Waste Land Essay: A Single Protagonist -- T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The Waste Land A Single Protagonist        The idea of a single and unifying protagonist in The Waste Land was briefly proposed by Stanley Sultan in Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Modernism form.  I would like to accompany this topic in greater depth.  Part I presents no obstacles to reading the poem in this light. On the contrary, the hypothesis of a single speaker and promoter adds shadow, depth, drama, and direction to everything in the movement. It disc overs a poem of far more seriousness, profundity, and complexity. Certainly the original functional title, He Do the Police in Different Voices, implies the presence of a single speaker in the poem who is gifted at taking off the voices of others--just as the foundling named Sloppy in Dickenss Our Mutual lifter is, according to the doubtless biased and doting Betty Higden, a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices. This speaker has a flair for tones of crimina lity, sensationalism, and outrage--the whole gamut of abjection and judgment or so the title implies. He shows a relish for such tones, he is virtuosic at rendering them. The working title was thus itself a harsh judgment on the protagonist (whom it travesties). All speech is abjection? The very impulse to perform voice is rummy? A complicity in the fascination of crime--say, murder? To create and to murder are near akin? These severe intimations are of a piece with the contemptus mundi of the poem. The hypothesis of an all-centering, autobiographic protagonist-narrator is not only consistent with the working title it explains the confident surfacing, in the latter part of the poem, of an unmistakable religious pilgrim. Unless this p... ...ough up, a phlegm of speech. By imbuing his protagonist with his own auditory and vocal genius of participation in the abjectness of his times and in approaches to the Absolute (for the silence must be heard, and speech must process it), Eliot made his poem a barometer sensitive both to the foggy immediate air and to the atmospheric pressure high and far off, the thunder of spring over distant mountains (part 5). A group or medley of voices cannot attend to a charged, remote silence for that a single protagonist was necessary, one who could both do the group and find in himself the anguish and strength to leave it, repressing the fatal impulse (as Moody puts it) towards a renewal of human love and seeking, instead, the neck Omnipotent. He Do the Police in Different Voices The Waste Land and Its Protagonist. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986.