The Wasteland of T.S.Eliot【艾略特长诗《荒原》的主旨+背景+框架+内容的概括分析】(全英文)

T.S. ELIOT: THE WASTELAND

This poem was written for the most part while in a sanatorium in Lausanne in Switzerland recovering from nervous exhaustion (not the least cause of which was his marriage to Viv). A revolutionary poem both stylistically- and thematically-speaking, Pound described it as the ‘justification of our modern experiment, since 1900’. Although this is a difficult poem to sum up (the vastness of its scope has made some critics describe it as the epic of the Twentieth century and even Eliot conceptualised it as a collection of separate poems rather than one whole poem), there are a number of technical and thematic features which are worth noting.

Formal Strategies:

Heteroglossia / Montage:

multiple voices succeed each other with alarming and bewildering rapidity. There is, notwithstanding a bizarre footnote crediting the figure of Tiresias with more importance in this respect than he has, no single, central speaker who unifies the multiplicity of perspectives offered in the poem. This is not a single dramatic monologue. Rather, many different chunks of the text (there are no clear demarcations) seem to be snatches (mini-monologues) uttered by different, individually recognisable personalities. At other times, there are passages seemingly uttered by oracular voices possessed of an almost visionary, prophetic, even Biblical quality (e.g. in the first and final sections). At other points, the voice is almost incantatory: e.g. the beginning where a speaker or perhaps a chorus of voices seems to lament the return of life in springtime.

The Absence of a Traditional Narrative Development:

no plot, no consistent flow of thought (logical or associational) to assist the reader in making sense of the poem. The effect of this accumulation of discontinuous voices is to release a flurry of implications whose swiftness and dense complexity make the poem difficult to apprehend, let alone digest. In short, this is a poem seemingly without coherence which simply begs the reader to unify it even as it denies the reader the normal means to do so: there simply is no continuity of setting, voice, narrative or style. In the place of these, one finds:

Naturalistic Description:

Eliot focuses for the most part on the more sordid and depressing details of the contemporary metropolis (such urban poetry represented a radical departure from the traditional focus on the natural landscape and on the agreeable, the beautiful and the ideal in Romantic poetry and its derivatives). The poem serves up something akin to a montage of visual images that explore city life and the lives of its inhabitants by juxtaposing images, scenes, dramatic vignettes containing fragments of conversation, etc. At times, these images assume an almost phantasmagoric dimension (e.g. “Unreal city”). Sordid urban images commingle with images of the desert/aridity to the point where, quite clearly, they are meant to comment upon each other: to wit, modern life in the city is being compared to an arid, sterile waste. Recurring Leitmotifs:

these, in accumulating significance, become evocative symbols: these are scenes, images and allusions that are repeated in separate contexts and, by dint of which, assume symbolic resonance: e.g. hibernation, the desert; the rock; water; drowning (the allusions to the drowned Alonso in The Tempest, Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet, a drowned Phoenician). As these motifs return in new contexts, they bring with them suggestions and associations from former contexts and evolve into “progressively denser nodes of connotation and feeling” (Perkins 504) and, in so doing, become symbols. This process also serves to link the diverse parts of the poem together. Eliot both draws upon established symbols and forges images into fresh symbols that include: fire (lust), death (this can sometimes mean literal death, sometimes the living death which these Wastelanders lead), rebirth, and water (arouses a mixture of longing [it quenches thirst], fascination and fear [death by drowning]).

Recondite Allusions: