Eliot's Last Laugh: The Dissolution of Satire in "The Waste Land" Author(s): Robert S.

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Eliot's Last Laugh: The Dissolution of Satire inTheWaste Land

Robert S. Lehman
Cornell University

Waste

This essay examines the formal role played by satire in the earlydrafts ofT.S. Eliot's The comes into Land. I argue that the reliefonlywhen precise characterof this role Eliot marshals to reconcilethe conflictualpolesofhis satire is locatedamong the strategies
the critical-historical and the creative, tradition and innovation. Satire

poetics:

in thedrafts ofThe Waste

history, and as a way for

Land as an immanentmeans ofmanaging the excessesof

the 'mature poet" to recollect the past while distinguishing

appears

himself final version of from it. Accordingly, I suggest,satires disappearancefrom the

the poem, its

literary

to accomplish the specific tasks that Eliot sets for it.

replacement

by

the so-called

"mythical method,

"signals

satire s failure

Keywords: Eliot / satire / TheWaste Land I tradition /Pope

Over
by Inventions image

the last few decades, an assortment of books and articles have appeared
that focus the onT.S. Eliot's indebtedness earliest?and studies share to the comic tradition.1 Spurred sketches on publication Hare, as a of Eliot's these coarsest?poetic a distrust of the one-dimensional and tireless in

of of Eliot

the March

man. In itsplace, theypresent an Eliot who laughed at slapstick, enjoyed theLon

don music halls, and, most concerns importantly, aside, the incorporated upshot of these these poetry. Biographical studies experiences is their success

prematurely-aged

conservative

foe of the average into his in

revealing the persistence of the comic inEliot's writings, from the early sketches, through the "Sweeney" poems, and including Eliot's masterpiece, TheWaste Land.
Because critics continue to read Eliot's a certain poetry, strain of and The Waste Land in particular, the as the culmination of at least Anglo-American modernism,

poetry, theyneglect its role inEliot's poetics', that is, theydo not askwhy the comic may have been essential to Eliot's literarypractice.

to see the comic as more than raw, thematic unwillingness providing anything to be shored data for Eliot's from Petronius and art, fragments passages alongside to Ovid. allusions with Content the presence the in of comic Eliot's demonstrating their

potential significance of studies that question this poetry's elitism or traditional ism is no doubt great.2 What limits these studies qua readings ofEliot, however, is

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of Number 2 Modern Literature 66 Journal Volume 32, aim inwhat follows is to show that at least one form of the comic?sat com a considerable formal role inEliot's literary practice, and in the ire?played position of TheWaste Land in particular.The precise character of this formal role comes into relief onlywhen satire is located among the strategiesEliot marshals My
to reconcile the

"the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past" (4). Satire appeared in the early drafts of TheWaste Land as an immanentmeans ofmanaging literaryhistory by reconciling the conflictual poles
of Eliot's

poet's

creative

act with

what Walter

Bate

memorably

described

as

Similarly, the disappearance of satire from the final version of Eliot's poem fol lowing the editorial suggestions of Ezra Pound, and satire's replacement by the so-called "mythicalmethod," reflects satire's inability to accomplish this task.

poetics:

the critical-historical

and

the creative,

tradition

and

innovation.

CATALYZING THE TRADITION

Eliot addresses themodern poet's need to articulate the critical with the creative in
his numerous references to the of tradition, most in "Tradition

writer

we might understand Eliot's use of the term and the Individual Talent." In fact, as an "tradition" attempt to facilitate this articulation by bringing the critical and the creative under a single concept. Tradition, Eliot argues, binds the temporal to the timeless, the living to the dead, the creative act to its context by making the
"most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity"

problem

famously

(38).Tradition conditions artistic success.The duty of themature poet is,therefore, to "know everything that has been accomplished in poetry (accomplished, not merely produced) since itsbeginnings?in order to know what he isdoing himself" ("War-paint" 1036). One
yet, mastery the poet even and first. And between of the tradition literary history to paper,

does not "make it new" by forgetting those who came

has a cost. Eliot presents the as one relationship ("Tradition" man of "continual self-sacrifice"

40). The poet, finding himself amidst theworks of all thewriters who preceded him ? to literaryhistory.Any suffers"(40) struggle to separate himself from literary once to as itprovides the verymaterial of his is and for all doomed failure history
poetic creation, a fact as clear from Eliot's critical before he puts pen sacrifices his biographical self?"the who

allusive poetic output. Instead, the poet must empty himself of every biographical The space of the poet's de contingency and open himself to the tradition's truths. personalized mind is the space inwhich the "gasses" of literaryhistory "catalyze" which the new is born of the old. (41), the space in
Though de-personalized, is because Novelty possible an to extent and which way the poet at the moment the poet "the the conscious past's remains an present awareness of itself cannot essential part is an awareness of this process. in a of the past

writings

as from

his

endlessly

show"

