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"I've
been in Tunisia," said our friend Ann. "Carthage and all. It
was fascinating..."
It was a wet, cold, late spring Sunday in Montreal, and when we returned
home and had had lunch, I settled down on the couch for an afternoon of
reading. “Carthage,” I thought, and clicked through a few
screens of information about the ancient Phoenician city, founded in the
ninth century BC and finally sacked by the Romans in 146.
"To Carthage then I came, burning, burning...." responded
my brain. "Yes, The Waste Land…” A few moments
later I had in front of me an annotated, hyperlinked digital copy of T.S.
Eliot's poem. I’d recognized the original quote from Eliot, but
didn't know that the poet was quoting St. Augustine's Confessions:
"to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all
about mine ears." So, with the long rainy afternoon stretching before
me, I went back to the beginning.
When I was in university, three friends and I performed a dramatic reading
of The Waste Land. We lived in a residential college at Cornell,
called Risley Hall, for students interested in the creative and performing
arts. Every Friday night, Risley residents put on a "Musical Dessert"
in the basement theater - a program of music, dance, and theater of various
sorts including spoofs and skits. I don't remember the details of our
performance, but to this day, I can still recite large sections of the
poem. The music of its words seems deeply embedded in me, although I still
don't fully understand much of it.
I'd been thinking of Eliot before Ann reminded me, via Carthage, because
it's impossible not to think of April's cruelty in northern New England
and Canada.
But another reason I found myself re-reading The Waste Land can
be chalked up to a bit of ethnicity-reclamation. I’m living in a
foreign country (and yes, Quebec is, culturally if not politically, a
nation unto itself) where English is not the first language and English-language
books are not even that easily obtained. After three years I've gotten
sufficiently wet in the occasionally-choppy sea of anti-American and anti-anglophone
sentiment here to see this more clearly. Though I understand the reasons,
and am willing to roll with them for the sake of what I'm learning as
a resident of such a remarkable and international city, the vehemence
of French defensiveness (at best) and racism (at worst) has made me—a
reader for many years of "world literature" — increasingly
interested in going back to some works written originally in English.
I feel the need to hold onto my own self, while lashing myself to the
mast of this ship sailing through foreign and often seductive waters.
It's not really Eliot our boat is headed toward, but bear with me for
a minute while I tell you about the mental peregrinations of yesterday
afternoon. First of all, in spite of my good liberal arts education, Eliot
has always made me feel inadequate. (I'd never even noticed before that
The Waste Land is dedicated to Pound!) As much as I’ve
always responded to the music of Eliot's poetry, and his skill with our
language, I used to dismiss this style of writing—full of references
to other works out of the past—as an egotistical exercise in erudition.
Let the academics spend their careers parsing out the references, I’d
thought, and droning on about them to new generations of students. In
fact, post-modernism has struck many additional blows to that whole concept
of historical cultural lineage, especially the supposed hubris of imposing
this particular one on students for whom it is can be meaningless, misplaced,
or inadequately representative of their own identity and experience. As
a woman I found precious few role models in the Western literary canon.
But I also never rejected it for a feminist alternative, because it
still spoke to me: this is my ethnicity. I can trace myself
back from modernism to Eliot to Shakespeare to Mallory to the Bible to
Virgil and Homer. And in fact, that's exactly what I spent earlier parts
of my life doing, and then, later, I moved horizontally, trying to broaden
my experience of the world through its literature—and found echoes
of myself there as well.
After a long day of work, I found it was a lot more pleasurable, frankly,
to read contemporary Latin American or Chinese or Indian or Egyptian works
than to struggle with James Joyce or T.S. Eliot. Which is not to say that
these works didn’t have plenty of cultural references. Some I missed
and some - like the Qu'ran, for instance – became a fascinating
new area to delve into.
But a recent blog post by a friend got me thinking about the whole question
of influences and traditions, especially as it affected one of the writers
he and I most admire—Seamus Heaney. So yesterday, I began with Eliot,
and went on a journey that led me to Heaney, and then back to Eliot.
After re-reading The Waste Land, I looked at some of the links
to try to find something in Eliot's own words about his method. In an
essay called Tradition and
the individual Talent he says, "Someone wrote, 'The dead writers
are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely,
and they are that which we know [italics mine]." Well!
His essay goes on to talk about how having an historical sense gives writers
an acute consciousness of their own place in time, as well as what is
time-less. "The past should be altered by the present as much as
the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this
will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities."
