Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash
A Heap of Broken Images
Whitehead and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
The height of literary modernism, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, was published in 1922, a little more than a hundred years ago. Its presentation of the "modern" world as a heap of broken images is as true today as it was then: civilization falling apart at its seams with war, the threat of nuclear war, environmental collapse, the rise of ethnic nationalisms, the breakdown of community, the rise of religious fundamentalisms. the emptiness of stale secularism, and obscene gaps between the wealthy and the rest of us. Eliot wrote in the aftermath of WWI. His is not an optimistic poem; he repudiated aspects of it in his later life. But it is an honest and beautiful poem. We need such honesty today if there is to be any kind of promising tomorrow.
This page is a collage of sayings, from Eliot and Whitehead, the BBC and The Poetry Foundation, which, taken together, can be springboards for thoughtful reflection on where the world is, and where it's going, with the underlying hope that, if we are honest, we might grow in some small way toward a better world: an Ecological Civilization. That better world is depicted at the bottom of this page.
A collage is fitting for this page, since Whitehead's own philosophy of experience mirrors the collage thinking of The Wasteland. The Wasteland is a collage of styles, voices, historical references, allusions, manners of speech. It is an experiment in radical parataxis: the juxtaposition of words and images without conjunctions.
Whitehead proposes that, at every moment of our lives, we are gathering together many fragments into a new, complex whole, not unlike the way that a collage gathers fragments into a whole through juxtaposition not 'explanation.' In Whitehead such juxtaposition is called a contrast. He believed that contrasts are at the heart of experienced reality. Things are together yet different, and together in their difference. The Wasteland reads like this. It is a poem of togetherness in difference. The whole of the poem is more than its fragments, and the fragments are more than the whole. The many become one and retain their multiplicity. My hope is that, in some way, the fragments below might function in this way as well.
- Jay McDaniel
Parataxis
"[Much of The Waste Land] is parataxis, that is, the juxtaposition without transition of fragments, some no more than a single word. Bits of myth, literature, religion, and philosophy from many times and cultures are combined with snatches of music and conversation so contemporary they could have come from yesterday’s newspaper. Meaningless in themselves, the fragments in this literary collage become powerfully suggestive in their juxtaposition and in the way they echo and explain one another as they generate larger wholes."
The Poetry Foundation on TS Eliot's The Wasteland
The Poetry Foundation on TS Eliot's The Wasteland
The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle's category of ‘primary substance.’..Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence.’ These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and of ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence.
- A.N. Whitehead on Ultimate Reality
A Heap of Broken Images
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
- TS Eliot, The Waste Land
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
- TS Eliot, The Waste Land
A World-Weary Voice
Eliot was successful — so successful that he remade all of English poetry, or what has passed for it since, in his image. The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot.
- Matthew Walther, NY Times
- Matthew Walther, NY Times
Wholeness from Fragments
The underlying subject of the last section of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said,” is restoration, not as a fact, but as a remote possibility. The previous images of drought and sterility reappear, but now accompanied by images suggesting the possibility of revitalization. Thunder sounds in the distance; Christ, the slain and resurrected hero whose death effects restoration, walks the land; the mythic hero whose personal trials can secure communal blessing approaches the Chapel Perilous. The tide of this section refers to an Indian legend in which men, gods, and devils listen to the thunder and then construct from that sound the positive message that can restore the wasteland and make its inhabitants fruitful again. The poem ends, however, not with restoration but with an avalanche of fragments, the most concentrated in the entire poem. The last fragment (“Shantih Shantih Shantih”), by chance a benediction, is the crudest in that, like April, and perhaps like thunder, it awakens expectations that it does not satisfy.
- T.S. Eliot, The Poetry Foundation
- T.S. Eliot, The Poetry Foundation
Unreal City
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Rebirth without Joy
The poem ultimately does promise a new beginning, but Eliot’s speaker appears, perversely, to prefer winter to spring, and thus to deny the joy and beauty associated with rebirth. He emphasizes the role of death and decay in the process of growth, most memorably in the conversation between two veterans who meet near London bridge after the war: “‘Stetson! / ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! / ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?’”
