Politics & Sex in the Western World

[Terrance]

1     They are rattling breakfast plates in basement
kitchens,
2     And along the trampled edges of the street
3     I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
4     Sprouting despondently at area gates.

5     The brown waves of fog toss up to me
6     Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
7     And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
8     An aimless smile that hovers in the air 
9     And vanishes along the level of the roofs.   

This Eliot poem, "Morning at the Window" (1914), consists of
only two stanzas. Note that the second is a repulsive and 
twisted rewriting of the relatively sober first, in which
the "I"  sits at a window looking on the street. This then
becomes an experience subject to "brown waves of fog" which
toss twisted
faces and tear smiles from passers by. This is "The brown
fog of a winter dawn" that will return as the  climactic
condition of The Waste Land's "Unreal City." For Eliot,  the
problems of poetry are  the problems of culture. This may
seem like a very obvious point, but to Thomas Pynchon, it
seems to me anyway, it's a point worth looking into. The
Waste Land examines dualisms and binaries, like beauty and
ugliness.  And there is nothing more beautiful and ugly than
to the modernist than sex. The persistent concern with sex
that is so important to Pynchon's novels,  to the
modernists, was the lens through which history was seen as
the history of decadence, decay and a progressive and
insidious Wasting.  The Waste Land re-reads history as a
sordid parade, witnessed by the bisexual Tiresias who
shuffles across its stage, and which climaxes in a series of
sordid liaisons. Tiresias, is an "old man with wrinkled
dugs."  He is witnesses to and foretells of the sterility of
heterosexual love. This is of course, in part, a symptom of
the need for a kind of language and communication and
communion which no longer possible. The desperate desire
for, and the impossibility of, communication, is both a
"truth" of sexual relations and of modernist writing.
However unpalatably, Eliot foregrounded a politicization of
writing which aestheticism had repressed in marking out "Art
for Art's Sake" against the political engagement of High
Victorian writing. So, when I say that Eliot is one of the
heads on the three headed monster that postmodernism has
created of Modernism it is of this political project that I
speak. As Modernist, Eliot's immersion of modern poetry in
the most sordid aspects of social life can not be separated
from his right-wing repulsion, his anti-Semitism, but this
political culture war is not conducive to understanding the
poetry, not how it is that Thomas Pynchon, an author that is
obviously Left of Mr. Eliot, but obviously shares much of
his repulsion as well.   Eliot's treatment of human beings
in his poetry can be obsessively cruel and vindictive.
Indeed, the extremely reactionary politics of Yeats, Pound, 
and Eliot,  are problematic, and often make their work
painful reading for reasons other than the fact that they
are as difficult, if not more so, than any Pynchon novel.