Improper Desire

[Dave Monroe]

>From Harriet Davidson, "Improper Desire: Reading The
Waste Land," The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot,
ed. A. David Moody (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994), pp.
121-31 ...

   "The Waste Land can be read as a poem about the
proper and the improper.  Eliot's change of epigraph
[from Conrad to Petronius] is one of many
circumstances that contribute to emphasizing what we
might call the 'proper' side of this poem, that is,
its scholarly apparatus, its respect for tradition,
and its recoil from the chaos of life, rather than its
'improper' side--its equally apparent lack of respect
for tradition and poetic method and its fascination
with mutation, degradation, and fragmentation....  The
poem returns again and again to 'improper' sexual
desire, temptation, and surrender and their often
tragic consequences.  The poem also, in its interest
in metamorphosis and use of quick juxtapositions,
blurs the proper boundaries between things; different
characters and voices confusingly mutate into each
other.... none of this is done in the spirit of play;
the overriding tone of the poem seems to yearn to be
rid of improper desires, setting up a deep
contradiction within the poem.
   "This contradiction, along with the poem's lack of
thematic clarity and its careful refusal of
connections between images, scenes and voices, makes
The Waste Land particularly open to different
interpretations.  In fact, it is a measure of the
poem's indigestibility that many of the controversies
surrounding the poem when it was published in 1922
persist today.  Readers in the twenties argued over
whether the poem was too radical and meaningless or
too conservative and tied to traditional values.  New
readers are still likely to come away from the poem
bewildered by the many voices, allusions, and shifting
tones of the poem.  And professional critics still
argue over th most basic of issues: what voice, if
any, dominates the poem, what themes control the poem,
and what values are upheld by the poem?" (p. 122)

   "But the power of the poem, I will argue, comes
from its refusal to supply anything to appease the
longing for propriety.  The poem treats myth, history,
art, and religion as subject to the sane
fragmentation, appropriation, and degradation as
modern life--nothing transcends the effects of
finitude and change brought on by the regeneration of
April... the barren waste can be read as different
from, and in opposition to, the chaotic life in the
poem, not as a metaphor for it.  In this reading, the
empty unchanging desert represents what would happen
if our wish to escape the uncertainties of life
through absolutes, transcendence, or, like the Sybil,
immortality were to be granted.  Sadly, the only
alternative to the human world of thwarted and
degraded desires, loss, change, and confusion is a
barren waste.  While the poem provides an emotional
and often visceral critique of the state of human
life, it equally provides a critique of the desire to
transcend and escape that life, and it offers no
alternatives beyond that life or the persistence of
that desire.
   "Eliot's prose writings of the time, especially his
philosophical writings, show very clearly that the
young Eliot believed that nothing transcends the
finite and particular world.... he challenges the
philosophical notion of a transcendent absolute,
either Ideal or Real, and argues that change and
diversity alone are absolute, thus undermining the
stability and unity of all ideas, things, and
personalities.  But Eliot is no relativist ... 
Eliot's philosophical position resembles the
pragmatism of his professors at Harvard: the world is
neither objective nor subjective, nor empirically
verifiable, but also not relative for each individual.
 Instead, selves and objects simultaneously arise out
of and create a shared culture ....  Our certainty is
only within a particular, historical, cultural
context, which will, inevitable, change for better or
worse." (pp. 123-4)

   "The Waste Land strongly reveals the unruly forces
of improper desire in its emotional yearning, in its
constant return to sexual tragedy, and in its
disorienting juxtapositions and displacements.  But
the textual history of the poem ... tends to tame some
of the unruliness of the poem....  These cuts excise
Eliot's rawer side: scenes of drunkenness, whoring,
urination, defecating, and bigotry are removed .... 
And with the removal of the manuscript's comic,
narrative opening, the poem foregrounds the
life-denying voice ...." (p. 124)

   "Perhaps even more important for confusing
understanding of the poem are the notes which were not
originally attached to it but were added only for the
book version.  The notes focused critical attention on
the scholarly exegesis of sources and allusions, and
encouraged the kind of source-hunting that began to
take over readings of the poem....  He was later to
write, 'I regret having sent so many enquirers off on
a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy
Grail.'...
   "Knowing the story of the quest for the Grail or
the significance of the Tarot does not, of course,
hurt when reading The Waste Land...." (pp. 124-5)

"The many abrupt changes and mutations in the voices
of the poem often blur the proper boundaries between
identities ....
   "Both modes--of sterile propriety and fertile
impropriety--cause despair, but neither is repudiated
entirely.  Much of the drama of this poem comes from
the interweaving and crisscrossing of these two modes
as desire disrupts order and desire for order sets up
paradoxical and unbearable tensions.  The poem
frustrates the reader's attempts to follow themes or
images in an orderly way ...." (p. 126)

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