Abstract.
The shore is special in this present moment. White foam, ebbing and flowing, following the ocean’s beating pulse, continuously restoring the shore into a tabula-rasa state. A clean canvas on which new seascapes of meaning can be painted, again and again. In writing, un-writing and re-writing itself, metapoetry resembles the shoreline, a constantly evolving site whence new lines of poetic interpretation may be drawn. This essay traces the dense lines of poetry in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a metapoem that resists being codified or constrained into a singular interpretation, and instead encompasses a non-totalisability that forms the focal point of this essay. This essay will observe and map the competing forces of land and water in The Waste Land, as epistemological devices that are intrinsically self-reinforcing, thus performing their own argument. Similarly, this essay will pendulum between these contrasting topographies, before arriving at the slippery shoreline where one achieves a con-current and re-current state of hermeneutical (dis)order, a necessary tension to rejuvenate the poem. Thus read as metapoetry, The Waste Land evinces a new way of reading poetry—and more broadly, of literature itself: one that does not demand from its readers a rigid textual interpretation, but only the equivocal process of (de/re)interpreting the poem.
Meaning exists in the penumbra of truth(s) which an active reader seeks to illuminate: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land demonstrates this hermeneutical logic, and evades total clarification and comprehension. In the face of tragedy—especially when one occurs on a systemic scale like World War I (WWI), only four years before Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922—the modern man was thrust into a desert wherein all traditional orders of meaning had collapsed. New modalities of apprehending our place within the world were urgently needed. This essay seeks to understand and resolve this complication of making meaning without compromising on our human need for control. It will deploy topographical frameworks, such as dry and wet epistemologies, to interrogate our readerly positions within the poem’s landscape, situating and expanding our provincial reading of the poem within a larger non-anthropocentric context. By reading the poem through these topographical frameworks, the reader is alerted to the futility of ossifying places (and his place within them), but more importantly, the impossibility of totalising meaning within any text. It becomes self-evident to the now-discerning reader that the poem’s ambiguity cannot be dissolved and is what ironically rejuvenates the poem’s meaning, repeatedly.
Following how The Waste Land itself is structured, this essay will address this climate of meaning paucity, beginning with the modern man’s initial dependence on a dry epistemology, before turning to a countervailing wet epistemology, and finally arriving at a shore-like epistemology. In Shipwreck Modernity, blue humanities scholar Steve Mentz argues that the subjective experience of historical change (e.g., WWI and its aftermath) can be represented through the poetics of wetness and dryness (11). Wetness emphasises disorder and disorientation, and often narrates the dissolution of a status quo. Mentz thus frames wetness as a problem in the long run that must be resolved, because a locus of total and permanent wetness is uninhabitable (11). Dryness, Mentz proposes, is the solution to wetness, for dryness is a “slow imposition of form and accumulation of knowledge”, that attempts to make meaning out of wetness-induced disaster (Blue Humanities xiv). For the purposes of literary analysis, I will adapt Mentz’s concepts of wetness and dryness. Dry epistemology is how many of us, by default, understand a text, that is by imposing upon it a singular totalising textual reality, governed by human order and structure, predictability and certitude. Wet epistemology, on the other hand, rejects such a parochial mode of interpreting a text and instead welcomes multiple coexisting textual realities—that is, parallel narrative trajectories within the poem—a/illusively layered over each other in a fluid, palimpsestic and sea-like formation. But unlike Mentz, I will argue that wetness and dryness should not be characterised, respectively, as problem and solution. Rather, both wetness and dryness should be understood as necessary forces that must be simultaneously present, prerequisites for a productive tension to be formed in a hermeneutical context. Thus I will argue that T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land stages a contestation between dry and wet epistemologies to advance the necessary readerly use of an in-between, shore-like epistemology instead, such that the poem continuously rejuvenates itself and obviates perishing into a hermeneutical waste land.
The poem first demonstrates the constraints of dry epistemology, whereby man anthropocentrically imposes fixed (b)orders, such as names and definitions, which can never achieve perfect stability and unequivocality. The setting of the urban city exemplifies mankind’s attempt at ordering and controlling nature. Alluding to Charles Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men,” Eliot uses the phrase “Unreal City” to characterize modern London as, what Baudelaire describes, a “city full of dreams” where “ghosts by daylight tug the passer’s sleeve” (Eliot 60; Baudelaire 92). London, portrayed as an “Unreal City”, lacks the solid materiality normally associated with cities; instead, it is rendered into a surreal “dream” (Eliot 60; Baudelaire 92). The “Unreal City” houses “ghosts” and “passer[s]”—both of whom are partial presences—who subvert conventional (b)orders of definition and identity (Eliot 60; Baudelaire 92). Due to these partial presences, these human (b)orders imposed can therefore never achieve perfect stability and unequivocality, and remains partly elusive, disordered and spectral.
Capitalizing “Unreal City” into a proper noun further discloses how this city (or capital) is accorded anthropocentric significance. Unlike common nouns, proper nouns refer to a specific entity, but the “Unreal City” is a general multi-directional signifier that points towards other ghostly human civilisations, such as “Jerusalem and “Athens” (Eliot 374). Through these linguistic traces, these civilisations are subtly made visible, haunting and destabilising the modern “Unreal City”, obscuring it into a vague, ghost-like presence. The “Unreal City” in its final appearance within the poem further re-iterates the limitations of dry epistemological constructs, their self-annihilating halfness and spectrality, revealed through the Unreal City’s repeated transformations and diminution. There the poem funnels itself from three cities to two then, finally, a cleaved “Unreal” that communicates the literal and figurative vanishment of the “City” (Eliot 374-376). Prematurely truncated in its linguistic form, “Unreal” suggests all that remains of the “City[’s]” dry civilizational order is its “unreal[ness]” or spectrality, for human (b)orders are ultimately ephemeral. Stanza-wise, the increasingly shortened lines from lines 374 to 376 parallel the physical disintegration of dry epistemological order. As a structural and hence structuring device, moreover, the refrain “Unreal City” usually appears as the stanza’s first line (e.g., lines 60 and 207), or in other words, as a predictable organizing principle of the poem. In its final appearance as “Unreal”, however, the refrain is only belatedly introduced in the final line (line 376), suggesting how anthropocentric orders (e.g., the “Unreal City”) have been overturned and declined, both literally and metaphorically (60). The structural integrity of the refrain “Unreal City” is undermined; in turn, the refrain no longer maintains its function as a reliable structuring device for the poem itself. As such, while throughout the poem, human attempts have been made to build stable and predictable orders of meaning in and of the poem itself, the poem signals the structural limitations of dry epistemology through foregrounding mankind’s unsuccessful project of building permanently stable human civilisations.
The cause of these dry epistemological orders’ collapse can be attributed to their prolonged state of stasis, also seen in the London Bridge (Eliot 375). It is noted that “many” men “flowed” over the London Bridge. While the identical rhyme of “many” creates predictable order, it lacks vitality and variation, reinforcing the spiritual deadening and lifelessness of urban life (62-63). What is ironic, however, is that man could have averted this crisis, if only they had looked at what is under and not what is “before [their] feet” (62). Their anthropocentric attitude is what made them impose dry order (i.e., build the London Bridge), at the cost of overlooking the Thames river running beneath them, the life-force of London city as it connects this in-land city to the broader seas afar. Detached from the river’s dynamism, man loses the potential for rejuvenation and recreation. It is man’s “fix[ation]” on dry epistemological order—without considering other epistemologies—that results in their literal and figurative downfall when later the London Bridge “fall[s] down” (Eliot 65, 426; Mridha 117). Now, analogous to rivers meeting the sea, this essay too will meet the sea, turning towards it for hope and salvation, in the form of a wet epistemology.
Adopting a wet epistemology to dissolve man-made boundaries, the poem becomes, like the sea, a more connective entity, expanding and rejuvenating itself by the surplus of meaning it contains. To draw out the sea’s hyper-connective condition and the implications it bears on the poem’s meaning, this essay will now borrow Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject. Hyperobjects are defined as things “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”; in other words, hyperobjects operate on starkly different spatialities and temporalities than those humans are familiar with (Morton 1). Applying Morton’s concept to The Waste Land, the sea as a hyperobject is not a passive landscape, but an entity of vast, ungraspable scale that “stick[s]” to beings involved with it (1). Connectivity defines all water bodies; the sea is no exception (Mentz, Blue Humanities 80). Even when mankind attempts to divide itself as “Gentile or Jew”, the sea demonstrates an ambivalence towards these schismatic human value judgements and epistemes, consuming all even Phlebas who was “once handsome and tall” (Eliot 321). The conjunction “or” points to an anthropocentric sociological divide born of human judgements which profiles people based on their ethnicity (319). But the sea, in its maximally connective potential as a hyperobject, opens up the human “or” into an “and” that reconciles and accommodates dry human opposites, such as “profit and loss” and “age and youth” (314, 317, 319). Thus the poem, borrowing a wet epistemology, sea-like and all-consuming in nature, becomes a site of hermeneutical vastness, brimming and surging with dissolved human binaries.
