T.S Eliot's Unreal City of God
Regarding deconstruction, The Waste Land manages to subvert the concept of a transcendental signified. The aim of this paper is to show through two sets of binary operations how the meanings of concepts shift causing a prevailing state of undecidability between signifier and signified. The first opposition I will analyze is between Real and Unreal, and here I will point out intertextual allusions to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and compare Eliot’s Unreal City to Baudelaire’s Paris, which is also an Unreal City. The second opposition, which is actually a subset of the first, will be Rational and Irrational. Here the intertextual allusion I will analyze will be to Saint Augustine’s Confessions and the story of his search for knowledge in the City of God. With this reading, I will show how the barriers within the oppositions are destabilized, ultimately leading to the breaking down of anything that could serve as a universal signified within the poem.
Starting with the counterpoised conceptualizations of Real and Unreal, it must be mentioned that Eliot’s use of the term “unreal” leads to a questioning of what constitutes “real” or what represents a real city to him. Upon a first reading, Unreal City is the signifier which refers to the city of London after World War I, but this concept also alludes to the dreamlike city of Baudelaire’s Paris (which affected Eliot so strongly that he included it in his poem). To expand on the origin of this Unreal City, Victor Brombert writes: “Indeed, the Paris of Baudelaire is a Waste Land, where love and especially sexuality are not only manifestations of sin, but the sign and the symbol of sterility.” Characteristic of both these cities are the dreams and nightmares, the secrets and mystery, and their foggy and gray colors, and what is most manifest is the incarnation of sin in a world that gives no spiritual nourishment. Examples of this destructive mechanization and corruption are given by Eliot in Part III, as he describes the waters of the Thames River contaminated with “empty bottles, “silk handkerchiefs,” “sandwich papers,” “cardboard boxes,” and “cigarette ends.”
A further examination of what would correspond to “Unreal” as signified brings us to understand the multiple interpretations of a word that becomes broad in meaning once it loses its prescribed relations. In other words, Eliot’s descriptions break down the expected one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, instead allowing multiple signifieds (ex. London and Paris) for one signifier. As another example of this deconstruction, in the poem London is crowded with ghostlike walkers who cross a bridge, and this image becomes a signifier itself as it corresponds to a purgatory. At the same time, the idea of purgatory signifies an in-between state of life and death, which is a main theme of the entire poem. Thus the signifier of the ghostlike figures corresponds to both purgatory and death as signifieds. The idea of a limbo includes the temptations found on earth which prevent the soul from achieving its maximum level of purity, leaving it at the midpoint between heaven and hell and preventing it from being a universal signified.
I have tried to show the discontinuous nature of Eliot’s objects and subjects. As Donoghue states, “Modern language presupposes a fragmented space made of objects solitary and terrible because the links between them are only potential.” So rather than seeing any one thing as clearly “meaning” or naturally implying something else – instead of signifiers being universally linked to particular corresponding signifieds – each signifier and signified stands solitary, capable of linking and re-linking ad infinitum.
Although the second set of binary oppositions between Rational and Irrational is linked to the first one, I find it important to examine them separately. What is significant to point out is that these two concepts rely on each other to find their meaning: to Denis Donghue, the rational imagination in the poem is represented by Shakespeare, Spencer, and St. Augustine and it is confronted with the irrational in many ways when these figures appear.
In Part III, Eliot makes an allusion to Augustine’s trip to Carthage found in his biography called Confessions, a memoir of Augustine’s path to conversion and Christian illumination: “ To Carthage then I came/ Burning burning burning burning/ O Lord Thou pluckest me out/ O Lord Thou pluckest/ burning.” This trip, taken before his conversion, was Augustine’s attempt to free himself from evil and the temptations of the world (like the evil found in Eliot’s Unreal City) and to reach ultimate enlightenment through faith in Christ. This faith comes aided by the hand of Reason understood in neo-platonic terms. In Confessions Augustine writes:
“By having read the books of Platonists, and having been thought by them to see in corporeal Truth, I understood how thy invisible things are understood through the things that are made. It still seemed what it was that the dullness of my soul allowed me to contemplate.”
This belief in Reason is further investigated in Augustine’s later years, when he wrote The City of God. This image of a heavenly land is important because it stands against Eliot’s Unreal City, and this is how both these concepts are created in the text, by robbing elements from one another and by standing against each other. The City of God, unlike the chaotic and human city of London, exists above Nature as it transcends the world, and according to Donoghue, “The contemplation of the City of God is also complete knowledge.” This idea is helpful in the process of understanding what is considered to be “real” in the poem, and how it stands against what is “unreal” as we come to the conclusion that the Rational and the Irrational do not contradict each other in the poem; rather, they remain together and coexist sharing various elements. For example, it could be argued that the guarantee of absolute knowledge has an evil aspect to it, and that the irrationality of Eliot’s London flourishes with a creative freedom that the City of God lacks, which is more special and less artificial than the one for which Augustine searches. In being conceptually supported by the Unreal City, the City of God, in the poem, loses any claim it might otherwise have to being a universal signified because it relies on the Unreal city to complete its meaning.
Another demonstration of how the link between The City of God and its signified, which represents absolute knowledge, is lost, can be found in the first draft of Waste Land. Before deciding to start out with the Sybil of Cummae quotation as the opener of the poem, Eliot had drafted his work with an introductory paragraph taken from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which he later decides not to use. In the epigraph, Marlow says to Kurtz:
“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during the supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision-he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than breath-“The horror! the horror!”
Whereas Augustine envisioned complete knowledge as paradisiacal perfection, Marlow experienced it as hellish terror. The fact that Eliot considered opening the poem with Marlow’s statement, combined with allusions to Augustine in the poem, undeniably implies Eliot’s own dissatisfaction with Augustine’s conceptualization of complete knowledge. This deferral of terms (What if enlightenment isn’t all it’s assumed to be?) unveils the hidden characteristics of the City of God, because, like Marlow, we find that with absolute knowledge there is also absolute horror and the price to pay for a life of reason with a goal of complete knowledge could be tragic. Here is marked the failure of a permanent link between signifier and signified, because the signifier (complete knowledge) becomes itself a signified (horror) as it opens the door to other concepts ( for example the Unreal City and its temptation and sin) which represent it.
It is clear then that the poem’s inclusion of contrasting concepts nonetheless reliant upon each other, coupled with its conscious corrupting of Augustine’s City of God, serve to deconstruct any possible universal signified. But whereas any reader could potentially find contrasting elements in a poem and turn them upon each other so that they collapse, the real beauty in Waste Land is that this deconstruction is not merely a function of the reader but also an intentional function of the poem itself. Eliot, trained in philosophy, understood the deconstructive implications of submitting Augustine’s City of God to the corruption of the Unreal City, as is evidenced by his juxtaposing Augustine’s concept of complete knowledge as reason and paradise to Marlow’s experience of it as horror irrational. In examining these binaries we not only deconstruct but actually witness the path of Eliot’s deconstruction.
Sources
1) Augustine, Confessions, Electronic edition. 02/19/2008. Text and commentary copyright (c) 1992 James J. O'Donnell. www.stoa.org/hippo
2) Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism. Third Edition, New Jersey.
Prentice Hall. 2003.
3) Brombert, Victor. Baudelaire: City Images and the “Dream of Stone” Yale French Studies, no.32, Paris in Literature (1964) pp.99-112.
4) Donoghue, Denis. _The Word within a Word_. Words Alone: the poet T.S
Eliot.. New Haven. Yale University Press. 2000.
5) Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, Prufrock and other poems. New York.
Dover Publications Inc.1998.
6) Parker, Richard A. Exploring the Waste Land. 02/19/2008
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Dream of Death, or the Place for the Poetic Bodies
By Alejandra Pizarnik
(Translated by Carolina Drake)
All night I hear the call of death, all night I hear the song of death near the river, all night I hear the voice of death that calls me. And so many mended dreams, so many possessions, so many immersions inside these possessions of a young one deceased in a garden of ruins and lilacs. Near the river death calls me. Desolately torn in the heart I hear the song of the purest happiness.
And it is true, that I have woken in the place of love, because when I heard its song I said: It is the place of love. And it is true that I have woken in the place of love because with a smile of grief I said to myself: It is the place of Love (but trembling, but phosphorescent.)
And the mechanized dances of those ancient dolls and the inherited sorrows and the water running fast in circles, please do not be afraid of saying it: The rapid water running in rapid circles while in the shore the paralyzed gesture of the paralyzed arms are calling for an embrace, in the purest nostalgia, in the fog, in the weakest sun light filtering through the fog.
More from the inside: The nameless object that is born and pulverizes itself in the place where the silence is as heavy as gold bars and time is a sharpened wind that makes its way through a "grieta" as that is its sole declaration. I talk about the place where the poetic bodies are made-like a basket full with the bodies of young girls. And that is the place where Death sits; it wears an ancient suit and plays a harp on the shores of the "lugumbre" river. Death in a red dress, the beautiful, the funerary, the spectral, the one who played the harp all night until I fell asleep inside my dream.
What was there, in the bottom of the sea? What landscapes were made and unmade behind the landscape which contained a painting in its center, where a beautiful lady was painted on it, and she carried a harp and sang besides the shores of a river? A few steps behind, I saw the stage of ashes where I represented my birth. Being born, which is such a "lugumbre" act, caused me laughter. This humor running through the contours of my body turned me into a phosphorescent figurine: The iris of a violet eye changed into blue as it turned in the light, a glowing young girl made of silver paper, half way drowning in a glass of blue wine.
Without any light or guide, I advanced through the path of metamorphoses. A subterranean world of unfinished creatures, a place of gestation, a green house of arms, of trunks, of faces, and the hands of the dolls, suspended like leafs from the ice sharpened trees, flapped and echoed moved by the wind. And the beheaded trunks dressed in lively colors danced in childlike circles near a coffin filled with the heads of madmen that cried like wolves, and now my head seems to want to burst out of my uterus like if the poetic bodies were fighting to come into reality, to disrupt it, to be born from it, and there is someone inside my throat, someone who has been gestating in solitude, and me, unfinished, burning to be born, it opens, it will come, I will come.
The poetic body, the inherited one, the one unfiltered by the sun rays of a foggy morning, a cry, a call, a flame, a calling. Yes. I want to see the bottom of the river, I want to see if it will open, if it disrupts and flowers on this side of the shore, and it will come or it won’t come but I feel it pushing its way. And maybe, and maybe it is only Death.
Death is a word.
A word is a thing; it is a poetic body that invades the circumstance of my birth.
Never, through this way will you ever be able to explore it. Speak, but over the stage of ashes: Speak, but from the bottom of the river where Death is singing. And Death is her, my dream told me, the song of the queen told me. Death with hair the color of crows, dressed in red, molding in her ancient hands the bones of birds to beat over my tomb, she departed singing and from behind looked like a beggar, and young boys threw rocks at her.
She sang in the foggy morning barely filtered with the rays of the sun, the morning of birth, and I would walk with a torch in my hand through all the deserts of the world and even dead I would keep looking for you, my lost love, and the song of Death unfolded that morning, and it sand and it sang.
It also sang in the old tavern near the port. There was a teenager dressed as a clown and I told him that in my poems Death was my lover and my lover was death and he answered: your poems speak the just truth. I was sixteen years old and had no other remedy than to look for absolute love. And it was in that tavern in the port, that she sang her song.
I write with my eyes closed, I write with my eyes open: The wall will fall; the wall will become a river.
Death in blue, Death in green, Death in red, Death in violet, in the visions of birth.
Her blue suit and the phosphorescent silver in the medieval night of every death of mine.
Death sings near the river.
And it was in that tavern in the port where she sang the song of death.
I am going to die, she told me, I am going to die.
Come at sunrise, my friend, at sunrise come.
We have recognized each other, we have made each other disappear, my friend, the one I wanted most.
Me, assisting my birth. Me, assisting my death.
And I would walk through all the deserts in this world and even dead I would keep looking, for you: because you were the place of Love.
(Translated by Carolina Drake)
All night I hear the call of death, all night I hear the song of death near the river, all night I hear the voice of death that calls me. And so many mended dreams, so many possessions, so many immersions inside these possessions of a young one deceased in a garden of ruins and lilacs. Near the river death calls me. Desolately torn in the heart I hear the song of the purest happiness.
And it is true, that I have woken in the place of love, because when I heard its song I said: It is the place of love. And it is true that I have woken in the place of love because with a smile of grief I said to myself: It is the place of Love (but trembling, but phosphorescent.)
And the mechanized dances of those ancient dolls and the inherited sorrows and the water running fast in circles, please do not be afraid of saying it: The rapid water running in rapid circles while in the shore the paralyzed gesture of the paralyzed arms are calling for an embrace, in the purest nostalgia, in the fog, in the weakest sun light filtering through the fog.
More from the inside: The nameless object that is born and pulverizes itself in the place where the silence is as heavy as gold bars and time is a sharpened wind that makes its way through a "grieta" as that is its sole declaration. I talk about the place where the poetic bodies are made-like a basket full with the bodies of young girls. And that is the place where Death sits; it wears an ancient suit and plays a harp on the shores of the "lugumbre" river. Death in a red dress, the beautiful, the funerary, the spectral, the one who played the harp all night until I fell asleep inside my dream.
What was there, in the bottom of the sea? What landscapes were made and unmade behind the landscape which contained a painting in its center, where a beautiful lady was painted on it, and she carried a harp and sang besides the shores of a river? A few steps behind, I saw the stage of ashes where I represented my birth. Being born, which is such a "lugumbre" act, caused me laughter. This humor running through the contours of my body turned me into a phosphorescent figurine: The iris of a violet eye changed into blue as it turned in the light, a glowing young girl made of silver paper, half way drowning in a glass of blue wine.
Without any light or guide, I advanced through the path of metamorphoses. A subterranean world of unfinished creatures, a place of gestation, a green house of arms, of trunks, of faces, and the hands of the dolls, suspended like leafs from the ice sharpened trees, flapped and echoed moved by the wind. And the beheaded trunks dressed in lively colors danced in childlike circles near a coffin filled with the heads of madmen that cried like wolves, and now my head seems to want to burst out of my uterus like if the poetic bodies were fighting to come into reality, to disrupt it, to be born from it, and there is someone inside my throat, someone who has been gestating in solitude, and me, unfinished, burning to be born, it opens, it will come, I will come.
The poetic body, the inherited one, the one unfiltered by the sun rays of a foggy morning, a cry, a call, a flame, a calling. Yes. I want to see the bottom of the river, I want to see if it will open, if it disrupts and flowers on this side of the shore, and it will come or it won’t come but I feel it pushing its way. And maybe, and maybe it is only Death.
Death is a word.
A word is a thing; it is a poetic body that invades the circumstance of my birth.
Never, through this way will you ever be able to explore it. Speak, but over the stage of ashes: Speak, but from the bottom of the river where Death is singing. And Death is her, my dream told me, the song of the queen told me. Death with hair the color of crows, dressed in red, molding in her ancient hands the bones of birds to beat over my tomb, she departed singing and from behind looked like a beggar, and young boys threw rocks at her.
She sang in the foggy morning barely filtered with the rays of the sun, the morning of birth, and I would walk with a torch in my hand through all the deserts of the world and even dead I would keep looking for you, my lost love, and the song of Death unfolded that morning, and it sand and it sang.
It also sang in the old tavern near the port. There was a teenager dressed as a clown and I told him that in my poems Death was my lover and my lover was death and he answered: your poems speak the just truth. I was sixteen years old and had no other remedy than to look for absolute love. And it was in that tavern in the port, that she sang her song.
I write with my eyes closed, I write with my eyes open: The wall will fall; the wall will become a river.
Death in blue, Death in green, Death in red, Death in violet, in the visions of birth.
Her blue suit and the phosphorescent silver in the medieval night of every death of mine.
Death sings near the river.
And it was in that tavern in the port where she sang the song of death.
I am going to die, she told me, I am going to die.
Come at sunrise, my friend, at sunrise come.
We have recognized each other, we have made each other disappear, my friend, the one I wanted most.
Me, assisting my birth. Me, assisting my death.
And I would walk through all the deserts in this world and even dead I would keep looking, for you: because you were the place of Love.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
I Heart Ballet
I always tell myself that I am too old for this. That I will never be a prima Ballerina and that this ongoing affair with ballet should be something I could give up by now, in exchange for a different career in dance maybe (something like ballroom, or even modern dance?) or a different career altogether. I thought I was not good enough to join a Company either, given that I’m not good enough to be a prima Ballerina. And in the end, I thought I just did this as an exercise. But I have been lying to myself all along.
