story, “Air Burst!” is told from the point of view of Chinese soldiers in a dangerous retreat after a failed offensive, and they are treated with exactly the same level of sympathy one sees in Kurtzman’s stories about American G.I.s.  Unlike the faceless German soldiers of Sgt. Rock, these guys have nicknames, they carry each other when wounded, they’re individuated, with some being kinder or more skilled than others, they suffer from terror during shelling by Americans, and, like the Kurtzman’s G.I.s, their fates can be ironic—in the end, one is killed by the trap his squad set to slow the American pursuit of their retreat.  Here, we've moved beyond the sympathetic to the empathetic, in that we don't just feel for the Chinese soldiers, we feel through them, are asked to see through their eyes and feel what they feel.  We become them, to the degree that we become Jane Eyre or Huck Finn or any other protagonist with whose plight a story asks us to identify.

Or almost.  There's one major stumbling block to our identification with Kurtzman's Chinese soldiers: the way he represents their speech.  Kurtzman's American G.I.s speak as realistically as he could make them, given the anti-profanity restrictions placed on publications by the Comics Code Authority.  But his Chinese soldiers, for all their humanity, speak a stilted, formalized version of English.  "Let us pause a moment" one will say, "Why do you stop, Lee?" another will ask. Then an airstrike that would have caused one of Kurtzman's Americans to shout "hit the deck!" makes a Chinese soldier call out "fall to the ground!" and then "we shall give the Americans a taste of shrapnel."  Seeing an American observation plane, another soldier calls out "he circles us!" and "let us run!"— you get the idea: no slang, no contractions, the kind of thing the writers of Star Trek did when writing for Spock or Data.  The idea seems to be to present the Chinese characters as exotic, and this interferes with the attempt to give us their experience and their point of view, since they are exotic only to us, not to themselves.  If they come across as exotic, we are taken out of their lived experience, and reminded of their otherness.  We are no longer fully experiencing their point of view.

The easiest thing to do would be to dismiss this as a kind of failure of imagination on Kurtzman's part, but the more I think about Kurtzman's representation of Chinese speech, the more I can see a point to it.  In fact, it has some of the characteristics most admired in postmodern translation theory.

Consider this passage from Michel Foucault's essay on Pierre Klossowski's translation of the Aeneid:

It is quite necessary to admit that two kinds of translations exist; they do not have the same function or the same nature. In one, something (meaning, aesthetic value) must remain identical, and it is given passage into another language.... And then there are translations that hurl one language against another... taking the original text for a projectile and treating the translating language like a target. Their task is... to use the translated language to derail the translating language.

That is, some translations seek to appear as if they were written in the new language: to make a version of Goethe, say, that seems like a work originally written in English.  This is the most commonly held sense of what a good translation looks like, and I confess that I've often thought of good translation in these terms.  When, for example, I read a translation from the French that stays too close to the Latinate side of English, using "submarine rock formations" rather than "underwater rock formations" for the French "formations rocheuses sous-marines," I tend to sneer at this as a bit prissy.  But there's another kind of translation, one that aims to retain the sense that the translated work was written in another language—this is Foucault's "projectile" translation.

The late Antoine Berman, one of the most influential and controversial translation theorists of the last thirty years, elaborated on this second kind of translation in an essay called "Translation and the Trials of the Foreign" (the title comes from Heidegger's discussion of Hölderlin's strange translations from the Greek).  Here, Berman describes a type of translation that maintains a strong sense of the original language's difference from our own tongue, and aims "to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness" by "accentuating its strangeness," which is, paradoxically, the only real way of "giving us access" to the foreign text as such, that is, as a foreign text.  The idea is to maintain a sense of strangeness in the translation, thereby preventing the reader from erasing the real, existing otherness of the original text itself.

Kurtzman, of course, isn't translating anything—he, not a Chinese author, wrote 'Air Strike!" and he wrote it in English.  But the representation of Chinese speech as a marked English, as something other than idiomatic, native-speaker stuff, may be taken as an attempt to maintain for us a sense that the people he is depicting are not simply Westerners with slightly different bodies: they come from another culture, and speak another language, and his representation of their speech keeps this always in front of us.

There's a case to be made against this kind of speech representation.  When I see pop-culture depictions of Native Americans, and they speak a kind of hyper-formal, dignified, contraction-free, unslangy English, I always rankle a bit, because it seems like this involves a flattening out of the emotional and expressive range of the characters.  They're not talking like the Cree and Blackfoot kids I knew growing up in western Canada, kids who were capable of wackiness, low diction, fast-talk, and as full a range of human affect as you or I.  But if Berman is to be believed, there's also a case for a kind of speech representation that marks difference as difference, that refuses to allow us to forget the foreignness of the foreign.  If we proceed on Berman's assumptions, then we can see "Air Strike!" as a combination of a Chinese point of view—inviting empathy—with speech effects that remind us that the empathy we're feeling is an empathy that stretches across cultural divisions.  And that's a subtle move—far subtler than many of us have been willing to attribute to something in the often maligned form of the old-school comic book.