39). The full meaning of the past appears only inhindsight. The distinction between
of artistic creation and the as literary past that with never his materials ceasing is, then, not a part so much ontological possesses perspectival: a knowledge him provides the poet, though of the tradition

("Tradition"

to be

of the tradition,

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Last in of The Land Eliot's The Satire Waste Dissolution 67 Laugh:

that the tradition are remote from necessarily us because lacks. As we know Eliot notes, "someone than said: 'The dead writers and

so much

more

are thatwhich we know" (40). The act of creation is they nothing but themoment of knowledge that occurs when the tradition?through the production of "the new (the reallynew) work of art" (38)?reflects on itself.In short, through the poet, occurs inEliot's early lyrics,for example, "Gerontion," firstpublished in 1920 and serve as to intended the briefly "prelude" to TheWaste Land {Letters504). ? it is arguably themost fully realized of Eliot's pre-Waste Land lyrics or because it so clearly anticipates the themes of TheWaste Land, but because itdra matizes the theory of poetic creation thatEliot was developing at the time of its
composition. to transform Essentially, past experience the poem presents a melancholic The consciousness "I" is an old man unable who into present action. lyrical literary history achieves self-awareness.3 A dramatic instantiation of this process

they did.'

Precisely,

? merits

"Gerontion"

is an

interesting

poem

not

only

because

of

its own

considerable

35-37).The speaker has been lost among history's distractions and has recognized his failings only too late. Because he seems to have spent his life entranced by the objects of literaryhistory in particular?he alludes to Dante, Shakespeare,
and Lancelot Andrewes ? it is

laments his fate as the dupe of an anthropomorphized history.Thus, the poem's best known lines: "History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And Guides us by vanities" {CollectedPoems issues,deceives with whispering ambitions /

man Eliot could himself become, and thus to read the poem as Eliot's proleptic the speaker of "Gerontion" doubts the compatibility of the literaryhistorical and the creative, the immersive of the tradition and the generation of the study really new work, such thatwhat is of "kept" literaryhistorywill always be "adulterated" (58-59), he opposes absolutely the position thatEliot sets forth explicitly in his critical writings and implicitly inhis allusive poems (including "Gerontion" itself).
Nonetheless, rather, his memories Eliot's ness the history anything occasions success. the poem's in a broken culminates series poem and a whirl of "fractured circumscribed atoms." by a remains failure speaker to make is more than just a of of Eliot's negative example praxis; more than a series of disconnected self-critique. Yet the difficulties of sustaining this reading are clear enough. If

tempting

to read

the

speaker

as an

avatar

of the

of And

of mirrors

images,

and in a wilder finally the chaos the poem that yet, coherent consciousness,

presents

as evinced words: "Here I am." by the speaker's first Although "Gerontion" may describe a failure to order this cannot failure be separated from the voice history,
that laments thoughts, the structure but he poem's speaker may one remains speaker. The a of lyric: single poem spoken it. The move somewhat I am associatively between structure in a single is, of course, describing voice. In the context of the

wholly

relatively

"Gerontion" lyric voice, presents in the assertion of ently, complete

with literary struggle history that "Gerontion" initiates,however, lyric is fundamen a defensive ameans of tally strategy, mastering an essentially linguistic confusion by locating it in the relatively stable relationship between amind and aworld. Through
the a of moments, disharmony chaos. It presents this chaos, and ends, appar within however,

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2 Number of Literature Volume Modern 68 Journal 32, lyric?that cannot but remind the reader that this of is all located within the confines of a single conscious this whirl atoms, chaos,
ness: lamento

the stricturesof a form?the

ergo sum.The

itdoes. It says that history is an unmasterable nightmare ofmissed opportunities even as it synthesizes this history in the form of the lyric. The ironyof this process
results poem from as the the disconnect lyrical "I"? and between the the man "mind" that who ? surfers thematized ? an effect of the creates in the generic

poem

divides

itself, then, between

what

it says and what

operations of the lyric itself.4 This ruse of (lyrical) reason functions inEliot's early poetry as a more or less
successful means of

theory.In TheWaste Land, however, the expansion of the poem beyond the form of the lyricpresents new difficulties insofar as the synthesizing activities of a single can no (lyrical) consciousness longer be relied on,while the same threat of liter in "Gerontion" persists. The question, then, is historical disorder thematized ary
how the poem when achieves ? as speaker the requisite is the case with "ironic The Waste distance" Land? from the the lamentations poem's "speaker" of its is not

poetic

synthesis,

and

thus

as an

enactment

of Eliot's

poetic

any identifiable subject but seems to be literary history itself.Satire, at least during Eliot's composition of the early drafts of TheWaste Land, initiallypresented itself
as a possible section. answer. Why this would have been the case will be my concern in the next

