T. S. Eliot's Concept of
Time and the Technique of Textual Reading: A Comment on 'Cross' in The Waste
Land 3, Line 175
Sukhbir Singh
More often than not a writer's
concept of time necessitates certain narrative structures and creates distinct
possibilities for compatible linguistic devices. To properly understand a
narrative, therefore, the reader must be familiar with the writer's view of
time. As Paul Ricoeur observes in writing about the "implicit equation" between
"time and narrative" "The understanding of action, in effect, is not limited to
a familiarity with the conceptual network of action and its symbolic mediations.
It goes so far as to recognize in action temporal structures that call for
narration" (59). In T. S. Eliot's poems, "mood, tone, and structure as well as
theme are largely determined by [his] ideas of time" (Gish viii). For Eliot,
"time past" and "time future" eternally coexist in "time present," and we
therefore simultaneously have in our mind the intimation of "time past" (memory)
and the intuition of "time future" (desire) while dealing with any given moment
in the present. In The Waste Land, Eliot employs certain linguistic
modes--words, phrases, symbols, images, punctuation marks, and syntactical
structures--in accordance with his view of temporality. These linguistic devices
prop the thematic progression and support the temporal structure of his
otherwise "broken poem" in three ways. They (a) communicate to the reader what
the author means in the immediate context; (b) recall to the reader's mind
memories of an earlier episode in the poem; and (c) cause the reader to
speculate about a later incidence of the same experience or a similar situation
in the subsequent narrative. Reading The Waste Land requires from us an
awareness of the earlier incidents and anticipation of the subsequent
occurrences in the text--"mixing memory and desire."
Eliot's use of
"cross" in the opening lines (173-75) of "The Fire Sermon" is a good case in
point:
The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and
sink the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are
departed.
(Eliot 44)
According to The Oxford English Dictionary
(1192-95), "cross" usually means to "traverse" from one end to the other. But
this does not take us beyond the simple implication of "cross" in Eliot's
poem--that dry wind traversing across barren land does not support fertility.
Nevertheless, the OED records several more connotations of "cross," of which at
least four conform to Eliot's mystical concept of time, and they carry us back
and forth through the narrative to reinforce the various themes of infertility
in The Waste Land.
The first meaning of "cross"--to meet someone in
passing--explains its immediate relevance in "The Fire Sermon." This
significance of "cross" is suffused with the subtle suggestion of casualness in
the act of meeting. "The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are
departed" (lines 174-75) sets the tone for the entire section and prepares the
reader to enter into a medley of casual/chance meetings between various
characters, which ironically suggests the hollowness of human relationships in
the modem world. The "nymphs" and "the loitering heirs of City directors" (line
179) meet casually on the banks of the Thames and separate never to meet
again--without knowing each other's addresses--revealing the shallowness of
human affiliations even in such lofty matters as love, marriage, and sex. Next,
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, invites the protagonist for a presumed
homosexual union at "the Cannon Street Hotel / Followed by a weekend at the
Metropole" (213-14) when they casually meet on the streets of the "Unreal City."
Their chance meeting symbolizes the sexual perversion and social alienation of
modern man. The streak of meaninglessness in human bonds among people in The
Waste Land continues in the subsequent narrative of this section through the
casual meeting/mating of the typist girl with the young man carbuncular (225-56)
and of the three Thames daughters with their opportunistic lovers (266-306).
The third aspect of "cross"--to mate one breed of animals or plants with another for producing a hybrid, improved variety--points to the ironic impossibility of such renewal or reproductivity in the modern wasteland. Though the inanimate land is stealthily crossed with the animate wind, this reproductive process does not restore fertility to the barren land. Eliot suggests this in the images of the rat that creeps "softly through the vegetation" (187-88) or the bones rattled by the "rat's foot" in a "little low dry garret" (195) from "year to year" (194). The theme of futile union between the animate and inanimate objects further continues on a metaphoric level in the seduction of the typist (216-56).(n1) The typist is merely a "taxi," a "human engine," for the young man carbuncular. He is bold and active; she is bored and inactive to the point of total inanimation. For that reason, the young man's endeavors "to engage her in caresses" and to stimulate her for active sexual intercourse remain totally unreciprocated. Nevertheless, he "assaults" the typist "at once," making "a welcome of indifference." And it appears as if he copulates enthusiastically with a bundle of bones and flesh.
