“Two and two, necessarye coniunction”: Toward Amalgamating the Disparate
Abstract: The issue in The Waste Land is vision—and understanding. Binaries populate the poem, and voices are many, and disparate. As a satire, the poem offers a negative or antithetical focus, specifically the wastelanders’ many incapacities and misunderstandings, separated as they are from the wellsprings of intellectual and spiritual sustenance. The famous pub scene in the second section highlights the problem, as it literalizes a central metaphor: life is aborted. The poem’s principal speaker, most prominent in the final part, participates in the widespread misunderstanding, craving water (despite the previous section, “Death by Water”). The poem actually suggests a different “approach” from that of the satirized speaker’s, bringing into serious question the desire merely to “shore” “fragments against [one’s] ruins” and to seek the peace that passeth understanding.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364692.
In the notes he added to The Waste Land, Eliot described Tiresias as “the most important personage in the poem, unifying all the rest.” The mythological figure, “a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’,” appears in the sexually charged third section, “The Fire Sermon,” at the poem’s geographical center, and functions as a “compound” of male and female; having thus “foresuffered all,” he can, from observing, “foretell” all that will happen, and not happen.1
As a “unifying” figure, Tiresias anticipates, while rhyming with, the “familiar compound ghost” that appears at an equally pivotal moment in “Little Gidding,” the last of Four Quartets. On the bombed-out streets of London in the dawning light, the ghost recalls the situation with which “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” opens: “Let us go then, you and I.”2 Indeed, Eliot renders the appearance of the ghost there as an enigma. Mentioning first the “eyes” (about which more directly), Eliot refers to him as a paradox (echoing in that regard the “Lady of silences” in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems): “intimate and unidentifiable.”3 Like so much else in Four Quartets, the passage relies on “two and two,” whether a “necessarye coniunction” or whatever. The passage also rhymes with the description of Incarnation (minus the) in “The Dry Salvages” and returns us to the depiction of “daunsinge” and the entailed “association” and “concorde” in “East Coker”; encountering that paradox incarnate (as it were), the speaker reports, assuming “a double part.” He then hears another voice asking whether “you” are “here.” The speaker tells us that “we” were not there. He also reports that he was “still the same,” “Knowing myself yet being someone other.” “He,” meanwhile, had “a face still forming,” and the speaker adds that “the words” somehow “sufficed / To compel the recognition they preceded.” Thus time is confounded, and paradox abounds: we end with the declaration that they—whoever and whatever—were “Too strange to each other for misunderstanding. . . .”4
The issue in this mysterious little drama is partly identity, partly vision, recognition, and understanding. (My head spins.) Meditative reading, as Eliot represents it, seems called for here if anywhere. Connections surprise.
I think, inevitably I believe, of an enigmatic passage—one of many—in The Waste Land, specifically, in “What the Thunder Said.” Here, though, “two” quickly and quietly expands to “three”: the speaker here wants to know who is “the third” that is always walking beside “you.” When he counts, he says, he finds “only you and I together.” Yet when he looks “ahead up the white road,” he sees “another” there walking “beside you.” This “one” wears a hood and a “brown mantle,” and he cannot tell whether that “third” is a man or a woman. He then asks, insistently, “But who is that on the other side of you?” Eliot himself directs us in the notes to “the road to Emmaus” scene in the New Testament, where the risen Christ appears to his disciples.
“Two” marks the nature and character of The Waste Land. So as not to belabor the obvious, I will forgo cataloguing all the instances in the poem of thematic and rhetorical binaries (for instance, Buddha–St. Augustine, divining / foretelling, the beauty of some verses / the striking ugliness of others). You might move to more important and telling points by noting the reappearance (as in “Prufrock”) of “you” (referring to the reader and that apparent “other” part of the self in the above-mentioned passage concerning “the road to Emmaus,” which itself points to the self-divided or double nature of human being); the fact of those added “notes,” which, in line with, say, Alexander Pope’s Sober Advice from Horace and The Dunciad, require reading as part of the whole text that goes by the name The Waste Land; the implicit acknowledgment that, similar to human being, writing requires a critical eye, from outside or within, to act as something like conscience. Moreover, as Eliot (partly) acknowledged in 1925, with his dedication to Ezra Pound (“il fabbro miglior”), two poets actually bear responsibility for The Waste Land itself: so extensive, important, and saving was Ole Ez’s judicious and artful editing, which provided the “eye” that Eliot may have lacked. Furthermore, the opening verses—regarding April as “the cruellest month”—are both about and made of “two.” The verses allude, of course, to Chaucer’s tonally opposite opening of The Canterbury Tales: two different points of view, reflective of different eras entirely and representative of different cultural perspectives (on spring, on going on a religious pilgrimage versus going skiing), set in juxtaposition—without any judgment, implicit or explicit, on the part of the speaker. Mixing occurs, stirring, thus “breeding”: what does this speaker, in fact, breed? The opening of The Waste Land raises questions to which the speaker, as much as the (other) wastelanders chronicled, is pathetically oblivious.