MASTERS OF HATRED
In his "Reflections on VersLibre," published in the New Statesmen in 1917, Eliot concludes his discussion of themost modern tendencies in verse with a nod to a moment from the literarypast that, he argues, ought to determine the literary
"We only need the coming of a Satirist?no man of genius is rarer?to

future:

prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge sinceDryden and Pope laid
it down" (36). Elsewhere, to them ("Andrew their status he discusses as the Marvell" the satirical acumen of Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and even referring "great masters" 162). Eliot's cases of, respectively, references of modernism's "contempt,""hatred," to satire are significant, valorization of classi

"disgust" beyond

as additional

cal forms. In Eliot s Dark Angel, Ronald Schuchard details the importance of this comic mode to Eliot's early development, noting that "as he began towrite the in 1918, Eliot immersed himself in the savage and violent tradi Sweeney poems tion of English comedy, from Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to Charles
Dickens,

England
to believe

thence

to the most

his bawdy friend Wyndham

that satire carried the hopes

contemporary

manifestation

of the ferocious

comic

in

Lewis" (89). For a moment, Eliot seemed

of literary modernism.

Eliot shared his interest in satirewith the other "Men of 1914." "Satire"was the termEzra Pound chose to describe his own earlyVorticist experiments (Hofer
463); and Pound remained attached to this term, so that on

zine's Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize in 1962, he described himself (albeitwith a bit of falsemodesty) as only a "minor satirist" (qtd. inKenner Pound Era 556).

receiving

Poetry

maga

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in Land 69 ofSatire The The Waste Eliot's Last Dissolution Laugh: Lewis, however, has perhaps the best claim to being the satirical "man of genius" whose coming Eliot foretold, and Schuchard is right to single him out. Lewis
spilled writer, more and he ink on the completed of subject was what satire probably than any other early-twentieth-century work of modernist satire, the greatest

on themores of the 1920s London literati (and the a The Apes ofGod, brutal attack Sitwells and the Bloomsbury group, in particular). As befit his bellicose character,
understood satire as an unequivocally combative form. Thus, we read in the

Lewis

firstVorticistManifesto: "We onlywant tragedy if it can clench its side muscles like hands on it's [sic] belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb" (31). This Nietzschean coupling of laughter and destruction Lewis justifies only later:
the greatest expressing satire itself is "non-moral," in art, has ever he reasons, "because in, nor no mind consented of the first order, to take in oth itself been taken

ers,by the crude injunctions of any purelymoral code" {Men withoutArt 89). The non-moral satirist does not justify herself by looking to any pre-existent social
standards; was and never everyone and so indiscriminate, more a is, therefore, everything potential but at least one aspect of satire's generally?is implicit target. Eliot ? promise himself for Eliot

for modernism

in Lewis'remarks.

For modernist

was above all a tool means ofwhich authors, satire by they could distinguish their
works (no and themselves mass of from the fallen The products of mass culture, as well as from the less fallen) producers. satirist mocks so as to demonstrate that he

or she has not "been taken in" As Lewis reiterates in his autobi by society at large. are in "we all the resist I the process ofmelting so have a very ography, melting pot. a time of it" Satire bulwark lively promises {Blasting 15).5 against melting, against
the omnipresent no Eliot, threat less than of cultural Pound indistinction. saw this threat everywhere. In what is or Lewis,

Marie ostensibly an obituary for themusic-hall performer

[w]hen every theater has been has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when when ingenuity has made replaced by 100 gramophones, when electrical

Lloyd, he notes that,

instrument replaced by 100 to

every music

every horse has been it possible

cheap motor-cars, hear its bedtime possible with

for every child

stories from a loudspeaker, when the materials on this earth tomake

applied science has done everything life as interesting as possible, it will rapidly follows the fate

not be surprising if the population of theMelanesians. The technological (174)

of the entire civilized world

follows

homogenization the arguments ofW.H.R.

of culture Rivers's

presages

our

extinction.

Here,

Eliot

{1922). As he describes Rivers's findings, "the natives of the unfortunate archipel ago are dying out principally for the reason that the 'Civilization forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom" (174). We risk sharing the demise of the Melanesians for the cultural reasons noted above, as well as for the failures of our political system: "The middle classes, inEngland
as elsewhere, under aristocracy are subordinate are democracy, morally to the middle dependent class, which on is the aristocracy, and the and gradually absorbing

Essays

on the

Depopulation

Melanesia of

will not exist for long" destroying them.The lower class still exists; but perhaps it

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of Modern Literature Volume 2 70 Journal 32,Number (173). Eliot's quarrel in this essay is lesswith the rise of the lower classes thanwith a general move toward themiddle, inwhich "the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie" (174). The tendency of our
culture is not toward the extremes

"ritual of separation" (43), a means of overcoming the unsettling nearness of the undesirable?in short, a refusal tomelt. Although Bogel is primarily concerned
with

deadened equilibrium typical of bourgeois society. Satire resists this sort of equilibrium. Thus, Fredric Bogel usefully describes the "firstsatiricgesture" as one in which the satirist "makes a difference by setting a or textual machine mechanism for producing difference" (42).What is sati up rized is alwayswhat is already dangerously close. Literary satire,beyond its merely comic effect,establishes a system of differentiationbymeans ofwhich the satirist is able both to evoke this dangerous proximity and tomanage it. Satire, then, is a

of the aristocracy

or the

lower

classes,

but

to a

that so appealed to Eliot, we can find the same logic operating in themodernist appropriation of satire. IfAlexander Pope perfected a "machine" bywhich cultural rubbish and the "scribblers" and "dunces" who generated it could be disavowed, a machine thatworked to set own writings apart from his Grub Street Pope's Eliot's contemporary Richard Aldington
divided between popular charlatans contemporaries, modernist writers felt a comparable of need for discrimination, as

Augustan

satire,

that

is, with

the

same

classical

eighteenth-century

texts

shows inwriting that "the arts are now

talent, who, of necessity, write,

and men

think and paint only for each other, since there is no one else to understand them" (37). The division between charlatans and men of talentwas hardly as certain as
Aldington's modernism's remark would proximity of suggest. to, or even In recent reliance years a number of critics have noted of its on, the very marketing to insist on strategies

hated mass-cultural other;6 yet, with themarket's penetration into all forms of life
during the

starkopposition, however wishful it was, could only intensify. satire enters Eliot's writings in the early drafts of TheWaste Land, it When
likewise does comes so as a means the of managing products a from denigrated Once the dangerous proximity. again, of a fallen culture and from the pos

period

high

modernism,

the need

the

reality

of such

threat

sibilitythat the distinction between the high and the lowmight prove undecidable. All of this is in keeping with themodernist turn to satire.Eliot differs from his act itself in its indebtedness to the tradition.The culture of sterilityand decay that TheWaste Land presents is not simply an effectof thewrong sort of people making art; it is a danger implicit in the synthetic act of artistic creation insofar as this
act?as Eliot theorizes that it?comes of the past characterize the modern perilously waste close to the mechanical role that land. The repetitions satire in plays contemporaries, however, in that he locates the source of this threat in the poetic

managing these repetitions ismy focus inwhat follows.

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71 in Waste Land ofSatire The The Dissolution Last Eliot's Laugh:

SATIRE INTHEWASTELAND
As I noted above, the importance of satire to the construction of TheWaste Land appears most vividly in the early drafts, composed in Switzerland while Eliot was convalescing following a nervous disorder and delivered to Pound for editorial

corrections in January 1922. In these drafts,Eliot toys with Pope himself. Thus, in a draft of "The Fire Sermon," the first stanza reads:
Admonished And by the sun's inclining ray, of the thievish day, blinks, and yawns, and gapes, rapes.

swift approaches

The white-armed Aroused Electric

Fresca

from dreams of love and pleasant summons of the busy bell to destroy the spell;

Brings brisk Amanda With Who coarsened draws

hand, and hard plebian

tread,

the curtain round the lacquered bed, a Depositing thereby polished tray Of soothing chocolate, or stimulating tea. {TheWaste Land: A Facsimile poem own continues satirical in heroic Rape of couplets the Lock is for sixty-two more

1?10) allusion to

The Pope's Eliot Pope's

lines. Eliot's of

aswell as in the stanza's form (heroic couplets) and content (a scene of awakening).
describes "Belinda"), the daily has activities already of a woman, a "Fresca" (a modern stand-in for who made very brief appearance as one in a series

apparent

in the mention

"pleasant

rapes,"

Awakened

of names in "Gerontion" {Collected Poems 68). In Eliot's draft of "The Fire Sermon," however, she is quite literallyfleshed out, defined initially solely in terms of her ? bodily functions sleeping and awakening, then drinking, eating, and defecating.
from sexual dreams, to bed, she to the bathroom, As the stanza of chocolate, returns eats her begins day an egg, relaxes Fresca as well, with chocolate or tea, retreats in a bath, herself and so on. not just tastes.

progresses,

however,

reveals

as a consumer eclectic

the toilet,". . . the pathetic tale ofRichardson /Eases her labor till the deed is done" {The Waste Land: A Facsimile 13-14); she "explores a page ofGibbon as she eats" (16); andwhile she lies in a bath,we learn that "Frescawas baptized in a soapy sea / of Walter Pater Vernon / Lee. The Scandinavians bemused her Symonds wits / theRussians thrilled her to hysteric fits" (56-59). In these lines, the distinc On
tion between Fresca does physical not read consumption the letters that and she intellectual receives; consumption rather, is rather them blurry. (19). she "devours"

tea, and

eggs, but of culture

an avid

reader with

On

the other hand, she "sinks in revery" while contemplating the "well-rounded dome" of a hard-boiled egg (17-18). In short, she fails to distinguish high litera
ture not just from mass forms but from any other that male consumable position the largely mindless fortably within But Fresca's ingestion the binary activities of culture that opposes are (actions object. her more She enacts com a or less

production Like

to female speaker

lives a vicarious life,a lifeof "Unreal emotions, and real while appetite" (53).That is,

complicated.

consumption). of "Gerontion," she

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Number 2 Modern Literature Volume of 72 Journal 32,

her desires bodily texts she consumes. literary-historical persist, But her unlike emotional the to experiences come second-hand cannot create from pass the from

speaker present

of "Gerontion,"who action, Fresca does

reminiscence

"She scribbles verse of such a gloomy tone /That cautious critics say her style is quite her own" (65-66). And here Eliot's specific satirical target comes into view.The threat thatFresca personifies is not the threat of the creative sterilityof
"Gerontion," but that of a certain

something:

ily from the consumption ofGibbon, Richardson, and Pater to the generation of her own gloomy verse. Indeed, passing from the consumption of the tradition to
the production the of verse is for Fresca of tea and nearly abound. from And consumption of her chocolates as automatic, as thoughtless, passing to the waste. of production bodily notes of Fresca The that "when speaker Fresca's creation is as

poetic

(re)production.

Fresca

moves

all too

eas

restless nights distract her brain from sleep / shemay aswell write poetry, as count
sheep" (62-63). As automatic as counting, poetic practically recollec somnambulistic. Fresca figures a threat inherent in the very act of literary-historical

examples

automatism

tion prescribed inEliot's criticalwritings. Her behavior isdangerously close to the behavior of themature poet: she reads fairly Western European widely from the creates tradition and out of these excursions into literary she her art. history Though
one could argue too that Fresca responds emotionally is too reliant perhaps to the texts she encounters on the Decadents, to those or that she (at least texts written

by the amusing Scandinavians and the thrillingRussians), none of these criticisms are by themselves sufficientto distinguish her practice from the practice thatEliot celebrates and himself embodies.When
describes the poet's mind as "a

in "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"

for seizing and storing up number

Eliot

unite

less feelings, phrases, images,which remain there until all the particles which can
to form a new is to the chemical are present together" compound reaction that occurs between oxygen This is all too process even refers to the close poet's (41), and his preferred dioxide sulphur own process analogy in the

receptacle

presence tradition;

of

platinum. Eliot

to Fresca's creative

indeed,

(41). Like Eliot's mature poet, Fresca sacrificesherself to an impersonal (because automatic) activity. Thus, she goes on scribbling,beguiled by her "flatteringfriends"
and

of the digestion as a "digestion"

The problem posed by Fresca is as central to Eliot's drafts of "He Do the Police inDifferent Voices" as it is to TheWaste Landin itsfinal incarnation. What characterizes themodern waste land ifnot an ineluctable passage from the high to the low, from the firstappearance of superior art to itsdigestion by a mediocre culture and its return in a fallen form? Everything in thewaste land?all of literary
history?returns

championed

by "cautious

critics."

tion, digestion, and excretion of formerlygreat works; to recollect literaryhistory at all is to risk being implicated in the same crimes. This process is thematized
again and again or in the poem, initially

degraded.

The

problem

extends

beyond

mass

culture's

consump

organic decay?the
example,

sprouting corpse that appears in "The Burial of theDead,"

Sybil of the poem's epigraph?but in more recognizably

through

figures

of

seasonal

repetition

and

for

the rotting

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The in The Land Eliot's Dissolution ofSatire Waste 73 Last Laugh: as literary-historical terms well. In the second section of the poem, "A Game of a series of questions?'"Do7 fractured 'You know nothing? Do you see Chess,"