Pericles Lewis, adopted from Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-151.
Pericles Lewis, adopted from Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-151.
Shantih
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The Illusion of being Disillusioned
The critic I. A. Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed.”
Eliot later complained that “approving critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.”
Pericles Lewis, adopted from Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-151.
Eliot later complained that “approving critics” like Richards “said that I had expressed ‘the disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.”
Pericles Lewis, adopted from Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-151.
Dancing Fairies/Crucified Saviors
There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.
- A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality
- A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality
Divine Multiplicity
Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting advance beyond itself. Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation. This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven.
- A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality
- A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality
Tragic Beauty
At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty. This is the secret of the union of Zest with Peace: —That the suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies. The immediate experience of this Final Fact, with its union of Youth and Tragedy, is the sense of Peace. In this way the World receives its persuasion towards such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions.
- A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
- A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
The Auditory Imagination
Yet Eliot himself saw poetry as a sensual object to be felt as much as to be meticulously understood. He celebrated the “auditory imagination”, the “feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end”. The African American novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that when he first stumbled on Eliot’s poem as a student, he was taken by “its power to move me while eluding my understanding. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets.” It is, ironically, through his allusive echoes, allowing us to grasp the deeper historical and cultural connections, that Eliot also reveals the ways in which language and literature and myth can move us “far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling”.
- Kenan Malik, The Guardian
- Kenan Malik, The Guardian
Absent the God
Many myths attribute the death of winter and the rebirth of spring to the death and rebirth of a god with human attributes, who in some ancient practices is a man ritually murdered and in others an effigy buried or thrown into the sea to guarantee fertility or to bring rain. In The Waste Land, however, the god himself is conspicuously absent, except in debased forms like the (missing) Hanged Man in the Tarot pack or the drowned Phoenician Sailor, who returns as “Phlebas the Phoenician” in the fourth section, “Death by Water.”
Pericles Lewis, adopted from Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-151.
Pericles Lewis, adopted from Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 129-151.
Tenderness/Wreckage
The image— and it is but an image— the image under which this operative growth of God's nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost...The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.
- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
Whitehead, Eliot, and
the Moods of Modernism
Literary modernists include T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos William, and W.B. Yeats. In some respects, time has passed them by. Chronologically, modernism refers to an epoch in the history of Western literature that originated in the late nineteenth century and ended somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century in Europe and the United States. It was replaced by post-modernism, meta-modernism, and non-modernism.
But modernism can also refers to a mood and outlook on life that was expressed in their works in different ways, and that can also be felt in other times, including our own. And not just in writers. It can seem to many of us in the first part of the 21st century that the world has become something of a waste land: a heap of broken images with no overarching sense of order, and with a future that is very dangerous. War and the threat of nuclear war, environmental collapse, the rise of ethnic nationalisms and political authoritarianism, the rise of religious fundamentalisms, the debilitating effects of stale secularism, the breakdown of community and family life: in Eliot's phrase, "a heap of broken images."
What are the moods of modernism? At least ten come to mind, many of which are moods in our time, too.
Certainly we find hints of many of these themes in Whitehead's philosophy and outlook on life. In Whitehead we find sense of tragedy; a recognition evil as discord and missed potential; an openness to adventure; the idea that novelty is a driving force in the universe (a creative advancer into novelty); a recognition of the constructive role of rebellion in human life; a sense of the multifariousness of life (dancing fairies and crucified saviors); a sense of the limits of language; a willingness to coin of new words in explaining his point of view; a recognition that words do not have exact meanings and that language itself consists of "lures for feeing," a mixing of genres (mathematics, philosophical prose, symbolic logic, poetry) throughout his career; and an interest in world history. Like the literary modernists, Whitehead felt keenly the breakdown of an earlier worldview (scientific materialism, conservative religion) and the need for something new. He called it a "philosophy of organism."
His aim in Process and Reality was to create something like a grand narrative; we might even call it a new myth. He included within his new myth a certain way of thinking about God even as he affirmed the value of science. Some literary modernists believed no such narrative is possible and that all we can have is a heap of broken images.
Whitehead's vision is less heap-like. He presents a universe that is itself an evolving whole of wholes and thus more than fragments. And yet he thinks each whole, each momentary experience, is itself discrete, both connected to, and transcendent of, other wholes, thus lending support to a sense of fragments. And he recognizes that each moment begins with multiplicity: the sheer plurality of a past actual world. He speaks of the discontinuity of one moment from the next as if each moment is a world of its own. Eliot himself rejected the world as heap view in his later poetry, leaning on the truths of Anglo-Catholicism in the Four Quartets. Whitehead's view of God as Love and Peace reminds us a bit of Eliot's later view. Like Eliot, Whitehead had a spiritual side.
However, like other modernists, Whitehead carried with him the modernist emphasis on uncertainty. He spoke of his narrative as but a "likely story" that includes within itself a recognition of its own finitude. In his words: "the merest hint as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."
In short, what we have in Whitehead is the beginning of something post-modern or meta-modern, but with powerful traces of the modernist mood. With his recognition of tragedy, he was not optimistic in a shallow, American sense. He was not forward-looking at the expense of being honest about ambiguity. Process was, for Whitehead, not progress. The passage of time could be regressive as well as progressive, or both at the same time.
Whitehead invites us to recognize the waste land of modern times and to hope against hope that somewhere, dimly seen, is a ray of hope, a still point of the turning world (Eliot's phrase in the Four Quartets), that is dynamic rather than stagnant, bringing wholes of heaps. This still point is not all powerful, not completely transcendent, as much a multiplicity as a whole. But not entirely distant, not entirely remote. When we embrace the heap of broken images in an honest way, without hiding, there may emerge, in a surprising and cathartic way, a sense of Shantih. Not a peace that makes everything all right, but a peace that carries within it a sense of tragic beauty. Whitehead writes:
The Peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty.
It is here, in this Beauty despite the wreckage, that Whitehead meets T.S. Eliot. Process theologians take this a step further. They emphasize the lure of God within each heart as a calling presence for justice, joy, and sustainability: for what they call an Ecological Civilization. All of this is Whiteheadian, too. But it begins trust in the efficacy of Beauty, whatever wreckage comes our way.
- Jay McDaniel. 2/18/22
But modernism can also refers to a mood and outlook on life that was expressed in their works in different ways, and that can also be felt in other times, including our own. And not just in writers. It can seem to many of us in the first part of the 21st century that the world has become something of a waste land: a heap of broken images with no overarching sense of order, and with a future that is very dangerous. War and the threat of nuclear war, environmental collapse, the rise of ethnic nationalisms and political authoritarianism, the rise of religious fundamentalisms, the debilitating effects of stale secularism, the breakdown of community and family life: in Eliot's phrase, "a heap of broken images."
What are the moods of modernism? At least ten come to mind, many of which are moods in our time, too.
- Tragedy: the sense of radical evil and human self-destruction (after WWI)
- Novelty: Breakdown of traditional (literary) forms and worldviews and a need to experiment with new forms and worldviews.
- Fragmentariness: a sense that the world is momentary, consisting of fragments not wholes, "a heap of broken images."
- Multiplicity: a sense of the "manyness" of life and the many meanings of language. No single voice dominates. Pound's Cantos, Eliot's The Wasteland.
- Hybridity: collecting wisdom different languages and cultures, mixing things together, combining different voices without a dominating voice (The Wasteland)
- Loss of Old Stories: a sense that the religious foundations of the past no longer hold sway.
- Need for New Myth: E.g. Eliot's turning to Anglo-Catholicism in later years.
- Ambiguity: recognition that life itself is not reducible to a single meaning or mood
- Cosmopolitanism: distrust of mass media, urban elite are the carriers of wisdom
- Difficulty: poetry must be dense, can be read and understood only be a few.
Certainly we find hints of many of these themes in Whitehead's philosophy and outlook on life. In Whitehead we find sense of tragedy; a recognition evil as discord and missed potential; an openness to adventure; the idea that novelty is a driving force in the universe (a creative advancer into novelty); a recognition of the constructive role of rebellion in human life; a sense of the multifariousness of life (dancing fairies and crucified saviors); a sense of the limits of language; a willingness to coin of new words in explaining his point of view; a recognition that words do not have exact meanings and that language itself consists of "lures for feeing," a mixing of genres (mathematics, philosophical prose, symbolic logic, poetry) throughout his career; and an interest in world history. Like the literary modernists, Whitehead felt keenly the breakdown of an earlier worldview (scientific materialism, conservative religion) and the need for something new. He called it a "philosophy of organism."
His aim in Process and Reality was to create something like a grand narrative; we might even call it a new myth. He included within his new myth a certain way of thinking about God even as he affirmed the value of science. Some literary modernists believed no such narrative is possible and that all we can have is a heap of broken images.
Whitehead's vision is less heap-like. He presents a universe that is itself an evolving whole of wholes and thus more than fragments. And yet he thinks each whole, each momentary experience, is itself discrete, both connected to, and transcendent of, other wholes, thus lending support to a sense of fragments. And he recognizes that each moment begins with multiplicity: the sheer plurality of a past actual world. He speaks of the discontinuity of one moment from the next as if each moment is a world of its own. Eliot himself rejected the world as heap view in his later poetry, leaning on the truths of Anglo-Catholicism in the Four Quartets. Whitehead's view of God as Love and Peace reminds us a bit of Eliot's later view. Like Eliot, Whitehead had a spiritual side.
However, like other modernists, Whitehead carried with him the modernist emphasis on uncertainty. He spoke of his narrative as but a "likely story" that includes within itself a recognition of its own finitude. In his words: "the merest hint as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."
In short, what we have in Whitehead is the beginning of something post-modern or meta-modern, but with powerful traces of the modernist mood. With his recognition of tragedy, he was not optimistic in a shallow, American sense. He was not forward-looking at the expense of being honest about ambiguity. Process was, for Whitehead, not progress. The passage of time could be regressive as well as progressive, or both at the same time.
Whitehead invites us to recognize the waste land of modern times and to hope against hope that somewhere, dimly seen, is a ray of hope, a still point of the turning world (Eliot's phrase in the Four Quartets), that is dynamic rather than stagnant, bringing wholes of heaps. This still point is not all powerful, not completely transcendent, as much a multiplicity as a whole. But not entirely distant, not entirely remote. When we embrace the heap of broken images in an honest way, without hiding, there may emerge, in a surprising and cathartic way, a sense of Shantih. Not a peace that makes everything all right, but a peace that carries within it a sense of tragic beauty. Whitehead writes:
The Peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty.
It is here, in this Beauty despite the wreckage, that Whitehead meets T.S. Eliot. Process theologians take this a step further. They emphasize the lure of God within each heart as a calling presence for justice, joy, and sustainability: for what they call an Ecological Civilization. All of this is Whiteheadian, too. But it begins trust in the efficacy of Beauty, whatever wreckage comes our way.
- Jay McDaniel. 2/18/22
A Documentary
A Scholarly Discussion of
The Wasteland and Modernity
Melvyn Bragg and guests, including Steve Connor and Lawrence Rainey, discuss TS Eliot's seminal poem The Waste Land and its ambivalence to the modern world of technology, democracy and capitalism that was being forged around it.