According to Ong (mentioned above), our contemporary communications media that accentuate sound reached a certain critical mass by around 1960. As a result of the cultural conditioning of the communications media that accentuate sound, people in contemporary Western culture are undergoing deep tectonic shifts in their psyches. No doubt those tectonic shifts deep in the psyches enliven their acoustic imaginations and move them closer to the collective unconscious.
No doubt the deep resonance of "The Waste Land" can be attributed in part to Eliot's acoustic imagination and in part to his use of myth. For example, he borrowed the imagery of the wounded Fisher King and the waste land from the medieval Christian Grail legends. In the Grail legends, the waste land appears to be an imaginative and fanciful way to express symbolically the woundedness of the Fisher King. Against the backdrop of the devastation of World War I, the waste land in Europe was real enough. No doubt the real enough desolation in Europe was matched by the emotional desolation Eliot and others felt as a result of the wholesale brutal slaughter of the war.
As Crawford makes clear, Eliot also had good personal reasons for feeling desolation about his personal life. Out of his deep desolation came "The Waste Land."
Crawford concludes his book with the following sentence: "It is as if he had never been young" (page 424). Yes, this impression of Eliot is really strong. Elsewhere, Crawford says, "He [Eliot] may have been thirty-one in late 1919, but he felt like an old man" (page 342).
You see, Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis. So he turned 31 in 1919, the year in which "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was published. He turned 34 in 1922, the year in which "The Waste Land" was published.
In terms of his chronological age when those two works were published, he was still a comparatively young man of extraordinary personal and professional maturity.
For progressives and liberals of a certain age today to identify with Eliot when they read Crawford's book, they will have to think about their own lives when they were around 31 to 34 years old.
Progressives and liberals today who are not yet 30 or so should think of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War -- and the loss of human life in those wars.
In terms of Eliot's chronological age when those two works were published, we could perhaps think of him as experiencing an early onset mid-life crisis. Perhaps the slaughter involved in World War I (1914-1918) contributed to his early onset mid-life crisis and to his maturity. Crawford says, "Almost a million British men had been killed in action; German and other losses were even higher" (page 342).
Crawford reports the following impressions that various people had of Eliot: "Reflecting on Tom [Eliot] in late February, Katherine Mansfield decided he was 'attractive' yet 'pathetic': 'He suffers from his feelings of powerlessness. He knows it. He feels weak. It is all disguise. That slow manner, that hesitation, side long glances and so on are painful. And the pity is that he is too serious about himself, even a little bit absurd. But it's natural; it's the fault of London that. He wants kindly laughing at and setting free.' Mary Hutchinson felt similarly about this man she was so fond of, and 'tried hard to "loosen him up."' [Ezra] Pound too perceived his good friend needed to be emancipated from at least some of his troubles, and strove to buy him time to write without anxiety" (pages 404-405).
Incidentally, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) apparently drew on the writer Katherine Mansfield as a model in constructing the young woman artist named Gudrun in his novel WOMEN IN LOVE (1921). In the film version of WOMEN IN LOVE (1969), Glenda Jackson played Gudrun -- and won the first of her two Oscars for best actress.
THE ADMITTEDLY TRICKY PART OF IDENTIFYING WITH ELIOT
Next, I want to turn to Crawford's discussion of Lawrence's book FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS (1922), which was a sequel to his earlier book PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (1921).
No doubt Lawrence was a brilliant and enormously creative writer.
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