Tradition and the Individual's Urges: Notes on T.S. Eliot

The new semester is upon me, and I find myself feverishly tapping out various course documents for my students.  I'm getting a bit ambitious in terms of what I'm assigning for the seminar on modernism I'm co-teaching, so I'm writing up some general notes for students to read ahead of time.  Here's what I've come up with for a session on Eliot that will feature The Waste Land, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," some excerpts from Eliot's writings about myth, and three early satirical poems ("The Boston Evening Transcript," "Cousin Nancy," and "Aunt Helen").  Some bits of it have been adapted from the Eliot chapter of a book called Making Nothing Happen: Poetry, Autonomy, Society that I've been working on.

1. Overview

T.S. Eliot was far from alone among modern poets in perceiving a crisis in the social position of poetry and in dreaming up a solution to that crisis.  Yeats, for example, sought to bring poetry out of the aesthete’s garret by allying it with both mystic rites and nationalism; while Ezra Pound dreamed of a world in which “the damned and despised literati” would, through clarity of language, keep “the whole machinery of social and of individual thought” functional, and therefore make themselves crucial to the legislators and governors of the world.  Eliot’s particular sense of the nature of the crisis, and of its solution, was colored by the decline of his social class and of the kind of public, moralistic culture associated with that class.  Eliot had strong family connections to a Boston-based, cultivated elite that entered a phase of steep decline around the time of his birth.  Eliot’s reaction to the decline was to satirize his declining class and its culture.  Out of his satire, though, emerged a new theory of poetry, in which the energies to which popular culture speaks are harnessed to the civilizing power of a tradition of high culture and spiritual discipline in a new kind of poetry.  Eliot theorizes about the value and meaning of high culture in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and works to fuse the energies of popular culture and the civilizing influence of high culture in his great, difficult, long poem The Waste Land.

2. Eliot’s Social Situation

The mark of the old, cultivated, civic-minded Bostonian elite was indelibly inscribed in the psyche of T.S. Eliot, but his was not an uncomplicated relation to his heritage.  There was, of course, the matter of geography.  The St. Louis-bred Eliot came from the margins of a social and cultural world whose metropolitan center was located somewhere between Harvard Square and Boston Common, and he knew it.  But even more important than his marginality to his class in space was his generational marginality with respect to that class.  When Eliot was still in his childhood it became clear that the old Bostonian elite and its national offshoots were being displaced, and in many instances dispossessed. The neighborhood surrounding the Eliot family’s house at 2635 Locust Street, once eminently respectable, was already coming down in the world when the poet was born in 1888.  It had, Eliot wrote in a memoir, “become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess,” and was an apt image for the decline of the high-minded St. Louis elite of which the Eliots had been cornerstones.  “The best citizens,” wrote Lincoln Steffens of St. Louis, “used to rule the town, and they ruled it well…. But a change occurred.  Public spirit became private spirit.” Steffens dates the change as beginning around 1890, and by the turn of the century the city had fallen into the hands of a self-interested and materialistic elite.           

            The story Lincoln Steffens tells about St. Louis was true of other places as well: indeed, his 1904 book The Shame of the Cities relates the same sad tale about Minneapolis, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.  The older elites of many of these cities, including New York, had been influenced by the ideals of the Boston elite, but increasingly, in the decades after the Civil War, the old elites faced the same kind of displacement the Eliots and their circle faced in St. Louis.  As historian Richard Hofstadter puts it,

The rapid development of the big cities, the building of a great industrial plant, the construction of the railroads, the emergence of the corporation as the dominant form of enterprise, transformed the old society and revolutionized the distribution of power and prestige…. By the late 1880s this process had gone far enough to become the subject of frequent, anxious comment in the press…. The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich were bypassing…the old gentry…

In 1917 Eliot would write that a writer’s art is formed by “the accumulated sensations of his first twenty-one years”—a period that in his case covered the years 1888-1903.  These were the years in which the class to which he was born had to confront the hard fact that it had been diminished, that the new America of industry, growing immigrant diversity, and imperial ambition had covered the old America of the Brahmins like a flow of fresh lava.

3. Eliot’s Satiric Verse

In Eliot’s view, the old world of genteel culture was too disconnected from the vital energies of the new, urban, industrial America to be revived.  Indeed, genteel culture appears as a spent force in the satiric verse he wrote in the early 1910s. If the genteel, decaying elite represented is satirized for the stifling nature of its commitment to old codes of behavior, the younger generation is satirized for the primitive nature of its urges, and for the vulgarity of the new mass culture that expresses and speaks to those urges.  We see this kind of satire in poems like “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Cousin Nancy,” and “Aunt Helen.”  

4.  Eliot on the Imagination and Tradition

Eliot came to see the mass culture of his day—jazz music, comic strips, boxing matches, and other popular entertainments—as things that engaged people at a visceral level, speaking to their inner urges, but not linking those urges to anything more spiritual or refined.  At the same time, he saw the high culture of his own social class as civilized but anemic and disconnected from the baser urges.  Eliot attempts to bridge the gap between our inner urges and a civilizing high culture through a theory of tradition and imagination that fuses the primitive urges with a mental world conditioned by long exposure to a literary and religious cultural tradition. 

            Eliot does not limit the creative process to the primitive, unprocessed urges, but he bases it there. 

            He describes the basis of the creative process as something unpremeditated, based in the unconscious, and not fully within the artist’s control.  In discussing Virgil’s Eclogues, for example, Eliot uses the idea of prophecy to describe the method of composition:

If a prophet were by definition a man who understood the full meaning of what he was saying, this would be the end of the matter.  But if the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.  This is certainly true of poetic inspiration…

Elsewhere, Eliot chastises the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold for failing, at times, to make his verse rise to the condition of true poetry.  The failure has, at root, what Eliot calls an insensitivity to the “auditory imagination”—though what is at stake in the auditory imagination is not mere sound, but a sounding of the depths of the unconscious:

What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back…. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses… the most ancient, and the most civilized mentality. 

Eliot finds the greatest force in poems that, unlike Arnold’s weaker productions, use words that have “a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires” and the spring from “a kind of power” that “comes from below the intellect.” In a short critical note appended to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro Eliot is quite explicit about the basis of the creative process, saying that for the poet the poem “is dictated, not by the idea—for there is no idea—but by the dark embryo within him.”

            There is another element to Eliot’s theory of poetic creation, though, one just as important.  Indeed, if we turn to the most famous of Eliot’s critical essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” we find Eliot advocating a rigorous preparation of the poet’s mind, so that the urges of the imagination will be received in particular ways.  The preparation involves the acquisition of the “historical sense,” which comes from much deliberate study, and results in a conditioning of the imagination such that the poet writes “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling for the whole literature of Europe.” This literary tradition is “the mind of Europe,” and the poet must understand that what it offers is “more important than his own mind.”  Indeed, it is in absorbing this tradition into his bones that the poet has his “self-sacrifice” and his “extinction of personality.” As Frank Lentricchia notes, the extinction of personality Eliot describes is not an extinction into “no-self” but into “self-in-historical-community.” That is: the poet’s imagination becomes not just a theater of individual urges, fears, and desires: it becomes a place in which those urges and desires take on meanings derived from a tradition larger and wiser than the individual.  The imagination’s reception of the dictates of the dark embryo within is tempered by the tradition’s teachings about the meaning and value of those dictates, teachings that have been wholly absorbed by the poet.

            For Eliot, the artist who does not fully absorb tradition, or who fails to connect the dark embryo of urges, fears, and desires to the teachings of that tradition fails, in some significant sense, as an artist.

5. The Waste Land

In reading The Waste Land, it is easy to become paralyzed by the fear that one needs to look up every obscure phrase and locate every reference.  Much can be gained from giving the poem that kind of attention, but there is also something to be said for reading through without too much hesitation, allowing the language and images to wash over you as if you were watching a film montage.   One thing one might keep in mind during this second, less anxious kind of reading is Eliot’s emphasis on both primal urges (often associated with popular culture) and high culture (often seen as anemic or remote from everyday life as lived in the twentieth century).

The Waste Land offers both abundant examples of language reduced to the bare expression of emotion, and instances of the transformation of emotion into spiritual wisdom based on the absorption of tradition.  As the critic William Harmon has pointed out, The Waste Land is full of “animal utterances” that are “below articulate language.”  These utterances are often connected with sexual desire, as in the “Weialala leia/Wallala leilala” of the Thames maidens; or with the consequences of violent sexual encounters, as in the lament of Philomela, a figure from Greek mythology who is turned into a nightingale after being brutally raped, and who is invoked in Eliot’s poem in these lines:

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Lust, sorrow, and other simple emotions, expressed in preverbal sounds: this is the traditionless condition, where “farmyard noises” (to use a phrase Eliot used in an interview) are the only vehicle for expression, and where what is expressed are merely crude emotions without much intellectual content.

            The repeated syllable we encounter at the very end of the poem, “DA,” seems, initially, to be yet another instance of preverbal noise, expression without meaning.   But we see, near the end of The Waste Land, the transformation of sound into language, and, in fact, into language redolent of the deep historical roots of spiritual tradition. “DA/Datta” speaks to us of the need to give, as articulated in the Sanskrit of the Upanishads; while “DA/Dayadhvam” and “DA/Damyata” speak to us of the spiritual need to sympathize and to control oneself as articulated in the same text.  Giving, controlling, and sympathizing are all matters of the disciplining of one’s more basic urges.  Eliot is dramatizing the transformation of primitive urges, of speech as a series of yelps, howls, and shouts, into the beginnings of a spiritual tradition.  The poem enacts a kind of re-creation of a spiritual and intellectual tradition that can connect with human urges.