Modernist perversions: The Waste Land and history
Jamie Chong
In my second-hand copy of Modernism: The Lure of Heresy , the previous owner had, quite brashly, etched into the margins that ‘ modernists are hipsters ’ . On reading the book, one might agree. As Peter Gay argues, modernism was a rejection of orthodoxy, of the bourgeoisie and its systems which defined the hierarchies of art and its value, quite like, though perhaps not with the same righteous grandeur, hipsters who define themselves according to their authenticity and uniqueness. 1 This notion of modernism as complete uniqueness is, perhaps, reinforced by the poet Ezra Pound’s dictum to ‘ make it new ’ . However, to make something ‘ new ’ implies reconstruction, renovation, reinvigoration, and on reading some of modernism’s defining work s, it may seem that they do the opposite of rejection. They are often packed with references, reuse conventional forms, and rewrite previous cultural works. Even from the title of Gay’s text, ‘ heresy ’ does not imply a rejection of orthodoxy in a way that provides a replacement; instead, it is a twist, something that turns the tradition on its head, so that it becomes almost blasphemous by exploding its contradictions and exposing its inarticulacies. T.S. Eliot believed that originality, or the expression of individual poetic talent, manifests itself in the weaponization of the literary tradition. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, he posits that ‘ not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously ’ . 2 Indeed, the rejection of orthodoxy, the ‘ most individual ’ , comes not from rejecting the works of the tradition, but by co-opting them, demonstrating an awareness of the way the poet’s relationshi p with the past and the poetic lineage impacts their own poetry. Eliot depicts the creation of new art as an alteration of an aesthetic ‘ ideal order ’ , the creative space for the synthesis of art, as established by the existing literary tradition, shifting it to accommodate the new piece of art. Perhaps the prevalence of poetic ancestry is even made evident in Eliot’s title; the ‘ tradition ’ precedes the ‘ individual talent ’ . While some may argue that this is a faithfulness to the tradition, I would argue that it is an infidelity, or a perversion. The work of the modernists is not mere pastiche; it is vandalism of the highest order. It cements its authenticity in allusion. I will use Eliot’s seminal modernist piece, The Waste Land , to demonstrate this. The Waste Land depicts post-war Britain in the ‘ immense phenomena of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history ’ , something he describes in his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses , but which may be better suited for this poem. 3 Published in 1921, London is devastated by war, left a socio-cultural vacuum, and Eliot uses intertextuality to compare this with history. This essay will examine the most prominent references in the poem.
The Waste Land is a modernist epic and thus, it is important to consider the modernist perspective of what an epic is. Pound defined the epic as a poem ‘ containing history ’ , yet critics seem to perceive a
1 Gay 2007. 2 Eliot 1919. 3 Eliot 1923.
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