The Waste Land:Collage, Hypertext and the Nodes of Meaning.

The Waste Land is a collaborative work created by T.S. Eliot who wrote the text/s,

Vivien Eliot who both wrote and edited and Ezra Pound who edited and collated the various

manuscripts together to create the poem first published in 1922, the same year as James

Joyce’s Ulysses. The text itself is comprised of a variety of language discourses ranging from

interiorized monologue and intimate daily speech to elegy, mythology and a World War One

marching song. These are collaged together around themes related to mortality and the

possibilities of death/life in/after life/death. In this essay I wish to explore the issues

surrounding the dispersive prose narrative of The Waste Land in regard to Pound’s concept of

language nodes or “the Vortex”. In reference to this I construct here a metonymic reading of

The Waste Land and conclude in the relevance of such a reading to the recent adaptation of

the original authoritative text as an online hypertext publication of the work. In this discussion

I do not intend to detract from T.S Eliot’s designation as author but rather to examine the

space between the original text, its primary editor Ezra Pound, and the philosophies of literary

production that may have influenced its production and the course it set in English literature

over the proceeding years. Its continued relevance today is furthermore embodied in its place

as a hypertext on the World Wide Web.

Pound’s Vorticist theory of writing is the basis for this essay as a metonymic reading. In

Gaudier-Brezeska (1916) Pound wrote:

The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can and

must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which and through which, and into

which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a

VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name “voritcism”.” (Perloff

1981:160)

The relationship between the form and the idea being fluid and flowing is consistent with

metonymy as a blended space of meanings. The metonymic sequences of The Waste Land

produce a profound and often individual understanding for each reader. Separately each of the

five parts of text could be construed as having very different meanings to that of the whole, as

would each of the shorter single image poems discussed below. Combined they provided a

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deeply immersive poetic experience and in its entire form it has come over time to symbolise

a malleable discourse around twentieth century western culture.

In understanding Pounds concept of “radiant node or cluster” the importance of his long

study of the Chinese language as sign system should be acknowledged. In 1913 Ezra Pound

benefited from the estate of Ernest Fenollosa when he received the orientalist's very large

collection of unpublished scholarly papers. He had already developed a strong interest in both

Chinese and Japanese literatures and was translating Chinese as early as 1903. His use of

what he understood to be Chinese characters as ideograms emerged out of his imagist period

(1912-14) as exemplified in the famous poem In a Station of the Metro (1916):

With this in mind The Waste Land may be read as a constructed series of “one image poems”

that combine in a metonymic structure to provide the potentially great number of cohesive

readings which can be applied to it.

There is not a sequential development of narrative/s in The Waste Land, rather it

presents a flow of images and exchanges that seem to hang together by the thread or “dried

tuber” root of their origins. This is accomplished through an extensive system of reference

and appropriation of historical, mythological, religious and literary sources and to the

structural collage technique initiated by the Eliots and finished by Pound. The reader is met

with a cascade of vegetative, corporeal, and urban imagery that all seem to exist outside time

in a permanent state of decay and death but never climaxing in total dissolution, merely the

suspended animation of the desert, watery preservation or the living dead. Each of the five

parts in turn progresses analogically from a biblical ‘man drawn from the soil’ and childhood

thematic (interiorized, thought base, nervous) to ‘alienated urban individual’ (language, self,

sense perception) to the ‘profane world minus the creator.’ (city, nature, society). These

themes are developed in relation to each other spatially and result in the metonymic meaning

so characteristic of the work.

