New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 163Having dissolved the distinction between subject and object, Bradley
himself acknowledges a “limit of this interchange of content between the
not-self and the self.” He admits that we do nevertheless entertain obscure
“sensations of an essential selfhood,” which derive from “our ability to feel a
discrepancy between our felt self and any object before it. This ... gives us the
idea of an unreduced residue.”^14 It is out of this unreduced residue, sensed
in spite of the problematical nature of the self, that modern literature
generates the mysteries of identity. And it is this unreduced residue—sensed
as a mere perceptual bias in “Preludes” and “Rhapsody,” and in the blank
young man in “Portrait” who responds to the street piano and the smell of
hyacinths—that develops into a positive force in The Waste Land.
The structure of “Preludes” anticipates that of The Waste Land.Both
present separate vignettes of city life; yet the vignettes are unified by the
central consciousness which must be understood as perceiving or imagining
them all. The speaker of “Preludes,” having thought of all the morning
hands “raising dingy shades/ In a thousand furnished rooms,” imagines
himself in the furnished room where the streetwalker wakes up alone. In the
same way, the protagonist of The Waste Landimagines himself at evening in
the furnished room where the typist receives the clerk; and he does this after
envisioning the city’s taut nerves at the end of a working day:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting.Not rest but stimulation is wanted (in the original draft, the next line was: “To
spring to pleasure through the horn or ivory gate”); hence the intercourse that
turns out as mechanical as the throbbing. This typist and clerk, too, have had
their souls trampled by the “insistent feet” returning from work.
“Preludes” gives us a world where people live alone in furnished rooms;
the speaker of “Rhapsody” returns to such a room. The Waste Landgives us
a world in which people do not communicate. Dialogues are one-sided; the
answer, when there is an answer, is thought rather than spoken and does not
answer the question:“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of?” ...
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.