Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature by Allan Johnson

Author:Allan Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

‘The Burial of the Dead’, the first section of The Waste Land, opens with an entombed speaker observing the cruelty of April, the month during which rebirth and new life requires a cannibalistic devouring of organic matter under the earth. Trapped between life and death and unable to release hold of its bodily form, the speaker bears witness to the constant regeneration of the earth in this eerie inversion of natural cycles and seasons where April can be cruel and winter can be warm. The seemingly indissoluble body is left to simply witness the earth ‘mixing / memory and desire’ (lines 2–3) after a blanket of snow during winter slowed down the fearsome decomposition. The change in diction and metre that comes with line eight indicates a new narrative voice, a shifted centre of consciousness, and a conceptual turn in the text, leaving the reader uncertain as to the relationship between the entombed voice of the first seven lines of the poem and the speaker of the next eleven lines. Shaken back into focus with the arrival of summer which ‘surprised us’, the speaker continues to mix memories and desires, now embodying a memory of the Countess Marie Larisch who is, unlike the buried corpse of the opening, still among the living (line 8). But like the Cumaean Sibyl, Marie’s present life of simplicity and solitude is defined principally by her memories of the past. It is through these happier memories that the reader ‘hold[s] on tight’ to ride down the sled into the environs of the wasteland, the vast barren valley of ‘stony rubbish’ from which we are only able to escape after the tortuous mountain climb in the poem’s final stanzas (line 20).

A recognition of the ultimate futility of Marie’s recollections of a happier and more fulfilled childhood leads to the poem’s first certain volta and to a new formal iambic register marked by dense intertextual reference to the Sapiential Books of Job and Ecclesiastes and to the writings of Ezekiel and Isaiah. ‘[W]hat branches grow’ out of the meaningless memories of a lonely woman, the speaker rhetorically asks, drawing into focus the disappointment shared by the Cumaean Sibyl, the entombed body, and Marie. Typical of Eliot’s method in The Waste Land, the curious devotional model of a wish to be mourned is refracted initially through multiple perspectives before coming together into sharper focus. Here we find the first of numerous references to the Hyacinth Girl who is blind and mute and seeking release that will be only finally found closer to the poem’s conclusion. Although the sages, prophets, and fortune-tellers of the poem often admit to an ancient esoteric wisdom regarding how to escape from this fearsome cycle of transmogrification, their knowledge is rarely legitimate. All that remains of the ritualistic mysteries that the tarot reader Madame Sosostris represents is a somewhat shambolic social enterprise, watched suspiciously over by society. Although Madame Sosostris’s tarot reading sequence is among the most remarked upon passage in The Waste Land,

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