Preludes

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

“The time of this episode is indistinct, though from its
placement it would seem to occur on Sunday, December 24,
1944.”  Weisenburger, GRC.82


The structure of episode 17invites comparison to episode one
and provides many clues to how the reader is to read the
book and what time it is. Of the seven holders of Pavlov’s
“Book,” only two are left after this episode: Pointsman and
Gwenhidwy. Unless of course the reader is, zero. “It’s six
on the dot
 six is the hour of the appearance of the
light
hands perfectly straight up and down.” Zero on the
y-axis. Now, as I asked in episode one, who is dreaming and
whose dream is it anyway? “You didn’t really believe you’d
be saved.” “It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.”
In
Pointsman’s dream it is  “only an interdiction, from which
there is no appeal.” So YOU are not yet doomed, but if YOU
are Pointsman, YOU are prohibited from grace. YOU are not
excommunicated, but YOU can not share in the Ritual of
Grace. Pointsman is the Minotaur.

Pointsman’s solipsistic obsession with Slothrop is akin to
Satan’s with “our Grand Parents.” All of Satan’s efforts
only turn inward towards the Minotaur that is himself. He
must control or destroy, “but his doom reserved him to more
wrath...” PL BK I. Pointsman’s obsession with Slothrop is
solopsistic. “But with Slothrop in it
Might Pointsman get to
have a go at the Minotaur after all?” Pointsman is a bit
like Brock Vond, he likes very young girls, innocents that
can not protect themselves. He is anti-social—“He’s even
aware
of being creepy
radiating the old creepiness
he’d like
to give them something to scream about.” There is a certain
irony in the fact that Pointsman is a powerful bureaucrat
and yet he is a not in control.

This episode is quite fragmented. Much of what is happening
in this episode sends us back to previous episodes—including
episode one—and, as is the case with the entire text, we can
not make sense of much of what is going on until we read
beyond it. Sometimes we have only echoes or words to
consider and structurally the entire episode is similar to
the novel as a whole.

Some echoes are in the text and some are outside the text or
from other texts. I don’t hear Milton, I simply think
Pointsman with his sinister night and hood, his solipsistic
evil quest to determine as he turns left, going in, invites
comparison with Milton’s Satan as described in the first
half of PL and “The Christian Doctrine.” I do not hear
Pavlov, because I have not read his Book, but I hear Eliot’s
“Preludes.”


I

1     The winter evening settles down
2     With smell of steaks in passageways.
3     Six o'clock.
4     The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
5     And now a gusty shower wraps
6     The grimy scraps
7     Of withered leaves about your feet
8     And newspapers from vacant lots;
9     The showers beat
10   On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
11   And at the corner of the street
12   A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
13   And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

14   The morning comes to consciousness
15   Of faint stale smells of beer
16   From the sawdust-trampled street
17   With all its muddy feet that press
18   To early coffee-stands.

19   With the other masquerades
20   That time resumes,
21   One thinks of all the hands
22   That are raising dingy shades
23   In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

24   You tossed a blanket from the bed,
25   You lay upon your back, and waited;
26   You dozed, and watched the night revealing
27   The thousand sordid images
28   Of which your soul was constituted;
29   They flickered against the ceiling.
30   And when all the world came back
31   And the light crept up between the shutters
32   And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
33   You had such a vision of the street
34   As the street hardly understands;
35   Sitting along the bed's edge, where
36   You curled the papers from your hair,
37   Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
38   In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

39   His soul stretched tight across the skies
40   That fade behind a city block,
41   Or trampled by insistent feet
42   At four and five and six o'clock;
43   And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
44   And evening newspapers, and eyes
45   Assured of certain certainties,
46   The conscience of a blackened street
47   Impatient to assume the world.

48   I am moved by fancies that are curled
49   Around these images, and cling:
50   The notion of some infinitely gentle
51   Infinitely suffering thing.

52   Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
53   The worlds revolve like ancient women
54   Gathering fuel in vacant lots.


For Eliot, problems of structure and form are among the
greatest problems facing the modern poet. The modern poet
must find "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" (Eliot, "Ulysses,
Order and Myth"). This sense that the modern world defies
traditional structure and that the poet must somehow find a
way of creating order amid chaos is a driving force in
Eliot's work, and Eliot’s poetry can be seen as offering a
distinct solution to the problems of form and structure.
"Preludes" lacks both a central, identifiable persona and
any semblance of narrative
development. What are the poems preludes to or for? The
first lyric section, for example, describes the settling
down of a winter evening: a "gusty shower" sweeps litter
through the empty streets, a cab-horse stamps restlessly.
The imagery seems to be setting the scene for something to
happen as the lamps are lit, and then, without warning, the
section ends without having gone anywhere.

"Preludes" consists of four lyric sections juxtaposed
against one another. The first and second lyrics describe
the sordidness of the external world, the first at evening
and the second in the morning. The third lyric introduces a
character whose inner world, the poet seems to suggest, is a
manifestation of the emptiness and degeneration of the
external world, and the fourth lyric is a generalized
comment on the link between the emptiness of the people (who
in the second section are described as assuming masks or
facades to hide behind) who inhabit a world without meaning.
Taken as a whole, the sections suggest a mood or a state of
consciousness that is severed from a distinct persona and
is, instead, universal. The juxtapositional relations of the
poem, the spiritual barrenness and the meaninglessness of
life implied throughout, and the sense at the end that the
mood, disconnected as it is from a single narrative voice,
is that of an entire culture rather than a central speaker
are all characteristics of Eliot's later poem The Waste
Land. The thematic and structural similarities between the
two poems are such that "Preludes" can be seen as
prefiguring The Waste Land, which more fully develops the
theme of the meaninglessness of modern life and whose
structure depends entirely upon juxtapositional relations
between fragments.


Episode 17 consists of three sections. The first section
references Pavlov’s Book and the “Paradoxical Phase.” A
narrative voice asks,  “When did it happen?” and begins
addressing the “YOU” (Pointsman) of a dream and discussing
“IT” (the Light). We don’t know what’s going on at first, we
can guess that Pointsman is dreaming and that the voice is
addressing him, but we can’t be sure and the question “when
did it happen?” produces the reader disorientation and
indeterminacy that we have come to expect in this novel.



Also,  the section currently under discussion (18) seems to
be a linking pair with the next section and while it returns
us to earlier sections (most notably 5) it also loops into
concerns that will only be apparent in later sections. I
think the idea of "freaks" and history as an aggregate of
last moments is very important, as is the idea of exile.
Every freak is alone, isolated, exiled, and the world of
their special gift, for which they are used, reflects the
general position of characters in the chaos that is the
"war."

Terrance