Modern American Poetry

New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 153

But the poet’s consciousness is itself an aspect of the age’s. We get the
overheard scraps of conversation, miscellaneous literary tags, and incoherent
cultural recollections that would stock a modern cultivated cosmopolitan
mind of 1920. This is where Western culture has come to, the poem is telling
us, as of 1920. The protagonist’s consciousness emerges from the collective
consciousness of the time, as another nameless, faceless modern voice. The
protagonist has no character in the old-fashioned sense; for he acquires
delineation or identity not through individualization, but through making
connection with ancient archetypes.
The point is that Eliot introduces a new method of characterization
deriving from the reaction against the nineteenth-century belief in the
individual as the one reality you could be sure of. Eliot’s nameless, faceless
voices derive from the twentieth-century sense that the self, if it exists at all,
is changing and discontinuous, and that its unity is as problematical as its
freedom from external conditions. In The Waste Land,and in his earlier
poems, Eliot is preoccupied with the mechanical, automatic quality of
existence. In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” he had written:

I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.

I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters,

And a crab one afternoon in a pool,

An old crab with barnacles on his back,

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

In The Waste Land,he says of the clerk: “Exploring hands encounter no
defence”; and of the typist afterward: “She smoothes her hair with automatic
hand,/ And puts a record on the gramophone.” The solution, toward which
he had been finding his way through the early poems, is the breaking out
from and enlargement of self through archetypalization. Behind the solution
lie the demonstrations by Freud and Jung that when we delve deep into the
psyche we find an archetypal self and a desire to repeat the patterns laid out
in the sort of myths described by Frazer and Jessie Weston.

The Waste Landopens with scraps of cosmopolitan conversations that
the protagonist might be understood to overhear, but which have enough in
common to project an upper-class tourist mentality, out of touch with and
afraid of life’s rhythms: “I read, much of the night, and go south in the
winter”—yet still feeding on recollected moments of genuine experience: