Life Without Meaning in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane
It is the foundation of modern civilization that knowledge is better than ignorance, understanding more valuable than confusion, and wisdom more desirable than foolishness. Consequently, people feel that they should be able to understand the meaning of life and, in doing so, know that their lives are not in vain. They want life to be a coherent whole infused with meaning, so that they can know and understand what life is and where they fit in, thereby attaining wisdom. Life, then, is in essence a struggle to find a meaningful framework for the experiences and feelings we have collected. Since art reflects the human state, and we have grown more conscious of this struggle, our art has come to reflect this problem of making a coherent, meaningful whole out of the assorted fragments of life we have collected.
Though this theme of collecting is visible in all media of modern art, it is especially noticeable in literary and film art, in particular in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. These two pieces analyze collecting on two levels: first because they focus on collecting and second because they are collections. However, the division between these levels is somewhat superficial, as both Eliot and Welles blur the lines between the two parallels, making the audience more acutely aware that this art is a picture of all human life. On both levels the artists draw parallels between the works and the audiences’ lives by examining the content, style, and meaning of the collection; that is, what is collected, how it is collected, and what it says, concluding that life is not a coherent whole, but rather “a heap of broken ima...
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...to be. Collecting points out that in the very act of observing the art, we are collecting, as the persona and Kane are, in an attempt to make a coherent and meaningful whole out of our lives, and that we will fail as surely as they do.
NOTES
1 T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962).
2 The original title of The Waste Land was a quote from Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend, "He do the Police in different voices."
3 When I say that the poem lacks a coherent meaning, I mean that it has no more coherent meaning that life itself does.
4 "I am not Russian, I am out of Lithuania, a real German."
5 It is interesting to note the two meanings that this phrase can have. It could mean that the fragments are anchored in his literary tradition, or it could mean that it is set up as a bulwark to prevent his ruin.
Elliot, George, and Gordon Sherman. Haight. Selections from George Eliot's Letters. New Haven [Conn.: Yale UP, Print
When read for the first time, The Waste Land appears to be a concoction of sorts, a disjointed poem. Lines are written in different languages, narrators change, and the scenes seem disconnected, except for the repeated references to the desert and death. When read over again, however, the pieces become coherent. The Waste Land is categorized as a poem, but exhibited visually, it appears to be a literary collage. And when standing back and viewing the collage from afar, a common theme soon emerges. Eliot collects aspects from different cultures or what he calls cultural memories. These assembled memories depict a lifeless world, in which the barrenness of these scenes speak of a wasted condition. He concentrates on women, including examples of violence committed against them and the women's subsequent lack of response to this violence, to show how apathetic the world is. But The Waste Land is not a social commentary on the plight of women. Rather, the women's non-reaction to the violence against them becomes a metaphor for the impotence of the human race to respond to pain. Violence recurs throughout time, and as Eliot points to in his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" in the epigraph, we can break this cycle of violence and move ahead only by learning from the past and applying this knowledge to the present.
Erika, Lee. "U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues." Journal of American Ethnic History. Vol. 20. Issue 2 (2001): n. page. Web. 18 Apr. 2013.
The use of diction throughout the poem aids the author in displaying the idea that
T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is considered by many to be the most influential work in modern literature. First published in 1922, it captures the feelings and sentiments of modern culture after World War I. Line thirty of "The Waste Land," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," is often viewed as a symbol of mankind’s fear of death and resulting love of life. Eliot’s masterpiece—with its revolutionary ideas—inspired writers of his era, and it continues to affect writers even today.
The early poetry of T. S. Eliot, poems such as "The Wasteland" or "The Love Song
Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work: the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes. A version of Spring and All without the sections of prose that were interspersed with the poems was first published in 1923; a year after The Waste Land first appeared. In titles alone, we can see the opposing ideals peeking through, The Waste Land, a poem embedded with imagery of “breeding /. out of the dead land,” a proposal of life moving forward in the wake of immense death that came with World War One, against the direct presentation of the title Spring and All, which seemingly appears as the solution, the key to rebirth (Ramazani 474).... ... middle of paper ... ...
In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.
...In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images God gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, diligent reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” offers an interpretation of the modern world that on one hand underscores the disillusionment of the future in a world that is fragmented and bare, and on the other hand, presents a case for recognizing freedom and meaning in the “heap of broken images” that make up the modern climate. The opening segment “The Burial of the Dead” looks toward a future that is composed of fragments and paradox. The fragments in the waste land that is presented are that of memory. More specifically, the fragments represent a failure in the human condition to connect memories of the past to those of the present in a way that is hopeful and inspiring. Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley present this concept in Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Here they describe a waste land in which “She [Marie] perceives the dualistic and paradoxical present as cruel because, in remembering the past and intuiting the future, sh...
Human trafficking, or the selling and buying of people, is a well-hidden yet prominent issue within today’s society. It is both an immoral and horrific topic that needs brought to attention and dealt with. When human beings are manipulated into work, sexual servitude, or economic hardship, human trafficking is occurring. In the year of 2006, only one individual is convicted of human trafficking per 800 victims (UNGIFT). By looking at straight statistics, reasons human trafficking happens, and the toll it has on people, it is very clear that this is a major issue that is happening in our world.
Moody, Anthony David. The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 121. Print.
Faced with a world lacking variety, viewpoints, vibrancy, and virtue- a world without life- a fearful and insecure T.S. Eliot found himself the only one who realized all of civilization had been reduced to a single stereotype. Eliot (1888-1965) grew up as an outsider. Born with a double hernia, he was always distinguished from his peers, but translated his disability into a love of nature. He developed a respect for religion as well as an importance for the well-being of others from his grandfather at a young age, which reflected in his poetry later in life. After studying literature and philosophy at Harvard, Eliot took a trip to Paris, absorbing their vivid culture and art. After, he moved on to Oxford and married Vivien Haigh-Wood. Her compulsivity brought an immense amount of stress into his life, resulting in their abrupt separation. A series of writing-related jobs led Eliot to a career in banking and temporarily putting aside his poetry, but the publication of “The Waste Land” brought him a position at the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer. His next poem, called “The Hollow Men” reflected the same tone of desolation and grief as “The Waste Land.” Soon after, he made a momentous shift to Anglicanism that heavily influenced the rest of his work in a positive manner. Eliot went on to marry Valerie Fletcher, whom he was with until the end of his life, and win a Nobel Prize in literature. T.S. Eliot articulates his vast dissatisfaction with the intellectual desolation of society through narrators that share his firm cultural beliefs and quest to reinvigorate a barren civilization in order to overcome his own uncertainties and inspire a revolution of thought.
Conlon, John J. "The Waste Land." Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Rev. ed. Salem, 2006. Literary Reference Center. Web. 7 Jan. 2014.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.