The last application of "cross"--to make a sign of the cross over oneself or others as an act of reverence to Jesus Christ--attains a wider significance in The Waste Land through its proximity to the color "brown." The dry wind "Crosses" the "brown land" (175) without bringing rain for the revival of life. The color brown has a dual signification in Christianity: it symbolizes both "spiritual death" and "spiritual rebirth" (Jobes 252). Eliot employs both significations to suggest a movement from infertility to fertility in his poem. Here the wind in vain makes a sign of the cross--a symbol of Christ's supreme sacrifice for the spiritual redemption of sinful humanity--over the spiritually dead soil (Smith 84) inhabited by the "nymphs" of the necropolis and "Actaeons" of the arid land, who have forgotten Jesus in their vulgar pursuit of sensual pleasures. Eliot's invocation of the color brown in these lines transports us back to the last stanza of "The Burial of the Dead" (60-76), where a "crowd" of the spiritually dead crosses over London Bridge "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn" (61). Here the color brown, signifying spiritual decay or moral blindness, is associated with the modem people who live in a state of suspended animation and therefore cannot see beyond the "brown fog of commercial secularism that is like a sighing up of the heavy color of the earth into the air, a mist formed by the lingering dissolution of the sense of the absolute" (Bedient 63). At the ninth hour, according to biblical chronometry, Jesus gave up the ghost (Matthew 27.45), and the "dead sound" (68) of Saint Mary Woolnoth's chime "on the final stroke of nine" (68) tolls the death knell not only of Christ on the cross but also of the modern populace for abjuring Him in their mad pursuit of money.(n2) Then the color brown carries us forward to the scenes of Christ's crucifixion (322-30) and resurrection (359-65) in "What the Thunder Said." There Eliot depicts Jesus, "Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded / I do not know whether a man or a woman" (363-64), beside his two followers walking to Emmaus, revealing himself as the risen Lord (Luke 24.13-15). Contrary to the earlier connotation, the color brown now suggests hope for spiritual rebirth by its association with the resurrection of Christ (Mayer 283-84). In short, these opposing significations of the color "brown" in the first and the last sections demonstrate a clear movement in The Waste Land from spiritual death to spiritual revival. A short while later, Parsifal reaches the empty chapel "the wind's home" (388)---despite all turbulence and temptations and restores fertility to the wasteland: "In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain" (393-94). <!--pagebreak-->It is absolutely necessary while reading The Waste Land to remain alert to the concealed correlations among different scenes, situations, events, incidents, symbols, images, phrases, and words. They are often directly or indirectly interrelated with others in the preceding and the succeeding parts of the text. With an awareness of Eliot's view of temporality, we can fully appreciate their thematic and structural significance by referring simultaneously to what has already taken place and to what might subsequently happen. These hidden connections create a structural complexity and thematic ambiguity, which together generate multiple layers of meaning and promote unlimited possibilities of new interpretations. In fact, Eliot decenters the traditional view about the fixed, singular meaning of a literary work by introducing such a vast variety of thematic nuances through the correlative structure of The Waste Land. In so doing, Eliot invites the reader to order the "fragments" he has "shored" against his "ruin" into a "coherent whole" by working out their possible relationships with each other. They both join to "connect nothing with nothing," creating the poetics of the waste that guides them to the resolution of the human predicament in the modem world through Give, Sympathize, and Control.
NOTES
(n1.)For illustration, see Bedient, who observes, "The rat figures abjection and its subversions of clean and proper bodies, distinct and secure identities. Reduced by a close-up to a creeping digestive system, it subsumes the horror implicit in the signs of oral appetite recalled from the summertime Thames. Food, notes Kristeva, is 'a boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the nonhuman.' Belly to bank is not just animate to inanimate, but the animate at its most nature-ingesting and substance-reducing, an aggression against as well as a slithering companionship with inert, low, and anonymous matter" (116).
(n2.)For more details see my essay "Eliot's The Waste Land": "Stetson and his fellow businessmen begin their commercial activities at the ninth hour in the morning, according to modern chronometry. The ninth hour according to biblical chronometry was the hour of Christ's Crucifixion. Here, Eliot's submerged suggestion of the Crucifixion relates the modern situation to the biblical scenario in 'What the Thunder Said'" (46).
WORKS CITED
Bedient, Calvin. He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.
Gish, Nancy K. Time in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Jobes, Gertrude. Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols--Part 1. New York: Scarecrow, 1962.
Mayer, John T. T. S. Eliot's Silent Voices. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. Rev. std. version. Ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
The Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
Singh, Sukhbir. "Eliot's The Waste Land." Explicator 51.1 (Fall 1992): 45-47.
Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956.
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Source: ANQ, Winter2001, Vol. 14 Issue 1, p34, 6p.