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The 1925 second edition of The Waste Land is dedicated to its co-creator/editor Ezra

Pound as “il miglior fabbro”; the better craftsman. Pound was a founding member of the

Vorticist movement in 1914 adapting and redefining its art driven, proto-fascist principles to

the realm of literature, and particularly poetry. In 1921 and 1922 Pound made major changes

to the text in editing The Waste Land, the most dramatic example being Part IV Death by

Water which he edited down from over 80 lines to just 10. It would be unlikely that the

“craft” Pound applied to the text was not deeply influenced by his own philosophy regarding

language and in particular his imagist-Vorticist ideas. The concept of “radiant node or cluster”

applies well to The Waste Land when we consider a metonymic reading of the work. As a

compositional text in terms of authors, technique and themes no single line of procedural or

sequential narrative can be established though the 435 line poem. Rather small particles (often

just two lines) of text are the independent nodes which combine to build up the greater poetic.

In these there are clear compact moments of distinct imagery which combine to give the poem

its overall atmosphere or one could even say meaning/s. Such powerful nodes as “That corpse

you plated last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (71-72)

provide points upon which the reader’s attention hangs as they negotiate their path through

the topography of The Waste Land. From such a feature on the landscape the reading can

transverse out through networks of meaning centred upon such themes as death and vegetative

interconnectedness. From the vegetative node there is a connection to the dual theme centred

on water (drought/flood) and the further associations with life and death.

To begin identifying themes in The Waste Land it is memory projected as narrated direct

speech which opens the poem. The famous seasonal opening, “April is the cruellest month,

breeding “ (1) is followed by recollections of a group (perhaps a family) in a holiday-like

atmosphere “coming over the Starnbergersee” (8), taking coffee in the Hofgarten (10). From

here it returns again to the opening lines powerful organic imagery of plants, rocks and water.

Magic is then taken up within this theme through both plant and rock; “Here is Belladonna,

The Lady of the Rocks,” (49), and the presence of Madam Sosostis provides it with a material

system; the Tarot. The city is also introduced here as the “Unreal city” (60), another form of a

material system, and presents as a recounting of a nightmare vision from Dante’s Inferno: “A

crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many”

(62-63). This city is operating under the system of time, as embodied by the Saint Mary

Woolnoth clock. Time is constructed as a system that can only be avoided by death, “With a

dead sound on the final stoke of nine.” (68). From this a further relation is constructed with

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both history and memory containing the sprouts of death; “That corpse you planted last year

in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (71-72). This development

of the vegetative theme in conjuncture with the temporal propels the reader from the

manifestations of human recollection (time, history) into the nature of being human, that is

hope, memory and death.

The trope of ‘System’ runs into the title of the second part of the poem, The Game of

Chess, but in Part II the players are also the narrators or authors of the game as much of it is

direct quotes from speaking subjects. One of the primary themes in The Game of Chess is the

orientation of an inside/outside binary as arranged around the self. Here the domestic emerges

from a mythological theme based around Ovid’s Metamorphosis; “The change of Philomel,

by the barbarous king” (99), along “withered stumps of time” (104). The narration moves

from mythological change and duality to two contempory urban people in a room “in rats’

alley” (115). The context or origin of these lines is understood to be speech recorded as prose

from conversations between Tom Eliot and his wife Vivien, “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes,

bad. Stay with me.” (111).It could be either one of them speaking but their combined attention

progresses outwards from thought (interior, thinking), to noise (sense, intermediate, speaking)

to natural phenomenon; “what is the wind doing?” (119) to society; “walk the street with my

hair down, so.” (132-133). From this taxonomy of perception the direct speech of the two

goes on to become the speech of many. The climax of this collaged progression provides a

spatial context not stated directly in the work; a public house and the gossip of drinkers

bringing the world of their troubles and sorrows from outside to within, the recognized

location of such a statement as “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” (165). The same time that

governs by Death at the clock of Saint Mary Woolnoth also governs the recounting and gossip

of the tavern. As night falls the public house empties out into the street and Part III comes;

The Fire Sermon and here it is the city that contains all, both the dead and the living. Whereas

Joyce’s Ulysses is founded heavily on an allegory of pre-Christian mythology, Eliot’s city (a

narrated London) is the topography for an early Christian grail quest. A prayer ends Part III

and Death by Water embodies further reference to classical themes in what became under the

Eliot-Pound production process the heavily edited Part IV.

Comprised of only 10 lines Part IV is the turning point of the poem. Death by Water

takes the form of a brief elegy for Phlebas the Phoenician (Phlebos Gr: “vein”) which

recollects the fictitious tarot card of “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” (47) of Part I. The

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implied binary between blood and water is clear in Part IV, although the binaries actually

written of here are “profit and loss” (314), “rose and fell” (316), “age and youth” (317),

“Gentile and Jew” (319). The future is invoked in the elegiac form by reference to the dead as

“O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, /Consider Phlebas, who was once

handsome and tall as you.”(320-321). This direct address to the reader places the intention of

future (“look to windward” implying both the -future- direction to be sailed toward and lush

rain –life- receiving side of an archipelago) as a challenge, or as a question. It is as if we are

the still living by the grave side and the consideration is to be ours. This oral theme returns us

to the opening of The Waste Land where memories are invoked and the events of a life are

recounted in hindsight. This circular closure achieved through the return to the opening theme

of recollection and memory brings us to the final Part V of the poem, What the Thunder Said.

The theme of the final section of the poem is a metaphysical cosmology based upon

principles of a divine presence or absence in the world. Future and history seem to have

crumbled by the time the reader comes to Part V; “He who was living is now dead / We who

were living are now dying / With a little patience” (328-330). Destruction as manifest in the

afflictions of time (decay, drought, age) rages across the material world which alternates

between bone dry desert and flood. Hindu and Christian imagery intertwine around the ruins

of the great cities and human perception is constructed as the prison in which we all sit, “We

think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” (414-415).

In a clear reflexive moment the poets own voice appears in the fourth last line to claim that by

“These fragments I have shorn against my ruins” (431) but this in turn is cast aside with a

twist for in the final line the only truth seems to stand as “Shantih shantih shantih” (435),

Sanskrit which translate roughly as "The Peace that passeth all understanding", even

presumable the understanding of poetry. In this the narration steps outside itself for a final

abysmal moment of clarification and folds in upon itself like a vortex.

‘Flow’ or ‘Direction’ as a theme can be read in “A crowd flowed over London Bridge,

so many / I had not thought death had undone so many” (62-63). The great movement towards

death which the narrative voice seems struggling to be to be outside of as in such couplets as

“There I saw one I knew and cried “Stetson! / You who were with me at the ships at Mylae!”

(69-70) are part of this flow or directional theme. In Part II The Game of Chess the flow of

images continues along a movement from day to night, from inside to outside, from thought to

sense perception in the dialogue of the speakers and in the movement from the private house

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to the public house and then into the street. This movement is maintained in Part III The Fire

Sermon in the pathways of the city taken by the wandering witness and in more intimate

exchanges such as “Bestows one final patronising kiss, / And gropes his way finding the stairs

unlit” (247-248). Again here is a leaving into the night, the flow from the sensual body into

the loneliness of a darkness that is imagined as death-like. In Part IV we meet death directly

in the elegy of Phlebas the Phoenician and the circle between inside and outside, day and

night, thought and thing is near to closing. The Zen koan-like couplet: “We think of the key,

each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” (414-415) brings the dream

vision of the poet to an end. Uniting the image with the thing in the thought of it and with this

juncture is the realization that the poet too is in the crowd shuffling across London Bridge

towards death. The poem offered as “fragments …shorn against…ruins” (431) are ruins in

themselves and the flow of life to death, as in the flow from day to night, cannot be avoided or

even negotiated with through such vehicles as poetry.

The adaptation of a text from one medium to another can, in a type of radical textual

intervention, expose elements of the text at its most basic levels. During his life T. S. Eliot

made an influential audio recording of The Waste Land (1946) in what Virginia Woolf

described as his "sepulchral voice". In 1968 the original manuscript was rediscovered and

published with the editing process coming under closer scrutiny, revealing among other things

the role of Vivien Eliot (d.1947) in the production process. Recently The Waste Land has been

adapted as an online hypertext and the metonymic structure of the poem is brought to the fore

through a text that can be read in many directions due to clickable links and multiple revisions

upon Eliot’s original notes. In the hypertext adaptation of The Waste Land the nodes as

metonymy are transformed as portals which lead to parallel readings of the “one image

poems” comprising the greater work. As well as this the exterior or contextual sources that

were once necessary to understand the many historical, literary and classical references in the

text (outside the footnotes and introductions of critical editions) are interwoven into the

hypertext adaptation.

There are several hypertext versions of The Waste Land on the internet but in terms of

metonymy the edition found at http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html is more

applicable due to its strong sense of contextual references and more extensive and maintained

links. In this adaptation the 435 lines of the original poem have been transformed into

thousands of lines, including linked books of the bible (also as audio), the Aeneid of Virgil,

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images of the church of St Mary Woolnoth, the works of other poets (Chaucer, Whitman,

Baudelaire) and the personal sources for Eliot for the imagery of the poem. In a metonymic

fashion one linked word or phrase leads to larger networks of information and associations.

The below screenshot provides an example of how three windows of text can be run

simultaneously both in reading the original text as well as the metatext provided from internal

hypertext links:

The main white coloured window is the text of the original poem, with links on phrases or

words in the text as well as commentary (yellow), Allusions (brown), Draft material (pink)

Cross references (“Xref” in blue), Eliots notes (“Eliot” in yellow), exercises for students (“?”

in olive), and Miscellaneous (“Misc.” in turquoise). The brown window to the right hand side

of the screen displays material from choices made in the colour coded links in the main

window and the smaller window at the bottom of the page is for links chosen from within the

actual body of the poem. The small pink window in the bottom left hand corner of the screen

brings in choices from outside The Waste Land, such as help with the document set-up and

information about the site’s creators.

To outline a reading strategy for the hypertext The Waste Land I will follow a single line

of metonymic association from line 60 of the original text; “Unreal City”. According to the

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cross reference link there are multiple cross references for both the words ‘Unreal’ and ‘City’

in the original text of The Waste Land. The word ‘Unreal’ is repeated three times in the text,

twice in conjunction with ‘City’. The word ‘City’ occurs in seven other contexts in the poem

and is found twice in line 259. Eliot’s own note draws the association with Charles

Baudelaire's poem Les Sept Viellards (The Seven Old Men), in particularly the lines;

“Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.” A

translation is also provided in the hypertext adaptation; “Swarming city, city full of dreams /

Where the spector in full daylight accosts the passerby.” There is also a link which opens in

the same window to the original Baudelaire poem in both French and English. The “Allude”

link provides the same information about the Baudelaire association. From the Poetry

hyperlink in the text a window opens to where some present day aspiring Ezra Pound has re-

edited the punctuation because “I was personally having a small problem following Eliot's

thoughts on lines 60-68 because of the interjection of the narrator's thoughts on death's

undoing of so many into the description of the flowing crowd”. (Exploring The Waste Land

File: pq060.html September 29, 2002). Within this shadowy editorial voice there is present an

echo of the formation of the original text over the dividing 80 years.

Although the newly integrated content of the hypertext adaptation is in many ways

somewhat simplistic and quantifiable, the relationship to the method of metonymic reading,

collage, ideograms and the Vortex is coherent. A hypertext adaptation could be made of any

poem, but the nature of The Waste Land encourages a genealogical development from the

2002 hypertext adaptation of the text to the original published poem of 1922. The poem’s

thematic system of discourse and its metonymic nodal structure in turn encourages re-

readings and re-interpretations. The Waste Land today is a historically important text,

developed collaboratively; it is dispersed in the sense of both language discourses (speech,

elegy, mythology, song) and production (the Eliots, Pound) as being a collage. “The Waste

Land” of today has come down to us as a cultural and literary node developing from early

Vorticist and imagist philosophies to the hypertext of 2002.

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