With a wet epistemology, the poem now becomes a hyperconnected entity, always containing a surplus of meaning, evading and resisting hermeneutical totalization, thus rendering itself porous and regenerative. To mirror the sea’s hyperconnectivity, the poem layers a/illusive realities over each other. One such allusion is that to The Tempest, whereby Phlebas the sailor alludes to father-and-son duo, Alonso and Ferdinand, both of whom thought the other had drowned in the sea. Phlebas, however, does not only allude to Alonso’s and Ferdinand’s a/illusive realities: it may also allude to the wealthy lady who “drowned” in perfumes and even Hamlet’s Ophelia in the section A Game of Chess (Eliot 89). So, while on the surface, the section Death by Water seems to narrativize the particular drowning of Phlebas; upon closer examination, this particular drowning is superimposed with the spectral drownings of other characters, both within and outside of the poem. Just as water can be simultaneously encountered as depth and surface, Phleba’s drowning, on the surface, appears as a singular event. Yet, the particular can also be magnified into the general, such that multiple drownings are overlaid on each other, re-creating a “deep sea” of coexisting hermeneutical possibilities (Eliot 313; Steinberg and Peters 252). If the poem is viewed as a “deep sea”, then like Phleba, the reader also drowns in this “deep sea”, experiencing the scalar disjunction of being in water: he feels both an intimate watery sensation (i.e., the particular drowning of Phlebas) and also the sea-as-hyperobject’s capaciousness against his skin (i.e., the general drownings of other characters) (Eliot 313; Mentz, Blue Humanities 132). Drowning in this “deep sea” of overlapping interpretations thus becomes a precondition for the poem’s hermeneutical rejuvenation and re-birth.
Despite the poem’s sea-like connectivity—made possible by a wet epistemology—that enables its creation of plural meanings, the poem would become too unstable without some terrestrial stability. In Steve Mentz’s words, we may “love immersion” but we “can[not] live in water” (Blue Humanities xiv). In less abstract terms, the slippery site where meaning exists cannot be a reader’s permanent and stable place of dwelling: ultimately, the reader still needs stable coordinates to anchor his reading. In The Waste Land, it is the boat that provides man with this anchor, within a maelstrom of instability. By the thunder’s third DA (i.e. Damyata or “self-control”) in the poem’s fifth section, What the Thunder Said, the poem depicts an anonymously manned boat on the sea where he only has control over his boat’s “sail and oar”, but none over the sea (Eliot 418-419). The sea’s uncontrollable caprice renders man helpless, as the only control he possesses is Damyata (i.e., “self-control”) (418). So man builds the “boat” to create partial stability: it is the structure wherewith man asserts his control and establishes order (418). Taming the sea’s choppiness with some semblance of human-induced stability, albeit temporarily, the “boat” represents territorial infringement on the previously untamable sea (Mentz, Blue Humanities 98).
However, the boat lacks the permanent stability and rootedness of land; as Michel Foucault describes, it is a vessel that situates man in an unstable “floating piece of space” or “a place without a place” (27). The reader similarly still needs dry epistemological order, despite the regenerative benefits of a wet epistemology. And so, the essay turns to the shore, a simultaneously (un)stable terrain, upon which the reader can dwell longer.
Facing both the land and the sea, the shore becomes a frothing material argument that resides between terrestrial stability and aqueous instability, allowing The Waste Land to be productively read through both dry and wet epistemologies simultaneously. In spatial and temporal terms, this shore-like tension is articulated most prominently in the poem’s final scene of the Fisher King. Spatially, the poem’s closing setting is a literal “shore” on which the Fisher King is “fishing”, contemplating whether to “set [his] lands in order” (Eliot 423-425). Shores are spaces of dynamism, conflict, and destruction; apart from how the sea’s crashing friction materially pulverizes rocks into sand grains, contrasting environments also disturb each other (Metz 120). Just as the shoreline varies throughout the day, The Waste Land’s verse lines vary across different readings—which, as discussed before, is made possible by wet epistemology—leaving the reader to traverse its argumentative ambiguity. This shore-like sense of becoming is no longer the means of hermeneutics, but the end in itself: the reader’s unstable process of becoming constitutes his foundational being (Hay 203).