The truth is that I am so obsessed with Ballet, again, like I used to when I was taking classes in Argentina. And it is not funny, because I am supposed to be focusing on other things: Like finishing college for god’s sake, or working a better job than one where I make cappuccinos all day. But I enjoy Ballet so much that this is all I want to do, and this is all I‘ve been able to think about. Even on my gloomiest moments, Ballet is all I can grab on to; all that provides me with an escape away from the heaviness of my being in the world.
This is to say that I took a class at the Joffrey Ballet School last night; a rundown studio inside a run down building in Manhattan, where dancers in leotards and leg warmers ran away from the cold of March. How much in love I am with this discipline is hard to explain, especially if I recall the eccentricity of my teacher who kept giving us Swam Lake variations and telling the class that today was Stalin’s anniversary. But how much in love I am with this discipline is easier to explain when I describe his eyes on me as I stepped into attitudes and did my pirouettes and he yelled “Good! Good!
And for a change, last night was the time when I did not finish a Ballet class frustrated at myself for not having done better. For the first time in one year since I took up dancing in Charlotte, I was enjoying myself.
These fleeting moments where I find myself at ease are so rare in my life, that when they happen, all I want is to prolong them. I wanted to extend the stupid, short moment of acceleration and happiness experienced when my teacher kept yelling “Good! Good!” I wanted it to last until summer; I wanted an entire withdrawal from my life in Charlotte in exchange for Ballet classes and an invisible existence in New York City as long as I could enjoy myself again through movement like I was doing last night and as long as some crazy teacher could encourage me from behind his sunglasses. Because sadly, I am the type of person that needs encouragement, or else I will fail miserably at everything.
I love visiting my parents in Queens, but I have to finish school in North Carolina and all I can aim for is to go back to Charlotte next week with a different approach. To keep taking my philosophy classes, to re-take Ballet, to work at my crummy job, to erase the hurtful feelings that have haunted me. And to hope for that other feeling to appear again: the one I experienced last night when I felt I was doing well in front of the class. When I knew I was good, and that I could do no better than that.
The truth is that I am so obsessed with Ballet, again, like I used to when I was taking classes in Argentina. And it is not funny, because I am supposed to be focusing on other things: Like finishing college for god’s sake, or working a better job than one where I make cappuccinos all day. But I enjoy Ballet so much that this is all I want to do, and this is all I‘ve been able to think about. Even on my gloomiest moments, Ballet is all I can grab on to; all that provides me with an escape away from the heaviness of my being in the world.
This is to say that I took a class at the Joffrey Ballet School last night; a rundown studio inside a run down building in Manhattan, where dancers in leotards and leg warmers ran away from the cold of March. How much in love I am with this discipline is hard to explain, especially if I recall the eccentricity of my teacher who kept giving us Swam Lake variations and telling the class that today was Stalin’s anniversary. But how much in love I am with this discipline is easier to explain when I describe his eyes on me as I stepped into attitudes and did my pirouettes and he yelled “Good! Good!
And for a change, last night was the time when I did not finish a Ballet class frustrated at myself for not having done better. For the first time in one year since I took up dancing in Charlotte, I was enjoying myself.
These fleeting moments where I find myself at ease are so rare in my life, that when they happen, all I want is to prolong them. I wanted to extend the stupid, short moment of acceleration and happiness experienced when my teacher kept yelling “Good! Good!” I wanted it to last until summer; I wanted an entire withdrawal from my life in Charlotte in exchange for Ballet classes and an invisible existence in New York City as long as I could enjoy myself again through movement like I was doing last night and as long as some crazy teacher could encourage me from behind his sunglasses. Because sadly, I am the type of person that needs encouragement, or else I will fail miserably at everything.
I love visiting my parents in Queens, but I have to finish school in North Carolina and all I can aim for is to go back to Charlotte next week with a different approach. To keep taking my philosophy classes, to re-take Ballet, to work at my crummy job, to erase the hurtful feelings that have haunted me. And to hope for that other feeling to appear again: the one I experienced last night when I felt I was doing well in front of the class. When I knew I was good, and that I could do no better than that.
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