dual personalities

I’ve had a pretty crummy week or so but I’m keeping my chin up. I’ve had a difficult time finding anything to watch at night and I’ve found myself just watching episodes of The Simpsons, in order, not specially selected favorite episodes. Today’s title comes from “Bart the Murderer,” an episode I had not seen in ages. The Wikipedia page says Fat Tony is the longest-running role of Joe Mantegna’s career. Fun fact central.

Since I’m down in the dumps, this line from Annie Hall has been amusing me (as it does from time to time):

“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.”

Alvie Singer, Annie Hall

I know, I know, this attitude is all wrong and I am really working on practicing contentment and pursuing righteousness, but sometimes Woody Allen is more my vibe.

Anyway, an interesting thing happened in the Capitol today. The giant chandelier that hangs from the rotunda was lowered to dust and change the lightbulbs. Here it is at eye level from the second floor:

And here it is from the first floor, back in its usual spot.

Yikes.

Licking envelopes and changing lightbulbs. Happy Wednesday!

SILVER SPRING, Md. – Greetings from the Dual Personalities East Coast Poetry Bureau! Senior T. S. Eliot correspondent DN here to mark the centennial of an annus mirabilis in English letters, 1922, when three seminal works of literary modernism debuted: James Joyce’s Ulysses,Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. October was the crux of this activity. Jacob’s Room was published on October 26, and The Waste Land appeared in the October 1922 issue—the first-ever issue!—of Eliot’s new literary quarterly, The Criterion. Talk about a side one, track one.

Both Woolf’s novel and Eliot’s poem break with formal conventions to treat the theme of loss after the Great War. Jacob’s Room is an elegy to a generation of young men struck down in their prime, while The Waste Land is (or is often interpreted to represent) an artifact of cultural loss in the century’s first decades. As you might expect from its title, the tone of The Waste Land is generally despairing. The poem reinforces this despair through its formal difficulty. Readers of The Waste Land encounter a cacophony of different voices and literary references juxtaposed without context or explanation. This obscurity is alienating: how on earth is this thing even readable? Such formal alienation is purposeful. Ezra Pound, to whom Eliot sent an early typescript draft, famously x-ed out entire sections of the poem to achieve this effect of obscurity.

Eliot dedicated the poem “FOR EZRA POUND / IL MIGLIOR FABBRO,” a phrase from Dante’s Purgatorio that translates to “the better craftsman.” A nice dedication, but “craftsman” is also kind of a dig. They were competitive guys! Still, Pound’s editorial eye was vital to the poem’s effects, in which compression of language reflects the alienation of industrialized, individualized, interwar modern life. And your modernist lit professor wants you not just to read but to reread it?! The poem is a hard sell.

In 1922, “hard sell” was literally true: the process of shopping the poem as a standalone book was exhausting, as Eliot continually sought to convince publishers that any readers would purchase it. Pound articulated a defense of the poem’s difficulty—its intentional obscurity—in a letter to Eliot: “Waste Land is one of the best things you [Eliot] have done … It is for the elect or the remnant or the select few or the superior guys, or any word you may choose, for the small number of readers that it is certain to have.”

For a work so self-consciously mandarin, The Waste Land continues to attract readers. There is something curiously engaging about it. The reader gets just enough—draws enough pleasure from the poem’s language, understands enough of its references—to continue reading on. Maybe you’re foolish enough to wish you were one of the “superior guys,” and you end up with a degree in modernist literature ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. This attraction was present in 1922 as well: all the cool kids wanted to be in the know, one of the small number of elect readers. A famous passage from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited captures how the poem held cultural cache for the youth. In one scene, the trendiest member in a group of edgy aesthetes broadcasts the poem from a second story window.

After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian’s room, and in languishing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.

“I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all.” he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches;

“Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed, / I who have sat by Thebes below the wall / And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead…”

I like this scene because it captures how Eliot’s poem, as a cultural phenomenon, was something that elicited big emotions. Languishing tones. Sobbing. On its face, this reaction might seem at odds with The Waste Land’s current reputation as a Difficult Poem™. However, in the 1920s, this complexity was central to its emotional force.

Today, your mileage may vary. If you’re of a certain mood and mindset, I think, the way that The Waste Land suspends meaning just beyond articulation can be stimulating. The poem dwells upon loss, yes, but it also holds out the possibility of generation or growth. The reason that cultural loss is so devastating is because this absence presents a conundrum for the future: How can we grow from here?

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

lines 1-4

These are the poem’s famous first lines, ones that present a barren land. But hark: on this ground, something grows. The land is infertile, but still, life is beginning. Stirred by rain, the dull roots appear to remember how live. They even desire to do so! But this desire is complex: the roots aren’t exactly choosing to live. Rather, they are being bred. The month is cruel. The roots seem more haunted by memory and compelled by desire than fully flourishing. They only persist—and barely at that.

To the cartoonist Martin Rowson in 1990, this mixture felt familiar. Who else is haunted by memory, compelled by desire, and just barely eking out an existence? Who else is searching among opaque clues for a meaning or truth that just eludes them?

The transformation of The Waste Land into a Raymond Chandler mystery allegorizes the experience of reading the poem. Finding sense can be frustrating, yet it can also be stimulating.

Ultimately, Rowson’s graphic novel doesn’t hang together in its own right as a detective story. You need read it side-by-side with the poem…or, I suppose, have already memorized The Waste Land (but who would?). To me, that’s part of what I like about the comic. It’s not self-serious. Rather, it uses The Waste Land to generate something fun by translating the poem’s gloomy mood into noir. It is, as the kids say, a vibe. And vibes were very much part of The Waste Land’s appeal in the first place.

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.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “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?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

lines 60-72

There’s lots of detail to enjoy here—the foggy crowd, Ezra Pound as Stetson, “mon frère” as “oh brother!”—but I especially love how the comic embraces The Waste Land’s approach to incorporating external cultural touchstones. In this case, on the middle panels of the second page, the imagery of the Vienna sewers from the famous chase scene in The Third Man.

Hey, I see what he did there! Maybe I really am one of the superior guys.

Recently, I came across this article that compares Homer’s The Iliad to John Ford’s The Searchers.  I was surprised to discover that the comparison works pretty well, and not in an entirely superficial way (well, maybe). Here’s a quick reminder of the salient points of The Iliad. When Agamemnon dishonors Achilles, the latter decides to sit out the war. As a result of losing their best fighter, things go badly wrong for the Greeks until Patroclus borrows Achilles’ armor to wear, so that the Trojans think Achilles is fighting. When Patroclus, Achilles best friend and cousin, gets killed, Achilles is beyond devastated that he wasn’t there to help his friend, and he goes for revenge in a big way. After slaughtering so many Trojans that the river becomes dammed with corpses, he kills Hector, the Trojan’s number one warrior, and mutilates the body until Priam, Hector’s father, visits to beg for his son’s return.

Priam’s grief reminds Achilles that his own father will soon mourn, for Achilles knows he will die at Troy. His humanity restored, he returns Hector’s body and the epic ends with the Trojan’s funeral. How, you ask, would that relate to The Searchers? Let’s see.

Years after fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War, Ethan Edwards reunites with his brother’s family and particularly his sister-in-law, Martha, whom he loves. She returns that love but both are good people and do nothing about it.  Martha is Ethan’s Patroclus.

When an Indian raid elsewhere draws the men away from the homesteads, Indians kill all of the family except for the youngest daughter, Debbie, whom they take. Thus, like Achilles, Ethan is absent when disaster strikes, and he cannot save his beloved Martha.

Like Achilles, Ethen is devasted but determined to get revenge. A changed man, he spends years looking for Debbie.

When he and Martin, Debbie’s adopted brother, catch up with the Indians who stole Debbie, Ethan kills their leader, Scar, and scalps him, thus (according to the article) crossing the line of regular heroic behavior. [I confess that I don’t remember Ethan scalping Scar and I could not verify it because I cannot use my DVD at the moment, but I’ll go with it.] Scar is Ethan’s Hector.  Just when Ethan seems to be beyond redemption, he finds and embraces Debbie rather than killing her. His confrontation with Debbie restores his humanity. She is Ethan’s Priam.

Ethan takes Debbie home but realizes that he does not belong among the other settlers and never will.  

Ethan, like Achilles and most of the other heroes of The Iliad does not get a happy homecoming. Think about it. Achilles dies at Troy. Odysseus arrives home alone and then has to fight off the suitors to reclaim his home. After doing so, the gods require him to make another long journey in order to purify himself. Odysseus doesn’t get any peace until he’s an old man. Meanwhile, Agamemnon finds his adulterous wife who then murders him, and Ajax kills himself. Nope. Those Greek heroes did not find happy post-war peace.

The article is worth a read, but I leave it up to you to decide whether the comparison tells us anything new about The Searchers, John Ford or westerns in general. Please comment!