Waste Land, ed.North 121-123)?is nothing?Do you remember' / 'Nothing?'" (The answered with what ought to be a definitive gesture to the literary tradition: "I remember /Those are pearls thatwere his eyes" (124-125). Summoned from the "ideal order" of the literarypast ("Tradition" 38), Ariel's speech from The Tem
re-members the dis-membered queries that precede it. But no

pest momentarily

sooner is the bard invoked than he falls towaste, asAriel's speech slides smoothly into thememory of a popular tune that Eliot might have heard playing on "100 - / It's so "But / O O O O that gramophones": Shakespeherian Rag elegant / So intelligent" (127-130). No work, apparently, is immune to its recurrence in a fallen
form. As the speaker of "Gerontion" feared, to "keep," to remember, is to "adulter

ate."This passage from the high to the low, from Shakespeare to "Shakespehere," reveals how porous the putative distinction between high and low a really is, fact some lines from "That not to that Eliot chooses supported by Shakesperian Rag" never "Bill / in knew of his quote: Shakespeare ragtime days, /But the high browed You'll admit, admit, surelyfit / any song that's rhymes,/Of his syncopated lines, / now a hit" (qtd. TheWaste Land, ed. North 51-54). Shakespeare "fits"into ragtime
just as Gibbon, Richardson, and Pater "fit" into Fresca's verse.

Satire provides Eliot with themeans of distinguishing his own catalyses of from these and fallen literaryhistory digestions repetitions. In this capacity, satire
on two related levels. First, and most obviously, Eliot's use of the satirical

works

mode in the drafts of "The Fire

Sermon"?clearly signaled by his pastiche of Pope's to insist on a difference between his own the Lock?allows him Rape of poetic and the automatic practices embodied by the lady Fresca. practice Again, satire's vocation is to "make a difference" where we find at firstonly a threatening proxim
ity.The real content of the difference between Eliot's and Fresca's

literaryhistorymay be effectivelyindiscernible, but the very fact of satirical pre

sentation introduces a formal distinction Fresca, Fresca's Eliot locates his own practice even if at this points is in within reproductions. By mocking of greater or at position authenticity, terms are these That point empty. relatively to a in her verse that neither Fresca, failing a can perceive. in the it poem, provides the content for between these

reproductions

of

least greater knowledge, verse can be satirized friends, nor her once

nor her

too-cautious place

critics

Moreover,

satire

the formal differentiation that it engenders. This content is satire itself. Against Fresca's digestive syntheses of literary history,Eliot proffers satire as an alternative model formanaging the tradition. The fundamental distinction between these
two modes ?

automatically, the satirist recollects it critically.Satire insists on a division between itselfand its literary-historical object, even as it serves as the vessel of this object's Bemused the Scandinavians and thrilled to hysteric fits presentation. by by the
Russians, repeats. part Fresca is not The satirist, practices on psychically the other distinct from the texts that she consumes not wholly and a hand, is not at stake in the game,

digestive

and

satirical?is

that while

Fresca

recollects

the tradition

of the

that he

condemns.

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74

ofModern Literature Volume 32, Number 2 Journal

Here, the significance of satire to the formal construction of TheWaste Land

comes into view. Like Fresca's verse, The Waste Land is a poetic anamnesis of

history; thus, it risks appearing indistinguishable from the degraded repetitions of classic texts thatFresca carries out.How, for example, can TheWaste Land establish
that its own

literary

order as Fresca's gloomy verse or "That Shakesperian Rag"? Satire provides (or ought to provide) TheWaste Land with the means to distinguish itself from the even as it partakes in the practice of products of themodern waste land literary recollection that calls these products forth. Without this critical distance secured by satire,Eliot would become Fresca, his degraded double.

repetitions

of Dante,

or Wagner,

or

Shakespeare

are not

of the same

THE ABSENCE OF SATIRE INTHEWASTELAND

Ezra Pound was, however, unamused.

Land

in 1928, Eliot notes that Pound "induced me to destroywhat I thought an excellent set of couplets; for,said he,Tope has done this sowell thatyou cannot do itbetter; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it,foryou can
parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope ? and you can't'" (The

Reflecting

on

the

composition

of The Waste

not

Waste Land: A Facsimile 127). The seventy-two lines of heroic couplets with which Eliot intended to begin "The Fire Sermon"were a casualty of the self-proclaimed poem.7 If, in 1928, Eliot could still describe the excised couplets as "excellent,"by 1929, he appears to have wholly internalized Pound's criticisms, warning aspiring poets that "ifyou followDante without talent,you will atworst be pedestrian and flat; ifyou follow Shakespeare or Pope without talent,you will make an utter fool of yourself" ("Dante" 217). Soon afterValerie Eliot's publication of the drafts of TheWaste Land in 1971, a number of critics voiced their agreement with Pound that Eliot's attempt to revive the satiricalmode was a failure, though each filled in the ultimate reason for this failurewith his or her own reading. Building on in Kenner's Urban "The argument Hugh Apocalypse," Philip Cohen notes that "a comparison of TheRape of the Lock to Eliot's parody shows how mistaken Eliot
was in his "sage homme" of The Waste Land, another cut in Pound's "caesarean" delivery of the

very real fascinationwith Belinda" (19). Cohen goes on to remark that the disgust of female physicality Eliot exhibits in this section tellsus more about Eliot himself
than about the poem's Fresca. author, David and Ward, states in on the other language hand, resists the as direct as Pound's to temptation analyze own that "the parody

conception

of

Pope.

Eliot

has

none

of

Pope's

occasional

playfulness

and

is for the most part nerveless and slack" (100). More recently, Marjorie Perloff has combined these positions: the lines thatPound "slashed," shewrites, are both "offensive"and "weak" (174).
what

may endorse Pound's editorial decisions, all of these critics ignore Though they
is most to essential "parody in Pound's criticism: the Pope," do to satirize not equal the master Pope's surprising of hatred in wit or suggestion himself. It and that Eliot's is perhaps

aim was true

that Eliot's

descends into cruelty (perhaps learned from Lewis) where Pope remains playful,

couplets

precision,

that Eliot

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in Land ofSatire The Waste 75 The Dissolution Eliot's Last Laugh: but Pound's suggestion thatEliot intended to parody Pope seems, on the surface, wrote in the style of the ancients to take thewind out implausible. Pope himself was was no doubt clear to his readers that his target of his contemporaries' sails; it notHoratio and Homer but rather those "scribblers" who would claim their legacy. inTheRape ofthe Lock he describes the titular theftof hair in terms and tones When Helen of borrowed from Homer's description ofParis'abduction of Troy, his aim is tomock the smallness of his contemporaries by opposing theirown trivialaffairsto Homer's gigantomachia. Similarly, when Eliot mocks Fresca in the style of Pope, who would imagine that Pope himself is the real butt of the joke? Nonetheless,
this seems to be Pound's the eye. than meets more to this odd And yet, there is suggestion. suggestion was so in to Eliot take Pound's and to If, 1922, advice, ready

when he drafted the first, Popeian lines of "The Fire Sermon," the effectof these linesmust be to satirize Pope himself. That TheWaste Lands
Pope results from

consign Fresca to thewaste-paper basket, it is likely because he recognized the truthof Pound's comments: in sum, whatever Eliot imagined himself to be doing

satirical recollection of literary history necessarily impli

poem's unusually ambitious scope. The Waste Land'con

cates

the

stitutes an attempt to recollect literaryhistory from its Western

and non-Western

organic holism: an "all-inclusive experience outside of which nothing shall fall" {Knowledge and Experience 31). All literaryhistory is, at least potentially, a part of
the waste land that The Waste ents. But proximity appears of this or that "other," if satire Land critically?which in The Waste Land not but also, is to say, satirically?pres to the manage only dangerous to recollect and more criti importantly,

to its most recent returns Eliot incarnations. In this sense, The Waste Land origins to a one that he first articulated to FH. with reference interest, persistent Bradley's

a waste to recollect, land that satire is part of the literary-historical clearly supposed so are were and satires. If to draw on them be unable not, Eliot would Pope's they for the first seventy-two lines of "The Fire Sermon." If Eliot's satire is to Popeian differentiate The Waste Land waste from the land, then, itmust literary-historical differentiate ferentiate The Waste The Waste Land from from Pope; moreover, satire. And Eliot's here Popeian Pound's satire must confusion dif about Land

where in this process do we locate the satires of Pope cally literaryhistory itself, (and Horace, Juvenal, Swift, Lewis, and so on)? Herein lies the difficulty. Pope is

Eliot's

the targetof Eliot's satire isunderstandable. In TheWaste Land, "Pope"(the satirical must to not Waste The Land from separate style) help just Pope (the poet subject to the cycles of literaryhistory) but from "Pope" (the satirical style) as well; each is implicated in the tradition to be satirized, and each is capable of returning in a As Pound recognized, Pope (like degraded form. "Pope") is necessarily intended in
"burlesque" because Pope is very much a part of the literary-historical waste

Popeian

land that TheWaste Land describes. If satire must distinguish TheWaste Land {torn must satire also itself satire.Satire must, from literary history, distinguish satirically, itself from itself. distinguish
If satire it can only do is to remain so as the the model satire for a critical recollection is the case, of the tradition the promise in toto, of satire of satire. But if this

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76 Journal of Modern Literature Volume Number 2 32,

to separate poets from dunces, to separate Eliot from Fresca, or to separate The

Waste Land from thewaste land, becomes confused. with What becomes of satire, " its gratifyingly idealized . . .coherence of self and other" (Bogel 46), when "self" and "other" are not just dangerously similar but demonstrably the same thing?The closer Eliot comes to approximating themasterful satireof Pope, themore difficult itbecomes to distinguish Eliot fromPope, or to distinguish Eliot's satire of satire from Pope's satire. In TheWaste Land, then, satire (of satire) ends up inviting the was supposed to dangerous proximity of literaryhistory (including satire) that it
The dissolves form relatively into a stable vertigo system of differences promised of undecidable self-parody, by a state satire as a generic akin to of affairs manage.

what Friedrich Schlegel, in a discussion of the related operations of irony, described il

as eine

in the early drafts of the poem, those drafts cut to ribbons by Pound, its work proves undecid
able. or In these of ? drafts, we cannot establish, there satire satire. Consequently, that what we read is satire, finally, whether to establish is no way the poem whether akin to a himself

Satire is absent from the finished version of TheWaste Land'because

permanente

Parekbase"'&

permanent

parabasis'

(18:85).

has successfully distinguished itselffrom the literary-historical repetitions that it

thematizes a

by his own hair.This is the fate of TheWaste Land insofar as it seekswithin literary history an immanent principle for the ordering of literaryhistory.On the other hand, if literaryhistory cannot be successfully recollected by an immanent con
sciousness necessitated outside or generic Eliot's technique, turn to the itmust "mythical be transcended. An awareness of this fact method," every in essence satirical a turn to a principle no matter how

process

seems

increasingly

person's

lifting

of, or prior must

to, the tradition

in which

gesture,

self-aware,

remain.

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Jonathan Culler, Douglas Mao, Neil invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Saccamano, and Audrey Wasser for their

Notes
1. 2. See, for example, Chinitz; Faulk; Johnson; Schuchard.

InA Genealogy of Modernism, Michael Levenson notes that,unlike much of the London avant-garde, "Eliot himself did not join the attack on tradition.He did not chant with the Vorticists that 'Life is the Past and the Future. The Present isArt.'He thus entered the debate at an opportune moment to assert the need for the regenerating example of past forms" (158). Here, Eliot figures a vision of modernism reconciled with its status as amoment in the great tradition of Western art; he thus eases the transition between two senses of "modernism"?modernism as rupture and modernism as institution. Franco Moretti, coming to Eliot's poetry with a very different set of assumptions, nonetheless positions The Waste Land as the capstone of the "last literary season' of Western culture (209). 3. My use of the more or less idealist notion of (literary) history achieving accidental. The likelihood that Eliot's theorization of the tradition originated self-awareness is not

in the neo-Hegelian

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in Land 77 ofSatire The Waste The Dissolution Eliot's Last Laugh:

on which Eliot wrote his doctoral dissertation, has been philosopher F.H. Bradley's organic holism, well documented. In The Invisible Poet, Hugh Kenner notes thatwe find in Eliot's writings "evidence for his unqualified ingestion of certain perspectives of Bradley's which one does not discover him ever an to have repudiated" (45), while in a more recent book, M.A.R. Habib identifies Bradley's appeal with to cultural fragmentation, writing that "the philosophies of Bradley, intra-philosophical resistance idealists might [Josiah] Royce and other [late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century] neo-Hegelian

be viewed

as a last ditch attempt to retain the larger unifying synthesis against the disintegrative realism" of and (13). positivism onslaught 4. Here,

I am following fairly closely thework of Paul deMan, particularly the reading of Baudelaire's "Correspondances" and "Obsession" that de Man develops in his late essay "Anthropomorphism and insists that "the lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to Trope in the Lyric." De Man desig nate the defensive motion of a understanding, the possibility of future hermeneutics" (261). Bracketing for a moment

de Man's more extreme assertions regarding the possibility of the lyric as a genre, we can still recognize in "Gerontion" the "defensive motion" that he describes: a more or less stable couple ? or "I/it" substitutes for an irrational and potentially unmanageable ? accumulation of "I/you" linguistic fragments. For a discussion of these lines that relates them to Lewis's notion of a non-moral satire, seeMiller,

5.

47-49. 6. Lawrence Rainey, for example, details this complex relationship ofmodernism as follows: "Modernism," he observes, to commodity culture

and investment?activities

that precisely in this period begin to encroach upon and merge into one another in marks neither a straightforward resistance nor unexpected ways. Modernism an to a momentary commidification but outright capitulation equivocation that incorporates elements of both in a brief, necessarily unstable synthesis. (3) 7.

is a strategywhereby the work of art invites and solicits its commodification, but does so in such a way that it becomes a commodity of a special sort, one that is temporarily exempted from the exigencies of immediate consumption prevalent within the larger cultural economy, and is instead integrated into a different economic circuit of patronage, collecting, speculation,

Pound described himself as the "sage homme" of TheWaste Land in a short poem of the same name included in a letter he sent to Eliot inDecember, 1921. The first three stanzas of read: "Sage Homme" These are the Poems of Eliot By theUranian Muse begot; A Man their Mother was, A Muse their Sire. How did the printed Infancies result thus doubly difficult?

From Nuptials

If you must needs enquire Know diligent Reader That on each Occasion Ezra performed the caesarean Operation. {Letters 498)

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