The speaker’s is not, of course, the only voice we hear in The Waste Land: there are multiple voices, from those in the pub at closing time to the Thames Daughters to the Thunder’s at poem’s end. There is also more than one reader: there is the speaker’s “semblable,” his “frère,” directly addressed at the end of the first section. This reader, we might say, is imagined, immanent. The other is “transcendent,” being outside the poem—and real. The structure here resembles that that functions in satire generally, in which an immanent “antithesis,” that is the object or objects of opprobrium, is judged and found lacking in comparison to the “thesis” that the “real” reader must supply from “hints and guesses.” The difference is that no one-to-one relationship exists between what is imaginary and what is “real” in the two instances. Satire, which is an indirect mode and genre, functions, and is defined by, difference between two competitors: what is being “said,” and what the author, Old Possum himself—not necessarily the speaker—intends.
Let us look, for a moment, at the pub scene in “A Game of Chess,” itself a matter of two principal players, of course. The main speaker is a “friend” of Lil, whose speech she reports in talking with another “friend” and in revealing Lil’s abortion, a scene fractured by the closing-time refrain (“Hurry up please it’s time”). “Hurry” turns out to be pretty much the issue, or at the very least symptomatic of it, along with impatience and indifference.
Rhymes with the woman’s decision to abort life appear throughout the sexually charged atmosphere of the poem, which also spotlights the infertility of the “waste” land and the indifference revealed in sexual—and meaningless—encounters. The problem with Lil is neither indifference nor infertility but failure to finish what is begun (Churchill famously said that if you’re going through hell, keep going); she cuts short, bails out, sacrificing life—literally. At play in the “real” reader’s mind, attentive and responsive to details and nuances, emerges a sort of Trinity, bred by responsible reading:
Being
Love
Offspring, product, living result
“What you get married for if you don’t want children?” the woman asked Lil, somewhat ingenuously, of course—things are never as simple or straightforward as they may appear. (The Virgin responds differently.)
Like almost everything else in this “waste land,” which, Eliot makes clear, involves not just London, but also Athens and Jerusalem and all the other “Unreal” cities, fertility is not enough, although it is necessary. Abortion steps in, in the case of fertility, and indifference hovers over, blighting, everything. Something is badly, sadly wrong. The Waste Land is a very negative work, holding the mirror up to our faces and exposing us—the way of all satire.
Against aborting stands the possibility of giving birth.
Let us now look somewhat more closely at the structural situation involved in the decision to abort, the literal case, that is, rendered up in the pub scene. The primal event involves two. Out of the “coniunction” may come a third—it all depends, of course. The Thames Daughter—“On Margate Sands”—reveals far more, and other, than she realizes when she laments, powerfully enough, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing” (she thus fails to understand that “nothing” can mean no-thing as well as refer to nothingness, a distinction known to and used by G.K. Chesterton, the amateur of paradox). The “coupling” in which she (too) has engaged is no fruitful “association,” representative of “concorde.” Connection has been, if not of the wrong sort, at least incomplete, certainly unsatisfactory. What powerfully emerges from the rendezvous of the “young man carbuncular” and the “typist home at teatime” is a sense of the failure to connect, never mind the indifferent coupling.
In a very different context, we recall, Eliot writes of the necessary amalgamation of “disparate experience” while insisting on, and practicing, comparison, understood as relating, measuring, and judging two things by each other. The speakers, the characters we have been considering, engage in no comparison, finding, or seeing, no connections, least of all with the “disparate,” different, the unlikely, and the unexpected.