This hopeful and productive shore-like epistemology also manifests itself in the poem temporally. Waiting on solid ground for change to happen, Fisher King exercises self-control (Damyata), aware that change is unexpected and uncontrollable, and thus welcomes change rather than avoids it by actively “fishing” (Eliot 424). By confronting and seeking out sea-change while standing on stable land, Fisher King recuperates his agency, through the possibility of yielding an unexpected harvest from the activity of fishing. So even though while some older poetic lines—like the literary-cultural detritus of the three allusions (lines 427-429), following the London Bridge’s collapse—were later fragmented and crashed into the waters, still there will always be a sea, whence one can fish for new interpretations (430). Also while “fishing”, Fisher King issues a rhetorical question on whether he should “set [his] land in order” (424-425). His rhetorical question is left unanswered and open-ended. Like the possibility of reeling in something surprising, the uncertainty posed by this question signals Fisher King’s use of a shore-like epistemology, for he embraces new changes while staying on firm ground. His inconclusive rhetorical question, ironically, becomes the answer that will set his “land in order” (425). The open question becomes a sea, out of which the reader too can “fish” change that rejuvenates the hermeneutically desiccated poem. A shore-like epistemology thus introduces ambiguity into the poem, enabling the reader to experience a dry-and-wet, (dis)orderly condition.
A shore-like epistemology ultimately renders the poem’s conclusion inconclusive, a partial opening rather than a complete enclosure. “Shantih shantih shantih” (i.e., “Peace peace peace) is the healing prayer with which the poem ends (Eliot 433). Peace only manifests itself when competing forces coexist in harmony, such that we reside in the in-between, and not have to choose either/or and create imbalance. To pray for help—as in the case of this poem’s ending—is to ask for an opening when we feel helplessly enclosed. This final prayer for peace, materialized as rainwater to counteract the dry lifelessness of land, constitutes a threefold opening. Epistemologically, it is an aperture that combines man’s rigid rationality (i.e., dry epistemology) and his openness to change (i.e., wet epistemology) into another shore-like epistemology as he prays for rainwater on land. Syntactically, the prayer is also an opening, a porous boundary that omits punctuation between each “Shantih” to remove divisive linguistic (b)orders. Linguistically, the prayer departs from the English language to Sanskrit, opening up the poem into an-other language and culture, as it constitutes an incomplete fragment of a prayer from the Upanishad. Given its threefold openness, the poem’s final line encourages a hopeful and regenerative reading as the reader navigates the poem’s slippery ambiguity, always renewing his understanding of the poem.
In my opening I sought a conclusion; in my conclusion I discovered an opening. Wet epistemology is this expansive opening. It is an epistemological alternative to our landlocked hermeneutical state (Mentz, Blue Humanities 138). Using wet epistemology alone, however, is too unstable. Rather, we must become amphibious readers, adaptable to both land and water, order and disorder. The shore is this site of hermeneutical renewal, this concurrently re-creating and de-creating space: the beginning that also exists as the ending. Here on the shore—the amper-sand conjoining land and water, a place of co-existing frictional forces—is where we rejuvenate the textual waste land. Always re-writing itself, this is the shore’s closing—or rather, its re-opening—line.
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. “Les Fleurs du mal.” Poems of Baudelaire, translated by Campbell Roy. Pantheon Books, 1952.
Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land.” T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909 – 1962. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1988, pp. 51-69.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, 27.
Hay, Eloise K. “T.S. Eliot’s Negative Way.” Critical Essays on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, edited by Cuddy, Lois A., and David H. Hirsch. G.K. Hall, 1991.
Mentz, Steve. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. Routledge, 2023.
---. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Mridha, Shibaji. “The Water Ethic: An Elemental-Ecocritical Reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” CROSSINGS, vol. 11, 2020, p. 117.
Steinberg, Philip and Kimberly Peters. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume Through Oceanic Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 2, 2015, p. 252.
Works Consulted
Campbell, Alexandra, and Michael Paye. “Water Enclosure and World-Literature: New Perspectives on Hydro-Power and World-Ecology.” Humanities, vol. 9, no. 3, p. 106.
Mantellato, Mattia. “A Prayer for Life: Water, Art and Spirituality in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Le Simplegadi, vol. 22, 2022, pp. 122-140.