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the
poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate
bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations,
nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course
is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the
third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement.
That's probably a pretty clear statement of how literature was presented
to young people at Oxford when Eliot was writing. Annoying, lofty, limiting:
easy for us to dismiss today, perhaps, when writing about the individual's
experience—often in what appears to be a post-modern, alienated
sensibility—is much more the norm.
But what, I wondered, did Seamus Heaney make of all this?
Robert Lowell called Seamus
Heaney "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," and whether
you agree or not, he is certainly one of the best poets writing in the
English language today. He's also popular, and unlike Eliot, his work
is accessible on a day-to-day level—he paints pictures and talks
about situations we can all recognize—while being much more complex
when you go deeper.
Blake Morrison wrote:
"One does not have to look very deeply into Heaney's work ...
to see that it is rather less comforting and comfortable than has been
supposed. Far from being 'whole,' it is tense, torn, divided against itself;
far from being straightforward, it is layered with often obscure allusions;
far from being archaic, it registers the tremors and turmoils of its age,
forcing traditional forms to accept the challenge of harsh, intractable
material.... A proper response to Heaney's work requires reference to
complex matters of ancestry, nationality, religion, history, and politics."
and another critic, Jack Knoll wrote:
"Like Yeats, Heaney combines all the conflicting poles of the
Irish experience into a rich, embattled language: paganism and Christianity,
repression and expansion, desire and chastity, country and city, ignorance
and enlightenment, hope and despair."
I listened to four
audio clips of Heaney speaking to the BBC and gained quite a bit more
insight. In one, he speaks about the poems he wrote about the “bog
people”: ancient bodies dug up in the Irish peat bogs, apparent
victims of human sacrifice to the fertility goddess who would make the
seasons renew each year. Heaney, a Northern Ireland Catholic, wrote those
poems during the Troubles, and critics made much of them at the time as
a political statement. Today Heaney both agrees and disagrees with that
assessment, and says it’s curious; the poems—still some of
his favorites—certainly emerged from his experience of that particular
time, but he finds new things that have nothing to do with politics in
them when he re-reads them now. As befits their subject, the poet himself
still isn't quite sure where these poems came from, or what layers of
subconscious historical memory they contain.
But in another clip I found what I'd really been looking for: what did
Heaney make of Oxford, and the literary tradition and teaching that came
before him? How did it shape him?
"[at Oxford]I was the perfect scholarship boy - I 'did English,'"
he said. "This was the accepted way, the Tao, at the time: you read
in the English language as a way to better yourself." But he said
the giants of British, and Irish, literature loomed very large: "Joyce
allays every anxiety - except the one of coming after him."
In an interview
in the Boston Review about his influences, he elaborated, saying that
as a schoolboy in a Catholic boarding school in Derry, he was daunted
"by T. S. Eliot and all that he stood for." Nevertheless, when
a relative offered to send him some books, it was Eliot he asked for,
describing his youthful admiration and dismay:
"...as much as I was learning from Eliot about
the right way to listen, he could not be the starter-offer of poetry
for me. He was more a kind of literary superego than a generator of
the poetic libido, and in order for the libidinous lyric voice to get
on with its initiations, it had to escape from his overseeing presence."
But later, with his own poet-legs underneath him, he came
back to Eliot. In the interview, Heaney quoted some lines from “Ash
Wednesday,” and remarked, "They are not what I at first mistakenly
thought them: constituent parts of some erudite code available to initiates."
He went on to say that perhaps the most lasting influence on him from
this time was not Eliot’s poetry, but his prose, including the essay
"Tradition and the Individual Talent," that I quoted above,
which Heaney says he "read and re-read."
"But more important of all, perhaps, was a definition
of the faculty that he (Eliot) called 'the auditory imagination.' This
was "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 an origin
and bringing something back . . . fusing the most ancient and civilized
mentalities."
At the end of the interview, Heaney says:
"Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this:
in the realm of poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no
end to the possible learnings that can take place. Nothing is final,
the most gratifying discovery is fleeting, the path of positive achievement
leads directly to the via negativa.
Many of the things Eliot says about poetic composition are fortifying
because they are so authoritatively unconsoling."
And he quotes Eliot:
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
hope
To emulate–but there is no competition–
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
[B]
ELIZABETH ADAMS |
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