The poem’s principal speaker—the so-called narrator—is little different (a connection available to Eliot’s “real” reader). He thus, pointedly, lacks “our” ability to see other characters’ incapacities and failures by means of (such) comparison—and connection—as is made possible and telling by means of the critical verses from “East Coker” that virtually cry out for connection with so much in (the disparate) earlier poem: the dancers keep time, keep the rhythm “as in their living in the living seasons,” which is the time of the seasons and the constellations, that of “milking” and harvest, and that of “the coupling” of woman and man and of “beasts.” The passage ends on the note of “two” with the rising and falling of feet, “Eating and drinking. Dung and death.” The verses themselves connect “beasts” and us human animals, as they at least imply a link between death and living.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the speaker at the beginning of The Waste Land is clueless as to the comparison and contrast solicited and invited by his words. All wastelanders, evidently, including the speaker, elevate (and celebrate) winter at the expense of spring, which they regard as engaged in precisely the wrong activity—they have absolutely no sense of seasonal rhythms, or any other rhythm or rhyme (or connection), for that matter; like Lil, who aborts, they want no “breeding,” no “stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Winter they see, not as enervate and dis-abling, but as enabling their desire to forget, covering them, keeping them warm, “feeding / A little life with dried tubers.” In “The Burial of the Dead,” the wastelanders welcome death, even literally.
Death strides The Waste Land like a Colossus. It appears in the title of the fourth section—“Death by Water”—and is the only subject of those eight verses, in which Pound’s severe critical eye and sharp editorial pen are most evident (he cut Eliot’s limp verse by a factor of something like eight-to-one). Readily apparent is the way the section depends upon and is structured in terms of “two”: the Phoenician Phlebas is said to be dead two weeks; he “forgot the cry of gulls” as well as “the deep sea swell,” also “the profit and loss.” As he was rising and falling, his bones picked by an undersea current, then succumbing to the whirlpool, he “passed” the “stages” of his “age and youth.” At the end, the speaker addresses “Gentile or Jew,” “you” who “turn the wheel and look to windward,” advising to think on Phlebas, “once” like “you,” both “handsome and tall.” By shortening Eliot’s draft, and thus spotlighting, Pound made sharper the contrast with the end of the preceding section, “The Fire Sermon,” whose “I” is Augustine and where the last word is “burning,” a word given five times in short space. And what if St. Augustine and Buddha were connected, rather than summarily distinguished and forgotten? Pound’s second set of eyes also helped ensure that the reader would grasp the rhyme with Madame Sosostris’s warning in “The Burial of the Dead” to “Fear death by water” (the “famous clairvoyante,” who rhymes with Tiresias, able foresufferer, ironically gets it right).
But water is, of course, precisely what the wastelanders, the speaker included, crave, eventually whining, in the next and last section, “What the Thunder Said.” The speaker descends from pathos into the pathetic: “If there were water we should stop and drink,” he says plaintively, then adds, “If there were only water amongst the rock.” Before long, the tone has grown desperate, as the repeated phrasing acquires emphasis, and with each cry the reader—at least this “real” reader—becomes less and less sympathetic: were there water without rock, were there water and rock—“And water,” the speaker adds, his mind unable to let go the object of desire. If there were a spring, if there were merely the sound of water, without the dreaded sound of cicadas singing or the “dry grass,” just “sound of water.” Then the speaker imagines that sound itself, before resigning himself to the fact of water’s absence: “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop.” Of course, the words on Eliot’s page, made of short lines thus extending and prolonging the lamentation, carry greater force than my paraphrase. In any case, it appears to me less that the speaker is in desperate need of water, with which desire only a brute would be insensible, than that he is mouthing a metaphysical condition (finally requiring “the sound of water only” while able to think of birds singing). He makes the desired sounds of water, providing some self-satisfaction.
In any case, despite warnings, the wastelanders all desire that which will bring them death, aborting life. Fire, though it can take the form of such lust as St. Augustine repents of, might, paradoxically, be the salvation the wastelanders know nothing of.
The Waste Land is thus about desiring, and desiring the wrong thing. Also about listening to the wrong voice(s), and half-understanding what is being said. Danger always lurks, for everything depends. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” ends, we recall, with these lines: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us and we drown.” I read, and re-read, Eliot because I am convinced his voice will keep me from drowning.
1 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
2 T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist Press, 1917).
3 T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).
4 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).